The oral history of Acme Inc.
In a meeting today with a company that is planning for rapid growth (yes, I was a bit shocked too, but how cool is that!?) one of the leaders said that their “tribal knowledge” wouldn’t scale to keep pace with new employees and locations. And so, they are beginning the process of codifying their corporate knowledge to ensure that new employees can be well informed and productive. A noble goal, for sure!
This, of course, begs the age-old question - How do you go about doing that?? Here are some options:
- Send out a letter to all employees who have been with the company for more than 2 years and ask them to stop whatever they are doing and write down everything they know about the company and their jobs and submit it to their manager.
- Hire a team of interviewers, like NPR’s Story Corps, to record discussions and remembrances with your employees and make the vignettes available to everyone, or better yet, play them over and over again on the company’s PA system.
- Insist that HR maintain a detailed job description of every role in the company, and sleep restfully at night knowing that those descriptions clearly and accurately reflect the real daily duties and priorities of your staff (oh wait, most companies already do that…)
Sadly, as many of you sharp bloggites have detected, so far “none of the above” looks like a winner in a landslide. And I have some suspicions why that might be…
Most companies these days love to talk about their “culture.” How it’s unique, or reflects their values, or is the key element of their staff retention strategy. And that may all be true! But culture is experienced, not taught. And that takes time.
I play basketball 3 days a week at 5:30 AM with a bunch of equally disturbed guys simultaneously trying desperately to cling their youth and a 15 foot jumper they probably never had in the first place. Many of us have played with the same group, more or less, for 5+ years. And over that time, we’ve occasionally gone out to watch the NCAA basketball tournament, golf, or start a Fantasy Football league, which can help with bonding and maintaining your composure when you’re being elbowed in the ribs. We’ve also developed a set of “unwritten rules” that govern how we play to the extent necessary – scoring, what the games are played to, play 2 games then sit, offense calls fouls, etc. But when a new person shows up, little of that is shared on day 1. We don’t hand anyone a sheet of paper and say, “here’s our rules if you want to play and, by the way, we’re going to grab a beer on Friday night – wanna come?” And if you think about it, if we did, it’d almost be creepy. Getting to know someone and mutually deciding if they belong in your culture and if they want to belong to it is a process that probably goes back thousands of years.
So if you feel like you need to accelerate the process of sharing tribal knowledge, don’t automatically start and end with “codification.” Think about the other ways that humans share knowledge and welcome new members into groups – through social interaction, story telling, and a respect for the ‘wisdom’ of the tribe’s elders and let that complement your efforts to ‘write it all down…’
