When a landscape architect is designing a park or campus, a decision must be made where to put the sidewalks. A favorite trick is to simply plant grass everywhere and wait. In a month or two it will be obvious where the sidewalks should go.
Now the same concept is being applied to the design of online tools to help people do their jobs. For the longest time such tools were designed by people far from the trenches. Those designers had an array of academic skills but lacked the hands-on expertise that only comes from “being there.” As a result, many online tools and eLearning programs were seen by the intended user group as “yet another thing from corporate” that got in the way of doing their job.
The problem is that the complex models developed by experts and consultants often don’t fit into the users’ world. People in the trenches understand more than they are given credit for and will resist adopting new methods and tools that don’t actually help them to get work done. They will be receptive to new tools if the tools respect the already overwhelming demands on the time and attention of knowledge workers, and if they help them do their jobs better and measure things that are meaningful.
The outcomes from conventional consulting solutions and the methods used to activate and embed those methods in organizations have often been underwhelming, because it has proven difficult to achieve widespread adoption and alignment. I often reflect on the comment made to me by a vice president of one of the world’s largest companies regarding the stacks of PowerPoint decks in his office. “I have eighty-million dollars worth of consulting sitting on those shelves,” he said, “and no way to get it out there.”
The solution is to turn the whole problem on its side and examine it from the end-user’s point of view. What busy professionals need is something to help them do their jobs better and faster. There is simply not enough time to learn everything that needs to be known, so needed knowledge must be made available in context on the fly. The people who know best what kind of tools will get the job done are the people who need to use them, so the design process needs to reflect that reality. The solution needs to come from them. Pull, not push.
Recently a large industrial company asked LeveragePoint to address the need for simple, elegant tools that treated their Intellectual Capital—the tacit expertise of their own people—as a commodity that could be captured and shared among their professional marketers. The idea was to give the end-users the ability to not only help design the tools they would use—based on their experience—but also the ability to refine and change the methods and practices that were being prescribed by corporate leadership so they would be more effective.
The trick was to find the appropriate balance between hierarchical knowledge and “open source” (collaborative, networked) knowledge. Too much of the former and the resulting rigidity gets in the way of an adaptive solution; too much of the latter and there is chaos. The LeveragePoint platform was employed to balance the two, facilitating rating of solutions, feedback on tools and methods, and sharing of best practices. Needed knowledge was embedded into the tool but was not an obstacle to getting the actual work done; it was available if needed, in the smallest coherent chunk and in context, but was not a required part of the process. 
Collaboration in product groups was facilitated in the online environment, and the tool was iterated again and again, each time capturing suggestions and improvements from the field. Powerful metrics were established to measure use, collaboration, virality, and most importantly, output and business impact.
At the end of three months, the tool had been used by a large percentage of the intended audience, far more than we or the company had ever seen previously, and user interest in it was spreading by word of mouth. People, given the chance to design their own solution, liked and used it. While we started out with a design mandate for a simple and elegant solution, the users further simplified it during the pilot phase, and in doing so made it even easier to use. Expertise became something that could be captured and transferred from one person to another, and it remained in the system even when people moved to other jobs or outside the company.
Moving from a static solution to a dynamic solution and allowing the end users to participate in the design of their own tools was an important breakthrough, one that moves the corporate competency model from a dry academic standard to one directly related to feet on the ground performance. And it became clear that competency is not just an individual metric—it is a collective capability that can be tapped into by each member of the team when the appropriate tools are made available.
Jonathon Levy
President and Chief Strategy Officer
