Today I read an article from Dorothy Leonard with James Martin in HBR online, titled "How your organization's experts can share their knowledge". I like the work of Dorothy Leonard, loved her book "Deep smarts", so I started reading right away.
On a side note, I realize I haven't blogged for a long time, meaning I never finished the drafts that I started. It has been a crazy time, especially in summer when my boyfriend suddenly got very ill (bacterial eye infection that took his sight in one eye - he's feeling much better now though we still have to wait if his sight will return) at the same time as I was training for a 50 kilometer trail run, so finding time to run between hospital visits and later assisting in my boyfriend's medication. A deep and high (I finished the 50k) in a few months time took all my attention.
Anyway, back to the article on expert knowledge sharing. Leonard talked about the difficulty of knowledge sharing by experts before in her book "Deep smarts". In this paper she comes with a new term, a "knowledge cascade". It is "the diffusion of experts' "deep smarts" to and through multiple learners in a way that minimizes the burden on the experts". I like this concept, as experts are often asked to solve the difficult issues (that require their attention) and perhaps coach people and answer questions at the same time. Leonard and Martin describe four ways to create this knowledge cascade. They give an important role to the "nexpert", basically the person next in line to the expert, who is the first to learn from the expert. The four ways are: Pay it forward, Present a challenge, Set up a 'campfire' and Translate.
Pay it forward means that the nexpert directly teaches or mentors others from what they've learned from the expert. In the second, present a challenge, the nexpert creates a scenario or problem-set based on the expert's experience. This is a bit more difficult than the first to develop, but for the learner a better way to actively learn than just listening. I liked the idea of setting up a 'campfire'. This is a meeting of a mix of experts and novices in which the nexpert presents lessons, which are discussed and expanded, which generates new knowledge. The final way to cascade knowledge is translation. It means creating an artifact that captures the expert's knowledge so it can be passed down to others. Examples are guidelines, a checklist or a wiki. This sounds like "externalization" in the SECI model by Nonaka and Takeuchi (from tacit to explicit knowledge).
It's a short article, with four suggestions (there are probably more) to use the expert's knowledge and experience without putting all the burden on him/her.
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