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Introducing knowledge retention: where are you now?
First, identify what is the current behaviour across your organization when it comes to knowledge retention: do not be surprised to find wide differences between organizational units, or inside organizational units.
"Scientific management" was originally based on sound knowledge of management practice.
The concept? Ease the training of managers without the need to start from the shop floor and rise up into management, as training was supposed to replace the experience.
With personal computers, the widespread use of computers tools like spreadsheets allowed to replace the transfer of "fuzzy" knowledge (people skills, etc) with a more structured and quantitative approach.
In reality, the 90s saw the sharp rise of spreadsheet-toting consultants, focused on quantifying everything, quite often discarding the unquantifiable as irrelevant.
Quantitative knowledge is fast and easy to replicate and communicate: successive generations of quantitative-focused managers and consultants increasingly drifted away from the business common sense.
Second, identify a set of qualitative parameters and some levels of compliance used to benchmark each organizational unit.
Third, using these parameters, a simple "radar" chart will become the basis for a brainstorming on possible initiatives to improve the status of each organizational unit, complementing the quantitative approach.
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