The two accountabilities in effective knowledge transfer

Transferring knowledge is like passing a ball - both the thrower and the catcher share accountability for an effective pass.

Imagine an experienced practitioner transferring knowledge to a younger colleague or group of colleagues. Who is accountable for ensuring effective knowledge transfer?

The answer is that the accountability is equally shared. It's like a football pass - both the thrower and the catcher are responsible for making a successful pass.

Not only is the accountability equally shared; both parties need to be equally involved, and both need specific skills.

The experienced person (the thrower of the knowledge) needs to be willing and able to share their knowledge. They need a good overview of what knowledge needs to be shared, and they need to have thought through the best way to share it. They need to understand the difference between showing, teaching, coaching and questioning, and know when each technique needs to be used. If they are writing their knowledge, they need to be aware of the curse of knowledge, and have to write it in such a way that it can be fully understood.

The junior person (the catcher of the knowledge) needs to be willing and able to learn. They need a good overview of what knowledge they need to acquire, and they need to have been trained in knowledge elicitation techniques such as open questioning and root cause analysis. If they are reading the knowledge, they need to pay attention; to "read, mark learn and inwardly digest."  Also they need a structure for storing the knowledge they acquire, so it can be useful to themselves and also to their colleagues. Learning blogs and a shared wiki can be powerful tools. They may also find it useful to video record their coach at work, and to analyse the video afterwards together with the coach.

So to make sure knowledge transfer works, you need to prep the passer and the receiver, just as in a game of football.

The 6 steps of Knowledge Retention

The Knowledge Retention process consists of 6 generic steps.

Missing pieces, by OnePoint services, on Flickr

In many organisations crucial knowledge is held in the heads of a few ageing experts, and when they retire, that knowledge is lost. In some Western organisations, with large baby-boomer populations, up to 50% of the corporate knowledge will depart within the next decade. Unless something is done, the organisation will suffer a form of corporate Alzheimers; progressively losing its intellectual capacity until it fails to function.

Or like a jigsaw progressively losing its pieces until the picture no longer makes sense.

Knowledge retention is an approach to dealing with the risk of knowledge loss when senior experts retire.  In high-reliability organisations, this knowledge loss presents a serious risk and is addressed systematically and routinely. The Nuclear industry, for example, has a complete and well documented approach to Knowledge Loss risk assessment.

When your organisation has a full KM framework in operation, this risk is mitigated as the expert knowledge should be already dispersed within the system and available to other staff. However you may still need to run additional activities just to capture the unique tacit knowledge of the most experienced experts. One of the oil majors, for example, despite their complete and well embedded KM approach, still conducts retention exercises for about 5% of departing staff to capture the last pieces of tacit knowledge that may have escaped the system to date.

Where your organisation has no embedded KM framework, then knowledge retention becomes a necessity. 

6 steps

I have recently completed a major study of retention approaches used by leading KM organisations, including interviews with some of the key players, and I see a total of 6 steps at work in the Knowledge Retention process. These are as follows:

1. Analyse the risk of knowledge loss through retirement, and high-grade the experts to address. You will not have enough resources to retain knowledge from all experts, so you need some method to identify where the risk of loss is greatest. The Nuclear screening approach is as good as any (although there are variants) and you or your HR department need to run this screening on a regular basis.

2. Engage the individual experts and their line managers in the retention process. Knowledge retention, done properly, is a resource-intensive process, and both the expert and their line manager need to understand the process, accept the importance of retention and the risks of not doing it, and agree to set the time aside to take part. When KM is at its infancy in an organisation this step is crucial and takes a lot of explanation. Once KM becomes embedded and retention is routine, this step becomes more efficient; merely involving a stated agreement between all parties. Part of this step also involves assignment of a facilitator to work with the expert, and the identification wherever possible of a successor to whom knowledge will be transferred.

3. Scope and plan the retention process. Even once you have high-graded the expert, you still need to high-grade the knowledge topics you want to address in order to focus on the knowledge topics that are unique to the expert, and are crucial for the future running of the organisation. The facilitator (and others) work with the expert to map out the knowledge topics the expert knows about, to prioritise these, and then to decide how each topic will be retained and transferred.

