June 21st, 2010
Two recent NPR stories caught my attention for how they speak to a pervasive problem plaguing organizations like mine: loss of organizational history.
One story is about “Bruce,” the name given to the three giant fake sharks used in the movie Jaws. After the filming concluded, all three models were lost and most likely destroyed. After all, you can’t keep every movie prop for sentimental reasons, right? Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and so, years later, the efforts of a determined journalist finally paid off. After coordinating tips from a dedicated Jaws fan community, a fourth shark made from the same mold as the movie models was found in a California auto yard. Used as a prop at the Universal Studios Theme Park in Hollywood, this 25-foot-long behemoth was sorely weathered. But Jaws fans can finally rejoice that a key piece of Americana has been found.
A similar story revealed that 75 silent films were recovered from the New Zealand Film Archive. One such film is a 1927 feature called Upstream by four-time Oscar-winning director John Ford. These early American movies were sent to remote areas of the globe late in their lifecycle. The physical films degraded quickly and, since they were shipped in heavy metal cans, distributors in the States thought it financially wise to abandon them rather than pay to ship them back. However, projectionists and collectors thankfully protected them until they found their way to the vaults of the New Zealand national archive.
Both of these stories are examples where the value of something – films and film props – wasn’t realized until years after they were lost. And, while I can understand how financial limitations prevented preserving a giant shark and dozens of classic films, the same doesn’t apply to expert knowledge and experience. These types of “artifacts” are easy to preserve, especially with the availability of social enterprise tools like blogs.
So I have two questions for you…
Can you think of a project or area of expertise you worked on years ago that has since been lost because the knowledge wasn’t captured properly?
What can you do – today – to prevent repeating this mistake?
June 4th, 2010
A while back, I asked for help identifying what web sites would be ideal for someone who had missed key advances on the Internet for the past several years. As a social software trainer, I teach a class designed to encapsulate the “latest and greatest” on the web in order to lay the groundwork for students to understand the nature of our social enterprise tools. It’s my goal to help them “get” how these tools can empower them and increase their productivity both professionally and personally.
I recently published a Google Doc as a guide to the websites we cover in the class and includes ideas for experimenting with each one. Since the class is only three hours long – and focused on those tools that have counterparts in our social enterprise suite – some of the sites (like the ones under “Media sharing”) are only mentioned.
Please view the list of “21st Century Websites” and let me know what you think. Alternatively, you can download the full PDF or 2-page condensed PDF versions.
What critical sites are we missing?
What other activities would you suggest we add to the “Try this” column?
Please feel free to reuse or redistribute this resource as you see fit!
May 25th, 2010
In an enlightening conversation I had yesterday, a senior leader where I work said that as we continue to face the likelihood of losing a large percentage of our workforce to retirement in the next few years, the organization has essentially three options to prevent hemorrhaging knowledge:
- Capture their knowledge (in a usable format) before they leave.
- Enable effective mentoring relationships that allow their knowledge to be transferred to the next generation.
- Hire them back as consultants.
As the conversation continued, I found myself ruminating on these options. Obviously, the first option is my personal goal and the goal of my team: to teach the workforce how and why to use social enterprise knowledge sharing tools – like wikis and blogs – to pull tacit knowledge out of the minds of people and aggregate it in a searchable and linkable format.
But the second option, while worthwhile, seems a bit shortsighted. After all, passing knowledge and insights from one generation to the next is important, but only delays dealing with the core problem: working in isolation.
I think an effective solution is to integrate (enforce?) knowledge capture within a mentoring program. This would mean providing the technology, training, and time for the mentee to be the “hands on the keyboard” for his mentor. Following each mentoring session, the mentee would either add to a wiki page or publish a blog post with what they learned from her mentor.
Would you be willing to pitch this idea to your mentoring folks?
Which is the biggest obstacle to adopting such a strategy, knowing how to do it, being willing to do it, or having the time to do it?
