Last week I spent a day in The Hague, delivering a KM training programme to a group there.As part of the day, after an experiential exercise adapted from the Marshmallow Challenge (which was great fun!), we had a more detailed discussion about the Peer Assist technique.
A Peer Assist, as Geoff Parcell and I said in “Learning to Fly” is
...a meeting or workshop where people are invited from other organisations and groups to share their experience, insights and knowledge with a team who have requested some help early on in a piece of work.
Whenever I teach how this works in practice, I always emphasize that the invitees to a Peer Assist are there to share their experience, rather than give their opinions. Experience, you see, is a precious commodity, an earned reward because someone was present, involved and personally learned from an event – and hence can share their story first hand.
Opinion is cheaper and easier to come by. I can google for opinions; I can give/receive opinion in a LinkedIn group; I can email you my opinion. I can receive opinions on a blog posting or a tweet. Sometimes the opinion given is rooted in experience, but not necessarily. It’s often “retweeted” opinion, amplified from someone else. This video where members of the public give their opinion on the new iPhone (or so they think!), is a classic example of retweeted opinion - the unwitting stars of the show have absorbed so much of the iPhone 5 hype that their received opinions distort their personal experience!
The language we use around Opinion and Experience is interesting.
"Do you want my opinion on that? Let me tell you what I think…. "
Opinion is something which is given. It’s transactional.
It’s like me buying a coke from a vending machine.
In contrast, we would never say “Let me give you my experience”!
We usually ask “Can I share my experience with you?”
As you share your experience with me, I begin to enter your world. I can feel how you felt, see what you saw, think what you thought, and then ask about what I don’t understand.
Sharing experience isn’t transactional – it's a conversation. It’s relational. It’s like we are sharing a meal together.
Why is this important? We have seen a dramatic rise in the number of social channels which surface opinion - within and beyond the boundaries of our organizations. For people like us, who work with knowledge, this is a good thing. We need to put that opinion to work and make sense of the patterns and sentiment available to us.
But all that experience is also still available for sharing....
This post is a plea for us to remain ambidextrous – let’s continue to be smart at working with opinion, and let’s also strategic about learning from experience.
As we immerse ourselves in transactional tide of opinion, let’s make sure that we can still see the richer, personal knowledge available through the sharing of experience. We need to spot the relational opportunities as well as the transactional ones.
Take a closer look at the bottom of that coke machine, and you’ll see what I mean. It's the real thing.