In this interview, Christopher Parsons and an unnamed guest (Speaker B) explore how the COVID‑19 pandemic and the rapid shift to remote and hybrid work have transformed the way organizations create, share, and retain knowledge. The conversation begins with the guest recounting a pre‑pandemic belief that tacit knowledge— the unwritten, experiential know‑how that is usually passed through informal, in‑person interactions— could not survive outside the office. Contrary to that expectation, the pandemic forced a massive experiment in virtual collaboration, revealing that many forms of tacit knowledge can be captured in long‑form recorded conversations, podcasts, and Zoom meetings that are searchable, scalable, and even enhanced by AI. The guests discuss how this shift has altered attitudes toward information consumption, leading to a willingness to engage with multi‑hour video content that would have previously been dismissed as too long. The discussion then moves to the implications for learning design. Traditional 60‑minute in‑person lectures are being replaced by on‑demand, native‑first content and flipped‑classroom models, where learners watch short, focused videos before participating in interactive discussions. Hybrid meetings are also evolving: while short meetings often default to Zoom, longer sessions (e.g., four‑hour retreats) see higher in‑person attendance because participants perceive greater value in face‑to‑face interaction for extended, discussion‑heavy formats. The guests also reflect on how their own assumptions about employee preferences have changed. Before the pandemic, they believed most people would choose to work in the office if given a choice; the crisis demonstrated that many now appreciate the control and convenience of remote work (e.g., muting oneself before speaking). Yet, they acknowledge that certain cultural or high‑stakes activities— such as performance‑review conversations or deep‑dive cultural change initiatives— still benefit from in‑person settings. Overall, the interview highlights a lasting re‑configuration of organizational learning, meeting design, and knowledge management driven by the forced adoption of remote work technologies and the discovery of new, scalable ways to capture and disseminate tacit knowledge.
Chapters
What's something you've changed your mind on with regards to— could be vicarious learning or the way that knowledge gets moved around, how organizations learn. What was a pretty strong conviction you had that you feel differently about now?
I would say if you had asked me pre-pandemic, right, pre-Zoom migration, can tacit knowledge survive in a non-in-person work environment, I would've been extraordinarily pessimistic. I would say I still think it can't all survive.
And by tacit knowledge, do you mean the transfer of it or you mean the, what, what, like what angle of it?
Yeah, sorry. The, the sort of sharing and dissemination of tacit knowledge. This is how we do things around here. Here's how you navigate the, the kind of thing. I, I loved your example of here's how you talk to a busy surgeon when you're doing a, a client pitch for them. The stuff that you just can't quite write down. I have been pleasantly surprised to see how much of that has persisted and adapted to the Zoom environment. And I think some of it is changing attitudes towards how we consume information and gather insight from other people. By the same token, if you had told me that there were 3-hour-long podcast episodes on YouTube that would have millions of views, I would've told you you were high and that people's attention spans are dwindling and blah, blah, blah. So I think there was some seismic shift in our willingness to do that. And it, again, it's this double positive whammy in the sense of knowledge management that a 3-hour casual conversation podcast is exactly what we would've done in the office, right? The kind of shooting the breeze, this whole conversation, we would've had this just in the office as a—
Or over a long lunch or whatever it is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. You know, the waiter would be very annoyed with us by now, right? Wanting to turn over the table, but we'd have this intellectual conversation. But the beauty now is because it's recorded, it is now scalable and searchable and AIable, for lack of a better catch-all phrase, in ways that then I think propels us that one step closer to a world where tacit knowledge doesn't have to be disseminated in person in interaction. I think there's still limits to it. I think you still need discussion and back and forth, but I'd say that would've been the thing that I would not have predicted migrating as well.
What do you think was the fundamental assumption that you held that prevented you from being able to see the way that it's transpired?
I think some of it was, I don't know, I was gonna say a misunderstanding of what people would be willing to do online. Right? And I don't actually know that it was a misunderstanding. I think the world just changed so much that we didn't have a choice. I don't think anybody preemptively would have chosen hybrid work or remote, fully remote work, right? If you gave people the choice, I think many more than do now would still say, no, I prefer to work in the office. It's essential for connecting and blah, blah, blah. All the things that we're hearing now, with companies who have expensive leases trying to drag people back into the office. I think all of us would've been saying those same things before.
Mm-hmm.
