Expanding on my last post regarding tacit and explicit knowledge, one of the greatest challenges is how to convert tacit knowledge into explicit. The challenge comes in how to access and document that elusive tacit knowledge—knowledge which can often be an individual’s or company’s source of competitive advantage.
Much of my knowledge capture experience to date is related to specific workplace learning and performance improvement projects—for the purpose of ensuring we have the content needed to enable the target audience to meet the desired learning objectives. As such the process often goes like this:
1. Define and confirm the training or information need (and ensure that it is something that can be solved by training), e.g., make sure that it’s not an organizational or motivation issue (because no amount of training can solve that!)
2. Define the target audience and performance expectations, i.e., what is it that you need the audience to be able to DO as a result of completing the training?
3. Work with experts to learn how they have successfully met those performance expectations in the past. This content gathering can take the form of reading the company’s existing materials on the subject, researching how other leading companies have addressed the same problem, interviewing the experts, facilitating work process or other analysis-type sessions with experts, observing the experts at work, etc.
4. Synthesize the results of the content gathering phase. Return to the experts as needed to fill in any content holes until you have adequate information to teach others what the experts know/do.
From there, with the learning objectives as a guide, you can design, develop, and test an appropriate performance improvement session and/or tool that enables the target audience to successfully accomplish the desired learning objectives. (This is where appropriate adult learning theory, interactivity/action learning, media selection, performance support/job aids, e-learning, games, help systems, etc. all come into play depending on the need.)
- Robin
Copyright Robin Donnan 2007. All Rights Reserved.
Performance Associates, Inc.
