Stories about Experience and Expertise

Succession planning

2010-08-30T20:19:00.000-07:00

Typically in our organization, people move on without a successor and then 6 months later someone is finally appointed to fill that role. This leads to lots of running around and waste. The organization is growing very quickly. But tacit knowledge is lost around relationships. This is sensitive information.

Draining

2010-08-30T19:53:00.000-07:00

Our organization has new management. They do not know the backgrounds of staff and the expertise of their own internal people. How do we tap into the expertise of our own people? External experts tend to come and go because they lack the business knowledge. This can be a drain on permanent staff because they have to constantly train or brief the externals!

Cuts

2010-08-30T19:48:00.001-07:00

All funding for new jobs and contractors has been cut. 40% of our contractors have left and much of this knowledge has not been documented - "It's in our heads".

Sub-surface function

2010-08-30T19:40:00.001-07:00

"Sub-surface function" is a specialist group of technical experts. Their functional management is strong across geographies and business units. They use discussion forums to share questions and solutions. They have strong leadership and are resourced by employees.

Hospitals

2010-08-30T19:33:00.000-07:00

Hospitals run through professional structures and staff have to work in the context of the organization. One hospital CEO was not an effective leader. Targets and cost cutting were more important than building relationships with key clinicians. Conversely another hospital CEO built very good relationships and instilled a sense of direction and a sense of worth. The latter person enhanced outcomes for their organization.

Unwritten rules

2010-07-20T08:08:00.000-07:00

I was at a regional meeting where research project proposals put forward by various consortia were assessed. There were formal rules but there were also many unwritten rules - e.g. Did the consortia members come from a sufficient range of countries? Was there a balance between small & large consortia members?

As a former bidder, I was angry that there were these tacit, unwritten rules.

ISO 9000

2010-07-20T08:00:00.001-07:00

Our organization was advised that for its ISO 9000 accreditation, we should use internal people rather than external consultants and that we should map our processes as they actually were rather than they should have been.

Both parts of this advice were ignored. We ended up with a shelf full of manuals that no one uses.

Expert Self-Image

2010-07-20T07:57:00.001-07:00

At my previous organization, we carried out a detailed analysis of the impact of a privacy breach on our business. Towards the end of my time there, this actually happened. This made headlines in the technology press. I do not think our modelling was used in dealing with this but perhaps that did not matter.

I thought that i had a lot of knowledge in this area and yet very little of this has been drawn on by that organization after i left. They are still operating so I presume that they did not need it. Perhaps experts have an over-inflated view of their own value?

Ombudsman

2010-07-20T07:32:00.001-07:00

We had a problem with our Ombudman organization. From a customer perspective, there was no consistency. If you put 10 ombudsmen in a room together, you will get 35 decisions. We encouraged experts in our organizational siloes to talk to each other. We got them in a room together and asked them to discuss what to do in a particular situation. We then put these discussions in our knowledge base. We still have multiple opinions but at least these are now visibl

Ignored Handover

2010-07-20T07:27:00.000-07:00

At a large multinational, I worked on a project for a year. When it was completed, I did everything I could to ensure the handover of the project - handover notes, process documentation. When i stopped working in that role, no one used it. That "embedded structural capital" was lost.

Expert as a Role Model

2010-07-20T06:37:00.001-07:00

You need “deep smarts” to solve problem instantly, help you to consider the relevant and critical areas. My role model is an ex-boss (American), in a complex industry with brand new technology, uncertain environment with small group of people. Trust was very important to him – he would select someone he can trust and work with. He considered what we could do if the plan did not work, what support we could get from Headquarters. He had a very clear communication style. He gave empowerment to his subordinates, and had a great sense of right timing, so he really had “deep smarts”.

If You Can't Get the Expertise, You Can't Keep the Business

2010-07-20T06:36:00.000-07:00

This was a huge project to enlarge a site in Saudi Arabia and we needed good engineers. They need to find the right kind of marble and the company did not know how to source it. The project of enlarging the site was stopped. Issue was that the company couldn’t manage the expertise to get the job done.

Unappreciated Experts Will Leave

2010-07-20T06:35:00.001-07:00

We have lots of interfaces between government and citizens and expert groups. We are a large organization. We have lots of people with 20 – 30 years of experience and yet they are not treated as having expertise or wisdom. They are considered to be in “ordinary” jobs with low recognition and not so much training required. There will be huge loss of knowledge when these people leave. Their know how is not appreciated.

Limited Transfer is Weak Transfer

2010-07-20T06:34:00.001-07:00

Our old computer system needs improvement. There is lots of inhouse customisation. The guy who did it has quit. The reports generated by the system are useless. We have called the guy and he did teach one person how to run reports. That person taught another and then got transferred. Now the third person is running the reports. All this happened within 6 months. There is not very much documentation and only one channel to transfer learning.

