Everybody knows about the importance of
harnessing organisational memory and as we have spoken about it in an earlier article too.
Now the question emerges : Is there an effective way of capturing knowledge ?
Oh yes, the KM enthusiasts cry aloud, you
have all your procedures and processes captured. That’s explicit knowledge for you.
And you have white papers and documentation which leads to corporate decisions being
taken, that’s another instance of explicit knowledge being captured.
OK, fine, but the question is where does the
biggest learning take place? Not, as many think, in the corporate training classroom. Most
knowledge flows as John Seely Brown points out in "communities of practice".
That seems a fairly airy fairy phrase. In fact, it or rather, they are something very airy
fairy indeed. Communities gather and come together of their own accord, driven by the
interest and expertise of the practitioners. A community could be the production engineers
across the company’s branches, who stay in touch through e-mail and exchange
professional advice amongst jokes. A community could be the sales executives who meet
everyday in the morning to plan their activity for the day and discuss their triumphs and
tragedies of the previous day. A community could be the HR people who meet at a site like www.humanlinks.com to find out what is new in their
respective fields. It could also be a cross-disciplinary alumni network in a company,
industry or region!
These communities and not teams are where
actual knowledge exchange happen, where the new recruits observe the veterans and imbibe
the tacit rules, tips and internalise them. These communities are where old war stories
are told and retold and in these stories valuable insights are shared. No drab clecklist
like the KM managers would have you believe but rather flesh and bones stories but yet
whose abstracts are fairly obvious.
That is how tacit knowledge passes from the
master to the students, through stories and these stories are the real organisational
knowledge. The problem with this mode of organisational learning is that is it amorphous
and difficult to pin down. In fact, more than the communities it is the stories that flee
the scene when confronted with structure and processes.
What then is the Knowledge Manager supposed
to do whose job responsibility is to "capture and codify knowledge assets" ?
Become a member of a community and
share knowledge blindly. No community welcomes you unless you can add value to it. If you
can’t you will be left behind!
Become a member of as many communities
as possible.
Capture stories
Sift and sort the metaphors and
symbols.
Abstract the stories and codify
them.
If you are successful in doing the above (and
there are lots of places to fail) you might capture the most important learnings and
memories in the organisation, that which resides in the proximity of the staff cafeteria
and the coffee vending machine. But do not delude yourself for any amount of time, there
will always be more stories than you codify, but you can always rest knowing that these
small codified abstracts will carry more weight than your "explicit" knowledge,
as these have been written with the blood and sweat of your employees!
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