Build Your Knowledge Base

Engaging with knowledge and Knowledge Management are critical parts of development. The ability to navigate the flood of available data to find accurate information is tied directly to individuals’ existing knowledge and their skills at distinguishing credible information from misleading content.

There is ample evidence that many individuals lack the ability to accurately judge their understanding or the quality and accuracy of their performance (i.e., calibration). To truly develop our knowledge, we need to be engaged in deliberative practice. But to truly calibrate requires feedback, guidance, and coaching that you may not have access to within our organizations. This requires effort and deliberate building of a system and processes.

Information can be found with little mental effort but without critical analysis of its legitimacy or validity, the ease of information can actually work against the development of deeper-processing strategies. It is really easy to go-online and get an answer, but unless learners put themselves in positions to struggle cognitively with an issue, and unless they have occasions to transform or reframe problems, their likelihood of progressing into competence is jeopardized.

Creative teams

The more learners forge principled knowledge in a professional domain, the greater their reported interest in and identity with that field. Therefore, without the active pursuit of knowledge, these individuals’ interest in professional development may wane and their progress toward expertise may stall. This is why I find professional societies so critical, and why I am always pushing people to step up.

My constant goal as a mentor is to help people do the following:

Refuse to be lulled into accepting a role as passive consumers of information, striving instead to be active producers of knowledge
Probe and critically analyze the information they encounter, rather
than accepting quick, simple answers
Forge a meaningful interest in the profession and personal connections to members
of professional communities, instead of relying on moment-by-moment stimulation and superficial relationships

Competence

If we are going to step up to the challenges ahead of us, to address the skill gaps we are seeing, we each need to be deliberate in how we develop and deliberate in how we build our organizations to support development.

Competence

We can break down people’s abilities into four areas:

Capability	What people need to do to produce results
Skill	Broken into technical knowledge and practiced performance
Interest	Passion
Required behaviors	Operationalize the organization’s vision, culture, or way of being in behavioral terms.

Competence is a combination of Capability and Skill. If I do not have the capability for the work, no amount of developmental training will be helpful. And, I don’t have the skill, you will never see my capability. Competence is a combination of both.

Interest or passion for the work will influence the amount of time for practice. The more interested I am, the more time I will spend in practice. And if I don’t practice a skill, the skill goes away, and competence diminishes.

There is also a set of required behaviors. Practice arrives with many qualities, frequency of practice, duration of practice, depth of practice, and accuracy of practice. Accuracy of practice relates to required behaviors. Practice doesn’t make perfect, only perfect practice makes perfect.

Deliberate practice allows us to influence all four attributes.

Subject Matter Experts Role in Knowledge Management – a Competency Approach

A Subject Matter Experts (SME) is a fascinating creature, both those within an organization and those considered a SME outside their organization – for example by a professional society.

A SME is engaged in knowledge management activities, what we want is for those activities to be a explicit and systematic management of the processes of creating, gathering, validating, categorizing, archiving, disseminating, leveraging, and using knowledge – whether for improving the organization and the individuals in it or the broader profession.

The thing is, this is another skill set for most SMEs. There will be SMEs out there who can do this from practice, but we need to be more deliberate in providing the skills. To provide the skills we must understand what we need to teach, which is where a competency model is valuable.

For the purpose of this post I’ll use the same three levels the ASQ Human Development and Leadership technical community uses for their competency framework:

Basic: Possesses general, conceptual knowledge or awareness of this concept OR a limited ability to perform this skill. Needs reference materials to complete tasks related to this concept.
Intermediate: Able to apply knowledge of this concept in work OR can perform this skill consistently with minimal guidance.
Advanced: Provides expert advice and make sound judgments using knowledge of this concept OR provides consultation and leadership to others using this skill. Can foster greater understanding of this concept among colleagues and stakeholders.

Competency	Level to build towards
Knowledge of principles of knowledge management, for example conceptualizing, managing, preserving, and/or maintaining organizational knowledge.	Advanced
Knowledge of methods and techniques for capturing and codifying knowledge, for example storytelling, data mining, cognitive mapping, decision trees, and/or knowledge taxonomies.	Advanced
Knowledge of methods and techniques for disseminating and/or sharing knowledge across individuals, groups, and organizations.	Advanced
Skill in designing and implementing knowledge management strategy.	Intermediate
Skill in identifying the quality, authenticity, accuracy, impartiality, and/or relevance of information from various sources, for example databases, print and online media, speeches and presentations, and observations.	Advanced
Skill in organizing and synthesizing information from multiple sources, for example databases, print and online media, speeches and presentations, and observations.	Advanced
Skill in curating instructional content, tools, and resources, for example researching, evaluating, selecting, and/or assembling publicly available online courseware.	Basic
Skill in identifying the type and amount of information needed to support the development of others in the topic.	Advanced
Skill in developing, managing, facilitating, and/or supporting knowledge networks and communities of practice.	Advanced

We need to recognize that not every SME will get to this level, or have the time to consistently apply it. This is why it is important to have knowledge management experts to support, nurture and step in where needed to assist.

