Knowledge Management: Still Floundering? Absolutely
June 21, 2020
I spotted this knowledge management write up: “How to Hold on to Critical Knowledge When Employees Leave.” The recommendations on the surface seem like common sense. However, there are a couple of typical knowledge management oddities.
First, the main recommendation is to create a more management oriented workplace. Management, in the KM world, means recycling MBA think from the 1970s.
Helpful, right? These tips include:
- Do the mentor thing and cross train workers. (How does cross training work when a person is hired to perform one type of work; for example, perform stress testing for Inconel variants?)
- Plan for people quitting. (In today’s business climate, how are those plans working out for organizations other than Facebook, Amazon, Google, and the other FAANGs?)
- Create a New Age organization chart. (Remember the hierarchical charts? Useful? Sure, but the charts did not match the territory. Great fun creating these charts, however.)
Now the flaw. Here’s the recommendation from the write up:
Conduct longer, more thorough exit interviews.
The hitch is that the person doing the exist interview typically does not:
- Have domain expertise. Therefore, the interviewer cannot probe in a way that reveals the needed information. Remember: One does not know what one does not know. Gnostic indeed.
- Have a system in which to store the information. Sure, there are notes, but the person departing may be involved in a non verbal domain of expertise. How about converting a mathy expertise to some words on a paper or digital form?
- Understand the context of special “knowledge.” (The departing employee may speak one language and the interviewer another. The result? No useful “knowledge” is obtained.)
Net net: MBAs are likely to be blindsided when a person quits. Think about Disney’s top guy hitting the bricks. The captured “knowledge” is not knowledge. The more sophisticated the knowledge, the lower the probability that the interviewer will know what the heck the person knows if anything.
Ah, managing knowledge. Excellent.
Stephen E Arnold, June 21, 2020
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