Stage 1: Planning
Given that lessons are technically buried in anything that a business or other type of organization does, where does one start? That management dilemma of deciding how to apportion actual work and learning to work is never resolved, but the hit list of nominations for the latter can at least be trimmed by an intelligent selection of priorities.
The first step is to decide where in an organization its knowledge lies. I call this ferreting exercise the Knowledge Chart, which in essence is an institution’s informal ranking in importance of occupational positions. This approach is comparable with the conventional methodology known as knowledge mapping with one important difference. Traditional knowledge mapping’s objective is to discover the location of existing explicit knowledge within an organization, usually in knowledge storage technologies such as databases or physical archives. This would include its intellectual property such as patents, copyrights, trademarks, brands, registered design, trade secrets, and processes whose ownership is granted to the company by law, licensing and partnering agreements, and rules and procedures contained in process manuals. This also includes important documents, files, systems, policies, directories, competencies, relationships, and authorities. While important to decision making in its own right, the approach of EBM’s Knowledge Chart is to also identify the living, breathing, and occupant holders of specific knowledge—those who are still accessible in the organization. This should include both managers and their key operatives. The reason for this is to identify the main decision-making points where the organization can access its important tacit knowledge and experience rather than just whatever explicit knowledge is lodged within the organization’s archive. In companies of up to 100 employees, such numbers of employees might add up to 15; in larger organizations this might add up to 100 or more.
With this information in hand, the next stage is to identify a list of main activities or “events/experiences” that are considered key to the organization’s business. I call this the Project Map, which akin to the Knowledge Chart’s hit list of knowledge sources, is intended to identify the organization’s main “actions.”
Depending on the institution, these might include anything the organization considers could be improved upon—for example, where quality could be enhanced and/or the cost could be reduced. This could apply to everything from a group rationalization to a new product launch and the way capital was raised from the bank or a new investor, from an employee strike to how a new manufacturing outsource company is selected or the employment of university graduates. In their selection, identification should be on the basis of an audited result (e.g., the latest product launch was twice as expensive as last year’s product launch) or should be important in its own right (e.g., how a marketing campaign or a salesman managed to persuade a previously reluctant potential client to switch allegiances). The choice should also include repeatable events where the time scale of recurrence is more than the average tenure of the main decision makers and/or from work areas that have a particularly high rate of employee turnover. Additionally, organizations should select both successes and failures although it should be kept in mind that more can usually be learned from the latter than the former.
Development projects such as new product design, outsourcing enquiries, and investigations into new institutional practices are a particularly good source of learning because they are a microcosm of the whole organization. Since project teams are usually made up of people from many parts of the organization, development projects test the strengths and weaknesses of systems, structure, and values. Project auditing, especially when done only to ensure compliance with formal procedures rather than to analyze its positive and negative aspects, is invariably a lost opportunity.
To each of these activities or events/experiences is then added the name or names of the main decision makers. When choices are made, selections should not be confined only to management as lessons learned can often be just as valuable to an organization when they emanate on the shop floor. In any event, managers should also have an intimate awareness of operational issues before any decision-making exercise.
The final roll call of individuals and projects to be targeted for knowledge capture is then determined after an analysis to plot the organization’s actual staff turnover, in order to be able to choose judiciously between what is considered important and where the greatest level of job turnover resides. If choices have to be made, it is logical to gravitate toward those whose decision makers are more peripatetic.
I call this the Employee Transit Audit, which can be undertaken relatively easily by an organization’s human resources/personnel department. Designed to plot the level of job discontinuity across an organization at regional, functional, and departmental levels, it is an analysis of an organization’s employee turnover and, particularly, its occupational positions. Not all of the lost occupational appointments will be jobs where the knowledge loss is critical but this exercise will provide a first-level gauge of the scale of the underlying problem of staff churn.
Having identified the potential size and location of the knowledge leaks, we turn to the next job, which is to compare all three analyses—a job best undertaken by a senior manager in consultation with the person or persons who will eventually manage the knowledge-capture process. Where posts and names replicate will help to pinpoint priorities. From there it becomes a process of matching perceived importance with a budget to arrive at a definitive Knowledge Retrieval Plan that identifies events/activities and candidates for knowledge capture.
For a medium-size organization, this list might include a dozen posts that have a particularly high level of turnover. Alongside this might be another dozen events/activities, each of which identifies three or four main decision makers and key operatives. In addition, the organization might identify the chairman, chief executive, and finance director. Space in the budget could be left for several additional unexpected events and departures.
Budget is always a thorny issue. How much is organization-specific knowledge worth to stockpile and learn from—10%, 15%, 20% of an individual manager’s annual salary? A percentage of the value of a project/event? The estimate of the cost of a mistake that gets repeated continuously, of wheels that are reinvented time and time again, and of change that takes an inordinate amount of time to realize? Or the cost and time of firefighting? The value that organizations put on this esoteric commodity invariably provides a nuclear indicator whether or not they are genuine learning organizations. For many, knowledge is just an all-purpose article of trade that can be acquired simply by hiring. For them, their organization-specific experiences and knowledge are of little value. For others, it represents the potential added value of not having to relearn their own experiences or repeat past mistakes.
The Knowledge Retrieval Plan will consist of a list of individuals and events, and a schedule of when the “capture” exercise might or should take place. For specified jobs, for example, the knowledge owners who leave with short notice should be scheduled for knowledge capture in the last month of their employment. For the specified events, the date and duration of the event will be specified along with the names of the relevant knowledge owners and decision makers, with a related timetable for knowledge retrieval—whether it be before its conclusion or after its end. For key appointments like the chairman or chief executive officer, knowledge acquisition might be scheduled in a specified nonbusy period before the new year.
Like the Project Map and the Knowledge Chart, the Employee Transit Audit and the Knowledge Retrieval Plan should be repeated on a 12-month cycle or, in the case of a seasonal business, a 6-month cycle. A low-cost exercise, it is an essential part of the overall cycle that can better target many of the organization’s learning opportunities.