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picture of the real world that exists in and around the
company.
3 EXAMPLES
For With the following examples, we address
collective change and dynamics in a new fashion.
We have created many ontology-based management
and leadership constructs and concepts and applied
those ontologies to Internet-based computer
applications. Several case studies have shown that
we can successfully reach a collective understanding
of current and future situations using these
applications, allowing management to obtain deeper
information from the grass-roots level rapidly (cf.
Ready and Truelove, 2011). This also enables
managers to deepen their knowledge of the current
position of their company, as well as achieving
valuable information concerning its future possible
interests.
3.1 The Folium and Talbot
Applications
Folium and Talbot are applications (Paajanen, 2006)
that are used to help the organization’s management
in the decision-making process when target
development plans are made to improve and support
organizational knowledge creation (c.f. Nonaka’s
SECI process, 1995) and organizational learning
(c.f. Tannenbaum’s model, 1997), on an objective
level. Both areas have a strategic nature. On a
practical level, Folium is used within the
organization to evaluate features that describe
activities, functions and practices concerning
organizational knowledge creation, current and
future. Talbot, in turn, is used to evaluate features
that describe activities, functions and practices
concerning organizational learning, current and
future. Folium and Talbot contain linguistic
indicative statements, which describe the features of
knowledge creation and learning organization in
practice, and respondents are asked to evaluate their
current reality and future vision as they perceive it
according to these statements. As a result of the
evaluation, a proactive vision is visualised, i.e. the
gap between the current reality and future vision.
The reasoning from the indicative statement
evaluation to the visualised proactive vision is made
with fuzzy logic; the statements are semantic entities
and the ontology is the information resident in a
knowledge base (Zadeh, 1973). Figures 1 and 2
show visual sample results from a technology
company. The concepts in the ontology are shown
on the left (in Figure 1 the cut words are: Merging
new knowledge, Spreading new knowledge and
Spending time). On the right, we see graphs showing
how the stakeholders perceived the current reality
and future vision levels of these concepts. The
current reality level is represented by the thinner
blue bars. The level refers to how well this concept
is organized at work. The difference between the
black curvy lines is the proactive vision (c.f.
Creative tension by Senge, 1995) that tells which
concepts and how much should be improved at
work. The length of the horizontal bars shows how
much the stakeholders’ perception about these
concepts deviate, i.e. it shows the asymmetry in their
knowledge and experience. In Figure 2, the Talbot
results show learning asymmetry results in a similar
way as in the knowledge creation example.
3.2 Evidence from the Test Runs
The sample graphs above show quite clearly:
A holistic picture of knowledge creation and
learning, since we can see what the concepts in the
ontology are. This is important in order for
stakeholders (workers, managers, administrators,
funders, etc.) to see what is relevant.
Asymmetry in terms of knowledge creation and
organizational learning. There are multiple
perceptions of knowledge creation and
organizational learning, at least, according to the
work roles, stakeholder roles and individuals.
A bottom-up view of important strategic issues:
current state and proactive future state.
Requirements to management and leadership are
revealed. It would not be possible to guess
something similar than for example Figure 1 and 2
tell to managers and leaders. That is why this is a
great way to provide really easy and useful tools for
strategic management and leadership.
4 CONCLUSIONS
The software industry has attempted to meet the
demand described here for many years. In this
context the executive support and decision support
systems so far developed have provided only partial
solutions. Such systems have supported either
specific activities or specific processes; they have
not provided executives with the kind of support that
would enable them to acquire a collective, holistic
understanding of the issues, concepts and constructs
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