Imagine a dictionary that is not ordered alphabetically…. You could perhaps use it to start a fire, but apart from that it would be quite useless unless its words are ordered alphabetically. All the information will be there, but it is extremely inaccessible. Imagine the frustration knowing that the definition of ‘inchoate’ is somewhere in the book, and you desperately need...
Knowledge is the most important production and performance factor for many companies. Strategic knowledge needs to be available redundantly to stay competitive. Redundancy can be achieved internally and/or externally. For a small electro-technical company, we made a knowledge network assessment. This assessment involved their 15 core knowledge domains. We used their collective knowledge network and visualized both internal and external experts....
Whether you work, study, or participate in any sort of activity, you most probably had to work in a team at some point. Teamwork has become the way to do things. However, I think we would all agree that the cooperation of team members is not always at its best. For some reason we can become distant, we don’t communicate,...
You have probably worked in teams before. Naturally, two team members are never identical as we are all human, which in the end makes every team diverse. But is it better to have a more diverse team? Or do too many cooks spoil the broth? Especially in an organizational context, diversity has been heavily discussed lately. Many organizations promote diversity as they...
Just read the article: “Help, de vraagbaak vertrekt. Wat nu?” in NRC Handelsblad (in Dutch). The article is about the ageing workforce and the effect on organisations if knowledgeable employees leave, specifically because of retirement. In this blogpost I will share three elements of the article and add a fourth one myself. The first element is that experience is a very important...
This is an example of the power of organizational network analysis. The analysis has been done at a production company with 7 locations. Their main location is HQ, they have a dedicated R&D location and 5 production locations. Production locations A2 and B2 are located abroad, but in the same country. Questions from the central management team in HQ: Can we be...
The direct reason to write this post is rather sad. In January 2016, Artur Fischer died at the age of 96. Fischer is best known for inventing the plastic wallplug, first patented in 1958. This solved the problem of attaching anything to brittle stone walls with hard metal screws. The company he started, kept on producing them until this very day....
Often people from different backgrounds find themselves working together in a team. Unless this group worked together before, chances are that no one knows what everyone else knows. This is especially the case if people come from different departments. But is it really necessary that everyone knows what everyone else knows? Research on transactive memory systems (TMS), or the collective group knowledge,...
Improve your personal knowledge management by uncovering your unknown knowns...
Knowledge is ever more important for businesses around the world. Knowledge continuity is threatened by employee turnover and retirement. Business leaders and executives are quite often surprised by the effect on available knowledge when an expert leaves the organization. As a business leader, you don't want to be surprised by critical knowledge leaving your organization. Recently we made this "Knowledge retirement...