4. Conduct the retention activity. This will be a series of activities to make sure the knowledge is both transferred to a successor (if a successor is available) and also, as much as possible, documented in guidance, stories, procedures, checklists and training material. Activities might include
• Coaching and mentoring the successor through work tasks, while the successor maintains a recorded log of what they are learning;
• Retention interviews;
• "Audience with ..." sessions;
• Critical Decision review;
• Narrated work;
• Lesson learned capture;
• Best Practice sessions, 
• and many more

5. Document and structure the knowledge. Although much knowledge will have been directly transferred to successors and others during these activities listed above, much can also be recorded in audio, video and text. The facilitator and/or successor will need to synthesise this source material into a useful and usable form - a knowledge asset for future reference, or training material, or a series of wiki articles, for example. 

6. Embed the documented knowledge within the organisation knowledge bases. The wrong thing to do is to build a standalone knowledge asset based on a single expert, The right thing is to disperse and embed that knowledge into the existing knowledge basis of the organisation - the wikis, the community portals, the training sites and so on. It needs to be integrated with what already is known, and put where the knowledge seekers will come looking. 

These 6 steps, run well and routinely, will help address the risk of knowledge loss, and help stave off the onset of corporate Alzheimers.

How to learn from critical decisions (video)

This video from the University of Bath, UK, shows Joseph Borders describing a varation of the Critical Decision Method.

This is a method used to elicit knowledge from an expert, in the context of an unusual even they were involved in, through an analysis of their decision making process.

You might use this technique as part of a Knowledge retention strategy for example, or as a form of Retention Interview.


The Critical Decision Audit: Blending the Critical Decision Method & the Knowledge Audit from University of Bath on Vimeo.

Where should you focus Knowledge Retention?

Knowledge retention can be a massive exercise if not focused. But which knowledge should you focus on retaining?

Imagine you are setting up a Knowledge Retention interview with a company expert. This expert has a lifetime's knowledge which would take an eternity to capture - where do you start? Where are the highest priority areas for capture?

This Boston Square may help.

The first axis of the square is the routine/non-routine nature of the activity which the Expert knows about. The Expert often has something that the ordinary practitioner does not have, and that is an understanding of the non-routine activity - the "one in a thousand" occurrences that most people never see, but which an expert has either met, or heard of somewhere. Most practitioners, even the junior ones, understand routine activity - it is when they meet non-routine circumstances that an expert is needed.

The second axis is teh criticality of the knowledge. How critical will that knowledge be? Will it save lives and millions of dollars, or is it not particularly critical?

Obviously the focus for your retention is the critical non-routine areas. If you do nothing else, then capture the knowledge of these topics.

Then, if you have time, address the "critical and routine" (although most people will know this already, it may be good to have the experts viewpoint), and then the "Non-critical non-routine" (it will at least help people avoid reinventing the wheel).

7 ways the brain loses or distorts knowledge

There are seven ways by which an individual forgets, doctors or otherwise overwrites their memories, and through which their knowledge gets lost.

Would you store your documents in a system that;

• Begins to lose them as soon as they are filed
• Never stores many of them properly in the first place
• Often won't let you find them when you need them
•  Returns results that are wrong
•  Allows documents to be falsified, and 
•  Gradually adjusts all the documents to fit what you currently believe?  

No you wouldn't, but that's how your memory works - the system in which you store tacit knowledge.


The human brain, despite its many remarkable features, is not great at retaining detail in the long term. A series of posts on the Farnham Street blog (posts one, two and three) reviews a book by Daniel Shachter called "the seven sins of memory - how the mind forgets and remembers".

For those of us in Knowledge Management, this is crucial stuff. We often assume that the majority of organisational knowledge is held in the minds of individuals, and there are many people who will argue that knowledge is ONLY in people's minds, and becomes information once recorded (an old but ultimately unresolvable argument).

But is it safe to store knowledge in brains? Here are 6 ways in which brains lose this knowledge.

• Transience - the issue of the forgetting curve. As the blog says - 

"Soon after something happens, particularly something meaningful or impactful, we have a pretty accurate recollection of it. But the accuracy of that recollection declines on a curve over time — quickly at first, then slowing down. We go from remembering specifics to remembering the gist of what happened ... What we typically do later on is fill in specific details of a specific event with what typically would happen in that situation".

