A Melding of the Minds–Knowledge Transfer

Like LaurenJay, I love StarTrek and the Vulcan mind meld.  The mind meld actually took on an even greater role in the 90s version of StarTrek: The Next Generation, when you had the Borg tapping into Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s brain and learning all of Starfleet’s strategies and secrets. The Borg managed to wipe out thousands (maybe millions–I don’t remember) of people–with Picard’s help!  Poor Picard almost failed to recover from his role in that mass destruction, even though he did not control how his knowledge was used. The whole idea of the nefarious uses of knowledge management warrants its own field of study, it seems to me, but I digress…

What the mind meld was really about was the transfer of knowledge from one expert to someone who had much less or even no knowledge on the topic. It was a way to tap directly into a person’s tacit knowledge and assimilate it (a good Borg term, for those of you who watched the show) as one’s own.  And at the end of the day, that is the goal of effective knowledge management in organizations–figuring out a way to harness the collective knowledge held by individuals in the group so that the entire group can benefit. I chose three articles on knowledge transfer to write about for this blog. First, Argote and Ingram writing way back in Y2K analyze the process of knowledge transfer to determine what works best and therefore will give organizations the best competitive advantage. Then, Kang et al discuss how the characteristics of the type of knowledge to be transferred affect how much effort the organization is willing and able to put into that transfer. And finally, Colon-Aguirre offers a great look at one way to informally transfer knowledge–especially of the implicit, tacit type–story-telling.

The title of the Argote and Ingram article led me to believe that the article would establish that knowledge transfer offers competitive advantage to firms.  The authors do make that claim, explaining that resources that are developed within the organization and difficult to imitate best impart competitive advantage, thus putting “organizational knowledge in a preeminent position as the principal source of competitive advantage,” (p.156)  However, the authors’ real goal is to understand how organizations gain competitive advantage through knowledge transfer.

They achieve this through an analysis of what they call knowledge reservoirs, the organizational elements in which knowledge is embedded, and how they interact to transfer knowledge.  They examine which of these reservoir networks are more effective conduits of knowledge and why.  Three basic reservoirs of knowledge are identified–members, tools, and tasks–and these elements can be combined to form subnetworks that also contain knowledge. Members are the people in the organization; tools refers to the IT system of hardware and software used in the organization; and tasks represent the implementation of the organization’s goals, intentions, and purposes, things like routines and standard operating procedures (p. 153). Knowing who in the organization is expert at performing a certain task, for example, is knowledge embedded in the member-task network; while knowing who is proficient at using certain software is knowledge embedded in the member-tool network. One way to transfer knowledge is to actually move the networks in which the knowledge is embedded–at least in theory it should work. The authors go on to point out that,  “in practice, however, this is difficult to accomplish,” (156).

Much of the paper is a literature review of the ways these networks effectively or ineffectively transfer knowledge, but some of the more interesting results of their own analysis are:

• Organizational knowledge offers a competitive advantage only when the organization can transfer knowledge internally yet prevent its transfer to competitors (p.156).
• Not only can the transferred knowledge itself be implicit, but the process of the transfer can be implicit as well, where the receiver remains unaware almost of the knowledge he or she has acquired (p. 155).
• Ineffective knowledge transfer attempts aren’t neutral.  In fact, they can negatively affect the performance of the knowledge recipient when that knowledge is inappropriate for and cannot be adapted to the new context, (p.163).
• The subnetworks that involve people are the most problematic when it comes to knowledge transfer, because people are more likely to vary across units than tools or tasks and are less likely to adapt to the new contexts that they encounter when the subnetwork is moved (p. 159). However,  embedding knowledge in the people-based subnetworks is an effective protection against knowledge leaking outside the organization, since it is even less likely that knowledge in these reservoirs will fit an external environment (p.160).

The Kang et al article explores the characteristics of the knowledge itself and how they impact knowledge transfer.  But unlike other studies in this area, the authors do not focus on how these characteristics affect the speed or quality of the transfer, but on how they affect the organization’s actual effort at transferring the knowledge. They looked at three qualities of knowledge–tacitness, difficulty, and importance–and considered how organizations react to those characteristics.  They use the frequency of contact with a knowledge source as a way to measure the level of organizational effort at transferring the knowledge.

