20

The Post Office

Mention the Post Office and a variety of images spring to mind: a mail train rushing through the night, a busy sorting office, letters falling through your letterbox. The knowledge to keeping the ‘engine’ running smoothly is enormous. The Post Office (PO) is a complex organization, being one of the biggest employers in the UK. It has 210 000 people in the organization, with approximately 20 000 in positions of management and leadership.

It is estimated that only about 10 per cent of the knowledge contained in the PO as a whole is explicit. Marc Baker, senior knowledge consultant at the knowledge management team in the Post Office Consulting (PO consulting) group (a business unit of the PO), comments:

We have 200 years’ experience in delivering mail. People who have worked here for decades have built up a huge amount of knowledge. We probably have a smaller percentage of managers with MBAs than other organizations but we've got an enormous amount of information inside people's heads.

The principal asset of the Post Office is its people who are the repositories of knowledge in the working of the world postal and distribution industry.

We have a lot of knowledge about everything from how we get mail from A to B, to how we use our people to get us through the Christmas rush. A lot of that knowledge is contained in documents, manuals, reports and so on, but there is also an awful lot more that isn't written down anywhere. It's all in people's heads … Everything about the Post Office can be replicated by any other organization except one thing … the knowledge of our people cannot be bought, and it's that vital ingredient that makes the whole thing work.

The PO appreciates fully that it must capitalize on it intellectual assets by enhancing cross-functional skills and sharing knowledge.

The PO, like many private organizations, operates in an environment where clients demand higher quality, more innovative solutions, better service and providing increasing value for money. The trends over the last twenty years have impelled the organization to become more customer focused, embrace total quality, encourage teamworking and foster flexibility. In recent times, PO Consulting examined these ideas from the perspective of developing PO into a knowledge-led business. To support this, Post Office Consulting developed a comprehensive framework of knowledge strategies designed to provide a coherent structure for the development of individual knowledge projects. The PO's knowledge programme and its constituent elements are shown in Figure 20.1.

The PO's knowledge management group's aim is to find ways to capture as much tacit knowledge as possible and transfer it throughout the organization. The difficulty, of course, is that tacit knowledge is often quite difficult to capture and communicate clearly. Tacit knowledge comprises far more than simple facts and figures; it involves understandings, assumptions and attitudes, which are far more difficult to understand and convey.

Fig. 20.1 The Post Office's knowledge programme

Post Office Consulting

Post Office Consulting, is made up of 1300 employees located around the UK and overseas. The business unit began in 1992, when the Consultancy Services Group was established to pull together PO expertise in project and change management.

For the last few years, PO Consulting has been grappling with managing knowledge at the PO. On this journey, PO Consulting has built it own experience and its own story of what has worked and what has failed. Post Office Consulting found that there is no easy solution and indeed there is no one right answer. In addressing these issues, PO Consulting have adopted what they term as an ‘integrated approach’, which tackles management of knowledge at three levels: organizational, community and individual.

Knowledge integration is a strand of the overall knowledge programme for PO Consulting. Its main focus is on developing knowledge tools and enablers to support the organization in the effective application of knowledge principles in the workplace. The knowledge management team has developed a range of techniques for capturing information.

The PO was built upon a culture infused with traditional functional line responsibilities and characterized by slow decision making and inflexible resources. Many of the working practices were outdated, and where good practices existed they were applied inconsistently. Post Office Consulting decided the solution to these problems was to reorganize around knowledge groups using a ‘spider's web organizational design’, in which individual knowledge nodes can collaborate across skills or knowledge groups to deliver customer solutions. This dismantling of walls between groups allowed knowledge to move laterally across the organization rather than up, across and down the structure as had previously been the case. Functional hierarchies had encouraged knowledge silos and breaking these down was fundamental in improving the effectiveness of the organization.

Post Office Consulting quickly recognized that there was a need to complement the new knowledge premised organizational design with a knowledge infrastructure to support the knowledge flow. Accordingly, a senior role of ‘professional head’ was created in each group. His or her role was to facilitate the fertilization and development of knowledge. Currently, knowledge management is co-ordinated across PO Consulting through:

• a knowledge director at board level
• a knowledge process owner who sits on the executive committee
• a knowledge community of professional heads from each knowledge group.

The knowledge programme

To maximize the development and application of knowledge, a large-scale change management programme was started. This was based around organizational development and the deployment of a framework of tools, techniques and approaches to improve both the capability of individuals and the ability of the organization to learn from assignments and deploy that learning across the organization quickly and efficiently. The vision for the programme was to deploy the right knowledge, to the right people, at the right time and in the right format.

