How to Feed a Dog: Solving Knowledge Retention with KM Practices

maybe yeah I heard bonus points one time when I started my last job at the law firm and I showed up in a meeting to give a presentation to like 100 board members across 10 offices and uh of course PowerPoint went down and I had printed notes and they were like what and afterward people stopped me in the hallway for weeks they're like wow you continued on yeah I continued on how are you guys not prepared for this but anyway um yeah so thanks we move forward I guess um I'm Brian mccan I am a certified knowledge manager I'm also a librarian um I spend a lot of time working with uh Collections and connections so we house a lot of stuff

and I help people to get to that stuff when they need it is the short version of what we what I do um whatever that looks like um today we're going to talk about knowledge retention this is a a problem that basically every business faces sooner or later because of this thing where time passes in our universe things will change over time and when they do you got to be ready so generally we think of it as uh retaining knowledge when people leave the firm they leave and their knowledge goes with them and we would like to know how they still did their jobs after they're gone um but I'd encourage you to think a little broader

than that it's not just when people leave completely but leave temporarily say you take maternity or paternity leave and you've got to hand off your jobs for a few months okay you should have documentation and a way to make that easy let's say that you had to take care of a relative who got sick maybe even even it's just taking them to Chemo one day a week that's 20% of your workload if you have documentation you could hand off to somebody which would be great the way we're going to uh get a handle on that is with really cute dogs so let's go ahead to the next slide CU you got that maybe these are Baxter and Spencer which

is either the name of a law fir or a show coming the CW in the fall uh bter is on the left he is oh gosh this is where I have notes um he is a docon he's about seven years old he likes barking and sleeping in chairs uh the larger think you is uh Spencer he's a bass at mix he's 12 years old he likes working and sleeping on couches because he's Baker now up until recently my daughter was in charge of feeding and caring for both of these dogs last fall the inevitable happened she went to college so we had to pass off those skills to somebody else to my son right um but she

was the only one who knew how to feed them both because they're both different ages they had different diets the smaller dog does not eat as much food so my son Ben had seen her feed them but didn't get like the measurements who gets what how many times a day um so my daughter Sophie she wrote the instructions all down for them hand them off uh my son Ben looked at this uh list of the the schedule that she' made um it didn't exactly work with his schedule because he attends robotics Club after school so he can't feed them at 3:00 if he's fixing robots till six like an awesome person so he had to make

some modifications then when he uh so he made his own list for how he would feed the dogs and now uh he and he wrote some of that down it's on the fridge so if he's ever out for a prolonged robotics tournament they're awesome if you haven't gotten to go to one they're like Tony Stark Expos but with teenagers that's beautiful um and now we have that knowledge around for all of us on the fridge what they did in sharing that knowledge around from Sophie to bend about how to feed the dogs make sure I get the right direction is they followed this Knowledge Management practice the secci model also known as the oh God SM the nonan teuchi

model they're the ones who came up with this if you want to take pictures please do but you can actually just Google secci model get full descriptions on Wikipedia there's lots of versions of this graphic uh there are some that are like little literally line draw anyway find them take a picture this is not the end all be all it's not behind the pay wall you can get out there this is where I'm going more my notes um this basically covers four stages it starts in the upper left uh with socialization and moves clockwise around you'll see on the outside there are words tacit and explicit a little bit tacit knowledge explicit knowledge tacet is knowledge that we keep inside

that doesn't get out explicit knowledge is stuff that's out there right that's been made explicit think of if you're a musician like me think of explicit lyrics that get a label and if you're a professionist like me I will give you a h later um concert percussionist we get tacit on our music a lot we don't play uh it's just be quiet while the horns do the important things that's fine here's the stages it takes some interpretation socialization this is where knowledge is sorted by proximity or by observation usually it's just by being physically close to somebody you're socially close to them and that's how you learn my son had seen my daughter feed the dogs but she never

actually told him how to feed the dogs right he just kind of you pick up some information along the way externalization is when you take that knowledge that's inside of you and put it outside of you that's when my daughter wrote down instructions and had it available for work situations this could be a video it could be screenshots it could be whatever but it's getting that information out outside of a person combination is the stage where you take that document and you put alongside other stuff right this is where my son compared that schedule to his robotic schedule and said okay this will or will not work we're going to come back to it but this is the place where in work

setting we have all the most to gain I

think you adapt information and then this last stage internalization is where uh you make the job your own you follow your own instructions and you might make some additional tweaks my son fun fact solid foot taller than my daughter okay even though he's younger by several years which means he can put stuff on a higher shelf if he wants to for example he can find that as he goes um so as we go and do things we can make adjustments in the center of this graphic there's another Spiral to indicate the passing of time these are that we cover and we cover again this is to account for things like the future that time passes

so this is not a one andone process it's more of a mindset that you begin um if you're into sci-fi it's sort of like entering a temporal Loop uh you go through the same time lip again but this time you retain the knowledge from before and you get to have more stuff going forward to solve your situation yes I watch Star Trek all the time um so at work what does this mean uh it means for social socialization somebody watches you do your job externalization you tell somebody how to do your job connect uh the third one combination they adapt how to do the job and then internalization they do the job then we get back to stage one where

somebody watches them do the job not you so a lot of the value I see for this is in the combination part because we can put instructions for a process next to other things this really gives us a chance to rethink the how and why of what we do so often we for example run reports or scans uh that people may not need anymore or if they want them in a different manner I got a new boss last year who wanted to get our reference stats in a whole different format so we worked through that um and it was a good chance to have documentation for it um it's also a good time to say you

