To toolkit or not to toolkit? (part 2)
In my last post, I wrote about why people value guidance from other people. This is because:
the advice comes from personal experience and;
the advice is immediate and catered to exactly what the advisee is looking for based on their own situation.
Unfortunately, toolkits often miss the mark on substituting for people. Toolkits tend to:
generalize experiences to create vague-ish guidance; and/or
have so much information about all potential scenarios that an information seeker has to go through 50 pages to find what they need.
Even if I’m brought in to use graphic design to make the toolkits as user-friendly and beautiful as possible, it won’t be helpful (read: it won’t be used) if the content itself is not user-friendly.
Let me share a more recent project. The assignment was to revamp the implementer’s toolkit of a 10+-year-old, globally-used program.
There was an abundance of knowledge that included all the past implementations, the evidence shared by researchers, the input of team members across the organization, and the knowledge kept by the program predecessors.
There was a lot of information being thrown in.
Of course, nothing should get lost.
It was 178 pages long.
What was being called a toolkit was, in fact, a storage room.
In an ideal world, the implementers read every manual carefully from top to bottom and know where all the information is for future access.
In the real world, organizations are messy, people are skimmers of documents, and resources (especially time) are never enough. People often come to a document when they need guidance for a specific decision or solution for a specific problem - and they need it fast.
So we give them a storage closet. But alas, there's no time to go through a storage closet. People improvise. They either go with their best guess or find someone to advise them.
Suddenly, we find that initiatives don't go as planned or that the change we want to see just doesn't happen.
'“Sure,” you tell me, “it would be great to have an all-knowing human providing advice and guidance to others. But it would be impossible to ask someone to hold all this information, nevermind asking someone to be the advisor of every current and future program implementation.”
What can we do?
We need a shopkeeper; a curator-on-demand.
There’s a film costume shop in Cape Town. When you walk in, your eyes go dizzy looking at racks full of pirate clothes, disco pants, Egyptian jewelry, medieval armour, and cosplay outfits. Everything is everywhere and you don't even know where to start.
The customers for this shop are usually working on a film or commercial and they come with a wardrobe concept. Rather than inviting the customer to browse - the shopkeeper asks the customer what they are looking for. The shopkeeper then pulls the relevant pieces on to a clothing rack, which is then presented to the customer to browse through and further finesse into the perfect wardrobe collection.
We need such a shopkeeper for knowledge.
I would LOVE to see AI and powerful search engines play a role in this.
I imagine a staff member submitting a question to the knowledge shopkeeper, and what is churned out are best practices, case studies, research papers, YouTube videos of people speaking from personal experiences, and maybe the contacts of available advisors.
Am I just dreaming?
Someone please build it!
Writing Challenge #3 of 100