Tim Wood Powell     The value of knowledge

I’ve been doing research for business clients for forty years.  That’s a lot of research.  (It also means I’ve made just about every mistake possible—at least once!)  When I started, each project looked very different-the details seemed to loom large.  I struggled with how to develop a unique approach for each one.

Several hundreds of projects later, my perspective had evolved.  The similarities among projects, not their differences, became most prominent.  I found that common themes ran among many of the projects, whatever their scope, methodology, or specific client benefit.  I became fascinated by the possibility that a few simple building blocks, moved around in different ways to fit the particular situation, could become the foundation of a whole way of looking at-and improving-the process of intellectual work.

The KVC uses a problem-solving technique called “sub-optimization”.  Basically this consists of taking a complex problem (or process), then breaking it down into component “micro-problems”, and solving each micro-problem.  Each micro-problem is much less daunting, and can be solved relatively easily.  Then, you can string the set of micro-solutions back together to get a solution to the bigger problem.

The KVC allows you to take a large intelligence problem, and pinpoint the nature of the problem, so you can solve it.  There may be more than one problem  lumped together, but with KVC you can pull them apart and solve each one separately.  We’ve even created a “KVC Scorecard” scoring system to help you do this.  [The KVC Scorecard™ is contained in in the full version of the KVC Workbook.]

Excerpt from the Introduction to The Knowledge Value Chain Workbook by T.W. Powell.

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