know I wrote this report and I send it to somebody but let me ask them maybe that report should go to somebody else maybe that job function was transferred to a different person and it helps helps you be more efficient and make sure that uh the value in what you're doing is always consistent so just remember that things will change over time you know our dogs will age they might need medicine of different kinds when they get older um platforms that we use will go to new versions software will need upgrades vendors will get sold or go out of business people will leave or change jobs so having this sort of process in place um really helps us when those

things inevitably happen so um I think check for time I could do that nice so I encourage us to think of this for knowledge retention for two main things for two main reasons one is when people leave the company when they retire or go somewhere else I've spoken with a number of it directors more than I would have expected who said that the biggest threat to their information security is a bus namely them getting hit by what because all that information they have lives inside of them and if they get hit by a bus nobody has that and they have to flounder and dig and try to find that information elsewhere which is a little unsettling

um but I would say knowledge retention is again more than that it's not just when people uh leave the company or get hit by a bus please don't I mean please I'm not saying that out into the universe don't get it by bu I love my IT director he's awesome um but it's also when people change roles or go through a different department consider that if you were given a promotion or moved to a different department if there was a task no one else knew how to do that task could move with you so yeah you've got this promotion but you also have to keep doing your old work that's not a new job that's more

job you don't want that you want to keep the keep the instructions with the key key roles rather than with the key people and having this sort of process helps distinguish those out so it's not just stuck with you um and also just because I live with information all the time and how people handle it uh please remember that knowledge retention is not binary it's not a that you do or don't do knowledge is already being retained uh to some extent when people leave your company or whatever um but it's retained really badly you know um new employees need to find things out for themselves often which takes time they might ask people for help which takes those other

people's times um I had a person here on my team who retired a couple years ago she'd been there for about 207 years and we asked her to WR write down some records for the new person she wrote a physical binder in print honest to God the print on the page was this tall and like okay this and it's limited to that binder so we couldn't transfer it anywhere else and it's like okay we got to please let us work on this so knowledge retention is happening but it's happening inefficiently and this sort of process helps you handle it well easily seamlessly so here's the part where you say to me Brian this sounds great but unfortunately it also sounds

like work so what does this take to get this done good question a lot of us have a lot of work to do and if you're like me you know I'm doing my job and doing stopping to do a process like this and document work feels like I'm not doing my job I'm documenting about it so it does take some time to start this process and write things down War how to do that in B but I will say it's less work than floundering for a year after the anti boss is hit by a bus or after several people in a department choose to retire in the same few months um yeah it takes some time and effort

and is worth it I also consider part of my job ensuring that information is stored well and that it's accessible to other people so even if you you don't get hit by a bus you could win a cruise around the world you could take maternity or paternity leave uh things happen time passes and it's good to be ready for that now instead of scrambling when it suddenly is thrust upon you um I also note that this process is front heavy a lot so once you do the ground workor it gets so much easier after that revising content is a lot easier than making content so this practice will build momentum over time um and it's a

loop in a spiral because it just keeps going it gets easier the more you go I'm going to move into okay we're almost ready if you want to get started and there's going to be time for questions if you want to get started with this process um how would you get implemented I would consider a big picture and a small picture approach let's get back to the cute dogs the big picture approach is the big dog it's bigger dog he's selling that really big um first look at your company's core values or their strategic goals um Knowledge Management really professes looking at what your company says it wants to do overall and time uh efforts

into that as much as possible most companies value things like uh sustainability or efficiency so go to your SE suite and say hey I saw that you in our goals that you want to be uh sustainable and efficient with things here's a way we can be efficient so that we don't have to uh retrain people so much whenever people leave retire we can actually streamline our roles it's hard for them to say no when you're giving them what they want generally and I find that work well for us uh the smaller more granular picture smaller dog um if you want to make sure things things get done uh standard practice for that Knowledge Management recommends as

a field is to tie it into people's performance evaluations know people do what they have to do we do what we get paid to do and so wiring it into that makes a certain amount of sense and the same way that you have you know other duties as assigned maybe have a line like you know maintain documentation regarding key tasks um oh sorry that was that was chap description um so yeah um what this means is if you're TI into the performance evaluation that people who currently work for you it puts it on the radar and it says this is the thing we're serious about we're going to be talking to you about this once a year how you embody

that is up to you it could be a checkbox did you work on this project this year yep true okay um it could be a f star rating of you know whatever it could be pick five tasks that you do and create documentation okay um and then the next year do five other tasks and did you revise these okay there's aot lot of ways you can do that depends on your company size and posture and all that up to your but that's for people who currently are on board add it to your job descriptions and then new people you hire it's on their radar from day one so when they enter it's on their job

description it's on their performance eval and they get it going forward and it's in the worst so spend you know maybe a year cycle doing that kind of work and then uh you can head into other things I'm going to I blurred through because we had Tech issues um that's large my thing this is a Q&A for you thanks to our sponsors um you can feel free to contact me at this really small email address okay um on most social medias I'm writer bran because I also write books it's a thing that I do um and you can find me there which if you want to know me I'm happy to do that further are there any

questions that you might have or things you want to look into

for or can be awesome that's fine CH is anything you need for me you can okay cool then thanks for your time um have a good day and keep records for what you do big round of