Young People Are Not Necessarily Good at Technology

2010-07-20T06:33:00.002-07:00

We assume that young people are going to be expert technology users but this is not true. Not all young people use technology well and they often cannot use search engines successfully.

The Hidden Expert

2010-07-20T06:33:00.000-07:00

This is a story about how a common secretarial worker became the most expert person. The secretary does all of the filing and the managers are completely dependent on her. She had developed the system and assumed how to transfer to another secretary would be easy. But it will not be an easy knowledge transfer, and the managers are completely out of the loop.

Turning Expertise into Algorithms

2010-07-20T06:32:00.000-07:00

I am currently working in Guangzhou. The textile industry them is in the top 3 in China. In this industry it’s difficult to measure color. There can be 30% uncertainty in measurements. Expertise is built by experience and there is no single fixed formula. Our problem is how can we standardize a formula? We have a gap between the workers, 40-50 age group vs younger 20-30 age group. The knowledge transfer or expertise building rate is not very high.

Change in Decision Patterns

2010-07-20T06:31:00.000-07:00

I was working in South Africa. We needed to transfer the white managers’ experience to black managers. The program was 6 months long. In the first 3 months, the black managers shadowed the white managers and it was switched around for the next 3 months. Black managers made the decisions and the white managers coached. The problem was that judgments made in the past were not valued today and they had disagreements. So they had to work on a meta level and work out principles.

Young People and New Expertise

2010-07-20T06:29:00.000-07:00

Young people are good with electronic gadgets. Why can they use these gadgets easier than older people? Young people can accept new ideas easily. Life experience may not be that important in today’s world

Assessing Expertise through Peer Review

2010-07-20T06:26:00.000-07:00

In the Communist party in China, trust is built using peer-review. They bring in a bunch of people to meetings to observe how people operate and make judgments on their expertise and potential based on that.

Expertise in Shared Drives

2010-07-20T06:25:00.000-07:00

In my company, co-workers save their files in local drive. Because of small share drive space, it’s full all the time (only 500mb per person). The issue is that there is lost knowledge (such as presentations) and we have to re-invent documents and waste time.

Experienced But Not Expert

2010-07-20T06:23:00.000-07:00

This was an experienced sales person with 25 years of experience who had good and bad habits. He could identify the customers and their roles in the deal-making process, such as price points and relationships between them. But he could not read other internal characteristics they had, such as low esteem.

Time and experience teach us to be experts

2010-07-05T01:46:00.000-07:00

I know I look at problems differently now in my 40s than I did in my 20s. I think my perspective now is more instinctive and holistic whereas it probably used to be far more analytic. I also believe I've witnessed the differences in approach between other people. I find that now I tend to see the pattern and what is likely to happen - I mean esp in organisational change situations - without and despite analysis. All I can guess is that with experience more of that earlier explicit knowledge becomes compiled and tacit. But it's odd how the world generally prefers an analytic approach to an experience-based one. I like methodologies, but I think they teach us to be novices, not experts.

Knowledge Transfer by Osmosis

2010-03-21T23:19:00.000-07:00

In my PhD research with R&D medical scientists, I explored how the scientists conceptualised the knowledge they worked with. A fascinating and unexpected aspect was not so much that the scientists intuitively understood that much of their knowledge was tacit (and unable to be articulated) but that they thought it could be transferred without being made explicit.

That is, they thought that when a novice scientist worked with an expert, the knowledge ‘sort of fell off the expert to the beginner, almost by osmosis’ (you can tell they were scientists!). Of course, the process by which this happened was shadowing, mentoring, observation – but the net effect was that tacit knowledge was seen to be transferred, without having been articulated.

Experts respected for organisational knowledge more than technical knowledge

2010-03-21T23:17:00.000-07:00

This was my first experience as a "knowledge engineer" trying to build an "expert system" for a chemical processing plant in the mid 1980s. That experience still shapes a lot of my thinking. Firstly the context was the archetype expert system one, the expert operator (and long term foreman), 35 years + experience, retiring in 12 months ... his name was Maurie. He had the total respect of the rest of the operating crew (who I might add only averaged 20 years on the job).

After doing my knowledge engineering thing and extracting a few hundred "expert" rules, I began testing them with the "junior" operators. Anything special or insightful? No not really... the common answer was yeah you could do it that way. Would you change your action if this was recommended? Maybe ... not sure if it matters. Even Maurie was a bit ambivalent and supported them in saying yeah that could work too. This was pre- TQM days and shortly afterward the standard operating procedure (SOP) was born, so there was a lot more support for standardisation ... not so much from what might work or what might not, but a view that if we standardised actions we would at least have a measurement environment that operating performance drifts could be more easily identified.

When we implemented the system I would have to honestly say that the value the operators gained was not so much in the "insightful" recommendations the system made, but the "evidence" in terms of signals tracked and displayed to justify the recommendations that were most valued.

