Book Conversations for a KM Lead Job Transition

The first step my successor and I took was to agree on a weekly informal conversation and I knew that conversations would be THE MOST SIGNIFICANT component of this transition effort.

Keeping these conversations informal doesn't mean we can't inject some planning and structure into them.  Since I also wanted to have a background reading component to the transition, I was already thinking about a list of books I could recommend.  Obviously, book reading isn't an ideal way of transferring knowledge, so I thought about making at least part of our conversations related to specific KM books. We could talk about the key concepts and insights from the books, but most importantly connect them directly to the context within which my successor will be working.

I couldn't help myself, I created a map of books I could recommend for these conversations.  These are books I've read and books that have influenced my thinking.  Out of the more than 20 books on the map, perhaps a dozen can be selected for their more immediate applicability and fit with the context my successor will face.  At the pace of one book a month, we can cover 12 books during this coming year.

This sounds great in theory.  I don't know that it's going to work in practice.  We'll see.

Click on the map to open in a new tab.

Planning a Job Transition

Most job transitions result in a great deal of knowledge loss. Some of it may be inevitable. However, that knowledge loss can be mitigated by having the successor identified early and planning for some job overlap with the person leaving. This is often not possible because either the successor cannot be identified early and/or funding the overlap time is challenging. In most cases of job transition that I have recently witnessed, the person leaves and even when he/she is replaced swiftly, there is no handover.

One notable exception to mention: A colleague, knowing that she would not be able to meet her replacement, spent some time creating onboarding videos for her successor, using simple video tools resulting in instructions based on narrated screencaptures. This was invaluable to the successors who would otherwise have struggled for weeks to understand how things were done and where the relevant documents were to be found. This seemed to be more powerful than any written down instructions. My own instinct would have been to create written instructions with screen captures. A document can be scanned faster to get to what you need, but a collection of short videos can do the job as well.

What if you had 12 months to transfer what you know about your job to your successor? I know what you're thinking: No way. This doesn't happen. This scenario is highly unlikely. Obviously, this assumes that you would know a year before your departure exactly who is going to be your successor.. which by itself is an unlikely situation.. AND YET, that is exactly the situation I am facing today:

• More than 12 months before my departure;
• A known successor internal to the company;
• An employer and a customer who both know about my departure and who support the transition.

It was up to me to set this up, and I'm glad I did in spite of some of the risks involved. It is now up to me to make it work. I have now two interesting challenges to address:
1. How to prepare for the next stage of my career (full time consulting on my own).
2. How to prepare my successor so that she can successfully take over my current job.

The initial analysis is very similar in both cases.

• What are my current skills, experiences, expertise? How will they transfer to consulting?
• What are some of the skills and knowledge gaps I can identify now and address in the coming year?
  
•  What are my successor's current skills, experiences, expertise? How will they transfer over when she takes over my job? Obviously she has been selected as my possible replacement because she is perceived to be a good match for the position to begin with.
• What are some of her skills and knowledge gaps and how can I help address these in the coming year?

We're not going to have a full year of overlap, but we're already set to have lunch conversations once a week.

The Curse of Knowledge: A Challenge for Experts and Fiction Writers

The “curse of knowledge” refers to the difficulty experts have in teaching less experienced or knowledgeable individuals in their field. At the expert level, a lot of background knowledge and tacit knowledge is taken for granted and becomes so unobtrusive to the expert that he/she doesn’t think of it as something that needs to be explained or discussed. As a result, the expert tends to speak at too high a level and can’t communicate well with non-experts.  This goes beyond the communication issues related to excessive use of professional jargon and it applies within fields, not just across fields. That is why mid-level professionals make better teachers and mentors than top level experts. Mid-level professionals haven’t lost touch with all that background knowledge necessary to climb the knowledge ladder. This is a relevant lesson for anyone trying to convey an important message to others. Are you paying attention to what the target audience for your message already knows? If not, you could be speaking over their heads.

Fiction writers face a similar “curse of knowledge.” They know a lot more about their characters than the reader will ever know, and the key task of the writer is to put just the right amount of information on paper to convey the essence of the character without sharing the full character development sheet (something that could include details such as their favorite food and the titles of the last three books they've read). Certain actions by key characters won’t make sense unless some relevant information has been provided beforehand (I've caught myself at times wanting to tell the readers to just "read it again" to catch what they missed on the first read). The sequence in which information is provided is therefore critical, yet the writer can’t dump all that background in the first few pages either.

The main difference is that experts can keep talking to fellow experts, be brilliant, and go on to win Nobel Prizes.  As long as they're not asked to teach college freshmen, they'll be fine. A fiction writer who is brilliant in his/her head but can't transfer that magic on paper is not going to be very successful.

Related Resources

• (Article) The Curse of Knowledge - Harvard Business Review Magazine - December 2006.
• (Series of blog posts) Made to Stick for Writers - Writer Sense - August 2010.
• (Book) Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die - Chip Heath & Dan Heath