hypergogue

The Incentive Question or Why People Share Knowledge

I get asked the incentive question a lot. How do we incentivise people to share their knowledge? The question is asked because when managers look around their organizations they don’t see much knowledge sharing going on. This is a serious concern, but I think it is the wrong question. The question is based on the assumption that people don’t want to share what they know and therefore require an incentive to get them to do it. And that assumption is inaccurate.

We share knowledge all the time. It's currency.

As Nancy Dixon points out, a smarter question is what did we do to mess up people's natural desire to share knowledge? Bonuses. Performance Objectives which are win:lose, unnecessary hierachies, lack of slack. . .

Lack of slack is my biggest bugbear. Any structure without any redundancy will fail. There are no exceptions to this rule.