Recent Developments and Approaches to Knowledge Creation and Learning in systems. A Proposal for Further Innovation

The field of knowledge management is in its third stage. After its emergence surrounded by a techno‐centric paradigm and based on the close connection to information management in which the handling of data seemed to be most promising in order to generate knowledge, the field experienced its first social turn led and heavily influenced by the work of Nonaka who was the first to put the human in the center of any knowledge creating process. Since then, it is widely accepted that knowledge creation is a mainly social process. Shortly after the turn of the century, the field shifted for a second time: Apparently, as a result of the growing challenges of globalized economy accompanied by the phenomenon of decreasing stability and higher uncertainty, the need for new approaches in knowledge management being able to take future demands for new types of knowledge into account has emerged. Future is not a probability‐based forward projection of the past. Rather, organizations and individuals need the capacity to sense emerging opportunities and adapt accordingly. There is an apparent need for theories and approaches being able to deal with the future and prepare individuals as wells as organizations for the time to come. In this third stage of knowledge‐based management, the most innovative strategies are capable of anticipating and shaping the future. Scharmer's concept of "learning from the future as it emerges" can be seen as a promising strategy to do so. Based on this idea, two recent approaches are considered in this paper, namely the Theory U model for processes of profound change (Scharmer 2009) and the Vikobama method for vision development processes (Kaiser & Fordinal 2010a). ...