The knowledge programme was based on a number of fundamental assumptions and beliefs that helped the company shape the knowledge management programme's nature, scope and its position within the overall corporate vision. These are that:

• knowledge is transitory – it has a time limit on its potential application
• knowledge is contextual – if we do not understand the reasons, assumptions and context the knowledge is based on, then knowledge can be misleading, inappropriate and potentially dangerous
• knowledge is personal – you cannot manage knowledge, it is in the brains of individuals
• knowledge adds value only when we share lessons from its application. Learning lessons as an individual and keeping them to yourself adds no value to the knowledge base of other individuals and therefore is of limited value to the organization.

Although the company works on the principle that knowledge cannot be managed, it believes that the enablers that support knowledge sharing and knowledge creation can be managed. These enablers consist of information, skills, experience, personal capability and culture. PO Consulting captures this in a simple equation expressed as:

Knowledge = (Information + (Skills + Experience) Personal capability) Culture

Knowledge culture

Post Office Consulting's approach to knowledge management involves a high degree of personalization, in which individuals are encouraged to share knowledge with their colleagues in networks and communities. As stated earlier, translated into the old marketing parlance this means putting people with the right knowledge in the right place on the right projects at the right time. For this to actually occur and result in the leveraging of knowledge there needs to be the opportunity to share experiences in a safe and rewarding environment. This is considered key, not only for the development of new and innovative solutions developed through creativity but also for sharing of learning from personal experiences in the form of tacit or ‘hidden’ knowledge.

Sharing only occurs in environments of mutual support, honesty and respect between individuals. One of PO Consulting's cornerstone beliefs is that in order to maximize the benefits from sharing opportunities, individuals must be given time, space and organizational permission for reflection and learning. The implications of this are profound and impact on the way targets are set for the organization, e.g. through the use of a balanced scorecard approach. This philosophy drives the way PO Consulting is seeking to embed the application of effective knowledge management principles into the day-to-day working processes.

Basic tenets of knowledge practice

1   Encourage the sharing of knowledge through linking people with people.

2   Encourage people to learn from other documented experiences through linking people to information.

3   Support the organization to learn through reflection and personal learning.

4   The importance of participation and dialogue as a means to achieve alignment to goals.

5   Provide an appropriate environment for individuals and teams which allows them to maximize their contribution to achieving business objectives.

6   Provide a clear framework to measure the journey to becoming an excellent knowledge organization.

7   Constantly look for opportunities to obtain feedback and use it to generate improvement in new and innovative ways.

8   Develop a culture of individual accountability for performance and development.

Communities of practice

Following the redesign of the organization in 1997, the knowledge programme was set up to manage the development of an integrated suite of twenty-five projects. All were designed to support the embedding of knowledge management principles.

The most important of these was to encourage people-to-people contact within the organization. This was deemed to be critical to the success of any knowledge project. This eventually was to form the basis for a number of Lotus Notes databases, including a ‘yellow pages’ of contacts and an assignment database designed to capture project information and learnings. These projects were designed to help people navigate their way through the organization and find people with appropriate skills, knowledge and experience. To enhance this further learning events were established, (for example the technology forum and learning zones), where people were encouraged to share their experiences and learning with peers

Communities are groups of people who organize around a common purpose or interest to learn from each other, exchange and share knowledge and explore new ideas. PO Consulting is structured around a network of practitioner groups or communities of practice based on common skills and capabilities. These groups are adaptable and vary in size according to requirements. Their key aim is to generate, capture and share knowledge from the variety of their experiences on assignments and projects, and build the capabilities of their people. For example, a community of interest exists in the PO around project management. These groups are sustained by a shared belief in the value of their professional skills to the organization and by a business driver for that skill set to be provided. While practitioner group communities are set up around the development of a technical skills set, without funding from clients in the form of assignment income they would cease to exist. What distinguishes a PO's community of practice from a traditional function is their focus on combining skills and capabilities with other practitioner groups to develop innovative new products and approaches.

This organizational approach is integrated with appropriate processes and technology to support effective teamworking and provide an environment where people feel comfortable sharing knowledge because they can see this will lead to mutual benefit. Project teams and communities have always been supported in the company. However, currently over 20 per cent of the organization is designated as ‘location independent’, meaning they have no permanent office and work from a variety of locations including home, customer sites, hotels, etc. This is where computers and technology play an especially important role in maintaining communication links and reducing the isolation of ‘out of office’ workers. PO Consulting's experience, however, has shown that project teams working ‘virtually’ need to establish an agreed framework of working for this to be successful. This reduces the possibility of technology and team make-up combining to cause dysfunctional team behaviours, and thus impeding the very teamwork it is meant to enhance. PO Consulting accords such importance to this area that they have established a two-day workshop for all teams and communities who work ‘virtually’ using communications technology.

