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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?
[ Systemic
Education . Systemic Coaching ]
When do you learn?
You learn when you gain experience. Your learning may
take a number of forms.
- Adaptive learning - you adapt (or react)
to your changing environment.
- Generative learning - you learn not only
to adapt - you also learn to change how you perceive (or assess or
measure) your changing environment.
- 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.
- 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)
- Socialization: Acquire experience by
observation, imitation and communication
- Articulation: Transform experience into
knowledge
- Combination: Codify knowledge and combine
it with other knowledge
- 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.
As a defining feature of expertise is unconscious competence,
Expert Modeling trains people by duplicating the beliefs,
values, attitudes, heuristics, mental processes and physical activities that
characterize proven expert performance in your organization. See Expert Modeling - ElicitationMake "excellence" your brand differentiator! |
