Elephants Never Forget

Elephants are extraordinary for so many reasons, but one of the most striking is their complex social structure and how the matriarch and other dominant females collect habits and memories throughout their years of experience, building what scientists call a memory bank. The matriarch’s memory is vital for the herd’s survival as she recalls the locations of water sources, safe migration paths, and areas abundant in food, which is crucial during times of drought or scarcity. This knowledge is passed down through generations, ensuring the continuity of the herd’s survival strategies and without this passing of knowledge the species would not survive.

For us mere humans most of our knowledge or explicit knowledge has been documented and can be sourced via the internet or is taught at schools, universities or colleges. Tacit knowledge is a type of understanding and skill that individuals gain through personal experience and is difficult to articulate, write down, or transfer to others. It includes things like intuition, wisdom, and “know-how” and can be shared through mentorship, observation, imitation, and is often transmitted informally through interactions and shared experiences within a group or organisation.

Fostering a culture of knowledge sharing, establishing robust off-boarding processes for departing employees, and developing systems for knowedge retention and retrieval are some ways to mitigate against the loss of knowledge in a company

When it comes to radio programming, yes there have been books written about certain aspects of programming and there are courses, some very good, that cover the basics but some explicit programming knowledge has not been captured and this has historically been passed down as has tacit knowledge, and with the number of experienced programmers having diminished over the years or simply no longer working in the industry the knowledge is not being passed on as widely as it once was.

Looking back over the past 40 years in radio there has obviously been a lot of change and people tend to highlight the corporatisation of the industry as the biggest change and I often hear that we are now “run by accountants” and people in Australia often look back at the glory years which depending on your age was either the 60’s and 70’s with the AM era and the introduction of Top 40 radio or the 80’s and 90’s with the FM era, when money was a plenty however nothing lasts forever and that time seems like a distant memory to those lucky enough to have worked at one of the big metro FM or AM stations depending on your era. During the late 90’s and the early 2000’s as the number of owners continued to shrink, the proverbial belt was tightening and we had key senior content people leave the industry and that included some of the best. The tightening of budgets due to pressure on profits, exacerbated by the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), led to reducing costs through redundancies which led to the slow march of networking and voice tracking, and as there were once herds of elephants roaming the Serengeti there was once an abundance of great talent on and off the air in radio, now that number has been reducing over time just as the herds of elephants roaming the Serengeti have been.

During these changing times the industry did not do the best job of nurturing talent and ensuring that the pipeline was supplying the next generation of talent at the level the industry needs. There is still great talent throughout the radio industry, but the loss of experienced radio programmers has meant that skills and knowledge are not being passed down to the next generation as widely as it once was and that knowledge is critical if you want success in a competitive market.

One impact of this is that some known practices get forgotten and replaced by practices that become the accepted norm. Let me generalise here to illustrate the point, for example, marketing historically was a critical part of what a radio station needed to do in order to be successful. There were a number of reasons for this, the first being that radio uses a recall methodology so keeping a station top of mind with listeners is important, stations that are in growth or want to remain successful need to increase cume (listeners) and marketing allows a station to attract new listeners and marketing also reinforces with existing listeners and clients why this is the station they listen to. Also marketing campaigns need to be of a decent weight to have the desired impact, this was because radio is not something people think a lot about, so in order for the marketing to cut through it needed to be a heavy weight campaign. In recent times with reduced budgets the weight of marketing campaigns has reduced and a medium weight campaign has become the new heavy weight campaign. I’m being simplistic to illustrate the point, but there were reasons why marketing budgets were the size they were and if you compromise, you lesson the ability to impact ratings. Again, to use another simple example, if you want to drive TSL across the workday, aside from a well crafted music hour then hourly cash contesting is an effective way to do that however with reduced budgets a lot of workday contests now carry the mechanic where you register to win. We know listeners like to hear people winning on the air and when you register to win, it’s harder to get a great caller when they are reacting to something that might happen vs something that has happened. Over time register to wins become the norm and we’ll wonder why driving TSL is more challenging.

Findings suggest that the impact of knowledge loss is reduced capability in strategic activities at the organisational level, and indirectly to ineffectiveness and inefficiencies at the individual level.

The industry can’t afford important knowledge to be lost and we need to do a better job of documenting explicit knowledge, and ensuring that tacit knowledge is also passed down. As companies strive for greater efficiencies a by product of that is less quality knowledge being passed down and the loss of more experience from the industry. The rise in networking is slowly moving us towards what occurred in the US, with for example, reduced localism, network music logs and a reduction in announcer creativity, which produces a less dynamic industry at a time when we are facing increasing competition from podcasts and other digital audio products including streaming services. Of course it’s important to remember that we are a commercial industry and shareholders expect radio companies to make a decent profit however while you can save yourself into prosperity in the short term, you can’t save yourself into prosperity in the long term. History tells us that time and time again, but its the residual damage of that short term race to reduce costs that is most concerning not least of all because of the further reduction in knowledge being passed down to the next generation, and one day, if we’re not careful we might find out that elephants do forget.