2. Mechanisms and practices to share knowledge and ideas inside an organization

The most important thing you must keep in mind is that the practices and habits of sharing ideas and knowledge are a matter of organizational culture before being a matter of a set of activities that one can implement.

The transformation of your organizational culture may take time and it definitely needs to start somewhere, but, once it is established, the habits of internal share become natural and part of the organization daily habits.

Source: https://pixabay.com/pt/illustrations/emprego-trabalhar-empres%c3%a1rio-tempo-1257202/ (Image by Gerd Altmann)

It’s important to remember about the importance of the environment to the creation of a suitable space for the knowledge and ideas creation and share. The physical space has an impact in the human behaviour therefore you must make sure that we provide the most suitable atmosphere to support your team.

Knowledge requires, also, key conditions to foster knowledge creation and ideas:

• Intention – the aim of achieving something within the group. A common purpose
• Autonomy – individual motivation, opportunity to share
• Fluctuation and Creative chaos – breaks, obstacles, fuzziness of concepts and ideas that support the search for a solution. E.g., try to give your team an abstract challenge. People will put efforts on focusing on a solution to the challenge, trying to give a common meaning and understanding to the core of the challenge
• Redundancy – overlapping of information, e.g., between departments, supporting knowledge share
• Variety – Different combinations of information, flexibility and velocity and equal access to information within the organization

This means that the organization and you, as manager, have an important role to play in the in the creation of the knowledge and ideas sharing dynamics. It’s important to create purposes and challenges while allowing people to have freedom and creative to come up with new ideas and ensuring easy and fast access to the information across the organization.

It is clear, by now, that socialization plays a key role in the process of internal sharing knowledge and ideas and creation of new ideas. So, what type of mechanisms and practices can an organization implement to foster knowledge and ideas sharing?

1. Physical spaces – create physical areas, inside your organizations, where people feel comfortable to spend some time together talking. These social interactions will support conversations and exchange of ideas and knowledge.

Source: https://pixabay.com/pt/photos/espa%c3%a7o-interior-projeto-arquitetura-4660847/ (photo by uh_yeah_20101995)

2. Creation of structures discussion groups:
   • Communities of Practice (CoP)

1. Knowledge networks – group of people and resources with the purpose of knowledge capturing, sharing and creation for value creation. Like Social Networks but with the aim of knowledge creation.
2. Focus groups
3. Internal meetings, which can also take the form of events where specific topics and themes are discussed

Source: https://pixabay.com/pt/photos/encontro-equipe-ambiente-de-trabalho-1245776/  (Photo by Free Photos)

3. Reward knowledge and ideas sharing
   1. Reward people for their knowledge and ideas contributions
   2. Celebrate and reward people for sharing and using external acquired knowledge
   3. Promote and support learning and skills development that will impact internal poll of knowledge and ideas
   4. Evaluate decisions based on the knowledge applied

4. Make us of IT solutions to foster sharing
   1. Use cloud areas to support the access to existing knowledge and ideas
   2. Make use of social media and online tools to support the share of news, ideas, accomplishments across the organization
   3. Adopt online platform as knowledge repositories, where people can have access to the existing knowledge
   4. Create online discussion forums where people from your organization can meet. These forums can either be general (discussion/communication of topics related with the organization in general) or thematic (related with one specific topic – a project, a department, a problem, etc.)

Source: https://pixabay.com/pt/illustrations/equipe-ci%c3%aancia-da-computa%c3%a7%c3%a3o-grupo-523239/ (Image by Gerd Altmann)

1. Other important practices to adopt and face the main constraints to knowledge and idea sharing:
   1. Make use of face-to-face meetings to foster trust relations between people
   2. Provide your employees time for learning
   3. Work towards an organizational environment where people don’t feel that hierarchies are an obstacle to knowledge and ideas sharing
   4. Support the use of a type of language that everyone inside the organizations understands, so that language doesn’t become a barrier to knowledge and ideas sharing
   5. Suggest the use of narratives to transmit knowledge between people. People tend to learn faster through stories
   6. Encourage coaching/peer-to-peer learning. Engage internal experts in training colleagues and/or reward this type of practices and behaviour.

It is also very important that you, as a manager, give an example. Simple actions such as reading a book and share the learning with your team, challenge your team with articles of interest for discussion and learning, meet with your team members to listen and discuss their opinions about certain challenges or give a group a people a challenge requiring solutions, will help you with the first steps in the creation of a knowledge and ideas exchange environment supported by the organization.

Source: https://pixabay.com/pt/photos/ler-treinamento-livros-um-livro-1564105/ (photo by Tom und Nicki Löschner)

It’s important to note that, although the IT solutions are an amazing channel to support knowledge and ideas exchange, IT tools are not knowledge. Ideas and knowledge can only be created by people, and innovation is created by a group of people working together. So, whatever mechanisms you decide to implement always remember that people are at the core of the process.