Knowledge sharing through the intranet

Organizational memory is the sum of the PO's explicit knowledge plus its tacit knowledge. The objective of the PO's knowledge programme is to embed explicit knowledge into the processes of the organization such that it becomes an instinctive reflex of the organization. In this manner it can provide opportunities and an environment that supports tacit-knowledge sharing. Framed in this manner, the challenge for PO Consulting's architects of knowledge programmes is how to enable the sharing through the two different types of knowledge conversion processes: explicit to explicit, and tacit to explicit.

The big challenge is to design an organization where the processes, values, beliefs, structure, people and culture support effective sharing. Initiatives aiming to do this have to integrate people, processes and technology and be supported by the organizational design or structure and business strategy (see Figure 20.2). By examining the implications of such factors in the introduction of intranet technology, PO Consulting has emphasized elements such as personal motivation, training, supporting systems and above all culture as part of their approach. The PO believes that people will only consider using intranet technology if they are able and above all willing to share their knowledge with others.

The PO's main justification for using an intranet as a tool to help manage information is that it enhances personal knowledge and effectiveness through improved access to the information base of the organization. By doing so it enables the principles of a learning organization.

Fig. 20.2 Key factors affecting a knowledge management initiative

To a large extent intranets are mostly effective in the explicit to explicit (systematic) knowledge conversion and are not highly suited for tacit knowledge conversion. Widespread experience of intranet technology suggests that companies simply relying on intranet databases to drive knowledge exchange succeed very superficially, and largely fail to reap benefits of tacit knowledge transfer.

Managing knowledge at PO Consulting served to highlight the magnitude of the challenge facing the PO. PO Consulting has over 1000 people, in twenty-three diverse practitioner groups (organized around technical capabilities) working on over 1200 assignments a year, each generating substantial supporting paperwork and with over 300 individual Lotus Notes databases available for access. Even with the advantage of a supportive culture, capturing, deploying, applying and reviewing the knowledge base was not an easy task. PO Consulting found that a major problem they were encountering was one of ‘how do you know where to look to find the individual with the knowledge that you need to help with your particular problem?’

This led to the adoption of technology-led solutions, which helped individuals navigate through the information sources of the organization as well as encourage serendipitous and spontaneity connections to be made, as first steps toward tacit knowledge conversion. PO Consulting searched for a solution that gives employees the time to apply their learning on key value-added activities and to reduce their workload on non-value adding activities such as searching for information. PO Consulting's approach to this was to make content location irrelevant and encourage informal networks and communities of people with common interests looking to exchange knowledge on similar subjects. Technology was needed to support people's learning and unlearning, allowing them time for reflection. Successful uses of technology have shown that speed of access and information retrieval efficiency are key to good knowledge sharing and creation. People need to be able to access relevant information quickly, and use the intranet to put people in touch with people. The more efficient this process, the more effectively is knowledge leveraged. Unfortunately the enabling technology, the intranet, has strong, potentially disabling and dysfunctional consequences too. Intranets can very easily create or add to the information overload problem. Negative experiences of the intranet highlight that as information comes out of previously inaccessible silos there is great potential for information overload.

Without a diligent and well thought-out implementation, intranets can leave users feeling that they are so overloaded with valueless information. In the extreme, they make it extremely difficult to identify useful information from useless information. There is another side-effect of using intranets: it can encourage slow unlearning of historical best practice, as there is a tendency to treat published information as the ‘answer’ rather than simply one potential approach that worked in a particular context.

The PO's approach to this set of problems and issues was to combine the use of intranets with intelligent profiling technologies. These help users navigate through the information maze and share knowledge with others.

Intelligent profiling uses software agents to search across multiple information sources and find documents which match an individual's area of interest. PO Consulting users can create and train agents by typing a paragraph in normal English, indicating the subject they are interested in exploring. The profiling software then abstracts the main ideas from the text, and creates an agent trained to search on these key concepts. The agents are sent off to search a number of information sources, both internal to the organization (such as Lotus Notes databases or Word documents) and also external sources held on the Internet. The results of these searches are e-mailed to the user, who can access the individual documents with highlighted content which matches their interest. A screen shot of this is shown in Figure 20.3.

Following the outcome of a search (which can be conducted while the user is off line) the search paragraph contained in the agent can be updated or retained by referencing documents found in the search. In this way, individual agents are specifically personalized to a user's interest. As an individual reads the documents, the agents are updated by recalculating interest levels in the different ideas. Concepts that once occurred frequently but are no longer important are replaced over time. In this way, the system keeps pace with an individual's changing interests.

