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Research Areas
Current research underway at the institute in the areas of learning,
knowledge, knowing, ICAS (the intelligent complex adaptive system), ICAT (the
intelligent complex adaptive team), ICAP (the intelligent complex adaptive
professional) and reality. Interrelated areas include change, complexity,
knowledge management, consciousness, meaning and spirituality. Each link will
take you to a larger treatment of the subject. When available, additional
articles and papers in these areas are included as well.
The MQI Research Library contains 18,000 non-fiction
books and is an affiliate of the State of
West Virginia State Library System. See About the Library.
- Research also underway: The New
Leadership, Decision-Making in a Complex Environment, Knowledge Mobilization
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- Knowledge
- We define knowledge as the capacity (potential or actual) to take
effective action. Knowledge consists of comprehension, understanding,
insights, meaning and the ability to anticipate the effect of our actions.
Knowledge is neither true nor false. Its value is difficult to measure
other than by the results of its actions. Hence, good knowledge would
have a high probability (p = 0.9) of producing the desired (anticipated)
outcome, and relatively poor knowledge would have a low probability (p =
0.1) of producing the expected result. MQI continues to explore aspect from
a variety of frames of reference. While some of this foundational work
is available for download, other articles/papers are scheduled to come out
shortly, and additional work is currently underway.
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- Learning
- Recognizing that adults
want to learn but do not want to be taught, the Institute is developing a new
theory and model of adult learning that provides individuals with an
understanding of how the mind learns, an appreciation of their unlimited potential
for learning and recognition that they can, and should, manage their own
learning. Based upon the latest neuroscientific, psychological and
educational research, the model is best described as inside-out learning.
The model begins with the unconscious and dreaming, considers the
pattern-forming mind, and moves to the self, consciousness and
autopoiesis. The model then considers Popper's three worlds and the limits
of science to complete the loop of learning from the unconscious to the
external world and back to the unconscious.
- Knowledge and Knowledge Management
- Knowledge management is a field that gives visibility and
focus to an awareness and appreciation of knowledge. Knowledge, the
foundational concept, is best understood as the capacity (potential or
actual) to take effective
action. Such capacity requires information, sense-making, understanding,
context, theories, rules, insights, intuition and judgment. However KM
primarily works with meta-knowledge or knowledge about knowledge. It also is
concerned with people, organizations, technology, networks and knowledge
about knowledge processes. Finally, it is concerned with knowledge about
designing, developing, leading, managing and changing organizations to
improve their performance in a knowledge economy. To discover the nature of
this field, research was directed at uncovering those aspects of the field
that excited passion in its thought leaders. New insights included new ways
of looking at the field and the discovery that it is self-referential,
complex adaptive, has no dominant leader and its nature supports autotelic
work. The research methodology, results and discussion of results are
available for download.
- Knowledge Mobilization
- Knowledge mobilization is the process of creating value or a value
stream through the creation, assimilation, leveraging, sharing and
application of focused knowledge to a bounded community, that is, the effective
creation, movement and tailoring of knowledge from its source (researcher or
expert) to its application (practitioner, community leader, community) such
that consequent actions are effective and beneficial and permit action
learning.
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- Knowing
- The concept of knowing focuses on the cognitive capabilities of
observing and perceiving a situation, the cognitive processing that must
occur to understand the external world and make maximum use of our internal
thinking capabilities, and the mechanism for creating deep knowledge and
acting on that knowledge. The power of "knowing" is an integrated capacity
built up over time through learning, awareness and self-change. Knowing is
seeing beyond images, hearing beyond words, sensing beyond appearances and
feeling beyond emotions.
- ICAS
- A new theory of the firm, the Intelligent Complex Adaptive System
(ICAS) consists of emergent characteristics, structures, processes and
competencies that, when integrated and implemented, significantly contribute
to organizational success. The ICAS concept is based on systems and
complexity thinking, knowledge management, and biological metaphors. It
recognizes the critical significance of networks and relationships in
providing the agility, openness and flexibility needed to perceive,
understand and respond to a dynamic, uncertain and complex environment. This
work was published as Organizational Survival in the New World: The
Intelligent Complex Adaptive System (Elsevier, 2004).
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- ICAP
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(Intelligent Complex Adaptive Professionals) The CUCA (change, uncertainty, complexity and anxiety)
environment has placed great pressure on professionals in all fields. A
common, but unproven, saying is that within five years after graduation at
least ½ of what college students learned in school is obsolete. Whether true
or not it is very clear that as our economy and technology speed up,
information explodes and the knowledge required to make good decisions is
constantly changing. This means that professionals and knowledge workers in
many fields must become continuous learners just to keep up. At the
same time the dynamics of the marketplace suggest that more workers will be
changing jobs and perhaps even careers than ever before. Most training and
education is oriented toward the organization's immediate needs or historic academic
categories. While useful, these may be highly constraining or irrelevant to
the individual professional. From the personal view, each worker will have
to be able to decide on their own what they need (want?) to learn. As
professionals move up the ladder, they will need to
expand their competencies to include new ways of seeing, thinking, feeling
and behaving—this, perhaps in addition to maintaining their specific
professional expertise. For example as complexity increases it becomes
essential that knowledge workers not only understand systems and complexity
but also that they know how to lead or work in teams to leverage the
knowledge needed for problem solving and decision making.
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Other
competencies would include relationship network management, critical
thinking, information literacy, risk management, etc. New leadership and
management skills will help deal with the new reality arising from the age
of complexity. Personal growth and a better understanding of the self and
others will enhance career success and lifelong satisfaction.
In summary, the knowledge worker of the
future, to survive, grow and contribute, will have to be an intelligent,
complex adaptive professional (ICAP). That is, they must be prepared,
think through situations, adapt several perspectives and work with others to
achieve goals and objectives. Complexity will be found in their creativity,
maturity of perception and ability to draw from their own and others
experience to find many options for actions. Adaptability will come from
continuous learning and a belief that their knowledge is never absolute and
their thinking must “go with the flow” of the environment and their own
objectives. They will see themselves as “one system” embedded within, and
coevolving with, many larger systems.
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- ICAT
- The world is changing. While there has been much work published on teams
over the past decade, there is little work considering teams as organic or
complex adaptive systems and a team's capacity to leverage knowledge and
achieve high performance under conditions of change, uncertainty, complexity
and anxiety. building on autopoiesis, complexity theory and knowledge
management, this research explores the foundations of effective team
performance, offering many new ways to understand teams and new techniques
for handling difficult problems and situations. The intent of this research
is to develop a roadmap for creating a team that can be successful in a
turbulent future ... a team for all seasons.
- Reality and Consciousness
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Today we live in a world where thoughts and ideas are spurred
onward by an exponentially increasing amount of data and information
accessible to everyone. In both our personal and professional lives we have
become adept at responding to and anticipating change. The very act of
change creates a new reality requiring new values and perspectives of life.
While we clearly recognize the importance of the individual, of self, in
creating and sharing feelings, thoughts and mental images to bring about and
apply new knowledge, thinking about how we participate in creating our reality can move us from a
reactive role to a proactive role.
The deeper we dive into these areas, the greater our need to understand
to the best of our ability who we are are and why we are here. While
we are aware of consciousness as our window to the world which we perceive,
the efficacy of our unconscious is often neglected and yet far more powerful
than our conscious. By exploring the human potential of both the
conscious and the unconscious we hope to better understand higher level
patterns of knowledge, meaning and purpose.
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