Epic Think Tank
Blending Learning and Knowledge Management
9. The Odyssey as quality manual
Once again, however, the troublesome part of the process is marked
by that slippery verb, capture - and the question of how tacit your
tacit knowledge can get before it disappears entirely off the radar.
How do you capture the good practice of exceptional individuals,
when exceptional individuals are so rarely rule-followers? When
David Beckham scores a goal, has his success resulted from 'the
observance of a set of rules which are not known as such to the
person following them'? Almost certainly Beckham is not conscious
of a set of rules, but whether anything so capturable and codifiable
as a set of rules actually underlies his performance is open to
question as well.
'You can never model the top five sales people in your organisation,'
said one of our delegates. Salespeople, like Premier League footballers,
are not noted for being the best followers of process, and it is
remarkable how diverse they are in the way they get results. Attempting
to distil a set of rules from the actual behaviour of top-achieving
sales people might give you the platitudes of Dale Carnegie at one
end of the scale, or the bleak tragedy of Glengarry Glen Ross at
the other.
And here is a further caveat. For every David Beckham, there is
a Roy Keane. Your exemplars of good practice can also turn out to
be exemplars of exceptionally bad practice if you get them in the
wrong mood. Modelling excellence can risk passing on bad practice
with the good - witness the series of financial scandals that has
recently rocked the US. Mere weeks before the most high profile
of these blew up, Enron was being touted on training courses as
an example of excellence in the virtualisation of processes!
There is a danger that in too slavishly pursuing stories about
excellence we too swiftly find ourselves in a realm of excess and
ambiguity that is, strictly speaking, the preserve of fiction. Genius
rarely makes good role models for life: perhaps excellence in the
Jackson Pollock league, the Charlie Parker division, involves operating
with knowledge too tacit for most of us to manage.
There might just be some in-built limit to how far we can practically
go with this capturing-tacit-knowledge thing. Will certain types
of knowledge always evade capture? Beyond this frontier we can only
fall back on a more rarified form of Dave Snowden's war stories
and parables.
Modelling excellence, after all, was surely what Homer was up to
in the Odyssey - the war story to end all war stories. And when
it comes to knowledge capture on that level, not many of us, not
even those who study the Epic religiously, can hope to hold a candle
to Homer.
John Helmer for Epic, February 2003
References and links
Peter Hall. Innovation, Economics and Evolution.
New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994.
Background
Relevant Epic case studies:
- Barclays 'bu …take
the lead': a blended leadership programme in which e-learning
modules are supported by online tutoring via e-mail and telephone
- Platinum: a secure
community website for collaborative learning
The following Epic white papers bear on themes discussed here:
Dave Snowden:
Biography
Value based management:
Industry
Week article on Managing for Value
Value
Based Management Resource Centre
VBM
Consulting
Intro: Sven, VBM and the book under
the counter
1. The personality of knowledge
2. Making the tacit explicit
3. Learning from war stories
4. The book under the counter
5. The convergence of learning and
knowledge management
6. Reward systems in the culture club
7. Modelling the tall poppy
8. Value based management and Sven's
men
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