AUA: How to Get Institutional Knowledge Out of People’s Heads

Sam Spurlin (0:02)

Hey, everyone, welcome back to At Work with The Ready. I'm Sam Spurlin, and I'm joined, as always, by Rodney Evans.

Rodney Evans (0:10)

Hey, Sam.

Sam Spurlin (0:11)

Every other week, we're tackling one tough, thought-provoking listener question and sharing a few ideas we think might help.

Let's dive in. Rodney, what have you got for us this week?

Rodney Evans (0:22)

This week's question is, how do you create and hold the space for creating a culture of knowledge-sharing slash working in the open slash async comms in an org that has only ever relied on oral storytelling as the main method of knowledge management? What do you think, Sam?

Sam Spurlin (0:42)

So I'm realizing in my notes here, I'm making an assumption that there has been a resistance to a more written approach to knowledge management. Maybe that's not the case, and this organization has just never thought about really doing some systems work around knowledge management. And in that case, I think it's probably a more straightforward answer. So assuming there's a reason why it has stayed a predominantly oral tradition, where my head goes is, so there's a harvesting of the wisdom in this organization that needs to happen. And I think there are interesting, fun ways to do that.

I think about, in actually in undergrad, I took what is it called?

An oral history class, basically. I ended up interviewing my grandpa a bunch of times over the course of the semester to get that information that had only been an oral tradition in our family. There's a version of that to be done in this organization, potentially. How do we set up a rhythm of gathering around the folks who have the wisdom, and systematically extracting that through interviews? And this is very obviously a place, I think, where AI transcription and summarization would be a useful tool. So that's the straightforward part of it. And then the other part where my brain goes is, okay, well why maybe has this organization resisted doing this in the past? There's probably a lot of power in having information, especially if it is not written down anywhere. You become the go-to person, that people have to ask how we do things, and that gives you the reputational benefit of the things like that. So if you really want to start to unravel it, you have to come at it through that lens as well. You're not going to have people voluntarily basically giving up their power in an organization unless they have a good reason to do so. So I think about, well, what are other more beneficial games to play in this organization other than hoarding information and being the wisest one because you've been there the longest or something like that. And I don't know exactly what that could be, but I could imagine we could come up with some stuff with through conversation and through kind of working with the question asker.

Rodney Evans (3:09)

Nice.

I took a very different lens on this question because I think that from a leader's perspective, I'm going to take the empathetic tact here, which is there are a lot of leaders who are not necessarily amazing writers, and who feel a level of insecurity about writing things down. And when you reach a certain altitude in an organization, there's a lot of scrutiny over things that are written because they can be and should be passed around. Often, like legal will look at things even that are just internal documents. Now, people regularly leak internal comps to various media outlets, or just post them online. And so I understand there's the less generous way of viewing this, which is like, it's a lot harder to be pinned down when you can change your story a little bit for every room that you're in.

Sam Spurlin (4:10)

Don't put it in writing.

Rodney Evans (4:11)

Yeah, don't put that shit in writing. And then nobody can hold you to it, which is true. I'm not saying that that is not a real and valid part of this, but I also understand leaders' hesitance to have these receipts on them at all times. So I just say that to say, I think there is some underlying psychology and some fear that's warranted around writing things down generally, which is a requirement for what you're talking about in terms of knowledge sharing.

I also think that there are a lot of leaders who I've worked with over the years who do really rely on tone and style and ability to adapt on the fly based on their audience. And that's super hard to do in writing. And so one way to maybe start making some moves this direction, and I'm not saying that this is just about a leader. I'm assuming that there's this tradition of oral storytelling generally, is, you know, can you start leaning in to more like the sharing of Loom videos, or the summarizing of transcripts from meetings? Because those things like let people have a little bit more texture and a little bit more control, rather than just like, I wrote this static thing one time, and now it might haunt me forever. I think like starting to shift in those ways to things that have more permanence, more shareability, than just stories told in the hallway, but not the same level of formality and potential scrutiny as like hardcore documentation. Again, I'm not talking about like workflow and processes. You got to just write that shit down. But because you specifically mentioned storytelling, I'm talking about stories and nuance and things that require like narrative and context and whatever. And I think some of these alternative formats might be like a step in the right direction.