Latest / Mechanical Engineering Made Simple / (#82) Tacit Knowledge Vision Culture and Tools

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(#82) Tacit Knowledge Vision Culture and Tools · Mechanical Engineering Made Simple

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  Welcome back to Mechanical Engineering Made Simple.
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  You know, I think every engineer, every product
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  developer really dreams of that one big breakthrough innovation.
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  Oh absolutely. The game changer.
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  The one that just completely changes the market.
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  Think of the post it note. We all know that story right?
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  A failed experiment that somehow becomes this massive global
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  success. The classic example.
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  But the secret to that kind of, you know, unique, original
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  discovery, it isn't just about the formulas or the material
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  science. It's about something totally
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  invisible. It's the knowledge.
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  Exactly. The tacit knowledge, that gut
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  feeling, the experience that's just held deep inside your
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  people. Precisely.
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  And that invisible expertise is where your true competitive
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  advantage lives. But The thing is, it's fragile.
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  It's so hard to manage. So that's our mission for this
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  deep dive. Right.
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  We want to explore the organizational mechanics you
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  need to actually tap into that hidden gold mine.
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  We're going to look at two key components.
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  First, the internal foundations you have to have in place.
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  Meaning the right culture and a clear vision.
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  A clear innovation vision, yes. And 2nd, we'll get into the
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  practical tools and frameworks, things like communities of
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  practice and the the virtuality permit, which is fascinating.
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  OK. So tools that turn that internal
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  expertise into something you can actually take to market.
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  Exactly, whether you're working with your internal team or even
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  with external partners. All right, let's get into it.
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  So where do we start? We have to start with
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  definitions just to get everyone on the same page.
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  Data, information and knowledge. They are not the same thing.
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  Data is just your raw facts, the chemical specifications you
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  recorded, the material limits from a stress test.
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  Just numbers on a page really. That's the easy part.
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  So information is when you organize that data, like a graph
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  showing how pressure correlates with the rate of material
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  removal. You got it.
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  But wait, here's a question. Is a massive database of, say,
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  chemical properties, is that knowledge or is it just a whole
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  lot of information? It's.
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  Still just information. Knowledge is the human part of
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  the equation. It's information combined with
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  experience, with context, with reflection.
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  So it increases your capacity to act.
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  That's the definition, yeah. A massive database doesn't act.
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  A person does, using that database as a tool, but informed
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  by all their past failures and successes.
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  In this knowledge, it takes 2 very different forms.
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  We all know explicit knowledge. That's the easy stuff.
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  The stuff you can write down. Yep, it's codified, it's
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  structured. You can transfer it in a manual,
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  a blueprint, or a spec sheet. Simple.
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  But then you have tacit knowledge, and this is the hard
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  stuff we're really hunting for today.
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  It's context specific, it's personal.
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  It's derived from a lifetime of practice and perception.
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  It's almost subconscious. It often is.
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  It's muscle memory or a deeply ingrained hunch, and because of
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  that, language just isn't the best way to share it.
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  That's why transferring tacit knowledge almost always
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  requires, you know, close physical proximity, shared
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  experience. The post it note story is a
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  perfect example of this isn't it?
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  Doctor Spencer Silver AT3M. He's testing this new adhesive.
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  The data was just the measured adhesive force.
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  The knowledge moment. The breakthrough was him
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  realizing that the monomer wasn't just weakly adhesive, it
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  was highly cohesive. It stuck to itself.
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  It stuck to itself. That was the realization.
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  That was the tacit insight that led to the repositional bull
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  note. And this next story, I love this
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  one. It shows just how hard it is to
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  convert that kind of realization into an explicit process.
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  OK, so Matsushita Electric was developing an automatic bread
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  making machine. Their first prototypes complete
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  failures. They just couldn't replicate the
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  taste of bread made by a master Baker.
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  So they studied everything, I assume the ingredients, the
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  temperature, the timing. Everything but they couldn't
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  find any technical difference. So what do you?
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  Do you do what any good engineer does?
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  You become an apprentice. You go watch the expert.
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  Exactly. They watch the Master Baker, and
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  after days of observation, one of the team members finally
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  noticed this tiny, almost subconscious action.
