WHAT’S NOT WORKING?

Time-worn knowledge “capture” programs—such as “post-mortems,” after action reviews, “lessons learned,” or automated “document-authoring”—often fail because the know-how captured is not representative of experience, is incomplete (or complete at the wrong detail level), or doesn’t get into the right hands. In the rare cases when a capture “event” results in an idea hand-off and a document, the “lessons-learned” fail to inform other teams or divisions without heroic efforts by motivated networkers or by desperate learners.

For example, a team that built a series of four department websites in just six weeks did a post-mortem on the remarkably accelerated process. They spent fifteen person-hours filling a spreadsheet with best-known-methods (“BKMs”). But the spreadsheet failed to inform any other web team (and, ironically, the originating team, themselves). It was difficult to find the final version in the repository, and even when anyone did, he would find that it was labeled with a specific technology version that was being phased out. You’d have to be pretty curious to open it up and dig for the more enduring messages.