• Absent-mindedness - the process whereby the memory is never properly encoded, or is simply overlooked at the point of recall, and never transferred from short-term to long-term memory.  When your attention is divided, you never store the memory in the first place.
• Blocking - the process where you know you know something, but you can't recall it. "It's on the tip of my tongue" you say, but you still can't recall the knowledge you know that you know.
• Misattribution - where you recall something that is actually wrong. For example, I prided myself in being able to remember word for word (in Norwegian) the introduction to a Norwegian Christmas TV serial from the 1990s.  Then I found it on Youtube, and discovered I was almost 100% wrong in what I remembered.  Misattribution is what causes eyewitness testimony to be so dangerous.
• Suggestibility - the way in which someone or something can implant false memories in your mind (a very disturbing phenomenon).  As the blog says, "Suggestibility is such a difficult phenomenon because the memories we’ve pulled from outside sources seem as truly real as our own".
• Bias - the way in which you gradually filter your memories to become consistent with your current worldview and with your personal "narrative".  There are in fact 4 biases that we are prone to when editing our memories: Consistency and change bias, hindsight bias, egocentric bias, and stereotyping bias.
• The "seventh sin" on the list is Persistence - the way in which unpleasant memories can persist, despite our attempts to forget. Although this is not a failure of memory, the unpleasant and persistent memories may come, through persistence, to override other memories, thus giving a distorted picture. 

How can Knowledge Management help?

Knowledge management has to have solutions to these issues, as they are real and pervasive. Some of the solutions are as follows.

• Team reflection processes, such as After Action review and Retrospect, are opportunities for a team to review and rehearse what happened in an activity or project. By talking together, they fill in the gaps caused by absent-mindedness, and help cement the memories deeply enough to combat some (but not all) of the transience.  AARs and Retrospects should become a habit in the organisation, and should be held as soon as possible after the activity in question, before transience sets in. 
• Team logging - perhaps through the use of a project blog or similar, allows the blog posts to act as an aide-memoire, thus avoiding misattribution, suggestibility and bias.
• Rehearsal through conversation - perhaps through conversations in a community of practice, keeps knowledge fresh and avoids many of the time-related aspects of knowledge loss. Ensure your community discussions are open to all, so all practitioners get constant exposure to discussion and exercise their memories on a daily basis.
• Codification - imperfect as codification is, it is the only way to retain details in the long term and avoid all of the 7 issues mentioned above. 

 Make sure your Knowledge Management Framework includes team reflection, logging, conversation and codification in their appropriate places. Don't rely on the human memory as a long term knowledge store, given it's seven modes of failure. 

A great story of tacit knowledge, and how to make it explicit

I came across this story twice recently, and it is a graphic example of the tacit nature of knowledge, with some pointers about how this may be made explicit. 

Image from wikimedia commons

One instance of the story was in Nancy Dixon's blog, and the other was a blog post by the psychologist Gary Klein. The story is of a firefighter who made a "gut judgement" based on unconscious (tacit) knowledge. As Gary explains:

"One of my first interviews with firefighters, described in my book Sources of Power, covered an incident in which a young lieutenant was called out on a simple house fire. At least it seemed simple. The flames were coming from the rear of the single family, one-story home. Almost certainly the kitchen. 

Kitchen fires are pretty common, and there is a straightforward script for handling them: send the hose crew into the house and attack the fire from the inside. That’s what the lieutenant did. Then he ordered the water to be turned off, to see the effect. But there was no effect — the fire came roaring back with as much intensity as before. They tried again, with the same result. When they stopped spraying water on what they thought was the seat of the fire, the fire showed no reduction. 

"This was bizarre. The lieutenant gathered his crew back into the living room to plan his next move. And then he became tremendously uneasy — so uneasy that he ordered his entire crew to vacate the building. Just as they were leaving, the living room floor collapsed. If they had stood there another minute, they would have dropped into the fire below. Unbeknownst to the firefighters, the house had a basement and that’s where the fire was burning, right under the living room. 

"I had a chance to interview the lieutenant about this incident, and asked him why he gave the order to evacuate. The only reason he could think of was that he had extrasensory perception. He firmly believed he had ESP".

