Knowledge Transfer by Osmosis

In my PhD research with R&D medical scientists, I explored how the scientists conceptualised the knowledge they worked with. A fascinating and unexpected aspect was not so much that the scientists intuitively understood that much of their knowledge was tacit (and unable to be articulated) but that they thought it could be transferred without being made explicit.

That is, they thought that when a novice scientist worked with an expert, the knowledge ‘sort of fell off the expert to the beginner, almost by osmosis’ (you can tell they were scientists!). Of course, the process by which this happened was shadowing, mentoring, observation – but the net effect was that tacit knowledge was seen to be transferred, without having been articulated.

If Important, it Gets Transferred

If it is important, it will get transferred. The most important knowledge gets transferred. In our institution we have a practice of creating a “collection of artifacts for the next teacher.”

Retirement Was a Gift

In the late 1980s, I was a supervisor. There was a manual process to create an authority file (like a database) and the person who was the supposed expert in this retired. They used the opportunity of his leaving to reengineer and reinvent the process, which was then much improved. “The expert” turned out to be not so deep, and through a group of knowledgeable people a new and better system was developed, leveraging resident latent expertise.

Orphaned Technical Knowledge

We developed websites or working interactives for customers. The architects were our SMEs. The boss sold the solutions. Then he left. No techniques were captured on how he sold (personal skills lost, behavioral tacit knowledge lost). We couldn’t bring strategy to new proposals. We were left with the technical knowledge, but the business development and leadership skills were lost. This was an organisational failure to capture or replace knowledge.

Deliberate Forgetting, Memory Had to be Rebuilt

When two legacy government agencies were merged, historical documents were shredded or burned from the old organizations, we lost an entire policy system. They probably did this so as to enable the new agency to start afresh. But in the new organization it created great difficulties in rebuilding documentation and history. We recreated knowledge via former employees who had retained old documents or by revisiting stored documents in boxes to recompile or reconfigure our knowledge. Bottom line: we lost organizational history. We had new work forces and very limited efforts to retain knowledge.

Lessons Learned Good For Newbies

We did a lesson learned on a refinery revamp where we had exceeded cost and time targets. At the lesson learned meeting we invited new employees to attend (who did not participate in the project). Older folks (38 of them) were reluctant to include new – finally agreed to 2. The conclusion was that the lesson learned meeting was a waste of time until the 2 new guys piped up that they had learned valuable information.

Sudden Attrition

This was a Fortune 500 company, with 50 years of history. 75% of senior level management retired within the past year after analysis that the company was top heavy. These people all had 25-40 years experience with the company. Who knows what the impact will be.

Expertise is a Crutch

Our research and development function was moved to another state. The result was a loss of expertise. We retained one individual as a consultant – it worked well. Then there was a management decision to stop the use of consultants. Then we had to try to capture her knowledge. Management felt we were using her as crutch and her specialist knowledge was not being internalized.

Expertise Sidelined into Management

In the growth of my current organization (20 to 100 employees, over 6 months) we end up being pushed from being experts into management roles. We did not pay attention to expertise movement taking expertise out of circulation.

Outsourcing Makes Life Complicated

This was an IT organization which restructured and we lost our internal employees who worked in application support. Support was outsourced to a third party. The current situation is that support for our application is so bad that internal people have to be trained. An activity that used to take 15 minutes now takes 2 weeks to go through the system.

Poor Judge of Expertise

I graduated in 2000 and went for an interview for teaching at the Ministry of Education (MOE). That same day, they read an article about me in the newspaper. I thought that that was a positive thing, but we kept talking about my art background. After 15 minutes, he said that I was not accepted. “Will you be teaching Art or English?”, he quizzed. A teacher in Jumeirah who used to teach me then called me about a vacancy. I joined them as a volunteer. Results were good, so the MOE invited me back. The same guy interviewed me. And on the same day, another article about me appeared. But luckily by then I had already been hired by MOE.

Different Ways of Transferring Expertise

Knowledge transfer depends on the type of knowledge and personality of learners. Sometimes they can pass peer to peer. Sometimes, they have to write it down. Sometimes, we create simulation games, decision games – ask the officers to read situations and make decisions. Computer gives a report of mistakes and reasons – tells them how to use which procedures and when.

Uncanny Ability

We have a guy at the airport who somehow knows how to identify people smuggling. Nobody knows how he does it. He doesn’t know how he does it either. He is not highly educated but 9 times out of 10 he will be right. He has been doing this for 20 years. There was one time he was convinced one guy was smuggling but we could find nothing. We held the guy for 48 hours, searched everything, found nothing. But our guy was convinced. Finally we noticed that he had some cargo, machine parts. We took it apart and found nothing. But finally we noticed a discrepancy between the declared weight and the actual weight. We had to tear the machinery apart and we found the drugs. Now we have 2 highly educated officers accompanying him to try and learn how he sports these things.

Youthful Persistance

This was from a smelting company. There was a 17-years-old assistant who had to get knowledge from one guy who is anti-social, short, smelly. There was no documentation. He put in the codes to run the smelter. The assistant was very persistent in asking how to enter the codes. Eventually, he was able to get the information in 3 days. The smelly guy left. The assistant left too after a while. The manager was in a lot of difficulty because nobody knew how to run the smelter. He called up the young assistant on the off chance that he might have the information, and he did. The manager was so happy he held a party.

Context creates expertise

My expertise has always been determined by my context. No matter what it is that I want to develop in terms of expertise, I have always found myself developing expertise nbased on the context I find myself in. An example would be where I was required to create business acumen training for Bank Managers but it required them to have training that was contextual to their role. In other words, no simulations that did not provide for direct application. From this project and the ensuing evaluation I developed a reputation for business acumen expertise and was constantly called on when considering decisions that influenced the models and processes that were introduced as a result of the success of the program. My context at the time provided the opportunity for me to develop that expertise.

Helpful Secretary

I was a new recruit at a patent attorney firm. Nothing had been written down there on how to do things. It was all assumed knowledge. I had to take a file and sit in front of a partner (a chemist) and work. I didn't want to admit that I didn't know anything! Fortunately his secretary was a very helpful person. I remember her well. She had a twin-set and pearls and an IBM typewriter.

In The Bar

I work in a bar. There's a young boy who works the same shifts as me, We keep on having the same conversation over and over again. He makes the same mistakes over and over again. He doesn't seem to be learning.

Battling on with KM during The Return of Scarcity

I needed to get internal auditors trained in the new versions of ISO 9001 -2008. However the GFC made this difficult to do via the usual route of sending them to an external course. So i used Quality Management groups in LinkedIn to have discussions on the new standard; also used ASQ forums (American Society of Quality - I'm a member) and Elsmar Cove comprehensive online Quality community resources. I pulled together a self-training pack and loaded it into our Sharepoint site. Problem solved. A new training qualification for the program created in our SAP HR ERP system. An economic downturn doesn't mean you have to give up training and development altogether - you just have to be resourceful & innovative.

Ask me

Me and "the last guy who left the team" had worked on so many proof of concepts that none of the current team members even know we did it. They would continue to experiment and fail or may take a sub optimal solution for the very same scenarios we have ready solutions. When all they needed to do was ask.

Learn Once Transfer Many

Our organisation went into a completely new area of work where we had no prior expertise.

So we hired a consultant from the USA. This project was in Thailand, but we knew we had customers for this kind of work in Indonesia as well. So we hired somebody local to shadow the consultant and learn from his experience, so he could reapply this knowledge to other projects.

We told him to do exactly what the consultant advised, and then when he got more confident to start customising.