I’ve read a lot of “practical” KM books (including a bunch by Laurence Prusak and whomever he happens to be collaborating with on a given week) and, frankly, most of them leave me cold. A little too theoretical to be useful, a little to mired in the details to provide a cogent theoretical framework. But Nancy Dixon’s Common Knowledge: How Companies Thrive by Sharing What They Know is different. This book manages to both be consistently practical and provide a strong theoretical framework.
Dixon divides knowledge transfer challenges into five types:
- Serial Transfer, in which “involves a team transferring the knowledge [it] has learned from doing its task in one setting to the next time that team does the task in a different setting”
- Near Transfer, “when a team has learned something from its experience that the organization would like to replicate in other teams that are doing very similar work”
- Far Transfer, when a team has acquired largely tacit knowledge from its experience with non-routine tasks that the organization would like to make available to other teams that are doing similar work
- Strategic Transfer, “when a team has taken on a tast that happens only infrequently–a one-off project–and wants to benefit from others, in other parts of the organization, that have done a similar task”
- Expert Transfer, “when teams facing an unusual technical problem beyond the scope of their own knowledge seek the expertise of others in the organization to help them address it”
I’m condensing here, of course. Each type of transfer is described in detail with lots of examples, characteristic criteria for distinguishing one kind of transfer challenge from another, and guidelines for effective transfer strategies. Then she pulls it all together in the last two chapters to look at building a comprehensive knowledge transfer organizational plan.
If I were allowed to recommend only one book on practical KM, this would be it.