I was inspired by an excellent article by Robert Bogue on the Tech Republic community site, entitled "Convert Tacit Knowledge into Explicit Knowledge to Ensure Better Application Development"

As knowledge and methods emerge from new technology and circumstances, a lot of know-how is uncovered and assimilated by workers in an intuitive and observational manner through direct experience. In the beginning, there are few written guides and rules that can be referenced to produce the same results that the experienced individuals can produce. From a business perspective, one of the key to cost savings is to find a way to quickly translate the emerging intuitive knowledge from experienced workers to less experienced workers. This is important to producing significant cost savings on large projects.

However translating that intuitive knowledge into new rules is not a necessarily a skill shared by the workers with the most experience. Very often your most experienced Subject Matter Expert has the least ability to map that knowledge into useable rules by others. As a project manager this can be a problem. 

My answer? Decouple the skills: the intuitive knowledge source still resides with the experienced Subject Matter Expert, but the task of eliciting that information and translating it into re-usable rules I give to someone with high-verbal, written, and social interviewing skills.

As Project Manager, that person with the high interviewing skills will often be you.

The principle of TRIZ says find the contradiction in an implementation (be it a product or a service) and there you will find the point where the next innovation, the next break-through, can be made.

Example:

You have a van that is in its dying months and you have a large family that can’t be stranded for its daily commuting needs, so you need to get a replacement soon.

Need #1: you want to be able to walk away from opportunities so you can get the best deal.

Need #2: if the van dies sooner rather than later, you don’t want to be forced to rush into a much more expensive purchase than planned

TRIZ solution: de-couple the contradiction (“you want to be able to wait” and “you can’t afford to wait”) by buying a much lower end vehicle (that only needs to last a year) so that if your current van gives up the ghost, you can still take your time shopping for the best opportunity.

I, in fact, consciously did that, when I was inspired by a TRIZ map I got in the mail. The decoupling of my problems allowed me to wait much, much, longer than anticipated, and it protected my cash-flow and filled-up the war chest. That’s what set the stage for an awesome deal! See pic of my 15 passenger van.

Enjoy the ride!