Preparing Your Knowledge

When I read the coverage about how the last piano manufacturing plant in the UK was closing down and the work being transferred overseas my heart went out to the workforce. They had been manufacturing pianos for almost 100 years but had to be rescued just over 25 years ago but now the end had come. Unemployment is a terrible thing. The factory that will now manufacture the pianos is over four times the size of the factory that is closing.

One of the assignments that we conducted was for an organisation whose business environment was going to be changed by a change in the regulations and the company sought our assistance to prepare for the new working environment.

After we had conducted the assessment to understand what knowledge they and how they used that knowledge we worked with them to identify the new knowledge that they would require in order to be successful once the regulatory framework had been changed. We used processes such as BDAL (business driven action learning) to import the new knowledge that they required.

We also put in place processes to systematically manage the existing knowledge that would still be of value in the new regulatory regime.

This gave them a framework that allowed their key knowledge to be applied. The framework also ensured that learning from the application of that knowledge in the new regulatory was also captured and applied.

The new regulatory environment meant that some of what the previously did was no longer of any value. The knowledge had passed its sell by date, it was still knowledge but it didn’t have any value to them in the new regulatory environment. The knowledge was packaged into ‘knowledge bundles’ and archived.

This organisation did however something very interesting with the knowledge that they no longer required, they tried to sell it. It might not have application in their new environment but that wasn’t to say it might not have value to another organisation. Because they had the knowledge distilled and packaged into knowledge bundles they were able to approach other organisations and engage them in a discussion re a potential sale.

I came across a new term today; narrative engineering. The text in which it appeared was “Narrative engineering is the KM discipline that applies storytelling to the purposes of the organisation.”


Knoco Ltd