The Curse of Elegance
Part II of this series of articles that share useful insights and practical guidance to troubleshoot underperforming self-help and learning systems
When a designer successfully balances function and form to achieve rare beauty we laud the creation as being elegant. In the realms of art, literature, architecture, furniture building, cooking and fashion we are eager to recognize and value achievement.
Though we don’t expect to be wowed by every piece in a gallery, we do expect to encounter many creations that spark our interest. And it is our interest that shapes the effort as our feedback incents the designers to push for creative excellence. Moreover, even though tastes and materials change, that which is truly exquisite becomes timeless and inspirational.
Unfortunately, such appreciation is not common in the arena of knowledge sharing and that lack of discriminating feedback is to our collective detriment. By failing to recognize the very best resources, we don’t compel the creators to advance the state of the art. This article asserts that a major obstacle to creative excellence in crafting useful content is that we fail to acknowledge that which is outstanding because we have unrealistic expectations as both providers and consumers.
We expect that a set of important instructions or a much-needed description to be clear, useful and as painless as possible to digest
Given our experiences, is this rational?
Consider a set of instructions for renting a luggage cart at an international airport. We expect explicit — but simple and easy to understand — instructions suited to our time-critical needs. Never mind that the older Middle Eastern customer ahead of us and the teenage European traveler behind us have the same expectations but vastly different needs. Each of us are apt to be bothered by either the complexity of the instructions or the lack of sufficient detail. If we are having a tough day, we may be frustrated by the ineptness of the customer who is delaying us and/or embarrassed by our inability to extract a cart in front of strangers.
However, should the Gods smile upon us and we encounter a spectacularly wonderful set of instructions — elegant in simplicity and universal meaning — would we be the least bit appreciative? Doubtful; after all, the three-step process illustrated with childish pictures is such an obvious solution that anybody with half a brain and an hour could have done it.
The curse of elegance is that the creation looks simplistic and blindingly obvious and therefore unappreciated unless you understand
how difficult it was to achieve
Fortunately, there are practical techniques one can employ to become a more discerning provider and/or consumer of knowledge resources:
Recognize the Primacy of the Question
Ask a silly question…get a useless answer. Those who espouse that there are no stupid questions have probably not spent hours on end trying to answer them. Put more affirmatively, those who take pride in framing perceptive questions invariably derive better results than those who do not.
- Knowledge Providers: If your knowledge-base is equipped with a sophisticated search engine, e.g. Google Search Appliance, take advantage of its correlating logic. Every time a search query is made and a particular resource is selected from displayed results, that resource is weighted to be more prominent in future results to a similar query. If your call center reps have slack time, a good use of it is to have them run real-world queries you’ve captured and have them select the most appropriate resource.
Note: If possible, configure the search engine to give more weight to the activity of call center personnel. - Knowledge Consumers: Keyword search is maddeningly inconsistent and does not leverage the potential of sophisticated search engines. For example, let’s say you are a small business owner and you want to confirm your IRS tax deadlines. You could try combining various keywords and wade through the results or you could inquire with the question, “When are the 2014 federal tax deadlines for small businesses?”
Calibrate the Target Audience
The usefulness of knowledge resources is enhanced when they are crafted to meet the needs of information consumers stereotyped into target audiences. Just as a staff member scheduled to present to the C-level receives copious guidance on how best to shape and convey information to that audience, that same diligence is warranted for our customers, partners and colleagues. This can be readily accomplished by identifying advocates for target audiences and providing incentives to contribute their insights.
- Providers: Look for under-served audiences. Telemetry and questions/feedback will help identify groups who find navigation/discovery difficult. A particularly useful and cost-effective approach is to assemble and curate collections of complimentary resources appropriate to the target audience, e.g. expense reporting collections for frequent and infrequent travelers.
- Consumers: Recognize your audience status. Resources intended for experts will be difficult for novices to engage. It is unlikely that a typical tax payer will find a knowledge-base for CPAs to be useful. Don’t spin your wheels; seek alternative sources appropriate to your expertise.
Reward Excellence
The quickest and most cost-effective way to improve knowledge resources is to recognize outstanding work.
- Providers: Challenge your team to be diligent critics of the resources upon which they rely. Establish the expectation that leadership will recognize and reward efforts to improve them. Put this into practice by tracking the deficient resources your team flagged and following up to ensure responsiveness. Negate the sting of criticism by volunteering to preview resources prior to publication. And, most importantly, make sure your resource authors are rewarded and recognized for outstanding performance as they refine their work.
- Consumers: If you encounter excellent instructions on how to return a product to a vendor, take a moment to acknowledge its usefulness; it’s likely you already do this when engaging a human by phone. Rate it or take a moment to jot a note via the feedback mechanism. You’ll make someone’s day and you’ll help the organization calibrate that which works.
Next Topic: How to Publish Self-Help Toolkits
Part III introduces the concept of assembling (curating) purposeful collections (or toolkits) comprised of hand-picked resources to solve a pressing problem.
Directory of All Topics
Browse this directory to discover how to troubleshoot the often thorny problem(s) preventing our self-help, intranet, training, support and/or extranet knowledge bases from being incredibly useful.
