Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Ask for a seat in the meeting
Someone who wants to be a director in two years can ask now for things that set up the bigger ask later. Mentorship and advice from a specific person is one version. Access is another.
One woman in a workshop realized she could simply ask to be invited to one very important meeting as a fly on the wall. Watching it would teach her the language the team uses and how its decisions get made, so that once she sat in that room as an active participant she would not be marked as someone who doesn't know. The point is cultural fluency in how a particular team speaks and operates, which keeps a person from making gaffes.
She could present it as part of her development plan. It would have no effect on her career that day and a large one later. It was not on the standard development plan for the role she wanted, so she made it up and asked for it.
How does watching a meeting teach a team's language?
Anthropologist Jean Lave and educator Etienne Wenger described this in their 1991 book Situated Learning as legitimate peripheral participation. Newcomers learn a group's practices by watching from the edge, taking on small parts, and gradually moving toward the center. The vocabulary, the unspoken priorities, and the sense of who decides what are absorbed by being present. The theory grew out of studies of apprentices such as tailors and midwives.
Why can't this knowledge be learned from a document?
Philosopher Michael Polanyi named the problem tacit knowledge in his 1966 book The Tacit Dimension, summed up in the line that we know more than we can tell. Much of how a team decides things, such as what counts as a good argument or when to raise an objection, is never written down. Even the people who hold that knowledge often can't spell it out. It travels through watching and doing.
More from Curiosity with Kristen
