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Knowledge Hub

Shared Knowledge or (How to Convert What You Know Into Written Words)

Shared knowledge helps your organization to make data-informed-decisions and to turn insights into new and improved products.

We already told you what to put into your Wiki and how to manage it appropriately. Now we want to get even more hands-on by showing you how to translate implicit, explicit, and tacit knowledge.

Again, What Is Knowledge?

Knowledge comes in various forms. It is a mixture and constant cycle of information awareness, curiosity, diligence, and distribution. That’s why it’s evolving by definition. You need to constantly practice your knowledge to ensure it’s effectiveness.

Most importantly for your organization: The costs of transmitting knowledge across teams and time increases over time. So while your company grows, you need to make sure individual insights get uncovered and transferred to everyone. A Wiki like Skara can help you to expedite the rate at which decisions are made by simply sharing knowledge. But how do you do that exactly?

The 5 Key Principles of Knowledge Management
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Introducing: The Feynman Technique

Physicist Richard Feynman came up with a method to ensure he truly understood anything he studied (https://fs.blog/2012/04/feynman-technique/). And his learning technique is all about sharing! So by pretending to teach his knowledge to a sixth-grade student, he eventually identified gaps in this explanation and tries to review and simplify them again. By following this approach, you too can ensure your understanding of various concepts and processes, and make your knowledge available to co-workers at the same time.

Step 1: Choose a Topic

Start with choosing a topic you know more about than most of your colleagues. One they might benefit from as well in the future. This can move into a guide, workflow, checklist, chart, or best practice. Your goal is to create a post that explains, guides, and can be reused.

Step 2: Explain in Simple Words

Think about your audience first. Do people who should benefit from reading your post have your background information? Or do they even use a specific technical jargon on a daily basis? They most likely do not. So try to summarize the topic first in plain, simple language. Anyone should be able to understand the topic and the relevance to them, no matter how long they are part of your organization.

Continue by adding specific, practical, and hands-on details. Think about all the aspects people need to know about and structure your knowledge in a meaningful way. Standardized formats can help you with that. We already share some of our favorites here.

Step 3: Review the Gaps

Even though you are the expert, keep an open eye for missing pieces. Review your post honestly and identify areas of confusion, blank fields, or opportunities of cross-referencing. Maybe you should also go back to your learning material, search the web for additional aspects, and add new information when they appear.

The ultimate test, off-course, is to show your updated post to someone who is not familiar with the topic at all. If you manage to follow the Feynman Technique, you will have supercharged your own understanding as well as your readers.

Conclusion

Shared knowledge is the foundation of successful and efficient teams. By collecting, editing, and providing reusable information, you can supercharge your company. The Feynman Technique is a method, which uses simple language to include everyone. Add posts to your Wiki Skara for easy access. Keep sharing!

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