If you had to teach your successor how to motivate your team what would you tell her?
How would you explain to an apprentice what exactly you do as a seminar facilitator to captivate and charm an audience?
How would you describe your ability to intuitively know a good hire from a bad one?
How do we teach others about the decisions we make that are based on intuition, insight, or gut reaction? How do we explain our ability to “just know”?
The impending retirements of the baby boomers over the next few years should place these questions at the front and center of any organization that has to replace experienced workers with their less experienced counterparts.
Expertise and knowledge my friends cannot be captured in a one-hour exit interview, or a knowledge repository.
Consider the case of the British plane spotter whose sole job during World War II was to differentiate British planes returning home, from German planes preparing to drop explosive bombs. This task was partly discerned by the sounds of the planes engine. The spotters, however, could not articulate how they made their assessment. They just knew how to carry out the task.
The Brits soon learned that the only way to train prospective spotters was by having experts provide trial and error feedback to the trainees until they became skilled in this mysterious undertaking.
This knowing is hard, if not impossible, to thoroughly articulate as it resides in one’s semiconscious or unconscious cognitive skills and evolves through experience. It is referred to as tacit knowledge.
Tacit knowledge is best transferred in a one on one relationship, over time and with a great deal of patience. It requires on the job learning methods and is most successful when taught through an apprenticeship.
Consider the job of the chick sexer. A chick sexer is responsible for determining the sex of a hatchling and placing it its respective bin. Male and female hatchlings are separated because they are given different feeding programs. Professional sexers cannot explain how they determine the sex of a hatchling. This knowledge is transferred from mentor to mentee over a period of weeks. Students observe their teachers repeatedly perform this task and eventually they are given the responsibility of doing it themselves. Of course, they are under the watchful guise of a teacher who provides immediate feedback. Through this process, the student learns the nuances of how to perform the task, but the development of such expertise occurs at an almost unconscious level. (For more on chick sexing and developing expertise see http://bit.ly/1zwHNim)
What tacit knowledge resided in your organization? Whose expertise do you need to transfer in order for your firm to continue functioning at optimal performance levels?
This is not something you want to leave to chance. Nor do you want (and I see this all the time) to wait until the 11th hour to put a knowledge transfer initiative in place. It is costly on so many levels.
Although I have been studying knowledge sharing in organizations for several years, and I have consulted on various knowledge transfer mandates, it wasn’t until recently that I came to truly appreciate the inherent challenges of transferring expertise.
A few months ago I was asked to teach a course on effective speaking because the teacher had suddenly fallen ill. Although I make my living as a speaker and seminar facilitator, it quickly dawned on me that delivering a speech and connecting with my audience are skills that have become second nature. I really didn’t know what made for an effective speaker or how to craft an effective speech. Nor did I have a clue as to how I would teach this! It was something I learned in the field, by trial and error, and developed over years of experience. But doing and teaching are very different skills. I can do – but how was I going to teach!
Many of us don’t even know what we know because our tacit knowledge is buried so deep within our unconscious mind.
In describing how he performs his craft, the Italian Maestro Carlo Maria Giulini explains, “conducting is a very mysterious art, I have no idea what I do up there.”
The above examples illuminate the inherent complexities of communicating tacit knowledge. The transmission of such knowledge requires the demonstration of the teacher, the deliberate practice of the student, and feedback from the expert. Much of the learning occurs informally and the teaching unconsciously.
This process requires time, patience and must be systematic.
As I muddled through the effective speaking course, I tried desperately to relay my knowledge and concretize my process for delivering an effective speech. But much of it remains very elusive to me. In the end, I determined that the only way to help these students develop their speaking skills was to have them deliver a speech every class and have me provide constructive feedback. Watching them make beginners mistakes surfaced my knowledge of what not to do which would have remained dormant if the situation did not call upon my experience. Likewise, formal classroom training would not evoke the subtleties of visual cues, hand gestures, body movements, or a change in tonality – behaviors that all contribute to giving a great speech. Although I am not aware of employing such behaviors when I speak, as an experienced speaker I can identify them in someone else.
The development of such skills requires extensive observation and feedback from an expert who has what experts Leonard and Swap refer to as an “experience repertoire”.
This requires time my friends.
Organizational Knowledge drives innovation, competitive advantage, and long-term success.
More specifically, it is an organization’s tacit knowledge that drives its competitive capabilities.
If your workforce is aging and preparing for retirement, then you should be implementing knowledge transfer initiatives. Otherwise, your business may suffer from performance disruptions, customer service chaos, missed deadlines, and financial fallout.
I encourage you to act fast as time is of the essence!
