'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 (what Heidegger called 'Befindlichkeit'). 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 this paper, we look at the mythical search for the 'magic spell' of IT deployment and treat it as an example of a Knowledge Management issue. The focus of attention is put on the relative contributions of cognitive and affective human processes in knowledge creation and sharing. Drawing on a disparate existing body of work, the authors draw out some useful conclusions in the context of knowledge management in organisational practices.