snip
>In my opinion most organizational learning is stored in the minds of its
>people. Since the knowledge is thus distributed it is essential that the
>people feel free to share the knowledge with each other. They should be
>able to form alliances to deal with business processes or issues and use
>their collective knowledge effectively.
>
>Note what this means to the incentive an organization has to retain its
>knowledgeable people.
Bill:
I agree with you with respect to the incentive. I would like to ask you
and others about situations in which the incentive is ignored and those in
which retention is not possible.
Let me give an example.
I worked for a couple of years on projects for a science, design and
engineering organization. In this business, projects tend to run on a very
long time line -- ten years or more.
This company has had a history of hiring hundreds of people in the early
years of a project, and laying hundreds off in the declining years of
projects. Layoffs tend to follow the "last in, first out" pattern. The
result is that the younger employees tend to be laid off, older employees
tend to be retained, and the average age of the core employees is quite
high. In some of the highly specialized disciplines, the company faces the
risk of losing irreplaceable technology and experience, through
retirement, illness, accident, or resignation. In some areas, I was told,
it would take a well qualified junior scientist or engineer three to five
years of selective experience to reach a point of full competency to take
the lead in certain areas of design, problem analysis, or testing. To
further complicate matters, some of these competencies are not required at
all times during the life of a project and related work may not be
available for one to gain experience..
The example is offered to illustrate the fact that there are circumstances
in which another kind of repository may be required.
I would be interested in hearing what your advice, and the advice of
others, would be to a company in this situation.
Brock Vodden
--Brock Vodden Vodden Consulting Business Process Improvement "Where People and Systems Meet" brock.vodden@odyssey.on.ca
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>