-->

Register Now to SAVE BIG & Join Us for KMWorld 2025, November 17-20, in Washington, DC.

Using Tacit and Explicit Information for Productivity

Article Featured Image

Storytelling expert Steve Denning describes it this way: “Storytelling relinquishes a straightforward journey from A to B, and in the end provides a vehicle for unveiling unseen tacit knowledge. Storytelling draws on deep-flowing streams of meaning, and on patterns of primal narratives of which the listeners are barely aware, and so catalyzes visions of a different and renewed future” (stevedenning.com/Business-Narrative/storytelling-to-capture-tacit-knowledge.aspx).

Capturing Knowledge Before It Walks Out the Door

One of the strongest driving forces for launching an initiative to capture tacit knowledge is to ensure that institutional knowledge is not lost as people retire or resign. Another is for succession planning and organizational growth. Lack of succession planning results in loss of knowledge. It undermines organizational stability and impedes innovation. Few software solutions are designed specifically to capture tacit knowledge, although some enterprise applications can be extended to take on this task.

Lcubed Consulting has extensive experience in business transformation to align people and process in large enterprises so workers can be supported by appropriate technology that enhances their productivity. The company also serves mid-markets with coaching on leadership effectiveness, advocating distributed decision making to support greater agility in responding to change. When challenged to assist with succession planning for a large state organization that anticipated about 100 retirements in the next few years, Lcubed decided to use Sugarwork to expedite its analysis of leadership patterns and to preserve institutional memory.

Sugarwork provides a structured method for interviewing individuals and capturing their knowledge in recordings, as well providing an AI-enabled analysis of the recordings. “Our original scope was to interview 50% of the departing individuals. Instead, we were able to interview almost all of them,” said Lisa Levy, CEO of Lcubed Consulting. “Each session consisted of 10 to 15 hours of recorded interviews. We then leveraged the Sugarwork LLM [large language model] to understand more about the individuals’ processes and roles.” The LLM elicited themes, pain points, and core values of the staff that had not been previously documented.

“The level of detail we were able to obtain was fantastic,” reported Levy. “It was much greater than we could have achieved with interviewers taking notes and discussing them in a traditional setting with whiteboards and charts. With Sugarwork, we were able to able to capture nuances, such as which employees were happy, which ones were frustrated, and why, as well as what their regular work activities were.” Not only did Lcubed interview twice as many people as planned, but it was also able to acquire about twice as much detail as would have been achievable otherwise, thereby improving the impact by a factor of 4.

Lcubed also documented 250 processes in the organization. However, it then faced the question of how to integrate them into the organization’s portals and engage employees, as well as how to make the data queryable to the staff at large. “That will be the next step,” commented Levy, “how to preserve this body of knowledge and, for example, put it into a chatbot that can carry on a dialog. The goal is to make the resulting knowledgebase a living body of knowledge.” In order to make this large amount of information more manageable, a likely intermediate step is for the leadership team to identify a few key processes in each of the functions that need to be understood by everyone and then define and retain the core knowledge.

KMWorld Covers
Free
for qualified subscribers
Subscribe Now Current Issue Past Issues