Oral debriefing
Encyclopedia
Oral debriefing is the interview
process of obtaining detailed verbal testimony from individuals. Analogous to interviews that are undertaken in journalism and sociology, its outcome in a comprehensive form is also known as ‘oral history’. Its application is additionally evident in disciplines ranging from psychotherapy, witness interrogation in crime investigations and in industry and commerce, both in oral and visual formats.
In the latter, it is now associated with knowledge management
, where the discipline is getting more attention since the advent of the flexible labor market, which is the single biggest knowledge disrupter of modern times. Introducing the biggest change in workplace practice for more than a century, the flexible labor market has imposed on employers an Alheimer-like corporate amnesia
as employees change jobs on average every four or five years in many countries. The loss of ‘organizational memory’, the body of data, information and knowledge relevant to an individual organization’s existence, is massive, inhibiting the ability of organizations to learn from their own experiences. Oral debriefing is becoming increasingly recognized as a powerful tool with which to capture this exiting institutional knowledge.
projects to preserve the reminiscences of former slaves and unlettered rural folk, and then in Europe. Its first cheerleader and practitioner was the American social commentator and writer Studs Terkel
(http://www.studsterkel.org). Born in 1912 and trained as a lawyer before becoming a journalist and writer, his fascination with the medium came soon after the tape recorder’s commercial exploitation when he started interviewing a whole cross-section of American society in order to piece together a jig-saw of experiences. From taxis drivers and teachers, the poor and the rich, young and old, his books on subjects ranging from race relations to war have provided a rich range of social opinion and attitudes of a nation undergoing rapid social change.
Terkel’s pioneering work was concurrent with the efforts of the US academic Professor Allan Nivens who, after successfully persuading educationalists to introduce oral history as a tool for serious scholarship in the 1940s, founded the Oral History Collection at Columbia University (http://library.truman.edu/microforms/columbia_oral_history.htm). Since then other universities, including Harvard, Princeton, the University of California, Berkeley, have also developed extensive collections of oral history. In the early 1950s Nivens brought oral history to industry when he organised the interview of more than 400 people for a history of the Ford Motor Company. Since then a handful of companies have supported similar programs, among them ARCO, Beckman Instruments, Bristol-Myers, Eli Lilley, Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical, Monsanto, Procter & Gamble, Rohm and Haas and Standard Oil Company.
In Europe, most of the efforts in oral history have been confined to non-business activities, where its use is relatively widespread in sociological and straight historical research. In a rare business-type project called "City Lives”, the National Life Story Collection attached to the British Library Sound Archive
has been interviewing about 100 top men and women from financial institutions who have lived through the changes since WW2 (http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelprestype/sound/ohist/ohnls/nationallifestories.html). Aside from that, only a small number of British companies have undertaken projects to record the memories and experiences of their employees, among them London Transport, which has made a special effort with their West Indian workforce, the brewers Bass, the telecommunications company Cable & Wireless and, until the project was aborted in 1991 as a cost-saving exercise, Ford UK. The uses to which they have put the information have generally been for museum exhibits or public relations.
The most accomplished practitioners are the US military, which has developed vast archives of oral testimony of wars since WW2 specifically as an educational tool for successive generations. The Department of the Army, for example, calls the process the End of Tour (EoT) interviews, which are conducted with departing commanders to make interviews available to their incoming replacements so that individuals can better understand the issues faced by their predecessors. Equally, companies such as Ford, ARCO, Beckman Instruments, Bristol-Myers, Eli Lilley, Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical, Monsanto, Procter & Gamble
, Rohm and Haas and Standard Oil Company have also initiated programs of oral history but their application in decision-making is tentative.
The oral debriefing usually centres on the issues and decisions unique to the organization and can be especially instructive as a decision-making tool. With senior decision-makers the most common candidates, such debriefings are always conducted near the end of a person’s tenure, although some practitioners are now using it on a more regular basis and in project management.
Whilst the co-operation of interviewees is essential, the quality of recall is often dependent on the skill of the interviewer, who needs to be commanding enough not to be intimidated by the interviewee and insightful enough to identify and pursue pertinent questions. The actual skill of oral debriefing is the art of asking relevant questions and when the answers are unclear or fudged, the asking of even more probing questions.
In the world of evidential gathering where rigorous substantiation is a pre-requisite for all experiential learning, the oral route is often more valuable than anything extracted from written sources. The reason is that managers are generally better speakers than they are writers. Also, their spoken word is invariably a more efficient way of conveying the abstract and complex nature of elements like the nuances of corporate culture, management style and the often-obscure issues surrounding decision-making within groups. Importantly, it can be effective at capturing the tacit ‘humanware’ elements of organizational memory.
The biographical debrief focuses on an individual's life or career. Conducted at stages during or at the end of an individual’s career, it is usually directed at very senior officers, often founders or people with decisive effects on organizational development. Its educational value to the organization is important because it can provide industry- and organization-specific insights into such aspects as culture, values and the way strategy would have altered over time alongside a changing market place. Separately, it also doubles as a motivator to successive generations.