Fig. 20.3 Post Office intranet

PO Consulting further capitalizes on the profiling agent capabilities by using them to support and enhance communities of practice. The profiling agents compare subject definition with other agents set up by other individuals in the organization and highlight those people who appear to be interested in similar subjects. This allows individuals to be put in touch with colleagues from other practitioner groups whose interests overlap with their own. This encourages tacit-knowledge sharing through identifying and promoting communities of interest.

Advantages and limitations of intranet technology

1   The primary focus of the intranet is on explicit knowledge sharing. This suggests that it should be considered as one of many approaches to tap intellectual capital. Intranets can help individuals understand the ‘know what’ question but only personal contact between individuals can help answer the ‘know why’.

2   Codification of knowledge in an intranet makes it more replicable and therefore makes for easier explicit knowledge transfer. However, without a clear understanding of the assumptions and context behind the explicit knowledge, this knowledge may prove dangerous, especially in naïve hands.

The PO's experience with intranets and profiling technologies indicates that they do not totally fulfil the company's knowledge transfer needs. However, they are a very useful approach to support the acquisition of information. Profiling is particularly good for proactive research, acting as a catalyst for new insights and ideas. Clearly, intranets and profiling do not provide the complete answer. Post Office Consulting discovered that what was required was an integrated programme that looks at all aspects of knowledge conversion, in all its complexity.

Knowledge interviews (KIs)

One of the most important tools developed by PO Consulting is the ‘knowledge interview’. The KI is a specially designed process for collating an individual's knowledge and spreading it for the benefit of others.

For PO Consulting knowledge resides in a number of repositories:

• explicit: in PO's technical reference sites, manuals, project reports, customer and supplier information, CVs, contracts, etc.
• tacit: the PO's consultants, customers, suppliers and employees.

Explicit knowledge across an organization (as discussed previously in this chapter) can be enabled successfully through information systems and supporting technologies. It is the articulation and transfer of tacit knowledge that presents difficulties. Best estimates indicate that up to 10 per cent of tacit knowledge can be captured effectively and transferred through existing mechanisms – this leaves 90 per cent or more still untapped.

The PO discovered that the problem presented by tacit knowledge is that it has no points of reference when stripped of its context. Therefore, the challenge is to transfer as much as possible of the original context so that others can assimilate and apply it in their own context. This means understanding how the individual's mental model was applied to the available information and the assumptions that underpinned that approach.

Within PO Consulting's knowledge programme, tacit knowledge is perceived to be a fundamental part of the knowledge equation. Practical solutions to transfer problems are found in mentoring, coaching, ‘yellow pages’, project databases, etc. While coaching and mentoring provide the richest transfer mechanism based on face-to-face interaction, they suffer from the time available and breadth of their coverage. This led the PO to search for an alternative method for surfacing tacit knowledge. This culminated in a third form of interventions which attempts to surface the tacit from within the explicit, in ways that support knowledge transfer across the organization regardless of time and location.

Knowledge interviews (KIs) are a systematic approach for surfacing tacit knowledge from the context of the explicit knowledge contained within the decisions we make and or solutions we devise. The KI adopts an end-to-end capture of tacit knowledge embedded in the mental models of employees and displayed in the outputs of their daily activities. Patrick O'Connell, professional head of knowledge management at PO Consulting, points out that computerized knowledge-capture packages were tried, but they proved to be nowhere near as effective as the interview.

We tried technology, but it got in the way. It broke the link in the conversation while we had to type in answers to our questions. We found we lost eye contact and non-verbal communication … So we dropped it in favour of the one-to-one interview where you can develop your questioning and maintain that conversational link with the person you're talking to. Technology may work for others, but it doesn't work for us.

Knowledge interviews are most appropriate in three situations:

1   When a senior member of staff leaves – unless a way is found of extracting what they know, most of their insights are likely to disappear with them.

2   When someone joins the organization – they may possess all sorts of relevant experience from other organizations that could prove useful to the PO.

3   When someone is recognized as having particularly vital knowledge that ought to be disseminated more widely.

Knowledge interviews, at the PO, are used as a means of capturing explicit and tacitly held knowledge and disseminating it throughout the organization. By explicitly recognizing the importance of both tacit and explicit knowledge, this interviewing technique captures knowledge on both levels.

The KI combines questioning aimed at uncovering experience with the opportunity for the interviewee to reflect on decisions, beliefs and assumptions. The knowledge interview is used as both an experiential and a reflective probe. Questions directed at pure experience typically result in high degrees of explicit and low levels of tacit knowledge, whereas the reverse is be true for reflective questioning. The combination of both techniques, incorporated into the KI aims to conceptualize the explicit and contextualize the tacit knowledge before it can be transferred.

