Strategies for Capturing & Transferring Knowledge

Originally published on The New Group blog on 9.26.07

So I just attended an event put on by ASTD Cascadia this morning. It was a small panel event with senior learning and development professionals from organizations like PGE, Nike and Boeing, plus a variety of other people who've been in the training and development fields anywhere from 10 to 25 + years. Aside from bringing to top of mind some basic but often overlooked practices, things like documenting processes, conducting "lessons learned" de-briefings and developing easy to use job aids like diagrams, check lists and such, a few of the more interesting topics that surfaced were:

1.) the fact that learning happens all the time, not just when we intend it to happen
2.) recognizing and tapping into communities of practice
3.) the notion that storytelling is fundamental to the knowledge transfer process
4.) the simple act of asking people to share their knowledge can be incentive enough for them to participate in the knowledge transfer process
5.) "tacit knowledge" - that which comes only from experience - is one of the toughest yet most important types of knowledge to capture and transfer

What I'm most curious to explore further are the types of internal communications that can impact employee behavior relative to participating in the knowledge capture and transfer process and how to make the captured content not only accessible but easy to consume.