LEARNING FROM SME SITE MANAGERS THROUGH DEBRIEFING

Site managers acquire knowledge through solving complex problems in their day-today work. However, the construction industry does not capture this valuable experience formally for the greater benefit of all. If this body of knowledge could be collected, structured and disseminated, there would be significant benefits to the construction industry at large. A research is reported here where the tacit knowledge residing with some site managers of ‘small and medium enterprises’ (SMEs) is being explicated. 32 site managers from 12 construction SMEs are involved in the research, where stories are used as a basis of recollecting previous events. The participating site managers are debriefed on their stories in order to explicate learning from the events and transform the knowledge gained into a form that is accessible to a wider audience. The preliminary debriefings carried out so far have succeeded in capturing tacit knowledge and extracting greater learning from the daily problem-solving events of these site managers.