Knowledge Resilience

Welcome to episode 130 of the Testing Peers Podcast.

This time join David, Russell, Chris and Dermot as we talk Knowledge Resilience.

After an ice breaker where Russell poses the question to the Peers of what have we wanted to learn, but have not yet achieved.

Then Dermot sets up the main topic with the following question: "what would you do with the knowledge that you acquired? If you learned it, it's fine, but if you wanted to share that knowledge. How would you transmit that?

We talk about:

• How people learn differently, and why a mix of formats matters
• Creating living documentation that stays connected to real questions
• What stops people from sharing, from fear and past experience to unspoken team dynamics
• How consulting and leadership roles shift your perspective on giving away knowledge
• Why rotating responsibilities and refreshing training helps surface hidden gaps
• The role of psychological safety in building a culture where sharing is the norm

If you've ever struggled with stale docs, tribal knowledge, or a team that relies on “just ask Dave” then this one’s for you.

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Thanks to our brand new sponsors – NFocus Testing.

nFocus are a UK based software testing company. They’ve been supporting businesses for 24 years by providing services that include burst resource, accelerated test automation, performance testing and fully managed testing services. In 2021, they launched a Test Automation Academy to create amazing testers and they’ve now created jobs for 48 people in our industry in just under three years!

nFocus were a big part of PeersCon in 2024 and 2025, really grateful for all they do supporting the Testing Peers.

www.nfocus.co.uk and info@nfocus.co.uk for anyone wanting to get in touch.

Transcript

0:02: Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the Testing Piers podcast. 
 0:07: Today we're gonna be talking about knowledge resilience, and we'll get into that topic a bit later on. 
 0:13: But let's welcome our co-hosts. 
 0:16: Today we have Dermot. 
 0:18: Hello folks. 
 0:20: And we have the usual suspects of Chris Armstrong. 
 0:23: Cheers. 
 0:25: And Russell Crackford. 
 0:27: Hello. 
 0:29: As always, we'd like to thank our wonderful sponsors Eocus. 
 0:33: They are a UK based software testing company. 
 0:36: They've been supporting businesses for 24 years by providing services that include burst resource, accelerated test automation, performance testing and fully managed testing services. 
 0:47: In 2021, they launched their Test Automation Academy. 
 0:51: To create amazing testers for the industry, and they've so far created jobs for 48 people in our industry in just under 3 years, which is amazing. 
 1:00: If you would like to get in contact with them, please look at their website at www.nfocus.co.uk and contact them at info@nfocus.co.uk on email. 
 1:11: So let's kick off with the banter and let's go over to Russell. 
 1:16: OK, so I've got a question for you as all really.re a little bit possibly by a conversation that we're gonna have, but I wondered what's one thing that you guys want to learn but haven't. 
 1:28: So maybe a foreign language, maybe a computer language, maybe a skill, maybe a sports. 
 1:36: What do you want to learn but haven't, cos it's easy to say what you have learned. 
 1:39: There are so many things. 
 1:43: Big one, pick a couple. 
 1:45: OK, I've started learning several languages, spoken languages, and never really progressed beyond the initial kind of phases. 
 1:54: Some of those would be Ukrainian, Polish, Arabic, and Japanese. 
 2:01: That's notwithstanding the other languages that I really want to get better at like German and French and Italian. 
 2:07: So, and for every one of those, I'm sure there's a computer language as well or or a computer methodology that I I intended to but have not yet settled down to learn about. 
 2:19: I will go for as a teenager, I  started to dress as per all good new metal following that people would do, and part of that culture, apart from rap metal, was also skateboarding, so I gave myself a good go at trying to do skateboarding, but despite my er. 
 2:42: Having decent balance from the gymnastic background, it turns out that I cannot skateboard for toffee, and I fell off and I may have dented one or two cars with skateboards. 
 2:57: And thus, I decided to cease. 
 3:00: But then I do have some friends who also broke bones when they were significantly better skateboarders than I, so maybe I got off a little bit like me. 
 3:09: So for me, I'll, I'd, I'd like to be a bit more chill. 