I continually experienced this in my Expert Systems days. A case based reasoning system for a consumer call centre was of most use to novices. More experienced staff would want to make their own decisions but appreciated the support information. Expert Systems in my experience worked best in the "complicated" domain (viz Cynefin)...where the effort of logically breaking down a decision process was both viable and valued.

As for Maurie ... why was he so respected as THE expert when the knowledge base we built from his so-called tacit knowledge was not seen as anything special? Well I learnt that respect and expertise can be different things. Perhaps Maurie's technical expertise was not necessarily superior any more to the 20 year "juniors". His people and organisational skills in working with the other operators was superior ... hence the respect that he was given. As one operator quipped ... Maurie knows where everything is .... you want a shovel or a broom....Maurie knows where it is!

I've recently interviewed some chief engineers that will retire soon. I found the same thing...its not their technical "tacit" knowledge that is valued as much as their "organisational" knowledge...especially the "how do you get stuff dome around here" tacit knowledge.

The Man Who Knew Too Much

2010-01-15T01:26:00.000-08:00

Here was an older engineer (let us call him Mr. Gupta) in a large manufacturing organisation. The emphasis in the organisation was on 'activity'. Those that showed enthusiasm were rewarded better than those who really knew the job. Mr.Gupta's philosophy was 'prevention better than cure'. But this was not glamorous. Younger engineers would jump in & be part of the excitement in firefighting. Mr. Gupta would refuse to be a part of this firefighting, which according him could have been prevented in the first place if only they had listened to him, which point he would not hesitate to recite to any one who came in contact with him. This obviously made him unpopular with the management and a laughing stock among his peers.
Mr.Gupta became a frustrated man and a mental wreck.

Promoted into Unhappiness

2009-12-17T00:04:00.001-08:00

This is from a university. Promotion in science is based on scientific expertise but promotion puts scientists in management roles. But management ability is NOT valued, therefore there is poor organizational performance and an unpleasant culture.

Not Appreciated Until the Need Arises

2009-12-17T00:03:00.000-08:00

Working as contractor – project manager for a big government organisation – hired by that organisation to teach project management. Found that inside the organisation, project management was not valued. Spent 1 year doing nothing. Then new legislation was created and the resulting change forced a project approach, so this expertise was shown to be more valued. Now the organisation sees the value and focuses on project management.

Need Context to Locate the Right Expertise

2009-12-17T00:02:00.000-08:00

This is about the effects of a lack of a phone book and directory. Some people would rather call to find an expert and start a phone tree instead of locating people online. We also have no ability to collect contextual information to help find people so the wrong people are getting calls.

When Self-Identification Didn't Work

2009-12-17T00:01:00.002-08:00

This was a project to build a master expertise database for an organization. The experts’ self-descriptions were not precise or systematic or standardized. Some people criticized others’ expertise. We tried to use a standard taxonomy but that failed. Some did not want their expertise advertised.

Expertise Not Discovered Until Almost Too Late

2009-12-17T00:01:00.001-08:00

This story comes from the military. We had an NCO who was considered mediocre in his technical job and transferred to a Training Unit, where he could be out of harms way until he retired. This guy turned out to be expert at databases and he ended up creating an online training system. It became the standard system for the whole organization, after it was recognized externally and won awards. His expertise was not visible or valued (even to himself) until he got the right job. His expertise in his original role was not valued. This happened in his 19th year of service so he then retired, and his expertise was lost almost as soon as it was found. He resented being given his original job. Moreover, it was an external party who recognized his accomplishment first, and not his commander.

If Important, it Gets Transferred

2009-12-17T00:00:00.000-08:00

If it is important, it will get transferred. The most important knowledge gets transferred. In our institution we have a practice of creating a “collection of artifacts for the next teacher.”

The Emperors Have No Clothes

2009-12-16T23:59:00.002-08:00

Sometimes the Emperor has no clothes. I have seen cases where experts draft complex solutions and show off their expertise, and an outsider notices an obvious flaw. Is the expert always an expert?

Retirement Was a Gift

2009-12-16T23:59:00.001-08:00

In the late 1980s, I was a supervisor. There was a manual process to create an authority file (like a database) and the person who was the supposed expert in this retired. They used the opportunity of his leaving to reengineer and reinvent the process, which was then much improved. “The expert” turned out to be not so deep, and through a group of knowledgeable people a new and better system was developed, leveraging resident latent expertise.

It's All Replaceable

2009-12-16T23:58:00.000-08:00

Where I am, there is no retention or respect for expertise. “They think it's all replaceable.”

Orphaned Technical Knowledge

2009-12-16T23:57:00.002-08:00

We developed websites or working interactives for customers. The architects were our SMEs. The boss sold the solutions. Then he left. No techniques were captured on how he sold (personal skills lost, behavioral tacit knowledge lost). We couldn’t bring strategy to new proposals. We were left with the technical knowledge, but the business development and leadership skills were lost. This was an organisational failure to capture or replace knowledge.

