Lucky You

Just today, I had the opportunity to speak with a group of educators. In fact, I enjoyed many such conversations as there are indeed many hidden gems after you ponder over it and reflect upon it.

One of the topics included the kind of advantages the new generation has over their predecessors. This reminded me of a story that was shared with me about a conversation between a child and his grandfather. The child was boasting about what the new generation has created; the internet, starbucks, computers, hybrid cars, space shuttles, and so on. The grandfather immediately shot back, saying that his generation was the one who laid all the foundations for all that were mentioned so that those creations are possible.

Along those lines, one of the educators were saying that the new generation is so lucky to have all the foundations laid out, so that when new recruits join the institution, they could just pick up and go.

This was what got me thinking. You see, back in the 80s, or even up to the 90s, some people believed that knowledge is power. That led to withholding information for fear that if someone were to get hold it, they would gain a competitive edge. So much so that when the term, knowledge worker, was coined, new concepts such as knowledge management tools appear. The whole idea was to codify tacit knowledge. In other words, to capture what you know into documents, manuals, flow charts, process maps so that even if the 'knowledge worker' walks out of the organization, the knowledge is retained. Exciting idea, but feasibility is questionable.

Flowing from that concept of knowledge management is the idea of getting organizations to adopt a particular framework, like the Malcolm Baldridge, as these are tried and tested frameworks adopted by world-class organizations. Hence the thinking behind it was, if your organizations were to adopt the same framework, it, too, can become world-class. Sounds logical but fundamentally difficult to implement.

Here, there are two seemingly different ideas but they are fundamentally the same to me. While it is true that tacit knowledge that is codified can be used and re-used again and again. And as such, these 'best practices' can be quickly adopted by individuals (or organizations as in the case of a world-class organization framework) who may have little or no experience in the area concerned. Some what, it is similar to someone who is being invited to give an after dinner speech but have no idea what to talk about and hence browse the web for witty subjects to present.

Should this person be a class-act in terms of putting up a facade, he may be able to pull this through. But anyone with a little conscience would know that you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. As such, even with free and widely available content, unless the person who is using it has sufficient baseline knowledge of the subject matter, it would be impossible to fake it. Or put it in another way, try memorizing some medical facts and attempt to pass off as a doctor.

So, in my opinion the availability of such wealth of information is good only when we have a purpose for it. For the implementation of the knowledge is not without significant efforts, understanding the intent of the knowledge is fundamental.

The other thing is, even with such wealth of information is not enough to get you ahead. Understanding how to make use of the information is one, knowing how to build upon it is another. Therefore, having a wealth of information do not a wise man make.