 3:11: I would like to improve my mindfulness, and also, although I do a lot of exercise, I don't do a lot of stretching. 
 3:20: So I'd like to learn how to stretch better so that I'm a bit more flexible because I can't touch my toes. 
 3:28: So test me in the next peers con as to, , whether I've succeeded in that, , learning journey. 
 3:35: I can extend your arms or shorten your legs. 
 3:39: Well, I could touch them if I bend, bend my knees, but yeah. 
 3:42: , fair enough. 
 3:43: How about you, Russell? 
 3:44: , some of the German, I guess possibly with languages, but it's definitely not a skill set of mind. 
 3:49: So, but I'd probably go for music actually. 
 3:52: Probably would have been more useful to have learnt. 
 3:56: To play the guitar, for example, I played it for a little bit but I didn't stick at it, but it's one of those things that I would wish I could play music, just, you know, pick something up, be a piano, guitar, something like that, but  I never really stuck at any musical instruments for long. 
 4:11: I've got a tambourine if you want to borrow one and play that, play that. 
 4:15: Yeah, I can hit tables and I can  I can hit tambourines. 
 4:19: Thinking more a bit more musical than the tambourine. 
 4:22: I know there's some skill playing the tambourine, don't get me wrong listeners. 
 4:25: But  it was probably more the guitar type thing or the piano. 
 4:29: Well this podcast needs more cowbell in my opinion, so OK, we'll invest. 
 4:35: we'll look into that. 
 4:36: Thank you for triangle, I think that would go down well. 
 4:41: But never mind. 
 4:41: Right, should we talk about our topic of the day? 
 4:45: Yeah, so I mean if you were to learn those things that we all just spoke about based on Russell's question, what would you do with the knowledge that you acquired? 
 4:55: If you learned it, it's fine, but if you wanted to share that knowledge. 
 4:59: How would you transmit that? 
 5:01: That's a good question because we do say that teaching is a great way to learn something and prove your knowledge, right? 
 5:09: And if you can't at least master the basics of something that you're trying to teach. 
 5:16: you're not in a good place. 
 5:18: Even if you understand theory, I suppose. 
 5:20: Knowledge is, is, is sometimes, sometimes theory as well it's practised. 
 5:23: Yeah, if I could skateboard, I, I would preach a lot of safety, I would imagine if I tried, . 
 5:30: Yeah How this transitions more into something that's practical for day work sort of stuff. 
 5:38: I mean, yeah, I quite like a lot of practise I've seen on the socials in recent years where people have been learning in public. 
 5:47: They've been doing a lot of investigating and sharing their. 
 5:52: Journeys where they've been doing stuff online, partly for accountability's sake, but I think also setting a, a, a decent example. 
 6:00: And that puts stuff out there in a way. 
 6:03: And so people blogging about things or talking about what they've been learning is a really cool way. 
 6:08: And I think in the workplace, that's something I've tried to adopt a little bit more. 
 6:14: Because otherwise, you can come into workplace and go, you know, oh, where's the documentation? 
 6:20: Or the manuals, and that can be quite dry, quite lonesome. 
 6:24: , and I'm a little bit of a social being and I quite enjoy doing stuff with people and interacting with people and learning with other people as I go. 
 6:35: That's kind of how I would try and model things to hopefully encourage others on the journey with me. 
 6:41: Yeah, yeah, so that's kind of what I was thinking about really when when we were talking about the the topic because we've all amassed knowledge for ourselves. 
 6:52: We've all been parts of teams where knowledge had to be centralised or knowledge had to be distributed. 
 6:57: You have the teaching and learning function, different people learn in different ways as well. 
 7:02: So as you say, documentation can be a bit dry, especially if it's Voluminous. 
 7:08: And with that and what what's going on in the public sector in the US where servers are being switched off on foot of the Dodge efforts within the government and I know for the last year or so, agencies like the FDA and the CDC have been rehoming a lot of their databases to other countries to protect them from the rampant server which are offer. 
 7:35: So stuff like that just made me think about how fragile knowledge is. 
 7:40: And I'm not just talking about data, I'm talking about knowledge, like enabling people and having the tools to enable people to do what they need to do or what they want to do. 
