The program works in a, a big environment, there's lots of different people involved. So, you've got everyone from the project delivery teams, the specialist experts down there, the project managers, the boards that are managing those projects. You've got the program board itself with the BCM and the SRO and the program manager, along with all kinds of ancillary type people that are involved in that like program office, program assurance. You've got the sponsoring group with all the key big stakeholders. You've got people in the outside world like the press, unions, you've also got, like, the frontline staff, the administrative people. There's a massive community of people that are all developing knowledge, developing skills, developing learning, and it's very important that we capture that, capture that understanding and learning, because it will help us to develop and move on to the next iteration, the next, the next tranche if you will.

Now, what's important to understand though is that knowledge comes in many different flavours but they basically boil down to two areas. There's things that we can, we can, like, clearly know, and there's things that we can understand, and the way that they're put, they're described in, in the MSP material is what's called explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge. And the way to think about that is explicit knowledge is something we can pin down, capture and see, so that might be, like, the number of sales that happen in a certain given month or the number of people that work in a certain department or a very clear step by step process that you have. But, then there's also tacit knowledge, and tacit knowledge is more what people know, kind of, in their heart or in their mind.

So, that might be things like the cultural values that people have, the attitudes that people have towards things. It might be a process that you do but it's very, kind of, emotional or it's very instinctive. And you see this all the time. When I'm delivering change I see this quite regularly, where you sit with somebody who does something and they do it really well and you look at them and you go, 'How do you do that,' and you see this blank look come over their face and they're just like, 'Well, I just, I just do it, you know, I just, just get on with it, I just do it, what?'

And you're like, 'Yeah, but how do you do it, break it down, talk about it?' So, that's always difficult. The problem with that is that what you've then got is you've got people sitting around who hold knowledge that could be lost if they leave or if they just forget or do something else or change their-, you know. It's very difficult to measure, if you think about things like the target operating model where we've got the current state of affairs and we've got the future state, the go-to that we're trying to get to, to be. If you don't know what the current state is because the way everybody does everything is just in their heads and they just figure it out, how can you figure out what the world's gonna look like afterwards?

So, one of the, the ideas in MSP if you like is to try and make tacit knowledge explicit. Try to take these things that people that just kinda know and turn them into things you can pin down and capture and show. And there's lots of different techniques for this. Loads of different questioning techniques you can use but probably the most common one is what's called the five hows, or the five whys is another one that people use. It can get a little frustrating when you're talking to people about this, because the way it would work is you'd say to someone, 'What do you do?' And they go, 'Well, I'll, I, I put this on the system.' How? 'Well, I input the data.' How do you input the data? 'Well, I, I take this form and U put it in by looking at that form and I put it on the screen.' How do you get the form? 'Well, I get the form from this person.' How do they do it-, and it can be a bit irritating because you're going, how, how, how, how all the time.

But what it does is you're drilling down iteratively, each more deeper level of knowledge, 'til you get to something you can write down. You know, you can just sorta picture and say, 'Okay, those are the steps you go through.' So that's, that's a useful way to kinda drill down into the process. Getting people to write it down, getting people to picture it, draw it, create workshops where people can sorta pin up the different steps they go through.

There's all kinds of different techniques you can use in there. Something you do have to be careful of though is something called knowledge hoarding. Some people can feel threatened by the fact that you're asking them to give away their, sorta, their currency, their, their knowledge. You know, what makes them un-expendable in the business because they're the only one who knows how that works and now you're saying to them, 'Tell everybody how that works.' And it's like, well then what, what worth am I going forward? We have to handle that very carefully.

If we think back to Enterprise Agility, in theory that shouldn't exist because people are receptive to change and they're willing to recognize mistakes and they're willing to contribute for the greater good, if you like. But, unfortunately, you do find people like that who are-, and I wouldn't look at it as a negative thing. They're just, they're just worried, they're just scared, so working with them in a supportive way. You know, trying to allay their fears and work with them piece by piece to draw some of that information out is probably the best way to go with them, but try to be sympathetic where you can. And what this can ultimately be supported by is what's called a community of practice, and I think the name is very descriptive if you think about a community of practice.

So, it's a community, a group of people that are looking at practice, the way we do things. So, you can have things like networking activities that go on where people share knowledge, that could be things like forums, chat rooms, repositories, you know, there's all kinds of sharing tools out there that we can use both online and within organizations. But, ultimately the community of practice comes from a cultural attitude. People have got to be ready and comfortable with knowledge sharing and I think for that, that starts at the top. So, the organization, you know, the people leading the organization, from the board to the sponsoring group to the SRO and down, have to generate that environment where, you know, it's okay to share. It's okay to have daft ideas, it's okay to say things work a certain way. A really key one that's close to my heart, it's okay to ask stupid questions, it's okay to state the obvious.

You know, the amount of times on projects and programs I've come across situations where things didn't work because nobody bothered to ask a question that afterwards seemed obvious. Like, 'When are you on holiday?' or, you know, 'What office do you work in?', that kinda thing. It can, it can really sorta undermine everything so knowledge is really important. I mean, as we know, knowledge is power and the more power that we have in the program the more likely we are to succeed in this change.

Views from the expert on the knowledge theme

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