For someone who is interested in a million different subjects, having a good grasp of how knowledge is created and spread is critical. It’s an incredibly fascinating topic, and a good mental framework dramatically accelerates your learning speed.
A good starting point is understanding that there are two types of knowledge, tacit and explicit, and that learning is a four-phase process.
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How far along an idea is, from 🌱 rough to 🌿 developing to 🌳 mature.
While explicit knowledge can be captured, tacit knowledge cannot be captured—or at least, not in a very practical way.
The context that produces original insight doesn’t belong to the company alone, or to the person alone. It comes from the relationship between the two.
Learning a new domain typically happens in four phases:
Rather than picking individual opinions and beliefs, human beings typically adopt entire belief systems at once.
Midwit meme and Bell Curve.
It’s impossible not to believe in anything. Human beings need to believe in something, and in the absence of explicit beliefs, they will start forming tacit/unknown beliefs, which are often even more dangerous due to their hidden nature.
Because communities of practice are loosely knit, they cannot be created by external forces such as management pressure. They can only be supported and nurtured if they are truly essential to the organization.
While cross-functionality creates silos, communities of practice break them down: because they are loosely knit, and centralize conversations around a specific subject matter, they help avoid situations where a cross-functional team isolates from everyone else, promoting knowledge sharing and reuse.
To truly understand something, you can’t just read about it. You must grapple with it: practice it, write notes, write a blog post, etc. When you do this, your mind starts to solidify the idea and form connections from that idea to adjacent ideas and concepts.
You cannot stumble into something novel by sticking to your routine. Serendipity requires doing things you’ve never done before, meeting random people, reading random books, etc. This is how you find new things, make connections between different fields, create theories, etc.
Explicit knowledge is characterized by the fact that it can be easily captured in some form: a book, a course, a seminar, or any other medium. It is the most basic form of knowledge, and the one we usually think about when imagining expertise.
Brainstorming in a group leads to converging prematurely.
Because it ties your self worth to not making mistakes, and mistakes are necessary for knowledge-management.
Memory gives you a web of facts/references that you can use to put new information into context. It allows you to answer questions with deduction, without having to look up key facts.
Transient notes are valuable scratchpads for supporting working memory, but knowledge should accrete (see Note-Writing Practices Provide Weak Feedback (opens in new tab), Designing a Better Thinking-Writing Medium (opens in new tab)). Transient notes should be an input for evergreen notes, which you refine and cultivate over time (Ideas need to be grappled with).
