DDBA 8581 Week 3 Critical Knowledge Inventory Example

What the Scheduler Holds That Exists Nowhere Else: A Capability Inventory Sorting the Role's Critical Knowledge Into What Can Be Written, What Can Only Be Shown and the Relationships That Route Work Through One Person

Student Name

Walden University

DDBA 8581: Succession Planning: A Survival Tool of the Fittest

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

What the Scheduler Holds That Exists Nowhere Else: A Capability Inventory Sorting the Role's Critical Knowledge Into What Can Be Written, What Can Only Be Shown and the Relationships That Route Work Through One Person

The Sorting Rule

This inventory covers the senior production scheduler profiled in Week 2. A capability is writable if a competent colleague, given a written procedure or annotated record, could perform it to standard without watching the incumbent. It is showable if it can be learned only by observing and practicing alongside someone who has it, because the incumbent cannot fully state the cues or judgments involved. It is relational if it depends on a relationship that routes information or cooperation through the incumbent personally. For each capability, the inventory records whether anyone else holds it and the evidence for that judgment.

The Inventory

[after]

Evidence for whether others hold a capability came from interviews with the junior scheduler, the quality engineer, the sales director and the maintenance planner, and from observing who operators and vendors contact.

Table 1

Critical Capabilities of the Senior Production Scheduler

Reading the Inventory

Three capabilities are writable and can be documented with modest effort. Three are showable and depend on judgment built over years. Two are relational: vendors and the maintenance planner route flexibility through the scheduler personally, and that flexibility would not transfer with any document.

Can Showable Knowledge Be Captured?

Polanyi (1966) argued that we know more than we can tell, and that much skilled knowledge rests on cues the knower attends to without being able to articulate them. On that view, the yield-drift judgment cannot be fully written down. Nonaka (1994) argued that tacit knowledge can be converted to explicit knowledge through externalization, using metaphors, models and dialogue, and transferred through socialization, shared experience in which a learner absorbs tacit skill by working alongside an expert.

I side with Polanyi on codification and with Nonaka on socialization. The scheduler's yield-drift judgment can be partly described, for example by recording the reactor temperatures and pressures the scheduler watches, but the description will not produce the judgment. It can be transferred only through months of joint work, with the successor making calls under supervision. Hansen (1999) found that complex, hard-to-codify knowledge transfers more effectively through strong ties, close and frequent relationships, than through weak ones, which supports joint work over documentation for these items.

Implications

Document the three writable items now. Begin joint work on the three showable items at least a year before any planned departure. For relational items, introduce a second contact to both vendors and to the maintenance planner and route some exchanges through that person.

Why the Relational Items Matter Most

The two relational capabilities are the easiest to overlook and the hardest to replace. When raw material supply tightens, the two vendors call the scheduler because they have learned over years that the scheduler will make a quick, reasonable decision about call-off volumes; a successor they have never spoken to will get the standard contract terms. The maintenance planner trades windows with the scheduler by phone because they trust each other's judgment about which jobs can move. Neither arrangement appears in any system, so a successor would not know it existed. Introducing a second contact now, while the scheduler can vouch for that person, is the only practical way to move relationships.

Order of Work

Writable items go first because they are quick wins; showable and relational items take longest and must start early.

Limits

Categorization involves judgment, and the incumbent may overstate how much of the role's skill is unwritable.

References

Hansen, M. T. (1999). The search-transfer problem: The role of weak ties in sharing knowledge across organization subunits. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(1), 82-111. https://doi.org/10.2307/2667032

Nonaka, I. (1994). A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation. Organization Science, 5(1), 14-37. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.5.1.14

Polanyi, M. (1966). The tacit dimension. Doubleday.