In December, the Society for Technical Communicators, Content Management Professionals, Special Libraries Association, and the Knowledge Management Community of Practice presented a joint event in Vancouver BC to watch a recorded presentation by David Snowden on Sense-Making. Having never heard of sense-making or David Snowden, I figured the meeting would at least be a learning experience for me.
During the presentation, I was hit with an overwhelming philosophy on sense-making, which seemed to make sense, but which I refused to take at face value (continuing with my sceptical tendencies). As a technical communicator and user interface designer, three things hit home with me that I’ll paraphrase here and then explore in more detail:
1. We always know more than we say and we always say more than we write down.
2. We only know what we need to know when we need to know it.
3. Knowledge can only ever be volunteered; it cannot be conscripted.
We always know more than we say and we always say more than we write down.
When we share information with people, most of us censor ourselves, deciding between what the person needs to know, what they don’t need to know, and what would be too much for them to know. Not only do we censor ourselves when speaking, but also when writing, deciding between how much the readers need to know and how much time and desire we have to write it down.
By censoring ourselves, withholding information, we decrease the amount of information another person has to make appropriate decisions or make sense of a situation. In technical communication, a programmer can’t possibly relate all information to a technical communicator, and a technical communicator needs to distil this censored information for the reader. When a co-worker has a problem with a manager and the manager asks you what’s going on, you need to decide to tell everything you know or tell the least offensive story. In the end, the reader or manager has less information than you do to make a decision.
We only know what we need to know when we need to know it.
I store numbers in my cell phone so I don’t need to keep track of them in my head. I create and maintain style guides so I don’t have to remember all the rules for writing and maintaining online help. I purchase books on user interface design so I don’t have to remember the intricacies of how error messages should be written according to About Face 2.0.
Many times, when interviewing a subject matter expert, information may not come up because the person isn’t thinking about and doesn’t need to remember it in that situation. Place a SME in the context of fixing or doing something and a lot more information comes out, plus you can ask questions pertaining to the task at hand if you are unclear about why the person is doing what he or she is doing.
Knowledge can only ever be volunteered; it cannot be conscripted.
An issue that technical communicators and other professionals fight against is the entrenched idea that sharing information means a loss of job security. If your interviewee shares information, this means that someone else can know it, do the job, and your interviewee can be easily replaced. The old adage, “No one is irreplaceable” helps to compound this attitude. Perhaps you run into problems in a less than friendly work environment where information isn’t shared because of past hostilities between the user interface design and programming teams.
As the population of North America ages and retires, companies are left with information voids. These retirees take with them the information gained in their 40 to 50 years of working, and since they have said less than they know and have written down even less of it, a gap is created between those who know what to do and those who don’t.
These three points are what I managed to absorb from the Cognitive Edge presentation, but there was an incredible wealth of information to which I am certainly not doing justice. You can find more information at http://www.cognitive-edge.com.
As an accredited CE practitioner, Michael Cheveldave from NuOptiks Consulting in Castlegar was on hand to field questions and share his experience of working with the BC Ministry of Forests.
Refreshments were provided by Bluestream Database Software Corp. Visit them online at http://www.bluestream.com.