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  What was it? The Baker wasn't just kneading
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  the dough, he was applying A subtle, almost invisible
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  twisting motion as he did it. There it is.
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  That twist was the master Baker's tacit knowledge, and it
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  was only through that close, shared experience that the team
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  could finally convert that invisible action into an
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  explicit, repeatable process for their machine.
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  That's incredible. So you can have the best idea in
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  the world, but if it's stuck in one person's head, it's
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  worthless. And that's the problem
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  Breakthroughs like Silver's discovery or the Baker's twist,
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  they're often unpredictable, even accidental.
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  So if a deep discovery is born from one person's tacit
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  knowledge, it might have 0 value to the company unless it's
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  guided by a common innovation vision.
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  OK, so the vision is the guardrail.
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  It keeps the accidental discoveries pointed in a useful
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  direction. It's the organizational guidance
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  system. Breakthroughs happen at this
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  crucial sweet spot, the intersection of 1 unmet or even
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  unarticulated customer needs. A Holy Grail.
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  And two, the company's shared vision of the future.
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  The Sony Walkman, is the classic case, right?
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  Customers didn't know they needed portable music.
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  Sony showed them the vision. So the vision needs to be more
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  than just a mission statement on the wall.
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  Oh, much more. A robust knowledge vision has to
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  have attributes like real commitment from senior
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  management, but also what the sources call generativity.
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  Generativity. Meaning it has to provide new
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  thinking. Organizational imagination has
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  to push people toward strategically important but
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  maybe unmapped territories. And if you don't have a flexible
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  vision, you end up like digital equipment.
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  A perfect cautionary tale. Their vision for the mini
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  computer market was wildly successful for a while.
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  For a while. But that same vision, which
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  became rigid, totally blinded them to the rise of the personal
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  computer. Yeah, they just couldn't adapt.
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  Their inability to shift focus was a major cause of their
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  failure. They got stuck.
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  So an effective project vision needs what, three things?
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  It really boils down to three it needs clarity and easy to
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  understand target. It needs support, real
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  commitment from the whole organization, and critically, it
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  needs stability. Because if the target keeps
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  moving, your teams can't mobilize that deep knowledge.
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  They won't even try. They'll stop committing to that
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  long term discovery process. OK, so we have the road map, the
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  vision, but even with that guide rail, if people don't feel safe,
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  they won't share their slight twist moments, they won't share
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  their hunches. It's a highly fragile process.
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  That's how it's described. Because you're publicly exposing
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  your beliefs, your judgments, you're making yourself
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  vulnerable. This is why you can't have
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  innovation without trust. Absolutely not.
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  And you have to build an environment based on what the
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  source is called care. This breaks down into 5 core
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  factors. 1st is mutual trust. Believing your colleagues won't
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  make you look stupid for a crazy idea.
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  Exactly. Second is act of empathy.
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  Really trying to walk in the other person's shoes, you know,
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  sharing their uncertainty in that moment of risk.
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  OK, that makes sense. 3rd access to help The experts in the
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  organization have to be genuinely willing to mentor and
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  assist people. And 4th lenience and judgement.
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  I can see that. I mean, imagine an engineer
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  shares a totally wild idea in a meeting and someone just laughs.
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  It's over. That shuts down Creative
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  Exchange for weeks. And the last one is courage.
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  Yes, individuals have to feel safe enough to experiment and
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  give feedback, even if that feedback is, you know,
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  disruptive to how things are normally done.
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  It's fascinating. One of the biggest barriers to
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  this is just internal inequality, Yes.
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  The medical field is a great example.
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  Nurses often have this deep tacit knowledge from just hours
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  and hours of bedside observation.
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  But they might hesitate to suggest something to a
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  physician. Right, because the physician's
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  judgement is based on different, often more explicit data, like
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  blood tests. When one knowledge base is seen
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  as more valuable than another, you create an instant barrier to
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  collaboration. So this culture of care has to
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  start at the top. It has to If trust is low,
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  collaboration just won't happen. Your incentive systems need to
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  reward building relationships, not just fostering internal
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  competition. If people are worried about job
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  security, that caring environment is the first thing
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  to go. Instantly.
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  All right, so once you have the culture and the vision, how do
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  you actually operationalize the sharing of this fragile
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  knowledge? You need tools, and the most
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  effective internal tool is what's known as Communities of
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  practice, or cops. OK, what are those exactly?