This is an example of knowledge so deep, the person holding the knowledge doesn't realise what he knows.  He does not know the grounds on which he made the decision to evacuate the building, and so can only explain it as Extra Sensory Perception.

Can such knowledge ever be made conscious (explicit) in such a way that it can be shared with others?  Well, yes, it can, because Gary Klein helped the firefighter become aware of what he knew, and so made the knowledge explicit. Here is how he did it.

• Gary interviewed the firefighter
• He got him to recall the events of the fire - what he saw, what he heard, what he felt
• He got him to reflect on those impressions, and analyse what was unusual; what was different. Indeed the firefighter had noticed two anomalies - the fire was much hotter than expected for a kitchen fire, and also much quieter than expected. These anomalies had alerted him that something was different - something was wrong.
• By the end of the interview he understood why it was so quiet: because the fire was in the basement, and the floor was muffling the sounds.

As Gary says in the blog post - 

A critical cue was what wasn’t happening: The noise he expected was absent. And that, as much as anything else, made him nervous and led him to order the evacuation. As a result of the interview, he could see that it wasn’t ESP that saved him, it was his experience. His experience enabled him to notice a cue — noisiness — that was missing.

Before the interview, this knowledge was so tacit the firefighter thought it was ESP. After the interview, he not only realised what he knew, he would be in a position to teach others and to pass that knowledge on.

It is through knowledge harvesting interviews such as this, and other question-based processes such as Peer Assist, After Action Review and Retrospect, that tacit knowledge becomes explicit. Nancy Dixon calls these processes "collective sense making", and often these processes require skilled facilitation. The task of making unconscious (tacit) knowledge conscious (explicit) is not an easy one, as shown above.

Without such questioning, the firefighter's knowledge would have remained tacit and, if he had been asked to advise others, he could have said little more than "try to develop ESP". After the interview, his advice would have been far more helpful.

Making tacit knowledge explicit can be done, it takes time and effort, but it can add huge value. In cases such as the one in this story it can save lives.

Two routes to map knowledge retention risk

Knowledge retention can be a major issue for organisaitons, but how do you approach the job of mapping the retention risk?

Knowledge retention and transfer is a big issue for many organisations, particularly engineering organisations, who may be facing a 10%-20% annual loss of knowledge as the experienced staff retire. Knowledge retention is also one of the most challenging tasks for KM, as it represents the need to "capture" and/or transfer tacit knowledge, as it is the tacit knowledge that is being lost. And everyone knows that tacit knowledge is very challenging to transfer and to capture. It's not as simple as a "brain download" or a vulcan mind meld.

The first step in planning your retention and transfer approach is an analysis of the risk of knowledge loss. It has become clear to me that there are really two strategic approaches to doing this.

• The first is a people-based approach, where you go through the company person by person, assessing both the risk of their leaving, and the value (and replaceability) of the knowledge they hold.  This is our preferred method, and can be done regularly as a mapping exercise involving HR.

• The second is a topic-based approach, where you go through the needed competencies of the organisation one by one, assess for each the value (and replaceability) of the topic, and its risk of knowledge loss.  This is part of a more general Knowledge scan or mapping exercise, and identifies areas of retention risk as well as other areas where KM is needed.

The end point is the same - a risk assessment mapped against both individuals and topics, which is a starting point for your retention plan, and for the suite of interventions you will need to apply, depending on the context and the amount of time you have available. However the starting points are different.

The choice of which approach to apply depends on the size of your company. An SME, with a relatively small number of staff, many of whom take multiple roles, will need the people-based approach. A large organisation, for pratical purposes, will need to take the topic-based approach.

Whichever approach is best for you, it will allow you to clearly map out the scope and impact of retention risk, and so build an effective retention plan.

How Poor KM cost Boeing $1.6

Poor knowledge management and a lack of Knowledge Retention can cost organisations a huge amount of money; witness this example from Boeing.

Boeing 737-300 der Ukraine International Airlines
Originally uploaded by maiak.info

According to Energy Voice

When Boeing offered early retirement to 9,000 senior employees during a business downturn, an unexpected rush of new commercial airplane orders left the company critically short of skilled production workers.

