Knack? Nurturement? This is NOT about Managing Explicit Knowledge. This is about Nurturing your most critical asset – your organizational knack.
What is expertise? First, a formal definition. Expertise is possessing expert skill or knowledge in a particular field. Ok, so what does that mean? The experts in the company hold the expertise of the organization. There may be a lot of information on servers or in databases, but this NOT your corporate expertise.
There are two components to having expertise: tacit knowledge and a knack. Both of these components reside only in people…between the ears in neurons, not in ROMs or RAMs. Tacit knowledge cannot be written down or documented; that is explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is developed over time…a blend of some person-to-person mentoring that is rewired in one’s own intellect through lots of repetition or by some Providential gift of innate ability, i.e. knack. No matter how tight the mentoring, the student rarely does it like the teacher but rather creates his or her own style. This is delightfully illustrated in this Dilbert video.
Now you can see why we don’t use the term expertise management, but rather expertise nurturement. To think that we could manage the development of tacit knowledge and knack is rather Orwellian. Like any organic system, it is far more productive to act in ways better described as “nurture” than “manage.” (after all, we all want nurturing parents, but would we ever have wanted managing parents?) Similar to the child raising concept that ‘it takes a village’, expertise nurturement cannot be one person’s responsibility. This is why it is so challenging.
eNthusaProve believes that expertise management involves developing processes that create joyful purpose to work, retaining the right skills for the mission, as well as self-awareness to effectively interact with others. These are the things that will set free the knack within your organization.
If you are facing increased retirement of the people with your key corporate expertise, experiencing high turnover, or if you are taking your organization down a new strategic direction, the expertise nurturement needs to be key capability for your management team. We can help you build that key capability. eNthusaProve has a decade of experience in both expertise nurturement as well as more conventional knowledge management to help creatively develop an expertise growth strategy for your organization.