For companies that depend on talent and knowledge, sustainability comes from developing those fundamental cornerstones. What strategies can we put in place to continuously nurture our talent base and knowledge vault, so we are stronger and more resilient over time?
People and knowledge are intertwined. Knowledge derives from creativity and willingness to tackle a seemingly impossible problem, relentlessly pursuing the best possible solution that fits the requirements and constraints. People are those that, properly aligned and nurtured, have the drive and brilliance to come up with simple, smart and beautiful answers, which are pure knowledge.
How can you continuously drive people to tackle problems and, as they solve them, capture the knowledge generated in a structured, replicable way such that you can reuse it to disseminate it and feed it back as nurturing elements to others in the organization?
The first thing is to accept that this is a continuous process that feeds itself with the results of every single challenge. Results, or knowledge, is the energy that drive people to know more and to tackle more problems and generate further knowledge. This continuous cycle, however, needs to be closely monitored and you must create specific conditions for the flow to be constantly evolving. Otherwise, both knowledge quality and talent drive will decrease and it will die down on itself. For this to work, you need to:
Build a comfortable, human-centric knowledge repository that people can relate to. There is no closed answer on this one but there are a few guidelines that help you to build one up properly:
- This is something that is meant to be used, so it must be defined by those that are going to use it. Take time to pilot it, to find the appropriate templates that make it easy for people to generate knowledge and to design the appropriate structure for the knowledge it will contain;
- Don’t focus on having one large repository. If the Internet has taught us something is that knowledge doesn’t need to be all in one place, it needs to be accessible. And do consider that different people, different areas, different knowledge may have different ways of being generated. Again, make it usable, don’t make it overwhelming;
- If it’s knowledge, it’s only valuable if you can access it. Regardless of the number of repositories you’re dealing with, make sure they are commonly accessible and searchable across the organization with simple, user-centric, google-like search mechanisms. If it’s easy to access, people will use it. If it’s visible and appropriate, people will love to contribute;
Focus on building teams that are taught to instinctively support each other in the quest to solve problems.
- Mutually supportive teams are prone to accomplish faster and better quality results. Barriers are far easier to overcome when you can bring in resources that have some background on the issues at hand and, at the same time, knowledge generation becomes mandatory so you can thank those that helped out;
- There’s a catch however, which is free riding. Too much available help promotes free riders to step in, so responsibility and balance must be in check to assure that you get help when you really need it not when you just don’t feel like pushing the problem on your own;
- If people are willing to support others they are also eager to produce persistent knowledge, because they know that knowledge will be important to others along the line. If you’re helping others it’s likely that others will do the same for you, generating enough knowledge for you to stand on your own;
Put this out to everybody like there’s no tomorrow.
- Build a core of focal points that push this message out consistently and that identify missed knowledge-creation and knowledge-use opportunities. Use these focal points as evangelists that defend both the value of knowledge as the seriousness of cooperation. Make sure they set the example and they are recognized for it.
- Use innovative, creative ways to push knowledge around, to make it stand out as a relevant piece of your organization and that it must be defended at all costs.
- Make knowledge creation visible to the organization. What knowledge is being created, by whom, based on what. Visibility makes people aware of its relevance and gives them the opportunity to be a part of something important. So, make it visible.
We’ve made knowledge one of our top strategic priorities and we’ve designed a full set of internal processes and visibilities to make sure that we all understand how critical and vital knowledge really is.
The best part is that we’ve consistently reduced our time to provide solutions and our incident ratio is consistently decreasing over time, as this strategy is taking serious roots in our company. Again, People and Process are keys for sustainability.
