KM Singapore 2012

The last presenter at the 2011 KM Singapore event was Aw Siew Hoong (Ash). Ash is Knowledge Advisor at Shell Global Solutions and in this role he oversees KM strategy development and implementation, and change management. In his presentation he shared with participants how Shell is addressing the issue of retaining tacit knowledge of its employees through the ROCK process.

ROCK (Retention of Critical Knowledge) has been running since 2005 and basically it consists of a structured interview process. According to Ash, not all the tacit knowledge of Shell’s employees needs to be captured and ROCK starting point is to identify what’s the critical knowledge that needs to be retained and passed on. Once this critical knowledge has been identified, the process deep dives into the experience the person has and the tacit knowledge is brought to the surface.

ROCK has proven to be very successful so far especially in the sense that the people to whom knowledge is transferred enjoy the process and find a lot of value in it.

Gary Klein was the international keynote in the second day of the 2011 KM Singapore conference. Gary is the author of Sources of Power (named one of the best books of the millennium) and Intuition at Work. He is a research psychologist renowned for his pioneering work in the field of naturalistic decision making.

In his presentation, Gary highlighted the importance of capturing tacit knowledge that experts have. Experts see “patterns we don’t see” and we have mental models more sophisticated. How to capture this tacit knowledge is essential and very difficult at the same time.

According to Gary, one possible way to succeed in the efforts of expertise retention is through storytelling. Stories are a medium for communication and representation; they are not just mere illustrations but are the way “you calibrate what’s in the bullet points.” Moreover, stories can rescue us from the problem we often encounter when different people mean different things with the same words. Through stories, these difference can surface and we can have a richer dialogue.