 7:51: Going back to the original question, what I, how would I share my knowledge, I agree with Chris that actually sometimes it's the journey that's important to show that you can fail and that you can still get up and you can continue on. 
 8:03: Mhm. 
 8:03: I think sometimes in the social media. 
 8:06: World, people show the finished article without the journey of getting there. 
 8:11: I remember making slime with my kids going, it's so easy, you know, you just put these bits together. 
 8:16: I'm going as a scientist, well, no, it depends on the quantity of each particular thing that you actually put together. 
 8:22: You need to have that information. 
 8:23: With that information with the best one in the world, you can't follow a video going, put in some of this, put in some of that. 
 8:30: So it's making sure that you share the right information in the right way so that people can then repeat it. 
 8:35: But also showing that, as I said, those failures to show that actually, people can be human, people can make mistakes and still get up and actually create good things in the end. 
 8:46: I would also say that with sharing knowledge, again, it's checking that knowledge transfer is there. 
 8:53: You know, it's all very well, as you say, writing a document, getting them to read things, finding out, or looking at videos, creating videos. 
 9:01: But unless it's given in a certain way that that's accessible to those people and you highlighted the sort of different learning styles, we created it  at our company, what we call the Python Academy or coding academies. 
 9:14: Basically, because of all this free material that's out there to save people time, we created, created something that caters for all four learning styles. 
 9:22: So therefore, there are blogs or documents or books that people can read, there's videos that people can watch. 
 9:27: There are podcasts that people can listen to about topics to do with Python. 
 9:33: We struggled a bit with the kinesthetics as example things, which is, I think is really valuable as well, but that's, that's not quite so easy to share. 
 9:40: But making sure that. 
 9:43: However we leave that information, it's accessible for anybody to pick up, I think is vital because not everyone learns in exactly the same way. 
 9:51: Yeah, one method that we put into practise in a previous team of mine was that we kind of took the notion that if we were offering documentation to our customers, the company's customers, then we would be writing documentation, but we started also writing or doing these short videos, and we started to realise it would actually be useful to have that internally as well. 
 10:14: So some of our internal how to documentation. 
 10:18: Included a short video that guided you through a process as well as documenting steps. 
 10:24: Sometimes you want to be led and you want it to be in a somewhat interactive or  a mixed media experience and sometimes you just want the the words. 
 10:34: So having both means that the people who rely on audible audio, visual or written  methods of learning are serviced by one document that contains all three. 
 10:48: I have to say that's certainly my personal preferred style as well, especially I think now that transcribing from videos and things have got a lot better automatically. 
 10:57: So that it can actually fill in some of the kind of the text blanks. 
 11:01: But being able to, certainly in our field, I think, the technology field where you see someone do something, click on a screen. 
 11:07: I've written long manuals of ways to do things, the screenshotting, the pictures, the trying to indicate things and all the rest of it and getting getting that right, it's nigh on impossible. 
 11:18: It's a thankless task, but when you didn't have other options, it was probably the best you could do. 
 11:23: So mixing in the other mediums of video and watching and screen shares and having people visually there, but also the screen at the same time. 
 11:31: All these things now make that sort of knowledge gathering. 
 11:34: More effective, more efficient, easier to do. 
 11:37: It's not everyone's cup of tea. 
 11:38: I know that a lot of people don't like the idea of recording videos, the idea of having to edit a video. 
 11:43: You know, we edit this podcast a little bit and sometimes it's stopping and starting. 
 11:47: We generally do everything and then just slice out bits that aren't quite right. 
 11:52: , and things like that. 
 11:53: And I guess that's the same with modern video technology. 
 11:55: It's actually become easier to edit video. 
 11:58: We do it more on our phones now than we've ever done before and so on and so forth. 
 12:01: So actually we're getting used to these mediums that once upon a time were rare. 
 12:05: I still remember some of the first systems and training I got on like working for like NPower and other companies like that. 
 12:13: And literally you've got a folder, an A4 binder on how to do things. 
 12:17: It was fun. 
 12:19: And then you have weeks of training. 
 12:21: And actually a lot of it was video and Bob's your uncle, easy peasy lemon squeezy. 
