The Curious Nature of Institutional Knowledge

By Dave Elniski, PhD Student, CTSP, CRSP, ATCL, Industry Advisor, Safety and Compliance, Alberta Motor Transport Association

Institutional knowledge is the knowledge (memory, understanding of concepts, internal and external awareness, expertise, experience, etc.) that organizations have at any one moment in time. It’s essentially the sum of all the relevant knowledge of each individual staff member – or perhaps just those individuals in positions where they can share such knowledge.

What’s neat about institutional knowledge is that it resides within the minds of staff. Even an organization with impressive archives of its many decades of existence only has what institutional knowledge exists in the minds of its current staff. In other words, all the historical information in the world doesn’t matter if no one in the organization remembers where it is or knows how to access and use it.

Truck and bus carriers operate in a complex regulatory environment. They are expected to do many different things at specific times (like updating vehicle registration details) or due to specific events (like reporting a collision). Even if the duties of some individual positions are fairly focused, people still have to manage many different tasks, which are generally grouped into categories like safety/fleet safety versus occupational health and safety/ operations/dispatch/management.

Oftentimes, new compliance requirements result in new administrative tasks for carriers, meaning some individual must take on some or all of the new tasks as part of their regular job duties. Many carrier office environments are stressful, which isn’t surprising given the chaotic nature of logistics, and compliance requirements often don’t generate the sort of interest in management that might be seen in, for example, a potential new market or customer. When this is the case, a new compliance task may be quickly and unceremoniously delegated to the first staff member with the right title (or the individual who first brought up the issue).

When things like this happen, a new task has been created, and institutional knowledge has been expanded. The organization has a new thing that it must do as part of its operations, and it will be successful as long as the specific tasks live within the work-related consciousness of at least one staff member. Ideally, management assigns this staff member the responsibility of documenting what is required for this task and sharing the information internally so these details don’t just live within one person’s mind and notebook. But often, this doesn’t happen, and the task gets done only because someone on staff remembers to do it as part of their job, and they do it in a way that makes sense to them but not necessarily to anyone else.

Hopefully, my point on the risks related to institutional knowledge is becoming apparent. Over time, should many individual compliance tasks be similarly (and haphazardly) delegated without documentation and cross-training, the departure of a single staff member may be all it takes for a serious loss of institutional knowledge. Carriers experience this all the time whenever a senior staff member exits the organization – even when the departure was forewarned – with no succession plan in place.

Institutional knowledge is essential, and organizations should guard and maintain it like any other valuable asset. This is easier said than done, though, especially when resources are tight and there is no one around who can take the time to create the necessary systems to maintain institutional knowledge outside the minds of individual staff members. Unfortunately, these sorts of organizations, like smaller trucking companies, often operate in hypercompetitive environments where Monday’s goal is to make it to Friday, and such cultures aren’t conducive to the planning work needed to preserve institutional knowledge and create succession plans unless time is carved out for the right people to take on such work.

Institutional knowledge matters: it’s what allows a company to carry out its affairs, solve problems, and provide products and services. But it’s more the product of effective teamwork and information management than it is the product of a few key people. Sure, someone may be able to manage a great deal of compliance and operational duties with great competency, but such an individual is also a risk if there isn’t anyone else who can quickly replicate what they do. When I was an artillery soldier, a significant amount of cross-training took place within the gun detachment so that even those with more specialized roles could still quickly take the place of another person should the need arise; such systems make sense in just about any organization, not just the army. Similarly, great sports teams need effective coaching, not just star players, to play at their best.

This is the curious nature of institutional knowledge. It is robust in that it always exists as the sum of the occupational knowledge of all current staff, yet it tends to be extremely fragile and vulnerable to risk without trust, communication and systems to manage it beyond the notebook of a sole, key individual.