Jan 28 2014

Share & share alike, a saying several hundred years old. Do we still do it? How well do we share what we learn?

Dynamic organisations are good at identifying problems, they solve them quickly and just as importantly, they share the new knowledge far & wide throughout their organisation. There are many ways to do this, some more effective than others. Personally I prefer active sharing, actually getting people together & showing them the story behind the newly gained knowledge. This also has the additional effect of building relationships & networks – easier to ask someone you’ve met before about something that cold calling a name on a data file.

Of course this isn’t always practical, one page lessons can be good ways of communicating new information, new standards, things recently discovered, but this method doesn’t always convey the process that led to the new knowledge, or why the new knowledge is important to understand.

Another method, one I am not fond of, at all, is the shared database. Sure, they can be great for all manner of applications, and in some cases they are useful, but for a disparate workforce with a wide variety of activities & focuses, the ability to find things useful to one area that were learned or discovered elsewhere becomes difficult. It may be as simple as the language or terminology used for similar items that causes searches to result with nothing useful. It may also be like trying to find a needle in a haystack – we add so many items to the database that it is virtually impossible to find something relevant when it is needed.

No matter which method you chose, and the above list is in no way exhaustive, think about the effects, the simplicity of use, the value of the knowledge transfer and arguably, most importantly, what you are actually trying to achieve. One hopes it is not a tick in an audit box!