Don’t Know What You Don’t Know? How Collaboration Makes You a Knowledge Champion
Knowledge workers become knowledge champions when they create a sharing culture on their teams that breaks down stovepipes. When they are fearless, knowledge workers not only share what they know but ask what they do not know, and when a few peers get stumped, collaborating out loud gets new ideas in the open.
Whether in person at the office or across teleworking virtual teams, collaboration habits among team members make the unknowns known and brings out knowledge champions.
About Arc Aspicio
Arc Aspicio enhances the future of our nation by creating bold ideas and bringing them to life. A consulting and solutions company, Arc Aspicio solves problems by applying our integrated capabilities in strategy, design, data, human capital, behavioral science, and technology. The company passionately pursues our vision to be the hub of creativity where people take action to change the world. To do this, employees collaborate with clients and partners to create solutions using a human-centered approach. Innovation is not possible without action. The company focuses on strategy first, then takes a hands-on approach implementing ideas to achieve results. Join Arc Aspicio and our Strategy Innovation Lab (SILab) by creating and sharing ideas to inspire people to change the world. Follow us on Twitter @ArcAspicio @SILabDC and learn more at www.arcaspicio.com.
Knowledge workers recognize that the key to success is sharing what they know and asking questions when they don’t. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld knew as much when he famously said there are “known knowns” and “unknown unknowns.”
Identifying the challenge on your own isn’t enough. Good collaboration habits are the only way to discover what you know and what you do not. Knowledge workers – in the Government, in the private sector, or in our business, consulting – make those discoveries by practicing some basic collaboration habits. Here are three to start:
Ask questions - While face-to-face conversations are best, the pace of the knowledge workforce requires using virtual tools to ask questions. We use in-house virtual collaboration tools to add knowledge to a thread, our Strategy Innovation Lab (SILab) to pose questions to our seasoned teammates who have seen it before, and an online knowledge base of job aids to guide team members new to the company to find answers
Share knowledge - Sharing knowledge is the hot potato of knowing what you know. If you know something, toss it along to the next person. Sharing may be informal through a brown bag session or through a blog that can help key know-how go viral. Sharing spreads knowledge and puts it to work in new and innovative ways
Collaborate out loud - Brainstorming and crowd-sourcing ideas in workshops or online chats can help bring innovation into the open, taking ideas out of the cubical or conference room and into a virtual space where anyone can watch or hop in. Collaboration habits can simply start through structured collaboration tools or video conferencing
