I am a management consultant and I have been working with over 150 companies for over 25 years helping to improve their Tribal Knowledge. In that time, I have seen over 10,000 ideas implemented and each one has been a fun experience.
We get employees to put ideas into play that create $100,000 of benefit to the company for an investment of only $2,000 or less. The cost benefit ratio of 50 to 1 is pretty good. On an average it is less than that. We had an audit a number of years ago and it showed over 38 to 1. It isn’t 50 to 1 but there aren’t many people that would turn down those results.
So, just what is Tribal Knowledge and how does it work?
While helping a manufacturer to address some problems that had long prevented the company from improving their cycle times and increasing their sales, we put a number of teams together made up of employees from various departments. The receptionist ended up with three machinists and one assembler. As they were dealing with the problem, the receptionist commented, “Why don’t you turn up the feeds and speeds? After all you are machining aluminum and you want to get the job done quicker.”
It was a wonderful moment. Mouths dropped because she was right and these experienced machinists they had never thought of it! Everyone wanted to know how she knew that.
Well, it turns out that she was raised in a family with three brothers and a father who were all machinists. They had a machine shop at home and she had learned the trade.
I defined Tribal Knowledge in the previous blog. So where is the paradox here? Think about it. This lady was a receptionist. She apparently didn’t have the skills to help the machinists but it turns out that she did. This is what I mean by Tribal Knowledge, in part because it is untapped or unused. In this case, it was a vast unused skill set that the receptionist had. When I asked her why she wasn’t using that skill, she said that she was raising kids and didn’t want to spend any more time at work than she was. She knew that if she were using her skills that she wouldn’t be free to run home when the kids needed something.
But once the cat was out of the bag. Her life changed. The company recruited her to contribute her Tribal Knowledge to the organization.
And finally I would like to leave you with a question: How can you possibly operate your business without paying attention to increasing your Tribal Knowledge? That is, after all, what we think companies should do!
Have a good day.
Len Bertain
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