“Think with your Senses – Feel with your Mind”: Cognitive and Affective Domains in Knowledge Creation and Sharing.

On a recent trip to Venice, an advertising hoarding was spotted which read ‘Think with your senses, feel with your mind!’ This reminded the authors to think about the relationship between cognitive aspects of individual and organizational knowledge on one hand and feelings/emotions – the affective domain – on the other. When using knowledge within an organizational context, an individual cannot divorce her understandings from the full range of experiences within which they were developed, i.e. life as it is lived. In last year’s keynote address, Daniel Andriessen referred to love as a metaphor in the context of knowledge management discourse. The relationship between feelings, cognitive processes and the creation of ‘knowledge’ is a fascinating area of inquiry in its own right. In drawing on the disparate but existing body of work while addressing this aspect of knowledge creation and sharing the authors draw out some useful conclusions in the context of knowledge management in organisational practices.