Are You Sharing Your Tribal Knowledge?

As many of you know, I recently stepped down from my position as Web Analytics Manager at Spark Networks to join Numeric Analytics. As I was beginning my transition, I was amazed at how much tribal knowledge was stuck in my head, it was the only place in the company that the knowledge lived. It quickly became apparent that I had failed at properly telling the story of web analytics.

So I started asking myself the question, why wasn’t I sharing my knowledge freely within the organization. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll ever come to an easy explanation as of why. Sure, I have a lot of excuses (I didn’t have time, there were too many people to share it with, my boss would think I was spending too much time talking and not enough time doing) but these are just that, excuses, and I can’t think of one legitimate excuse for why we shouldn’t be openly sharing our knowledge and if you tell me “we don’t want our competition to know our measurement secrets”, then I’m going to laugh in your face.

Whenever I hear of people closely guarding their web measurement strategies, I can’t help thinking about the Utah Jazz in the days of “Stockton to Malone.”

Every team knew that the Jazz were going to continually run the pick and roll with Stockton and Malone. If fact, I remember being at one game, watching John Stockton come down the court, holding up one finger, and all the opposing players starting shouting out “pick and roll, they are running the pick and roll”, yet they couldn’t stop it.

Did the Utah Jazz offensive system with Stockton and Malone work so well because their game plan was a closely guarded secret? NO! It worked, despite the fact that the other team, the announcers, the ball boys, and everyone else in the arena knew their plays. It worked because they executed to near perfection.

If you are not openly sharing your tribal knowledge, especially within your own organizations, I suggest your start asking the question ‘why’.

REMEMBER: Your game plan is worthless unless you can execute!

Jason Thompson

Jason is the Sr. Director of Community Solutions at Keystone Solutions. If you are interested in partnering with Jason at Keystone, in need of analytics & optimization consulting, or looking for employment/internship possibilities, please feel free to email ‘jason [at] keystonesolutions [dot] com’

Twitter - Facebook - More Posts