The Impact of Oral Traditions on Mentoring and Knowledge Transfer

“We’ve always done it this way” might be six of the most infuriating words you can string together in work culture. The traditions of leading by example and verbal instruction are strong, because often they’re the easiest to find in the moment when you need help the most. The solution to that in many places is a set of written instructions that anyone can use. Can they find it, though?

I’m a fan of oral tradition, and how could I not be? The Cajuns that I’m descended from spent hundreds of years with no written language, but a rich culture of stories, traditions, superstitions, music, and food. That’s just how we learned things. My mother was a native of East Texas who’d lived all over the world and was determined to learn to cook the Cajun dishes my father grew up with. Her teacher was my great-grandmother, Sarah Hernandez Babineaux. Mom-Mom taught her as best as she could, by example and description. The biggest obstacle to that was that Mom-Mom barely spoke English, and my mother didn’t speak Cajun French. What came together was a complicated mimed game of charades between the two women, one barely over 5 feet and the other not even, probably reaching by tiptoe and gesturing into a cast iron pot while speaking two different languages. Mom learned well, and we frequently urge her to write those recipes down, but some things you can’t learn if you’re not staring down into a browning roux.

The Cajun oral tradition benefits from the unique situations where it was applied. When the pot is too greasy, or the name of some new ingredient wasn’t known, the training changed to fit the situation. Cajun culture evolved, taking in more of the local influence of Native American, Spanish, and English around them. The way that it adapted made it what it is today, and it’s an amalgam of the solutions that we needed the most. Cajuns by nature are resourceful, which is why anything a Cajun puts in their gumbo still makes it an authentic one.

In this way, cooking is a message our ancestors share with us, but can this work for the modern office? We’re already doing it. When I can’t find a button in Revit and I holler over the cubicle wall at the person next to me, that’s oral tradition. If you’re wondering if Cajuns still use food as a love language, look no further than company-wide crawfish boils. These are not the pizza parties that new workers bemoan. The pizza party that is supposed to motivate can often come across as insincere, or a minimal sharing of profit and success. A crawfish boil is an act of service, and a community effort to put together and clean up after. It ain’t easy to pull off, but that extra effort translates, I think, to a shared experience.

Like the crawfish boil, the oral tradition is an expensive one, both in time and money. It can be spur-of-the-moment, or it can be a mentorship program. It would be cheaper to have a reference document that everyone trains on, but those documents can’t respond to problems that come up, or address how our knowledge base increases and shifts with every new hire and project. This extra time cost is a good investment and provides a community that new hires need to feel like a member of the team.

Training documentation is still great and has its place, but please don’t strap new hires into headphones and set them in front of a mountain of prerecorded and preprinted instruction. The transition from new hire to old hat should be one largely experienced face-to-face, and the lessons we learn shouldn’t be relegated to the dark corners of our network drives. If you take anything from this, develop a mentor program first and back it up with training documentation. Even if your new hires don’t stay to train the next generation, they can remain a part of your community as the lines between companies blur and collaborative work evolves.