An organisation that recognises itself

Imagine a company that has grown steadily over the years. Order books are healthy, the people are experienced, the customers satisfied. Much is going exceptionally well, and that is the honest starting point. And yet those responsible sense that something is no longer running smoothly with the new.

It begins harmlessly. A report that used to be reliably on the desk on Friday now only arrives on Monday. Nobody makes a drama of it. But gradually a quiet unease creeps in. The well-practised groove, that natural meshing together, develops cracks. In a meeting someone makes a remark of the kind made a hundred times before, and this time someone feels attacked. Small conflicts appear where there were none before.

By now several people are running undertakings, each in their own way. As long as everything goes well, the difference goes unnoticed. As soon as an undertaking runs into difficulties, nobody notices in time because a shared yardstick is missing. When management asks about the status in a meeting, the responses are structured so differently that they can hardly be compared. People suspect that one of the undertakings is behind schedule but cannot prove it, and the person responsible is convinced that everything is under control. Instead of looking at the matter together, people start to justify themselves and look for reasons in others.

It is not only executive management that feels this pressure. It hits the team leader one level below just as hard. She is expected to deliver but has no reliable overview of her own people's work, because everyone records what they do differently. So she keeps asking, and because that is tedious, in the end she prefers to do much of it herself. She becomes the bottleneck of her own team – not out of a need for control, but for lack of a shared basis.

No additional tool and no additional person closes this gap as long as management does not clarify these three areas.

Then comes the day when the most experienced person leaves the company. And here something shows that has been well studied. Many organisations do carry out so-called lessons learned, that is, reviews of completed undertakings. In a survey of around a thousand experienced project managers, sixty-two percent even had a formal procedure for this. But only twelve percent actually adhered to it. The knowledge is captured, but hardly used. It moves into filing systems that become silent archives from which nobody retrieves anything any more. What survives are mostly the forms and templates, not the actual insights.

It would therefore be wrong to say that this organisation does not learn at all. It certainly learns the small things in everyday work. But the valuable knowledge from the new, which arises when an undertaking passes into operations, is largely lost because it depends only on people and was never put into a shared form. With the experienced person goes a treasure, and her successor starts almost from scratch.

This company has no technology problem and no personnel problem. It has a strong foundation and a gap in its second mainstay. The first step is not to buy something but to recognise and clarify the few open areas of clarification. The good remains; it just finally gets something to hold on to.

Chapter 9 shows how knowledge stays in the organisation instead of in individual heads.