Monthly Archives: January 2015

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Join Us! Eight Different Types of SMEs and How to Work with Them: Webinar and Article

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On Wednesday, January 28, KnowledgeVision is sponsoring a Google Hangout where we will discuss the eight types of SMEs and how to work with them. You can still register here.

The book Working with SMEs identifies characteristics that you may encounter when working with subject matter experts and gives you some tactics for overcoming these behaviors. The webinar and article that you will receive when you register discusses these issues taken from the book. In advance of our Google Hangout tomorrow, you can view a presentation on the eight types of SMEs here.

The eight types of subject matter experts we discuss are:
1. Speedy SME – impatient and tries to control the pace of the session
2. Scattered SME – does non think sequentially and believes their knowledge is too complex to be captured in steps
3. Shortcut SME – been doing their job so long they use shortcuts a novice could never follow and is not best practice for the organization
4. Defensive SME – feels their job is threatened if they tell you anything
5. Not-Quite-Expert SME – doesn’t really know best practice, or thinks they do not know it
6. Overcommitted SME – consistently misses or is late for appointments because they are overburdened
7. Interrupted SME – on the phone, email or other interruptions during your interview sessions
8. Reckless SME – doesn’t review the draft carefully

To learn more, you are invited to join us for a Google Hangout at 1 p.m Eastern.

KnowledgeVision has developed applications for capturing the knowledge of experts in an easy-to-use platform. Find out more here.

I look forward to hanging out with you tomorrow!

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Deep Time: Preserving and Storing Knowledge for the Long Haul

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If you are working in a corporate environment, and especially if you are writing training programs, your focus of knowledge capture and transfer is immediate. You have a procedure or a technique or a leadership program that you are instituting now, and it is relevant for the immediate future.

Sometimes, however, you are writing training or capturing knowledge for the long haul. You might be preserving the words of a founding CEO. Or one of your R&D people has made a groundbreaking discovery that changes the way things are done in your industry. That kind of knowledge capture requires the guarantee that it is preserved in a way that it can be recovered later.

We really like physical documents for that reason. Nothing like a stone tablet to preserve some good ideas, right? Monks have dedicated their lives to rewriting valuable works because paper products disintegrated over time, and it was the only medium they had at their disposal. Not all valuable knowledge is codified in writing. After all, there is good old on-the-job (OTJ) training. Through apprenticeships and mentoring, processes are demonstrated and passed on in the working environment and preserved as a matter of common practice. Recent wisdom tells us that training is a 70-20-10 split – 70% OJT, 20% elearning and 10% classroom learning.

Our age, though, the information age, holds so much more possibility for what we can capture, preserve and pass on to future generations. Wouldn’t you like to watch a craftsman from 1860 build a window? Imagine the little tricks of the trade that have been lost to the ages.

Those things don’t have to be lost anymore. The trick is to find the right medium for capture, and that medium has to be one that can be accessed in the future. So, those early elearning programs I wrote that landed on VHS that people watched on a big old cathode ray tube in the conference room, or those audio cassettes they listened to in the car? Gone. Nothing on there is of much relevance anymore, so nobody will lose sleep over that.

But what of the precious words of your founding President who set the tone for your company, and maybe an industry, a la Steve Jobs?

Today, the technology of knowledge capture makes possible watching someone assemble a window and see all the little tricks that might not make it into the assembly manual.

Which leads us to the issue of preservation.

A Very Cool Book on Preserving Knowledge

Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia by Gregory Benford is a curious little book written in 1999 by a University of California physics professor whose work includes experiments in the fields of astrophysics and plasma physics. He is best known for his award-winning science fiction including the Galactic Center Saga series. In his non-fiction work, Deep Time, he describes how humanity interprets former civilizations by studying architecture, tombs, layers of the earth and time capsules. For example, he explains, we leave behind clues relevant to our time and culture, like placing a Buns of Steel video in a time capsule to tell future generations…what? (I will leave it for you to interpret the value of this human legacy.)

In one particularly striking example that leads me to discuss this book, however, Dr. Benford was part of an Expert Judgment study group hired by the Department of Energy to leave a “Warning: Do Not Enter” message on a nuclear waste site in New Mexico to be interpreted by future inhabitants/visitors/species for up to 24,000 years. So it begged the question not only of how messages are sent and delivered across time, species, and cultures, and what kind of messages are sent, but also the methods by which those messages are preserved.

At our present level of technology, we deem that we can preserve what is valuable – or we perceive to be valuable (see Buns of Steel video) – using digital language preserved in the cloud.
Professor Benford writes: “Strikingly, no libraries survived antiquity, though some were quite grand. A Christian mob burned the greatest trove of ancient writings, the Library of Alexandria, taking from us hundreds of thousands of papyrus and vellum scrolls. Writing on organic sheets is vulnerable to fire, whether from fanatics or accident. Acid-free paper withers in a few centuries.” (Deep Time, p. 15)
He goes on a bit later in the book to describe the vulnerabilities of what, in 1999, was state-of-the-art technology.