 12:26: So I do think that multi-medium, the video, the talk, the text to go with it so you can read and you can look at the transcript. 
 12:32: You can find the bit you need. 
 12:34: And examples. 
 12:35: Yeah, exactly. 
 12:36: And you know, exercises at the end of it if you really want to cement learning, it's quite a good way of doing it. 
 12:42: I always think that questions at the end of things sometimes are a bit. 
 12:48: They don't necessarily check learning. 
 12:50: That's what I find is that they, they're sometimes, oh, we've, we're testing people or we're checking the people's learning, but. 
 12:57: Yeah, sometimes they seem to be there just to tick a box rather than actually helping health and safety, for example, . 
 13:09: Yeah, cybersecurity training is based on that kind of. 
 13:15: Do these 6 questions and you can do them infinite number of times till you get them right and there's only 12 questions out, so you, if you do it 5 times, you'll get all the answers. 
 13:22: , and, and we'll do them in a slightly different order so that we won't, you know, but yeah, yeah. 
 13:27: You've got better at it, but it's still, it's better than when it was on paper. 
 13:32:  and you just have to do it. 
 13:34: Multiple times on paper. 
 13:35: But yeah, I agree with you. 
 13:37: I think I do think exercises, but again, it all depends on context of what you're sharing. 
 13:41: If it's a policy sort of thing, is it a process, the questions are all be kind of a bit dry and dull. 
 13:48: Sometimes exercise will work, sometimes it won't. 
 13:50: So if it's programming, you're teaching, or how to do is solve certain type of problems, find certain elements, all those sorts of things. 
 13:57: Exercises can be quite good, but if it's, thou shalt not steal. 
 14:01: As an example, it's hard to do an exercise where you do a role play of someone taking something. 
 14:06: What do you do about it? 
 14:08: It doesn't quite fit. 
 14:09: So I do feel for them at times where you've got to try and show that learning has been absorbed. 
 14:14: It's not an easy one, like. 
 14:16: Yeah. 
 14:17: I worked for a company and we created learning content. 
 14:21: A lot of the challenge was the validity. 
 14:24: Of someone has taken the course and they've proved that they have consumed some of that data and roll my eyes off a multiple choice because doesn't really tell me something of question, but in in terms of a lot of those things, it is the cost of having a human validating the learning of another human was too much, , to be able to do and I think there's that that's often a. 
 14:53: Hidden trap we fall in when it comes to sharing knowledge, you know, how many times have you worked on something, socialised it within a group for review or for confirmation of something, and there's been deathly silence on the, , every time. 
 15:15: Not only, not only deathly silence with these things, but also just a, a lack of. 
 15:21: Interest, I think there's a real sort of culture. 
 15:26: Of if I don't know I'm more protected, it's almost like, you know, you're you're, you're protected, because you don't know things, goodness knows what happens if suddenly you're one of those people that knows knows this, you're gonna get the call at 23 in the morning, are you gonna. 
 15:41: , be responsible for those things if, if, if we're audited and such, and I, and I, I worry that, that people just typically are getting more and more time poor, as, as time goes by and therefore, taking on more is actually not seen as a good thing, not seen as an opportunity, but as a, that's the thing that's pulling me further away from the job that I actually want to do. 
 16:06: I'd agree, I think that people don't always give time for knowledge transfer. 
 16:09: They don't give time to write the documentation or do whatever medium that they choose to do it, you know, in terms of projects that we do, you know, it's getting the work done, doing the development, doing the testing, checking the quality. 
 16:24: And there is not the time to write how to actually do things. 
 16:29: We do hardware at our consultancy as well, and we have EMC, we have an anechoic chamber, and that's a complex beast, you know, trying to set that up, making sure that all the details are there. 
 16:40: And a good case in point, the person who was mainly running it left at Christmas. 
 16:45: So we've been sort of playing catch up a little bit. 
 16:47: The documentation wasn't all there. 
 16:49: We now have people being trained up. 
 16:52: Or finding it out and making sure that actually the folder structure is there so you can actually create the graphs and things like that, but it's all taking time, it's all an investment in making sure that it is all there. 
 17:03: Unless we do invest in that time, then we will lose knowledge. 
