PUTTING KNOWLEDGE TO WORK

In Chapter 1 we encountered the following issues with knowledge jail—info glut, language barriers, and prose erosion. The antidote for jail is setting up the right conditions for making it easy to move knowledge to those who need it and how they need it. That is, translation. Here are some ways that the Translation discipline gets knowledge out of jail:

• Translation surmounts “language” barriers. Brokers (and the seekers they support) mold the knowledge, listening for what was going on as the originators recount how they made decisions, and mentally mapping that into their context. (“That drilling team was dodging hurricanes. We’re going to fend off icebergs. We need to keep temperature in mind.”) When the broker packages Jammed knowledge in a usable knowledge product, such as a requirements document, a product spec, or a training curriculum, she is translating from old context to new context, from the language of the originators to the language of the seekers.