A recent article in Knowledge@Wharton, Do
Talk to Strangers: Encouraging Performative Ties to Create Competitive
Advantage,
summarizes research that “documents and explains the surprising pattern of support and sharing between
professionals in a large, global, professional services firm.”
The
author, Sheen S. Levine, suggests that “the major indicator
of a firm's knowledge transfer ability is whether its employees
routinely call upon distant colleagues — people unknown to them — for
information, after a wide search.” He calls these “performative ties.”
“Although
these people are likely to be complete strangers, when they share
knowledge, it's done in an intimate transfer as though the parties
involved were actually close friends. There's no negotiation, no
explicit reciprocity, no quid pro quo on an individual basis. It's more
the idea that 'I'll help you today because I expect that if I needed
help someday, someone else would help me.'”… “the person giving the
information is often unlikely to ever need help from the beneficiary,
as when a senior person helps a junior one, or an expert advises a
layman.”
Anyone familiar with the blogosphere would find this altruistic knowledge sharing less than surprising.
Levine studied professional service firms since
their success is based on their ability to bring knowledge from across
the firm together efficiently to bear on a client's problem.
He quotes several of his subjects on how they manage knowledge transfer:
“There's
the codified component — information on industry verticals, analytic
tools, and functional capabilities — which we invest heavily in. But
the more important part is tacit. It's about putting people in touch
with others in a flexible way.”
From
a systems standpoint, he adds, “on every project we expect teams to
write a one-page summary of the case background, key questions, reason
for hiring Bain, the approach, the tools used, and the results
achieved. It's then sanitized for anonymity and loaded into our Global
Experience Center.” That system is linked back to Bain's finance and
human resources systems, so there is data on the hours billed,
workstream, and start and end dates. “We also have a search engine
linked to it, so employees can search on any topical dimension, read
the summaries of cases and then make contact with people.”
-Bob Armacost, director of knowledge management at Bain & Company:
“Suppose
you are looking at the pricing of steel. You may contact people who
have worked on pricing for airlines or theater tickets, because it may
spark an idea that has relevance,” says Bhojwani.
“A strong connection exists throughout the firm regardless of
geography. We often hold events worldwide that foster such connections.
Even without a direct connection to someone, however, I feel
comfortable picking up the phone and calling pretty senior people.
Everyone responds with the utmost enthusiasm.”
According
to Bhojwani, having a database of knowledge is equally important:
“Before someone called, I'd expect him or her to have already read
what's in the knowledge base,” he says. “In fact, the presence of the
knowledge system may help enable performative ties because the basic
stuff is already there. You won't waste people's time.”
-Nikhil Bhojwani, project leader at Boston Consulting Group:
For firms whose business model is not so obviously based on efficient
knowledge transfer but who recognize that using the collective knowledge of their workforce as
efficiently as possible could provide competitive
advantage, the important question is how to improve. Most attempts take the most knowledgeable people away from their own
productive work or fail in encouraging and sustaining knowledge sharing practices.
Levine
found that the social infrastructure within a company is the key. He
found that the most powerful reason people share knowledge is because
they believe “it's the right thing to do.” And the stronger their
social tie with the recipient of the knowledge, the stronger this
belief.
He writes that managers can encourage knowledge transfer by
strengthening weak ties through face-to-face interaction, through structural conditions such as seating people with different
people then they work with
if people are embedded in multiple networks in the office, that makes them more likely to engage in performative ties
and through encouragement and enforcement
BP, for instance, celebrated the 'Best Stolen Idea.' At GE, Jack Welch would ask, 'Who else have you shown this idea to?'”
Learning
networks designed by The Otter Group offer a new way
to provide the structure and encouragement to increase knowledge
transfer. These networks allow people to easily maintain ties
with multiple networks by subscribing to what others across the company
are publishing. As users accumulate a set of subscriptions over time
they create a
personal set of channels through which they exchange knowledge and make
connections with others across the company. And the connections are
reciprocal. Publishers can
monitor who is “reading” them. When you know someone is reading what
you write, is in fact waiting for the next thing you write, it forms a
strong social connection between publisher and subscriber.
Monitoring
who is reading whom also allows knowledge sharers (and their managers)
to discover just how useful what they
know is to the company and to discover unexpected connections that
others make.
The publishers need not know who might find their experience useful
before they publish it, which greatly simplifies the process.
Building a reputation through sharing knowledge, when accompanied by appropriate
recognition and reward, provides the encouragement to sustain and
expand knowledge transfer. This is something that is rare inside the
enterprise where centralized information distribution based on job
description often restricts the flow of information to the detriment of
innovation.
Simplifying and encouraging the knowledge transfer process is at the heart of The Otter Group's RSS Learning Networks.
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