The idea of knowledge packaged as an ‘atomic unit’ was first suggested by Michael H. Zack*, who stated “… knowledge-as-object becomes knowledge-as-process. The basic structural element is the knowledge unit, a formally defined, atomic packet of knowledge content that can be labelled, indexed, stored, retrieved and manipulated.”
This ‘atomic unit of information’ needs a name or label to support its use as a fresh form of information currency. For this, organisations can leverage a concept developed and refined by the technical communication profession. As part of their transition to increasing digital distribution and management of technical information, they coined the term ‘topic’, which is defined as “a title and content that is short enough to be specific to a single subject or answer a single question, but long enough to make sense on its own and be authored as a unit”. Qualifying this concept to cover just information about organisational activity, gives us the term “Business Information Topic” or BIT.
Replacing policies, procedures, and work instructions with BITs not only breaks down out-dated cultural influences, but knowledge resources can be built so that they are much better suited to digital communication and interaction.
Individual managers can begin to raise the Collective IQ of their teams immediately simply by abandoning conventional approaches to writing policies and procedures and, instead, use a topic-based approach. As a manager, this means:
- changing your mindset from ‘command-and-control’ to ‘knowledge sharing’
- writing to address specific tasks or circumstances and how best to handle them (by combining all the relevant elements of policy, procedure, and instruction)
- employing a writing style that is easy to understand and engage with (this means using the active voice and other ‘plain English’ techniques, as well as following the Behavioural Insights* precepts of ‘simplify’ and ‘personalise’)
- developing the content collaboratively with team members
- enabling and actively encouraging team members to provide feedback, criticism, and improvement ideas
- using the documented information as a basis for common understanding, coordinated action, and collective improvement
Making these changes immediately improves the capacity for written information to bind and focus a team.
*
Zack, M. (1999) “Managing Codified Knowledge” Sloan Management Review, Volume 40, Number 4, Summer, 1999, pp. 45-58
Nudging the world toward smarter public policy: An interview with Richard Thaler McKinsey Quarterly June 2011