It's Like Being Able to Call Him Up And Ask A Question

In this post I would like to share with you a discussion that took place with someone who had participated in a knowledge harvest exercise. Some of the details have been changed to protect client confidentiality.

We had been engaged to conduct a number of knowledge harvest interventions and create knowledge assets with the resulting material. Also part of the scope was to transfer our skills in knowledge harvesting to the in-house knowledge management team and provide them with a knowledge harvesting toolkit. Knowledge harvesting is a process whereby the experience and knowledge of one or more individuals is gathered, distilled, packaged and made available to a wider audience. It is used in private, public and third sector organisations, frequently when someone is leaving the organisation and the organisation wishes to retain the knowledge.

We were conducting the end of project retrospect to identify and capture the learning from conducting the knowledge harvests and transferring the skills to the in-house knowledge management team when in response to the question, ‘what could have worked better’, one of the interviewees responded that they thought that the edited transcript of their interview was very poor indeed. There was repetition, the grammar was loose and it just wasn’t the tightly scripted text that he was used to.

This was great feedback as it allowed us to then ask the second part of the retrospect question, ‘what could we do to avoid it next time?’

For me, that’s when the real learning from this interviewee occurred.

The interviewee explained that they were so disappointed by the edited transcript they had been given that they decided to look at how the material from one of the previous interviews had been packaged as a knowledge asset on their intranet. They shared with the group how as they read the knowledge asset on the intranet they could imagine the person sitting in front of them saying those words, in that way, with the same mannerisms. It was interesting that on a survey of people who had also visited the knowledge assets someone else commented “It’s like being able to call him up and ask a question”.

They went on to explain that they suddenly realised that the text they were given to review and edit wasn’t intended to be a tightly scripted report or business case but rather it was intended to replicate how they spoke and shared insights when speaking with people. They finished by saying that once they had got that into their head and how it would come across to the end user, it was like they themselves were talking to them.

At the end of the dialogue we asked them to summarise the learning for the future. There were two main learning points;
• When asking the interviewee to review and edit the text that you want to finally convert into a knowledge asset and load onto the intranet, if possible show them an example of a knowledge asset so that they will understand that the text they have been given is not intended to be a tightly scripted report but rather something that when the end user reads it, they will imagine the person is sitting opposite them share those words with them
• Knowledge harvesting works as a process and helped to identify the key knowledge that they wanted to impart to others

I have been doing knowledge capture and packaging for a long time but this is the first time that an interviewee has so succinctly described the difference between the text that is in a report and the text that appears in a knowledge asset.
So if you are planning knowledge capture and packaging, it might be worth highlighting the difference to any interviewee before you send them the text to review and edit.


Knoco Ltd