In the first part of the meeting, after the introductions and welcome, the host team explains what they know about the activity they have planned, the nature of the bid or the nature of the market, the strategic objectives and any local constraints they may be working under.

 In the second part of the meeting, the visiting peers discuss their knowledge and experience from previous activities of this sort and may even present details of successful bids or marketing campaigns.

 In the third part of the meeting, the host team and the visiting peers go through a process of dialogue, often in small groups, as they attempt to use past experience to address the host team’s issues.

 In the final part of the meeting, the visiting peers confer, then feed back their recommendations to the host team.

 The peer assist needs clear objectives. The visiting peers are bringing their knowledge to the host team for a purpose. The clearer you can be about that purpose, the more likely it is that the peer assist will deliver value. Sample objectives might be ‘develop a list of risks and issues’ or ‘provide a list of options for reducing the bid price by 20 per cent’.

 The peer assist should be focused on assisting. In other words, it is a meeting where the host team needs help and assistance, which is provided by the visiting peers. The host team therefore need to be open to learning and the visiting peers need to be willing to share their knowledge and experience. If the meeting falls into ‘attack and defend’ behaviours, it has failed its purpose. This will be most likely be achieved if 1) the peer assist is held early in the activity, before the team have selected their preferred option, and 2) the peer assist is facilitated by someone external to the project.

 The peer assist should truly involve peers, i.e. the peers of the host team. These are not meetings where you bring in experts or senior managers to review what is being proposed by the host team. People are far more open to learning from and sharing with their peers and this removes all the politics associated with management hierarchies.

One day of each meeting is spent working with the sales force in the market in which the meeting is being held. The day begins with a briefing on the local market and its structure, including the top three challenges which the business unit is currently facing. The GPG members spend a day working in smaller groups with an experienced local sales associate, looking at a broad range of retail outlets. At the end of the day the GPG reconvenes to give detailed feedback on what they see as working well in the market – how to build on the successes they see. They also give their top 10 ideas on how to address the challenges, based on lessons and experience from their own markets. In this way the host market receives positive confirmation of their success and how to build on it, plus around 30 ideas and improvement suggestions targeted at their key challenges, based on lessons from proven, practical experience elsewhere in the world.

 Decide on the topic. A knowledge exchange addresses a ‘hot topic’. This may be a topic where teams in one area are known to have expertise that the others need; it may be a topic where all have expertise and where there is interest in seeing other good ideas; or it may be a topic where it is accepted that a more common approach would be beneficial.

 Assign an organisation team. A knowledge exchange can be quite a large event and needs at least two people, possibly more, to form an organisation team. People are needed to fill the following roles (although some members of the team could hold more than one of these roles):

 Choose an off-site location. At an office location, people will be distracted and may be called away to deal with urgent problems.

 Decide on scope and objectives. You have to be clear on the topic to be covered at the knowledge exchange. If the scope is not well defined, the event can expand out of control.

 Introduction to the meeting – State the purpose of the knowledge exchange, the objectives and the ground rules, why it is important to the business, how it will be conducted, what the purpose of the recording is and what end product will be produced. Go through the agenda, discuss roles, make sure everyone understands what they are there to do.

 Message from the business sponsor – It can be useful to start the knowledge exchange with an introduction from the business sponsor, describing the importance of the exchange and the business need. If they cannot attend in person, ask them to record a short video message, which can be shown at the start.

 Identification of key issues associated with the topic – You need some way to divide up the entire topic under discussion into meaningful chunks. There are a number of ways to do this, such as dividing the process into its component parts as a flow chart or timeline, or brainstorming, grouping, sorting and ranking the key issues.

 Dialogue around some of the issues or some of the steps, often in small breakout groups, to identify good practices – Dialogue in one big group is possible and some of the issues can be covered this way, but you may get a more open dialogue in a smaller group. The smaller groups can discuss the same issue in parallel or you can divide the meeting into separate groups to discuss separate issues. Each issue will need a couple of hours’ dialogue and 15 to 20 minutes of feedback and discussion time. Give the groups clear tasks, such as ‘discuss the main learnings around this issue and what messages you would give to others based on your experience. Be prepared for one of your group to give a 10-minute flipchart-based summary of your learnings, back in the main room in two hours’ time.’ For each group, somebody needs to be appointed as facilitator and somebody needs to be appointed as recorder or ‘scribe’. The facilitator needs to get this dialogue going and steer it to delivering valuable output. However, most of the time the conversation takes off rapidly and barely pauses for breath. If conversation flags, the following questions may be useful:

 Validation of this knowledge by feeding it back to the main group – The groups reconvene in the main room and each group feeds back their findings for discussion in the wider group. The feedback sessions can usefully be recorded on audio or video. Also make sure you record the details of the discussion that follows, as much valuable knowledge may be exchanged.

