Yesterday’s post addressed the key process steps for how to capture knowledge to ensure you have the content needed to enable a target audience to meet desired learning objectives. Today, let’s explore the more elusive challenges of how to capture knowledge in those situations when an experienced (expert) individual has serendipitous moments of insight (that they gain only from experience) that lead to a problem solution.
What I’ve found is that, honestly, it depends on the content expert. For example, there are times experts are very aware of their process and are happy to share what they know; gathering content from them is easy. On the other hand, there are times people are less aware of what it is they do so well that has made them the “expert” on a subject. In cases like that, I find it best to get them talking about what they do and have done, i.e., encourage them to tell stories. You can get them started by asking questions like:
- Think about some projects where you were doing XXX (like what we want our target audience to be able to do). Tell me about one of the projects that went extremely well. Why was that so successful? What did you (or others) do (or not do)?
- Now, tell me about a project that went poorly (either from your own experience or one that you observed). Why would you classify that as a being a problem project? What went wrong? What would you do different next time to not make the same mistakes?”
This will get the expert talking and help reveal not only details behind their process, but also war stories and key success factors—all very useful items when trying to teach someone how to “do as the expert does.”
- Robin
Copyright Robin Donnan 2007. All Rights Reserved.
Performance Associates, Inc.
