Tribal Knowledge Paradigm – The Key

An observation was made in an earlier book by one of the authors (The Tribal Knowledge Paradox)[1] that challenges executives to ask themselves: Why is it that employees are at one moment touted as a most prized asset and in the next breath, they are victims of massive layoffs.

In that book, employees are shown to be looking at problems in a fictional business in teams of fellow employees.  Each team wrestles with a problem and presents a solution for the company president to judge and approve, or make suggestions before approval will be granted.

But what we see in the book are teams aggressively competing with each other to earn the respect of management, their peers, and the market.  This is the “earned respect” that we have discussed.  The Employees work hard to deliver their presentations and management can only respond positively for such effort.

Although the book is fiction, it mimics the authors’ experiences in over 150 such engagements at companies both large and small.  Employees are seen to have great insights to the wastes that are the impediments to profits.  And they will work tirelessly to help address them, if given the chance.  They have great insights based upon what they see, not what managers think they should see.  And this is another way to look at the paradox: If companies tout employees as being “their greatest asset” with their clear vision of what is going on, why do they not respect them?

It is almost motherhood and apple pie, to say great companies are a product of their competent and highly motivated people, yet most organizations do very little to engage and build this resource.   Which is why we call it the “tribal knowledge paradox”.

So, as we try to help CEOs deal with this paradox, we show them a simple approach to management that we call the Tribal Knowledge Paradigm.  As we learned from our experience with teams and with the intensity of competition, broadly engaging employees brings to the table, ideas and action on those ideas is the objective of the paradigm.  Everything should be constantly improving. (You might want to look at one of my videos where I talk about this.  The Tribal Knowledge Paradox Interview with Len Bertain.)

To generate the action, we need both a process to get ideas into play (improve Tribal Knowledge) and to support their efforts to manage them through an ideation process into action.  So we suggest that companies create such an action center.  In the aforementioned book, we called that center the Tribal Knowledge Council.  It is the central point in the process that is the management control point for capturing all ideas.  It is the center of innovation in the company.  All ideas are tracked and managed by the Tribal Knowledge Council (TKC).  We will discuss more about this later in the book.  We want action and lots of ideas and the TKC helps keep everything in focus.  After all, everyone has a piece of the puzzle.  That is the basis of the thinking of the Tribal Knowledge Paradox.

But to make this work, all Executives, Managers and Supervisors need to understand that their new responsibility in this paradigm is improvement of Tribal Knowledge.  This is not an impossible new responsibility.  It is quite logical.  Managers are told that their new job description includes a line of responsibility that requires them to support suggestions that improve company Tribal Knowledge.  This is self-fulfilling in that it feels good for a manager to support an employee who has an idea or implements it.  When a manager sees the excitement from an employee, whose idea has gotten recognition from its implementation success, that is almost enough to make anybody’s day.  The job of a manager in this context then becomes one of supporting an idea/action process that improves Mission Relevant Tribal Knowledge through the Tribal Knowledge Council.