(2010-05-15) Rader Knowhow Coaching

Gregory Rader on the gap in the Internet's offering: Coaching for KnowHow. The internet currently provides two things very well. At one extreme all the information ever created is at your fingertips. Anything you might hope to research or learn about is a Google search away... At the other extreme is Wisdom. This also is very easy to find on the internet. Web portals feature quick tips on how to achieve this or that goal. Myriad blogs provide motivational material and all other manner of advice (Self Help)... In between these two extremes something is lacking. I am going to refer to this middle ground simply as knowledge. It is the stuff that enables you to apply information... if you are seeking the knowledge necessary to achieve a complex goal then you are likely to be frustrated by the lack of Actionable knowledge available... We need to stop looking for teachers (people who disseminate information) and start looking for coaches (people who accelerate the discovery and Mastery of knowledge).

Or maybe just OutSourcing makes more sense? Certainly it has the potential to dramatically reduce the barriers faced by first time product designers. Unfortunately that process doesn't seem to provide much Learning to give you future independence/options. In my previous post I posed several questions as examples of knowledge problems that are not easily answered by the abundant information on the internet... The answer to those questions perhaps need to come from the platform or service that inventors graduate to after finding initial success on Quirky.

Apr'2011: now he frames that missing-middle being about helping people search for a Purpose. (Maybe there are 4 areas, and Purpose comes between KnowHow and Wisdom? Vs DIKW?) This gap explains the preponderance of people who want to start a business but haven’t yet found that perfect idea... They are like the people who say they want a boyfriend/girlfriend but can’t in any way describe the person they are looking for... Any achievement opens up an Adjacent Possible, that compels continued striving. As applied to this discussion, it should be noted that the word “purpose” is carefully chosen. Purpose does not mean “individual Business Model (Making A Living)”. It means a consistent mode of action justified by individually accepted Meaning or Value. Meaning and value are context dependent. As our environment changes so too will our sense of meaning and value. The argument above cannot suggest that finding purpose is the endgame…a discovered purpose by definition implies striving to achieve it…and an achieved purpose implies a new search... In our current environment anxiety results from the recognition that the space is now open…that we could be achieving so much more if we only knew better where to direct our efforts.