 The next set of dialogue follows, around the next set of issues, until all issues have been discussed.

 Discuss ‘how do we continue this exchange when the meeting is over?’ The attendees at the knowledge exchange might have developed some close relationships that will form the foundation for a powerful community of practice. The attendees need to agree on the processes for keeping the community alive once the meeting is over. They will need to appoint a coordinator and other roles, choose a communication mechanism, determine a meetings schedule and begin a discussion on aims and objectives and ground rules. They will need to start up a membership list and develop a plan for enrolling other members.

 Closure of the meeting with thanks from senior manager.

 Follow-up to the knowledge exchange (building the community of practice, publishing the knowledge asset – see page 70 for further details on knowledge assets).

 Knowledge offers – What knowledge do you bring to this? What are the areas within the identified topic where you feel you have a lot of knowledge and experience to offer? These need not be areas where your business has performed well – you may have learned the hard way! Choose three areas where you have knowledge to offer.

 What knowledge do you want to take away? What are the areas where you feel you have a lot to learn? Choose three areas of knowledge where you need knowledge.

Retrospect set-up

It is important to schedule the retrospect close to the end of the project, before the team moves on to new work and while memories are fresh. It can be useful to combine the retrospect with an end-of-project celebration and treat it as a close-out exercise for the team. It is important that everybody on the team attends and somebody who was not part of the project team should facilitate the retrospect. The better the facilitator, the better the outcome of the retrospect will be. Find a good facilitator who has a clear idea of the retrospect process and of the purpose of the exercise. Retrospects are not complicated meetings, but they do need attention to purpose, attention to behaviours and, in particular, attention to the quality of the lessons that are identified. Understanding and following the process are key to a successful outcome.

It is very powerful if you can find somebody who will reuse the lessons – perhaps the project leader for the next bid project – and get them to attend the retrospect as an observer. Their presence will give the process a greater level of focus and legitimacy and they can help make sure that the lessons that come out of the retrospect are expressed as useful recommendations and advice. For example, one organisation we worked with had just won a bid for major construction work in a former Soviet country. They invited the bid manager from a neighbouring country to attend their post-bid retrospect. As he was in the process of compiling a bid himself, many of the lessons could be transferred immediately and he was able to probe for useful, specific actionable detail. This knowledge reuser should not facilitate the retrospect; they will have their own agenda, which should not be allowed to dominate the meeting, as they will not be the only users of this knowledge. The facilitator needs to make sure that all the knowledge from the project is captured, not just the knowledge that will be immediately reused in the next project.

The retrospect process is described below:

Recording retrospects

Knowledge has credibility when it is expressed by credible people – people with experience. Knowledge captured in the form of quotes or soundbites from the project team can be seen as being the voice of experience and can be used in stories to add context to the identified lessons. If you are going to add context and credibility in this way, the retrospect needs to be recorded carefully – recording people’s own words as closely as possible, recording the stories that give context to the lessons and recording who said what. You either have to take very detailed notes (speed-writing) or, if possible, you should audio-record the event. Although some people may worry about having a tape recorder present, you can reassure them that it is only for transcription purposes, that any recordings will be destroyed after transcription and that nothing will be published without giving the retrospect attendees the opportunity to edit it first. However, the amount of learning that emerges during a retrospect is so huge that often audio-recording is the only practical way to capture it all.

It can also be useful to summarise some of the key retrospect lessons and stories on video. At the end of the retrospect, when the lessons have been identified and discussed, ask a few of the more eloquent speakers to summarise what has been learned and what they would recommend to future projects based on that learning. These small video summaries can be a good and engaging way of recording some of the key lessons. They are frequently stored as part of the knowledge asset on the topic.

Retrospects (with some individual interviews) were the tool of choice for one organisation that we worked with to collect and collate their knowledge on ‘winning work’. This was compiled from the knowledge of their bid teams and covered elements such as business development, partnering, prequalification, building the bid team, bid preparation, document preparation, pricing, customer relationships and negotiation. It is no surprise that many of these themes are the same as those from the PFI knowledge exchange described above, as these are part of the standard steps of preparing any bid and elements that each bidding organisation has to perfect.

