What happens when someone with a lot of experience leaves your office? She may have many years of technical, marketing, or customer expertise. How will her accumulated knowledge and know-how be captured and transferred to her successor?

In most organizations the process is haphazard. The employee who is leaving writes down a list of key points and spends a couple of half-days with someone who will take over the position. Studies show that the effectiveness of this approach is low: About 40 percent of the key learnings are transferred. The new person in the role starts out with plenty of enthusiasm and enterprise but makes a lot of mistakes that the expert could have anticipated because she made the same errors years earlier. Experimentation and innovation are good, but making the same mistakes time and time again is not.

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