Stories to Build Historical Context

2009-12-16T23:57:00.001-08:00

I was involved in knowledge retention for a large consulting firm. I was able to interview a retiring partner. We learned a great deal about the background of how working for government used to be like. He told a story about how reporters used to go through the trash of lawmakers’ work in committees and so on, to get material to report. They discovered this during their first audit exercise they did for the lawmakers, and this is why they tightened up the way they dealt with papers.

Deliberate Forgetting, Memory Had to be Rebuilt

2009-12-16T23:56:00.000-08:00

When two legacy government agencies were merged, historical documents were shredded or burned from the old organizations, we lost an entire policy system. They probably did this so as to enable the new agency to start afresh. But in the new organization it created great difficulties in rebuilding documentation and history. We recreated knowledge via former employees who had retained old documents or by revisiting stored documents in boxes to recompile or reconfigure our knowledge. Bottom line: we lost organizational history. We had new work forces and very limited efforts to retain knowledge.

Expert by Training or Experience?

2009-12-16T23:55:00.002-08:00

Knowledge and expertise are highly contextual. When is expertise actually expertise? “I’ve never actually stormed a castle but I’ve taken a lot of siege management courses.”

Not Recognising the Need to Manage Knowledge Work

2009-12-16T23:55:00.001-08:00

In my organization, right now, lean six sigma is a huge initiative. However most activities in our organization are knowledge work, and they haven’t yet come to grips with that.

Expertise Outsourced to Contractors

2009-12-16T23:54:00.000-08:00

Here’s a story about government procurement and expertise. There was a huge contract up for renewal. Management was concerned because the incumbent contractor wouldn’t have competition so it wouldn’t be “free and open competition.” Therefore they split the procurement and this led to a great deal of churn and disruption of work, because the contractor’s familiarity with our organization was broken up too.

Not My Cup of Tea

2009-12-16T23:53:00.000-08:00

I was the only person with technical engineering expertise in my firm. The firm would garner some projects with technical content. They were never particularly close to my expertise, but as I was closest to the content, I would be assigned. I was unhappy and always having to learn and work on these things. I was actually not all that knowledgeable about it and certainly not interested in this work. Meanwhile, I could not work on what interested me and what I was hired to do. So I left.

The Wrong Expertise

2009-12-16T23:52:00.002-08:00

Here’s a story of how a non-expert screwed it up. The assignment was to create a KM system. It was assigned to a non-expert because they had some taxonomy background. The result: we got a “good” taxonomy outcome, but an unusable KM outcome and $1m down the drain.

On Not Building Expertise

2009-12-16T23:52:00.001-08:00

At my organization, you “build without thinking.” They never look at lessons learned. You can almost guarantee failure by not looking at lessons learned.

More Than a Job Title

2009-12-16T23:51:00.000-08:00

Expertise is more than a name. Job titles in organisations don’t describe or indicate expertise, though people assume they do. We need to think more broadly than title.

Age of the Dinosaur

2009-12-16T23:50:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, you need to go back to the source. Legacy knowledge and people are sometimes needed. Don’t discount the old guys’ value or the grey beards.

Management Decisions Didn't Consider Knowledge Needs of Project

2009-12-16T23:49:00.002-08:00

This is a story about an IT project. Management decided on a large platform change. A lot of relevant personnel were getting ready to retire. Leadership felt they didn’t need as much mid-level and contract personnel, and this had a big negative impact on the project. We ended up having to re-start, and that project is still going on.

Courage Saves Time

2009-12-16T23:49:00.001-08:00

This is about saving time. A new kid gets assignment. He looks up the experts in the “who knows what” database. He finds a “Vice president” as the designated expert in this area and although he is very junior he decides to approach him anyway. He gets advice from the VP and “a 3 day task took me half a day.”

Recognising the value of consultants

2009-12-16T23:47:00.000-08:00

I work in a large government organisation as a consultant. I report to a senior manager within one of the departments. My expertise that has been gained from 20 years industry experience is highly valued and my opinion/insights are received very positively. This is within an industry where I have minimal experience in the core service, however I can make significant contribution in the management and governance around the organisation and delivery of those services. Areas where my expertise has been sought include internal team structure, vendor relationships, project evaluation, research data, project and program management and inter-departmental governance

Stagnant Best Practice

2009-12-14T03:53:00.000-08:00

I was working in a consulting organization and we had to move content from fileshare to SharePoint as a move to support collaborative workspaces for groups. They wanted to rate the SME content for “best practice”. The manager did not understand the limitations inherent in a stagnant best practice approach and insisted we did it.

