Tap Into Your Organization's Tacit
Knowledge Pool
By Rick Nigol
The training / learning model
embraced by most organizations can be characterized as top-town,
centre-to-periphery, and decidedly one-way. In other words, training
is pushed from the centre, out to a dispersed audience of learners
to be passively received in isolation. Not only is this usually not
a very productive or enjoyable learning experience for trainees,
this one-way "push" model of learning completely fails to leverage
the treasure trove of knowledge and organizational memory residing
in the brains of those in the field.
In other words, all the tacit knowledge about how
things work, what does work and does not work, lessons from past
experience, etc., that individuals have remains unshared with others
across the organization. Technology can make this tacit knowledge
sharing a very efficient process, but, unfortunately, most
organizations do not take advantage of such technologies.
Two items that have found their way into my email
inbox in recent weeks really help to illustrate the importance of
changing our organizational training models to more closely reflect
how people learn in the age of Google and social networking.
Firstly, Janet Clarey of Brandon-Hall Research
provides this excellent
slide show
that contrasts the multitudes of ways that individuals learn and
interact online in their personal lives versus the very linear,
isolating, and ineffective ways that learning is often organized in
the workplace.
Secondly, Intel corporation set up an internal
wiki, titled
Intelpedia,
that captures and shares knowledge across the organization. Anyone
within the organization can post and edit content on this wiki. In
its first year, Intelpedia had more than 5,000 pages of searchable
content and had garnered 13.5 million page views. Talk about
leveraging the tacit knowledge stored in your peoples' heads!
Remember, not all learning need be in the guise
of formal courses (whether in-person or online). Sometimes, for many
just-in-time, on-the-job learning challenges, the best thing you can
do is facilitate an easy way of communication and knowledge sharing
and get out of the way. Such an approach recognizes that most useful
learning within an organization is informal and happens on- the-fly
and as needed.
