We all have things we know that just seem to come natural to us. Maybe it’s intuitively knowing when the dog needs to be walked or when our spouse is particularly upset with us. Whatever the case may be, we came to that knowledge through time and experience and one could call this tribal knowledge. However, if we wanted to transfer that knowledge to someone else we might have a predicament on our hands. How do you take what you know and impart it on another person?
In the days of old village elders would regularly tell stories to the young children that sat around them. They would use this story telling time to transfer the tribal knowledge they had acquired over a lifetime and the lifetimes of previous generations. This knowledge transfer process took years of carefully detailed lectures to an audience that was willing to listen. It didn’t happen overnight and the level of detail was usually increased as time went on to insure that the listeners had a good base to layer the detail on top of. Do you follow this process in your business?
I don’t think there’s an adult out there that has started a new endeavor and been fully prepared. We take the appropriate steps to plan for a new role but we won’t know exactly what we need to do until we are in the position. We typically get a brain dump from somebody at the company that describes who the company is, what the company does and where you fit in but that is only the tip of the iceberg and there is a much steeper learning curve coming. The question that usually runs through my mind is how will I become the all knowing and all powerful village elder I need to become?
I fixed hilltop repeaters for a living. These are usually large radio transmitter sites that rebroadcast radio signals to and from dispatchers and people in the field. Obviously, a hilltop repeater, by its name alone implies that they are not sitting around at your local mall or a movie theatre. Hilltop is also a bit misleading because in the area where I worked these locations were always on mountaintops. This was a great job since I got paid to go four wheeling five days per week. Oh the fun I had (when the weather cooperated). There were some harrowing experiences with that job as well but all in all it was a good gig.
I had one site that was on a ridge that overlooked Hemet, California. The site was accessed by a dirt road (and calling it a road is a grotesque overstatement) that was 36 miles from leaving the comfortable pavement to the door of the building. The backside of the mountain was a sheer cliff that dropped approximately 2600 feet to the valley floor. It was a great location and had an unbelievable view.
There were no maps of the trail leading to the site. There were no satellite images to assist and even if there was imagery it would be close to useless since you can’t necessarily tell if the terrain is truly passable with a wheeled vehicle from the air. The solution was for me to ride along with a guy who had made the trip several times before. This was a good solution but lacked anything in the way of repeatability if my pal Jim was ever hit by a bus.
Do you remember the game telephone from grade school? You get a line of kids together and tell the kid at the beginning of the line a fairly detailed story. That kid in turn tells the next kid in line and so on until you reach the end of the line. The last kid then tells the final version of the story to everyone assembled and it usually doesn’t even come close to the story you started with. The same occurs with tribal knowledge. I have an axiom that I used when I was training people and it goes like this: If I know 100% of all that is known on a subject and I train you verbally and you are the best student on earth I can impart a maximum of 80% of my knowledge to you. Assuming that process holds, you could only impart 80% of your knowledge onto the next person you “train”. And so on, and so on. Very quickly we have lost a substantial amount of the knowledge that was originally available on the subject. We didn’t withhold the information it simply couldn’t get imparted in the environment we chose and there is no reference material to fall back on so it is lost to any new folks forever.
I had been driving to the Hemet site at least once a week for about three months when we had a torrential rain storm that caused flooding in most low lying areas. As a precaution we had to inspect our sites for any damage or potential hazards. I jumped in my Jeep to head to the site and about 16 miles down the mud trail I came upon a boulder about twice the size of my vehicle sitting on the road. There was a steep drop off to my right that ended about 200 feet in a gully and a hillside that sloped up for another several hundred feet on the left. I wasn’t going forward and had to back up about 300 feet on the mud road. What fun.
I got to a flat spot and called my pal Jim. I gave him the low down on what I faced and he replied, “No problem. Go back to the second turn and stay to the right instead of the left. That will take you onto the Reservation but you should be Ok. The Tribal Police are usually pretty cool once they know it’s us and not some stupid kid in a 4×4 tearing up their land.” Was he kidding? No. He was absolutely serious. Why hadn’t he told me this before? Why did it take a full road closure to get this nugget of wisdom out of him? Where was this documented? What if that errant bus had found Jim prior to this day? Oh the humanity!
While this seems like a fairly extreme (and ironic) example it is indicative of how we typically train new employees. I’m sure you have some kind of new hire training program aimed at indoctrinating fresh minds into the company but do you have the same level of training for the job the newbie is actually going to do? If I get hired tomorrow, will I be fully knowledgeable on our benefits program, harassment policy, HR directives and other important matters but completely clueless on my actual duties? Do I have to now try to suck the tribal knowledge out of the heads of the people who are currently doing the job and pray that they are great trainers and I am a great student and hope I get the 80%? Will I know everything I need to know to be successful after that initial brain dump or will that only take place after I talk to Jim? I’m in the field, poorly trained and on my own like a teenager in mom and dad’s car. This has bad written all over it!
I’m not suggesting you provide satellite imagery to each new hire but you may want to start considering how you would impart your knowledge on a fresh new mind. The village elders didn’t just tell one story and then throw the kids in the deep end of the pool and scream, “Swim!” Why would you do that to someone you are paying? Whatever you decide you will need to start somewhere and then add to it as you remember the outliers to your process. And say hi to the Tribal Police for me when you see them.
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Tags: Brian Philbin, Business Mobility, Business Process, Field Service, Mobile Futures Today