Experts think differently

Research on expertise has identiﬁed the following diﬀerences between expert performers and beginners

Experts have larger and more integrative knowledge units, and their representations of information are more functional and abstract than those of novices, whose knowledge base is more fragmentary. For example, a beginning piano player reads sheet music note by note, whereas a concert pianist is able to see the whole row or even several rows of music notation at the same time.
When solving problems, experts may spend more time on the initial problem evaluation and planning than novices. This enables them to form a holistic and in-depth understanding of the task and usually to reach a solution more swiftly than beginners.
Basic functions related to tasks or the job are automated in experts, whereas beginners need to pay attention to these functions. For instance, in a driving Basic functions related to tasks or the job are automated in experts, whereas beginners need to pay attention to these functions. For instance, in a driving school, a young driver focuses his or her attention on controlling devices and pedals, while an experienced driver performs basic strokes automatically. For this reason, an expert driver can observe and anticipate traﬃc situations better than a beginning driver.
Experts outperform novices in their metacognitive and reﬂective thinking. In other words, they make sharp observations of their own ways of thinking, acting, and working, especially in non-routine situations when auto mated activities are challenged. Beginners’ knowledge is mainly explicit and they are dependent on learned rules. In addition to explicit knowledge, experts have tacit or implicit knowledge that accumulates with experience. This kind of knowledge makes it possible to make fast decisions on the basis of what is often called intuition.
In situations where something has gone wrong or when experts face totally new problems but are not required to make fast decisions, they critically reﬂect on their actions. Unlike beginners, experienced professionals focus their thinking not only on details but rather on the totality consisting of the details.
Experts’ thinking is more holistic than the thinking of novices. It seems that the quality of thinking is associated with the quality and amount of knowledge. With a fragmentary knowledge base, a novice in any ﬁeld may remain on lower levels of thinking: things are seen as black and white, without any nuances. In contrast, more experienced colleagues with a more organized and holistic knowledge base can access more material for their thinking, and, thus, may begin to explore diﬀerent perspectives on matters and develop more relativistic views concerning certain problems. At the highest levels of thinking, an individual is able to reconcile diﬀerent perspectives, either by forming a synthesis or by integrating diﬀerent approaches or views.

Level	Performance
Beginner	Follows simple directions
Novice	Performs using memory of facts and simple rules
Competent	Makes simple judgmentsfor typical tasksMay need help withcomplex or unusual tasksMay lack speed andflexibility
Proficient	Performance guided by deeper experience Able to figure out the most critical aspects of a situation Sees nuances missed by less-skilled performers Flexible performance
Expert	Performance guided by extensive practice and easily retrievable knowledge and skillsNotices nuances, connections, and patterns Intuitive understanding based on extensive practice Able to solve difficult problems, learn quickly, and find needed resources

Levels of Performance

Sources

Clark, R. 2003. Building Expertise: Cognitive Methods for Training and Performance Improvement, 2nd ed. Silver Spring, MD: International Society for Performance Improvement.
Ericsson, K.A. 2016. Peak: Secrets From the New Science of Expertise. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Kallio, E, ed. Development of Adult Thinking : Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Cognitive Development and Adult Learning. Taylor & Francis Group, 2020.

Know the Knows

When developing training programs and cultural initiative sit is useful to break down what we really want people to know. I find it useful to think in terms of the following:

know-how: The technical skills to do the work
know-what: The ability to perform functional problem-solving, to adapt the process and innovate
know-who: networking and interpersonal skills, with social/emotional intelligence, for empathy or social network capacities
know-where: institutional and system knowledge of how the work fits into a larger ecosystem
know-who/how: strategic and leadership skills, for political ‘ nous’ in setting agendas, managing institutions, mobilizing resources;
know-why: creation of meaning, significance, identity, morality, with practical intuition for creative arts, sports, everyday social exchange.

To build all six elements requires a learning culture and a recognition that knowledge and awareness do not start and end at initial training on a process. We need to build the mechanisms to:

Communicate in a way to continually facilitate the assimilation of knowledge
Incorporate ongoing uses of tools such as coaching and mentoring in our processes and systems
Motivate the ongoing enhancement of learning
Nurture the development and retention of knowledge

We are striving at building competence, to be able to grow and apply the knowledge and abilities of our workers to solve problems and innovate.

Training, Development, Knowledge Management, Problem-Solving – these are a continuum but too often we balkanize responsibility of these in our organizations when what we need is an ecosystem approach.