Maria Schingen, a psychologist and knowledge management consultant who has been closely involved in developing the technique, says that the technique is effective because it is in tune with the way human memory works. It goes through stages of recalling things, gradually becoming more specific, and recognizes the links between explicit and implicit knowledge. ‘It's a very powerful tool for uncovering those aspects of knowledge that are hard to get at,’ she says. ‘Sometimes people realize they know more than they thought they did.’

In brief, the KI is an in-depth qualitative interview using memory enhancing techniques to allow the interviewee a comprehensive recall of occurrences, projects or other work involvement. The interview is loosely structured, with no fixed questions. However, the interviewer does use a specially designed interview schedule and interview map as a guide. All interviews are taped and transcribed, allowing for conceptual analysis into models, case studies and knowledge maps. These interview outputs are visual or descriptive and presented in a manner that is likely to lead to the most effective transfer of tacit and explicit knowledge for that specific set of practice(s).

Post Office Consulting's entry-expert-exit (3Es) interview system for tacit knowledge capture

It is almost a truism that a company's knowledge assets walk out of the door at 17.00 and you do not know whether they are coming back tomorrow. Post Office Consulting has an approximately 20 per cent staff turnover rate. The likelihood is that even this estimate is low, especially if sources of tacit knowledge across the PO's knowledge pipeline (the company's customers and suppliers) are considered. In view of this the PO developed the 3Es (entry-expert-exit) KI system, which is a cradle-to-grave approach. This approach recognizes the importance of a person's tacit knowledge when he or she joins the PO, as he or she becomes a subject expert and as they leave. The 3Es’ product was been developed to overcome the problem associated with traditional exit interviews: they are a very poor means of learning from someone at the end of their career.

The aim of the 3Es is to produce a way forward for PO Consulting to implement a knowledge management infrastructure which allows the organization to better manage and retain its sources of know-how, skills, experience, etc. and the information sources they use. The 3Es approach is seen as complementing (and may be triggered by) other initiatives, such as after action reviews which support the capture of learning points, by producing a more rigorous evaluation of the decision-making processes that provided the context for the learning.

The PO's previous approach to this problem was simply to ask questions of employees when they were leaving, such as why that person joined, why they were leaving and what would make the company better to work in. The PO had no systematic means of capturing what that person brought with them, what they developed along the way and what they are taking with them.

The 3Es tool can be applied at many levels of employees, joining or leaving:

• a team
• a skills group
• a business unit
• the organization.

To capture every individual's task in this way is far too enormous. Because of this, the first and important step in the KI system is the surfacing of key people within the organization who possess critical tacit knowledge. These individuals are the prime candidates for the knowledge interview.

The knowledge interview process

The interview takes place as part of a much longer process of preparation and analysis. First, a manager who wants one of his or her employees to go through a KI contacts an interviewer at PO Consulting and describes the broad areas of information they want to access. Then the individual is informed and their consent to take part in the process is sought. A copy of the subject's latest CV is sent to the interviewer and a check sheet outlining the specific areas to be tackled given to the interviewee. The interviewer and interviewee then meet for an informal discussion and to agree a schedule for the main interview. At the interview, all discussion is recorded on tape. It can last anything from an hour and a half to several hours, or can be broken up into shorter sessions. The interviewer will analyse the information gained and produce a report. This could be either a short case study setting out all the data gathered, or a more graphically presented ‘knowledge map’, which is handed back to the person who requested the knowledge interview. It could then be used to provide the new incumbent of a job with the background they need, or could be published in the PO Consulting journal or put on to a database for use by the whole organization.

Step 1: preparation

Planning and prior preparation is critical to running correctly the process. Planning helps in the mental process of getting ready for the interview. The purpose of the interview must be understood and requires careful scrutiny of what information is already in existence is made. This examination is made prior to the interview. Information can be obtained from:

• the professional head of the interviewee's unit
• the on-line CV and assignment database
• a pre-interview with the interviewee.

The professional head in each skills group has responsibility for the development of knowledge and professional expertise within their group. They are given the opportunity, through a questionnaire, to highlight the key areas of knowledge they want captured. The on-line CV and assignment database provides the quantitative and qualitative data on past projects, assignments and consultancies completed by the interviewee.

The pre-interview check sheet for the interviewee enables much of the preliminary information-gathering activity to be completed before the main debriefing process. It covers the following sections:

• about you
• about your work
• about your achievements
• contacts and people who have influenced you
• who will benefit from this knowledge.

