DaChispa

KM lessons from hairdressing – a bit of a stretch? Maybe not. I’ve changed hairdressers recently and I was nervous, because a bad haircut can take a while to recover from. Fortunately I have struck gold and ended up with the best haircut I have had for years. What was interesting was the process I went through in the course of the appointment. I started out by giving quite specific instructions as to what I wanted done. The hairdresser made some sensible suggestions and then went to work. As time went on, I realised that she was doing a really good job and I stopped giving direction and told her to do what she thought was best. I went home very happy. How does this relate to KM? Well, I think it has to do with demonstrating expertise in order to build trust. If we can make expertise explicit in the way a hairdresser does – a good haircut is highly visible – we can more easily build a trust relationship with our experts. Trust is at the root of a lot of KM success – the building of successful communities of practice is based on it. There, the equivalent of the successful hairstyle is a good piece of advice or a strong paper.

Trust is also important in preventing re-inventing the wheel because you think you can do better, or not looking elsewhere because you think you know best. If I had kept on with the previous hairdresser, or forced the new one to do exactly the same thing as before – I would not have ended up with something so much better. If we could persuade people to ‘change hairdressers’ once in a while, maybe they too would get a different result.