Knowledge transfer: making it stick #LIKE30

Thursday night saw the latest gathering of knowledge and information professionals (and librarians, in case Tina is reading this!) that is the London Information and Knowledge Exchange (LIKE). Gary Colet, Knowledge and Innovation Network Facilitator at Warwick Business School shared with us some thoughts (and exercises) to get us thinking about the knowledge transfer process, and how we might approach facilitating it in a work environment.

All talk...

Gary's intro to the session was to demonstrate the degradation of "knowledge" through the oral transfer process. He banished four reluctant "volunteers" from the room (beer and all!) and brought them back in again one by one. He told a story to the first participant, then asked her to relate the story to the next person who was then brought into the room. This process was conducted a further two times. The rest of the audience had been issued with the key facts from the story beforehand, and marked the volunteers on how accurately they passed on the story - this must have been fairly daunting for the volunteers, who I dare say weren't expecting a night in the pub to turn into exam conditions!

Unsurprisingly, this manufactured version of Chinese whispers demonstrated the gradual (or in some cases not so gradual) degradation of the knowledge that was transferred down the line as the story was passed on. [As an aside, whilst the short exercise elicited the expected response this is nonetheless a useful, relatively swift exercise that I may consider using to make a point in my own work.]

The point of course was to demonstrate how key points and facts can easily be lost or distorted. It may seem trivial in the manufactured environment described, but translate this to a corporate setting, where a senior executive or a vastly experienced professional is leaving a company, and the potential losses (on an experiential, intellectual and even financial level) could be massive. When put in these terms formalising a process for some form of debriefing in such situations seems a no brainer, and yet in my experience at least it is far from common. Gary may have put his finger on the reason for this when he pointed out that the approach he advocates (namely facilitating conversations with and between small numbers of relevant people within an organisation) can be labour intensive and hence high cost. Perhaps the initial outlay puts organisations off taking this route. However, an analysis of time/money saved by the organisation through the facilitation process might change a few minds... an argument for pushing for better ROI measurements in the KM arena if ever I heard one, though that's a can of worms to be left for another time methinks!

A little less conversation... a hit for Elvis, but a miss for KM

Back on track, and Gary expanded further on his approach to the facilitation/interview process. Essentially the focus is on conversation and eliciting nuggets of information from the individual being interviewed, or preferably facilitating the transfer of valuable information between the subject and an additional key stakeholder within the organisation. Now clearly there's more to this than just sitting a couple of people down and having a good chin wag. As with so many things in life, preparation is vital. For the facilitator this is understanding the things that are important to the organisation through a process of discussions with relevant individuals, and then mapping types of information that may emerge agains a 4 x 4 matrix with axes covering short/long shelf-life and low/high value. I think that makes it sound more complicated than it is, but I know what I mean! With an idea of what they're trying to get at, it's then down to the skill of the facilitator to nudge and cajole the interviewee/subject in the right direction.

Any questions? Well, not quite any...

Gary's questioning technique is OPEC - nothing to do with oil production in this case, but referring to the types of question to ask / the preemptive approach to structuring the conversation:

Open - often general questions that encourage the subject to talk, e.g. "tell me about your current role".
Probing - mining for valuable information, with questions such as "what went well/not so well? What were your successes/challenges?".
Examining - essentially looking for validation on relevant points that have emerged so far. Typically who, what, why, when, where, how questions?
Closing - to bring a sense of closure to the interview and for the subject. Questions such as "If there were three things that you would most like to talk to your successor about what would they be?"

Asking the right questions is half the battle for the facilitator, but Gary also identified some skills that are vital for the person fulfilling this role:

Capture - teasing out the nuggets of information is one thing, but getting them down on paper efficiently and effectively is another. Gary recommends mind mapping as an efficient approach. Identifying 2 - 3 branches of the map relating to the key areas that you are investigating before the interview, then developing the map from there.
Listen - conversations can go in all kinds of unexpected directions and the facilitator needs to hear what's being said, understand its importance (or lack thereof) and capitalise or redirect the conversation as appropriate.
Think ahead - the facilitator needs to be mindful of the brief from the employer, the approach to questioning, and the time available, then adapt/direct the interview as appropriate.

The gift that keeps on giving

As we saw from the initial exercise, the Chinese whispers effect can reduce the success of the knowledge transfer process. Therefore it was suggested that having the interview subject joined by the most relevant colleague(s) in the process to help provide the path of least resistance in the transfer process is often the ideal scenario. The importance of any tangible end product (or output) from the interviews shouldn't be underestimated either. Any report, video/audio snippet or other output should be well polished and usable, and mindful of the likely end-user/target audience to ensure its usefulness. This sentiment brought to mind Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell's "knowledge assets" from their book learning to fly (definitely worth a read), the concept of which is briefly described by Knoco on their website.

Reflections

This was a very enjoyable session that got everyone involved and trying out some of the methods that Gary described. The emphasis on the importance of conversation in the knowledge transfer process had echoes of David Gurteen's approach, and I have employed his knowledge cafe technique in my own work with successful results. The main difference in the two approaches is the numbers involved, with Gary focussing on working with individuals or small numbers and the knowledge cafe approach accommodating larger groups. The former is therefore very much focussed on learning from the experience of the individual and passing this on, whereas the latter useful for facilitating group learning/sharing, and also the observation and facilitation of distributed cognition, particularly when the boundaries of the k-cafe are pushed slightly to include either a scribe to jot down the ideas emerging from group conversations or the provision of writing materials in the tradition of the world cafe.

Clearly there are situations that suit one method more than the other and vice versa, but the principle of conversation is at the heart of both. From Gary's recollections of his work, and my own experience of the knowledge cafe process, conversation is clearly a powerful method of "knowledge transfer", though I think it's often underestimated and/or undervalued. Perhaps that's slightly unfair - taken for granted might be a better description, particularly by senior managers who are short on time and look for the extraordinary or novel when committing their time to a process that may appear to have minimal direct value to them and their current objectives.

I would therefore suggest that it's down to us as practitioners to advocate the importance of conversation in the knowledge sharing process. As we saw at #LIKE30, talk, far from being cheap, can actually be incredibly valuable.