Challenges to Capturing and Sharing Knowledge in a Fast-Growing Consulting Organization

Abstract

This capstone examines my residency with a national nonprofit pursuing educational equity in three key ways: partnering with school systems to help them ensure that effective teaching is happening in every classroom (its consulting work), working to inspire a national education agenda focused on closing the opportunity gap (its research and policy work), and supplying effective teachers to underserved students (its pipeline programs). The pandemic and related federal rescue programs created an unprecedented window of growth for this organization, allowing it to double in size in 2021. The organization’s rapid growth in both the amount and types of consulting services it provides created challenges to sharing knowledge and learning across its staff and projects. This capstone examines my 10-month residency during which I led a process to try to improve how the organization supplies its consulting staff with the knowledge they need to avoid “reinventing the wheel” or, worse, replicating a strategy that the organization knows doesn’t work in a given context. My hope was that, by designing a clear strategy for how the organization could learn from its work, codify that learning, and share it with staff, the organization’s clients -- and therefore students nationwide -- would benefit from the best of its thinking and experience. This capstone offers a description and critical analysis of this effort. At the organization level, the findings from this capstone indicate that the organization will benefit from clarifying whether its main business is selling customized consulting work (which relies on personalized, tacit knowledge), or selling standardized consulting work, which relies on codified knowledge. At the sector level, the findings indicate that system leaders should embrace persistent experimentation and learning. The implications I share may be helpful to leaders grappling with challenges related to organizational learning, knowledge management, decisions about what and how to standardize, and the importance of creating coherence across these three areas. The implications I share will also be helpful to leaders working to solve ambiguous, adaptive challenges amid complexity.