Impedance in the Knowledge Flow

What things impede knowledge flow in your organization? Where are the places where knowledge flows - just not as quickly or as clearly as it could? Here are the top 5 sources of knowledge flow impedence I see in my travels. Which ones apply to you?

• High Noise - Low Content Communication Channels: Over-reliance on communication channels that tend to hide or distort information. These include audio-only conferences (especially those done late at night at the kitchen table to deal with time zone differences), slide sets with more than 1 slide for every 2 minutes of presentation, most email, memos and reports that are longer than two pages or anything that requires access to a system that is hard to navigate.


• Overloaded Resources: Don Rienertsen's Managing the Design Factory lays out a strong case demonstrating how overloaded resources slow down development. But did you realize that they also slow down the flow of knowledge? People juggling too many projects in too few hours will be driven to take shortcuts that stop the flow of knowledge. They will stop taking the time to talk to others working on similar problems to figure out how to share solutions, and they will resist requests to share their knowledge with others if it doesn't help them with their immediate to do lists.


• Artificial Organizational Barriers: knowledge-sharing works best in an organizational structure that is a balance of both strong functional and strong cross-functional teamwork. On the one extreme, departmental silos prevent knowledge from spreading to related functions. On the other extreme, product-centered teams don't share knowledge effectively across products.


• Lack of Common Engineering Tools: Knowledge gets stuck when one set of tools (product data management systems, for example) can't talk to other tools. This is one area where the benefits of standardizing on a common toolset is well worth the pain. Teams working on similar problems need access to each other's information in ways that can be easily shared.


• Complex Knowledge Management Tools So-called "knowledge management" tools often become write-only databases because it is too hard to store information in them, and then too hard to retrieve it. With new search technologies like Google Desktop, you don't need a specialized tool to manage knowledge. Simple, searchable file shares of electronic A3 reports may be all that you ever need.

As you can see, most of these barriers are structural - embedded in the organizational structure, culture and IT systems that support the organization. This list contains few ideas for quick wins. The companies that have strong flows of knowledge in their organizations have worked for it, relentlessly identifying and eliminating the barriers to knowledge flow.

What can you do? Individuals working on their own can greatly improve their knowledge sharing effectiveness by attacking the high noise - low content communication channels within their direct control.

If you lead a product development organization or work on a lean product development team tasked with improving knowledge flow, it would be worth your time to identify the specific impediments to knowledge flow within your organizations, and invest the time to fix them as part of your lean product development efforts.