The pre-interview is a relatively informal 20–30-minute event. It allows initial screening and an opportunity to explain the process. Also, it serves to build rapport and breaks the ice, thereby avoiding unnecessary awkwardness at the start of the main interview.

Step 2: interview map

This stage involves developing the interview plan. An internally devised interview map (Figure 20.4) is used as a framework for this work. This considers the key areas to probe and asks simple questions like:

• What did you do?
• How did you do it?
• Why did you do it?

Fig. 20.4 Interview map. © RM Consultancy, 1998

Step 3: main interview

The main interview tends to take from two to five hours to complete. Typically it involves using a digital cassette to capture the event and sometimes even a video recording. The focus is on a systematic surfacing of the assumptions (the what, why, how) that led the person to make a particular decision or behave in a particular way. Attention to this sort of detail is important if it is to unearth sufficient contextual background of the assumptions to be assimilated by other people. It is based on the premise that the assumptions have a longer shelf life than the actual decisions, since they are based on fundamental beliefs and acquired skills/experience.

Step 4: analysis

A number of software tools are used at this stage to map the knowledge captured. Initially they were an integral part of the interview but were later dropped because they disrupted the flow of the interview. Developmental work in this area is still being conducted to identify potential tools for mapping the learning (for example, there is a project with the Open University Knowledge Media Institute).

Step 5: outputs

Depending on the requirements of the consultancy unit, some or all of the following can be produced

1   Interview. The interview transcript is simply a typed verbatim record of the interview. No editing or changes to the original interview text are made. The transcript is ready for analysis or can be read as a record of the interview.

2   Case study. From the interview transcript a case study is constructed. The aim of this is to capture the elements of projects and processes that are particularly worthy of note and learning. Case studies are a summary of project activity, key learning points and outcomes from the interviewee's point of view.

3   Job description. The job description isolates all given information in relation to the activities performed, the standard of performance required and any key abilities/skills necessary to carry these out, i.e. what type of job has the individual carried out?

4   Person specification. What are the specific personal and interpersonal and other skills traits of the individual that are considered to be necessary or useful in carrying out assignments and projects, i.e. what type of person is required to carry out this job?

5   Consultancy tool kit. The consultancy tool kit aims to summarize the practical steps that have been performed by the individual in project and process work. The result is a wallet of short and practical case studies, flowcharts and checklists, i.e. if we were to do this project assignment again, how would we do it? How about carrying out a similar activity?

6   Induction/training pack. A combination of case studies, person and job description and the consultancy tool kit. This helps to answer the question, what does my successor need to know?

7   Contact directory. Who are the enablers in our organization? Who are the useful contacts and for what? The contact directory summarises information regarding useful people and relationships. This learning can be embedded into a knowledge map of what is being done, how and why? Graphical representation often makes the knowledge more accessible and user-friendly. Software tools help in mapping and can provide key word graphical overviews of the flow of activities.

Examples of knowledge interviews

Personnel move: The KI was used when the head of the PO services group was due to move to a new job as head of Royal Mail service delivery. He had set up the services group, which included the PO's catering service, the third largest operation of its kind in the UK, of which 49 per cent had been contracted out to a commercial company. There was a huge amount of background knowledge involved, covering the way the group had been established and the reasons why catering was the first service in the PO to be outsourced. Much pertinent knowledge was recovered through the knowledge interview process.

Recorded delivery. KIs were used when a team of six from PO Consulting went to Singapore to advise on a project to replace a manual sorting system with an automated postal centre. Singapore was the first country to install the equipment and the change involved training 3500 people.

British consultants advised on the whole process, including planning the changeover, training the staff and managing the transition. KIs were held with all six consultants. Some of these lasted up to seven hours, producing eighty or more pages of transcript.

David Cowin, senior consultant at PO Consulting, in charge of the Singapore KIs comments:

It was a major transition project involving equipment that we are likely to use ourselves in the future. We wanted to capture the experience of working with another postal organization so that we could use it ourselves in this country. The interviews gave them the chance to reflect. They enabled us to get below the bald facts about how things were done and discover why they were done.

Apart from information about the technical side of the operation, the interviews revealed valuable insights into the cultural issues of working in a country like Singapore. They included, for example, the realization that Muslims, who made up a large proportion of the local workforce, needed time for prayers on Fridays, and that this would affect shift rosters. The interviews also cast light on the working methods in East Asia, where decisions are often made by consensus rather than one person taking the lead and telling everyone else what to do.

Railnet project. A variant of the knowledge interview was also used during the PO's Railnet project. This involved a huge expansion of its mail network, with new trains and stations all over the country. Much of the knowledge needed to understand how the network operated was gleaned from interviews with people who had long experience in the PO.