From Expertise to FAQs

2009-12-14T03:52:00.000-08:00

We knew someone was retiring. We brought someone in to interview him, and he asked questions and we captured all the answers to those questions. And now in SharePoint we have those Q & A and it is accessible to all.

He's an Expert but Not Credible

2009-12-14T03:51:00.002-08:00

Experts’ opinion tends to be dismissed due to personality quirks. This person can identify core gaps and develop tools for dealing with them but he is not taken credibly because of history and his personality.

You Can't Ignore Internal Expertise

2009-12-14T03:51:00.001-08:00

This was in a bank. We brought in experts / consultants but found that we have people with greater expertise in house. The in house experts are finding flaws in the consultants’ work and driving the need to redo work.

Internal Expertise Ignored, Leads to Failure

2009-12-14T03:50:00.001-08:00

Our website was taking too long to respond. It was unstable. It was built by a consultant but our in house expertise was ignored.

Easier to Access External Expertise

2009-12-14T03:49:00.000-08:00

I was running into technical issues with System X. I knew that it would take 2 days to get the issue into the Company (owner of System X) system and 2 weeks to get it resolved. I blogged about the issue. Within 20 minutes, I had the solution. We documented the solution and exposed the solution for others to see.

Scientific Secrecy and Accessing Expertise

2009-12-14T03:48:00.001-08:00

In my company there are rules about not talking in public. Scientists can’t access others’ expertise – it’s in logbooks or in their heads. Also credit is given to the first inventor, so people are reluctant to talk until they have published.

The Expertise Audit That Wasn't

2009-12-14T03:47:00.000-08:00

We wanted to get to know other organizations in the company. We put our top 3 areas of expertise in a table but it turned out that everyone put what they wanted to be instead of what they are.

Lessons Learned Good For Newbies

2009-12-14T03:45:00.001-08:00

We did a lesson learned on a refinery revamp where we had exceeded cost and time targets. At the lesson learned meeting we invited new employees to attend (who did not participate in the project). Older folks (38 of them) were reluctant to include new – finally agreed to 2. The conclusion was that the lesson learned meeting was a waste of time until the 2 new guys piped up that they had learned valuable information.

On Not Being Able to Validate Expertise

2009-12-14T03:44:00.001-08:00

We have lots of examples of work on projects. We don’t know which are good or bad examples. The author is perceived as an expert but it is really unknown if he’s good or bad.

Sudden Attrition

2009-12-14T03:43:00.002-08:00

This was a Fortune 500 company, with 50 years of history. 75% of senior level management retired within the past year after analysis that the company was top heavy. These people all had 25-40 years experience with the company. Who knows what the impact will be.

External Expertise Saves the Day

2009-12-14T03:43:00.001-08:00

We held a peer assist – brought in expertise. He was a consultant in marine design, who said our design would not work. The engineers had to rethink the design, and we saved both time and money.

Expertise is a Crutch

2009-12-14T03:42:00.001-08:00

Our research and development function was moved to another state. The result was a loss of expertise. We retained one individual as a consultant – it worked well. Then there was a management decision to stop the use of consultants. Then we had to try to capture her knowledge. Management felt we were using her as crutch and her specialist knowledge was not being internalized.

We Had to Do it Ourselves

2009-12-14T03:41:00.000-08:00

We need to use software to manage our safety data sheets. IT put up a software package that was a dismal failure because they did not scope all the requirements well enough. We created a very simple material safety data sheet (MSDS) system from scratch based on our experience.

Boss Knew Best

2009-12-14T03:40:00.000-08:00

I was handed a dicey project. There were conflicting interests involved, but a demand for a single common solution. The boss came in and dictated the solution elements, negating the conflicting ideas, based on his experience. This was very tricky because there were ramifications with our biggest client. We went with the boss’ solution after offering an alternative based on a different budget.

Expertise Sidelined into Management

2009-12-14T03:39:00.000-08:00

In the growth of my current organization (20 to 100 employees, over 6 months) we end up being pushed from being experts into management roles. We did not pay attention to expertise movement taking expertise out of circulation.

Outsourcing Makes Life Complicated

2009-12-14T03:38:00.002-08:00

This was an IT organization which restructured and we lost our internal employees who worked in application support. Support was outsourced to a third party. The current situation is that support for our application is so bad that internal people have to be trained. An activity that used to take 15 minutes now takes 2 weeks to go through the system.

Losing Access to Expertise in a Merger

2009-12-14T03:38:00.001-08:00

At the time of our merger, our phone system was shut down – when we had a problem, it took 2 weeks to find the person who knew the answer - once we found the person, it took just 2 hours to fix the problem.

Blogging Helps Track Fast Moving Expertise

2009-12-14T03:37:00.000-08:00

We have lots of movement, with staff in 2-3 years tenures. We have enabled blogging to allow commanders to share expertise and stories in this very fluid environment. Anyone in the armed forces can access, it’s not open to the Internet.