The knowledge lost from veteran employees, combined with the inexperience of their replacements, threw the firm’s 737 and 747 assembly lines into chaos. Overtime skyrocketed and workers were chasing planes along the line to finish assembly.

Management finally had to shut down production for more than three weeks to straighten out the assembly process, which forced Boeing to take a $1.6 billion charge against earnings and contributed to an eventual management shake-up.

The Grandparent effect

A couple of presentations chimed for me at KM World yesterday.

Grandparents day by mavining1 on Flickr

Firstly a statement by David Snowden about how older staff and younger staff are more receptive to knowledge and ideas than middle-range staff, and how the retention and transfer of knowledge between these two age ranges may therefore be easier (he called it the grandparent effect).

Secondly a range of stories from Colin Cadas and Katarzyna Cichomska on the KAMP (knowledge acquisition and modelling process) at Rolls Royce, where young staff were trained to capture knowledge from people due to retire. In one case, a group of engineers with 30 years experience were retiring, and the KAMP project was run by a group of 19-year-old new hires, who had been given training in Knowledge elicitation and packaging.

There are several advantages to pairing up very experienced and very inexperienced staff in knowledge capture programs, rather than expecting the successor to the experienced person to capture the knowledge;

• There will be no rivalries between the experienced person and the junior. The junior is "no threat"
• The experienced staff will explain all the details, rather than making assumptions about what the juniors already know
• The juniors take the documentation load from the seniors
• The need to document means that the juniors are active participants rather than passive listeners. They learn better when they need to create the official record.
• When the experts check the documentation, this provides a second learning opportunity for the youngsters
• They leave the program with a training in KM techniques
• They leave the program with an "ownership" stake in the knowledge record, and are much more likely to refer to it and re-use it

Recording the Know-Why as part of Knowledge Assets

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We are working with a client at the moment, who has a good system for documenting Standard Operating Procedures, and updating them with new Lessons Learned as appropriate. This is their way of continually improving their processes, and of institutionalising (one form of) corporate memory.

However there is a risk here. The risk is that they are recording "how to do it" and not "why to do it this way" - the "Know-How" and not the "Know-Why". And if the context changes, and the procedures need to be adapted, then without an understanding of the "why", people won;t know how to change. Once you get outside the standard operating envelope, then standard operating procedures don't work.

This is an operational version of "thinking fast and slow". The Fast thinking is to follow the SoP, when all you need to know is "what to do" or "how to react". The Slow thinking is to go back to the principles, go back to the Why, and derive the new operating procedure.

So how do you record the Know-Why?

You have a couple of options.

• Record enough commentary in the SoP so that you can see what it is based on. For example, one legal company we worked with used to keep standard contracts, but each contract clause had extensive commentary describing why the clause was there, and why it was written the way it was. The contract could then be amended if needed (together with amended commentary) and the commentary stripped out when the contract was printed. That way they preserved the Know-Why.
• Create a secondary document, such as a Basis of Design document. This document takes each element of a project design, a product design or a software design, and described the basis and the assumption son which it was designed. You can create a BoD before the project, and revise it during and after the project to capture changes to the design, and the rationale behind those changes. The BoD then helps future teams working on the same product to make intelligent changes, rather than blind changes. It also helps transfer knowledge to subcontractors working on the project, and protects against loss of knowledge. I recall someone saying to me, about Basis of Design, "I could look at the BoD and put out a quality project design in 2 weeks, and there hasn't been any work done in this area for 2 years".

A new look at mentoring in knowledge transfer

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Mentoring and coaching are tried and tested ways of transferring knowledge between an older experienced person, and a younger less experienced person. However this relationship often breaks down. In a recent study for a client we found that knowledge transfer through mentoring was running at about 20% of the efficiency that was needed.

When the relationship broke down, the two sides blamed each other (“he won’t tell me anything”. "he never asks me anything" (remember this?)), but in reality there were very few incentives to build the trusting relationship required for effective coaching. 

