Practical Techniques for Complex Knowledge Transfer: A Case Study

Knowledge Management practice is heavily preoccupied by the problems, processes and technologies associated with explicit knowledge transfer. However, much of the most important knowledge to organizations resides in the heads and abilities of people, and is extremely difficult to transfer. This article reports on a research project that was focused on using practical techniques for eliciting and representing a particular form of complex, tacit knowledge described as “knowing as sensing”. It outlines the processes and methods used in the project to build realistic, complex and ambiguous case studies for businessmen who want to acquire greater sensitivity to the China business environment, using the input of experienced China hands. A technique for facilitating the final stage of knowledge transfer, internalisation, is also described. In the summer of 2003, the Singapore Institute of Management (SIM) commissioned Straits Knowledge, a knowledge management consulting and research firm based in Singapore, to conduct a research project on the challenges faced by Singapore small and medium businesses attempting to do business in China. What was curious about this decision was the selection of research partner. Straits Knowledge would not be a usual suspect for such a study. It has no special portfolio in market intelligence research, nor does it have extensive expertise in understanding the China market. Why would SIM choose a knowledge management specialist for such a project? In fact, the choice of research partner came from SIM’s characterization of the learning problem faced by Singapore businessmen venturing into the China market, as a problem of complex knowledge transfer (requiring knowledge elicitation and representation techniques), rather than a problem of information transfer (such as that provided by analytical research methods). Businessmen in China face primarily context-rich and context-specific knowledge problems of how to sense and respond to what’s happening in the fast moving economic, social, and regulatory environment around them. Information and explicit analysis matter, of course, but there is no lack of such material, and there is a more basic problem that if you can’t “read” your environment effectively, no amount of such knowledge will help you, because you won’t know when or how to deploy it. What’s lacking is a vehicle for gleaning and easily transferring the hard-earned insights and judgements of experienced foreign managers and entrepreneurs in China, to lower the learning cost and increase the learning speed of novices to this environment. In this article, we examine the methodology used in conducting the research study, Challenges of Doing Business in China (Lambe and Tan, 2003) explicitly to pursue this goal, and the rationale for the techniques used. First we’ll explore in a little more detail the knowledge management issues behind such knowledge transfer problems.