How new organizational knowledge emerges through the hermeneutic process of genuine encounter — where established understanding is ruptured, expanded, and transformed through improvisational dialogue.
Every organization develops what my research, drawing on Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, calls a Gebildet — the mutually constructed community of trust, shared knowledge, and pre-understandings that enables group members to operate rapidly and effectively together. This includes shared professional language, norms, habitual formulations, and mutual expectations that constitute what participants recognize as legitimate, relevant, and appropriately argued.
The Gebildet is both precondition and obstacle. It enables efficient organizational dialogue — members don't need to renegotiate basic assumptions in every conversation. But when it hardens into unreflective repetition, it becomes the primary barrier to genuine organizational learning and the creation of new knowledge.
Erfahrung — genuine hermeneutic experience — is the dialectical process in which one learns that one was wrong: the recognition of other perspectives' relevance, the movement of negativity that compels revision of the horizon within which understanding operates.
Drawing on Gadamer's distinction between Erlebnis (immediate, non-binding lived experience) and Erfahrung (genuine, transformative hermeneutic experience), my research examines how organizations create the conditions for genuine learning. Erfahrung arises from encounter with otherness — the moment when established understanding proves insufficient and must be revised.
This is fundamentally different from conventional knowledge management, which focuses on capturing and codifying explicit knowledge. The most valuable new knowledge emerges not from information transfer but from the disruption and expansion of existing frameworks — what happens when the organizational Gebildet is challenged by something it cannot accommodate without transformation.
My analysis traces how organizational knowledge transforms through a series of movements:
Gadamer's concept of Horizontverschmelzung (fusion of horizons) describes how genuine understanding always involves the meeting and mutual transformation of different perspectives. In organizational terms, this means knowledge creation is not additive — stacking more information onto existing frameworks — but transformative: the framework itself changes through the encounter.
Improvisational dialogue creates the conditions for this fusion by suspending the Kronos-governed agenda and opening a Kairos-space where participants can be genuinely surprised by what emerges. The jazz experience serves as catalyst precisely because it creates an encounter with a radically different mode of coordination — non-verbal, embodied, emergent — that cannot be assimilated into the existing Gebildet without transformation.