The Value in 
Knowledge Work
is Thinking

"It is often more important to frame the right questions than to supply the right answers."

By Oscar Rhudy

The question is, "How to keep up with your marketplace?" 

Coping with the information explosion involves disciplined learning using the key question: How much do you need to know and why do you need to know it? 

If you follow the world merely for the fun of it, personal interest will do as a method. But if you are in business or need to know about many technologies for serious purposes, you need another technique.

1. Use personally understood framework

2. Read what makes you think

3. Validate with experience

While many things are shocking, not all are significant, particularly if they don't happen often or to very many people. Trying to keep up with everything published isn't it. Instead the key is the context of your personally understood framework.

Facts, assertions of sales or technical character, even published analysis by experts, have scant value until placed in some personally understood framework. Without context, most facts, even generalizations, are either quickly forgotten or misremembered. After all, they rapidly change. But putting information in context is not enough by itself.

The other rule is: Read what makes you think. If a report of an analysis fails to encourage you to make mental connections, it is likely to be of little use. More important, it needs to meet the following basic test in processing information: The reader is usually his or her own best source -- but only as good as the stimulation received.

Anything that stimulates thinking greatly multiplies the value of whatever is read or heard. It is perhaps the only way to avoid today's unhappy dilemma, whether to know more and more about less and less -- or less and less about more and more. The former is what the expert supplies. The latter is what television produces. Neither is adequate in the face of overwhelming amounts of information, that needs, above all, to be organized. This is particularly true of information about operational consulting, the significance of which is largely dependent on interpretation in a complex and dynamic setting.

The dynamics are so complicated and their ultimate resolution so unpredictable, that it is often more important to frame the right questions than to supply the right answers. Senior managers know well that few questions have neat solutions, and are ill served if asked to settle for them. Of course, raising problems without talking about solutions is insufficient. But the solutions shouldn't be too strongly pressed. They aren't the essence of what makes people think, and can close people's minds if oversold. Getting the questions right matters more.

Clarity is also important. Since clients can take slightly, if not amazingly, different meanings from the same material, simplicity is essential to avoid misunderstandings.

Finally, there is the problem of repetition. It is a universal temptation for consultants and authors to weigh in with their opinion on a popular topic, no matter how many have done so before them. This can waste the reader's time; often it simply alienates or distracts from core capability. More truly can turn out to be less.

So if a subject is competently handled in a technical reference, there is no reason to recite it again unless there is something new to say.

Oscar Rhudy, a systems and operational management consultant, offers seminars and other training opportunities. Contact him at: oscar.rhudy@computer.org.

© Copyright 1999, 2000 by Oscar Rhudy

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