Learning demotivation and unintended consequences

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Here's an expansion on my last post.

The same company I was discussing, the one that was trying to simplify the capture of lessons in their sharing system, had a situation where a new project enthusiastically filled in the knowledge transfer form with 50 lessons.

By this time the company had put in a quality assurance system on lessons, and found that 47 of the 50 lessons were too simple, too brief and too generic to add value. So they rejected them.

The project team in question felt, quite rightly, that there was no point in spending time capturing lessons if 94% of them are going to be rejected, so they stopped sharing. They became totally demotivated when it came to any further KM activity.

 Here you can see some unintended consequences of making things simple. Simple does not equate to effective.

Our advice to this company was to introduce a facilitation role in the local Project Office, who could work with the project teams to ensure that lessons are captured with enough detail and context to be of real vale. By using this approach, each lesson will be quality-controlled at source, and there should be no need to reject any lessons.

OK, it's slightly more complicated, and it's not as easy as it used to be, but it should work, and it should avoid the demotivation.