WHAT WE DO

We can both familiarise you with the problem and help mitigate its effects. We offer the following five services to industry to help companies become better knowledge managers – and decision-makers .....

(1) FOUR CORPORATE WORKSHOPS

We offer the following four stand-alone corporate seminars/workshops.

(i) “Knowledge Management & The Learning Organisation” – an overview that explains the mantras whose popularity is matched only by the widespread confusion over how to put them into practice.

(ii) “Swing doors & musical chairs” – how to cope with the modern flexible labour market.

(iii) “You have not had 30 years’ experience. You have had one year’s experience 30 times” – explaining Experience-Based Management (EBM) and how companies can learn to make better decisions.

(iv) “Literary fiascos & corporate white elephants” – how to produce a good corporate/product history.

These workshops can be tailored to your company’s requirements.

COST: On application.

(2) THE EMPLOYEE TRANSIT AUDIT & KNOWLEDGE MAP

Undertaken jointly with your HR/Personnel department, this tool is designed to accurately determine:

+ The level of jobs discontinuity across your workforce at HQ, regional, functional and departmental levels.
+ The main areas of knowledge loss.
+ Which individuals in your company are the main knowledge owners.
+ Who should be targeted for knowledge capture.
+ A practical knowledge capture and learning programme.

It is normally presented to you in the form of a report and/or presentation.

COST: On application.

(3) ORAL DEBRIEFINGS

The flexible labor market sees your knowledge/experience walk out of the front door on a regular basis. This tool is designed to capture useful and relevant organisational memory (OM) from your key knowledge owners, principally for the benefit of their incoming replacements but also for cross-functional application. Oral debriefings are undertaken with designated individuals either at regular intervals during their tenure, immediately after key projects or when they retire or move on to new employers.

This tool is ideally suited for capturing short- and medium-term OM up to 10-years duration and is particularly germane to operational issues. It can be incorporated into an intranet or a wider IT knowledge bank.

We can either undertake the oral debriefings for you or train up someone in your organisation to do the job.

Cost: On application.

(4) BETTER DECISION MAKING USING EXPERIENCED-BASED MANAGEMENT (EBM)

Corporate amnesia or institutional ‘forgetting’ is the single biggest constraint to decision-making excellence in companies and a massive contributor to productivity shortfalls. The low organisational memory imposed by the flexible labour market bestows an “Alzheimer” effect on companies. It is responsible for many of the repeated mistakes, re-invented wheels and other unlearned lessons that experience can teach.

The majority of managers get appointed because of their vocational prowess rather than their decision-making skills. Unstructured, theoretical, informal and anecdotal, decision-making’s instruction is normally subsumed into wider fields of study such as ‘Leadership’, ‘Marketing’ or ‘Strategy’ and then left to individuals’ hands-on experience, intuition and their ability to cope with corporate politics.

Experience-Based Management (EBM) formalises the process of reflective thinking in business. The six-stage methodology helps organisations improve the quality of their decision-making. It supports the universal paradigm of progress being incremental and also that learning should be continuous.

Cost: On application.

(5) CORPORATE AND PRODUCT HISTORIES

While oral debriefings are suitable for the capture of short- and medium-term organisational memory, the ideal medium for long-term OM is the traditional corporate/product history. Rapid corporate change and the flexible labour market has given this tool a new and vital corporate function beyond conventional public relations. Done well, this portable repository of corporate know-how and experience can bring a measure of continuity to a discontinuous workforce and - so they don't have to re-invent the wheel - allow the newer generation to learn from the tried and tested experiences of their predecessors. Whereas oral debriefings are ideal for operational applications, the corporate/product history is more relevant to strategy and culture.

A corporate/product history is an extremely difficult product to do well. Most corporate histories document "what" happened. Some better ones document "why" things happened. The distinguishing feature of the most useful histories is that they also focus on "how" things happened. It also has to be readable and credible. This transforms what is often just a corporate indulgence into a powerful management tool for a range of corporate applications like induction, management development and investor relations. Done well, it is also an extremely efficient way to assimilate quickly the new employees acquired via acquisition.

We can produce your corporate/product history for you. Like oral debriefing programmes, it can be incorporated into an intranet or a wider IT knowledge bank. We can even publish it for wider public consumption, if that’s what you want.

Cost: On application.

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