KM World 2008: Trautman – Transferring Knowledge Isn’t Just for Nice People
Nice people are often a liability when it comes to knowledge transfer. While we might pick Jane to do our training and knowledge transfer because, after all, she is such a people person, Jane is most likely to become a liability in this role. Why? Because she will tend to over teach. That is, she will teach both the stuff that she knows and the stuff that she is not expert in because she is so keen to help and to connect with people.
So, if being friendly is not required what is? Only two things: the person must be competent in the thing that they are teaching and they must be willing to be involved (although being grumpy is fine!)
This was another timely paper for us as Grant and I are bottlenecks in two main areas – creating proposals and managing risk.
Steve gave a set of questions for extracting the wisdom from your experts. We’re going to try this. Example questions include:
· Why does each step matter?
· What are the most common mistakes?
· Who do you have to talk to and why?
· How do you know when you’re in over your head?
· What are the rules and which ones can you ignore?
· How do you know if it is good?
· What should you listen and look for?
He also gave a set of steps for transferring knowledge. I was so engaged by his presentation style that I forgot to jot all of these down so I think I’m going to have to order his book.
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November 13th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
Hi Sarah, sounds like KM World was worth the trip. I wish I had been there, especially so that I could have heard more about the Trautman paper. While I understand the principle of what he is saying I dont agree that “being grumpy is fine”
If you want to transfer knowledge then surely both sides of the transfer need to be willing participants, not simply the one transferring. If the person receiving the knowledge is not a willing participant, (and how many in EDRMS implementations are!) then the attitude and mood of both parties will become important.
If the person transferring is grumpy then surely that attitude will affect how well the recipient accepts or more importantly retains the knowledge being imparted?
So in some respects knowledge transfer is for nice people or at least non-grumpy people
November 13th, 2008 at 7:12 pm
Hi Paula,
Thanks for commenting - good points about unreceptive EDRMS recipients…..:). Think that could be the subject of a great blog post….are you interested in writing something here?
One of the points that Trautman made is that people don’t think that they are natural teachers or trainers and what they often lack is a structure for sharing what they know not more ’smile training’. I’ve ordered his book (still waiting on it) because there are specific areas where we want to transfer knowledge, we don’t think the people that hold it are necessarily particularly good at sharing it (and they’ve been known to be grumpy!) and we think it’s pretty specialised…but maybe it isn’t really.
Watch this space - if the book ever arrives (Amazon having problems getting a copy) I will post the results of our experiment!!!