 17:07: The thing is though, and also the knowledge needs to be kept up to date. 
 17:10: There's so much sort of intrinsic or just with long running projects, there's an assumed knowledge that you know how to set up. 
 17:19: So a new person comes onto the book project. 
 17:21: And you go, oh yes, you just install this, but actually it isn't just install this, you need to tweak it or have your computer in a certain way in order for it to be successful or make a little change to one of the small environmental variables or whatever in order to make it work on your, on your machine. 
 17:40: Yeah. 
 17:41: Works on my box. 
 17:42: Yeah. 
 17:43: So making sure that all those things are captured so that if people do choose to leave or move on or do whatever, then the thing can go on without wasting too much time because actually that's what all knowledge transfer is, is trying to make the process seamless. 
 18:01: It's a well-known thing as well in companies that scale, right? 
 18:04: Like it could be start with with a single team, a single squad, a single group of people, and as you scale, those people seem to know how everything works because they were just there. 
 18:13: And as new people join, they all just go what the heck is happening here? 
 18:18: And it's like, oh, you know, go and speak to Bill, Bill goes and press that button and Tim over here does that, and then Judy goes and does this. 
 18:24: It's just how it's always worked. 
 18:25: But what happens when Judy leaves? 
 18:27: Yeah, how do we combat this? 
 18:29: Well, because ultimately that's really what probably our listeners wanna know causes. 
 18:32: Mhm. 
 18:33: And it is challenging cos I've, I've worked as delivery manager for a while and one of the things I tried to instil into teams was like let's document as we go. 
 18:40: Let's not have big bang documentation at the end, let's keep a little light. 
 18:43: And so on. 
 18:44: But the one thing I know that we didn't do was, OK, a new person comes in tomorrow, does this instruction works. 
 18:50: It, it made sense, we did iterate the documentation, we did add chapters as we went and so on. 
 18:55: We did explain situations, how to do things, add on the extensions. 
 18:59: We kept the documentation living, which was reasonably good I thought. 
 19:03: But in hindsight, I also knew that no one ever tested it per se, as in, if I got a brand new laptop, would this work? 
 19:11: And the answer was probably not in most cases, cos that was a level of too much effort for anyone really to want to invest in. 
 19:18: And I kind of get that as a tester, I don't particularly really want to go, well, I'll go do this hour's worth of set up to test to see whether it works in this particular computer. 
 19:28: And all I'm doing is testing the documentation. 
 19:30: , unless there's a really good reason for it, it's going to a third party. 
 19:33: It's part of the what we're selling. 
 19:36: You find it hard to justify that time sync on a process, a policy, a way of doing something. 
 19:42: It's a challenge, isn't it? 
 19:43: But It is about trying to find that balance. 
 19:46: I think new starters, new people, demonstrating it to somebody else. 
 19:51: It's a fantastic time to test documentation, test the videos, show it to somebody else, pairing up with somebody is a great way of doing it as well. 
 19:59: Tell you what, can you, you walk through this, I'll take notes you're doing it, and then we'll do it together and you'll learn a lot more than you pretending cos I must admit, even if I pretend to be novice. 
 20:10: To install it on a new laptop, I'll take shortcuts without realising it. 
 20:13: I'll read into the documentation what I wrote, what I thought I wrote, not what I actually did write. 
 20:19: I don't know if that's dyslexia in me or not, but I just, I write perfect English as far as I can work out till I read it back about two months later, and I realised that I've missed about 50% of the words. 
 20:30: I think it's a really good idea doing it in pairs because actually, Then the new starter doesn't actually feel isolated if things start going wrong. 
 20:38: They have someone there who's going, is this working right? 
 20:41: Rather than actually being, as I said, you know, being isolated and having to, to try and work it out and getting up the confidence to go to someone and go, this isn't working, why isn't it working? 
 20:51: Not to harp on about things that we talked about in the past, but there is a point of making a place. 
 20:58: Safe enough that people feel that they can call out knowledge gaps, problems, issues, non-optimizations in process or documentation. 
