Learn before

“Learning before, during and after was one of the early bywords for Knowledge Management at BP” writes Nick Milton¹ and BP may well have been the source from which I first heard that catchy phrase

I think of ‘learn before’ as having three particularly important aspects:

1. Training and education.
2. Preparing to act.
3. Prior art

The first of these, training and education, isn’t really within the scope of KM but is the proper domain of Learning and Development (L&D). It’s not really preparation since it is far more speculative than specifically-targetted.

The second, preparing to act, may well include elements of L&D but can also be far broader. I can think of some examples from my own career. For one, I was in a cohort of people selected to manage some strategically important process improvement projects. We spent three weeks together learning Lean Six Sigma and other methods and tools in preparation for our projects. We also spent time together developing our team ways of working collaboratively. A similar example would be the start of a companywide KM programme during which a team of around a dozen spent several weeks discussing and developing the programme and also a methodology for how we would approach it. In both cases the people involved in the teams all brought to them their own skills and experiences and together forged new understandings as well as sharing between us what we each had. My feeling is that this sort of ‘preparing to act’ doesn’t happen nearly as often nor as extensively as it could. Instead, staffing managers mostly look for people who can slot right into a project role without any preparation. It’s obvious why the ability to do that is an advantage, but the more innovative the project challenge, or the more innovative the approach to it is allowed to be, then the more benefit there will be from allowing time at the start of the project for these kinds of preparations. That Lean Six Sigma programme and that KM programme both motored after that.

The third kind of ‘learn before’ that I listed above was ‘prior art‘ and by that I mean a stage in which the project team deliberately looks for previous relevant experience that they can learn from. Maybe a very similar project, or maybe one that has only one or two key dimensions of similarity: same problem, same solution, same industry, same client, same methodology, same scale .. so on. There is so much to be learned in an easier way that making all the same mistakes over again for yourself – simply by looking at prior art.

Getting to a state in which both ‘preparing to act’ and ‘prior art’ are part of project start-up critically means budgeting for these kinds of activities from the start, and creating the expectation of a somewhat more ‘tortoise’ rather than ‘hare’ approach in the early days of the project.

Remember who won the race.

_{[1] http://www.nickmilton.com/2013/03/learning-before-during-and-after-how-to.html}