Capturing Tacit Knowledge

It's not your father's knowledge management anymore. The concept of retaining and building an archive of knowledge in companies has been around for decades. It’s about capturing, maintaining, and sharing the best practices and wisdom in an organization to maintain continuity and build upon the learning that has taken place over time.

Here's the issue: When talented people in your organization leave—be it for another opportunity, retirement, or even death—before you've been able to capture the tacit knowledge resident in their brains, you’ve lost an asset that could be crippling to your business. Can we be more efficient and effective at knowledge management these days?

I was discussing this problem with Corey Olynik*, author of The Mentor’s Mentor, and he pointed out another trend that intensifies the problem: young people today plan on working for 6-8 companies during their careers. It’s no longer “IBM forever,” rather it’s “what I can learn here today to propel me into a better opportunity somewhere else?”

Knowledge Out the Door. The net result is that many companies are faced with people leaving the organization and taking their vast experience and knowledge with them. The company would be much better off if that know-how were captured and transferred to others in the organization before the knowledgeable employee leaves. If you can’t retain the people, be wise, and retain their tacit knowledge!

Here’s a related concern: What happens if your 45 year-old employee with 15 years of experience leaves and the only person you have to replace the one leaving is a 27 year-old with only two years of experience? The answer is this: the wisdom walks away right after the “thank-you-we-wish-you-all-the-best party” if you’ve not captured the senior person’s tacit knowledge.
Corey posed the challenge this way: “What if you could create a program where a 27 year-old with only two years of experience could function with the same wisdom and proficiency of the long-term 45 year-old? What if you could capture the knowledge of the experienced person and transfer that wisdom and functional capability into the younger employee? What would that do for the company?

By the way, this is not just a problem at the manager and senior leadership levels. This situation may even be worse when you lose the first-line delivery person on the shop floor—the one employee who understands how to keep the nail press running because of years maintaining and repairing the machine. That person may have an intimate understanding of the idiosyncrasies of the machine that goes well beyond the manual. We’re talking about critical information that cannot be reflected in a job description.

An Expanded Solution. Retaining the best employees is obviously one way to combat the problem of wisdom drain. One area to focus on, of course, is hiring people who
“fit” into your company. My continued recommendation is to have a clearly stated set of core values and a values-driven reward & recognition system to keep a like-minded workforce aligned. Realities, such as the trends mentioned above, however, suggest that no matter what we do to try to hire and retain the best people who will love working in our companies, attrition will still occur. So let’s deal with it.

Step 1: Use core values to select like-minded talent and build values-based reward systems to retain the best of the best.

Step 2: Engage your best and most productive seasoned employees as mentors to share their knowledge on a one-to-one basis with younger talent.

Step 3: Engage your mentors in group mentoring sessions to spread the wealth of knowledge among greater numbers of people in the organization.

Step 4: Use social networking and participative technologies to engage everyone in the organization—long-term and bright up-and-coming talent alike—to share their growing knowledge and experience.

The Key. The key to success with this multi-tiered mentoring approach is the medium for the transferring knowledge: use stories. Interesting, fun, even embarrassing stories can be an enormously effective way to transfer knowledge. The lessons coming out of the stories, the best practices, will evolve…and grow…especially when profiles and stories are shared via an internal community network.

Here’s the thesis: Values can help us to hire and retain the people who best fit into our companies. These values beget corporate habits. High-quality corporate habits yield best practices. Best practices can be readily transferred using lo-tech (mentoring) and hi-tech (participative technologies) story telling methods to capture and retain knowledge and know-how from all corners of your organization—even after the experienced story teller has “left the building.” (Thank you, Frasier.)

I welcome your comments.

*More about Corey Olynik: www.coreyolynik.com