Knowledge activation: going beyond top of your head

Top of your head or the best following possible action?

After important meetings and negotiations, we sometimes think something could have been done better if we followed professional logic. For example, a customer can suddenly change the approach to the project implementation despite the team having already elaborated on it for several weeks, and everyone approved it. If you keep professional project management logic, you quickly recognise the scope change request situation or the whole project re-initiation and react accordingly. But the top of your head response would be: "What did just happen? Why is he acting like that? Everything is crumbling apart!" Even if you keep calm and don't ruin the relations by saying what you think, you missed the opportunity to clarify and rectify the situation immediately by asking proper questions about impact analysis or changing timelines and who and how covers expenses for the team. Being professional can be challenging. Knowing is different from activating knowledge and taking the best action when needed.

What makes knowledge activation difficult?

As professionals engaged in cross-domain work, such as systems engineering or project management, we often find ourselves grappling with a wealth of knowledge. This can be particularly challenging, as we encounter numerous concepts with synonyms and broader or narrower terms, necessitating a shift in our perspectives when expressing an opinion or making a decision. And all that we usually do in real time during meetings. We should train ourselves to be better decision-makers, and to do that, we should build a solution that helps us to excel in it.

Knowledge activation solution

Such an environment consists of several elements:

• project domain modelling and ontology development
• repeatable activity and process extraction
• developing personal knowledge graph (cataloging)
• setting up search and discovery over multiple sources
• building concepts grounding and team sharing flows

Let's go through the overall method step by step on a simplistic example.