Even if all the rules in the world would be written and you’d had access to all of them, there’s still no better teacher than personal experience. People learn on the way and each gets a different lesson.
Communicating these lessons and exchanging proficiency information is an important aspect of every business aiming to stay organized, solid and competitive. It’s a bonus that brings benefits not only at organizational level, but also at individual one. Employees and their combined knowledge are the most resourceful assets of every organization. And that “combined” detail is the key that puts efficiency into motion – because sharing it with others is what prevents the repetition of errors within the company.
Even so, those lessons can’t always apply to our entire activities because there is what we call the specific of a situation. This kind of circumstances can be solved by analogy, sometimes by professional instinct or in the best case by a plurality of expertise. And this is how we get our know-how, that implicit knowledge that adds value to the work routine we’re engaged in.
The difficulty with communicating this type of knowledge (acquired from your own experience) is that there is no form of putting it in a procedure or a dedicated documentation – and this would only slow down the learning process anyway. It’s true that it can’t be taught, but it can be captured. By simply referring to it in a given situation – by calling someone’s help when faced with a particular issue that you can’t figure out by yourself.
To sum it all up in a random example: it doesn’t make any difference if Danny knows what to do in a situation if Andy is the one that’s experiencing it. And chances are Andy doesn’t even know that his solution is only two desks away. Danny is willing to provide answers by employing his knowledge, but he is not aware that Andy needs it. Doesn’t it all sound like a ridiculous situation? I think it does and this is why using a knowledge sharing software makes such a big difference for the organizations that understand collaboration is the most natural and dynamic answer for digging up hidden opportunities.
Happy Knowledge Sharing!
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