Discounting of Expertise

2009-11-30T18:22:00.000-08:00

This is from Michiko Kakutani's review of Sarah Palin's book Going Rogue, published in the NYT November 14 2009:

'Yet Mr. McCain’s astonishing decision to pick someone with so little experience (less than two years as the governor of Alaska, and before that, two terms as mayor of Wasilla, an Alaskan town with fewer than 7,000 residents) as his running mate underscores just how alarmingly expertise is discounted — or equated with elitism — in our increasingly democratized era, and just how thoroughly colorful personal narratives overshadow policy arguments and actual knowledge. Ms. Palin herself had a surprisingly nonchalant reaction to Mr. McCain’s initial phone call about the vice president’s slot, writing that she was not astonished, that it felt “like a natural progression.”'

Memory is linked to context

2009-11-11T16:45:00.000-08:00

From a blog post by Shawn Callahan 10/11/08

Remembering experiences is heavily dependent on surroundings. I’m currently helping an energy company learn the lessons from retiring employees. I’m videoing their experiences with the view to facilitating sessions using the footage; it’s not really about capturing knowledge, just sparking new conversation based on what’s captured. My last subject was the company’s network controller. He’d been in the role for 10 years and I interviewed him in his office, which was right next to the control room. The control room looks like a mini version of the one from the movie The China Syndrome. His office has a window looking into the control room and it is festooned with charts and whiteboard diagrams. Everywhere you look are computer screens. He has a large table in the middle of his office, which has been the site of many disaster response war rooms. He was brimming with stories.

The network controller was retiring two weeks after my interview and I asked whether I could interview him again at his home. He was happy to help. A month later we met in his lounge room and the response was noticeably different. The stories weren’t as rich. It was harder for him to recall the events. The surroundings didn’t contain the memories and prompters to help him remember what he knew. Surroundings make a big difference to what people can recall.

http://www.anecdote.com.au/archives/2008/11/ask_a_gardner_w.html

Invisible expertise on proposal teams

2009-11-11T16:39:00.000-08:00

A proposal team is going through a debrief after the proposal is submitted. The proposal team manager admits that he really doesn't like to write and wishes the organization had more proposal writers available to support the proposal teams that are essentially made up of scientists and engineers. While the scientists have typically developed writing skills, the engineers haven't.

A member of the team present at the debrief timidly raises her hand to declare that while she's typically uncomfortable contributing in group settings, she's very comfortable with writing and she would have loved to play a greater part in writing the proposal. Her official role on the team only required her to write a half page. She could have contributed much more but she was never asked and she never realized her writing skills would have been appreciated.

On the same team, a scientist who knew nothing about the budget side of the proposal was successfully pulled in to help write the narrative related to the budget. Sometimes you've got to look beyond a team members' assigned role and look for hidden expertise.

Inexperience Can Be Deadly

2009-08-30T20:12:00.000-07:00

From BBC news 30 July 2009

A fatal accident inquiry will be held into the death of a cancer patient who was given a massive overdose of radiation, BBC Scotland has learned. Lisa Norris was 16 when she died in 2006, months after staff at Glasgow's Beatson Oncology Centre miscalculated her treatment for a brain tumour.

A post-mortem examination found the brain tumour caused her death. But it is understood the Procurator Fiscal has agreed to hold an inquiry, which will look again at the case. Lisa was initially diagnosed with a brain tumour in October 2005. Three months later she was given radiation treatment 58% higher than prescribed, which left her with burns on her head and neck.

'Critical error'
She died in October 2006 at her home in Girvan, Ayrshire. The teenager's parents, Keith and Liz Norris, have said NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde failed in their duty of care. A report commissioned by Scottish ministers identified a "critical error" in Lisa's treatment plan by inexperienced staff. It said the overdose happened after an under-qualified and under-trained member of staff entered a wrong number on a form. Another report, commissioned by the teenager's solicitor following a BBC Scotland investigation, suggested the chances of survival were in Lisa's favour until the mistake.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/glasgow_and_west/8176341.stm

What's My Line?

2009-07-17T17:44:00.000-07:00

In the 1950's there was a popular TV show in the US called "What's My Line?". The panel, composed of minor celebrities, would hear a brief description of the interest job or accomplishments of an otherwise little known person. then 3 individuals would appear, each claiming to be the person whose bio had just been read. The panelists would ask them questions for 10 minutes to try to determine which of the 3 was the real person and which 2 were imposters. The panelists would succeed about 2/3 of the time. The lesson for the real world is that we are not so good at detecting fraud as we might like to think. We are easily misled by appearances and our prejudices and preconceptions.