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  They're basically informal groups, bound together by a
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  shared expertise and, importantly, a shared passion.
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  Think a group of geologists or a team focused only on battery
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  chemistry. And these cops provide that that
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  rich socialization experience you need for the tacit knowledge
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  transfer. That's the whole point.
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  The core insight here is that relationships, not documents,
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  form the rails along which knowledge passes.
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  The knowledge flows through those social bonds.
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  So what does the structure look like?
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  Well, they have to be voluntary and they need to be focused on
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  issues that are both important to the business and crucially,
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  that align with the members passion.
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  And the innovation comes from the edges, right?
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  Often, yes. The sources point to Daimler
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  Chrysler, where they intentionally mixed people from
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  marketing and engineering into a single cop just to force that
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  boundary crossing perspective. OK, so cops are for deep
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  socialization. What complements that?
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  You need organizational tools like an innovation intranet,
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  something like PNG's innovation, that these systems are designed
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  to maximize connections, both people to people and people to
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  information. So practically speaking, what do
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  they do? They can provide team spaces for
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  sharing documents and discussions.
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  They can collect periodic reports like trip reports or
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  experiment summaries into one central place.
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  And those reports become so valuable over time.
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  They act like a curriculum vitae for everyone's expertise.
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  Exactly. So if you have a problem, you
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  can use the system to quickly find out who knows what based on
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  what they've actually done. It saves countless hours of
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  searching. Now you mentioned a prerequisite
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  tool for this, A. Quick but crucial 1 Competence
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  and capability mapping. You have to know what you're
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  good at and what you need to be good at.
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  Why is that so important? Because that mapping ensures
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  your cops are focused on creating knowledge that meets
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  the V on criteria. Valuable, rare, immutable and
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  non substitutable. The recipe for competitive
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  advantage. Get that wrong and you suffer
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  from what's called core rigidity.
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  Look at Polaroid. They stuck rigidly to their
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  expertise in film chemistry. And completely missed the boat
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  on digital photography they. Failed to develop the new
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  competencies they needed. They mapped their strengths
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  poorly and poured resources into knowledge that was becoming
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  obsolete. OK, let's switch gears a bit.
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  Let's talk about new product development teams and PD.
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  Critical Area. The reality for most of us
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  listening is that our teams are geographically dispersed.
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  We're relying on e-mail, Slack, teams, all of it, right?
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  So we have to challenge this idea of a purely virtual team.
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  It's not an on or off switch. It's really a continuum.
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  And if you're managing one of these MPD teams, you need a way
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  to diagnose where your team sits on that continuum.
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  That's where the virtuality fingerprint comes.
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  In fingerprint. OK, so it's a diagnostic tool.
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  It is. It measures a team's position
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  along three key dimensions. First, team member proximity.
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  Are you all in one room or spread across the globe?
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  Second would be communication. Communication modality, yes,
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  from face to face, which is synchronous and personal, all
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  the way to e-mail, which is asynchronous and a personal.
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  And the third. Team task structure.
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  Is the task simple and well established, or is it complex
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  and emergent where you're figuring it out as you go?
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  And what we learned from analyzing these teams is that
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  being at the strict extremes of any of these dimensions is
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  actually bad for creativity. It is high proximity sounds
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  great, but it can lead to constant distractions or even
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  worse, groupthink. Where nobody wants to rock the
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  boat. And on the other end, high
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  dispersion relying only on asynchronous emails.
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  That just stalls complex creative tasks completely.
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  The back and forth is too slow to build any shared
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  understanding. So the key isn't one or the
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  other, the key is. Flexibility.
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  The highest creativity is found in flexibility.
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  A team that can flexibly move between being Co located and
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  dispersed, or between a video call and a simple e-mail.
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  They get the benefits of both worlds.
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  So how do you visualize that potential for flexibility?
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  We use a model called the Virtuality Pyramid.
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  You assign a flexibility score from one for rigid to three for
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  highly flexible to each of those 3 dimensions proximity,
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  communication and task structure.
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  And those 3 scores form the base of a triangle.
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  Exactly, and the size and stability of that base determine
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  the team's maximum creative potential, which you can
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  visualize as the height of a mass supported by that base.
