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Why
Businesses Need to Start Nurturing Collective Wisdom
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by Marcus Goncalves |
Editorial Note: One way a company suffers by not collecting the
knowledge of its employees is through excessive, redundant work. For
example, worker "A" could have done a task in half the time if they
had access to information from worker "B" -- benefiting from worker
"B"s learning curve and results. Begin to use the suggestions here
to collect the wisdom contained in your organization.
Kay
Graham-Gilbert
COLLECTIVE
WISDOM CAN BE AN effective tool for solving the problem of knowledge
deficit, or the underutilization of organizational knowledge. If you
are a small, medium or large business, and you don’t have a method
in place for harnessing and managing your organization’s collective
knowledge, you may be losing opportunities for significant revenue
enhancement. According to a study by the Delphi Group, less than 20
percent of knowledge available to an enterprise is actually used.
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Furthermore,
IDC predicts that Fortune 500
companies are currently operating at a $19 billion knowledge
deficit, increasing to $31.5 billion by year’s end.
Such studies that quantify the value of
knowledge deficit should give businesses a reason for viewing
strategy meetings and other forms of brainstorm sessions (where
employees across the organization are encouraged to freely share
their own ideas) in a very different light. Such meetings are
powerful tools in nurturing collective wisdom that transcends the
corporate memory. These meetings should cover areas that are
largely determined by the specific needs (gaps) of the organization
and may range from |
developing a corporate quality mission
statement to establishing practical methods for empowering employees,
creating a new concept for a product or service, and so on.
The main idea is to tap into the collective knowledge
of the organization as a whole (memory) and its members, inheriting the
tacit knowledge that they carry with them. Unfortunately, most of the
knowledge contained in an organization goes unused, and often gets lost
through employee layoffs and resignations, even before it is
acknowledged and captured, generating knowledge deficits (another form
of gap!).
According to TMP Worldwide, it takes 1.5 times an
employee’s annual salary to replace that employee. This is due to
several factors, one of which is the loss of unrecorded information and
data. Lost information may include internal business processes, external
contacts/relationships, and proprietary data.
Knowledge deficit refers not only to know-how, but to
codified data as well. Knowledge deficit is caused when employees cannot
access:
- Databases
- Documents
- E-mail communications
- Expertise of other employees/outside sources
- Internet content
Therefore, as gaps are created and the organization
attempts to fill them, employees should have at their disposal searching
capabilities that enable them to search for codified data, as well as
unrecorded tacit knowledge. Such a process fosters collective wisdom,
which in turn fosters innovation, one of the prime goals in tapping into
corporate instinct.
Expertise management, as Information Market accurately
contends, enables the creation of knowledge superconductivity. For
instance, strategy meetings can enable employees with business problems
to tap into the minds of those experts who can at the very least add to
their knowledge, and may even be able to solve the business problem at
hand. However, these meetings should be moderated and include a variety
of themes and dynamics that encourage freethinking, commitment, loyalty,
and willingness to create.
Hence, these meetings play an important role in
ensuring that any effort in developing new concepts, in innovation, is
supported by the entire organization, top to bottom. These meetings can
include topics such as:
- Achieving unanimous agreement and commitment to a
new concept from executives and senior management
- Creating a comprehensive plan by which a new
product or service concept can be implemented and become sustainable
(remember, without sustainability, the new concept is only a great
idea)
- Crisis/contingency systems (dealing with major gaps
in times of chaos)
- Developing specific tactics by which new concepts
and respective plans are to be realized establishing appropriate goals
and benchmarks.
As well as these strategic and planning meetings,
there are also some less apparent but equally important communication
issues which can be addressed during the quest for collective wisdom,
including:
- Developing high-profile actions that communicate
management’s commitment to change (creation of gaps) and innovation
(bridging the gaps)
- Developing ongoing means for communicating progress
of the strategy meetings and developing a collective wisdom process
for both internal and external customers
- Effectively communicating the collective wisdom to
managers, staff, and the entire organization as a whole.
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Marcus Goncalves, Founder & President, Marcus Goncalves Consulting
Group, a MetroWest Boston-based knowledge, change and project
management-oriented international consulting firm, is the developer of
the innovative knowledge management methodology Knowledge TornadoTM.
Marcus has served as a Senior EAI and IT strategies professional at
global market research firm, ARC Advisory Group and lectures at Boston
University’s graduate CIS and MBA programs on subjects including Program
and Project Management, and Information Systems Management, among
others. Author of more than 28 books published on the subject, Marcus is
a member of Who’s Who among US Executives and in the Computer Industry,
an award conferred by the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundation. Marcus
can be contacted at
marcusg@marcusgoncalves.com; 508-435-3087.
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©
2005 Interactive Consulting. All rights reserved.
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