We are each other’s only resource. Somebody will figure something out when they’re doing their work and then, whenever it comes up as a question for somebody else, we all just have to work together and share our learnings and pass it on, to speed things along on the learning curve. Our boss doesn’t know our system as well as we do and we can teach each other. Whenever we have questions, we usually go to each other before we take it anywhere else.

There’s a lot of sharing that goes on within the team and before that we were pretty much just silos. There’s probably something that comes out of every meeting where someone is saying, ‘Does anybody know how I can get past this roadblock?’ or ‘Is there something that I could do to help facilitate this?’ And there’s been a lot of times where someone else on the team said, ‘Here’s how I’ve been able to accomplish that.’ Or ‘Have you thought about talking to this person in this department?’ It’ll be surfaced at the team meeting if somebody is having an issue with something and most of the time somebody within the team can propose a solution.

You need to take all of these opportunities and make them learning opportunities to try to make the team better. Really look for best practices. It’s not just ‘Look at that (sales) number, you’re down, you’re here, you’re whatever.’ It’s ‘Hey Jim, it looks as though you were at 125 a year ago, what do you attribute your success to? Why do you think you’re doing so well?’ And do that in a group conversation. And then if somebody’s down, ‘What are the issues that you are facing right now? Is there anything that we can help you with?’ On paper it looks like this guy isn’t pulling their own weight. But in the meanwhile they may be pulling their weight, once you understand exactly what the root problem is.

(Our sales manager) is always looking for successes that one person has and trying to find ways that those successes can be transferred to other accounts. He doesn’t just go into one area and say, ‘Well, so and so did this and I want you to try it,’ instead, he’s really good at facilitating the communication between the various field managers so that they’re sharing the successes and working on solutions together for each other’s accounts.

Don’t be afraid to ask your peers questions (in these meetings). ‘I’m a new account manager, new to the channel or new to the business,’ don’t be afraid to ask questions. Pick the brains of the sales reps that are currently on the team.

When you identify some of the key learnings someone else on the team will say, ‘Hey, you know what, I had that same experience, this is what I did which was better and different and you should try that approach’. Or, ‘Hey, have you tried to ask so-and-so in the national office for resources to help get that project completed?’ So you review it as a team, you talk about the key learnings, you talk about some shortfalls or the misses, then you know other people can share experiences and it literally will help that person or will help the entire team.

I think it’s great because I worked previously in a world basically where I was kind of out on my own in a very unique group and so did not have a lot of that sharing that took place amongst my fellow peers. And coming to this new group, it is quite the opposite. We have this information and it flows freely and I just think it’s great because you can feel comfortable saying, ‘I have to work on a presentation coming up; I’m getting ready for this certain project, does anybody have anything that may help me here?’ And people send information; I think that’s a very positive thing about our team.

 ‘Susie, you’ve had a very successful month, can you share with us what you did and what you can recommend to others?’

 ‘John has some big challenges on his account. Can anybody think of things that he could do to turn the situation around?’

 ‘Guys, it looks like we are all facing a challenge on this particular brand, can we put our heads together and pool what we know to decide the best way to tackle it?’

 What was supposed to happen? The first question is asked about the objective of the activity and the target performance. We have often found that the first few times you ask this question, people may turn out to have been confused about the objective or the target or else no clear objective was set. One of the by-products of AARs is that they promote objective-setting.

 What actually happened? The second question looks at actual performance. If you are conducting an AAR, you need to establish ‘ground truth’ with this question. You are looking to determine reality, rather than opinion. This is where you have to ensure that you avoid opinion and emotion. It is very easy for the discussion to become heated at this point. Try to avoid that by always coming back to ‘ground truth’ – what actually happened and what is the evidence to support it (sales figures, for example, or customer comments)?

 Why was there a difference? The third question seeks to understand why a particular result was achieved. Perhaps you did better than expected; perhaps you did worse than expected; perhaps you met your target. What were the factors that determined the result? Another way to ask this question, if the first way doesn’t work, is ‘What went well and what did not go so well?’

 What have we learned? The fourth question asks about the learning and should be expressed in terms of what will be done differently in future (or, in cases of over-performance, what should be repeated in future).

 What action needs to be taken? Here you move from analysis of the activity to ‘what are we going to do about it?’ Now you need to assign the action to ensure it gets done. Much of the time the action lies with the team. If the team cannot fix the action, there needs to be an escalation route.

 Aim for openness, not hiding any mistakes.

 There should be no hierarchy – everyone’s input is equally valid.

 The focus of the exercise is learning, not blame or evaluation.

 Everyone who was involved in the activity should take part in the AAR.

