The concept of best practices has become familiar to me as I have continued my foray into academia. Best practices are, essentially, ways of doing things that are considered the most correct. They are the most effective way of achieving goals as established through past knowledge and experience. Some organizations consider best practices to be obvious or standardized simply because that’s the way things have always been done. However, in the realm of knowledge management, the obvious question becomes this: How do we communicate best practices when they are not standardized within an organization?
Szulanski (1996) lists four stages in the transfer of best practices within an organization (p. 28-29):
- Initiation – the history leading to the decision to transfer knowledge
- Implementation – begins when the decision to proceed with knowledge transfer is made
- Ramp-up – the use of transferred knowledge
- Integration – achieved after the recipients of the knowledge achieve “satisfactory” results
These steps for knowledge transfer seem pretty self-explanatory. Where Szulanski provides a unique look at transfer of best practice knowledge is his evaluation of internal stickiness, or “the difficulty of transferring knowledge within the organization” (p. 29). There are several factors that can affect the difficulty of knowledge transfer (p. 30-31):
- Characteristics of the knowledge
- Characteristics of source of knowledge
- Characteristics of the recipient of knowledge
- Characteristics of the context
The results of Szulanski’s survey of several organizations imply that the most prominent origins of stickiness are the “lack of absorptive capacity of the recipient, causal ambiguity, and an arduous relationship between the source and the recipient” (p. 36). Therefore, using incentives to bolster motivation for smooth knowledge transfer may not be the most effective course of action for organizations. Instead, developing close relationships within the organization and providing resources to the “learning capacities” of individuals within the organizations are suggested to mitigate internal stickiness (p. 37).
Similar to the concept of developing close relationships to bolster transfer of best practice knowledge, Colon-Aguirre (2015) looked at organizational stories shared between librarians as a method of transferring knowledge. By interviewing librarians, Colon-Aguirre was able to understand the rich cultural practice around the types of stories and knowledge shared. Stories about unusual patrons, former supervisors, poor administrators, former employees, and past crises emerged throughout these interviews. Much of the knowledge transferred through these stories was discovered to be tacit knowledge (p. 431), often on how to deal with a variety of patrons or difficult management.
These stories are rich in knowledge relating to the library patrons’ needs and idiosyncrasies; moreover, these stories provide a way to communicate best practices among reference librarians. (Colon-Aguirre, 2015, p. 430)
Ultimately, this research helps foster understanding of how organizational stories are used to transfer knowledge and best practices, though not necessarily providing specific guidelines for improving or developing knowledge transfer practices.
Finally, I took a look at Kang, Rhee, and Kang’s (2010) article. This piece looks at the specific aspects of the knowledge characteristics and how they affect knowledge transfer. As their hypothesis posited, the more difficult the knowledge is to understand, the more difficult it will be to transfer. At the same time, the more important the knowledge is, the more effort the individuals in the organization will make to transfer the knowledge.
One of the most interesting results gathered via interviews with project managers from a consulting firm was the difficulty in transferring tacit knowledge. At this point, I was not surprised to read that they discovered that the more tacit the knowledge, the more difficult it is to transfer. However, I was a little surprised that they suggested potentially abandoning “acquiring the knowledge and decrease their effort to secure knowledge transfer” (p. 8159). Kang et al. essentially propose that the cost to organizations fro attempting to codify tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge for transfer would be too great. That may sound negative, but referring back to Colon-Aguirre (2015), I argue that attempting to make tacit knowledge into a more explicit form is not completely necessary in order to transfer it, as individuals within the organizations will likely use stories as a form of transferring the knowledge.
Overall, these readings were more helpful in understanding general knowledge transfer as compared to the transfer of specific best practices, but I am confident in applying most of the results to the specific transfer of best practice knowledge.
- Colon-Aguirre, M. (2015). Knowledge transferred through organizational stories: a typology. Library Management, 36(6/7), 421-433. doi: 10.1108/LM-06-2014-0073
- Kang, J., Rhee, M., & Kang, K. H. (2010). Revisiting knowledge transfer: Effects of knowledge characteristics on organizational effort for knowledge transfer. Expert Systems with Applications, 37(12), 8155–8160. doi: 10.1016/j.eswa.2010.05.072
- Szulanski, G. (1996). Exploring internal stickiness: Impediments to the transfer of best practices within the firm. Strategic Management Journal, 17, 27-43. doi: 10.1002/smj.4250171105
Lauren Johnson & the Exploration of Knowledge Management 
I also was surprised at the research showing that organizations put less effort into transferring tacit knowledge, I guess because of the law of diminishing returns–they believe it is ultimately a useless effort. In my blog on the same article, I suggested that coming up with innovative ways for transferring tacit knowledge is the real key to competitive advantage and worth the investment.
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“If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more productive.” Lew Platt, CEO, Hewlett-Packard
It would be hard to make a list of everything you don’t know. I can excuse an organization for not pushing on it, because the leaders don’t know what the organization does know. I’m sure the leaders are aware of the gap but pushing for it comes as what opportunity cost? Since they can’t quantify the effort or the cost, they might be afraid to push on it.
I can only imagine what the cost to AMTC was at first. (The Wang et al., article)
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I agree with you. It also makes me think about how many fields of medicine and health require people to intern, shadow, take a residency, etc. before practicing on their own. All this experience under close monitoring from a seasoned professional helps us learn from them and gain our own tacit knowledge to utilize in practice. Some other organizations also use a mentoring program to help with this (e.g. Buzzfeed).
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Szulanski’s findings are interesting. I would have guessed that the use of incentives to bolster motivation for knowledge transfer would be an effective method for overcoming things like lack of absorptive capacity of the recipient and causal ambiguity. I can see that those tactics may not work on arduous relationships between the sources and the recipients, and thus the idea that developing close relationships within the organization and providing resources would be an effective remedy for those cases. I may need to read Szulanski for my next blog post.
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It’s definitely worth the read. By no means do I think that motivational efforts are wasted within organizations, but I believe their research emphasizes that these efforts are in no way enough to obtain successful knowledge transfer within organizations.
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I was sort of surprised about Kang and colleages’ findings regarding the simplification of knowledge: the simpler the knowledge, the easier it is to transfer.
My initial thought was, “But of COURSE! You can’t share something intricate and complex and expect someone to understand it 100%!”
However, the more I thought about it, the more I became concerned with the notion of simplicity. Simplicity is inherently subjective when it comes to something tacit such as knowledge. Just because I consider something to be “simple” doesn’t mean that someone else will. Are you concerned with this, too?
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Oh definitely! It’s very easy for someone who is competent in a topic to make something “simple”, but their version of simplification is coming from a place of expertise. This may not jive with someone who has zero history with the topic. I think in this situation it just comes down to consistent communication between the sender and the recipient (and a good amount of patience) in order to get on the same level. If all else fails, reaching a decent level of understanding is a good start. Not everyone can be an expert on everything, after all.
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My reading of Szulanski only reinforced my own opinion that the transfer of knowledge and especially best practices or other organizational cultural information is achieved primarily through the transfer of tacit knowledge. While this can prove difficult (as we know this type of knowledge can be difficult to explicate) personal narratives seem to be an excellent tool for the transfer of this particular type of knowledge. The highly personal nature of this form of knowledge transfer allows the individual to impart their own viewpoints and historic experience through anecdotal evidence. While the systematic and explicit transfer of best practices may prove to be too costly for some organizations. It must be remembered that this knowledge is already being created and disseminated informally by members of the organization.
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