As Published in Business 2 Business, June 2008

Stop the Brain Drain

By Ira S Wolfe

The alarm that has been ringing in the ears of senior managers and business owners lately has become louder and more painful as they see retirements and job-hopping drain their organizational “brain power.” It has become all too obvious that companies have not done a very good job of documenting and retaining the knowledge of their key personnel and subject matter experts.

Every organization can learn a lesson from British Petroleum. 

In February 2006 a small leak in a quarter-inch hole in the Prudhoe Bay pipeline was discovered. By August 2006, oil spills forced a shutdown of the largest U.S. oilfield.  Overnight, 8% of domestic oil production was shut down and hundreds of thousands of crude oil was spilled.

A Congressional investigation followed and it was discovered that BP’s senior corrosion engineer retired just a few years earlier.  The job had been left unfilled for more than a year creating a huge knowledge gap. This vacancy, and others, hindered BP's ability to maintain a strategic view of its corrosion prevention activities.

Clearly, BP did not document nor retain the knowledge of its senior corrosion engineer. But BP is not unique. Unfortunately poor knowledge management and lack of talent planning is strangling many organization’s ability to execute their growth plans. Ask yourself: who is holding the knowledge in my organization that could prevent the “quarter-inch hole” from turning into a disaster resulting in catastrophic loss of customers, suppliers, employees and most important – trust.

Stop the brain drain

To begin to capture and transfer knowledge in your organization, where do you start?  I offer the following steps.

1. Identify your subject matter experts and super-experts.  If any of these experts were to leave your organization tomorrow and on the way out the door offered to “dump their brains” along with their ID badge and key on your desk, what knowledge would you want them to leave behind?  What questions must you ask if you have any chance of capturing what you need to know?  
2. Be careful what you ask for. A corollary to this brain dump is: what do you do with this pile of knowledge left behind? Just like cleaning out your file cabinets and closets, all the information you find may not be relevant.  You’ll likely find that experts are mental “packrats.”  They keep everything because you just never know when they might need that information. After they are long gone, someone will need to decide what to keep, what to archive, and what to trash.
3. Identify the right recipients.  If you expected that this transferred knowledge will continue to live without support, you’re in for a big surprise. The receiver can’t just take the “mental” boxes left at his door and file them away for safekeeping.  This successor must take the information and integrate, not just file, it into his or her own knowledge base.  Not everyone has the cognitive capacity, interest, or motivation to do this. 
4. Assess the talent pool.  After you identify the employees who you believe are capable of capturing knowledge, it is essential that you assess them for cognitive capacity and potential.  It is not enough to identify just the smart and ambitious employees. A successful transfer of knowledge will require that the receiving employee(s) have the ability to deal with added levels of complexity, ambiguity and responsibility.  If you’re not sure who these recipients are, it is even more important to scan your entire workforce for successors. 
5. Mentor, mentor, mentor.  Now that you’ve identified your experts and successors, it is time to pair them up. Many relationships will develop naturally. Others will struggle. It takes time to build trust. Many experts have a difficult time communicating at a level that the rest of the world understands.  Some will be reluctant to share their knowledge sensing their value in the organization will diminish once they reveal what they know.  The mentor may need to be coached on how to mentor and the mentee how to learn.  Potential personality rifts must be recognized up-front or the talk of knowledge transfer will remain just that – talk.  The same employee assessments used to identify the right talent can be used to pair the right mentor with the right mentee.
6. Don’t plan like you have a tomorrow. Start today. You can plan for retirements but you can’t plan for illness, disability, and deaths of key employees or those who leave your flock for greener pastures.  Knowledge transfer at the implicit level takes years, not months or weeks.

Sidebar #1

What you see is not always what you get

To understand the difference between just information (know-that) and knowledge (know-what and know-why), the iceberg metaphor is often used. Above the water lies the information that we know and can articulate without prompting. It is visible, readily available and shared by whoever wants it.  It is simply explicit.

Most organizations are putting at least some effort into dealing with information capture.

You can ask a know-that question to just about anyone in the organization and they can likely regurgitate it back even if it doesn’t have anything to do with their job. You can compare explicit knowledge activity to snorkeling verses scuba diving.  Snorkeling is relatively easy and safe and fun.  And most mentoring programs and just plain old writing-down-what-you-do fits into this level of knowledge transfer. 

Below the waterline lies an organization’s tacit knowledge, or implicit knowledge. This is where transferring knowledge to slow brain drain begins to get a bit more complicated.  Knowledge near the water surface is still fairly easy to work with.   As outsiders or new employees enter an organization, they seek out these “snorkelers” to find out how to get things done.

Most of us can articulate tacit knowledge, what we call knowledge at this surface level, if we are prompted.  Employees floating below the surface are often the organization’s subject matter experts.  They hold the technical and some company culture knowledge that is revealed when they are asked. When these experts leave the company, a good deal of know-how walks out the door. This knowledge can relate to things as simple as who keeps the rest room keys to proprietary trade secrets.  The most important thing lost? Relationships.

As we dive deeper into the water, the nature of this tacit knowledge changes. The view  becomes murkier. It is harder to see ahead and get a handle on things.   Like the iceberg, the deeper you go the knowledge becomes more complex and vast. At these levels, we begin to see all the different reasons why our tacit knowledge is unspoken.

Tacit knowledge is unspoken. It rarely if ever is recorded.  It often lies deep inside the minds of the employee.  It is difficult if not impossible to capture. It’s not as easy as saying “Let's find out what we know and then document it.” Tacit knowledge is what we know and believe but cannot articulate, often because it has become so ingrained in our minds that we cannot separate it from who we are. 

This tacit knowledge however is exactly the knowledge that organizations need to capture. It is the competitive advantage of an organization, held by a few people who make the connections between all the content that differentiates your organization from the competition. 

For more information about workforce trends and hiring the right people, contact Ira S Wolfe at 717.291.4640 or iwolfe@super-solutions.com