Knowledge gap — The self-destruction path
How to avoid the knowledge gaps that can destroy individuals, teams and organisations.
Recently, I wrote why speed wins 💪 and how companies like Netflix beat Blockbusters with speed and a management model that allows fast changes according to what the customer really wants.
You see, Blockbusters was suffering from the “too big to fail and too big to listen” syndrome, with executives fabricating reports that were lying to themselves. They didn’t invest in change, they were slow and most important, they didn’t really listen to what customers had to say.
Blockbusters reports stated stuff like:
people like going to our stores (…) they like to go to our stores because they like the ability to open and close and read the back of the DVD cases. They enjoy the serendipity of possibly running into their neighbour. (…) they really like picking up popcorn on the way out.
At the same time that Blockbusters was writing this report, Netflix was taking over.
Sometimes the culture of the company or the influence of the management or specific stakeholders may have a negative impact on the team, and nobody sees what is happening.
Let me give a couple of examples:
In one of the last projects I worked for, the product was being developed for the previous 2.5 years without any feedback from the potential final consumer. Basically, there was much discussion about what would be the best for the customer, but there was zero feedback from potential users. And we know that is much better to get the perspective of the client than “take the perspective” which is when the team put In The Client’s Shoes (and that’s what Blockbusters made, they thought that customers like to go to the shop, see the DVD case and buy popcorns🙄). The problem is that many times the team will be wrong and is developing a product with a huge knowledge gap.
Sometimes teams discover that they have this knowledge gap too late in the game and they have to pay the cost to get back on track. The cost of correction is sometimes big and in a startup may event represent complete failure (which was the case). That’s why it is essential to do Agile/Scrum (being Agile the methodology and Scrum the framework)to ship frequently, to have incremental deliveries, test and have feedback from users frequently. This is the way Agile use to reduce the knowledge gap and the risk of uncertainty, always riding the information wave.
The Agile manifesto also states “ Working software over comprehensive documentation” which means that it is more important to focus on the development and ship frequently than produce a lot of documentation. Is not that we shouldn’t document but what really brings value to the customer is finalised product and not documentation.
Additionally, you can also consider that code is documentation right? And we already saw too many projects with thousands of pages of documentation that are complete failures.
Oh, the knowledge gap also reminds me of the movie Wall Street (1987)
Everything in life requires real-time or updated information in order to avoid the knowledge gap.
Some companies also face this situation when the top management or the shareholders don’t understand and don’t want to understand what is Agile and that they need to “change at the speed of innovation”. Consequently, they don’t get the point “Working product over Comprehensive documentation” and demand a ton of documentation, they hire people to audit what the team is doing, audit the code. This may make the team slower and less efficient. We all also know that it’s easy to write what the stakeholders want according to their agenda. Stakeholders need to focus more on requesting a frequent demo of the product over documentation.
We are often responsible for changing the organisations we work with, and for that, we need to develop our change leadership skills. Be faster and be assertive.
Knowledge gap of yourself
While writing this article I started to think about the knowledge gap that we as individuals create inside our biased mind. Organisations and teams can create expensive knowledge gaps but individuals create knowledge gaps every day!
Once again, every time we create knowledge gaps (and naturally we create a lot) we need to pay the price. Most of the times we are quite used to it because we do it every day. Let’s say, you don’t check the weather and don’t bring the jacket and consequently, you feel colder later, or you don’t measure well small trade-offs such as “I choose the restaurant A instead of the restaurant B because I didn’t know that the restaurant B is today running a free beer promotion”.
You can avoid reality but you can’t avoid the consequences of avoiding reality. Ayn Rand
Although every day we pay small prices for small knowledge gaps, bigger knowledge gaps may change the path of your life. Big knowledge gaps may have a big impact on our personal and professional careers.
How to avoid knowledge gaps
I would say that the formula to prevent or minimise knowledge gaps and achieve success is: to be obsessed, focus on one thing and Scrum (or some sort of Kayzen or Agile framework).
To be obsessed, the focus and Scrum it is the way to do it both on the corporate side and the personal side. You see, when you are obsessed, focused and do frequent improvements, you are minimising the knowledge gap, right?
Let’s see some examples:
Be obsessed with your mission. Companies have mission statements and so you should have it too.
Tesla: To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.
IKEA: To create a better everyday life for the many people.
InvisionApp: Question Assumptions. Think Deeply. Iterate as a Lifestyle. Details, Details. Design is Everywhere. Integrity.
These companies are obsessed about delivering what their missions statements state.
Grant Cardone book “Be Obsessed or be Average” talks about this and how obsessed you need to be about something to achieve a certain level of success. Part of this obsession is, of course, learning the skills you need for your development, learning about your market and ultimately reduce the knowledge gap.
Be focused in your “One Thing”. In the book “The one thing” by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, they explore the obsession paradigm from a slightly different perspective. The book basically talks about the one thing that you need to do in order to improve all the rest.
According to the book, multitasking is a lie (we all know this already 😒) and you should focus your attention on the one thing that doing it repeatedly, will make all the rest easier or unnecessary. i.e what is that activity that will improve all the rest? For Netflix for example, the one thing is to constantly improve their product. Non-stop. For a salesperson, the one thing probably is to grab the phone and do as many calls as possible to sell the product. To a pianist, the one thing that is going to bring him success is to play as much as possible and improve is piano playing skills (and reduce the knowledge gap that he has from the top player level!).
If that piano player tries to be a software developer, a salesperson and a bodybuilder at the same time, he will not achieve a great level of success in any. The same happens with organisations. If Netflix tries also to be the best popcorn seller, develop a marketplace and integrate a food delivery service, they are not going to be a good entertainment provider.
Scrum everything. Agile methodologies, especially Scrum and Kanban provide a huge help to reduce knowledge gaps. The objective is to provide frequent product releases or frequent updates and get feedback from stakeholders and users.
Scrum and Agile methodologies also encourage failure. Failure is not only ok but also important to learn. Additionally, it’s better to fail faster and sooner than later. Scrum is organised by Sprints (2 weeks for example) and if any of the features developed over a 2 week period fail, the team has wasted only 2 weeks. However, in a scenario with a lot of planning and without constant feedback from users, the knowledge gap can grow quite a lot and the cost of failing may correspond to months of development or even years.
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