by John Brooker | Feb 27, 2012 | Innovate
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 57 Taking time to capture stories during and after a project could help make explicit a lot of tacit data. “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it” Winston Churchill” What is the best story in your organisation? Being the season of the “greatest story ever told”, I found myself at the Christmas concert of the youth orchestra in which my daughter plays. My son and I sat right at the front with my daughter a few feet away in the “pit”, waiting for her group to perform. The music started and the band kicked in to a variety of classic songs from the likes of Lionel Ritchie and the Beatles. Despite not having heard many of them for over ten years, I found the lyrics popping in to my head and I began quietly singing along, until I saw the horrified look on my daughter’s face (seriously uncool to sing along Dad!). Reacting to her press of the metaphorical mute switch, I turned my head away and singing mutely, I pondered from where these lyrics had popped up? Perhaps they are stored in some obscure memory bank and the “vault” is opened by a combination of musical notes? After the concert I thought about tacit knowledge in organisations, all those valuable snippets of information, insights and understanding that are not written down and are often lost. What organisational equivalent of “musical notes” does it take to elicit these tacit nuggets and make them explicit? Do we all have to line up and sing a company song each morning, I...
