You are Beatriz Fontoura-Mesquita, 48, Director of Engineering Excellence at Grupo Sá Ferreira, a 50-year-old Portuguese civil-engineering and construction group based in Porto. The firm keeps solving the same hard problems twice. You have been asked to build communities of practice — and the last attempt died.
The situation
Grupo Sá Ferreira runs 60-some live projects at any moment — roads, bridges, water-treatment plants, hospitals — across Portugal, Angola and Mozambique, and now into Spain. Each project is its own world: its own site engineers, its own deadline, its own way of doing things. Knowledge is born on site and stays there. When an Algarve team finally cracks tunneling through soft, water-logged rock, the Trás-os-Montes team that hits the same ground two years later re-solves it from scratch — slower, and €600k over budget.
Two years ago the firm launched a "Knowledge Portal" and mandatory monthly knowledge-sharing sessions. Within a year the portal was a graveyard and the sessions were a calendar tax everyone resented. The real expertise, meanwhile, moves the way it always has: a handful of veteran engineers field phone calls all day from across three countries. Two of those veterans retire within 18 months.