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    Can an Organization's "Deep Smarts" Be Preserved?

     
    4/4/2005
    When employees leave, they take more than their coat and hat. How can companies better preserve the accumulated knowledge of individuals? Isn't that what separates average companies from truly great ones?

    by Jim Heskett

    Successful organizations, according to Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap in their new book, Deep Smarts: How to Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom, rely on people who possess knowledge that provides a distinctive competitive advantage. It is tacit (non-quantifiable, implicit, and often very subtle in nature) knowledge based on "first-hand life experiences" and "shaped by beliefs and social forces" based primarily on "know-how" and "know-who." It is "as close as we get to wisdom," and is dubbed "deep smarts" by the authors. Deep smarts are, in many ways, what enables managers to reach good judgements well before others—at the extreme, to practice "blink" (recalling my February column). The authors, based on their observation of deep smarts at work, prescribe ways in which they can be cultivated and transferred, and therefore preserved.

    Conscious efforts can be made to develop deep smarts, according to the authors. They involve offering opportunities to obtain a great deal of experience through combinations of various jobs (requiring at least ten years for the accumulation of sufficient experience), simulations (speeding up the process a bit), and formal education. But most importantly of all, they involve the employment of "knowledge coaches" capable of creating opportunities for "coachees" to develop deep smarts through everyday observation and decision making. Such coaches are distinguished from mentors by the degree to which they structure and engage their charges in various learning experiences.

    Deep smarts, it is maintained, can be transferred from one management "generation" to another. But it isn't easy. It requires that carefully-selected individuals possessing deep smarts devote significant amounts of time to the coaching of a self-selected protégé by creating a learning process that the authors term "guided experience" (including practice, observation, problem solving, and experimentation). Techniques to be employed range from presentations and lectures on the passive side to the provision of rules of thumb, storytelling with a moral, Socratic questioning, and learning by doing at the active learning end of the spectrum. It might involve following the coach through important activities or conducting post mortems of both the coach's and the protégé's behaviors and decisions. In an educational institution, one example of the use of knowledge coaches in the transfer of deep smarts is the employment of emeritus faculty members, disengaged from the performance evaluation and promotion process, to teach alongside junior faculty members while providing coaching in everything from classroom teaching techniques to the mores and culture of the organization.

    The problem, of course, is that this process is both costly and time-consuming, particularly in organizations required to meet quarterly earnings targets. This raises the question of just how practical it is: Won't it always be relegated to the "nice to do" category of activities and responsibilities? How is knowledge coaching measured and rewarded? While everyone with requisite experience, according to the authors, is a candidate for knowledge coaching, can an organization afford to allocate sufficient time to the practice, including training? Conversely, are these questions merely symptomatic of a basic problem in management today; that is, the failure to preserve the deep smarts that separate the best from the average performers? What do you think?

    To read more: Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap, Deep Smarts: How to Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2005)

    HBS Working Knowledge readers: For your response to be included, please respond by or before Thursday, April 14th.

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