Archive for the ‘wisdom transfer’ Category
Saturday, January 23rd, 2010
By William Seidman
Ever wish your company had come with an instruction manual? Michael McCauley and I have written a book, Advantage Media has published it, and we’re excited. You can buy “Strategy to Action in 10 Days: Creating High Performance Organizations” directly from us, in bookstores, or on Amazon. There’s a Kindle edition, too.
Join our Facebook page and come with us as we travel to promote our book.
Ron Nakamoto, CEO of Strategic Financial, has praise: ”I recommend Strategy to Action in 10 Days to any person interested in creating a high performance organization. It clearly illustrates how to break from the status quo and create a truly sustainable change. It is as much a practical guide as it is a game changer.”
We’re as excited about our book as we are about the many people who are using it to create real, lasting, and positive change in their organizations.
Posted in best practices, business, captology, knowledge workers, leadership, management consulting, optimization, organizational assessments, organizational change, organizational culture, persuasive technology, positive deviance, positive deviants, positive leadership, training, wisdom discovery, wisdom transfer | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
By William Seidman
Tribal knowledge is important, and important to the work of training managers. Seth Godin explains it here (the video is 12 minutes long). The transmittal of tribal knowledge was on our minds at the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI)’s annual meeting earlier this month in Orlando, Florida. I attended a presentation by Jon Revelos . The focus of the training was the use of stories in training. There was a great discussion about the value of story-based learning when holding and delivering critical tribal knowledge. In the presentation, we talked about ways to show the value of a narrative to management by emphasizing positive deviant stories. Positive deviance stories proved increasingly valuable because they are richer in content and have a more direct connection to performance. We also talked about the use of stories when motivating and sustaining responses, which effectively connects stories to impact.
Jon is now driving a compliance training program — these can be pretty dry. He is looking for ways to bring stories into compliance training. Again, positive deviants are an opportunity because they treat compliance as a fundamental tool to achieving a greater social good. All of this is consistent with our work with positive deviance, and it was an altogether interesting and exciting presentation.
Tags: ISPI, Jon Revelos, positive deviance, positive deviant stories, Seth Godin, story-based learning, tribal knowledge
Posted in organizational change, personal change, positive deviance, positive deviants, story-based learning, wisdom transfer | No Comments »
Thursday, September 11th, 2008
The techie is me, William Seidman, and the interview is excerpted here.
Tags: interview with William Seidman of Cerebyte
Posted in best practices, business, positive deviance, wisdom transfer | No Comments »
Thursday, August 21st, 2008
By William Seidman
I run into a paradox in my work helping companies define and create “best practices.” People often want to plunge in - try something - without any planning. When I push back they say they will create a best practice once they have worked on it for a while and know the best practices. The biggest problem with this (besides that it’s expensive) is that you don’t know what you don’t know.
What I hear is:
- “We don’t know much about what we’re going to do.”
- “We’re worried about the time it will take to do it. But there’s no reason to make a plan!”
- “When we’re totally screwed up by having tried something without thinking about it in advance, we’ll need time out to think. But we’ll be in a reactive mode then, with no time to think.”
Ouch. What can you do about this problem within your group or organization?
- Invite people to imagine emergency response services without planning or exercises. Pretty convincing!
- Make a time and energy commitment to thinking and planning.
- Ask hard questions and devote time to answering them.
There are usually fewer unknowns in the future than you might have thought, if you can use current expertise to define and create “best practices” going forward.
Tags: best practices, emergency response services
Posted in best practices, business, organizational change, wisdom transfer | No Comments »
Saturday, August 9th, 2008
By William Seidman
Are a lot of your company’s best people approaching retirement? The prospect of losing expertise at a high rate can be more than a little frightening. We get numerous inquiries about this.
Not many organizations take this seriously enough to fund programs or change daily routine sufficiently to prepare for this. Why? I think because it’s seen as a future problem, and not big or bad enough to tackle now. The executives who make the funding and priority decisions don’t want to plan around it - after all, they’ll be retired themselves before it hits, and they don’t want to rock the boat. It’s not a sudden crisis, but rather a slow loss of capability - sometimes so slow as to be barely noticeable.
An alternative way of framing this problem is to state it as a crisis in the protection of critical knowlege. This is what’s lost when great people retire, and what’s so important to preserve. David DeLong has said that “This is a huge problem for the nuclear industry, because it goes without saying that it can’t afford to make a single mistake.”
Tags: business, loss of knowledge, retirement, Retiring knowledge workers
Posted in business, knowledge workers, retirement, wisdom transfer | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008
By William Seidman
We get asked if our solution is “sustainable.” Organizational change is sustainable if the people in the organization are committed to taking responsibility for their success. That commitment to change has incredible energy in it. Wisdom transfer isn’t magic - it takes hard work and a degree of diligence. Sustaining the changes is the organization’s charge. We give the tools and the support, but the group must use them well, and over time.
Tags: business, organizational change, wisdom transfer
Posted in business, organizational change, wisdom transfer | No Comments »
Monday, July 21st, 2008
By William Seidman
How can you find expertise and, then, assure that it will be shared? Alden Hayashi’s “The World Might be Small, But Not for Everyone” describes research by a team led by Morten Hansen from INSEAD. Are the results surprising or could you have guessed what tends to happen? Significant groups within an organization are consistently and systematically excluded from critical knowledge. This exclusion decreases individual productivity and organizational success. Morten suggests that mentoring might solve this problem.
But we have found that many designated mentors don’t know how to mentor, and that the best people often don’t like it. Cerebyte’s research has found that reliance on human-to-human ad hoc mentoring does not solve this problem, which is often universal within the organization.
Use the research on positive deviance to define the content you want to gather and transfer, the research on fair process and positive visualization to motivate acceptance of the desired change, and the research on neuroplasticity to ensure that the learning will “stick.” Recent science offers some really great answers to these challenging problems of knowledge transfer - whether it’s called “sharing expertise,” “wisdom transfer” or “knowledge management.” We’re incredibly excited about it, because it can transform people and organizations.
Tags: Alden Hayashi, business, knowledge management, mentoring, sharing expertise, wisdom transfer
Posted in business, organizational change, positive deviance, wisdom transfer | 2 Comments »