 No outsiders should be present; nobody should be there to ‘audit performance’.

 Deal with the significant issues and the significant objectives, not trivia.

The After Action Review met most of our standards for business processes. Additionally, it was a natural companion to another business process for planning. However, it failed to meet our requirement for a visual representation. So we created our own, one that in the words of our Manager of Instructional Design, Catherine Walker, ‘can be drawn in the dust on the hood of a sales associate’s pick-up truck’. With our adaptation of the AAR, we ‘Buckmanized’ it by naming it the Buckman After Action Review (BAAR). Overall, since the inception of our knowledge sharing system,⁴ we’ve experienced a 50 percent rise in sales from new products, which indicates a dramatic rise in profitability from innovation. Sales per associate have increased 51 percent, while operating profit per associate has gone up 93 percent. The payoff is clear.

They might come to me and say ‘I am not sure what to do.’ Instead of giving the answer, I get them talking. ‘Well, tell me what could you do?’ And then we talk about it and they might realise they have already got the answer. Often my role is to give them the confidence in their own answer. I might say, ‘You know this account far better than I, what is your gut feel?’ Of course this depends on the situation and if somebody came to me in their first week and I started giving them coaching, we would be there all day!

Preparation

Careful preparation will help you and the interviewee and will give a better end product. Allow at least an hour for a normal interview or several hours for an in-depth interview with a senior person such as a sales director or marketing vice president. Make sure the interviewee knows why you are interviewing them, who you are, what the process of the interview will be, how long it will take and what you will do with the output. Make sure you know who they are, why they are important and what their role was in the activity being reviewed. Do a bit of background reading so you understand some of the context and know some of the technical terms.

Explain the process

Be clear about the topic, purpose and ground rules of the interview. You are interviewing this person to identify their lessons, rather than to critique their performance or obtain a magazine article. You therefore need to make it clear to them at the start precisely what you are interviewing them about. For example, ‘I would like to interview you for about an hour on what you have learned about sharing knowledge in a dispersed sales team.’ You then need to explain what will happen to the output, who will write it up as lessons, what their role is in validating the lessons and how the lessons will be carried through into action. For example, ‘The purpose of this exercise is to help sales managers deliver the same degree of success as yours, by building on what you have learned. I will write up the lessons, ask you to review them in about a week’s time, and when you have approved them they will be passed to the senior sales directors, who will create some guidelines for the organisation.’

You will also need to explain the process that you will use, ask permission to record and reassure the interviewee that they will have the right to edit the output before it is published. We generally assure the interviewee that any recording (with the exception of video clips) will be for transcription purposes only and ask them to be as open as they like during the interview in the knowledge that they can go back and reword things later. Make sure they realise that their lessons will be attributed to them. These will not be anonymous lessons; the interviewee will be given full credit for their knowledge.

The interview process

During this process you will be helping the interviewee uncover the key bits of knowledge that they may not even realise they have (the unknown knowns). You as interviewer have dual responsibility – first to the interviewee (to help them become aware of what they have learned) and second to the ultimate audience (by making sure that the lessons you help the interviewee to identify will be specific, relevant and actionable). You must ask questions on behalf of the audience and manage the conversation so that useful answers emerge. You are looking for the secrets of this person’s success, what they have learned from their experiences and how others can repeat the success. You don’t know what these secrets are and the interviewee may not fully know either. So there is no point going into the interview with a list of questions and expecting simple answers – the questioning process is a process of exploration.

Keeping track of the structure

You need to keep good notes in order to follow the questioning structure. When I am conducting an interview, every time the interviewee mentions a new theme, success factor or challenge that will become a new ‘branch’ in the interview ‘tree’, I put a big asterisk against it in my notes. Then I can keep checking back and making sure all of these branches have been explored. For example, ‘Mr X, earlier you said that team learning had gone well – can we just explore that for a bit? Why do you think the teamwork was so good?’

Use your listening skills. Your role is to ask short questions to allow the interviewee to express what he knows. Make sure your listening/ speaking ratio is 80:20 or greater. Listening is not passive, however. You need to use ‘listening skills’. Some of the basic listening skills include:

You need to keep the interview on track by finding a ‘nice way’ to move them on when they are rambling or going off track. If this happens you might need to ask them, ‘So what are the learnings?’ to bring them back to the topic being discussed.

Summing up

Once you have explored all the topics and identified all the lessons, a good way to sum up the interview is to ask the interviewee to summarise the top three or top five lessons. The following question is one that we find very useful in prompting a good summary:

This section of the interview can be a good one to capture on video or audio file. You may want to give them a couple of minutes’ preparation or thinking time before running the cameras.