“Worse, nothing dates more quickly than computer equipment. Already, historians cannot easily decipher the punch card and tape technology of 1960s computers, and the output of early machines such as Univac are unintelligible.” (Deep Time, p. 61)

“…I imagined my own works, stored in some library vault for future scholars (if there are any) who care about such ephemera of the Late TwenCen. A rumpled professor drags a cardboard box out of a dusty basement and uncovers my collective works: hundreds of 3.5 inch floppy disks, ready to run on a DOS machine using Word Perfect 6.0,” he wrote(Deep Time, p. 60)

If you are a trainer, you probably have very little concern for this type of long-term preservation. After all, you aren’t capturing and passing on knowledge that needs to be preserved for a thousand years. Or are you?

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“MONEY Master the Game” Masters the Art of Interviewing Subject Matter Experts

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If you don’t know Tony Robbins, you are among a rapidly dwindling group.

The leadership heavyweight and inspirational guru to the powerful and famous just published the second book of his dynamic and storied career. Money Master the Game contains lots of great investment principles but, more than that, it contains lots of advice for living life and being a great leader as well as a gracious human being. And for our purposes here, as I poured over it during a long holiday weekend, I found that the book lives as a stellar example of how to interview and get the most out of subject matter experts.

In this 600+-page tome, Robbins interviewed “more than 50 self-made billionaires, Nobel Prize winners, investment titans, bestselling authors, professors and financial experts” including 12 of the top investors in the world to learn the strategies employed by them to manage the portfolios of high-net-worth individuals and share those strategies with us – the hoi polloi.

Although I read the book to better understand investing, it became clear to me that this book stood as a testament to great gathering and organizing complex content from subject matter experts. MONEY Master the Game demonstrates some of the most important strategies for working with subject matter experts, and as a result, Robbins wrote what is truly a must-read book for investors, leaders and just about anybody else who wants to know how the financial world works.

Robbins described his interviewing process within the pages of the book, which makes it a wealth of information for people who work with subject matter experts.

1. He prepared thoroughly before meeting with each expert. He learned about their background and studied what was already written about them and by them. He didn’t waste their time.

To be able to sit with yet another of the great investment legends of our time was truly a gift. I spent close to 15 hours studying and preparing for my time with Ray [Dalio], combing over every resource I could get my hands on (which was tough, because he typically avoids media and publicity). I dug up some rare speeches he gave to world leaders at Davos and the Council on Foreign Relations. I watched his interview with Charlie Rose of 60 Minutes (one of his only major media appearances). I watched his instructional animated video How the Economic Machine Works – in Thirty Minutes (www.economicprinciples.org). It’s a brilliant video I highly encourage you to watch to really understand how the world economy works. I combed through every white paper and article I could find. I read and highlighted virtually every page of his famous text Principles, which covers both his life and management guiding principles. This was an opportunity of a lifetime, and I wasn’t going to walk in without being completely prepared.

2. He had a prepared set of questions that he asked each expert so he had a baseline of information as a springboard to ask more specific questions tailored to each SME.

[I asked] them some of the same questions you’d ask if you were in the room with me. Here’s a sampling…

…If you couldn’t leave any of your money to your children, but only a portfolio or set of financial principles to pass on to help them thrive, what would it be?

3. He set up short interviews (an hour) and then, by asking great questions and engaging his subjects, he managed to get three to four hours of their time after the interview began.

Most of the interviews were scheduled for an hour or less but turned into three- and four-hour sessions. Why? Because each of these financial giants was interested in going deep when he or she saw that I wasn’t there just for some shallow questions.

4. He recorded and transcribed the interviews.

…you’ll see only five to ten pages for each interview as opposed to the average 75-page transcript.

5. He curated complex information to make it valuable and accessible to the reader.

To keep this section under 9,000 pages, I’m including highlights from just 11 of the interviews. Well, 11 plus one bonus.

6. He cared about his subject and his subject matter experts.

Their answers excited me, shocked me, sometimes made me laugh. Other times they moved me to tears.

7. After he collected and digested four years’ worth of work, he boiled it down and made it useable for the reader.

My mission has been to synthesize the best of all they’ve shared into an integrated, simple 7-step financial blueprint.

Only one of his interview targets, Warren Buffet, declined a formal interview. He told Robbins, “Tony, I’d love to help you, but I’m afraid I’ve already said everything a person can say on the subject.” In a brief biographical sketch, Robbins shared the highlights of Buffet’s career and toplined Buffet’s investment strategies drawing on public information. He added color by describing his personal interactions with The Oracle of Omaha.

Most importantly, Robbins treated his subject matter experts with respect. He delivered their content with the same care that you would use shipping your grandmother’s china across the country – it’s packaged very carefully. For any number of reasons, not least among them as a great example of working with subject matter experts, it is well worth picking through the bubble wrap to unpack the immense value of this book.

How well prepared are you to speak with your subject matter expert?