Part of the problem with the traditional view of mentoring is that accountability for knowledge transfer lies with the coach or mentor. It is written into their job description, they are coached in the process of mentoring, and they take a leading role. The status of "having knowledge" is compounded with the status of "driving the process". The mentee plays a passive role, and we end up with "Knowledge Push" if we aren't careful. We end up with Teaching; not necessarily with Learning. At the same time, the mentor is still busy doing what he or she sees as "real work", and when push comes to shove, real work takes precedence over mentoring. As far as the coach or mentor is concerned, there isn't much of an incentive to do the coaching. This is especially true of the experienced person is due to retire. Ineffective transfer of knowledge is "not my problem" as far as the retiree is concerned.

More recently we have been looking at changing this realtionship. If the mentee is given an active status, that of a "dedicated learner", and is trained in the skills and processes of knowledge elicitation and interviewing, there is a change in the dynamic. The mentee takes a more active, more leading role - almost like an investigative reporter, or an industrial spy. After all, ineffective transfer of knowledge IS "my problem" as far as the mentee is concerned. It becomes a Learning-driven process, not a teaching-driven process.  That learning can be planned, through a learning plan, and monitored and measured. And as he or she learns, then instead of just taking notes in their personal note book, they start to build knowledge assets in the company knowledge base. So as well as transferring the tacit skills, a documented knowledge base can be created as well. Now we have knowledge driven by Pull, not Push, which as we know is far more effective.

KM in the NRC - Quantified success story 20

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An interesting post here about Knowledge Management within the Nuclear Energy Commission.

A few things struck me - firstly that NRC estimates it loses 4,000 work years of experience every year through attrition and retirement.

Secondly, the KM Framework thay are using to deal with this, incluring retention, mentoring, communities of practice etc.

Finally, they give us a value figure

By making information readily available through the Knowledge Center, NRC estimates it saved $37 million between October 2009 and September 2010, Eng said. Having communities of practice for new inspectors and providing links to training resources, for example, has decreased the time it takes a new employee to pass his oral board by six months, down to a year and a half. Those employees are able to work on their own sooner as opposed to being paired with more experienced workers.

So the value in this case is measured through more rapid onboarding. There may be additional value through better decision making, and fewer errors, but these are harder to quantify

KM and the overloaded expert

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Heavy Load
Originally uploaded by feserc

Tom and I are working on another book in our "Knowledge Management For......." series, this one on Knowledge management for Sales and Marketing (see here for a list of the others). There is a very interesting chapter in there by Graeme Smith, on KM along the supply chain in the Ordnance survey. I won't tell you the whole story (he tells it very well in the book), but there is one point that really struck me.

Before the Ordnance Survey applied KM to their supply chain, they did an audit of supply chain activity, and measured the level of conformance with process. In other words, how much time were people spending doing their core role and core process, and how much doing other things, including rework.

They found a level of non-conformance in some areas of 80%. These people, most of whom were very experienced, were spending 80% of their time not doing their job.

Graeme explains

Closer inspection of the data and workplace analysis of activities measured, revealed the nature and extent of the role these individuals were playing within the social network.
The most revealing aspect of their role was the fact that the rest of the organisation was using them as knowledge experts. They were being exploited for their knowledge; the position they held in the value chain; their propensity to help others solve customer problems; and, to a certain extent, by their own management who left them alone simply because they "got things done" and helped the team achieve their key performance indicators.

As a result of staff movements and retirements, these individuals were having to deal with increased demand and conversely were becoming a scarce resource and a growing risk to the business. Their own lack of capacity to create and innovate change in the process, due to volume pressures was reducing their ability to transfer knowledge to others. Of immediate concern to management was the high degree of risk that this built into the process. Individuals leaving their role would see a collapse of the social network previously dependent upon their knowledge.

That is a vision of Knowledge management being done because it is needed to be done, but being done with absolutely no support or strategy or structure or process, and as a consequence resulting in a very risky and unsustainable situation.

The Ordnance Survey took a number of actions to address this, including reworking processes, codifying expert knowledge into a "knowledge and learning pack", and a major program of retraining. But what can YOU do in your organisation, if you find people playing the expert role at the expense of their day job?

1. You can make the expert role into their day job! Its obviously what's needed to be done, and they are obviously the right people to do it. See blog post 
2. You can start to codify as much as you can; into processes, wikis, checklists etc
3. You can build the communities which can support the expert

But don't leave it with the poor overloaded individual, with only 20% of capacity left for their official job. That way, you are heading for a fall.