Table of Contents
Effective Information Flow © Martyn Carruthers
If you can recall useful data from raw experience, you can use that data 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 you can survive the consequences of your decisions – you may be deemed intelligent. If you can enjoy long-term benefits, you may be assumed to have wisdom.
- Data concerns raw experience, reactions and measurements
- Information is about measuring tools, measurers and contexts
- Knowledge concerns skills, discernment and relevance
- Intelligence is about making decisions and solving problems
- Wisdom concerns insight, benefits and consequences
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Information Technology & Knowledge Management
Your skills as a manager depend on your ability to identify, store and retrieve useful information to create a knowledge database – a knowledge base primarily used for making wise decisions. We create knowledge … which re-creates us.
Knowledge Management (KM) is more than information technology (IT). KM overlaps project management and relationship management. You can transfer information with a fax or email. You can transfer knowledge with effective training, you can transfer skills with coaching and instill wisdom with mentorship. We use knowledge management to predict, cause and measure change:
- Proactive: What can we change?
- Reactive: How can we cope with change?
- Competition: How can we change it better than others?
- Proof: How can we prove we changed it?
Systemic Education . Accelerated Learning
When do you learn?
You learn when you apply remembered experience. Your learning may take a number of forms.
- Adaptive learning – you change (or adapt or react) to your changing environment.
- Generative learning – you not only adapt – you change how you perceive (or assess or measure) your changing environment.
- Evolutionary learning – you not only adapt and perceive, you change (or transform or transcend) your identity within your changing environment.
- Systemic learning – you not only learn to adapt, perceive and change identity, you learn how to change (or manage or lead) your relationships within your changing environment.
Knowledge Management
Information only becomes knowledge in a context or system. You can use Knowledge Management to find relevant information:
- Socialization: you acquire experience by observation, imitation and communication
- Articulation: you transform experience into knowledge
- Combination: you codify knowledge and combine it with other knowledge
- Integration: you integrate knowledge into a repertoire of competencies
Practical Knowledge Management
A human system’s most valuable asset is the condensed experience or 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:
- Best practices
- Lessons learned
- Appropriate examples
- Insights and innovations
- Local procedural knowledge
- Coaching aids / training skills
For each step – research “What to know?” as well as “What to do?”.
Why is Knowledge important?
The data that you or your organization knows is unlikely to ensure survival. What you or your human system knows how to do with this data drives performance and success in responding to changing environments. Key questions include:
- 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 will you require?
- Processes: What record system will you need tomorrow?
- Sales: What coming opportunities can you capitalize on?
Limits of Knowledge: Sharing Expertise
Critical knowledge may not be codified into rules, examples and knowledge. In an organization, certain knowledge essential for survival (critical knowledge) is often embedded in the behaviors of a few people who appear to have expert skills that cannot be easily duplicated. (A presupposition of expert modeling is that “Experts do not know exactly how they achieve expertise“.)
Consider experts at mental mathematics. If you ask such people how they can do mental math so quickly, you will probably get a stunned look, followed by a smile and “I really don’t know“.
If critical expertise could be replicated amongst members of your organization – if they could learn faster than your competitors – your organization will be more productive, more responsive and more effective. Your organization is more likely to succeed in a changing world.
Critical expertise in a knowledge base includes four important elements:
- Expert skills and capabilities, analyzed into behavioral strategies
- Expert knowledge and competencies, organizational routines, habits and world view
- Expert infrastructure for producing, processing and disseminating knowledge
- Expert methods of accessing, communicating and utilizing information
Our effective Expert Modeling programs not only replicates critical expertise across a team or work force, but also trains your on-site trainers to continue this program unaided.
From Expert Knowledge to Expert Performance
Our Expert Modeling integrates systemic coaching, accelerated learning, value theory, typological analysis, behavioral psychology and management science to duplicate excellence. We use Expert Modeling to decompose skills, create models and transfer competence, as part of individual, family team or organizational development.
To duplicate the defining feature of expertise, the ability to be an expert without thinking about each step, often called unconscious competence, we train people by duplicating the beliefs, values, attitudes, heuristics, mental processes and physical activities that characterize proven expert performance. Here is an overview:
Elicit Expertise
- Identify the critical expertise
- Identify appropriate experts
- Elicit components of expert skills
- Decompose expert skills
- Compose an expert model
Model Expertise
- Ensure experts perform expertly
- Synthesize components of expertise
- Identify elements of knowledge base
- Identify critical interconnections
- Test and refine the model
Duplicate Expertise
- Formulate a final model
- Present a pilot training
- Formalize training program
- Train in-house trainers
- Provide mentorship
Expert Elicitation . Expert Modeling . Expert Duplication
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Do you want to resolve emotional challenges and solve relationship problems?