Learning Directly From Specialists In Other Organisations

‘Borrowing’ is one of the five strategies for building employee competence (which includes knowledge) advocated by Dave Ulrich (2000). One innovative practice, adopted by some organisations is that of finding ways of learning from companies in totally different business areas^[11]. Some examples include:

British Airways, for example, often pay for a day of a specialist’s time from a different field in order to help them get a new perspective on operational problems. On one occasion, faced with the problem of how to stop grease trails developing along the floor-covering on the aircraft’s galleys, an expert on the lay-out and equipping of surgical theatres was invited to come and help them work through a solution to this problem.

A group of cardiac surgeons at Great Ormond Street Hospital concerned about the dangers involved when an infant is handed over from Surgery to Intensive Care, because of having to disconnect and reconnect feeding lines, asked MacLaren, the Formula One racing company, to help them because of their expertise in pit stops!

A variation of this practice comes from the experience of Matsushita when they were designing a new home bread-making machine (Nonaka, 1998). When the product developers were experiencing difficulties getting the new machine to knead the dough in the way that they wanted, a member of the design team went to work alongside an expert bread-maker in a top international hotel. After observing how this expert bread-maker set about kneading dough, the designer then transferred this knowledge to the design of the electronic home bread-making machine.

^[11]J. Whatmore, Ideas via Intermediaries. The Centre for Leadership in Creativity.