Whoa, I can now add certified conference guru to my resume! The interesting thing is that at all these various industry events, one hot topic is always “fostering collaboration to document all the rich information that is often stored within the minds of employees, but not documented elsewhere.” That’s a mouthful, but not quite as big as the task it presents.
Nicole Haggerty, Associate Professor at the Ivey Business School defines tacit knowledge as “deeply embedded experimental knowledge within people’s heads that is difficult to express out loud.” Wikipedia goes on to say that “the concept of tacit knowledge refers to a knowledge which is only known by an individual and that is difficult to communicate to the rest of an organization.” Research shows that this same tacit knowledge accounts for 80% of an organizations knowledge. We need this knowledge—but it’s locked away in the heads of our employees. It would seem that we’re at an impasse.
The reality, however, is that often times the facts of a situation are documented somewhere. Unfortunately the facts are not strung together as a story, so for one individual to first find all related facts and then add a contextual story the task becomes almost impossible. Add to this a new employee who doesn’t know who to go to or worse yet the person with the knowledge is no longer there. All of the sudden intellectual property is missing and it must once again be re-created. This can be costly. Though I don’t have an absolute answer to this solution, I know that it is not resolved by technology alone or even one application. To improve how tacit knowledge is shared and captured there must be a mix of culture, technology and process changes.
Culture is critical and must be engrained from the top down to promote knowledge sharing. Sometimes individuals are reluctant to share lest their idea is ridiculed, they‘re ostracized because it does not align with current strategy, or worse their idea is taken without them receiving credit. It is so important to create a culture where open dialogue, innovation and creativity are welcomed. Trusting is a prerequisite to earning trust. If organizational leaders trust staff and are open to new ideas, they are more likely to instill trust and openness in the work environment. Organizations have then made it easier for creative ideas and tacit knowledge to flow without restrictions.
Once an organization creates the right culture and tacit knowledge has a gateway, we then need to ensure that we can capture the information and that staff can share and collaborate. This is where technology comes in to play. We need tools like wikis, blogs, micro-blogs, videos, etc. to help capture knowledge but then we also need more focused tools like Information Optimization to help gather, analyze and disperse this knowledge in a meaningful way. Truth be told, most of an organization’s knowledge is in email and hasn’t been lost. Understanding a way to securely distribute key pieces of information gleaned from email and other content systems could have a large impact within an organization.
Process is then the third crucial factor in capturing tacit knowledge. It must align with traditional work flow as users will not go out of their way to share information. If you can encourage them to share in their traditional work flow they are more likely to assist. For instance, enabling employees to quickly tag a document once it’s been discovered can help another colleague discover it more quickly next time. Being able also to comment on a document also makes the process richer.
Many companies are getting better at this but it requires effort and ongoing adjustments in how they nurture their culture, acquire technology and implement processes. It all comes down to optimizing the way information flows to users, both through automated and manually processes, so they are better equipped to do their job both effectively and efficiently. This gives a whole new meaning to the saying “the mind is a terrible thing to waste.”
capture information, collaboration, employee expertise, employee knowledge, Information Optimization, knowledge sharing, tacit knowledge
Thanks for this blog post. Tacit to Explicit conversion is one important knowledge exchange. The reason may tend towards it is because once things are explicit, they become significantly more scalable.
However, tacit to explicit conversion is exceedingly difficult. Without a human component, tacit knowledge holders are VERY reluctant to spend time “uploading” their knowledge. Some of the best approaches have included mining tacit knowledge “conversations” via tools like email, twitter, forums, etc…
But, even if you can only increase the tacit to tacit knowledge transfers via in-person storytelling and best practice CoP discussions, you are definitely helping with Knowledge Management in your organization.
Swan
Swan, thank you for your comments. I couldn’t agree more that this is a key challenge that many organizations face today. One area I hear the most about the need for capturing tacit knowledge is in the federal government where they are seeing a high number of valued employees retire. I know the U.S.
Air Force has created their own Communities of Practice (CoP) for doing just this. In fact, you can hear more about how they tried to promote information sharing by watching a video from Randy Adkins, their retired Director of Air Force Center of Excellence for Knowledge Management.
Much of the value of CoP’s is tacit to tacit knowledge transfer. When done well, they include a strong in-person component as well as the online capabilities.
The holy grail is always to make things knowledge explicit, but often people try to force round pegs into square holes to try to accomplish that goal and end up with unused applications.
I highly recommend that everyone check out http://KMers.org where chats take place every week on a KM topic. It is one example of how tacit knowledge can be made explicit.
Swan, perhaps we can moderate one of your Kmers chats on tacit knowledge or Information Optimization. Let me know.
Stacy
My experience is that individuals first need to be encouraged to develop their unique sense-making processes to help them with their work:
http://www.jarche.com/2010/08/active-sense-making/
Organizations should then find ways to encourage sharing & collaboration, but top-down methods will not work:
http://www.jarche.com/2010/08/leveraging-collective-knowledge/
Harold, I very much agree with your thoughts as one of the things that I tell our clients is never stop or prevent your users from creating information. Allow them to create in the process they feel most comfortable with. The catch is then you need to ensure that the flow of this information is optimized so it is easily accessible and navigable by those who need it. I think that many KM practices have failed because there has been too much concentration on “managing” how users create, tag and store data which often prevents the knowledge sharing aspect. The top down need is the tolerance to allow employees to share information in a manner that is complimentary to their traditional workflow and then leveraging that information in a consistent and intelligent way for broader access.
Stacy