Identifying the documents

As you go through the interview, make a note of any key documents that the interviewee mentions (for example, ‘Bill took photographs of the product displays, which we found very useful’). Ask whether you may have an electronic copy of these to include in the final product (‘Can you get me a copy of Bill’s photographs?’). Again, as you make notes during the interview, you can put a mark against your notes whenever a key document is mentioned. This allows you to refer back to them again at the end (‘You mentioned the following key documents – X, Y and Z – do you think you would be able to e-mail these to me by the end of the week?’). These documents may be very useful to attach to the lesson.

Recording

A vast amount of knowledge will come out from an interview. They are a rich source of guidance, anecdote, experience, advice and story and you need to capture this material in an equally rich way. You really need a complete verbatim transcript from which to work. You therefore should record the interview with a digital voice recorder. A simple pocket dictation machine will be sufficient and can sit fairly unobtrusively in front of the interviewee. Make sure whatever recording machine you use is compatible with the transcription service you will employ. Make sure the batteries are fresh and that you have spares. Ideally have a spare recorder. I was interviewing earlier this year and managed to tip a cup of tea over my digital recorder. However, I was prepared and I had a second recorder in my bag.

Take detailed notes as well. Speed-written notes are useful in two ways; as a non-technical backup to the recording equipment and also as a way for you to follow the structure of the interview as it branches. Detailed notes are also valuable as a backup if your recording equipment fails or if the recording is of poor quality. Speed-writing is a useful skill for the knowledge manager, but it is a tiring process. Make sure you have a large notebook and several sharp HB or B pencils. Buy a new notebook for each series of interviews.

It may be useful to take a photograph of the interviewee. Some organisations put the originator’s photograph in the lesson document.

Telephone interviews

Sometimes it will just be impossible to conduct the interview face to face, for example if you are interviewing the members of a global team. You will then need to interview them by telephone. The process will be the same, but a telephone interview will require far more concentration than face to face. You may also need to spend additional time setting up the context and establishing rapport. It is not so easy to ‘break the ice’ in a telephone interview and you will need to go quite carefully through who you are, who commissioned the lessons identification and what you will do with the output. As you conduct the remote interview, be careful to explain what you’re doing in more detail than you would face to face. For example, ‘I would like to ask one or two context-setting questions and then we will go into more detail,’ or ‘Can I please follow up on that point, because I think this would be a very useful area to discuss further?’

Take care with recording. Often the best you can do is to place a tape recorder next to a speaker phone or video-conference loudspeaker. It is better to buy a splitter that takes an audio stream from a telephone handset socket. You should use a speakerphone or a telephone headset, so you have both your hands free for taking notes. Do not audio-tape a telephone conversation without the person at the other end being aware beforehand that you are going to tape the conversation.

Setting the context

You need to be very clear about the purpose of the knowledge asset and also who the user of the knowledge asset will be. The user will often help define the scope and purpose. Once you have purpose, scope and user, you need to make sure you have the resources needed to complete the exercise.

Capturing the knowledge

Processes for capturing knowledge have already been described in this chapter; they include after-action review, retrospect and individual interviews.

Distilling out the lessons

The analysis and distillation step consists of looking back at what happened and turning this into forward-looking advice for the future. Lessons can be presented as recommendations for the future or as questions that future users should ask themselves or, in the simplest case, as a checklist for future users to follow. Use the transcripts from the knowledge capture process to derive quotes that answer the questions (or illustrate the recommendations), which can then be grouped into themes. During a long knowledge capture process involving many people, analysis can be run in parallel with the later interviews.

Validating the lessons

Any lessons, recommendations or questions/answers derived during the distillation phase need to be validated with the team and with the wider community of practice.

Setting out the contents of the knowledge asset

A knowledge asset can be built from the experiences of a single project team or by collating know-how and experience from many teams. The contents of a knowledge asset may include some or all of the following:

Choice of media

Different people learn in different ways and the richer the medium, the more easily knowledge is transferred. Although your knowledge asset will probably be text-based (unless you are creating a video), you should consider including pictures, audio and/or video, depending on your available bandwidth and technology. Multimedia wikis have huge value as a medium for storing a knowledge asset, as it can so easily be updated as new knowledge becomes available. Knowledge goes out of date if it is not kept fresh.

