Category Archives: Knowledge Management

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Succession Planting for Retiring Experts

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This article is also posted at the International Federation on Aging website here.

As a newbie gardener, I subscribe to lots of gardening magazines and email lists to get up the learning curve as quickly as possible. This morning, I received an email about succession planting for a bountiful garden all season long. For those who have been cultivating a lifetime of knowledge, we also have waves of harvests. And it seems that the rules for succession planting in our gardens also make sense for succession planning for our lifetimes of contribution to the world around us.

Growing meals throughout the season means consistently looking forward, and reaping harvests from your education and experience means looking forward, too.

Let’s apply the 6 tips for choosing appropriate crops for succession planting to succession planning for your ongoing contribution to the world:

  1. Rotate plants in season. After you have harvested the value of your education and experience in one career, use that bed of knowledge to prepare for your next adventure – be it volunteerism, consulting or starting an enterprise of your own. Your prior experience will help lessen the chance for failure.
  2. Sow or transplant a small amount of seeds at one time at regular intervals. Make sure you have several little projects and interests in play for a well-rounded life. Your new business doesn’t mean giving up your volunteering. One thing may always lead to another.
  3. When planting late in the season, choose plants that can be enjoyed young. When you embark on an adventure completely new to you, choose one that you can enjoy immediately, like learning a few chords on the piano that allow you to play a simple three-chord song for immediate gratification.
  4. Switch varieties for switching weather. As your life changes, or as your mind, body and emotions change, be prepared to try a new hobby, interest or career path more in tune with who you are becoming.
  5. Consider how two plants share a space and interplant complimentary varieties. Think about the people around you, how you can build teams and community, and how you can serve others. Life is more fun lived with and for others.
  6. Transplant and sow directly. Sometimes you want to take skills and abilities from other parts of your life and earlier career paths, and use them in your current pursuits. Some other things can be started from scratch so you can always be learning something new.

Life is, indeed, our garden to nourish, grow and enjoy. With some care, you can reap harvests throughout all its seasons as you continue to mature, contribute and participate while sharing your unique gifts, talents and experiences to leave everything better than the way you found it.

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Imagining Knowledge in the Age of AI

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K35621_cvr  Artificial intelligence, data, analytics, neural net, computer-human interface…these aren’t the future. They are now. For those of us with a foot in the age of human intelligence and a foot in the age of artificial intelligence, it makes us wonder: so what do we make of what we know, if we (as humans) may become irrelevant?

It’s not as ridiculous as it sounds.

This blog will be brief because the idea is huge, and I want to give us all time and space to ponder this one thought.

Humans are finite, at least for now. We have a limited lifespan. For generosity’s sake, let’s call it 100 years. And then we take what we know with us when we go.

Some of us have preserved our thoughts, ideas and creativity for future generations, but let me venture to guess that most of us have not.

For millennia, without that knowledge capture, preservation and transfer, we kept starting all over.

All that changed with the printing press, and accelerated rapidly with video and audio capture. Look at the rapid proliferation of knowledge, now doubling about every one or two years because we are able to continue to build on what came before.

So what is the threat of AI to human intelligence? Here it is…

Computers don’t die. Teach them to think, and they will keep thinking and growing and learning and eventually…well, their intelligence surpasses that of any human simply because their learning curve is theoretically infinite.

This is what all the fuss is about.

I leave you with that.

And encourage your thoughts and debate in the comment section or send an email at workingwithsmes@gmail.com.

Oh, by the way, my latest book, Retaining Expert Knoweldge: What to Keep in an Age of Information Overload, was published in hard cover on May 10 and you can buy it here. I just noticed that a Kindle version has been added. Thank you for your continued interest!

 

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Available Now! Retaining Expert Knowledge: What to Keep in an Age of Information Overload

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K35621_cvr
I couldn’t wait to get out the word that my new book, the latest in the Working with Experts series, is available for sale today!

I’ll be doing some promotions which you will hear about later, but for now here’s the description on Amazon:
Retaining Expert Knowledge: What to keep in an age of information overload covers two major topics central to capturing and transferring expertise in organizations:

  • Methodology and best practices for interviewing subject matter experts (SMEs) to capture their knowledge
  • Identifying the SMEs to interview

The more critical problem is identifying the SMEs and the knowledge that needs to be captured.

One reason identifying the right experts is now so important is that in the next 10 years, the largest recorded exit of talented and knowledgeable workers from organizations will occur as baby boomers retire. In their wake, they leave their former employers understaffed and, even scarier, under-informed. Identifying the right SMEs is also critical because of the rapid acquisition of new knowledge. Some estimates say knowledge now doubles every two years, so it is crucial each organization identifies its journey and catalogues it individually and collectively.

This book provides managers with answers to the following questions:

  • Are we talking to the right subject matter experts?
  • What knowledge should we capture?
  • What knowledge needs to be captured immediately as opposed to eventually?
  • If we have limited resources, which experts are most important to speak with first?

Every organization has a history, a culture, and knowledge that may have lost its current relevance but not its importance. It is that broader vision of capturing knowledge, which this book addresses. It guides readers on how to preserve corporate knowledge and provides tools to assess organizational circumstances and judge the value of the resources to capture.

Retaining Expert Knowledge is a training resource, but it is also a business resource. As knowledge proliferates and organizational culture rapidly changes, now is the time to step back and determine what has been important to your organization’s success, where the organization is today, and what it will take to stay in the game tomorrow.

Your company houses knowledge, skills, attitudes, intellectual property, trade secrets, company culture, and individuals who will never be replicated exactly as they are today. Because they have demonstrated value in the past and are demonstrating value today, these treasures are worth preserving. This book shows how to preserve these valuable assets today for tomorrow’s successes.
You can buy this wherever you normally purchase your books.

Here’s a link directly to Amazon.