Poor Judge of Expertise

2009-06-29T18:58:00.000-07:00

I graduated in 2000 and went for an interview for teaching at the Ministry of Education (MOE). That same day, they read an article about me in the newspaper. I thought that that was a positive thing, but we kept talking about my art background. After 15 minutes, he said that I was not accepted. “Will you be teaching Art or English?”, he quizzed. A teacher in Jumeirah who used to teach me then called me about a vacancy. I joined them as a volunteer. Results were good, so the MOE invited me back. The same guy interviewed me. And on the same day, another article about me appeared. But luckily by then I had already been hired by MOE.

Too Young to Know

2009-06-29T18:57:00.002-07:00

I regret a decision I made 6 years ago. I used to swim. I had a very good and kind trainer. He wasn’t a professional trainer, but he’d joke and way easy going in the pool. After a while, he was replaced by a pro trainer. First day, he asked us to show him what we could do, and he said, “ You call this swimming?” He took away our interest. At 16, I didn’t know what a good trainer was.

Be Careful Who You Let Go

2009-06-29T18:57:00.001-07:00

This story is about a mechanical man working for a train company. He was not educated. When he left the company, they realised that he was the only one who could read the technical papers which was in Russian. They hired him back to train young people. The company also sent the young people to Russia to learn Russian. But young people’s skills not the same as his.

Those Who Can’t Teach

2009-06-29T18:56:00.000-07:00

This story is about a military aeroplane mechanic. He was not educated. He spent 25 years maintaining those planes. The technical information was in Russian. After he left, every time they re-assembled a plane, they had 25 extra parts. They had to call him back to train. But he is not trained to train, so the knowledge is in fact lost.

Count the Cost

2009-06-29T18:55:00.002-07:00

A friend was working as a chief editor of an IT magazine. It’s a US magazine but was in local language version. He did most jobs from A to Z. After working for a long time, he wasn’t valued. So he resigned. They hired someone who was less skilled and experienced. Finally, the magazine closed. People were not interested in reading the magazine anymore.

Virtuous Cycle

2009-06-29T18:55:00.001-07:00

When I started here, I took over marketing. I did not know much about the company then. The person before me was very organized in what she left behind. I managed to do my work better. Now, I understand importance of leaving organized work behind now.

Whatever It Takes

2009-06-29T18:54:00.000-07:00

This story is about an IT expert, a brilliant guy. Many schools were under severe closure in this village, but we had results of 12 grades to issue. He sneaked out from the village where he lived and kept working for 4 days and nights to rush results out.

Scaling Expertise

2009-06-29T18:53:00.002-07:00

One colleague here was a principal at a school. The school was doing well, and her supervisor was very happy. She was transferred here, and is doing strategy development for her previous school plus other schools as well.

Finding a Gem

2009-06-29T18:53:00.001-07:00

This story is about a chemistry teacher who is socially not significant. I discovered by chance that his hobby was repairing old TVs. I got him to lead a class, on recycling old parts to make teaching aids for scientific study. Now he teaches lab technicians to recycle old apparatus. He has a lot of know-how in geography and geology too.

Restrictive Supervision

2009-06-29T18:52:00.001-07:00

I worked in the Ministry of Education but left after 6 years. My supervisor / trainer who hired me knew me and what I could do. I had activities after school, and she allowed me to schedule my classes accordingly. But I was promoted to a secondary school. The new principal didn’t allow extra activities. I was going to hold an art exhibition, and the guest of honour was the Minister of Education. The principal didn’t allow me to go but I went anyway. The next day, I was told that I didn’t have a job anymore. The following month, I joined KHDA and I’m happy here.

Bad Apple

2009-06-29T18:51:00.000-07:00

Once I was director of Education. This person was in charge of HR. His task was to move people between schools. I discovered that he was bribed by people. We had to take him out and reorganize everything. There were closures of towns in this country – large constraints. Took a lot of process mapping, survey of HR Team. Took 3 months before everything was re-organised again.

One Man’s Trash…

2009-06-29T18:50:00.002-07:00

We were shifting to a new police HQ, and were destroying the old building. A policeman walked by and found old boxes with photographs and files in the garbage. He took them to the police chief. It was a fortune of old pictures relating to the history of the police force. Nobody knew about it. We didn’t even know who the people in the photographs are. Eg, there were 400 photographs of a 1981 Hurricane taken by the police. Nobody else had documented in this way.

Different Ways of Transferring Expertise

2009-06-29T18:50:00.001-07:00

Knowledge transfer depends on the type of knowledge and personality of learners. Sometimes they can pass peer to peer. Sometimes, they have to write it down. Sometimes, we create simulation games, decision games – ask the officers to read situations and make decisions. Computer gives a report of mistakes and reasons – tells them how to use which procedures and when.

