sticky fingers

Just finished Sticky Knowledge by Gabriel Szulanski. It's a brief book written in a somewhat academic style but GS's point is both simple and powerful.

We often wonder why we can't get the one team/division/subsidiary that does something really, really good to show the other team/division/subsidiary how to do. There is a tendency to think that this main barrier is recipient motivation - "they just don't want to improve" - and that this barrier can be surmounted by tweaking incentives.

GS's research indicates that the main barrier in his examples was actually the absorptive capacity of the recipients - i.e. the people that need to learn don't know enough to take the new stuff on board. The knowledge jump is too great for them. The second barrier was causal ambiguity - i.e. we didn't understand what made the original good thing tick well enough to transport it lock stock & barrel.

So if we are going to learn from each other (generalisations ahoy):

• A little and often is better than all at once.
• We must be cautious of overconfidence in our preferred solution.
• Bribery may not help.