Breaking news: we need to capture Boomer knowledge!
Breaking News: The baby Boomers are retiring and, in an organisational furore that suggests this to be an apocalyptic extinction event, managers the world over are scrambling to "capture" the "critical knowledge" from this generation, before it is too late. As a side note I happen to believe that organisations are really speaking about "scarce knowledge" over "critical knowledge," but that is another issue altogether.
For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be. Matthew 24:21
The wisdom of the Baby Boomer generation is so valuable that apparently organisations just cannot live without it. Organisations are about to fail. Seas will boil. The face of the Earth will split open and we will be pulled to a fiery end at its core. Salvation can only come from the capture of everything the Baby Boomers know. Our only hope, aside from Bruce Willis, is that Knowledge Managers can capture and store the knowledge from this generation and make it available for the whole of wo/mankind for eternity.
Really? Do we really need this knowledge? Will organisations cease to exist the moment the Baby Boomers leave the workforce? Perhaps we are forgetting what it is to be human and how nature works - where there is a gap, nature works to fill it.
You have to decide whether this demographic shift in organisations is a threat or an opportunity. I happen to see an opportunity; a chance to explore new ways of doing things - the gap left by the Baby Boomers will provide challenges that will offer up new ideas, the benefits of which just cannot be predicted at this point; an opportunity to break away from the norms of the past; an opportunity to creatively destroy constraints that have hindered progress.
However, if you are determined to mine the Baby Boomer knowledge base for "critical knowledge" nuggets, you have to consider what it is to be human and what that means for your capture efforts.
First, "critical knowledge" has to be seen to be "critical" by both the knowledge holder and the potential user/s. This is problematic, as there obviously has to be an awareness of the knowledge available - people will talk of knowledge elicitation methods, but they are subject to the bias of the process/facilitator and therefore limited. Then there is the problem of communication, where knowledge is at least twice removed - coded and decoded by the user who then has to communicate it to a receiver (usually unknown) who then has to recode the message (signal noise creating knowledge loss).
Then there is the issue of the value of what is captured and the impact it creates through reuse - the following is a worst practice example from a recent project in Europe:
A large multi-national had captured 1300 lessons learned in a Lessons Learned Portal (LLP). In speakign directly with the LLP management team about access rates, re-use rates and impact/results from the lessons captured, the managers were not able to provide any evidence for a single lesson being accessed, re-used or how the LLP had created an impact. This equated to zero value being linked to a LLP that had cost in excess of $1,300,000 over a two year period. This included no ROI on:
LLP staffing costs
Investment and maintenance costs of the software platform
Staffing costs associated with 1300 engineers completing a lessons learned template that required, on average, 5 hours of input from 5 staff - a total of 32,500 man-hours).
So, ask yourself, is a Knowledge Capture strategy the way to go? Or, could it be better to examine what it means to be human and focus on social learning, linked to enhanced "knowledge capability" competencies (e.g. communication, critical thinking, decision-making skills)? An approach underpinned by new mental models/HR policy and practice that builds a culture of knowledge sharing, based on gap analysis, that naturally fills the voids that exist in the existing knowledge base.
Is it really worth setting out to capture what Baby Boomers know, in the traditional technology-led sense? Perhaps it is better to trust the emerging generations. Instead of trying to shape their future practice in the image of those that are leaving, resources would be better spent equipping them to recognise their emerging future and prepare to solve the problems of that future.
Couyld that be a better, more human, approach.
