About this Project

We (Matt and Patrick) have been working in knowledge management for (too?) many years, and one of the areas we see growing in importance is how organisations try, succeed or sometimes fail to get the best out of the experience and expertise of the people that work for them. This is an issue that cuts across many disciplines, not just knowledge management: talent management, learning and development, succession planning, business continuity, quality management, risk management, operational managers, leaders - all have a stake in this issue.

But there is very little known about common ways that experience and expertise are actually treated and used across different geographies and organisation types. So we thought we would conduct an open research project designed to examine the ways that experience and expertise are valued and used within organisations (or not).

By "open" we mean public and collaborative, where the products of the research are available to all the contributors. We want to involve the different communities with a stake in this area: knowledge management, education & learning, organisation development, professional associations, and not least those with expertise and deep experience in a particular field themselves. The focus is not limited to any one geography. The results of this study will be made openly available via this blog.

The project will be in three overlapping phases:

Phase 1: Story Collection (December 2008-March 2010)

Gathering examples of how expertise and experience are leveraged – or not – in a diverse range of organisations, to prime the rest of the project.

Phase 2: Sensemaking (February 2009-March 2010)

Working with KM practitioners and others in different countries to identify patterns, issues and themes in how experience and expertise are leveraged across diverse contexts. We are also running a survey to check out some of the emerging findings from the early sensemaking workshops.

Phase 3: Intervention Design (March 2010-December 2010)

Working with relevant stakeholder groups to identify possible strategies and ways of encourage better use of experience and expertise in different contexts.

We are now in Phase 2 in the midst of the sensemaking activities, but are still collecting stories:

Please contribute your own examples in the contribution form here, using the suggested topic areas as a guide. You can also browse other people’s examples, and make comments or discuss particular issues that you see in these situations.

Phase 2 Outputs: visit our project wiki to see the outputs from our sensemaking workshops.

A Note on Methodology: the methods we use in this project are largely inspired by the work and techniques developed by Dave Snowden of the Cognitive Edge network.

Supporters: this project is supported by Anecdote.