The Oldest Knowledge-Sharing Tool in the World, Now With a Microphone

Later this week I’ll be at the Podcast Learning Festival in London, delivering a session on microphone selection. In preparing for it, I’ve spent more time than usual thinking about podcasting, and in particular about one specific use case that keeps proving its worth with organisations I work with: capturing and sharing the knowledge of experienced employees.

This is, of course, one of the oldest approaches to learning that exists. Long before competency frameworks and LMS platforms, there was the village blacksmith and their apprentice. Not a formal curriculum, not a structured assessment, but a transfer of hard-won knowledge; the small things you only learn by doing, the shortcuts that work, the mistakes that are worth avoiding because someone else already made them. We now call this institutional knowledge, and organisations spend considerable energy worrying about losing it whenever an experienced employee leaves, retires, or simply moves to another business.

Podcasting, offers a practical way of capturing it.

Research into expert performance has consistently shown that much of what makes someone truly skilled at their job is tacit knowledge, the kind of knowledge that is difficult to articulate on demand but flows naturally in conversation (Polanyi, 1966; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). When you ask a high-performing employee to deliver a training session, they often struggle; not because they lack knowledge, but because the explicit reconstruction of implicit expertise is cognitively demanding in ways that formal presentation makes worse. A conversation, by contrast, reduces that cognitive load considerably. The interview format, in particular, gives the expert a scaffold: a question to respond to rather than a blank page to fill.

This is why the two approaches I tend to recommend both centre on conversation rather than instruction.

The first is an open forum format: a short, relatively unstructured recording in which the experienced employee shares something specific from their own practice. Three things they’d tell their younger self about handling a difficult client call; sixty seconds of advice on reading a complex situation; a worked example of a case they handled particularly well, told in their own words. These recordings don’t need to be long, polished, or perfect. Their value lies in their authenticity and their specificity; the listener recognises the situation, recognises the language, and feels spoken to by someone who has done the work.

The second is a more structured interview, in which a host or colleague asks targeted questions designed to draw out the insights that matter most to the organisation. This approach is particularly useful when the goal is to capture knowledge about a specific process, a particular type of case, or a domain where the organisation knows it has gaps. A good interviewer can surface things the expert didn’t know they knew.

Either way, you end up with a context-rich artefact that is far more likely to support performance than a policy document or a mandatory e-learning module. People learn from people; from stories, from examples, from the sense that someone has been where they are and found a way through.

The practical value extends beyond the end user, too. Knowledge management teams can mine recordings for insights that belong in the organisational knowledge base. Those recordings can be transcribed, edited into written articles, and broken into smaller clips for use across different channels. A single thirty-minute interview with a performance exemplar can reasonably produce a full-length podcast episode, several short-form clips, a written article, and a handful of quotable insights for internal knowledge systems. The return on a modest investment of time is considerable.

The important caveat is this: the starting point has to be the problem, not the technology. Podcasting is worth exploring here because there is a persistent, and well-documented problem to solve. Institutional knowledge walks out of the door regularly, and most organisations don’t have reliable mechanisms for capturing it before it goes. If you have that problem, and most organisations do, then podcasting is worth serious consideration. If you’re looking for a reason to start a podcast and working backwards to find a justification, that’s a different thing entirely.

Start with the people who know things that others need to know. Give them a microphone, a good question, and someone who’s interested in what they have to say. The rest tends to follow.

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I’m speaking at the Podcast Learning Festival in London later this week on microphone selection. If you’re attending, I’d love to continue this conversation there.

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References

Nonaka, I. and Takeuchi, H. (1995) The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Polanyi, M. (1966) The Tacit Dimension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.