The Gurteen perspective: Learn to share

I GAVE a talk recently on knowledge sharing entitled the rather tongue-in-cheek, ‘How do you make people share their knowledge?’ as clearly you cannot ‘make’ people do this.
At the end of the talk a woman from the audience approached me and said “David, I loved your talk but I am still unsure why people won’t share their knowledge and how it is possible to make them”.
Now I suspect she asked this because I had not made things clear enough (or she was not listening) so here is an answer to her question.
First, there are a wide variety of reasons why people do not share their knowledge. I have identified 50 or more different reasons in my Knowledge Cafés. Some are acceptable, such as language barriers, other reasons are not so valid, such as the belief that knowledge is power and therefore sharing it makes no sense at all.
The reasons why people do not share vary for each individual (there is not a single answer), but by and large people will only share when they see the personal benefits to themselves. And here lies the root of the answer to the question ‘How do you make them share?’
If you try to explain the benefits to people, and if you show them how many of their perceived barriers are myths, then they are most likely to feel you are trying to manipulate them. You cannot make people share their knowledge, reward them or otherwise manipulate them. They have to see the reasons and the benefits for themselves.
So how do you do this? Well here is my suggested solution. You need to bring them together to have conversations about the issue in order that they might start to engage with the subject, think about it for themselves and realize the need for personal change.
I do this through the Knowledge Cafés. I start by giving a short talk about knowledge sharing and the barriers and the benefits, but typically for only ten minutes or so. I then pose the question to the group ‘What are the barriers to knowledge sharing in your organisation and how do you overcome them?’ I then move into a more detailed discussion so people get to have conversations with each other. From this, hopefully, people start to see the problems and the benefits for themselves and the need to change their attitudes, mindsets and behaviours around knowledge sharing.
I say hopefully, as of course there is no guarantee that they will do this. Some people will see it immediately, others will never get it, and the majority will take a while to come around to a ‘sharing is power’ viewpoint and start to change.
Over time you can go on and run other Knowledge Café style events where people come together to discuss the actual problems facing the organisation due to lack of knowledge sharing, such as mistakes being repeated, work being repeated and lack of knowledge regarding what is going on in other parts of the organisation. They can then take personal responsibility for the problems and work together to solve them. Of course, this takes time and there is no guarantee of success but this approach is far more likely to work then wagging your finger and telling people to share or trying to reward them with goodies!