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Knowledge Management: What do you know?

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If you can recall useful patterns of your raw experience, you can use those patterns to predict future patterns. Your data has become information. If you use this information in a defined context, it becomes knowledge - a basis for decisions. If your decisions allow you to enjoy the benefits and survive the consequences of your decisions, people may call you wise.

Please don't make me think!

Thinking is a series of actions that enable you to review the past, solve problems now or plan the future. Thinking with purpose usually involves making decisions. Here is a rough but useful hierarchy from Expert Modeling for thinking with purpose:

• Data concerns raw experience, reactions and measurements
• Information concerns measuring tools, measurers and context
• Knowledge concerns skills, discernment and relevance
• Wisdom concerns insight, benefits and consequences

Although you can improve your decision-making with systemic coaching or mentorship, you either need a knowledge base from which to make decisions at all, or someone to make decisions for you.

Information Technology vs Knowledge Management

Your skills as a manager depend on your ability to identify useful information to create a personal or organizational knowledge base - primarily for making better decisions.

Much more than information technology (IT), knowledge management (KM) overlaps project and relationship management. You can transfer information with a fax or email. You can transfer knowledge with effective training and you can transfer wisdom with coaching and mentorship. Typical uses of knowledge are:

• Proactive: What do we want to change?
• Reactive: How do we cope with change?
• Competition: How can we do it / get it better than others?
• Proof: How do we prove we did it / got it?

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When do you learn?

You learn when you gain experience. Your learning may take a number of forms.

1. Adaptive learning - you adapt (or react) to your changing environment.
2. Generative learning - you learn not only to adapt - you also learn to change how you perceive (or assess or measure) your changing environment.
3. Evolutionary learning - you not only learn how to adapt and perceive, you also learn how to change your identity (or transform or transcend) within your changing environment.
4. Systemic learning - you not only learn how to adapt, perceive and change identity, you also learn how to change your relationships (or manage or lead) with your environment.

Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management is a core development process for finding relevant information in a context. Information becomes knowledge relative to an environment or system. Experience and knowledge can be interlinked in a “knowledge spiral” (See: Nonaka I., Takeuchi H. 1995: The Knowledge-Creating Company. Oxford University Press)

1. Socialization: Acquire experience by observation, imitation and communication
2. Articulation: Transform experience into knowledge
3. Combination: Codify knowledge and combine it with other knowledge
4. Integration: Integrate knowledge into a repertoire of competencies

Practical Knowledge Management

Your organization's most valuable asset is the knowledge of its members. Important or critical knowledge can be captured in a Knowledge Base, and the knowledge structured for communication and decisions. A Knowledge Base can include:

• Appropriate examples
• Best practices
• Insights & Innovations
• Knowledge Flow
• Lessons learned
• Local procedural knowledge

For each procedural step you can ask “What to know?” as well as “What to do?”.

Why is Knowledge important?

Except perhaps for government bureaucracies, what you or your organization knows about last year is unlikely to ensure survival. What your or your organization knows how to do appropriately in a changing environment will drive performance and success.

• Cost control: How can you control your support expenses?
• Investment: Which concepts or resources should you acquire?
• Operation: How can you retain profitable customers?
• Productivity: What coaching or training do you require?
• Processes: What records system do you need?
• Sales: What opportunities can you capitalize on?

Limits of Knowledge: Sharing Expertise

Critical knowledge may not be codified into rules, examples and knowledge. It often resides in the behaviors of a few people who appear to have "expert" skills that cannot be easily duplicated. Indeed, a rule of expert modeling is that "Experts do not know how they do it".

Consider experts at mental mathematics. If you ask such people how they do mental math so quickly, you will probably get a stunned look, followed by "I don't really know".

If your critical expertise could be replicated amongst members of your organization - if your people could learn faster than your competitors - your organization will be more productive, more responsive, and and more effective. An expert knowledge base has four elements:

• Expert skills and capabilities, analyzed into behavioral strategies
• Expert knowledge and competencies, organizational routines, cultural habits, personal attitudes and world views
• Expert infrastructure for producing, processing and disseminating knowledge
• Expert methods of accessing, communicating and utilizing information

An Expert Modeling program can not only replicate your experts' skills across a team or work force, but also train your on-site trainers to continue this program unaided.

From Expert Knowledge to Expert Performance

Expert Modeling combines systemic coaching, accelerated learning, value theory, typological analysis, behavioral psychology and management science to duplicate excellence. Expert Modeling is used to decompose skills, create models and transfer competence, as part of management and organizational development.

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