Ideal Knowledge Transfer™ Tips

• Understand your natural talents and weaknesses as well as those of others around you. Focus on cultivating your areas of talent instead of trying to improve weaknesses. However, manage key weaknesses so they do not interfere or take away from your talent.


• If you want to improve your productivity, work on effectiveness first, then move to efficiency. Otherwise, you’ll be efficient at doing the wrong things.


• When creating or using a new system, keep it simple in the beginning. Avoid data overload and develop/use only the required basic features. This approach will get you and your team up and running faster, while minimizing confusion and scope creep.


• Never compromise on data integrity. Like trust, once it has been lost, it's extremely hard to get back.


• "Stop. Analyze. Think. Plan. Do. Repeat." Following these steps to make your "doing" efficient and effective.


• Only implement full-automation when the steps are fully defined and operational using manual methods. Otherwise, take conservative risk planning measures.


• Perfecting the last 1 to 10% of an individual task may take a disproportionate amount of time and resources and usually does not provide a positive overall return. Instead of perfection, strive towards a state of overall robustness where multiple strategies help ensure the desired outcome.


• Until you can verify otherwise, never assume work that was done before you meets your standards.


• When given an opportunity to take blame, do so. Such action shows humility and responsibility - or, in other words, good leadership. It will promptly bring focus to creating a plan to get back on track and to avoid future incidents.


• In order to evaluate the effectiveness of an implemented system, meaningful and frequent measurements must be taken, trended and compared against goals or limits (e.g., tracking body composition on a diet and exercise program). Such action is critical for any quality system.


• Package communication for the receiver's benefit. Keep in mind that individuals have different key motivators; such motivations may be based on personality traits or Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, among other factors.


• Setting higher expectations and standards at the onset of a task tools resources for the duration, thus accelerating overall completion. Conversely, raising the bar at each step requires resources to frequently retool, adding time, cost and feelings of frustration.


• Until governing first principles are well-known and understood, remain skeptical of (apparent) cause-effect relationships


• When transferring knowledge, try to take the route of "least variables."


• Always be critical of important data, especially when it is presented pictorially.

 

"The ancestor of every action is a thought " - Ralph Waldo Emerson