Identify Knowledge Work Tasks - Workshop Exercise
I’m preparing an upcoming workshop and I thought it would be interesting to get reactions to an exercise that I’m considering using to help identify types of common knowledge work tasks and the related methods, skills, tools. It’s a bit different to read it as compared to having someone present it, but I’ll do my best here to give you a sense and then - I would like your help:
1. What would your answers be if your were sitting in the workshop?
2. Do you think this exercise works as a lead into a discussion of types knowledge work tasks? And really as a set up for a lot of discussion around work literacy.
Here’s the scenario:
——
The construction company’s CEO and Suzie reach the door at the same time on the way out of corporate HQ. He holds the door open for her. The CEO is very charismatic, came up through the ranks; he’s old school and always worried about margins. He talks about how nice a day it is and asks Suzie what she does. She works in learning and development. “How great†… “Hey, I was just thinking about something and this is great. Do you have 5 minutes?†Suzie doesn’t realize the trap that lays before her. She steps right in and the bear claws close.
The CEO goes on to explain that there aren’t enough good young engineers coming in and that their best engineers are going to be retiring. The CEO explains that it takes 15 years for an engineer to really learn the art needed to work on the major projects they do. And that’s when they can get good engineers. Unlike when he was young, getting a job at the company doesn’t seem as sexy. The CEO is convinced that a lot of the issue is that young engineers aren’t getting exposure to what this company does and how interesting the engineering challenges are. He believes that they need to attack this from a learning standpoint aimed internally and externally. He’d like to see if working with universities and possibly in conjunction with other construction firms might make sense to help take some of the materials they already have and possibly develop new materials. He wants to put something in front of other execs an put it in the budget next fall. “So, Suzie, what do you think?”
Suzie’s head is spinning. She says, “That sounds like a great idea,” without realizing that this only makes the trap tighter.
“Great,” the CEO proclaims happily. “What I need you to do then is pull together ideas that I should pitch to the rest of the senior management team around this. Nothing urgent, we have six months, but it would be good to see some progress along the way. I’m really looking forward to seeing what you come up with. I think this is going to be great.â€
Suzie’s not sure what just happened. It’s all happening too fast. At first it was exciting to be talking with the CEO. But she doesn’t really know much about this. She hardly sleeps that night. The next day she wakes to realize how crazy this is. She goes immediately to her boss to figure out what this means. Her boss tells her that the CEO has come up with pet projects before. The rest of the conversation with her boss is pretty dismal. No one in the chain of command is going to be helping Suzie get out of this one. No one is going to help. Suzie got herself into this opportunity / mess. And the parting words from her boss were the icing on the cake, “Oh, and I still need you to get done all the rest of the work you have.”
Suzie is still somewhat excited. Maybe if she does a good job, this will give her an opportunity for exposure. It does sound like an interesting problem. But she’s nervous and not sure what to do.
What are some things that Suzie should do?
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As facilitator, I will try to avoid answers that are trying to “get out of the assignment” and will try to focus on classic knowledge work tasks.
I also have a series of follow-up things in mind, but I would love to hear (as I stated above):
1. What would your answers be to the question - “What are some things that Suzie should do?”
2. Do you think this exercise works as a lead into a discussion of types knowledge work tasks? And really as a set up for a lot of discussion around work literacy.
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June 18th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
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June 18th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
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June 19th, 2008 at 12:17 am
Tony,
Is your goal to have them discuss effective strategies for helping old school CEO’s to go forward and fund a new media solution? Or do you want them to discuss potential learning elements?
My concern is this may evoke a bit more how to avoid trouble with your boss and other related stories and less about a learning design. Yes, it is part of it, so if you are just facilitating one group you can help keep it more balanced.
June 19th, 2008 at 7:41 am
I’m not seeing this case as well connected to knowledge work. To me, it’s much as Suzie’s boss pictures it: a senior-executive idea spasm. The CEO could as easily be saying, “We’ve gotta implement Six Sigma” or “we should do all our professional training through webcasts.”
I’m also having trouble picturing a CEO like this guy slowing down enough to listen to a conversation about what’s really cognitive infrastructure. (After his “do you have five minutes,” the only thing Suzie gets to say is “that sounds like a great idea.”)
In other words, even granting that the engineers would be happier and more effectively professionally if they could better scan, find, etc., those things are not engineering, any more than business writing or effective meeting behavior is.
I’m sure that before this exercise, you plan to deal with the knowledge-work tasks you’ve listed elsewhere (scan, find, etc.), but there still seems to be quite a gap between those categories and getting good young engineers to join this company (one symptom the CEO cites).
While I’m not saying the CEO is wrong, I don’t know whether “not getting exposure” and “not joining the company” are problems or symptoms. And in either case, I don’t know that attacking them from a learning standpoint makes sense.
If you want a discussion of knowledge work tasks, and you want it because you’re convinced there are more effective ways to engage in that knowledge work, go there.
Like f’rinstance:
(1) Ask people (maybe in small groups) to tell each other about kinds of knowledge workers in their organizations. (Is the person operating the case-packer at the pharma factory a knowledge worker? Is the technician who maintains the case packer?)
