Just another brick under the wall...

Three weeks ago I met Isabel, a business coach, with a view to working with her. She had been recommended to me by Nicki as Isabel has a knack of pulling coherent ideas from the free-flowing discussions and coming up with a clear message regarding an offer, branding and identity.

As Isabel and I sat there waiting for our coffee to cool down and talking about the future, she asked me a really important question. “On a scale of 1-10, how committed are you to making a difference to your business so that you can grow and get to where you want to be.” 

I said "9". I also added that given the time I put into developing human factors and non-technical skills programmes for the diving community, my wife would say I was a 10!

"Good, because I only deal with people who are a 10.” she responded.

We started working together a week later.

During the meetings we have had since then we have discussed the data, information, knowledge and experience that I possess from 25 years in the RAF as aircrew and systems engineer, months of working offshore delivering a WOCRM programme, hundreds of dives around the globe exploring wrecks and photographing them, the multitude of books I have read, the papers and articles I have written for magazines and journals and the courses I have developed and taught.

My take was that knowledge is developed from information which comes from data. Isabel had something critical to add to this which would change my view.

The data I am referring to are single points and/or observations which exist on their own, and the information is created when those single data points and observations are brought together into a report, a book, research paper or general presentation/teaching point.

I then said I believed knowledge is about pulling the information together into a coherent manner which relates to a specific context. Examples of these include the documents I use to create my training and coaching resources like CAP 737 (civil aviation), IOGP Doc 502 (Oil and Gas) and the Non-Technical Skills for Surgeons handbook (healthcare - surgeons) which take the research from world leading academics and operational teams and apply it to a specific domain so that it is relevant for that domain. My domain is primarily wreck, cave and rebreather diving where there is currently no non-technical skills training and where any safety culture which is present is at the pathological, maybe reactive, stage, but I also work in other high risk industries like oil & gas and healthcare.

Even though this popular cartoon from @gapingvoid shows that knowledge comes from connecting the informational dots, it was clear from our discussions that having all this knowledge is of no use if you don’t actually act on it. Like the book under the wall in the title image. The book contains data, information and knowledge, but on its own, it doesn't create action.

With this knowledge we can create action and with that action, if pointed in the right place, as ‘The Castle’ by Mexican artist Jorge Méndez Blake shows, disproportionately large changes can be created from such small actions. Blake's work highlights the impact that a single outside force can have on an existing situation. In the first installation (many more exhibitions have taken place around the world), a 75 x 13 foot brick wall was built over the top of a single copy of Franz Kafka’s The Castle. No mortar or adhesive was applied during the construction and so great care was needed to ensure it remained upright and intact, this is despite the disruption. What can be immediately seen is that the book, despite its small size, has created a change and distorted the wall, an effect which the artist had planned for.

So what?

If you want to create change, you have to do something with the data, information and knowledge you have. You have to create action. Sometimes that action means getting someone else in who can take the information you have, create knowledge from the dots you have and then hold you accountable to ensure the action happens. For that, I have Isabel.

What about you? What are you going to do to change the create action from the data, information and knowledge you have?

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Gareth Lock is the owner and Director of Human in the System, a training and coaching company focused on teaching and developing high performance teams and individuals. If you'd like to know more about the developmental programmes offered, drop me a PM or contact via here for a complementary 30 min chat about yours or your organisation's needs.