Half-Life of Knowledge

Half-life is generally a scientific term that denotes the time it takes for half of something to decay, or otherwise degrade. It is commonly used to describe the time it takes for half of the unstable atoms in radioactive material to decay. It also used in the drug industry to indicate the time it takes for the concentration of a drug in the body to drop to half of the starting dose.

In this article, half-life is used to describe the slow decay of knowledge.

When we learn something, that information does not stick with us permanently. Think back to high school geometry or calculus and try to recall what you learned there. What you are experiencing is the effect of the half-life of knowledge.

There is a delicate balance in creating a continuous improvement culture.

It relies upon a tremendous amount of skill from a tremendous number of people. That means that your team needs to be well-trained in continuous improvement concepts. The balance is that you need to actually do something. If you focus too much on training, actual work doesn’t get done. Neglect training, and your team will work hard, but accomplish far less than they could be.

Day-to-day skills stick, because they are reinforced repeatedly. Daily management, for example, by definition, is done every day, so people remember how to do it.

But what about things like cause and effect diagrams, or how to do value stream maps, or the steps of jidoka? If you don’t do them regularly, how much you remember fades over time. The pace of that time is the half-life of your knowledge.

Now, unlike scientific, physical things, this is not well-defined and repeatable by experimentation. It is different for each individual. The thing for people to do is to make sure they cultivate the knowledge they have that is important to their job.

The first step is to catalog what is important to your current role, and to the future job you want. You have limited time, and you won’t be able to maintain a working knowledge in everything you ever learned. Figure out what is important and focus on those items.

Then do a gap analysis. In this step, determine which skills you have that your feel good about, and those you need to work on. The ones you need to work on fall into two categories. There are those skills you never had, and those that you once were proficient in, but now are lacking.

The ones you had will be easier to re-learn.

As you start building up your skill portfolio, though, highlight the skills that you think will be the hardest to maintain. These are going to generally be the more complicated tasks you do, or the ones that you do less frequently.

Make a plan on how to maintain those skills. It might be refresher courses, cheat sheets you draw up, or just making sure to use the skill on occasion. Getting a bump back up in the skill level is easier the closer you are to your last use of the skill. The longer you wait, the more effort it will take to regain your expertise.