Companies are highly dependent on, as well as vulnerable to, employees who possess “deep smarts,” or accumulated wisdom. The authors use this term to describe key employees who, through years of experience, have developed business-critical knowledge that enables them to make timely, astute decisions regarding strategy and tactics. They explain what deep smarts are and, more importantly, how employees can acquire them.
What’s Inside?
Deep smarts are a rare asset. They include expertise and highly developed ways of thinking that lead to decisions that benefit an organization. Because they are often a product of an individual’s experience, they can take many years to cultivate before eventually becoming an unconscious action. Often, those who possess deep smarts do not even realize it. Moreover, because deep smarts are primarily an inner mental process, they are not easy to access. This fact, in addition to time constraints and lack of opportunity to engage with experts, makes it more difficult to acquire deep smarts. But through keen observation of and frequent dialogue with experts, people can develop such expertise themselves.
How Is This Research Useful to Practitioners?
The characteristics of the managerial profession combined with today’s ultra-competitive work environment have necessitated adaptive solutions. Although the familiar structured training programs are still present, the majority of manager development comes through individuals’ own initiative; employees in today’s business environment have to take on considerable responsibility for their development.
The authors have formalized a process called “OPPTY”: observation, practice, partnering and joint problem solving, and taking personal responsibility. Would-be experts can apply OPPTY to build expertise. Observation entails following the experts and carefully analyzing their actions. Practice involves deliberately emulating and practicing specific behaviors under the expert’s tutelage. Partnering and joint problem solving occurs when the employee and expert dynamically interact to address any challenges that arise. If successful, the employee should be in a position to demonstrate deep smarts without the aid of the expert—that is, taking personal responsibility.
The authors apply this process to a case study for an international beer company. The employee, Melissa, an ambitious sales representative, has been with the company for eight years and aspires to be the regional vice president. She would like to emulate George, her general manager, who possesses deep smarts. Melissa applies the authors’ template to her situation, attaching various timelines to each step and carefully tracking her progress in a log book. This record provides vital feedback as to what worked, what did not, and how next to proceed.
How Did the Authors Conduct This Research?
To compile their data, the authors conduct more than 100 interviews about knowledge use and sharing with organizations of various sizes, including NASA, the U.S. Forest Service, SAP, Raytheon, and the U.S. Army. The common refrain from managers is how much they rely on those employees who possess deep smarts, or practical wisdom and intuition accumulated through years of experience.
The authors’ goal is to identify and extract the desirable behavioral traits of experts and make them transferable to other employees. Underpinning the process is the notion that it is better to build expertise through experiences guided by mentors than to stumble through an outdated process that assumes good judgment comes from the experience of making bad decisions.
Because deep smarts reside in experts’ psyches, often without their awareness of it, the authors design a process to pull out this information and actively distribute it to willing participants. They accomplish this task through their OPPTY process. A case study representing a composite drawn from the many executives who participated in the study is also presented to reinforce OPPTY’s tenets.
Success of the OPPTY process depends critically on experts who are willing to work alongside and share their knowledge with aspiring experts. For their part, the would-be experts must be highly motivated and focused to see the program through to completion. OPPTY works best when the mentor and student are both in the same location, but the authors show that it can also be applied remotely.
Abstractor’s Viewpoint
In today’s fast-paced work environment, managers often become enraptured with sophisticated technologies to train employees and forget how much can be learned through simple observation and dialogue. The latest technological gadgets get all the attention, but they cannot replicate the human interaction necessary to attain deep smarts. I believe development of the OPPTY process is timely in that it recognizes that many Baby Boomers will soon be retiring, taking all their accumulated expertise with them. OPPTY responds to this situation by accessing their knowledge before it is lost.