A tribute to Professor Ikujiro Nonaka, father of Scrum

Professor Ikujiro Nonaka, father of Scrum, is no more.

In the early 90s, when I was studying Management Information Systems (MIS) in France, I learned about Nonaka’s pioneering work on Knowledge Management (KM).

After finishing my master’s degree in Open Information Systems at CentraleSupélec in 1995, I dreamed of pursuing a PhD in Knowledge Management (that dream never materialized).

It’s hard to succinctly pay tribute to Prof Nonaka, who did groundbreaking research on so many topics relevant today.

Let me list some of Nonaka’s seminal work:

In 1986, Nonaka and his colleague Hirotaka Takeuchi published in Harvard Business Review “The New New Product Development Game”, in which they emphasized speed and flexibility for new product development.

The article inspired Jeff Sutherland to develop the Scrum framework, an agile software development method used widely today.

Nonaka & Takeuchi did pioneering research on “tacit knowledge”

In their book The Knowledge Creating Company, they explained how Japanese firms achieved global competitive advantage by leveraging tacit knowledge.

Nonaka and Takeuchi proposed the SECI model to represent the spiraling knowledge processes of interaction between explicit knowledge & tacit knowledge.

SECI is short for Socialization, Externalization, Combination, Internalization.

As a coauthor of a book on Wise Leadership, I am most interested in Nonaka’s work in his later years on Phronetic (Wise) Leadership.

Phronesis was used by Ancient Greek to describe “practical wisdom” (in contrast with Sophia, or spiritual wisdom).

For Nonaka, a Phronetic Leader is able to make sound decisions and take wise actions for the greater good in any given context.

Read Nonaka’s coauthored HBR article on Wise Leaders.

My friend Mohi Ahmed who studied with Nonaka applied his Practical Wisdom framework to develop a Wise Innovation model that he applied at Fujitsu and now at Shimizu Corporation

(check also the Wise Innovation initiative at SP Jain Institute of Management & Research (SPJIMR), a top business school in India).

Read the amazing slides from a talk given by Nonaka in 2010 that synthesize all his pioneering work & concepts.

At Management Innovation Round Table in Tokyo in August 2024, Nonaka said:

“Innovation is a collective process of creating new meaning and value for the future.

It is brought about by humans, not just by science and technology.

True innovation emerges from collective wisdom generated through dialogue between people with different backgrounds and perspectives, sometimes through conflict.”

As AI dominates headlines and the world is being torn apart, let’s heed Nonaka’s message to “humanize” organizations and economies and harness our collective wisdom and ingenuity to co-build a conscious society.

Let us be Idealistic Pragmatists who think and act wisely for the greater good.