The most effective way you can increase the flow of knowledge across an organization is to connect organizational members to each other.
By connect I mean, “I know what you are currently working on and what problems you are facing” and you know that about me. It means, if I need help, I know what questions I might be able to ask you about. I also know how I might be able to help you, for example, when I come across something I know you are interested in.
I’ll give you a personal example. I have a good friend - we both like reading mysteries. I recently came across a great site. Here is how it works, if I type in the name of an author I like, the app generates a map of other authors that people, who also like that author I typed in, regularly read! I quickly sent my friend a link to the map.
You have to know what another person is interested in, to know what to share with them.
Connected also means there is a sense of trust between us, so that I know you will respond if I ask for help and that you won’t think less of me for not knowing the answer. The two main reasons employees give for not asking for help is 1) they don't want to bother the other, imagining they are too busy and will be irritated by the request, or 2) they don't want others to think they are not competent! Both reasons are less relevant when employees are connected because asking and sharing are ways to maintain the connection between people. It signals, I am aware of you and am interested in your success.
The short way to think of the strategy I am suggesting is, Connection before Content, that is, before you can exchange content productively, you need to have built a connection.
That is true at several levels in an organization. For example, at the level of a project team. Hackman, who is probably our greatest authority on teamwork, explains that before a project begins, the leader needs to bring the team members together – in person, when that is again possible. Hackman suggests pairing up team members and asking each to write out what they think the goal of the project is and then discuss what they wrote with each other, in order to come to some kind of agreement. Secondly, he has each one of the pair interview the other about what experience they bring to the project that will help the team reach their agreed upon goal. And finally he has each person introduce their partner to the rest of the team, explaining what skills and experience their partner brings. Team members need to know who has what knowledge if they are going to to make the best use of the team’s resources to solve problems. Connection before content.
It is equally true at the department level, where again each member needs to know both the tasks and the experience of their colleagues to work most effectively. One way department members can gain that knowledge is to start department meetings with a "check in" during which each members reports on what they are currently working on. That allows others to offer help, as well as, to coordinate. You may recognize this as an Agile practice of holding 15 minute morning meetings. Connection before content.
And it is true for a community, where there are lots of ways to build connections, e.g. “working out loud circles,” Communities of Practice, having robust profiles up, brown bag lunches, your department offering fresh coffee and donuts at 10 each morning for any department they need to stay connected with. Connection before content.
As we all know, relationships deteriorate over time if they are not renewed. So even if a group has met before, taking a few minutes before a meeting to reconnect reestablishes the relationships and trust that increases knowledge flow.
I realize that these examples raise the concern that one-to-one is a slow way to proceed and that we should be thinking about how to scale knowledge. But if every employee is engaged in one-to-one exchanges, then the whole organization is learning. Moreover, they are getting knowledge that pertains directly to their work, not something that they might possibly need to know sometime in the future.
The idea that you can scale knowledge sharing by posting something that everyone in the organization will learn from is a bit of an illusion, as The World Bank found out when they studied readership in 2014. The published report examined how frequently posted policy reports were downloaded or cited - not just by the 10,000 bank employees, but by everyone. About 13 percent of policy reports were downloaded at least 250 times while more than 31 percent of policy reports were never downloaded and almost 87 percent of policy reports were never cited. (Which World Bank Reports are Widely Read, Doerte Doemeland and James Trevino, 2014) Those numbers suggest that we should question the value of relying solely on publishing to share the organization's knowledge.
That said, every company needs to publish explicit knowledge like policies, SoPs, processes, etc. But if a company wants knowledge to reach employees when they need it, they need to focus on Connection before Content.