The water cooler effect

Summary

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Transcript

In the recent past a group of employees chatting around the water cooler might cause the boss to think, .Get back to work! Stop chatting. You.re wasting your time and my money.. But, what the boss didn.t realise was that the chat wasn.t just idle gossip. When one employee complained that X was late again, the colleague was also learning that it would be better to choose another supplier for that product or to get his orders in earlier and expect delays. This type of information is not so likely to crop up at a formal meeting. For one thing, meetings have agendas and people need to stick to them to finish on time. Unless a review of that supplier was on the agenda and the complaining employee remembered the incident and was given the opportunity to discuss it, it would not have become shared knowledge. In the water cooler situation there was also the opportunity for the other worker to ask something like .who else would you recommend. or even to suggest an alternative themself.

Large companies are rediscovering some business basics. The appropriateness of hierarchy, formal meetings and technology in the modern organisation are being challenged. Researchers into knowledge management have found that the pre-industrial revolution cottage-based industry was a better environment for fostering knowledge gathering and sharing.

There are two main types of knowledge. Firstly there is codified knowledge which we could think of as textbook type knowledge. It includes rules of conduct, etiquette and even mathematical formulas. It is knowledge that we.ve been able to put into words and is typically written down. The other type of knowledge is what is being transferred at the water cooler. It.s known as tacit knowledge. It includes knowledge that we can articulate such as .don.t buy from Y because they.re unreliable. to .there.s something about them that makes me suspicious.. It may even be a gut feeling that we can.t put into words and we.re not consciously aware of.

Tacit knowledge is not gained from reading books. It.s gained via hands on experience. Like riding a bike or driving a car. Studies show that we use roughly equal amounts of codified and tacit knowledge in our day-to-day activities, but tacit knowledge is what gives us a competitive edge over others.

Tacit knowledge resides in individuals and its sticky. To get it from someone else you need to be in contact with them. Frequent, informal and face-to-face contact is seen to be the best way to share tacit knowledge. In contrast, contractors, workers from home and part-time employees have little opportunity to interact socially, a situation that is less than ideal. Sending people on training courses, reading the manual, getting people to document everything and setting up sophisticated information systems can all help with increasing our codified knowledge. But to increase our tacit knowledge we need to do, rather than listen or read, and we need other people.

So what strategies are being used to increase tacit knowledge? One approach involves team building activities such as role playing, social events and even weekends away. Coaching or mentoring is also gaining popularity as a way at the corporate level. The idea is similar to that of masters and apprentices in the trade industry.

In a return to our primeval times, storytelling and narratives have made a come back as a way of describing what is both good and bad business practice. The descriptions are richer and more engaging than those recorded in a database or information system.

Capturing knowledge is recognised as the bottleneck in managing knowledge. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, experts like to be indispensable and fear their position will be threatened if they disclose what they know. Secondly, experts often can.t explain why they made a certain decision. Even when they offer an explanation or describe what they know or do, they often actually don.t do it that way when you watch them. But, people love to tell their stories in graphic and gory detail. Match the storyteller with an audience trying to solve a similar problem and you have two motivated parties willing and able to communicate at a level that email, meetings and manuals will never be able to achieve.

While face-to-face is seen to be the optimal method of transfer, this is often not practical. Many large multinationals are using an approach which brings together groups of people within the organisation who share common roles, skills or interests. These groups are known as communities of practice, and they interact so that its members can find out tricks of the trade, share war stories and ask for expert advice. The supporting technology need be no more than a web-based chat room or discussion forum, it.s the people and their experiences that make a community of practice a success or a failure.

Technology is also being used to ensure that the right people are put into the right situations for knowledge exchange. Companies are tracking their social networks to map who knows who, how often they meet, what type of meeting it is (such as a water cooler or formal type meeting), how important it is to meet and even who they try to avoid. The technique was used back in 1996 by police to track down the Belangelo State Forest murderer, Ivan Milat. Well, social network analysis is not just for identifying criminals and their victims. The modern organization is using these maps to see whether people are mixing within the organization. If the analysis reveals cliques or bottlenecks, the company knows to take action to break down communication barriers.

The mail boy who.s found a better way should be able to access the company CEO. And open access also means a change to office design. Instead of people being locked away in their own rooms, open plan offices, comfy lunch and recreation areas, complete with healthy bowls of fruit, are the latest trend.

Well we knew all along that no matter what the company sold, we were its most valuable resource. It might have taken a couple of hundred years, but senior management have finally worked this out too. So just smile back at your boss next time he sees you chatting by the water cooler. You.re working overtime.

Guests on this program:

Debbie Richards
Radio National Science Media Fellow 2005
Associate Professor and
Industry and External Relations Director
Department of Computing
Macquarie University
http://www.comp.mq.edu.au/~richards/
http://www.comp.mq.edu.au/~richards/