Lost and found

The issue is no longer ‘brain drain’. It’s all about ‘brain circulation’.

By Jerry Ash

It has been 33 years since the US landed its last astronaut on the moon. From 1969 to 1972, the US landed 12 astronauts on the lunar surface, but according to a recent report in the New York Times, most of the knowledge from the Apollo programme that sent men to the moon has been lost and the US probably couldn’t go back to the moon today even if it wanted to.

NASA has ‘forgotten’ how because engineers who built the original Saturn V rocket retired from the space agency in the 1990s without leaving any collective memory. Important blueprints were never catalogued.

These days, the problem of lost knowledge is at the forefront of corporate consciousness, not only because of the legacy of the downsizing craze of the 1990s or the feast or famine nature of a volatile market, but because of inattentive management and increasingly agile and independent workers who no longer stake their careers on long-term relationships with a single company. Those are even bigger issues than the overstated departure of the ‘baby boomer’ generation in the US.

For example, a recent survey of 500 managers in North America, conducted by Primix Solutions, US, reported 40 per cent of the respondents planned to leave their jobs within two years, 20 per cent of those within six months or less. One fifth of these same managers planned to work for direct competitors.

The study also indicated nearly half of all companies have lost customers and significant revenue opportunities due to employee turnover and the resulting loss of their unique knowledge and expertise.

Another study in the UK reports that a growing number of workers are opting to switch jobs more frequently. According to the survey carried out by totaljobs.com, over 40 per cent of the overall workforce planned to change jobs within the next 12 months, almost a quarter citing career advancement as the main reason. Younger workers were found to be most likely to switch jobs often, with half of all workers aged 20 and under having had between two and five jobs since leaving full-time education.

But there is another side to knowledge lost – knowledge gained.

Jean-Baptiste Meyer, a socio-economist at the Institute of Research for Development in France, has been working in Asia, Latin America and Africa regarding the international mobility of workers since 1990. He concludes there has been a paradigm shift in migration patterns from ‘brain drain’ to ‘brain circulation’ and that mobility of highly skilled manpower should be seen as a normal process that should not be resisted but managed.

If you think of knowledge as a flow, then it flows both ways through revolving doors and continues flowing for as long as it stays within an organisation. Gain or loss depends entirely on how we handle the knowledge resource while we have it. The best time to capitalise on the knowledge asset is between the point of entry and the point of departure. Knowledge retention is laudable, but blocking or capturing departing knowledge is foolhardy.

The lessons learnt by Northrop Grumman (see page 26) during an episodic downsizing of the B-2 bomber staff reached beyond knowledge loss to knowledge managed. When Scott Shaffar returned to the scene after time off to complete his doctoral degree, the focus was on the traditional concern of lost skills. “During this episode,” says Scott Shaffar, now director of knowledge management, “we learnt the difference between the skills that are required to do the job and the knowledge that is required to meet the future.” Meeting the present and future became the primary goal of Northrop Grumman’s ultimate KM programme.

As production of the B-2 bomber wound down, Northrop Grumman became acutely aware of the real value and vital importance of managing its knowledge resources from lost to found, to capitalisation and retention, and, yes, on to the final turn of the cycle, lost knowledge.

Through a comprehensive knowledge-management initiative, Scott Shaffar and his team ensured that never again would knowledge be lost so profoundly as it was when more than 10,000 employees were sent packing. At the same time, he designed a programme that would capitalise and sustain knowledge regardless of turnover.

Northrop Grumman made considerable progress on managing knowledge flow before it was lost. The new KM programme included a document-management system to organise explicit knowledge, a database providing an overview of the tacit knowledge in people’s heads and a change in the way the company managed people.

When the second downsizing came, Northrop Grumman had become smarter about handling departing knowledge by managing existing knowledge better. Administrators knew more about what people knew, enabling better decisions about who would depart and who would stay. Most importantly, administrators had developed a process across the decentralised company structure that enabled transfer of knowledge and knowledgeable people from one sector to another, a critical process at a time when Northrop Grumman was simultaneously shrinking in one place and expanding in others through rapid merger and acquisition.

The KM programme at Northrop Grumman has become a critical success factor, helping raise the capabilities of the company to reach beyond airplanes to space. And, who knows, its knowledge diversity may have recaptured the knowledge necessary to return to the moon.