Some obstacles to knowledge sharing and learning 

Knowledge is at the heart of any business, but this is not new - since the stone age, people have worked out ways of doing things better, increasing their chances of survival and success.

Human progress has been based on the ability to:

• identify problems
• work out ways of tackling them
• test possible solutions
• reflect on the results
• make further modifications and continually improve.

And all that, combined with the ability to share ideas with others (or pinch other people's ideas and improve on them) so we are not continually reinventing wheels.  Once the great trading routes provided the means by which ideas were spread - now they are zapped around the world at the touch of a button.

But these days, just when the speed of change means we have to learn more quickly than ever, there seem to be more things getting in the way:

Failure to admit to failure: People are rewarded for their successes, and it goes against the grain to admit to our failures, so we try to brush them under the carpet - yet we need to recognise these and learn from them if we are to improve.

Not invented here: Teams and individuals need to have a sense of self-worth and pride in their work, so we tend to turn our backs on ideas that are "not invented here". Meanwhile other teams and organisations may have found better ways of doing things, or they have worthwhile suggestions to make, so we need to be able to consider alternatives and take account of constructive criticism.

Activity trap: Often the volume of work that people face gets in the way of learning and knowledge-sharing. There never seems enough time to pause at the end of a project, to capture the lessons and share them with colleagues. Teams are too busy with their own work to spend time learning what their colleagues are doing. A knowledgeable colleague is about to leave, but no-one has found the time to find out what he or she knows about key customers or business processes. Allocating time to knowledge sharing and learning has to become a higher priority in most organisations.

Complexity: As the organisations become more involved in complex working relationships with partners and other collaborators, and as many projects and processes become highly technical, it gets increasingly difficult for managers to make sense of it all. Senior managers have no time for the detail, whilst middle managers only see their part of the bigger picture, and the technical specialists and business managers have trouble communicating in the same language! Mechanisms are needed to cut through the complexity and enable better informed decisions to be made.

Failure to see the benefits: "Knowledge working" and "learning" can seem very intangible, with a lack of demonstrable benefits to the business, at least in the short term.  So they never get the attention and investment of time and effort they deserve.  However there are well-proven techniques for demonstrating the contribution that knowledge working can make to improving business performance, which can be tailored to the needs of each organisation.