Whenever I build the case for People-Based Information systems, I submit that some of an organization’s most important information doesn’t reside in databases, documents, or software. It resides in people. The challenge is that people move. They retire. They get promoted. They transfer. They leave the company. Sometimes they’re simply unavailable when their knowledge is needed most.
I once worked with a utility company that depended heavily on the tacit knowledge of experienced employees who understood the nature and location of underground assets. Much of what they knew wasn’t sitting neatly in a database. It had accumulated experientially, through years of working with the system. I’ve seen the same problem in very different organizations. At one high-tech company, extraordinary professional-service skills could only be developed through mentoring and immersion. At a financial-services company, only a handful of people deeply understood critical proprietary technology.
You couldn’t solve these problems by asking everyone to document what they knew. Some knowledge is tacit. It cannot easily be explained or codified. But that doesn’t mean its transfer has to be left to chance. If the knowledge matters, don’t leave its transfer to chance.
The alternative is to intentionally design a People-Based Information System: an organizational system for identifying significant tacit knowledge and ensuring that knowledge survives the movement of the people who possess it. Here’s how.
1. Identify the Tacit Knowledge That Matters
Don’t start by trying to identify everything people know. You’ll create an enormous inventory that nobody can possibly manage. Instead, focus on consequence. Ask what knowledge the organization cannot afford to lose.
Where would the departure of one or two people create significant operational disruption? What capabilities depend upon knowledge that isn’t adequately documented? Where do people repeatedly turn to a particular expert because nobody else quite understands what they do? Tacit knowledge becomes an organizational design concern when the organization cannot afford to lose it with the people who possess it. That gives you the boundary of the system you’re trying to design.
2. Identify the Sources
Once you’ve identified the knowledge, find the people who actually possess it. I call these people Sources. Job titles and organizational charts can help, but don’t assume they contain the answer. Formal authority and actual expertise aren’t the same thing.
A better question is often: Who does everyone call when nobody else can figure it out? Those people are usually not difficult to find. Organizations tend to know who their indispensable experts are, even when that expertise has never been formally identified. Make them explicit.
3. Identify the Collectors
Next, determine who needs to acquire the knowledge. I call these people Collectors. This isn’t simply succession planning. If Mary transfers everything she knows to Bob and Mary retires, you may have successfully transferred the knowledge—but you haven’t necessarily protected the organization. What happens when Bob gets sick? Tacit knowledge has not been sustained if its transfer merely moves organizational dependency from one person to another.
Design for sufficient redundancy. The appropriate level will depend upon the importance of the knowledge, the likelihood of disruption, and the consequences of losing access to it. The objective isn’t to make everyone know everything. It’s to ensure critical knowledge is sufficiently distributed to avoid untenable concentration risk and withstand the normal movement and occasional absence of people.
4. Design the Distributors
Now you need a mechanism for moving knowledge from Sources to Collectors. These are the Distributors in a People-Based Information System. A Distributor might be a mentoring relationship, apprenticeship, Community of Practice, recurring structured meeting, job rotation, peer-review process, immersive assignment, or another deliberately designed social mechanism.
The important word is designed. Putting two people together and telling them to “share knowledge” isn’t organizational design. Different forms of tacit knowledge require different social mechanisms. Some can move effectively through relatively informal networks. Others require prolonged immersion, structured processes, governance, or changes in how people work together.
This is where experienced organizational designers become important. They can design fit-for-purpose Distributors based on the knowledge, people, context, required reliability, and investment the organization is prepared to make. Organizations carefully design where data is stored. They rarely design how tacit information flows. They should.
5. Go Live
This is the step I suspect many organizations would skip. Don’t. If you’ve designed a People-Based Information System around knowledge important enough to protect, launch it like it matters.
Develop a rollout plan. Explain why the system exists. Make Sources and Collectors clear about their roles. Establish expectations for participation. Explain how the Distributors will work and how knowledge transfer will be assessed. Develop and execute a Change Management Plan.
And if the system is strategically important enough, make some noise. Hold a launch event. Celebrate the Sources whose expertise has become valuable to the organization. Recognize the Collectors taking responsibility for sustaining it. A People-Based Information System should be implemented as an organizational change, not quietly introduced as a collection of knowledge-transfer activities.
Making the launch visible also sends an important message: transferring organizationally significant knowledge is part of the work. It isn’t something people should squeeze in when they happen to have time.
6. Assess Whether the Transfer Happened
Tacit knowledge presents an obvious measurement problem. If you can’t completely codify the knowledge, how can you determine whether it has been transferred? Measure what the Collector can do. Can the person reliably perform work that previously required the Source’s expertise? Can they diagnose unfamiliar situations? Can they exercise appropriate judgment when circumstances deviate from the norm?
Skill acquisition provides evidence that tacit knowledge has transferred, but it doesn’t necessarily demonstrate that the transfer is complete. Assessments therefore need to expose Collectors to enough variation and complexity to reveal meaningful gaps. And don’t assess only whether the knowledge moved, assess the fidelity with which it moved. Tacit knowledge can lose nuance, context, and judgment as it passes from one person to another.
You can also measure the transfer process itself. How long does it typically take a Collector to reach the required level of proficiency? Where does transfer stall? Which Distributors work particularly well? Where does knowledge lose fidelity as it moves from one person to another? Tacit knowledge transfer can often be measured even when the knowledge being transferred cannot be codified.
7. Sustain—and Debug—the System
Going live isn’t the end. People-Based Information Systems require maintenance just like data-based information systems do. Sources leave. Collectors change roles. Knowledge becomes obsolete. New knowledge becomes strategically important. A mentoring arrangement that worked beautifully with one pair of people may fail miserably with another. And sometimes the system simply doesn’t work as designed.
That’s when you debug it:
- Perhaps a Source isn’t sharing what they know. Why? Maybe they’re worried that transferring their expertise diminishes their value. Maybe incentives reward them for doing the work rather than teaching others to do it.
- Perhaps Collectors aren’t developing quickly enough. Is the problem with the people selected, the amount of exposure they’re receiving, or the Distributor itself?
- Perhaps everyone is participating exactly as designed, but the knowledge still isn’t moving. You may have an Information problem—or the underlying issue may actually sit somewhere else in the organizational design.
This is why I believe organizations need people capable of serving as Social System Administrators: professionals who understand how social systems operate in practice and can diagnose and correct problems as they emerge. Don’t allow nascent misalignments to accumulate until they require wholesale redesign. Continually diagnose and correct them as they emerge.
Start With One
Organizations spend enormous amounts of money protecting their information. They build databases. Architect systems. Establish redundancy. Monitor performance. Maintain backups. Hire specialists to keep everything operating. Yet some of their most important knowledge may exist only in the minds of the people walking through their hallways. You may never be able to put that knowledge into a database. That’s okay.
If the knowledge matters, don’t leave its transfer to chance. Start with one piece of tacit knowledge your organization cannot afford to lose. Identify the people who possess it. Then ask a simple question: What happens if tomorrow they aren’t here?
If you don’t like the answer, you’ve found the first People-Based Information System you need to build.
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