But there was just such a seismic shift. I mean, it's a, this will be a case study for 10,000 dissertations, but this was the kind of disruptive event that just fully resets expectations. Mm-hmm. And sorry, by this I mean the pandemic. Sure, sure. The pandemic was a, a resetter of expectations in ways that unlocked stuff that I, I just thought, yeah, would have never happened. I would never imagine a world where I would prefer a Zoom meeting over an in-person meeting. And I live that world every single day now because on Zoom I can mute myself before I say something bad. And in person, you know, I can't, right? Like there, it's weird. I would have not predicted that in a million years. I used to actually teach a class on teaming prior to the pandemic. And we did a fun little day on virtual teaming. Right. And as a novelty, I made them do it remotely. On Adobe Connect, right? This is how I'm dating myself now, but right, everybody had to log on to Adobe Connect and they hated it. It was like, it was a teaching point to show how different it was and how much you needed to change your approach as a leader if you were gonna work in a virtual environment. And I just laugh, that just feels so quaint and comical now because if you're teaching a teaming course now, yeah. The default is a virtual team.
You're gonna have to teach people how to be around each other in person, right? Like, right.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That, that would be the novelty day. It's genuinely true. We teach online courses now that have these in-person residencies where it's like, hey, we're gonna do this weird thing for 3 days. You're gonna come and be around each other.
Oh my God.
Instead of fully online.
Yeah. How do I go off camera? I don't understand. Like, right.
It, it's, it's fascinating and not something I would have ever predicted. I mean, I, you can go back, my writing from that era was all, we need to be in the office, you know, yeah, sometimes you might have to do this remotely, but really the only way to do it well is get people together.
Yeah.
And now my writing has changed to, okay, well how do we get it done given that we won't be all together?
Right. Yeah. I think that that parallels this, the big shift that we've seen. Um, we, We're building a learning management system into our technology. And the big seismic shift we've seen is these in-person 60-minute things is no longer going to be the default for most of our clients. It's like they're going to be on-demand native first, probably flipped classroom stuff. Go watch some of this, then we'll have a discussion. Just because no one wants to— I shouldn't say nobody. Many people do not want to sit through a 60-minute lecture, let alone a recorded 60-minute lecture. Yeah, it's just really shifting. And then the hybrid thing was interesting. I've seen a bunch of our clients move towards like even if they're in the office, they do Zoom or Teams, right? Because you can't have second-class citizens, like a different experience for people in the room than the people, you know, offline.
Yeah. Yeah. And people are right when they ask the question of like, so then what's the point, right, to come into the office to be on Zoom? Yeah. What are we doing? What we've found ironically is even having meetings for our center, if we had an hour-long meeting and we did all the right things, we provided lunch, we provided all that, 75% defaulted to the Zoom option. But interestingly, when we made it a 4-hour meeting, we called it a retreat to make sure that we didn't say the evil phrase of 4-hour meeting.
Right.
What was funny is more people opted for in-person than, than on Zoom. Now I have no solid theory or even evidence beyond that kind of n of 1, but it just got me thinking, will it totally change how we start to structure things? Because I get it, right? The logic, oh, like I'm going to do a 4-hour retreat on Zoom. That is miserable. I'd rather be here, be able to pop out, you know, or at least have a sidebar conversation with somebody. Like if I'm going to be doing it for 4 hours, I want to be there. You know, that'll be more fun. We'll interact or whatever. But yeah, again, not what I would have predicted 5 years ago.
The CEO of one of our clients, I was talking to her actually for an episode of the podcast that's going to come out after yours. Hey, fun fact, these things aren't always recorded in order. And she said, she says that she is going to do on-demand learning for things like here's how you use the CRM or here's how you do XYZ technology because like that doesn't need to be in person. It can be short, to the point.
And by on-demand, you mean online?
I mean online, prerecorded, like all the things.
Gotcha.
Yeah, but if it's something like we're changing the way we do performance reviews, that'll be in person. It'll be multiple hours, kind of along the lines of you're saying. And like, this is something we all need to experience as people because it's a fundamental culture change moment that we're going through versus here's some technical information we're trying to give you. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, it's an extension of this meeting could have been an email of now we have this whole range of you have to really decide what kind of Yeah. Thing is this, right? Is this an information only sort of thing? Is this discussion? Because I think for us, part of the move to a 4-hour retreat that I think did draw people in is it was obvious, more obvious to them. There's no way this is just announcements for 4 hours. 4 hours, right? Right. If they blocked 4 hours for it, there must be some kind of input or breakout group or something. Right.
Right.
Versus when it's a 1-hour meeting over lunch, we fully intended it to be a discussion. But they would always turn into just kind of one-way things because most of the people were online and it was just sort of like, okay, any questions from anybody? Nope. Nobody's camera's even on. Okay, we're just going to go along with it. And so, yeah, really thinking about the mode of meeting and the length of meeting now as a, a communicator of the impact or the intent in a way that maybe wasn't true before where a meeting was a meeting was a meeting.
