The organizational culture itself is not attuned to wanting to retain knowledge. … It seems like the organization forgets something for no reason other than convenience

Season 5, Episode 9 — Click here to download the transcript

Turnover can be a devastating thing to some organizations, the loss of expertise and experience, if not transferred in some way to existing members, can disrupt the organization’s ability to perform at the highest level over time. But unfortunately, one of the things that some organizations do less well than they should is capturing that knowledge so that it can withstand the loss of its best experts. There are a lot of people looking into this problem, but typically as a knowledge management or a human resources problem. Now, reflecting on several instances of this sort of brain drain happening, I am questioning whether this isn’t some other type of problem entirely.

In this episode, I discuss two types of brain drain that organizations may experience when its experts walk out the door (whether departure or retirement) with their knowledge. Sometimes due to intellectual property, there are reasons why the experts take knowledge with them and don’t leave it behind. But the problem I’m more concerned about here is when the organization does not have the capacity or the inclination to seek to retain it. No knowledge management structure or human resources approach can deal with this alone — it is partly a problem of culture and assumptions that any lost knowledge can be regenerated rapidly.

My proposed solution is a grand narrative approach that instead of using a database structure as the repository, and we use monographs instead. Each monograph is a self-contained repository of knowledge as understood at the time, and a broader story — the grand narrative — connects the monographs together. I’m pursuing this approach in multiple venues and it seems to be off to a good start.