Book Extract

Learning, understanding, and sharing

The author’s "how to" list of key proven and practical things that organisations can do to become faster at organisational and individual learning contains the following:

1. An organisation's culture has to support rapid and continuous learning. It needs to have the expectation that everyone's job is to continuously learn. Phrases such as "We have always done it this way" or "We are different" need to be treated as words to fight over, more for the attitudes they represent than for the words alone. Culture involves the kind and level of performance that is expected of individuals and teams and how they are evaluated and rewarded. "To walk the talk", organisations need systems that reward the right behaviour. Managing employee performance includes the way individual and team objectives are set and aligned with organisational goals.

2. The training provided for new tools and job performance techniques needs to be robust. People need to learn within their organisation. A college education is just the beginning. For people to learn aggressively after college, many of the principles are the same, but the approach has to be adapted to the culture of the organisation. Developing a knowledge network on the job is the choice of each individual employee. Belonging to a knowledge network will not be prescribed in the typical college curriculum of required courses. Yet the authors contend it's a very effective way to learn once on the job. Also, once on the job, education, experiences, and training need to be designed by type of employee and aligned to employee's competency and development needs.

3. Establish knowledge-sharing symposiums and internal meetings to elevate, highlight, and share knowledge. Benchmarking will identify several very successful approaches to doing this that may be adapted to particular organisations. Several MAKE (Most Admired Knowledge Enterprise) Award recipients have an established record of doing this very effectively and have gone through several cycles of refinement and improvement. Use CoPs to concentrate rapid learning among core technology groups.

4. Provide recognition and rewards for sharing and reusing knowledge. While achieving reuse is not easy, getting people to share knowledge regularly is even harder. Thus, addressing "What's in it for me?" right up front is advised. Once again, several MAKE recipient organisations serve as excellent role models and benchmarks.

5. Obtain access to several of the splendid knowledge databases and use document-friendly software packages. These tools are necessities for searches and learning, and they enable organisations to quickly document and update explicit knowledge content for training. Engage corporate librarians and information specialists to expand the knowledge network capabilities.

The American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC), in existence since 1977 and an internationally recognised resources for benchmarking and knowledge management since 1992, identifies three themes that resonate with it regarding successful learning, knowledge transfer, and benchmarking. The gist of these themes underscores the importance of relationships, a passion for learning, and learning something new every day.

Innovative knowledge sharing

One innovative approach to sharing knowledge was started in 1996 by Texas Instruments (TI) as a sharing day with awards. TI launched its "Not Invented Here But I Did It Anyway," or NIHBIDIA, awards. The purpose was to encourage best practices sharing (BPS). It was called ShareFair. Best practices teams manned booths to publicise those practices and engaged in Q&A with fellow TI employees. The name of the awards reinforced TI's desire that its teams and individuals go outside, tap into the world's stockpile of rich knowledge; and import, adapt, and innovate upon best practices knowledge that already existed. This event got TI people actively talking about ways in which they could reuse valuable knowledge.

To the extent that TI wanted to encourage sharing, ShareFair did just that. Individuals and teams were recognised for the most successful shared best practices and knowledge, including those that produced great results. Senior managers presented the awards, which further encouraged others to share and reinforced the idea of sharing.

The first year, the event attracted 500. Besides booths, seminars were held on how to share effectively.

Two leading-edge thought leaders were speakers: Tom Davenport of the University of Texas and Carla O'Dell, president of the APQC. They energised the attendees with perspectives on knowledge sharing and reuse.

Overall, 52 nominations were submitted for the NIHBIDIA Awards, which resulted in the recognition of 450 team members who, combined, generated over $1 billion in annual savings.

During the second year, 1997, the focus of ShareFair was on the use of Internet technologies to share best practices and company intranet and extranet capabilities. The important effect of teams was recognised. That year, 51 nominations were received involving the work of 480 TI employees.

TI's Dallas Wafer Fabrications Operations and Silicon Systems, Inc., received awards. TI's Defense Systems and Electronics Group, which had just been sold to Raytheon and renamed Raytheon TI Systems (RTIS), also participated jointly. Five winners from RTIS were recognised, with acknowledgments to both the teams that shared and those that reused knowledge.

All in all, the TI approach was innovative and changed the compensation systems so that knowledge-sharing and reuse were recognised, rewarded, and encouraged. This was but one of many steps that TI took to make best practices sharing an integral part of individual, unit, and overall company performance reviews.

Six Sigma celebration

As the Raytheon Six Sigma (R60) process was beginning in 1998, it became evident that face-to-face learning and recognition would be an important part of sustaining the momentum of R60 teams. Several business units had begun business-unit recognition events as well as participating in the corporate-level event. As each unit a little better event that the last, a healthy rivalry began regarding the team accomplishments in one unit compared to the team accomplishments in others.

Senior leaders decided to hold an annual gala Raytheon recognition event, and they named it R60 Celebration. The winners from each business unit were invited and recognised at this annual event. Before the planning had gone very far, it was evident that five hundred employees needed to be invited. To produce a conference of this size effectively, one of the business units needed to host the event and assign resources to handle the detailed planning and logistics involved. And so the event would rotate from one business unit to another year after year.

At each event, booths were allocated to each winning team. For publicity, internal one-page press releases were written and distributed to the attendees to share knowledge about each team's project, including the problems they encountered and the results they achieved.

Excerpt from ‘Winning the Knowledge Transfer Race’ by Michael J English and William H Baker, Jr. Price: Rs 350. Reproduced with permission © 2006, Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited. E-mail: vishwanath_mum@tatamcgraw-hill.com