 21:08: It's not always the case that people feel that they can, you know, there's check the manual, stupid, kind of, I'm, I'm being polite in a particular way, I'm rephrasing that, but there, there's a lot of that sort of attitude that's been rife in our industry down the years. 
 21:24: And people haven't felt safe to check on those things and, and speak up. 
 21:28: And not, not just because they don't want the extra work, but also because they don't want to be undermined or made to feel stupid for being the ones to ask those questions. 
 21:37: So I, I like the idea of having someone on boarding, pairing with someone else who can help model. 
 21:43: Asking those questions, querying those things, pushing back on those. 
 21:46: I think it's a nice, nice way to bring someone into the company where you can go, oh, that's interesting. 
 21:50: I like that, yeah, oh I don't like that, you know. 
 21:53: I've don't know when I've been left alone and it's horrible the isolated because you think you should be able to follow it. 
 21:57: You assume it's guys, it's there, it's good, and actually the context is generally wrong somewhere. 
 22:04: And then you'll fiddle like if you're like me. 
 22:07: And you might make it worse. 
 22:09: And then that makes it even harder to talk to somebody because you actually feel like you've been the problem. 
 22:13: So it is a world, but not all the things can be documented in that way. 
 22:18: That's a great way of like introductory to a framework, introductory to how to do a release maybe where you are or how to write a test case, you know, those sorts of things can be generally described, I guess, to a set of setup can be done. 
 22:33: But a lot of what we do is a bit more ad hoc though, isn't it? 
 22:35: It's. 
 22:36: Who do you speak to about what? 
 22:38: That's some of the knowledge that we lose. 
 22:39: And certainly in the leadership role, that's the knowledge I find almost hardest to find out in a company. 
 22:46: You come in and unless you've been there 10 years, you don't know who to speak to about what. 
 22:51: Like you can get a lovely matrix job description title thing. 
 22:55: It doesn't really tell you much. 
 22:57: And that getting that knowledge out of people's heads is hard. 
 23:01: Getting that documented, recorded in, or passed on is often hard. 
 23:06: Get shadowing is one of the better ways, but it is something that I've had people say, oh, it's just time. 
 23:11: People don't generally stay in jobs more than a couple of years. 
 23:14: So if it's gonna take a couple of years to learn it, then there's a problem here. 
 23:18: That's good to grind your gears as well. 
 23:20: Like if you're, if you're trying to get up to the same speed as other people in the organisation and it takes you longer because there isn't a clear route. 
 23:29: You don't feel you're performing at your best. 
 23:31: That's going to grind you along the way as well. 
 23:34: So, you know, you may not even stay a couple of years if it's not a satisfying job to be in. 
 23:39: It puts you disadvantage to your colleagues, if you know what I mean. 
 23:42: Anything that feels like that can be frustrating, to your point. 
 23:46: That information is something that we've got to carry cascade, share, store, create, and you know, sometimes it's just being less robotic with some of these things and actually having more of a rough description of the type of stuff people do rather than just a job title. 
 24:01: It's maybe on a diagrammatic sense that all you can afford is a job title. 
 24:04: It doesn't mean somewhere else there isn't a bit more of a guide, an intro. 
 24:08: Some such, oh this guy looks after, does knows a little bit about Jira, it's a classic one. 
 24:13: Therefore, he's the god of Jira. 
 24:14: That's the way it often sometimes it works, but even just little hints to who might know something about, oh yeah, Dave built this stuff, that's sort of like mini biography almost of people can be a great way of kind of understanding a bit more about what they might know, who to speak to about what, where to start. 
 24:31: So that's really what you need. 
 24:32: Let's take this topic in a slightly different way and yeah, talking about resilience. 
 24:37: What about people who are resilient to giving up their knowledge? 
 24:40: You know, people that Yeah. 
 24:42: They they think that sharing their knowledge means that they're then superfluous and and may well lose their job because they've they've shared, you know, they're, they're so intent on keeping their knowledge because then they are deemed as useful. 
 24:55: Mhm. 
 24:56: I can understand the mindset to a certain extent. 
 24:59: I was in a previous job in a room with a senior vice president who explained to us how it was a good thing that we were training up our own replacements. 
 25:11: Go. 
