Project performance improvement in the broadcasting industry

“Knowledge transfer has always been a challenge for organisations,” according to David Levine, and this
challenge also extends into the field of project management.

The majority of rich project knowledge is gained by individual experiences, creative thinking and interaction with other team members. This knowledge is for the most part captured and stored as tacit knowledge.

Todd Groff said tacit knowledge is “personal knowledge embedded in individual experience and involving intangible factors such as personal belief, perspective, and values.” Often this knowledge is not recorded anywhere and remains with the individual, only to be selectively shared at their discretion. This can lead to the same questions being asked and the same mistakes being made many times over.

Limiting the transfer of knowledge between team members disadvantages the project and weakens the design for success. The organisation that the project is attempting to benefit also suffers. In his book The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge promotes the concept of a learning organisation were “people talk about being a part of something larger than themselves, of being connected, of being generative.” He uses the word ‘metanoia’, which means a “shift of mind” to describe a deeper level of learning, as a group of individuals come together and increase the level of knowledge within a team or organisation.

This paper discusses the development of a model to improve the transfer of knowledge between team members. This in turn increases the level of creativity and deeper learning demonstrating the potential for metanoia to positively transform learning.

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