Clarity Strategic^TM

Once, long ago, I worked for NASA. One of my co-workers there, someone I liked and admired, was one of America's leading experts on fastening and joining. And local management didn't understand the importance of this knowledge until a few months before this guy was to retire. THEN they got a contractor to record my friend's knowledge on video.

My friend passed away a few years ago. I have no idea whether NASA even attempted to replace his knowledge, or whether anyone watches the videos. I have a copy myself, that my friend gave me before he passed. But I don't know fastening and joining well enough to try to pass on that knowledge.

The lesson I learned was this: you never know when someone brilliant might move or quit or retire or become infirm or die. And that their knowledge must not be allowed to die with them.

I've had people oppose this view. They tell me I over-value knowledge, that nobody is irreplaceable, that there may always be a contractor you can hire when you are in danger of losing corporate experience. But I think the opposition is mostly because not all knowledge is not that important:

• Some is ubiquitous - you can find it everywhere - and the Internet makes that likely.
• Some is racial - you can recreate it or rediscover it from scratch if you have to.
• Some is trivial - it makes no contribution to whatever it is you want to do in the future.

So we're not talking about "leaving a legacy." Though others will care about what you leave behind, chances are a company won't depend on it. Some of us aren't that specialized, or that successful, or for that matter, not that important. As far as that goes, the opposition is spot-on.

BUT. Some knowledge is not like that:

• It's highly specialized.
• It's difficult and expensive to recreate.
• It's a key element in ensuring a safe, functional design of a product - or a company. I'll refer to NASA again: one of the principal reasons for the failure of the Mars Climate Orbiter was that the people who wrote its guidance software had retired, and were gone. When there was a problem, who could anyone call?
• Even when the knowledge is not itself valuable, the process by which it was gained may be.

THAT is the knowledge we have to act intentionally and strategically to save.

• It may be distributed among multiple employees, in different organizations.
• It may not be captured in a way that ensures future learning.
  • It's not recorded at all, or not recorded on permanent media.
  • It's not in use right now, and hasn't been used recently.
  • It's packed away in storage, or nobody knows where it is.

Some organizations call this process "succession planning." Whatever. Planning, in any case, because this kind of loss isn't prevented by accident.

I'm not here just to moan and complain, though. There are people, like David DeLong and his Smart Workforce Strategies, for instance, who work with large companies to prevent that knowledge loss. And I'll offer a few things a small company can do to capture knowledge while there's a chance:

1. Make sure everyone on the team gives the effort "buy-in."
2. Whenever something goes right (or wrong), figure out why and write it down.
3. As a team, find the most critical elements of what went right (or wrong) and expand on that.
4. Store the results so they can be found and used.
5. Build in some overhead on every project to make this happen. For your customers' sake, between five and ten percent of the total estimate ought to be about right. Let the customers know you're doing it, and make them welcome to share in it.

If you need more help with this than I've written here, drop me a line. ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )