Building ‘deep smarts’ in an engineering team

Can you remember a time when you were provided with an opportunity to step up, to take on new responsibilities or a new role but where the support from an experienced person was lacking?

I know I have had many of those experiences over the last 30 years of professional life and while there can be some advantages in being left to ‘fend for yourself’ (I have become a great resource investigator!), a lack of access to the deep knowledge and wisdom of those who came before you, is quite frankly a waste of institutional knowledge and a lost development opportunity.  

Way back in 2005 in the very early days of what was to be known as the ‘War for Talent’. The Harvard Business Review released an article based on a book of the same name called Deep Smarts by Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap. Yes, it was a long time ago, but the article is not only still relevant today but was incredibly influential for me (Jacqui Simpson, TGE Chief of Staff) in my own journey as a leader and in developing others in the corporate world. Leonard and Swap describe Deep Smarts as practical wisdom: accumulated knowledge, know-how, and intuition gained through extensive experience. According to the article, someone with deep smarts can make fast decisions, use context to solve problems, extrapolate from a novel situation to find a solution, know when existing rules do not apply, easily recognize patterns in data or scenarios and effectively use tacit knowledge, basically a dream employee when you work in a complex and knowledge-based environment. Compare that to when you were left to fend for yourself early in your career, where everything takes so much longer to get done because you must think about every single detail. 

I was reminded of the article again this week and the process of transferring deep smarts between more experienced and less experienced team members because we have a new member of the geotechnical team at TGE (welcome Ryan Kieu!). Ryan has been out on-site learning from our most experienced team members as well as participating in many problem-solving discussions back in the office.  This practice of accompanying and observing experienced team members followed by a debrief and problem-solving session afterwards is known as guided practice and guided experience, and it is part of our standard practice at TGE. These guided experiences are a much more active form of learning compared to more passive forms such as directives, presentations, lectures, and rules of thumb. It is also quite different to being left to fend for yourself. In the guided debrief following a task, team members can unpack and learn from the years of tacit knowledge and experience that exists in more experienced team members’ brains and apply that to the current problem. 

The act of first observing senior team members in action also provides both relevant context and the important neural connectors that prime a learner’s brain for the learning to occur, Leonard and Swap call this making sure the ‘‘catcher is ready before you pitch’’. Without this context, developing deep applied experience takes longer and can be more challenging because the learner has no reference point or context.   

For a small team, this may seem like a big commitment, but think about it this way, guided experience and guided problem-solving lead to more people in the team with deep smarts, more quickly over time (you are going slow initially to run fast in the longer term).  This has huge benefits both for the leader in being able to step back from day-to-day tasks and focus on more strategic matters in growing the business and for the team members to grow in their own professional journey.  

Jacqui Simpson, Chief of Staff at Total Ground Engineering.