One of the most powerful things you can accomplish as a leader is to expand your knowledge base before making strategic decisions. In business, a knowledge base is a highly dynamic resource that demands constant inflow, input, and insights, as well as diligent filtering, all of which are necessary to mitigate the ignorance and error that often lead to unintended consequences.
Harnessing and expanding knowledge within a firm can result in valuable insight that can lead to far more informed decisions, strategic leadership, effective team-building, and purposeful action with ensuing success, and there is a wealth of pertinent knowledge at your fingertips, both inside and outside of your company.
Knowledge Within the Firm
Cultivating a culture of learning is the greatest investment you can make in your firm, and unfortunately most firms lose their learning capacity and succumb to blind spots and group think habits as they grow. Companies don’t organically develop into learning organizations; it takes constant work and rigorous practice.
Within the business itself, your employees can serve as a powerful aid in contributing to executive knowledge and curbing unintended consequences. Create opportunities to engage with the various levels and departments, as each element has something different to share, and doing so will facilitate the ability to address the inevitable questions that will arise from employees as they in turn endeavor to deliver expected outcomes.
Strategizing against ignorance and error means understanding the current limitations of your organization first and foremost. This starts by assessing current knowledge: what does your organization know it knows? Knows it does not know?
Does not know it does not know?
Identifying and facing knowledge gaps is not a weakness, but an opportunity for growth. An undiagnosed gap simply means that we don’t fully understand a problem even though we believe that we do or we’ve simply overlooked the fact that we don’t. By exposing the underlying depth of knowledge behind a concept, you can test how well the concept is understood and how well it stands intellectual scrutiny.
Knowledge Outside the Firm
There is always room for improvement and collaboration within a firm, no matter how much knowledge is cultivated internally. Collaborating with peer executives in your own industry and executives from outside your industry who have faced similar strategic choices will give you the competitive edge gained through the real-world knowledge of how their decisions played out for them. You needn’t make as many mistakes if you can first learn from the mistakes of others. You can spend more time perfecting the wheel when you don’t have to keep reinventing it.
Gaining greater insight and varied perspectives from other executives’ experiences will broaden your own horizons, strengthen your strategic initiative, save you from common mistakes, and provide you with a wider base of knowledge.
In addition, you can reach out to specialized consultants who are armed with the experience and insight needed to expand your own knowledge and your organization’s capabilities. These are all invaluable allies, especially in times of making strategic decisions. However, don’t overvalue the information so much that you negate their own gut feelings. It is essential to keep all opinions in perspective.
Actively harnessing and managing knowledge is essential for your organization’s success, and this success is threefold: by making learning a routine, you cultivate a learning organization; in doing so, you stimulate cultural change and innovation; in turn, enriched knowledge and improved collaborations will facilitate your decision-making capabilities.
By being willing to question your firm’s knowledge and listen to the perspectives of others, your leadership will develop a characteristic of openness, and your firm will move toward increased improvement and progress.
More information can be found in my recently released book, Killing Cats Leads to Rats: Mitigating the Unintended Consequences of Business Decisions. Purchase the book on Amazon here: https://amzn.to/2pGJB6D
Richard Franzi: Speaker, Author, Radio Host, Entrepreneur
Richard currently chairs CEO Peer Groups® throughout Los Angeles and Orange County, CA. His work and research into social/peer learning has been featured in national print and online media, talk shows, publications, and educational forums and outlets.
Richard is the host of Critical Mass Radio Show & Podcast. His program has showcased over 1,200 interviews and is available on iTunes, iHeart Radio, Stitcher and various podcasting platforms.
He is currently conducting extensive research for his 4th book The Critical Mass Company™.
He and his work have been featured in national media: Forbes.com, INC.com, CNBC.com, American Express OPEN Forum, various talk shows, as well as Southern California publications: Orange County Business Journal, Orange County Register, OC Metro Minute.
For more information on Richard Franzi and his work, please visit his website: www.CriticalMassforBusiness.com or contact him directly.