#73 - Neanderthals, Knowledge sharing and Sketchnotes

Collaboration and sharing knowledge in large organisations can do wonders

Sep 22, 2024

Writing an action down makes that action more likely to happen. Applying any kind of physical activity to an insight strengthens the circuits holding the insight in place.

~=~ DAVID ROCK ~=~

Neanderthals were known to use relatively primitive tools, in part due to the general lack of innovation among these pre-humans. If someone invented a new way of doing things, the ability to share that knowledge — the ability to learn as a group — was stunted in Neanderthals.

Yet modern humans, who came to dominate as Neanderthals died out some 40,000 years ago, had superior, and complex, social networking skills that enabled greater adaptation and innovation. They evolved to develop social skills that enable extensive information and idea sharing.

It is remarkable how many organizations are populated by “Neanderthals” of the 21st century. While virtually every company is a potential hotbed of innovation, there is no working mechanism to share that deep knowledge.

There is incredible knowledge generated every day in organizations, but when it is not shared, it is lost. Even the Neanderthals didn’t have to “reinvent the wheel.”

So what to do? The key is to avoid unnecessary bureaucracy and wasted time, while still finding a way to broadcast what works, and what doesn’t. First, you need to support the effort at the top. If senior executives don’t buy in, why would anyone else want to play ball?

Second, there’s not a “one size fits all” here. It might be necessary to experiment with different approaches to see what works in any particular organization. It also wouldn’t hurt if successful efforts to disseminate knowledge to others were measured as part of regular performance evaluation.

And here’s how sketchnotes can really help ease the knowledge sharing process.

Create a sketchnote of the meeting
Share with the group.
The visual nature incites interests. Also the scrappy nature communicates that it’s not finalised yet.
Ask the team to come together and decipher each other’s sketchnotes as a team. This brings lot of clarity and empathy of different perspectives of the same information.

AtomicSketches update

In the line of main topic of this newsletter I want to share how Knowledge Sharing works in AtomicSketches community. Every day a prompt is shared and members share their version of the visual. Put together they bring out a 360 understanding of the word. This is a very small glimpse of the power of learning through connections.

Sketchnote from community

5 key human skills that will be valuable in the age of AI.

Curiosity
Compassion
Creativity
Communication
Courage

I asked community memebrs to come up with a creative sketchnote of this skills. And here’s what we got. This week we have Sketchnotes by Jatin Kapadia, Kanupriya, Deepa G