Dave's Whiteboard

Tony Karrer wrote about concept workers the other day. He finds the term “knowledge worker” an adequate — people in a call center and engineers in R&D are all called knowledge workers.

So he’s using a term from Daniel Pink: concept worker. Says Tony, “It’s all about how easy it is to obtain the answers. The harder it is, the more conceptual.”

As I commented on his post, sometimes answers are hard to find because the organization has lost them in a “knowledge warehouse” from which Indiana Jones couldn’t retrieve them. Or, because the organization’s processes actively work against retrieving knowledge.

In other words, “hard to find” answers aren’t necessarily the conceptual ones. A member of my team at Amtrak spent close to a month veifying that, ten years into its existence, the company used the term “exchanging a ticket” but had no procedure for doing so. People in different locations either followed what the previous passenger railroad had done, or made up stuff, or told passengers it couldn’t be done. That’s not knowledge work; it’s Evening at the Improv.

To me, the core issue is whether you can find a specific solution to a problem. Sometimes, there is a right way to do things. Safety, legislation, regulation, process validation may constrain how far you can vary. When a pharmaceutical company calibrates a scale used to weigh dosages, they don’t want you casually coming up with new ways to calibrate. Neither do the people taking the drugs.

More often, especially in more complex settings, there isn’t one right way to address a problem, so you have to create one. The more your job calls for creating such solutions, the more it involves “concept work.”

I see another angle as well — a kind of informal validation. Would exemplary performers agree that the solution you came up with is a good way to resolve the problem — even if it’s not one those exemplars would have come up with?

Thanks to my colleague John Howe, I’m a big believer in the value of involving exemplary performers when you’re designing training (or facilitating learning) for higher-level, non-procedural jobs. I’ve written about exemplars before. Later this week, an example of working to uncover solutions about which exemplars say (approvingly), “Yeah, that works.”

Warehouse photo by *spo0ky*.