Costs of the knowledge interview technique

Since the KIs were launched, only about fifty or sixty sessions have been held per annum. The reason for this is that it is a costly technique. Nevertheless, the KIs have proved successful in yielding big savings.

While the PO has been able to save a substantial amount of time and money, the cost of interviews does mean that they are worth doing only if the benefits outweigh the costs. For this reason PO plans to use them only on big projects. Provided knowledge interviews are focused on areas where they can have most benefit and are carried out properly, PO's experience indicates that they can be very worthwhile.

Knowledge interview target individuals

Knowledge interviews are particularly useful for capturing tacit knowledge from senior managers. The reason for this is that as managers progress in their careers their knowledge evolves from book learned to experiential and intuitive and is often not verbalized. It becomes more tacit. All managerial types (junior, middle and senior) require varying degrees of professional, interpersonal and conceptual knowledge.

• Professional knowledge refers to the technical understanding and competence required to understand the managerial task at various levels.
• Interpersonal knowledge is the experience and ability to relate to or influence colleagues.
• Conceptual knowledge refers to the ability to abstract, to strategize, to see the larger picture.

While all three managerial levels require good interpersonal abilities and the necessity for such abilities remains largely unaffected as one progresses up the managerial career path, the picture is different for the other two categories of knowledge and skill.

There is a tacit and an explicit level to all three categories of skills. However, one is more likely to find explicit knowledge in professional jobs. The reason is that this skill tends to be taught more widely than conceptual or strategic skills. There is a stronger overall tendency for conceptual skills to be tacitly held and not articulated as readily as professional skills. Since, senior management skills tend towards a tacit knowledge orientation this makes them more difficult to capture and transfer. More importantly, the holders of these skills are becoming increasingly crucial to the organization – yet the PO's high turnover figures show that this knowledge is being lost with increasing frequency. Existing knowledge drains away from the organization or department while the knowledge required to develop new management is either not available or not transferred adequately. Also the PO estimates that with current methods of baton passing it takes about 13.5 months, on average, for employees to maximize their efficiency. The costs associated with upper level managers’ turnover have been estimated at 1.5 times the annual salary for the job. These costs associated with job changes are largely due to non-existent transfer of knowledge resulting from non-existent capture of knowledge. Moreover, it is important to remember that 80 per cent of employee turnover costs are likely to be hidden costs.

Running knowledge interviews

The problem with tacit knowledge, and the surfacing of it, is that we are not used to assessing why we took certain decisions or courses of action and the assumptions upon which we based them. Some of them are done subconsciously. Managers are action focused, and reflection is often regarded as an unnecessary and time-consuming task.

Management education and business life encourages assessing the quality and value of the final output rather than the value of the knowledge resource applied to the activities that produced the output. It is this knowledge resource, the skills, experience and inspiration tied up in the thoughts, insights and ideas in people's heads – i.e. tacit knowledge – that is the most challenging problem for knowledge managers to solve.

Any attempt at surfacing or recording these deeply held forms of knowledge might be met with a defensive reaction. The principles underpinning the approach to 3Es interviews being developed in PO Consulting recognize the psychological barriers to sharing why we acted in a certain way.

The PO's 3Es interview process aims to record tacit and explicit knowledge through in-depth interviewing. However, in general, methods aimed at recording knowledge through interview techniques are flawed – just as flawed as trying to research other human intellectual activities. They cannot be comprehensive or objective; the interviewer's perspective and understanding is often very dissimilar to the interviewee's. Problems of communication, interpretation of language and non-verbal signs are often missed in the objective-observer search for that elusive Holy Grail – tacit knowledge.

Nevertheless, interviews, especially in-depth, semi-structured or unstructured, are also a very powerful tool in recording tacit knowledge as they provide the researcher with the opportunity to help the interviewee recognize and verbalize his or her own tacitly held knowledge and beliefs. Other methods such as observation can provide data on this type of knowledge but seen entirely through the observer's eyes and verbalized in the observer's language. So, there is this powerful yet flawed tool to assist in the recording of tacit knowledge. While the evident flaws cannot be removed, their effect can be alleviated. One way to do so is through understanding the potential psychological barriers an interviewer can experience during the knowledge interview.

The interviewer's questioning technique is very important in limiting defensive barriers. PO's experience suggests:

1   Evaluative questions directed towards tacit knowledge make the interviewee think that his or her basic beliefs and thoughts are being questioned. This can elicit another defensive reaction to shield the individual from the perceived threat, i.e. the interviewer.

2   Content-directed questions (mostly open questions) help the interviewee in opening up and verbalizing his or her own tacitly held knowledge and beliefs.

