Let’s try to help KTMB to make our ride On The Train to be a bit better, June 24, 2010

I was not even out of my office building yet when somebody mentioned to me about the bad news regarding the Komuter service. The person is a regular commuter like me and according to her, her friend said that one of the electrical wires broke into two somewhere between Segambut and KL station rendered one line ceased to be operable. She was walking to the station to confirm the news and for her to take alternative to go home. She was complaining that she has a monthly ticket and if KTMB continued to behave this way she going to be at the losing end. So I was not surprise when I saw the crowds moving and coming from the same direction. As I was thinking of what to do an announcement came on air about the mishap and delays. The announcer also mentioned that who ever wish to continue with the journey their ticket will be refunded and with that I straight away decided to take the STAR LRT to Petaling. I queued up at the counter and got my RM4 refund. This morning the line between KL and Segambut was still not ready and a lot of people were late for work.

Let’s try to dissect the problem and maybe, just maybe, we could offer KTMB a solution. First of all from the six years experience that I have taken the Komuter Train service all their problems that I had faced were not new problems. Meaning that they have had experience on almost everything happening within this year before. From learning perspective they should have learned from all these experiences and be better equip to anticipate and deal with the problems but this did not happen. Why?

They do not now how to learn?
The have issue with knowledge flow so much so the lessons learned were not shared?
Not enough opportunity to share because of structure, culture or process?

Truly, most adults take for granted that since they are adults they know how to learn. In actual fact they do not have a clue. KTMB need to find out if this is so within it’s organization. How to learn properly is important in terms of comprehension and retention. The capacity to learn is also as important as ability to learn. Most need to understand both of these first in order to know what proper learning is. If you are a baby boomer highly likely you would not have a clue about this unless you read and learn about it. Taking into consideration the population of the staff of KTMB especially the technical section that mostly deals with the current situation they are facing. Learning style, retention and the way learning is design and deliver are very important for them. I am beginning to wonder what sort of learning and training intervention they provide at their Batu Gajah Training Centre?

Or maybe with all the learnings they had from dealing with the day to day problems and issues just stuck with few people in the organization and the learnings were not being shared enough. This could happen due to several reasons for them. The technical knowledge were not captured properly and thus not many know the knowledge exist within the organization. Maybe it is due to the knowledge are not flowing far and deep enough in the organization. There is a bottle neck or stopper somewhere along the line of their knowledge flow value chain. The barrier could be a person, social network or process and the three may have a connection to the culture of the organization.

If all these are not the problem then it is just a case of not enough opportunities exist or being created for them to share ‘war stories’ easily in the organization.