Mining and Leveraging the Tacit Knowledge Inside an Organisation

Collective knowledge or tacit knowledge in organisations is a vital resource that drives effectiveness, efficiency, sustainability, and adaptability of the business. It enables companies to discover solutions to new challenges, it enables people to move up the learning curve swiftly and become adept and effective in their roles. It provides a history that can inform and guide future decisions. It helps people bind together during the downtimes and find ways to be resilient.

Taking this collective knowledge from the different parts of the organisation and making it available for everyone can be a major value creating organizational goal. Beyond the immediate technical knowledge, there is cognitive knowledge or tacit knowledge which gets accumulated over time – knowledge of how to engage with different stakeholders, knowledge of how to look at new problems that crop up, knowledge of how to collaborate in teams, knowledge of how to innovate, etc.

In a sales organisation, different sales teams in different parts of the country encounter different customer situations and engage with them. Some are successful, some are not. Each such situation generates knowledge – of practices which led to success and those that were ineffective; of ideas which clicked and those that bombed; and so on. A newly recruited sales executive can tap into the tacit collective knowledge of the institution and be up the curve immediately, empowered and enabled to engage with different customers, handle customer objections and other flashpoints that may happen in each sales cycle.

Mining tacit collective knowledge is a multi-disciplinary practice. It starts by identifying where the knowledge resides – the different silos in an organisation that are formed because of location, department, business vertical and teams. Then comes the probing and assessing the depth and value of the knowledge; following this, the knowledge is documented, compiled and coded for future use; this coded knowledge needs to be transformed into usable knowledge – usable by different stakeholders in the organisation; knowledge access systems have to be made for the end-users, people in the organization, to be able to consume this knowledge and become more enabled and empowered.

A large paints company put in place a tacit collective knowledge mining engine using the above methodology which was designed and facilitated by Illumine. Over 3 years, over 10,000 sales associates operating out of paint dealerships and hardware stores became both knowledge generators and knowledge users – providing solutions to a range of sales flashpoints from the mundane like customers not responding, to the complex like project delays, whimsical customer requests, and quality control.

An important impact of mining tacit collective knowledge is that everyone in the organisation gets transformed into a knowledge worker. There is tacit knowledge in everyone, and each person can become a knowledge generator for others in the organisation. This same knowledge, once processed and converted into usable form, comes back to the people on the ground to enable them to work better, delivering higher quality of performance and results. In the same paints company discussed above, each of the sales associates, whose role was about using traditional sales ‘push’ methods while chasing and converting leads, became knowledge driven professionals who were more thoughtful, systematic, and creative in their work.