Posted by Dwayne Cox on May 01, 2000 at 23:16:29:

In Reply to: Re: KM awareness exercises posted by Daniel West on April 27, 2000 at 11:34:25:

Lisa,
Here's another one.
Bring a few men's neckties with you.
You can break the group up into whatever size,
diad, groups of five, groups of three, whatever is appropriate given the size of the room and your creative whim.

Assign one person in each group as the person who will follow the instructions given by the other member(s) of the group (we'll call this person the student)
Have one person at a time attempt to explain how to tie the tie to the student, while the student follows the instructions. You can imagine what would happen if you allow a group of five people to explain simultaneously, correcting others in the group, or attempting to be more articulate in the description.

You can also introduce the component of attempting to have a couple of "artists" or engineers is always good, assign the engineers the task of illustrating how to tie a double windsor.

Now, have someone who knows how to tie it step forward and show someone who doesn't know, and see what happens. If you want to save time and perhaps embarrassment, depending on the level of intimacy of the group and how hard you want to drive the point, your "student" could simply be someone who already knows how to do it. The point is more dramatically made when you have someone learning it for the first time, and everyone realizes the futility of imparting tacit knowledge, or the essence of this knowledge, through verbal, or even written, and many times illustrated instructions.

Whatever you do, I hope you have fun with it.
I have another exercise I will post separately.

• Synergy Central....knowledge communities in action

---

Follow Ups:

---

Click Here to Post Follow Up in New Forums

    Knowledge Management Think Tank (New)

  

 Subject: 

Message: