<div dir="ltr">Hi Caroline and the rest of the group,<div><br></div><div>I do succession planning for family businesses and I've done considerable work on knowledge transfer. Also I wrote my dissertation on HVAC maintenance mechanics and most of my clients are in some form of maintenance.</div><div><br></div><div>Here are some thoughts/tips for your challenge:</div><div><br></div><div>1. Do a little reading of Anders Ericsson. He is, in my opinion, the best scholar in the world for breaking down expertise, what it is and how it happens. He is the scholar behind the "10,000 hours to expertise" concept made famous by Malcom Blackwell. I'd flip through <i>The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance</i> for some orientation to expertise.</div><div><br></div><div>2. Realise that, in experts, knowledge, skills, abilities,and performance all merge together into someone that "just takes the bat and hits the ball." It is usually impossible to extract that knowledge from them by simply interviewing them and observing them.</div><div><br></div><div>3. Also realize that they cannot be perfectly replicated without putting someone else through the same repeated experiences over time. It may take several people to replace an expert.</div><div><br></div><div>However, to get the best you can do this:</div><div><br></div><div>1. Make a list of all the core deliverables the expert provides.</div><div>2. Ask the expert to recite or document the steps they take to create that deliverable.</div><div>3. Bring in a person with experience, but not an expert. Usually the steps articulated by the expert are not a single act to the person with experience. For example an expert sales rep may say, "OK, first, get an appointment with a prospect." A non-expert may then say, "But how do I do that?" </div><div>4. Have the experienced non-expert break down the bigger steps to, in this case, get an appointment. Document those sub-steps and repeat for all steps of all the expert's deliverables.</div><div>5. Then engage a conversation between the two about why they do it that way and things to watch out for. You will begin to hear proverbs and beliefs around why certain things work and don't work.</div><div><br></div><div>Once you have your processes written out for all deliverables and your best list of proverbs and beliefs about why things work, you will have your knowledge mostly documented. Best as you can anyway.</div><div><br></div><div>There's the method I use. Good luck!<br clear="all"><div><div dir="ltr" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><b><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(3,35,88)"><br></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><b><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(3,35,88)">John P. Sherk,
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