How do your busiest people transfer their knowledge?

Question

This question was originally posted on Programmers SE. I've placed it here based on advice in the comments.

We have recently polled our company wide wiki users and found out that there are two large groups of users:

• people with lots of knowledge but (who claim they have) no time to document
• people with time but (who claim they have) not enough knowledge worth documenting

Each group covered almost 50% of the users!

How do your companies handle this? That is, how do you encourage your busiest / most knowledgeable people to share their knowledge?

Answer 1

I am one of the busy people in group #1. I document a lot because I don't have time to keep answering the same question over and over. A lot of questions are answered by linking to the wiki. Or writing an answer on the wiki and then linking to the wiki.

People in group #2 often need nudging. They think they don't have knowledge worth documenting but often do. I will ask them to document specific things when we come across it. That way it isn't always "the expert" documenting. Or I will ask them to document something they do know as part of showing a new person what to do.

Answer 2

The same way you get people to do anything - with carrots and sticks. Explain to them why its important and that they're expected to do so, reward them when they do the right thing, punish when they dont.

The bigger question is do you really need the busy people to train the others? Maybe you should look at the surgeon/surgery team model, where you have a few skilled people doing the work supported by others.

You haven't said so but its dangerous to assume that documentation is the best way to transfer knowledge. Often it gets outdated quickly and ignored or worse, confuses people reading the old docs.

Perhaps the best solution is assign the #1 group to a new project or time off and force the #2 group to do the work on the coalface.