Recording a black box for progress

By VICKI JAYNE

Anyone who has stayed with one organisation for a few years will probably have spotted that new management brooms may shift a lot of furniture, but often succeed in sweeping the same old dust under the carpet.

In the mad gallop towards some new organisational nirvana, lessons learned from previous, often painful, restructurings are neglected, ignored, forgotten - and repeated.

The result, as British organisational consultant Arnold Kransdorff points out, is painfully slow progress.

"Without the knowledge of where it came from, an organisation can't apply those experiences and build on them.

"They end up falling back a step, starting from scratch and having to relearn the same lessons - it's a very slow method of moving forward."

How to capture past experiences, tease out organisational knowledge and function on a learn-as-you-grow basis rather than ending up down the same old corporate culs-de-sac is his specialty.

It's what his 1998 book, Corporate Amnesia: Keeping know-how in the Company (Butterworth Heinemann), is all about and the area for which his company, Pencorp, has devised some useful management tools.

They are tools Kransdorff is keen to promote in New Zealand. He has decided to expand his British consultancy Down Under and, given this country's increasingly high levels of staff turnover, reckons it's timely.

"My feeling is that New Zealand industry is probably as inefficient as in most other developed countries. Given the flexible labour market is now motoring along rather effectively here, things can only get worse."

As Kransdorff wryly notes, we're all a bit slow to learn from our mistakes.

A short or selective memory of past experience can conveniently gloss over blunders or shovel blame elsewhere.

Such natural tendencies are being compounded at corporate level by the trend to shorter job tenure.

While organisations have clear advantages to gain from a more flexible work model, he says too much expensively acquired knowledge is leaking out of the front door with every staff departure.

"It's a very costly loss and companies haven't realised that yet."

What can we do about it?

One response is to use electronic technology to "net" the knowledge by regularly uploading it into a readily accessible database such as a company intranet.

That's all right up to a point, says Kransdorff. Where such knowledge management systems tend to fall down is that while very good at capturing explicit information - the "what" of corporate know-how - they can't so easily transmit tacit information - how that know-how is best applied.

The latter is usually personal, functional, context-specific and much harder to codify.

Kransdorff regards capture of what has been called the "humanware" aspect of knowledge as very much a human resources or management issue, rather than an IT one.

The mentoring of new recruits by experienced staff is a useful tactic, as is the provision of time for regular cross-functional interaction among employees.

"Companies say they can't afford this but it's very useful.

"Likewise the process of overlapping - when you provide time for your departing employee and their replacement to spend time together. Paying two salaries is seen as wastage but long term, it speeds the induction process and saves money."

The tools Kransdorff has developed involve formalising this kind of tacit information download through a process of "oral debriefing".

An individual employee sits down with a skilled interviewer and, with appropriate prompting, provides a detailed account of his or her job experiences.

Done when a senior employee is leaving, the resulting document - usually about a quarter of an average novel length - enables the successor to literally read themselves into the role.

Such techniques become vital components of organisational memory.

"We draw up a knowledge map of the company, identify the major knowledge owners and carry out oral debriefings for these people on an annual basis."

Regular debriefs not only offset the problems of short or selective memory processes, but also help the interviewee clarify their own experiences from a more objective perspective.

They are done orally because the spoken word is a "more efficient way of conveying the abstract and complex nature of often-obscure issues surrounding decision-making within groups".

A less popular but more powerful tool is the learning audit - a similar oral debriefing process undertaken either at the completion of a specific project, or while it is still underway.

A bit like an aircraft's black box, these provide a lot of useful contextual information surrounding specific events - particularly should something go wrong.

This kind of "black box" approach works well only if the company involved is a true learning organisation - one in which employees are genuinely encouraged to learn from mistakes, warns Kransdorff.

Otherwise it can become an unhelpful exercise in buck-passing or blame allocation.

Another useful long-term tool to aid organisational memory is the corporate history.

Often done for purely PR purposes, these can serve a much more useful role if well researched and analysed.

As restructuring, outsourcing and the increasing use of temporary or contract workers steadily shrink the repositories of institutional memory in New Zealand organisations, such tools can usefully prompt remembrance of things past.

As US philosopher George Santayana has pointed out: "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it."

In a future-directed society it is perhaps all too easy for companies to ignore history in the blithe belief they can re-invent better wheels.

But why waste what's already been paid for? asks Kransdorff.

"Whether large or small, old or new, organisations have already paid for their experience at least once. If organisational memory is not to pass beyond reach, it needs to be managed - just like any other corporate asset. The prospective payback is enormous."

* vjayne@iconz.co.nz