(2) Have the groups come up with their own categories of knowledge work. You might encourage them to consider context but in general keep the categories context-free. That to me is the “infrastructure” part: everybody needs to retain, for example (my one-word suggestions for keep/organize/refind).
(3) Using each person’s knowledge of the specific workers and organizations, ask how people typically go about these tasks. What are engineers / plant managers / marketing analysts doing when they scan, find, retain, etc.?
…I’m not sure where to go next. (3) might generate a range of stuff, from what people did in the 50s to use of current technology. But this gets the focus where it seems to me it belongs:
What are knowledge-work tasks?
How do people go about them?
Can they do that better? How?
June 19th, 2008 at 7:47 am
My answer would be: Suzie needs to define the problem, both as the CEO sees it, then as the problem really is. She should do a JTA - which may be difficult politically if no one will help her - to find out what tasks are done by engineers. Then look at reasons why young engineers don’t want to work for this CEO (maybe because he calls engineering sexy?!?! - I hate that term so much). Then she will be in a better position to offer a plan to the sr. mgt.
I think the discussion could be derailed from the JTA - or discovering what sorts of knowledge work engineers do - very easily because of the politics involved in the scenario.
June 19th, 2008 at 7:51 am
Tony
What’s your learning objective?
A) To elicit potential sources and strategies of knowledge and skill acquisition
If so, then your set up it a little too complicated. As Christine above mentions, they are more likely to focus on the boss (because he gets most of the copy) then the task which, I think, is upskill fast on how to attract engineers into a profession, network with competitors and universities and potentially reach out to schools.
The set up is better if tighter. In my experience too many details give an audience too many opportunities to go in the wrong direction and I’m sure there must be an algorithm for the number of people you need in a room to get some really stupid and unhelpful questions.
You’ve been asked to brief the President next week on the Guatamalan coffee industry. What do you do?
BTW I just written my first blog and it’s all your fault.
H
June 19th, 2008 at 8:34 am
I think also at work here is generational problem that your audience might not address. Engineering students have been “taught to do” engineering whereas engineers with years of experience have learned engineering on the job, with a lot of tacit knowledge.
The way this case is written, I think most ID’s will look at the gap of “what they need to know” (content) rather than how to support access to the tacit knowledge and bring new employees into a community of practice/learning. As Dave mentions, your attendees might feel that this does not fit their situation. I agree with him that you first make them aware of what their preconceptions are based on their own experience, then begin to create a common framework. Using that framework, you could then use the same questions to look at the case (e.g. how does the CEO percieve the knowledge work of his employees? Would your definition of knowledge work fit the CEO’s? Why or why not? What questions do you think Suzie should be asking the CEO as she begins to create this program? What questions should she be asking new employees to gage their learning needs? What questions should she be asking veteren employees to gage their assumptions about knowledge work tasks?
June 19th, 2008 at 10:03 am
Tony, not totally clear on the exact learning objectives, but one thought I had was that you might want to adapt Beth Kanter and Dave Wilcox’s social media card game for the workshop. It has a CC license and you might be able to have people use these to address specific knowledge work tasks–maybe give them your initial list of tasks and then have them use the cards to come up with some strategies for addressing the tasks using social media. I’m planning to use this construct for a workshop at the Brandon Hall conference, but I think it might work for this scenario with some tweaking. The game is at: http://socialmedia.wikispaces.com/Social+media+game
June 19th, 2008 at 10:24 am
If I was sitting at the workshop my first reaction to the scenario would be to suggest Suzie to better define the project with the CEO and find an agreement with her manager for the resources she needs…
Basically I see this scenario like a way to discuss on how to handle the “two bosses” situation.
I don’t know exactly what is your objective, but most likely, whatever it is, you will have to facilitate the discussion in order to have the participants getting the right focus.
June 19th, 2008 at 10:26 am
Great comments.
The goal is to have them identify knowledge work tasks that Suzie will need to perform.
A recent conversation with someone who I think is incredibly good at this stuff suggested that this type of exercise needed people to engage with the person, the story, have a bit of fantasy to it. So, I was also trying to make it be something that people would find compelling.
Christine - you are right that avoiding trouble with the boss is what a lot of people will focus on - so, how can it be something interesting that doesn’t seem just like another project?
Dave - if Suzie is going to respond to the CEO and try to formulate something, she has many knowledge work tasks to perform. The focus is not on the engineers activities, but Suzie’s activities. I hadn’t really thought about that aspect, but Suzie needs to begin to prepare some kind of presentation/report - how is she going to do this?
Dave - you suggestions (1), (2) and (3) are similar to exercises that follow this one that I’m thinking about. But the person who led me to this exercise said that it was best to start with someone else and try to help them.
Dave - your last three questions are pretty spot on.
Gina - I’ll change the term sexy. Great response. As a facilitator, I might ask - what does she doesn’t really know how to do a JTA or isn’t sure how she’ll do it in this case.
