Knowledge Sharing: obstacles and tips in today's projects

The “me” factor plays a role in obstructing knowledge sharing when a team member acts as an individual rather than part of a team and thinks locally than globally.

Fostering and establishing a collaborative environment will certainly help overcome the “me factor”.

Yasmina -

Organization siloes, a lack of perceived value for the knowledge sharer, a mistaken belief that closely guarded knowledge is power, and insufficient capacity/time to be able to curate and distill knowledge are all barriers.

To be more effective, we have to plan for it - i.e. budget time/money for knowledge management within our projects. We also can try to break down the knowledge protection behaviors by incentives or by educating such hoarders on the issues and risks of being single points of knowledge.

Kiron

When discussing something and how to improve it, I find it helpful to come up with a common definition. This helps me communicate more effectively because we have a common frame of reference. With this in mind, my responses to your questions will be based on the following definition of knowledge sharing - the process of exchanging contextually relevant information between people, teams, or organizations. A quote from Stanley McChrystal speaks to why contextual relevance is important - "...information is only of value if you give it to people who have the ability to do something with it."

If you were to categorize the obstacles to knowledge sharing, I would hazard a guess that the categories haven't changed much in the last decade or two. Technologies have changed - there is an overabundance of collaboration tools to choose from, which can bring its own challenges, but I wouldn't call it a major obstacle. I think the biggest obstacle to sharing tacit knowledge is culture. Are people uncomfortable sharing what they know? Or too comfortable? Do they know who to share the information with? Are they hoarding knowledge because they feel it gives them job security? Does the culture implicitly/explicitly encourage or discourage experimenting and trying new things or new ways of doing things?

Your company might be doing great in sharing explicit knowledge - meeting notes, memos, announcements, wikis, etc. But how much is too much? Is there so much information being shared with people who don't need it that it just becomes white noise? This is probably the next biggest obstacle (in my experience).

Early in my career, my meeting notes were extensive and detailed. And nobody read them. I wasn't the only person blasting out information to everyone, regardless of their need, and people were experiencing information overload. I've learned to keep my notes focused on key points, decisions, and action items. I haven't gotten to the point that everyone gets their own custom notes, which would be ridiculous BTW, but every now and them there is someone who needs a little extra attention.

I encourage the team to share knowledge in a few ways. I've made the team's work public, to improve transparency. I encourage the team to include details on what they did in BitBucket when they've solved a particularly challenging problem or fixed a bug. They also maintain a wiki. We try to have regular lessons learned and retrospectives and I send relevant information to people who need it, while encouraging feedback in between meetings. Dissenting opinions are explored, not discouraged. We're slowly influencing other departments.

Final tip and then I'll close this book. Work with your team(s) on how to make their tacit knowledge explicit and get it to the people who can do something about it. I can't say what the best way is to do this in your organization, but start changing mindsets, first.