Using personal construct theory to challenge knowledge management practice in construction

The construction environment has time and cost pressure which forces staff to seek immediate solutions. Thus, staff and managers expect the same instant solution capability from knowledge management (KM). KM can to some extent fulfil this task by identifying, capturing, filing, storing and accessing solutions against problems from a database, however, this may not be effective nor even what is really needed. It is argued that the true value of KM lies in its ability to change the way individual's undertake tasks to make wider and longer term improvements and to develop individuals' learning capability so that they can face the ever-changing world and solve the unique problems they will face. Indeed, one of the industry's failures identified is that it keeps making the same mistakes based on reproducing past practice which it adopts pragmatically without an overarching critical appreciation. This gap between the industry's wants and what it needs in KM needs to be explored. A new technique of KM, called Knowledge-Event Management (KEM), uses audio diaries to capture knowledge from day-to-day events and debriefing to analyse and transfer knowledge. The output from the study allows an analysis of the gap between the usefulness of the industry's wants and needs because the technique works on the real problems both at an immediate and at a deeper level. This paper uses personal construct theory to explain the gap and to demonstrate how new techniques such as KEM need to work on many levels of knowledge to be effective and to face the emotional consequences that changing construction requires. This paper uses a real-life example to demonstrate how this is achieved. This way, new KM practices can ensure that individuals will be motivated and empowered to undertake their practice differently and that their organisations can best benefit from KM practice.