Preserving Priceless Knowhow
Back in 2008, I attended a talk with Jennifer 8 Lee who was promoting her book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, about Chinese food and identity in America. I learned that, contrary to what we might assume, fortune cookies are not of Chinese origin, that the vast majority of the world’s supply of fortune cookies are made by a small handful of U.S.-based companies, and that only a few people within these organizations contain the requisite knowhow to keep the business going. “I die?” one of the cookie making owners said to Lee, “Fortune cookie crisis!”
By now you’ve heard us differentiate between conceptual versus procedural (action-based) information a number of times. But there’s another distinction that is critical to any body of knowledge: explicit versus tacit. Explicit knowledge is that which can be explained or demonstrated in a straightforward manner, but tacit knowledge refers to experiential knowhow acquired over one’s lifetime or career. It’s more nuanced, considered the most priceless form of knowledge, devastating when lost, and hard to bottle up and share.
As you think about all the experiential knowhow that exists in your company – and who possesses it – knowing how to capture and share it is a challenge. The tendency might be to make a whole library of videos that any learner could eventually watch during onboarding or whatever. We have our own issues with this kind of passive take-and-receive approach to learning, but what we can share are a few thoughts on what to ask an expert when trying to distill that individual’s tacit knowledge.
One approach is the straightforward line of questioning: “What do you know / How do you know it / Why does it matter?” That’s all good and fine, but the inherent problem with that is that experts “absolutely suck at telling their own stories.” The information you get is only going to be as good as the questions you ask, and unspecific questions will result in vague, unsatisfying answers.
We prefer Charles Duhigg’s approach to asking questions. According to his new book Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection, the best communicators are the ones who ask deep questions about values, beliefs, and experiences.
You can start by asking the expert to walk through their typical day, or how they decided to pursue their line of work. To get to the experiences and lessons learned, I like to ask questions like “Can you tell me about a day when everything went right? How about a day when everything went wrong?” The key to culling in-depth knowledge is really in the listening: key words, phrases, moments of active thinking, etc. (We can speak on this more later.)
Lastly, my personal favorite question is one that I land on at the very end of an interview, and that is the magic wand experiment. I ask my interviewee: “If you had a magic wand, what is the one thing about [your job/your life/any context] you’d use it for?”
Finally: you have to have a plan for storing and disseminating this knowhow, as it’s pointless without a means to share it with others. (That’s where we come in.)
