Sharing knowledge

Knowledge can yield a lot of power. Sharing knowledge not only creates a strong network but also sparks new ideas. If you just give it one brain cycle to think about it, it becomes very evident that sharing knowledge is the more powerful strategy.

In the 1980s, professor of Political Science Robert Axelrod ran a tournament inviting strategies from collaborators all over the world for the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. As the winning strategy in these tournaments "Tit For Tat" emerged as the clear winner.

This struck many people as unlikely and even false because "Tit For Tat" values cooperation over competition to the point that it would accept one non-cooperative move by the opponent and still cooperate. However, since then, the strategy has been confirmed in multiple experiments as superior.

Once you share knowledge it can multiply and copy freely. The benefit of the original author of the shared knowledge is that he or she gets to participate in the synthesis of new ideas and knowledge based on her contribution which more often than not is magnitudes more valuable than the original information.

Add to that the fact that in a world where information can be shared at almost no cost and incredible speed, knowledge and information spread fast. Throughout history it was almost never the case that an idea only was born in one place. Famous examples for this are the Radio and the Lightbulb. So, the one daring to share knowledge has a clear advantage over those how don't. Just make sure to trace what is happening with your knowledge if you want to participate in the fruition!

Just sharing knowledge will have a massive impact on your teams productivity. But as soon as more people are involved, things become a little bit more tricky. For this i can offer you the tool we created to save our lives — literally by stopping to waste 50% of our waking time in meetings.

We call it untwist and it helps us to untangle all the open ends and discussions meetings usually create and turn them into a straight thread to success.
I always love hearing from people about their experience regarding meetings, productivity and happiness — feel free to email me at thomas@untwist.io !