Tacit Knowledge
Hey!
Welcome back to another week of musings! Our dog was sick, so we spent much of the weekend caring for him. We also donated some of our clothes and other items that we no longer use.
I hope you had a restorative weekend as well!
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Recently, I've been thinking about the context that 'leaves' when someone decides to pursue other opportunities or is laid off. This departure could result in losing valuable tacit knowledge, which we should strive to prevent.
While knowledge-sharing sessions and document creation are common practices, there are unique aspects to each individual's mental process and context. These unique elements could potentially lead to specific thoughts in the future, a concept that is intriguing and worth exploring.
I was looking around, and this is what gets called Tacit knowledge.
What would Oscar do?
I used to have an exceptional mentor at work, and many people around the company would always ask, "What would they do?"
They helped so much around the organization that people wanted to copy them and be as helpful. I've talked with peers who often get asked, "How did you come up with that?" and cannot fully explain their thought process. They frequently want a "flow chart" to help people with decisions based on their own experience, which they can't fully share.
The lost context
Once you've reached a certain tenure length or are switching jobs, you might have noticed in yourself or around you that there's a context loss when people move around.
You might have some ideas you took with you, which might find a new home in your new team or company when re-applied into a new context. If you've stayed, you sometimes might need to dig into documents or spelunk code bases to decipher what the people meant or which direction they wanted to take.
Shadowing people
Currently, the primary way I've found around "inheriting" people's tacit knowledge is to shadow them in their work. Practically speaking, you cannot shadow someone 9-5, so you'll have to pick and choose which area is a priority.
Asking people to document helps with the facts around projects or decisions. But sometimes, meeting notes, project plans, or software designs suffer from certain abstractions or people in their expertise assume certain things from the audience reading.
Your turn!
How do you prepare for people leaving your organization? How have you helped your team prepare for your departure? Reply to this email to let me know!
Happy coding!
Things I discovered in the past week
- The Magic Loop is a framework for growth at a company developed by an Amazon veteran. While not everyone is interested in that, I find it interesting, especially as mentees sometimes ask me ways to improve.
- I started reading some chapters from Enabling Microservice Success. The first chapter was mostly around ground-setting definitions and context around microservices, but I'm excited about what's to come in the next chapters.
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