Hugh - that’s an interesting suggestion -
“You’ve been asked to brief the President next week on the Guatamalan coffee industry. What do you do?”
or let me shift it -
Suzie has been asked to brief the …
—
Does this work better for folks?
I’m a bit worried that it doesn’t have some kind of objective - maybe brief on how to better engage with them or something?
—-
Certainly it avoids many of the objections above …
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Virginia - like Dave - you’ve gone right past where I was asking. I hope you’ll let me know what you think about Hugh’s suggestion with or without my modifications.
June 19th, 2008 at 10:28 am
Wow, Michelle and Fabio commented as I was processing the others. Thanks so much for the help.
I’m definitely going to change the scenario - the question is to what. So far, Hugh’s suggestion seems good.
One problem with the scenario is that I want it to occur over a period of time (so that scanning becomes more important).
June 19th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Tony, have you heard the song “Let’s talk about me” by Toby Keith? I think most people want to first see what is in it for them and talk about their situation. From there you get the concepts.
I think also that I totally misunderstood the scenario, because I thought the focus was on Suzie trying to determine the knowledge tasks OTHERS (engineers) needed. So Hugh’s suggestion (take it out of the context of “training” and make her the PR director, for example) to have her do a briefing would be good. It would also help to not muddy the waters with discussing engineering as that is a knowledge based career. I would also expand from what knowledge tasks she needs to know to what impact this could potentially have on the organization (creating networks of information, accessing information, collaborating with others thus creating a common mind frame, creating new ways to access information and disseminate it throughout the organization.
June 19th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
If the audience is training/development people, they’re likely to start identifying with Suzie (or likely to thing “doesn’t she have any clarification skills?”), which means they’ll focus on what if anything to do for the engineers (as I did).
Now that I understand a bit more of what you want, I’m thinking of how to present a problem that likely does involve needing to use what I’ll call for want of a better term more generic knowledge-worker skills, rather than those of a trainer or whatever.
How’s this? Write one-paragraph descriptions for three people in three different roles within Megalith Corporation. Maybe your research has revealed certain clusters of knowledge workers — those trained in highly formal ways like engineers, for example; those who tend to learn on the job, like IT people; maybe a third kind of worker whose job has transformed in the past 10 years or so, like someone in marketing or product development.
Let your participants pick one of these people as their “character” for the exercise(s). Because I gotta tell you, I don’t want to be the tonguetied Suzie. More seriously, this lets people choose someone, and that choice gives them ownership of the character’s situation.
Okay — now introduce some seismic change that will affect everyone at Megalith: merger with (takeover by) a smaller, nimbler rival. Everyone’s going to experience changes in terms of customers, internal partners, company objectives. And there’s going to be a lot more cross-functional, maybe even cross-national work.
You could specify role-specific details if you want, or make it more general. “You’re going to a strategy session with your new workteam in three weeks… What do you want to know? What do you want to learn? What are you going to do?”
Although I’m sure you were going to do this, I want to make it explicit: encourage people to move from job-content details to knowledge-work details. In other words, if I’m the IT guy, I may want to learn about the new company’s enterprise software. But in this exercise, I don’t want to bog down in details about SAP versus Oracle; I want to think about how I’d find out what they have, and (since it’s different, naturally) figure out how to learn more.
All sorts of variations for working this out. I like the idea of tossing different characters together, but you may not need too much structure.
It’s the nonessential details that help without distracting. Megalith, which began in Illinois as a manufacturer of farm machinery, now has three main branches: inventory software used in many small to mid-sized businesses, landscaping services and supplies through a chain of nurseries, home gardening products sold under the house brands of stores like Target and Lowe’s.
That one sentence is like the galaxy that the Enterprise wanders around in: large enough for anything you want to do, small enough that you don’t spend light-years getting from point A to point B.
June 19th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
If I were sitting in the workshop this would be my answer:
I’m a bit like the person with the hammer who can only see nails that need pounding. (I’m a writer who has studied narrative inquiry - so that’s my hammer ;> )If I were Suzie, as first described, I would be focused the need to retain the knowledge of the departing engineers in order to help the young engineers get up to speed in fewer than 15 years, and to develop a sense of how exciting the job could be.
Could I negotiate time to interview the older engineers? Could I get them to write up, or allow me to record, stories of discoveries and/or how they solved tricky problems? Then could I set up something like an internal wiki with rich sets of tags for each story, names, techniques, etc.? Maybe even have an internal set of brief videos as part of it?
But that’s social-media-loving me playing Suzie, and maybe she wouldn’t see those possibilities.
June 20th, 2008 at 8:15 am
“As a facilitator, I might ask - what does she doesn’t really know how to do a JTA or isn’t sure how she’ll do it in this case.”
Is the point of the exercise to think about new ways to get at that sort of system information? If so, then I agree with Joan’s comment…I’d try to find ways to get the engineers to talk about what they do, why they do it, why they have stayed so long in their positions, etc.
Or is the point of the exercise to surface all the different skills an engineer needs to be successful? I’m still confused at what your objective is. Blame it on midterms coming at the end of a quarter.