Is Yours A Learning or Re-Learning Organization?
Capturing and Accessing Tacit Knowledge
How much of the information that has made your enterprise successful over the years is locked up in drawers or in the heads of people that have moved on? How much time does your team spend re-learning the knowledge, heuristics and tricks-of-the-trade as a result of promotions, layoffs and retirements? I’m going to guess that the answer to both questions is: probably a whole bunch. Let’s see how we might cause less re-learning and more real, new learning.
Joe, a baby boomer sales executive, is about to retire. He’s the only one in your organization that really gets along with your biggest customer. Before Joe leaves with his stainless steel watch, you would likely have him teach someone else how he did it, because it would be silly to have that someone else start from scratch. But let’s spend some more time with him in order to create a ‘Virtual Joe’ – one that will answer questions that your team has anywhere and forever.
You could ask Joe to simply write down the important things he’s learned and the short-cuts he’s used, but like most unconsciously competent people, he would only skim the surface and not record the why’s behind the things he did. One inexpensive way of getting deeper into Joe’s brain is to have someone follow Joe around for a couple of days with a camcorder and
- have him talk about his job and what he thinks is important,
- watch what he’s doing and ask why, why, why,
- ask for stories that illustrate key points,
- have him debrief his sales calls (remember the why’s), and
- listen in on his phone calls (you might check with legal first).
So now you’re left with 12+ hours of video. You probably wouldn’t ask someone to watch through all of that every time they wanted to ask Joe a question. One way of making Joe’s wisdom more accessible is to do what people who post on YouTube do:
- Chop up the video into logical clips,
- Attach key words and phrases to each clip (in the YouTube web application)
- Publish the clips on YouTube
Chopping up the video is fairly simple with tools such as Windows Movie Maker (there’s a built-in, easy to use editor within PowerPoint 2010). The key words and phrases would be, for example, “price objections in department stores” or “sales call planning” or “cold-calling”.
The down-side of this method, of course, is that the clips are there for anyone to see, and you’re seeing only the video and not, for example, Joe’s prospect spreadsheet or other non-video files. If those are deal-breakers, you could create a database that is searchable for words and phrases that would give you the name of the video file to find and watch.
And yet another option is a tool that grew up in the market research field, LIFEbytes Online. I suspect there will be other, similar tools out there, but I haven’t found them as yet. LIFEbytes Online is a patents-pending, web-based portal that can house Joe’s and others’ video for easy access. Because Joe and others will answer dozens of questions in the video that aren’t asked, LIFEbytes Online uses the entire, verbatim transcription from the video (with added context and narration of unspoken activities) that is fed into a database. The video is then edited into clips that correspond to the bits of the transcript – you can query the database and the results are the video clips (along with other types of documents).
The differentiation here, in comparison to the former state-of-the-art keyword technique, is that by using the entire, enhanced transcript, you can search for subjects that didn’t seem important enough at the time to key word. Joe can now answer questions he wasn’t asked before he left. LIFEbytes Online is a powerful tool in the market research space for the same reason – you can ask the portal questions that weren’t asked of the respondents during the field work.Your video clips and other files are accessible only to people that you authorize.
Imagine what your organization could become if so much time was not spent in re-learning things that had already been learned!