An Autoethnographic Account of Knowledge Creation: Seeing and Feeling Knowledge Creation in Project Teams

An autoethnographic study was used to explore the combination capability of a project team that facilitates knowledge creation. Both emotional and analytical approaches contributed to the ability to ‘see’ knowledge creation. An emotional ‘ahha’ was associated with acknowledgement the team created something new. This ‘ahha’ occurred when an individual team member(s) had done some independent ‘percolation’ work and introduced this work as a boundary object. Team members had to authorize the individual to introduce the stimulus and the individual presenting the object had to be willing to see their ideas ‘torn apart’ in the process of achieving joint understanding and subsequently knowledge creation. In this process of joint sense-making our data shows that it is important for ideas to be visually captured in a shared space and for each member to demonstrate care of and about the ideas of others.