Contributed By Anand Chhatpar, CEO of BrainReactions LLC

Most corporate managers, at least twice every year, will fall victim to knowledge calamities. Let me share some scenarios:

Has this ever happened to you? You are working on a project for the last 13 months and are 5 months away from your 18-month deadline, and suddenly, there’s a “corporate restructuring” event that completely dismantles your team. You find yourself leading a brand new team, one that will never achieve the performance or efficiency of the old team because 90% of your team’s knowledge has gone away with your ex-team members. This is a classic knowledge calamity. It can also happen to you a lot if you experience employee attrition or M&As.

I’m sure you have experienced this scenario if you work for a company with more than 100 employees. You realize 3 months after paying an expensive consultant that the answers you were looking for were already known to this one guy, Bob, who sits at the other end of the floor from you in a different team and never really talks to anyone from your team. That’s another knowledge calamity: “information silos”.

Here’s a new one: Your team is relying too much on advice they find on online forums to run your business. This advice is less than accurate, does not specifically apply to your business, or is simply outdated. However, your employees don’t bother asking around the company to look for the internal expert on the subject because it takes too long compared to searching for an answer on the almighty Google. I have not found a suitable name for this type of knowledge calamity. Perhaps we could call it “Our employees listen to Wikipedia more than our Senior-VP.”

Yet another knowledge calamity is the result of overused group emailing that starts with the benign intention of tapping into collective brainpower. However, 15 emails later… who does not hate mass-group-reply-all emails? Enough said.

If you can identify with any of the knowledge calamity scenarios above, let me assure you that not all hope is lost. We have licensed a brilliant solution from FPS Consulting’s Jaki Scarcello and transformed it into an easy-to-use software tool. Knowledge sharing tool Snap Answers insures your company against knowledge calamities, and is worth your time to review. There is also a tour to show you how it works. Plus, all readers of BrainWaves get a complimentary 30-day trial account for their company if they request a demo of Snap Answers and mention BrainWaves.

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