2. • Faster because you won’t have to spend time learning, and
• Better informed because you won’t have to ignore knowledge that time
pressures prevent you from getting.
Some of the things to consider about the team’s knowledge base are:
• The types of knowledge it needs,
• How that knowledge will be acquired,
• The form in which it should be stored, and
• How the team will access it.
The types of knowledge required for intelligent behavior include:
How does the “world” work? This is a model of the domain in which
the team will operate. Without an accurate model of cause and effect, it
won’t know how to interact with that domain to achieve results.
How do actions affect the world? You can’t reach a destination if you
can’t put together a series of linked cause and effect steps.
What actions are they capable of? It’s no use thinking about an
advertising program that will cost ten times your budget.
What’s the world’s current status? This includes objective information
like market projections, price sheets, competitors, contact information,
policies, procedures, etc. If you don’t know if you’re in New York or
California, you don’t know what direction leads to Chicago.
Knowledge acquisition involves both information gathering and transforming
information into knowledge.
From where will you get your initial information and knowledge?
Most will probably come from your organization’s current knowledge and
worldview plus research based on the same sense of opportunity that
caused you to form the team.
How will you augment that with additional information?
How will you explore? Observe your best explorers and create a
catalog of processes structured around knowledge needs or you
may wind up with a lot of interesting, but irrelevant, knowledge.
3. How will you make sure that the information that presents
itself during the team’s experience is not lost or forgotten in
the journey toward results? Debrief and learn to mine
indirection.
Turning information into knowledge:
How do you generalize from experience?
How do you assess likelihoods? It’s extremely unlikely that there
will be a guaranteed if-then result. Most things are probabilities.
One way of thinking about the most appropriate container for knowledge is to
consider where it fits in the explicit/tacit continuum.
What knowledge belongs in databases, spreadsheets, word
processing documents, presentations, etc?
What knowledge will be on external web sites?
What knowledge belongs in social media like wikis, shared
bookmarks and blogs?
What knowledge will be in stories? “…the most valuable type of
knowledge is tacit knowledge, which cannot easily be codified or
abstractly aggregated. Tacit knowledge, which often embodies subtle but
critical insights about processes or nuances of relationships, is best
communicated through stories and personal connections. 3”
How will people find the information and knowledge they need when they
need it? What will your librarian function look like?
Reasoning
Every decision will have ad hoc elements, but the reasoning process should be
planned and practiced with as much support from systems and procedures as
possible. This will make the process more
• Efficient because you won’t go down (as many) dead ends, and
3
The 2009 Shift Index: Measuring the forces of long-term change. Deloitte 2009:
https://www.deloitte.com/assets/Dcom-
UnitedStates/Local%20Assets/Documents/us_tmt_ce_ShiftIndex_072109ecm.pdf
4. • Complete because you will have thought of what needs to be
considered.
What kinds of decisions will the team make? For each:
What should trigger it? It could be the achievement of a milestone, an
internal request from management or another group or an external
event, such as the action of a competitor.
What is the goal? If there are multiple goals, what are their relative
priorities?
What factors should be considered when making the decision?
What knowledge and other resources will be required?
How will the decision be implemented? Develop implementation
competencies that can be easily invoked. For instance, how do you
execute a price promotion? Identify the variables (product, price,
duration. etc) and develop a system where you can feed in the variables
and the promotion happens.
After you understand the nature of the decisions:
How will you train the team? They need to both feel comfortable with
the process and know how to obtain the necessary resources when they
need them.
Learning
“The most important thing to understand about the mind is that it's a learning
device. 4” Every answer you give to the questions asked so far is, and will be, an
assumption.
How will you critique the validity of your understanding, knowledge and
decision making? A coherent, structured process makes it easier to learn
because you have a set of elements to analyze.
Can you learn from failure? “What makes something worth knowing is
organized around the concept of expectation failure. (Assumptions) are
interesting not when they work but when they fail. 5”
4
http://edge.org/conversation/information-is-surprises
5. How will you make sure you learn the right lessons?
The way you remember the world may change when the world didn’t. A
hard time with a customer may harden someone when it was an
exception and not a new rule.
The world may have changed but your understanding didn’t. A feature
set that used to be peripheral may become essential, e.g. a camera in a
phone or free Wifi in coffee shops.
How will you implement what you learn?
Even if things meet your current performance standards, can they be
done better? How will you intelligently explore the realm outside your comfort
zone?
Conclusion
AI opens the door to do for cognitive processes what things like Lean
Manufacturing and Six Sigma did for production processes. And in a world
where thinking and imagining are critical core competencies for many
companies, eliminating wasted and inefficient thinking may be the next
competitive edge.
Bibliography
Russell, Stuart; Peter Norvig (2011-03-09). Artificial Intelligence: A Modern
Approach Prentice Hall.
Brockman, John. Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution
5
http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/d-Contents.html