Publishing the knowledge asset

The knowledge asset needs to be placed somewhere that knowledge customers can find it in the future. Publish it in ‘community space’ and let the community of practice know that it has been published. The advantage of publishing it on a community wiki is that community members can then edit the asset further. Seek feedback on your knowledge asset, appoint a knowledge owner for the asset and make sure the asset is updated regularly.

Some of the knowledge assets that we have helped to create for sales and marketing organisations include the following topics (many of them mentioned above), which give some idea of the range of topics suitable for knowledge assets:

1. Best is temporary. There may be a current ‘best way’ to do something, but like ‘world champion’ or ‘world record’, it’s not going to stay the best for long.

2. Best is therefore a starting point. You should always look to improve on best, but without knowing the temporary best, you don’t know what you have to beat. Like a world record, best is there to be beaten – it’s a minimum accepted threshold.

3. Best is contextual. There may be no universal ‘best way’ to do something. The best way to market hair dye in Norway may not be the best way to market hair dye in Nigeria. However, in each context there will be a best practice; for example, a Scandinavian best practice, a West African best practice, etc.

4. In a new context, you cannot blindly apply ‘best’ from another context. However, you can learn from other ‘bests’ – no context is ever totally alien and there may be approaches that you can reuse and approaches you can use to inform your own approach.

5. Best practice does not have to be written down. It can live there in the community cloud of tacit knowledge. Usain Bolt’s ‘best way to run a sprint’ is probably not even conscious – it’s in his muscle memory. However, if it can be written down – in a wiki or a document or a knowledge asset – so much the better, so long as it is immediately updated every time it’s superseded and improved. The risk with documenting a best practice is that it goes out of date and there is no point in documenting without allowing for continual update. The risk with not documenting a best practice is that people can’t find it, can’t refer to it and so make up their own practice, which is frequently far from best. The answer is to record and continually update – through a wiki or through a constantly reviewed and updated knowledge asset.

Colombia’s Pony Malta is a category-leading, non-alcoholic, malt beverage competing directly with carbonated soft drinks, juices and dairy beverages. Following the principles of SABMiller’s Marketing Way, the Colombian business continued the brand’s evolution in 2008 by positioning the product as a ‘natural balance between nutrition and refreshment’. The challenge, then, was to differentiate the brand from rival categories while appealing to audiences with different priorities – children and young people who mainly drink it for refreshment and their mothers who value its nutritional properties.

The resulting campaign mixed traditional advertising with point-of-sale merchandising, prize giveaways and multi-media promotions. Initiatives included the ‘Pony Futbol’ event involving more than 25,000 young footballers around the country. In the year to 31 March 2009, the brand increased its sales volumes by 3.4%. Having consolidated its position as number two in Colombia’s carbonated soft drink category, after Coca-Cola, Pony Malta is well placed to continue growing.

 They need to be true – There is no value in a made-up story; people will find out that it is not true and then you lose all credibility. Knowledge can be transferred through stories, if they are true.

 They need to be told by the people concerned – Stories lose their power when they come second-hand. They need to come from someone involved or someone with direct contact with the people involved. Obviously these people can’t be everywhere; they can’t go round telling their story to everyone, so record them on video. New Scientist magazine recently reported on a study in Benin, in the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability. The study described how a team from the West Africa Rice Centre was attempting to transfer knowledge to women farmers in West Africa, on the topic of ‘how to parboil rice’. They tried a variety of ways to transfer the knowledge, including workshop demonstrations and video demonstrations. They found that firstly the video attracted more watchers than the conventional workshops (74 per cent of women in the villages, as opposed to 22 per cent) and secondly that the reuse of the knowledge by those who attended was much higher (72 per cent as opposed to 19 per cent). This was at least partly because the people telling the story in the video were women rice farmers from Africa, not Western scientists. This delivered a level of trust in the knowledge, as it was being demonstrated by peers and by the people concerned with rice preparation.

 They need a clear learning point – Not every form of storytelling is effective for sharing knowledge. We can tell stories for many reasons, such as interest and entertainment and scandal, without necessarily deriving lessons from them or sharing knowledge through them. Storytelling alone, with no learning points, is not an efficient way of learning and even a story that conveys learning benefits from clear identification of the learning and the recommendations arising. Without this, everybody listening to the story would need to draw their own conclusion. For experienced staff, this may be all right, but inexperienced staff may miss the learning points completely or draw the wrong conclusion. The most qualified person to draw the conclusion is the one who lived through the story. Why not let him or her share their conclusion as something that others can learn from? Stories are easiest to learn from when they carry a learning point that others can use to guide their action.