Nurturing Knowledge Learning and Sharing Culture

We are living in a so called knowledge economy age. The change rate of knowledge has been largely accelerated. As a modern people, continually taking in new knowledge is probably a must to build your relative advantage in the talent market. Therefore study is so important. But the question is does everybody know the importance of study and is everybody’s study effective. From my own working and study experience, as well as my observation to others, I often saw there is a large amount of improvement potential in our daily study.

 

The most fundamental question is why we study even after we have spent decades in schools and universities. Some people think they have got enough knowledge to stand in the society firmly in their past lives; so when they meet unsuccessful situation, the only thing they blame is they are so unlucky, there is no any reflection on their own capability. Sometimes, even they identify they probably are incapable for something; they also think it is just because the condition they live or work in is not as good as it should be. So many excuses can forgive themselves. However the opposite is often true. They can improve their own capability so that they can make greater achievement through study, through learning something really helpful and useful. The knowledge studied in school just gave us basic knowledge or just gave us an ability to conduct self-learning which should be lasting for our rest of life.

 

The previous paragraph deals with the willingness to study. But some people could argue we are not unwilling to study. The difficulty is how to study. Anyway, in modern company environment, we often feel we are too busy to have enough time studying. I have ever met a team member. To be honest, he is diligent and wants to accomplish assignment as quickly as possible. I often detected an interesting phenomenon of his hasty behavior. He often used “time is tight and task is heavy” as an excuse to explain why he can not calm down and do due study to help him solve technical problems. For this kind of people, I think letting them realize correct study attitude and what kinds of books can really be helpful is the first step to persuade them to pay due attention to study. Only after he realizes what he can get from study, can he really calm down to study.

 

Team workshop is a quite good method to encourage knowledge sharing and to encourage new knowledge study. In the past years, I always tried to organize regular team workshop to let each team member preside a workshop session per a week in rotation. Team member can choose any topic he/she likes to talk in his/her session. Through workshop, all team members quickly get used to sharing knowledge and are no longer shy to seek help from others when he/she thinks it’s needed. All those formal and informal knowledge sharing activities help team building, help a team becomes a real team.