Within almost any organisation, there is more intelligence, ideas and insight than ever gets put to use.
In most, unless managers are sufficiently curious and have a method for capturing them and getting those unique understandings working for gain for their business, the best may never find their way into action.
And in many, unless those holding the insights themselves are also extrovert or sufficiently pushy in support of what they know and believe, what may be best for the business may never see daylight.
Certainly, in most businesses without a process for ensuring that new ideas can be exposed, considered and enhanced through the scutiny of other minds, they probably never will be.
The three videos here – https://bit.ly/3PiQq80 – show how and why the collective intelligence of your organisation can be captured and developed.
But, without a deliberate process to make what is known but out of sight – and therefore, when unexplored and unarticulated, also unusable and unmanageable – few companies can design their maximum intelligence around the needs of their customer.
So, that is what the following paragraphs seek to address.
How the process of knowledge capture is performed to grow collective intelligence
In most businesses, the diversity of cognitive experience in play across a workplace can only be guessed at until it is reported back to the managers able to put it to work.
It is only once you know what intelligence you are dealing with that you can begin to design around it, according to your objectives.
In what follows here – and in line with the diagram above – these basic steps, proven over centuries of commercial publishing, describe what must happen to give form and bring workplace knowledge to life, using what are now commonplace internet-document-sharing applications.
First, following the simplest rules of research or journalism, the more precise your articulation of your requirements of what you need to know, and of the question that must be asked of your team members, the better will be what you get back in reply.
Second, the replies you receive must be read, checked, edited and summarised and to ensure what you get back is, first what you wanted, and second, what the writer(s) intended to say. Every writer, ideally, needs a second reader to check their work, as even the best writers’ original writing contains errors they can’t see.
One inevitability is that across your organisation, while their intelligence, their ideas and suggestions may be good, the quality of its team members’ writing abilities will be uneven.
But it is when the replies are summarised and reported back to those who contributed that the magic begins to happen, as it is only then that people begin to see what goes on, unknown and unexperienced, in the minds of others who they themselves may also otherwise not know.
The learning process this drives is exactly that which we experience when we first read news we would not otherwise be able to obtain for ourselves. And if we are curious, this then frames our pursuit of further, related knowledge, joining the dots as we go.
But within an organisation, because it reveals who knows what, through the precise data it can drill down on, management now has access to a bottomless, renewable resource – an inexhaustible ocean of new questions and answers – whose creativity may be limited only by its imagination in what it asks for.
Once you know how to unlock who knows what about your company and how to get more of that knowledge, through this can be propelled the growth of ROI through the attraction and capture of other new and satisfied customers.
The reason Amazon succeeds is because it understands its customers. In the emerging CX-driven economy, it will be the cancer of ignorance that kills others.
My work will create digestible reports for use by managers and teams as tools to assist understanding, decision making, and future more effectively shared CX-focused learning.
Contact me, Graham Lauren, for more, at graham@cloudcitizen.com.