Conversation on the ACTKM EMail Group! Sound advice for anyone taking on a new role, joining a new office.
-----Original Message-----
Dear knowledge members,
I will be contracted as a strategic assistant in company with all their culture and complexity in next couple of days. The person who isworking in the position at the moment is going to leave in January,that means he has only 20 days to learn me what he “knows”. That givesme a kind of uncertainty because tools for knowledge transfers are notcommon. Only older reports which he made he was able to pass to me andI will participate on meetings! Surely the people will not expect thatI will start where he left in the first month, because the base isstill out of sight, but I want to use the 20 days as “sufficient” aspossible. I am reading this forum now for a while and know that there is a lotof practical and knowledge “out there”. Therefore, i am keen to knowabout your experiences and opinions how the knowledge transfer couldbe managed on a good possible way in the next 20 days! Thanks!
Regards, ..........
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Dave Snowden responds:
Twenty days is not long, not even a fully monthly cycle
My advice would be as follows:
1. Buy yourself a digital tape recorder fast and record everything you are told - keeping notes means that you will miss significant "weak signals" in the material. In six months time you will be asking "Hang on, there was something about that but I can't remember it".
2. At the end of everyday don't transcribe the tape, but chuck it into sections and catalogue it with a simple text description of each item "the annual report saga" or similar - something that will trigger your memory and is no more than a line.
3. As a part of that review identify a set of questions that you want to ask the next day and get them written up for the next day
4. Set up a set of structured interviews around the rhythms of the job - what do you do on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. People normally work to calendar cycles and asking them to go through it around that cycle is more likely to trigger memories
5. Create a list of “key people I need to know” and get introductions, ideally get a meeting fixed along with the person whose job you are taking and get them to reminisce about the work they have done together – best moments, worst moments, most amusing, near tragedies etc. The idea is to look at the extremes so that things pop out of the middle.
6. Get the person to think about significant events during their time in the organization – who did they work with, what made things work.
7. Create a social network map of the persons contacts - those they go to for information, where they go for help if they don’t understand something or there are difficulties, where they have good or difficult (never say bad) relationships. Keep that map as a diagram (people in boxes with in and out arrows) and link to the digital tape recorder output – make sure you have material about all of the contacts, what they did and how they did it. These are the people who will fill in the gaps for you and you need to know who they are and also to be introduced.
8. As part of the social network map ask them for people or roles that they would like to have had contact with to make a difference to their jobs – keep prompting for this as you will have a golden opportunity to create these links as a new person
9. Get the war stories – there is more knowledge hidden in that everything else,
Dave Snowden
www.cynefin.net
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