 25:12: Not a very tactful person, it turned out. 
 25:15: If that's a knowledge transfer that ultimately ends in in your dismissal, then I can sort of understand it, but there is a certain amount of trust that you need to have in an organisation. 
 25:28: So, we talk about the safety of asking questions. 
 25:32: You also want to have the safety to share knowledge and to make yourself less indispensable on the hope that in doing so you're actually making yourself more indispensable as a collaborating team member. 
 25:47: Yeah, it's one of those things that I've talked about with  consultancy and my sort of take on consultancy was always. 
 25:55: I don't want to work with a service provider who's going to basically get themselves clawed in and hide knowledge or take protect IP so that we have to keep on paying them. 
 26:09: I want one that's going to be so damn good at being here, sharing, training, solving problems that we want to give them more work because they are that brilliant, like as a. 
 26:21: More of a trusted strategic partner, rather than someone that we've ended up getting stuck with for a long, long period of time. 
 26:29: And I feel like that's a decision you probably make either consciously or subconsciously, , in different companies. 
 26:35: And the more, more of one you see, maybe the less you want to spend in that company, as you go. 
 26:40: But I think as folks. 
 26:41: Who have maybe been privileged to be leaders in, in their workplace. 
 26:45: One of the things I would say I would try and do is not only remove dependence on me, but also in terms of, if I did enough that they didn't need me around, I'd probably think I'd done a good enough job in transferring those things. 
 26:59: You'd want to leave a place better than you found it normally. 
 27:02: Hm, I hope. 
 27:04: I've always had the mentality of my role is to make myself redundant as a leader. 
 27:08: If if I can help the people around me do it without me, I've done a fantastic job. 
 27:13: That's the measure of success in my head. 
 27:16: I want, I don't want to be a, I guess, , single point failure. 
 27:19: I don't want to be a bottleneck. 
 27:20: I don't want to be those, those sorts of things. 
 27:23: So the more I can cascade, share, disseminate information, the better I'm doing my job. 
 27:29: It doesn't mean one other person needs to know everything I do. 
 27:31: That's possibly crazy. 
 27:33: Diversify, you know, have different people that have different knowledge of different things. 
 27:38: Spread that knowledge, spread that information, enable people to do the right thing so that there isn't single points of failure. 
 27:46: There isn't multiple single points of failure. 
 27:48: If Russell's off and David's off, , we can't do anything. 
 27:51: That would be bad. 
 27:52: So you disseminate, share, and you try and enable people. 
 27:56: Like if I ask someone to do something and they need some support, I give them some support, you work with them, you collaborate. 
 28:02: It's that whole thing about like fishing and fishing rods. 
 28:05: You want to give them the fishing rods so they can catch their own. 
 28:07: You want to enable them to have that knowledge because otherwise all you're doing is telling them or consenting or giving permission. 
 28:14: You've got to be in a place where you enable people to make that decision in the future and pass on that information. 
 28:21: And I think knowledge sharing's got to be centred around this idea that a single point of knowledge, bad. 
 28:27: We talked about turning servers off at the very start. 
 28:29: If you have only got one place where you store all information everywhere, if it goes down, like you wouldn't do that with servers for your application life systems, but sometimes we do that as a strategy of the business. 
 28:42: Everything must be in SharePoint. 
 28:44: Great, once if SharePoint goes down. 
 28:45: We don't have the kind of backup plans and diversification of things. 
 28:49: And I'm a, I don't think SharePoint's the world's greatest, I think it's the worst, but actually having one place where everything goes is sometimes a dangerous strategy. 
 28:59: I kind of get it because the opposite is you have multiple places look everything up and you've got duplication and chaos. 
 29:06: But it's about striking the right balance and having different things. 
 29:09: You might not have the same data everywhere, but you're willing to make sure that you're not got one place, I guess that all that information is or one person or those sorts of worlds. 
 29:18: And sharing it is the key thing, is making sure that people have that information, that you are training them and it's not just a document. 
 29:27: I think for me, recognising that if someone chooses not to. 
 29:32: Share that or finds it difficult to share their information. 
 29:35: First of all, I'd question the psychological safety of the company, first of all, I think Chris mentioned it before. 
