We all walk around the world with certain expectations. We have a sense of how the food will taste at a fast food restaurant. We know what our favorite slippers feel like on a cold morning. We brace ourselves when we get a letter from our accountant. When our expectations aren’t met, we struggle. We complain that the line at our go-to coffee shop is longer than normal. We can’t believe that a particular clothing store no longer sells red T-shirts.
We also struggle when something or someone exceeds our expectations because we don’t know how to react. The entertainment industry plays on this mismatch of expectations and reality. But often, we celebrate when faced with such unexpected scenarios. Julia Roberts can afford to shop in the pricy boutique in Pretty Woman. Frodo is much more than a just a hobbit in Lord of the Rings and defeats the greatest evil in the land.
We carry around the same expectations at work. Learning and knowledge teams often begin projects with deeply held beliefs about the other. Prior interactions between the two teams (like the mass of ERP projects in the 1990s and 2000s) have built and reinforced such preconceptions. Yet in reality, both teams exceed these expectations.
Learning teams see knowledge managers as organizers of information, building categories and subcategories to put knowledge into well-identified bins. Knowledge managers historically controlled the content necessary for the learning team to develop training, managed access to that knowledge, and ensured that all of the knowledge was formatted properly. The learning team saw the knowledge managers as keepers of policies, processes, and procedures for knowledge. The demands of these procedures frustrated learning teams, creating an impression that knowledge managers were more worried about the format and categorization of knowledge than whether it fit a particular need. Knowledge managers were perceived as gatekeepers, not enablers. Learning teams felt compelled to create supplementary content to fill in what they perceived to be gaps in the “fit” of the knowledge.
Knowledge teams, on the other hand, saw learning managers as trainers only, adapting content that they had created. Learning teams might change the order of the presentation of knowledge to make it easier to consume, which would affect the context of the knowledge presented. Knowledge teams also felt an intense pressure to deliver “complete” knowledge to the learning team. This was particularly difficult in complex projects where changes to the deliverables would alter the knowledge required to build training, creating numerous back-and-forth interactions between knowledge and learning teams, and frustrating both. Knowledge teams also were frustrated by the amount of time that the learning team required to build training.
Obviously, neither of these sets of expectations is true. Today, both learning and knowledge teams are driving toward the same goal—delivering the knowledge and skills that team-members need as close to when they need them as possible. Just-in-time knowledge and learning delivery systems mirror one another in intent.
Knowledge and learning teams need to recognize their limiting expectations and learn to exceed them. Can you imagine the applause you can get if the teams move past their expectations?
Would you like to know how to build this partnership and achieve exceptional results? Check out our March issue of TD at Work: “Enabling Success through Learning and Knowledge Sharing.”
