Humans ferociously guard know-how, knowledge or skills as a means of survival by being valuable/indispensable to the community. And tribal knowledge is a quintessential example of this primal instinct in the industrial world. From individuals to nations, everybody at all levels do it all the time. In the modern world however, the indispensable person with valuable knowledge is bound to that role, doing the same job for life without opportunities to grow in their careers. In today's era of technology where things change soo fast, the path to scale (for individuals or nations) is to commoditise tribal knowledge so that anybody can execute it well, and look for newer challenges. Foxconn iPhone assembly plants and Tejas production by HAL are primarily knowledge hoarding challenges at a geopolitical, industrial or defence-readiness scale where individuals or institutions refuse to let go of know-how as a loss-aversion strategy. This restrictive mindset blocks them from ever reaching the cutting edge since they are continuously entrenching themselves into processes and technologies that will become obsolete in a few years.
In a nutshell (pun intended), tribal knowledge is:
If you see some of these pitfalls, it's likely a deal-killer and tribal knowledge is the reason despite what your potential customer might say.
"If I can't use it, how will my team use it, and how will the field guys use it." - says the man who is sitting at the same job for the last 20 years protecting his turf. This gentleman has come across many technologies and rejected every single one of them. If it does not align with his ability to control the turf, he's not going for it. We've come across these folks sitting on top of technicians and inspector organisations where they have specific knowledge that makes them indispensable at the company. They accrue authority and prevent smart folks from using technology to rise up the ranks. These guys point out to trivial issues as reasons to not use software tools fearing loss of their fiefdom.
In a few instances of working with pharma and banking verticals, we came across IT teams that flat out refused to support an additional tool because they didn't have bandwidth, existing tools were not fully explored, and (this is the worse) they didn't source the software vendor. In these instances, the process of vendor management became the deal breaker, not the software or the user requirements. The IT teams do not have the incentive to introduce new software and there a few people outside their department who understand the IT team's job. So the business teams are at the mercy of IT teams, and the enterprises fossilises with old tech.
The is specially true in the world of software programming - today's world of LLMs and AI has removed all notions of tribal knowledge in the software knowledge economy. It is far easier for a 10-15 years experienced developer to build a strong software tool with a smaller team and a fraction of the cost. And that means, the opportunities for a large number of entry-level obs have vanished. This extends to all associated roles in this software knowledge economy like analysts, content, talent management, and operations. The commoditisation of software and software tools is clearly visible on the layoffs of 1000s of software developers across all levels in all geographies around the world.
A golden nugget of advice I came across a few weeks ago: "by distributing knowledge to coworkers or digitise/automate things, you are free to pursue other interesting things. If you become the blocker, you will always remain stagnant". These are not impossible problems, it requires a mindset change amongst leadership yes, but also down through the chain of command. In most instances, the top management wants new technology, but the rest of the organisation is just incapable of adoption. This one's a classic example, the rest of the organisation is clinging to tribal knowledge forcing capital away from tough problems because government customers cannot be counted as customers.
The transition will be tough, but tribal knowledge will have to be digitised for new and existing technologies to bubble-up for customer adoption.