 29:41: Why are they choosing not to? 
 29:43: But if, The current company is psychologically safe. 
 29:46: I would also ask them why, why they're struggling with that, you know, and if, if it is about job security, if it's suitable and sensible, reassuring them that it it's purely just knowledge sharing. 
 29:58: And I always now, rather than being run over by a bus, which is rather negative, I always say, if you win the lottery. 
 30:05: And choose not to, you know, which is a bit more positive way of saying it, especially to a particular person. 
 30:11: You need to frame it as to helping other people, not as you losing your knowledge or your or your expertise. 
 30:20: Absolutely, the context that it's messaged is vitally important as well. 
 30:26: I like that. 
 30:27: Definitely don't get hit by bosses. 
 30:31: Part of the resilience part as well is, is how live the knowledge is. 
 30:36: Mm. 
 30:37: So that could be a function of age, but it could also be a function of use. 
 30:41: Refreshing and stuff, right? 
 30:43: Yeah, exactly, and redoing transfers. 
 30:48: So in the past, for example, where we've had new hires and I'm no longer a new hire. 
 30:54: I have actually sat in on the training sessions just to familiarise with the way the training sessions go through and to hear the questions that the new hires bringing because everybody brings a different perspective to things. 
 31:07: So it's actually a great way of keeping your hand in and keeping active. 
 31:12: But if you have a community of practise or a team or whomever that kind of periodically rotates around this training function, whether they're delivering it, receiving it, or simply sitting in. 
 31:28: It's a good way of making sure that there's a flow of knowledge, also a flow of ideas and a stimulation of further ideas. 
 31:36: Because what might happen is that somebody would teach person A would teach person B something and person C would say, well, why do we do that? 
 31:45: And it could lead to further development, problem solving, changing up policies or processes or whatever, a movement towards more efficiency. 
 31:56: So having the knowledge isn't enough, it needs to kind of be cycled and circulated. 
 32:01: I think that's a really good point cause like we're MP even. 
 32:05: We have single people that do certain things and stuff like that, but actually getting other people into it improves the process. 
 32:11: You learn like the way we did, one person does something, but then with the second person coming in makes it better, gives improvements to it. 
 32:18: It's not stopped. 
 32:20: So actually by cycling people through these things, it helps drive that continuous process improvement because otherwise it's the same person with the same ideas and the same situation with the same background, with the same context. 
 32:32: It's harder on that person. 
 32:33: It's not a failure of that person, it's harder on that person to think differently about a problem unless they have a life experience or something else or it goes wrong. 
 32:40: So there's a lot of parallels with we do regression testing. 
 32:43: Why do we do these tests? 
 32:45: Well, we've always done those tests. 
 32:46: What does this test do? 
 32:48: I don't know what this test does, but we always run this test. 
 32:50: Part of the pack. 
 32:51: What value does this give? 
 32:52: Is it's still relevant blah. 
 32:54: Blah, blah, blah, blah. 
 32:55: But we could, we could dive a lot deeper in, but friends, we have got the time. 
 33:01: Thank you very much, Mr. 
 33:03: Incredible Dermot Kenney, for joining us today. 
 33:06: For those of you who aren't watching, which is, all of you, Dermot's wearing a wonderful Mr. 
 33:10: Incredible t-shirt today. 
 33:12: So we thank you for joining us again. 
 33:14: Thank you for having me. 
 33:15: How many. 
 33:16: So is that now 3 or 4 now, then? 
 33:18: 4-ish, I think, yeah. 
 33:20: Yeah, yeah, you're climbing up the rankings. 
 33:22: This is impressive. 
 33:23: Thank you for joining us again. 
 33:24: Thank you to our, , good friends and Focus for their continued support. 
 33:29: We may or may not be announcing more stuff about Pier 26 very shortly, friends. 
 33:36: That's quite exciting. 
 33:38: And please, we love your feedback, please tell us ideas you'd like thing for us to talk about, how you're finding the pod, how you're finding our audio levels, are there really good things going on. 
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 34:08: Thank you very much, everyone. 
 34:10: So now, It's goodbye from the testing peers. 
 34:14: Goodbye.