Uncanny Ability

2009-06-29T18:49:00.000-07:00

We have a guy at the airport who somehow knows how to identify people smuggling. Nobody knows how he does it. He doesn’t know how he does it either. He is not highly educated but 9 times out of 10 he will be right. He has been doing this for 20 years. There was one time he was convinced one guy was smuggling but we could find nothing. We held the guy for 48 hours, searched everything, found nothing. But our guy was convinced. Finally we noticed that he had some cargo, machine parts. We took it apart and found nothing. But finally we noticed a discrepancy between the declared weight and the actual weight. We had to tear the machinery apart and we found the drugs. Now we have 2 highly educated officers accompanying him to try and learn how he sports these things.

Healthy Competition

2009-06-29T18:48:00.002-07:00

The city government has CoPs to share expertise eg, environmental expertise, agriculture, etc. We have over 600 different minds of expertise in different fields. This year, we will start a centre of expertise to reduce research costs, eg, use experts to help organisations to solve their problems, identify research areas. We will have open competition to solve identified problems - for a prize.

Youthful Persistance

2009-06-29T18:48:00.001-07:00

This was from a smelting company. There was a 17-years-old assistant who had to get knowledge from one guy who is anti-social, short, smelly. There was no documentation. He put in the codes to run the smelter. The assistant was very persistent in asking how to enter the codes. Eventually, he was able to get the information in 3 days. The smelly guy left. The assistant left too after a while. The manager was in a lot of difficulty because nobody knew how to run the smelter. He called up the young assistant on the off chance that he might have the information, and he did. The manager was so happy he held a party.

Internal Expertise Helped Saved Money

2009-06-29T18:46:00.000-07:00

This is a success story about benchmarking. My colleague told me that in his department an employee complained of a back injury (slipped disc) and brought a medical report saying he needed 180,000 for operation. They were shocked, and didn’t think they had to cover it. The guy’s embassy said that it was a work-related injury and that they had to cover it. The organization said they wouldn’t cover it, as it was not a work injury. How can we prove that it is due to work? The embassy suggested a 3rd party medical report, from an environmental health expert. It would cost 20,000 for this report because it required special certification internally. They found someone who had the certification, and who was not working in a related field. She was able to prove that it was not the company’s responsibility.

The Assistant Knows It All

2009-06-29T18:45:00.001-07:00

I worked in an investment bank. It had cutthroat bankers and long work hours. They would sabotage each others’ projects. Assistants do everything for their boss. Whenever the bosses move, they will take their assistant with them as they know stuff about their wife, kids, dentist, etc. Had to learn all about his bosses’ family as new assistant.

The Real Source of Information

2009-06-29T18:44:00.002-07:00

There is one guy who knows everything about development and history of our who’s who. The police force can get the real story from him and not the published story. He usually says, “I don’t have time” so we go drink coffee with him, ask him a questions and record it immediately after on my mobile phone. Then I go back and write it down that night.

The Unusual Suspects

2009-06-29T18:44:00.001-07:00

My office boy and my secretary are my knowledge guys; they know everything about everything. It is not just the formal experts in the organization who know.

To Catch a Thief…

2009-06-29T18:43:00.001-07:00

In police work, we use serious offenders or people who think like criminals. They are best in catching crooks or working out faults or security risks but they often get caught doing bad things.

Toyota’s Canteen

2009-06-29T18:42:00.000-07:00

A story from Toyota about a big canteen where a lot of knowledge sharing takes place. You feel safe, loyal, secure in that culture.

Tough Nut to Crack

2009-06-29T18:34:00.001-07:00

The most difficult task is to capture tacit knowledge especially with older guys. 3 years ago, we had a brigadier who had been in Dubai Police for 50 years. He had worked in many different departments, but hard to capture his knowledge. He was shy and refused to attend workshops, speeches, and refused to cooperate with experienced interviewer. We started by searching his profile and then asked him questions about incidents and cases in his past. Got something from him but not a lot.

Sniffing Things Out

2009-06-29T18:33:00.001-07:00

At the homeless shelter, you need to be able to discern quickly if people are “dry” before you let them in. You have to differentiate between ex-alcoholics and those who are drunk or on drugs. You need to work out quickly at the doorstep. You don’t want to admit people who are on drugs or drunk as they will affect others.

Database of Crime

2009-06-29T18:32:00.002-07:00

We have a Crime Investigation Diploma course taught by officers who have worked in the field and not just in classroom context. The material is from their own experience. We have a monthly magazine where we publish cases as interesting stories. We have a database of cases all the way from the 1980s.

Price of a Manager’s Insecurities

2009-06-29T18:32:00.001-07:00

There was this very competent worker who wrote books about the job. People went to him for advice and he always assisted. But his line manager felt very threatened and facilitated transfer of this competent man to another department. This guy eventually left. But people still went to him for advice many years after.

Disposable Expertise

2009-06-29T18:30:00.000-07:00

Large consulting company has lots of data in their databases on previous project. Consultants are dispensable assets as they just get proposals, use templates, work hard, then they last a year or two and we throw away and get more consultants.