Sharing Expertise Face-to-Face
Where transfer of expertise is tremendously valuable, the limita-
tions of technology should not be allowed to become constraints.
Nearly all large companies have what we call mirror-image
functions: large numbers of groups engaged in parallel tasks.
Districts in a sales force, teams in a call center, and product
development teams in a research and development facility
are common examples of mirror-image functions. There will always
be a distribution curve of performance in such mirror-image func-
tions, and we have noticed in many of the companies we have
observed that management tolerates a fairly wide performance
distribution because the tools they have to narrow or shift that dis-
tribution (hiring and firing, financial incentives, process standard-
ization) are such blunt instruments. In many of these cases, the
value of narrowing the gap between current performance and inter-
nal benchmarks is astronomical. For one credit company, for
instance, the value of moving each unit in their five collections
sites halfway to the performance of the best site was $75 million
per year.
Certainly, in cases like this, it pays to try actively to influence
the process by which leaders learn the practices that enable others
to achieve superior performance. What we have discovered in sit-
uation after situation is that the value is so high that sophisticated
internal or external resources can be used to help groups of leaders
understand one another’s practices and how insights from one area
can be applied in other areas. Rather than codifying the knowledge
of the best practitioners, putting that knowledge into a system, and
letting others access that system, we have found that the returns are
far higher from having a trained facilitator engage groups in dis-
covery and application face to face, in real time. Much of the effort
spent disembodying knowledge, so that it becomes a commodity
that can seemingly be “managed,” could be better leveraged
through increasing the quantity and quality of problem solving that
takes place among peers outside the chain of command.
WHERE“MANAGINGKNOWLEDGE” GOESWRONG 33