The authors make the important point that “knowledge by itself is not a useful resource that creates value and competitive advantage until it can be shared and transferred within the organization,” (p.8156).  Even though knowledge management is a well-worn concept by now, I still believe this is one of its most overlooked principles.  Organizations still focus too much on the knowledge acquisition and generation and not enough on innovative ways of knowledge sharing. Getting individuals to share what they know is extremely difficult, I find; and getting them to share tacit knowledge is next to impossible, as they don’t even realize what they know that others need them to share.

Tacitness is one of the knowledge characteristics that the authors postulate has an effect on organizational effort to transfer knowledge.  Their hypothesis states that “When the perceived tacitness of knowledge is high, organizations are more inclined to frequently contact knowledge sources,” (p. 8156), thus indicating that organizations work harder to transfer that knowledge.  Again like LaurenJay, I was surprised that their survey interviews of project managers failed to support that hypothesis, suggesting instead a weak link between the tacitness of knowledge and the effort put forth to transfer it (p.8159).

On the other hand, the survey interviews did reveal that the importance and difficulty of knowledge has a positive impact on organizational effort to share it.  The authors claim that because the respondents in the study are from a large, knowledge intensive consulting firm, they have clear and strong motives for knowledge sharing. Thus, they are less likely to abandon the effort just because it is difficult, as opposed to being ambiguous as is the case with tacit knowledge (p. 8159).  The same holds true for the importance of information.  It would appear, then, that if an organization really wants to get an edge on its competition, the best way to do so would be to arrive at a successful method for transferring tacit knowledge, since so few persist in the endeavor.

The Colon-Aguirre article discusses one such method—organizational storytelling, which the author defines as “the detailed narratives of management actions, employee interactions, and other events in an organization that are informally communicated within it,” (p. 421).  Stories offer a more informal way to transfer knowledge that is difficult to codify, especially the cultural knowledge of an organization. Cultural knowledge refers to the “shared beliefs, norms, and values” that people in an organization use to “construct reality and assign value to new information,” (p. 421).  Difficult to codify or even express, awareness of organizational culture is key to employee success in any organization.  One of the main ways stories help transfer knowledge within an organization is by giving members the knowledge necessary to make sense of it.

In their examination of storytelling for knowledge transfer, the authors studied the stories told by reference librarians in four academic institutions. At first I was put off by the fact that they only interviewed 20 librarians—a sample of 20, an effective research study does not make—but the fact that they only stopped with the interviews because the interviewees began repeating the same stories so no new information was being collected assuaged my concerns somewhat.  That said, a larger study of more libraries would have been more robust.

Analysis of the stories revealed five primary themes (p. 423) :

1. Unusual patrons
2. Former supervisors
3. Poor administrators
4. Former employees
5. Past crises

One type of knowledge shared through these stories was how to cope with difficult situations, whether they be people-driven (as in the case of unusual patrons or poor administrators) or by events (as in the case of a crisis).  The stories were also shown to pass along important, more tacit skills essential to success on the job, such as staying positive and being patient.  By sharing details about former employees, supervisors, and administration, the stories effectively presented model behavior, as well as undesirable behavior.  The authors did point out, however, that the stories regarding poor administration consisted largely of rumors, a potentially harmful type of knowledge transfer.  “…rumors may undermine the positive effects of storytelling…by diluting the meaning in stories and confusing the process by inserting additional narratives,” (p. 430).

Which brings me back to mind-melding assimilation with the Borg and the nefarious use of knowledge.  It seems to me that knowledge management is becoming less and less about how to create, harness, and share knowledge in an organization and more and more about managing the negative use of good knowledge and the sharing of bad knowledge.  At the very least the two facets are now on equal footing.  Leaked passwords, data breaches, Facebook espionage, fake news—all of it represents an aspect of knowledge management that I haven’t seen addressed in any of the literature I have read so far.  Yet it is an aspect of knowledge management that I hear about every single day.

References

Argote, & Ingram. (2000). Knowledge Transfer: A Basis for Competitive Advantage in Firms. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 82(1), 150-169.

Colon-Aguirre, M. (2015). Knowledge transferred through organizational stories: a typology. Library Management, 36, 421-433. doi: 10.1108/LM-06-2014-0073.

Kang, Jina, Rhee, Mooweon, & Kang, Ki H. (2010). Revisiting knowledge transfer: Effects of knowledge characteristics on organizational effort for knowledge transfer. Expert Systems With Applications, 37(12), 8155-8160.