This is the sixth in a series of posts about the Midwest Knowledge Management Symposium held June 16, 2023 at Kent State University. This post is about the fifth presentation in Track 1 (People and Processes) delivered by Rachel Teague.

Rachel Teague is a rising KM transfer and retention expert, consultant, speaker, writer, master trainer and facilitator, collaborator, and education professional. Throughout her life she has lived through change, growth, transition, and restructure. She has leveraged these experiences, both positive and negative, to inform her outlook and understanding of how organizations work and thrive. This, combined with her education, training, and certifications, gives her a unique worldview and allows her to effectively understand and communicate with people at every level of an organization, and deliver work products that are user-friendly, readily understood, effective, and easily integrated into complex system.

As a result of Rachel’s case study, How an Effective Knowledge Management Program Supports Critical Tacit Knowledge Retention Within a Higher Education Institution: A Qualitative Intrinsic Case Study, she developed tools educators can add to their experiential tool belts as they navigate new challenges facing education, including retirement, staffing changes, and budget cuts. As the world of education evolves, shifting with these changes is necessary to effectively adapt and provide the best opportunities for the learning ecosystem.

Applying Knowledge Transfer: Real Life Tools in Real Life Examples by Rachel Teague

Rachel began by sharing four themes based on her findings from her efforts:

• A strong community and culture can facilitate openness in knowledge sharing.
• Stakeholder buy-in is needed to create a robust learning organization.
• Transparency assists in breaking down silos.
• Training and consulting can help prevent critical knowledge loss.

She provided details on the Knowledge Retention Program pilot:

• Defined a framework to formalize and standardize how to capture this type of knowledge.
• Curated a multimodal toolkit and repository.
• Marketed the Knowledge Retention Program as an enterprise-wide service to effectively capture and share critical knowledge.

Rachel offered this slide showing the high-level process she used:

She provided four proven practices for capturing knowledge:

• Foster a positive rapport.
• Practice active listening and open questioning.
• Take lots of notes.
• If possible, utilize video.

Rachel added that you don’t know what you don’t know, and you might uncover something important in the process.

She concluded her presentation with a depiction of the elements of a learning organization. These make up a sequence of onboarding, on-the job training, experience, knowledge capture, development, knowledge sharing, knowledge retention, and offboarding knowledge incorporation.

Rachel’s presentation was succinct and conveyed useful advice that can be applied by anyone involved with knowledge capture, transfer, and retention.

Part 7 of this series will feature Maggie Starkey. Part 5 featured Rajesh Dhillon.