The second type is the subject debrief, which concentrates on obtaining knowledge about a single event or topic, such as a product launch or new building development, where research may require interviews with several people to obtain complete coverage. Its application is valuable when project performance is often over budget or overdue.
Thirdly there is the critical incident debrief, which, as it suggests, occurs when there is an unexpected event, usually something damaging. Debriefs are usually carried out as soon after the episode as possible and include as many of the people involved, even non-managers.
The debriefs provide only the evidential component of experiential learning
. The learning arises when the experience (from oral debriefing and other sources) is assessed and then assigned its own meaning in terms of individual and/or the organization’s own goals, aims, ambitions and expectations. From these processes come the insights and added meaning, which is then applied to new circumstances. The end product is better decision-making.
Arnold Keransdorff, Corporate DNA, Gower Publishing, 2006.
Interview
An interview is a conversation between two people where questions are asked by the interviewer to obtain information from the interviewee.- Interview as a Method for Qualitative Research:"Definition" -...
process of obtaining detailed verbal testimony from individuals. Analogous to interviews that are undertaken in journalism and sociology, its outcome in a comprehensive form is also known as ‘oral history’. Its application is additionally evident in disciplines ranging from psychotherapy, witness interrogation in crime investigations and in industry and commerce, both in oral and visual formats.
In the latter, it is now associated with knowledge management
Knowledge management
Knowledge management comprises a range of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences...
, where the discipline is getting more attention since the advent of the flexible labor market, which is the single biggest knowledge disrupter of modern times. Introducing the biggest change in workplace practice for more than a century, the flexible labor market has imposed on employers an Alheimer-like corporate amnesia
Corporate amnesia
Corporate amnesia is a phrase used to describe a situation in which businesses, and other types of co-operative organization, lose their memory of how to do things. The condition is held, by some people, to be analogous to individual amnesia....
as employees change jobs on average every four or five years in many countries. The loss of ‘organizational memory’, the body of data, information and knowledge relevant to an individual organization’s existence, is massive, inhibiting the ability of organizations to learn from their own experiences. Oral debriefing is becoming increasingly recognized as a powerful tool with which to capture this exiting institutional knowledge.
History
In its contemporary formulation, the techniques of oral debriefing were first explored in the US in the 1940s in New DealNew Deal
The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...
projects to preserve the reminiscences of former slaves and unlettered rural folk, and then in Europe. Its first cheerleader and practitioner was the American social commentator and writer Studs Terkel
Studs Terkel
Louis "Studs" Terkel was an American author, historian, actor, and broadcaster. He received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1985 for The Good War, and is best remembered for his oral histories of common Americans, and for hosting a long-running radio show in Chicago.-Early...
(http://www.studsterkel.org). Born in 1912 and trained as a lawyer before becoming a journalist and writer, his fascination with the medium came soon after the tape recorder’s commercial exploitation when he started interviewing a whole cross-section of American society in order to piece together a jig-saw of experiences. From taxis drivers and teachers, the poor and the rich, young and old, his books on subjects ranging from race relations to war have provided a rich range of social opinion and attitudes of a nation undergoing rapid social change.
Terkel’s pioneering work was concurrent with the efforts of the US academic Professor Allan Nivens who, after successfully persuading educationalists to introduce oral history as a tool for serious scholarship in the 1940s, founded the Oral History Collection at Columbia University (http://library.truman.edu/microforms/columbia_oral_history.htm). Since then other universities, including Harvard, Princeton, the University of California, Berkeley, have also developed extensive collections of oral history. In the early 1950s Nivens brought oral history to industry when he organised the interview of more than 400 people for a history of the Ford Motor Company. Since then a handful of companies have supported similar programs, among them ARCO, Beckman Instruments, Bristol-Myers, Eli Lilley, Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical, Monsanto, Procter & Gamble, Rohm and Haas and Standard Oil Company.
In Europe, most of the efforts in oral history have been confined to non-business activities, where its use is relatively widespread in sociological and straight historical research. In a rare business-type project called "City Lives”, the National Life Story Collection attached to the British Library Sound Archive
British Library Sound Archive
The British Library Sound Archive in London, England is one of the largest collections of recorded sound in the world, including music, spoken word and ambient recordings....
has been interviewing about 100 top men and women from financial institutions who have lived through the changes since WW2 (http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelprestype/sound/ohist/ohnls/nationallifestories.html). Aside from that, only a small number of British companies have undertaken projects to record the memories and experiences of their employees, among them London Transport, which has made a special effort with their West Indian workforce, the brewers Bass, the telecommunications company Cable & Wireless and, until the project was aborted in 1991 as a cost-saving exercise, Ford UK. The uses to which they have put the information have generally been for museum exhibits or public relations.
Exit interviews enhanced
Modern oral debriefing is an enhancement of the old-fashioned prescriptive and formulaic exit interview, which is typically not an interview at all, rather the output of a formulaic questionnaire that attempts to uncover why employees – usually lower hierarchy workers - leave. The oral debrief has been sophisticated to the extent that its output is now a powerful means of extracting from individuals valuable knowledge that can be used to improve on past performance.The most accomplished practitioners are the US military, which has developed vast archives of oral testimony of wars since WW2 specifically as an educational tool for successive generations. The Department of the Army, for example, calls the process the End of Tour (EoT) interviews, which are conducted with departing commanders to make interviews available to their incoming replacements so that individuals can better understand the issues faced by their predecessors. Equally, companies such as Ford, ARCO, Beckman Instruments, Bristol-Myers, Eli Lilley, Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical, Monsanto, Procter & Gamble
Procter & Gamble
Procter & Gamble is a Fortune 500 American multinational corporation headquartered in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio and manufactures a wide range of consumer goods....
