Japanese business culture leads the world in understanding how context and relationships lead to commercial success.
Nonaka Ikujiro of Hitotsubashi University is a globally respected leader in knowledge management, and his SECI model of knowledge is world-famous.
His important contribution is to show the important relationship between tacit knowledge, formed through valuable experience, and codified knowledge. It is the process of Socialization, Externalization, Combination and Internalization, which takes place in an organisation’s ‘Ba’ (a physical or conceptual space), which builds organisational knowledge and capability.
In long-tenure Japanese corporations, the management of knowledge is, in a way, much more straightforward. There is more time for knowledge to be generated, and more consistency in the Ba.
But how do you make knowledge generation work in a high-turnover multinational corporate environment?
One strategy is to simply identify the person who already has the knowledge you want, and then pay that person a lot of money to join your organisation and bring their knowledge with them. The problem with this approach is that we know knowledge is contextual. How many times have you seen highly paid experts brought into the organisation, only for their expertise to be useless in your context? It is actually very hard to ‘cheat’ by buying in skills. Knowledge needs to be created in your organisation’s context to yield results.
The alternative strategy then is to look for people who have a track record of a success with similar problems in similar environments. They don’t have to already be experts in your area, they must instead be experts in generating knowledge, and therefore outcomes, in organisations like yours.
They need to be expert learners and doers, not experts with ready-made solutions.
This is not as hard as you think. If you stop recruiting based on a few key words, or prior assumptions about who will and won’t work, and instead use a process of rigorous analysis to identify the fundamental skills and motivation you need in your context, you will find that your talent pool opens up. Your superior insights will allow you to tap into talent pools others are ignoring, and move out of the hiring red-ocean of endless counter-offers and high turn-over.
I am an expert in Skills-based hiring, and in every project I have worked on, I have been able to open up new talent pools through the reframing of the fundamental recruitment problem. I suspect that you would be able to do the same.
Or contact me if you would like some assistance!