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  So a perfect 333 flexibility configuration that supports the
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  highest creativity. It does, but if you have an
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  unbalanced setup, say 133 where the task structure score is A1.
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  Meaning the leader is micromanaging every single step.
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  Right then, the Yramid base is lopsided and it just tips over.
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  That rigid task structure destroys creativity.
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  No matter how well you manage the other two dimensions, the
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  team has no autonomy. So a manager has to actively
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  manage these things. You have to you expand or
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  contract the flexibility based on what the project needs at
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  that specific stage. So for proximity management, if
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  your team needs to brainstorm new ideas, you need high
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  flexibility. So you intentionally start with
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  high proximity, you Co locate them to build trust and shared
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  understanding. Then as tasks get more
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  specialized you can gradually dispose the team.
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  We saw this in the household electronics industry.
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  And for communication management?
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  You use face to face or synchronous contact for the
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  really complex multidisciplinary decisions, the stuff that needs
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  real time feedback and empathy. But you save the asynchronous
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  electronic stuff for simple individual matters.
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  Flexibility is knowing when to switch tools.
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  And finally, task structure management.
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  This is all about leadership. It is.
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  The leader shouldn't strictly coordinate every task.
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  That's low flexibility, but they also can't be completely hands
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  off. That's just chaos.
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  Right. Instead, you did die in the task
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  somewhat. You set the clear boundaries,
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  the target, but you give the team considerable leeway and
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  autonomy to define its own process and structure.
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  That's what supports creativity the most.
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  OK, last big topic, let's talk about looking outside the
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  company, external collaboration. Yes, Co development, working
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  across corporate boundaries, it's crucial today.
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  Why so critical? Well, smaller companies use it
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  to get the market faster by leveraging a partner's
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  expertise, and larger companies like Millennium Pharmaceuticals
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  use it for focused innovation. So they partner for the later
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  stage drug development. So they can keep their internal
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  teams focused entirely on that core early stage drug discovery.
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  But picking the right partner has to be incredibly difficult.
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  It is. We can look at Cisco Systems for
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  some guidance here. They use 4 non negotiable
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  criteria. The first three are common sense
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  short term returns, clear long term potential, and a shared
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  vision. But the 4th 1 is the most
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  important. By far a shared destiny of
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  cooperation, not competition. That shared destiny is the only
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  thing that ensures you can actually trust each other enough
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  to share intellectual property. OK, so you found the partner.
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  How do you structure the relationship?
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  With two key documents. First is the business contract.
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  This is the legally binding one. It manages risk.
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  It covers the big legal issues like funding penalties, IP
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  ownership. The What if this all goes wrong?
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  Document. Pretty much the second document
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  is the less formal Joint Development Agreement, or JDA.
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  And this is the How We Work Together Today document.
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  Exactly. It's focused on project
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  logistics and the rules of engagement.
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  How will the teams communicate? What are the measures?
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  The day-to-day targets? It defines the actual
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  collaboration. And this needs management at 2
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  levels. Yes, you need to manage the
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  individual partnership of course, but you also have to
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  manage your entire partner portfolio, making sure the
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  overall mix of partnerships is actually aligned with your
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  company's long term strategic goals.
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  OK. Let's bring this all together.
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  I think the path to breakthrough innovation really requires a
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  dual focus internally. You have to cultivate that safe,
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  collaborative culture, supported by a clear vision to encourage
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  sharing that fragile, pass it knowledge.
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  And then externally. Externally you need structured
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  processes, things like the virtuality pyramid to diagnose
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  your own team's dynamics and formal agreements for your Co
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  development partners. You have to leverage both
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  internal expertise and external capacity.
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  So here is a final thought for you to chew on.
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  If flexibility is the key to maximizing creativity in your
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  teams, how often are you actually reviewing your own
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  project structure? Good question.
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  I mean from your physical location to your communication
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  methods, are you purposely changing them to avoid that
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  creativity killing trap of being stuck at 1 rigid extreme?
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  Somebody to think about? And if you haven't already, get
• 17:13
  over to our YouTube channel Mechanical Engineering Made
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  Simple, where we post hands on how to videos, visual
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  breakdowns, and practical engineering walkthroughs.
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  You can actually use a family that solves together, stays
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  together.