INTHEBLACK February 2025 - Magazine - Page 52
WORK SMART
“Knowledge is a key strategic asset in any organisation.
A lot of the time, businesses aren’t great at capturing
it, particularly when it comes to the tacit wisdom
employees have gained over years.”
NADIA TAYLOR, MAPIEN
information is shared openly and widely, with
the right systems and processes in place to
support it.”
DEMOCRATISING KNOWLEDGE
A starting point is to recognise the two
types of organisational knowledge. “Explicit”
knowledge includes how processes work
and information that is easily documented
and transferable. “Tacit” knowledge is insights
learnt from personal experience and
innovation that is stored in the individual’s
mind and is often quite challenging to
articulate and share formally.
The good news is that advances in
technology have made it easier
to democratise explicit
knowledge, according
to Professor Paula
Brough, director
of the Centre for
Work, Organisation
& Wellbeing at
Griffith University.
“To navigate an
organisation 20
years ago, you’d
need personal
knowledge of
who to contact
and in which
department to get
the best results,”
Brough says. “Largely
that’s diminished with
the introduction of AI, work
automations, chatbots and the other
technology systems we have today. Cloudbased storage of key projects and policies also
means other team members have access to the
same formal documents; whereas in the past, it
was easily lost on individual hard drives.”
Capturing employees’ tacit knowledge often
remains elusive, she says. “It’s the subjective
knowledge of how things are ‘actually’ done
that’s often most valuable, and organisations
can underestimate the impact when it’s lost.”
52 INTHEBLACK February 2025
TRADING TACIT WISDOM
With an eye to lower the risk, Taylor
says organisations are testing different
approaches to encourage the sharing
of wisdom between employees.
“Some are creating internal ‘capability
marketplaces’,” she says. “The expertise
of each employee is published and when
someone needs to skill-up on a particular
topic, they can find an internal expert and
be mentored by them.”
Others are creating knowledge-accelerator
programs — where key employees shadow
others to absorb their tacit knowledge —
or are sharing employee insights in other
engaging formats.
“Some run internal podcast series, where
employees will discuss how they’ve tackled
challenges or take a ‘day in the life of’
approach, which can help bring life to,
and retain, that tacit knowledge,” May says.
“When an employee does leave, instead
of just a one-on-one exit interview, some
workplaces open it up to interactive sessions
with the whole team so everyone can hear
their insights.”
MICROLEARNING IN THE MOMENT
Microlearning is also becoming popular,
Taylor says. “While traditionally you might
have gone to a full day training course to cover
100 things, microlearning breaks it into
five-minute segments, making that knowledge
far more accessible at a time when an
employee really needs to know it,” she says.
“Another approach we’re taking in our own
business is to record our key leaders’ meetings,
and when someone says something brilliant that
would benefit the whole team, we extract that
from the recording and find ways to share it.”
She advises capturing lessons from major
projects in the same way — on the fly
rather than waiting until the end as most
organisations do. “During project update
meetings, we record and share those key
insights — good and bad — straight away,
while they’re fresh.”
