From almost the moment that the commercialized Internet had its lights switched on, businesses everywhere have been working to find new ways to use instant global communications to find, store and leverage organizational knowledge.
It’s a tough problem, far tougher than a lot of people think. Innovation happens when the spark of inspiration lands on the deep tinderbox of experience, and in order to make that innovation a fairly predictable (and therefore profitable) process, businesses need a way to turn that experience into usable knowledge. And so, countless document repository systems have been designed and deployed. Endless research has been done on how companies learn and remember on an organizational level. And increasingly, those tasked with tackling the tough problem of knowledge are being driven to a single very lucid conclusion.
The problem isn’t what we don’t know. That’s easy to fix.
The problem is what we don’t know that we know.
It’s called tacit knowledge, all the stuff that is known but not said. If document retrieval and knowledge base systems are storing and making use of the tip of the iceberg, tacit knowledge is the rest of the ice – and much of the surrounding water besides. It lives in the esoteric experiences of your tech staff, in the side comments heard and mentally filed away by your field sales people, and in the patterns found and forgotten in your market research. Tacit knowledge is the great blizzard of genius being lost between the cracks of your knowledge management protocols.
This kind of knowledge is what builds a business and makes it succeed. So what can you do today to uncover some of this knowledge and put it to good use?
At Load Bearing Creative, we develop and write a lot of case studies, whitepapers and other technical marketing documents for major technology and industrial manufacturing companies. For us, this process is very interview-driven. We focus hard on not just getting the surface-level story, but also a fair share of the underlying context. As a result, we’re often able to deliver a strong package of tacit knowledge to our clients – the story they knew, but didn’t know they knew.
As an outside party with both technical and communications skills, we’re often able to bridge the critical gaps between sales, engineering and the larger marketing vision. It’s never just about the outward-facing product.
The most effective technical marketing projects are designed around a strong knowledge debrief component, which in turn should include:
• Strong interview skills. Whenever possible, interviews should be conducted with the most knowledgeable people involved, and questions shouldn’t be limited to the specific job at hand. Once you have them on the phone, every interview should be an opportunity to learn details about what’s happening on the frontier. Never waste a good interview.
• A context design process. Knowledge is information wrapped in context. You need a detailed process for taking the raw facts that emerge from interviews and demonstrating why they matter. Staying abreast of the latest news, innovations and thinking in related fields is an absolute must when you need to best leverage limited and precious interview details.
• Simplification steps. Once you have gathered the raw data and contextualized it into a usable structure, you need a well thought-out process for simplifying and clarifying those patterns and extending their usefulness to as many parties as possible. Often, this is where the final products of the marketing process – brochures, case studies, whitepapers, etc. – come into play. But this step can also involve artifacts (spreadsheets, presentations, data systems, etc.) designed purely for internal consumption. What matters is that they are accessible and useful enough to serve as the foundation elements for future debrief interviews.
Your marketing investment should do more than present a clean, polished front to your customers. It should also speak within. Designing and assembling a professional process for debriefing your field people – in a way that efficiently and effectively translates both to internal knowledge and external message – is probably the single most important step in getting the most mileage possible for your marketing dollar.
Is your marketing hard at work, uncovering what you don’t know you know?
If it isn’t, it’s not working nearly hard enough.
