How To Make Tribal Knowledge A Company Asset: AI Can Help, But Can’t Do It Alone

Aaron Rallo is Founder & CEO of Trovia, a knowledge layer for content that makes enterprise AI accurate and trustworthy.

​What’s the one thing that McDonald’s does exceptionally well?

It’s foundational to scaling globally, operating consistently and maintaining brand loyalty. It’s an activity humans have done since the dawn of time. It’s astonishingly difficult for most companies.​

The answer: Sharing knowledge.

Although it sounds simple, sharing knowledge is challenging to do effectively. After reading an SOP, attending training or shadowing a colleague, no employee can perform a task exactly as specified. Effective knowledge sharing requires excellent training resources, sufficient time to learn and consistent performance feedback.

Much of McDonald’s success came from meticulously documenting their procedures and even teaching them at the Hamburger University. Not all organizations have the resources to encode their processes into a full-blown curriculum, but all organizations need to transfer knowledge if they wish to sustain and expand.

In the rapidly growing residential and commercial cooling industry, for example, thousands of new technicians are needed, and most of the existing workforce will be retiring soon. In this industry, like most, while some knowledge can be documented, the really crucial stuff lives in the heads of your top performers. According to organizational theorist Nonaka’s widely accepted model, knowledge transfer follows an infinite path from implicit to explicit. Your grandmother’s pinch of salt is implicit knowledge. Writing it down as ⅓ teaspoon of salt makes it explicit. Once the knowledge is recorded, operating procedures evolve and the cycle starts again.

In university, I worked in a warehouse for a fast-growing retailer. There were procedures for optimizing the packing of delivery trucks, but the senior team knew certain steps only applied to certain products.