Organisations can be interpreted as a collection of actors who produce value for clients.

In order for organisations to stay competitive there is a need for organisations to

continuously develop their ability. An organisation’s ability is determined by its ability to

effectively apply existing knowledge to create new knowledge and to take action that

form the basis for achieving competitive advantage from knowledge-based assets. One

mean for developing the organisational ability is to establish a mutually accepted

understanding of the context in which the actors are acting. One important part of the

organisation’s knowledge creation processes is to facilitate the sharing of personal

knowledge. A condition for developing the organisational ability is to expand the amount

of shared knowledge to an appropriate level. One type of knowledge that needs to be

shared among different actors within the organisation is the knowledge about how and in

which order actions are performed (contextual knowledge) in order to satisfy client

needs. In this paper an approach for team-based reconstruction, used for going from

personal to shared contextual knowledge, is presented. The approach bears on the

foundation of theories about knowledge management for understanding the process of

externalisation and theories about language action for understanding organisations.

Experiences from three case studies are presented. Team-based reconstruction can be

used for 1) going from personal knowledge to shared contextual knowledge in an

efficient way, 2) arriving at a foundation for efficient organisational co-ordination, 3)

arriving at a base for development work, as well as 4) organisational learning.