What Knowledge Is Critical to Your Organization?

There are a number of reasons why it is both urgent and critical to understand where the critical tacit knowledge in your organization lives. Is it held in the heads of your senior people, in the heads of bench scientists, or in the heads of those who deal with your customers on a daily basis?

You want to ensure you retain the knowledge, share it more broadly through the organization, and build the internal bench strength and competencies around that knowledge.

But the first question I ask is, “Are you certain you know what knowledge, expertise, and experience is critical for your organization’s success?

You need to ask “What is the knowledge and experience that, in losing, would cost productivity, increase risk, decrease profits?”
In other words, what is the knowledge, experience, expertise critical for your organization to not only survive but thrive?

If you can’t answer this, you are not alone. Many organizations cannot answer that question. Honestly. Large and small organizations, public and private, for- and not-for-profit organizations… few can answer the question. And, if they do, their information might be outdated or based on assumption.

What knowledge is critical to the survival and sustained success of your organization? Is it the knowledge your employees hold around new product development? Is it how they use internal processes to develop products quickly; knowledge about the materials needed, the new designs or technology available? That knowledge may well be based on knowledge about what products are critical to your customers.  And, what is critical to customers will change over time, so there must be an ability to forecast, to predict and to prepare for the future.

Perhaps your critical knowledge is around the ability to effectively leverage your supply chain, to get products or services to those who need them quickly, accurately, cheaply and with little error.  Or perhaps it is in how you service and work with your clients, more than it is how you develop new products. It might be that your organization builds loyalty like no other but do you know why and are you certain, absolutely certain, you can retain that for your future customers? Do you know who your future customers are and what they will want or need, much less what they will pay?

Knowledge about your core competency must be retained, enhanced, reused….but first it must be identified.  And not necessarily by YOU. It must be identified by the clients, the customers, those who purchase whatever it is you have to sell—be it a service, a product or somewhere in between.  It must be identified without emotion or assumption, but as an honest assessment as to what sets you apart from your competitors now and in the future.

There is no substitute, no golden bullet, and no way to ensure your organization’s continued success unless you are certain you know what that success is built on.  There are few more important questions then “What is the knowledge/experience/expertise that you must have for continued, sustained success.”

Shared Mind Maps for Personal KM

Mind mapping is an interesting technique to help organize and visualize your thoughts. I recently heard a mind map 'expert' say that a mind map exactly represents what goes on in your brain. No, I do not buy that, not even close. I should hope our brains are much less simplistic than the brightly colored diagrams set on flip charts or butcher paper. The statement was a bit of a surprise.

Without being flip, there is a lot of value to mind mapping and for those who have no other recourse in getting their networks and areas of influence down on paper, and who need to separate the wheat from the chaff as far as what knowledge is critical to share, it's a decent place to start.

What would be even better however is to do this with those around you, those with whom you work on a daily basis. Look for overlaps and notice the gaps between the maps. You may well see where knowledge is held in common, and that may give you one piece of information, and you may well see what knowledge is held by only one, and that may give you  a different piece of information.

At the very least, the exercise may well help generate excellent and insightful conversations between you and your colleagues around what knowledge you each hold, what is critical and how that impacts your work.

My caveat here is to be careful how you assess the information. Think about the filter you are using and make sure you are wisely leveraging this very interesting tool. Trends and patterns provide critical information when you analyze carefully.

Maybe you can map how you think about mind mapping.

A Framework for Knowledge Transfer

Today I had an interesting exchange in the 'Knowledge Managers' group on LinkedIn. I enjoy reviewing questions posed by the various groups I participate in on LinkedIn but found this one quite interesting. www.linkedin.com
The subject was on the transfer of tacit knowledge and goodness knows I have a few opinions about that.

I posted that frameworks help organize the deeply held knowledge to be transferred from experts, to help make the knowledge applicable and actionable. Again I thought of the complexities of knowledge and the importance of organizing what has been accumulated over years and years of experiences, decisions, missteps and successes. We do struggle to identify what needs to be transferred and what does not. Not only do we need a framework to organize but we need to discern in some objective way, which areas of knowledge should be the focus to apply the framework on. Let's start there.

