Keyser Soze and Organizational Learning
I watched The Usual Suspects again last week. I just love this movie. This time around I couldn't help linking the way Keyser Soze, Kevin Spacey's character, conjured up the story in the interrogation room with the way experts make sense of novel situations. In the movie, Keyser Soze, one of the two survivors of a waterfront massacre, is grilled by a police officer. The interrogation takes place in a police officer's room which has the usual information snippets, newspaper clips and mug shots stuck all over the walls. Soze, the real crook in the movie, uses all the information available in that room to spin a believable story and finally manages to convince the officer of his innocence. This is the same way experts make sense of situations. (Stop your inductive reasoning here: all experts are not crooks!) They use their experience base to interpret the information around them to mentally play out a story. And if the mental story makes sense, they act it out. If it does not make sense, then they revise to balance it out till it does. This entire sensemaking happens in a few seconds or a few minutes timeframe. If Keyser Soze were a novice con man, he would have found it difficult to interpret the information around him, let alone spin a story around it. Here’s my point. A rich experience base is what distinguishes an expert from a novice. One way to build an experience base is to wait for experiences to come to you. This is the natural way. The other way is to create an environment where experiences can be accelerated. This is the realm of training. But how much of our training is based on accelerating experiences? How many training outcomes are based on interpretation and sensemaking capabilities? This is where I feel that business organizations are missing out on a great deal. (I know the Army does a lot of this kind of training). The very nature of a business organization provides for a fertile ground to accelerate experiences. Knowledge management can provide for the wealth of accumulated experiences to tap from, while training and e-learning initiatives can leverage on this wealth of lived experiences to build environments where sensemaking can be accelerated. If you have come across such initiatives for accelerating experiences in business organizations, please let me know. Mail me at maish-at-elearningpost.com.Permalink | Monday, December 06, 2004
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