Archive for September, 2007
The making of an expert
July’s Harvard Business Review had a very interesting article based on the premise that experts are always made, not born. It highlights some key points on how people become experts:
o They practice ‘deliberately’. Unlike most of us, they don’t focus on things that they already know how to do, but rather on improving things they can’t do well
o They analyse their errors and work arduously to correct them
o They take the time they need to become experts. People who become famous, seemingly overnight, usually have spent a lot of time in training and preparation
o Experts find coaches and mentors to help them at different points in
their development – but eventually surpass them and become selfcoaches.
o Real experts seek out constructive, even painful feedback and constantly push themselves beyond their abilities and comfort level.
o Even traits such as charisma can be developed using these approaches
The good news is that anyone can become an expert. The bad news is that you have to work at it.
No commentsThe obvious question…
Back online, after a hectic summer – and to record an obvious question that I was asked recently. I was talking about knowledge management and what it meant (and how it could be taken forward) – the type of conversation all knowledge managers have. And then someone asked the obvious question “Yes, but what exactly IS knowledge?”. Well I have my stock answer – ‘knowledge is information in action’, or ‘knowledge is what you need to know to do your job’ but they really aren’t good enough. We had a bit of a conversation around this and came to the conclusion that knowledge meant different things to different areas of an organisation in terms of specific artefacts. For example knowledge to a research unit might be statistics or experimental data and its interpretation while to a legal department it is more likely to be around legal precedent and how to apply it. However, irrespective of what knowledge means (and I think that defining it for different areas suddenly becomes quite important) the ways in which we share and manage it are processes that are common across different functions.
It’s easy to get so blinkered in your specialism that you forget that you haven’t communicated the basics… people need to understand what knowledge is for them.
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