Unique, relevant and critical are the three terms I use to begin to determine if what someone knows needs to be transferred to the successor or the organization. Why? Because if many people hold the knowledge, is it necessary to transfer? No. It's a commodity.  What if it is unique but not relevant for the future? The expert may know something fascinating about the history or background of the product or company, and that knowledge might appeal to the KM practioner. But does it have an impact, will it matter in the future? Much of the historical knowledge held will matter, it may well provide context behind decisions, structures, processes. But not all of it is relevant and we must discern (with verification) if it is relevant. And then there is the issue of what I call critical. Is this knowledge crucial? One way to consider this is to imagine what might change if the knowledge is lost. Will things slow down, will quality fail, will products be more difficult to produce? Will relationships falter?

Are these criteria for discernment scientific? No. But do they work? My 16 years of experience says yes. I have applied these criteria in many situations and, like the framework, they have yet to fail me. It is less about the criteria being perfect and more that they are practical. Applicable. They are relevant.

Varied viewpoints frame expertise

The deeply held knowledge we have accummulated over time through experience is what we use to make sense of the world and to make good decisions time and again. That knowledge is hard won and many people think it is also hard to transfer. I had a conversation about this today, and I thought it might be interesting to share my experience in why people find transferring deeply held knowledge so difficult.

For one thing, there is a lot of it. For another, it is not all created equal -- it is not all of equal value. Why transfer what is not useful or needed? If you have long term experience and expertise which you want to share with others, you will understand what I mean.

There is experiential knowledge which helps you determine what factors are important in making decisions, identifies your current context, how that context influences your decisions, and how to make sense of what you are about to do. If you had to tell me exactly how you made your decisions and what part of that was most useful to be transferred, it would prove to be quite challenging.

But what if I asked those around you, those influenced by your decision or resulting activity, what they thought was most unique about the knowledge you held and what they turned to you for? Wouldn't that help you determine what knowledge was priority for you to transfer? One view of a subject, issue or challenge is only one view. It can not help but be skewed. How do you know if that view is correct? Or useful? Checking with others helps to frame the knowledge most useful and important. And if knowledge is not useful, why bother?

There is enough information floating around to overwhelm all of us. We need to transfer what is most important, not forgetting the contextual aspects, but to consider what would impact the most if lost. We need to make knowledge transfer as simple and useful as possible. What are your viewpoints?

Digital Data Crisis

There is a fascinating and terrifying story on the BBC News website that is well worth the time to read. In essence the reporter tells us that the chief executive of the UK National Archives warns there is a "ticking time bomb" in our problem of accessing old digital file formats.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6265976.stm

Scary but it makes a great deal of sense. The thought of losing years worth of critical knowledge because we can no longer access old file formats is not new to those of us who may have archived an old computer without removing all of the data.
Doing so now, years later, would be quite difficult if we had forgotten things such as passwords or types of software.

In this story, Gordan Frazer, the UK head of Microsoft, warned of a "digital dark age."

Identifying, capturing and re-using critical knowledge is a foundational concept of knowledge management. Technology has long been thought to be not only an enabler, but to some it is the most important tool. Now, it seems, technology becomes the biggest challenge if we do not ensure data access.

And do we care? Remembering the stories from David DeLong's Book, 'Lost Knowledge', you bet we care. Do we have the time, the resources or the patience to re-learn what has already been learned? Is it not arrogant of us to think we need not build off of past knowledge as we create new products, ideas, concepts?

It seems we could face, on a much larger scale, the issues we face in our organizations each day-- determining if we have time and desire to learn from the past. I have written about this often and experience it with almost every client. And we have terabytes of data at risk in this brave new world.

Is it not worth the time for us to consider how we can mitigate the risk of not being able to utilize data, information and knowledge created in the past few years or the past many years? Are we shortsighted enough as a society that we believe we can simply let all of our past learnings go?

Would we be willing to do that as individuals? What if we had to let go of every lesson we had learned in our lives, save those in the past few years, unless they were embedded in us. In addition, we could not pass the old lessons on to our offspring because we had lost it. Does that make sense on a personal level? Does it make more sense on a professional level?