It’s not about knowledge, it’s about action

Converting knowledge into wisdom

Will Durant, the famous historian, philosopher, and author of The Story of Civilization, wrote, “Intelligence is intellect with its feet on the earth.” I think this is a perfect quote for underscoring what we are trying to achieve when turning knowledge into action. For knowledge to be useful, it has to have two feet solidly touching the earth, in other words, business outcomes. We are talking about revenue, profit, costs, talent retention, and so forth.

I have three suggestions for you to think about.

First, start tracking the impact of knowledge. For some of my clients, this means tracking the number of useful insights generated every week. For others, it means capturing when a specific datapoint was useful in driving a decision. If you aren’t tracking all of these small contributions, you will diminish the value of knowledge.

Second, think about creating routines for knowledge conversion. For example, many organizations are now designing decision playbooks that guide teams on how to tackle tricky decisions such as dealing with a crisis or analyzing a missed financial projection. Another idea is hosting WDIM (What Does It Mean) meetings, in which a team discusses the importance of a specific datapoint.

Third, protect the creation of knowledge. Go back to the five questions above and make changes to your company culture. Knowledge needs time to think (no pun intended), and you can’t do that if you’re drowning in emails and back-to-back meetings.

Conclusion

Scrooge McDuck could afford to keep a roomful of coins without spending it. Maybe he had to reconsider his position during the 1970s’ days of high inflation, but that’s not our concern. Organizations cannot continue to digitally hoard knowledge. Investments in knowledge technology have to pay and provide an ROI. It all starts by making different decisions.