How Do You Ensure that Tacit Knowledge Critical to the Organization Gets Shared?
How do you ensure that the critical tacit knowledge lodged in the brain of some of your best and brightest gets shared?
In the age of remote and hybrid work, the opportunities may look and feel different. One potential way is for more junior employees to buddy with a senior employee on a project. But what if that is not an option because of the criticality of the work or lack of bandwidth? Those valuable, seasoned employees usually have the least time, yet what they have locked in their heads is critical.
NASA has thought this challenge through. When they were working on a Mars rover program in the 2010s, they gave younger engineers a smaller, parallel project: to build a rover for use in educational programs on Earth. It was not the real thing, but it provided them some hands-on experience. NASA also has an emeritus program brings in retirees to mentor junior staff.
Make time for people to bring up anything unexpected that happened and talk of how they addressed it, or might have done something differently. Those conversations can be spirited, and a bit of oneupmanship may creep in, but those are the details that are remembered.