Do You Know So Much That You've Forgotten What Other People Don't Know?

As we began building the full discovery process for Knowledge Asset Studio, the list of questions kept growing. Not because we developed a lifelong enthusiasm for interrogating perfectly innocent business owners, but because the obvious questions produced obvious answers, and those answers didn't tell us what we really wanted to know.

Ask somebody what they are an expert in, and they will usually tell you the thing written on their website. Ask what services they provide, and you will get another perfectly sensible list. Ask what courses, books, presentations, or material they already have, and you'll eventually get a useful pile of information, but you can still miss the most interesting part because experienced people are remarkably bad at spotting the knowledge they use every day without thinking.

Expertise Does Not Arrive Wearing A Name Badge

Some of the most useful things we know about learning do not arrive in our heads as a theory with a label attached. We can look at a programme and start noticing where people are likely to get lost, where we ask too much of them, where the sequence fights the learning, and where a perfectly respectable collection of information has somehow failed to become an experience anyone would willingly finish.

After decades of doing it, that judgement does not feel odd or extraordinary to us. It feels like looking at the thing in front of us, and I suspect the same is true for almost everybody who has spent a long time in a profession, because the hard-won knowledge eventually becomes the ordinary furniture of your working day.

The Useful Stuff Is Often Hiding In The Sentence That Begins 'I Just...'

I just know when a client is not ready. I just look at the figures and can tell something is wrong. I just ask them a few questions. I just know which supplier to call. I just know when the learner has misunderstood the point.

Twenty years often sits inside the word 'just'.

The trouble is that if something now takes you five minutes, you can easily forget that it took fifteen years to learn how to do it in five minutes, and that is where a great deal of potentially valuable knowledge disappears from view. It never gets written down, taught properly or turned into anything because its owner no longer sees it as something another person would need to learn.

This Is Why We Ended Up With Sixty-Eight Questions

Our full Knowledge Asset discovery questionnaire eventually reached sixty-eight questions, which I appreciate sounds less like a pleasant business exercise and more like something administered under a very bright light. The point, however, is not to make people write an autobiography before breakfast. It is to approach the same body of experience from enough different directions that the things hiding in plain sight begin to appear.

We ask about what people have created, naturally, but also what customers repeatedly ask them, which problems they solve unusually well, what they have developed that did not exist when they began, which decisions have become instinctive, what other people depend on them for and, perhaps most interestingly, what would disappear if they stopped working tomorrow.

That last question can be rather revealing because it removes the job title and leaves the knowledge behind.

And Then We Ask What Else It Could Become

Finding the knowledge is only half the exercise, because Knowledge Asset Studio isn't a very elaborate way to build a filing cabinet for somebody's brain. Once we can see what is actually there, the much more enjoyable question is what else we can do with it.

A method used with private clients might become a professional programme for other practitioners. A collection of workshops might contain the beginnings of an academy, and years of internal training might become something a company can license or sell. A book might have another life as an educational resource. A specialist process might become a toolkit, an assessment, a certification or a completely different product for an audience its creator has never considered.

The answer will not always be one of those things, and you certainly shouldn't decide it because somebody recently watched a webinar saying everybody needs a membership. The point is to find the opportunity that fits the knowledge, the audience, and the life the owner actually wants.

Have A Look At The Things You Call Obvious

If you want to try this without completing sixty-eight questions, which I imagine you definitely do! Listen to yourself for the next few days and notice every time you say 'obviously', 'I just', 'everybody knows' or 'it's quite simple really'. Then ask yourself whether it would have been obvious, simple or instinctive to you on your first day in the job.

You may discover that some of the most interesting material for your next educational product, professional programme or business has been sitting in the part of your expertise you stopped noticing years ago.

What Have You Stopped Noticing?

If you know there is a great deal of experience sitting behind what you do but cannot yet see what could be created from it, tell us about it. You do not need to arrive knowing the answer, because this is exactly the territory the Knowledge Asset Blueprint is designed to explore.