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sharing network in their organisation might use this lens to evaluate their communications
systems.
Examples
Two very simple examples are now discussed. The first is an account of the response to
a community level problem, with special emphasis on knowledge-sharing issues. Hope-
fully, the analogy to ants' nests and small-worlds phenomena is apparent.
Comfort (1994) argues that the citizens' response to a oil spill near Pittsburgh in 1988
was a self-organised one, as the situation developed too rapidly and was too complicated
for a simple top-down leadership response. She reports that the crisis began with a four
million gallon diesel fuel tank collapsing. This resulted in a seventeen-mile-long emulsified
oil and water mixture flowing down and over the locks and dams of the Monongahela
River, extending bank to bank. The river provided drinking water for the Pittsburgh
metropolitan region but the risk of damage to water filtration systems made the water
authorities shut down the water intakes, resulting in a lack of water for either drinking
or fire suppression. For two weeks alternative arrangements had to be organised, requir-
ing the coordination of 25 different types of organisations - public, private, and com-
munity non-profit. The zoo, the fire service, medical services, the coastguard, hazard
waste services, car washes, and bottled water companies all had to be coordinated.
One can easily imagine groups of concerned persons establishing informal clusters around
their particular concern, or expertise. The bottled water people may be one cluster, the
fire services another and so on. Most of their knowledge sharing would be within their
cluster, perhaps on a one-to-one basis. Every now and then one of these clusters would
need information from another concerned cluster; for example, the bottled water people
might need an estimate of how long the crisis would last, or need to know how to get
access to extra transport, or bottle manufacturing facilities. They would then use their
'weak link' to make contact with another cluster, as they would need to keep an overall
appreciation of what was going on. The whole system would only work if there were
both the locally knowledgeable clusters and the presence of weak but effective inter-
cluster links.
One knowledge-sharing centre handled an estimated 37 000 thousand incoming and
outgoing messages during the crisis; averaging 154 per hour, 24 hours a day, seven days
a week. This would have been a fraction of the knowledge sharing involved. Comfort
(1994) emphasises the need for a dynamic decentralised information system, one that
provided up-to-date local and overall information as the situation changed, able to record
messages asynchronously and then supply relevant messages to inquirers at a later time.
The danger was that critical information would not be stored and located effectively
and so not be correctly identified due to the sheer mass of messages generated. Achieving
this was not possible through one hierarchical knowledge sharing hub. A self-organisation
or small-world knowledge-sharing system was required; one that needed to use human
memory and awareness.
Another simple but familiar wicked problem example may help. A university is made
up of numerous groups undertaking research in their own discipline area. This typically
involves small groups ranging in size from perhaps only two to laboratories containing
10 to 20 or more members. These groups know much the same 'stuff', the discipline-
specific research methods, the literature and the worldwide experts in their field. View
these research groups as small-worlds knowledge clusters. The strategic imperative, or
common purpose some of these wicked system clusters may appreciate is the need for
multi-discipline research to provide a comprehensive research effort to deal with wicked
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