, Rohm and Haas and Standard Oil Company have also initiated programs of oral history but their application in decision-making is tentative.
The oral debriefing usually centres on the issues and decisions unique to the organization and can be especially instructive as a decision-making tool. With senior decision-makers the most common candidates, such debriefings are always conducted near the end of a person’s tenure, although some practitioners are now using it on a more regular basis and in project management.
Whilst the co-operation of interviewees is essential, the quality of recall is often dependent on the skill of the interviewer, who needs to be commanding enough not to be intimidated by the interviewee and insightful enough to identify and pursue pertinent questions. The actual skill of oral debriefing is the art of asking relevant questions and when the answers are unclear or fudged, the asking of even more probing questions.
In the world of evidential gathering where rigorous substantiation is a pre-requisite for all experiential learning, the oral route is often more valuable than anything extracted from written sources. The reason is that managers are generally better speakers than they are writers. Also, their spoken word is invariably a more efficient way of conveying the abstract and complex nature of elements like the nuances of corporate culture, management style and the often-obscure issues surrounding decision-making within groups. Importantly, it can be effective at capturing the tacit ‘humanware’ elements of organizational memory.
The other types of oral debriefing
In addition to the augmented exit interview there are three other types of oral debriefing.The biographical debrief focuses on an individual's life or career. Conducted at stages during or at the end of an individual’s career, it is usually directed at very senior officers, often founders or people with decisive effects on organizational development. Its educational value to the organization is important because it can provide industry- and organization-specific insights into such aspects as culture, values and the way strategy would have altered over time alongside a changing market place. Separately, it also doubles as a motivator to successive generations.
The second type is the subject debrief, which concentrates on obtaining knowledge about a single event or topic, such as a product launch or new building development, where research may require interviews with several people to obtain complete coverage. Its application is valuable when project performance is often over budget or overdue.
Thirdly there is the critical incident debrief, which, as it suggests, occurs when there is an unexpected event, usually something damaging. Debriefs are usually carried out as soon after the episode as possible and include as many of the people involved, even non-managers.
The debriefs provide only the evidential component of experiential learning
Experiential learning
Experiential learning is the process of making meaning from direct experience. Simply put, Experiential Learning is learning from experience. The experience can be staged or left open. Aristotle once said, "For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them." David A...
. The learning arises when the experience (from oral debriefing and other sources) is assessed and then assigned its own meaning in terms of individual and/or the organization’s own goals, aims, ambitions and expectations. From these processes come the insights and added meaning, which is then applied to new circumstances. The end product is better decision-making.
See also
- Organizational memoryOrganizational memoryOrganizational memory is the accumulated body of data, information, and knowledge created in the course of an individual organization’s existence...
(OM) - Corporate amnesiaCorporate amnesiaCorporate amnesia is a phrase used to describe a situation in which businesses, and other types of co-operative organization, lose their memory of how to do things. The condition is held, by some people, to be analogous to individual amnesia....
- Flexible labor market
- Corporate historyCorporate historyA corporate history is a chronological account of a business or other co-operative organization. Usually it is produced in written format but it can also be done in audio or audiovisually...
- Corporate culture
- Corporate memory
- Information ageInformation AgeThe Information Age, also commonly known as the Computer Age or Digital Age, is an idea that the current age will be characterized by the ability of individuals to transfer information freely, and to have instant access to knowledge that would have been difficult or impossible to find previously...
- Episodic knowledge
- Explicit knowledgeExplicit knowledgeExplicit knowledge is knowledge that has been or can be articulated, codified, and stored in certain media. It can be readily transmitted to others. The information contained in encyclopedias are good examples of explicit knowledge....
- Tacit knowledgeTacit knowledgeTacit knowledge is knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another person by means of writing it down or verbalising it. For example, stating to someone that London is in the United Kingdom is a piece of explicit knowledge that can be written down, transmitted, and understood by a recipient...
- Evidence based practiceEvidence based practiceEvidence-based practice is an interdisciplinary approach gaining ground after 1992. It started in medicine as evidence-based medicine and spread to other fields such as nursing, psychology, education, library and information science and other fields...
- MentoringMentoringMentorship refers to a personal developmental relationship in which a more experienced or more knowledgeable person helps a less experienced or less knowledgeable person....
- ProductivityProductivityProductivity is a measure of the efficiency of production. Productivity is a ratio of what is produced to what is required to produce it. Usually this ratio is in the form of an average, expressing the total output divided by the total input...
Sources
Arnold Kransdorff, Corporate Amnesia, Butterworth Heineman, 1998. Also http://www.corporate-amnesia.comArnold Keransdorff, Corporate DNA, Gower Publishing, 2006.