3   The 3Es interview is an experience for both parties, and one which works most effectively in a climate of trust, empathy and support.

4   One of the key skills recognized during the development of the 3Es product is that of the interviewer. The PO has made it a requirement for 3Es interviewers to be formally trained operational and personnel assessors, building on skills already developed by the business.

Organizational applications of the knowledge interview

1   Organizations have experts in certain fields or processes whose knowledge could readily be captured and shared amongst other employees. Knowledge interviews prevent the formation of knowledge silos – whether organizational or personal.

2   Master classes – a special form of a KI with audience participation – allow for instant transfer of expert knowledge in organizations.

3   Knowledge interviews do not only allow for the effective capture and transfer of knowledge to any successor in cases of management turnover, but are also an effective internal communication tool. Internal publication articles, team presentations, attachments to project review documentation, or even to individual CV information (on centralized CV databases), are all potential organizational applications of the KI.

4   Knowledge interviews also work well with project teams who are together for a limited time period after which individuals move on to new projects. In this context the approach provides a useful supplement to existing project outputs allowing the team to express the tacit knowledge often not captured in formal project reports.

Apart from sharing of knowledge and transfer, dissemination of positive and negative experiences assists in the ‘humanizing’ of senior management, thus engendering a culture of trust and empathy. Additionally, for the individual job changer or expert, the KI offers a means of facilitated reflection time, articulating tacitly held beliefs which can then be evaluated and contribute to the individual's own learning. From an organizational perspective, the practice of KIs by senior managers provides additional impetus to the management of knowledge throughout the company.

After action review (AAR)

Complementing the knowledge interview, PO Consulting deploys widely the technique of AAR. After action reviews are tools for reflection and are particularly useful in helping us to ‘stop and think’ before we progress. Knowledge interviews often might be triggered by the outcomes of an AAR.

After action reviews can be used after any indentifiable activity (e.g. training, workshops, meetings or presentations). After action reviews are also used when someone has completed a task or project. The actual process is simple and consists of four steps:

1   Group (or individual) agree(s) to hold AAR

2   Facilitator sets the scene

3   Hold AAR

4   Decision or deployment and follow up.

The AAR itself poses four questions:

1   What were the aims of the project?

2   What actually happened?

3   Why did it happen in this way? (Why is there a difference between what was supposed to happen and what happened?)

4   What could be done better next time? (What can we learn?)

The technique is that simple. It can take from a few minutes to half an hour. The facilitator makes sure that the discussion avoids blame, and is honest, focused and records the event. The record of the AAR can then be passed onto the professional head for future reference, and further dissemination in PO Consulting (if some of the learning applies to more than just the group who carried out the AAR).

After action review is a simple reflective tool and contains no hidden agenda or magic. The PO uses it as an avenue for honest supportive reflection. The benefits of AAR come through from the learning process that is initiated by the AAR.

The PO believe that previously they would often agree on the benefits of planning and action, but all too often by the time reflection was approached the urgency had gone and been replaced by another action.

Reflection helps the PO make the connection between ‘what we wanted to do (planning) and what we did do (action)’. By failing to make this connection it was not possible to learn whether planning was effective or whether actions were carried out efficiently. Consequently, it was possible to evolve in a successful manner, and encounters with failure were persistent and common.

Summary of the Post Office's experience

The PO has discovered that knowledge management is fundamental for its long-term survival. However, the knowledge management answer does not lie solely in designing computer systems to capture knowledge. Knowledge resides in people and therefore it must start at an individual level.

The PO's experience suggests that providing the appropriate environment is a key factor in a successful knowledge exchange. One of the PO's major plans to do this has been to create a supportive space which allows individuals time to reflect on key decisions they have made and for the outputs of that reflection to be analysed and processed. While the PO has found KIs to be very useful they, nevertheless, are not the complete answer to knowledge sharing. Knowledge interviews are expensive to run, requiring at least two to three hours for the interview and a further six to eight hours for analysis and processing. However, in certain cases, such as senior management job changes, they provide a cost-effective approach to knowledge capture. They are best used as a complementary tool to the AAR, which is speedier and easier to conduct within operational settings.

The PO's experience suggests that knowledge management is contextual. Because of this, the PO had a radical examination of its existing approaches to management, ranging from organization design to the effective use of teams and the management of individual knowledge. This has taken the PO into new areas of management thoughts and practices. For example, the PO is now repositioning its leadership approach around the use of ‘dialogue’. This has led the PO to develop people approaches to help employees manage their personal explicit and tacit knowledge in ways that give them new options for looking at their jobs – both for the good of the organization, and for their own careers.