In a corporation, Tribal Knowledge is the collective wisdom of the organization. It is the sum of all the knowledge. It is the knowledge used to deliver, to support, or to develop value for customers. But it is also all the knowledge that is wrong, imprecise, and useless. It is knowledge of the informal power structure and process or how things really work and how they ought to. It is knowledge of who constrains the process and who facilitates it. It is the knowledge that is squirreled away by employees who feel a need to protect their jobs by not sharing the information needed to do a job. This is part of the totality of the Tribal Knowledge. For example, it is the knowledge and the experience of the assembler who won’t tell others how he can put those two casings together (when no one else can). That knowledge is his job security. But more importantly, it is the untapped knowledge that remains unused or abused.
From this basic definition, we will expand on it over the rest of the contents of this blog.
In our experiences, if you understand Tribal Knowledge, you can start the innovation ideas that we are so fond of discussing. Stay tuned.
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