Current McKinsey research Measuring the value of search finds that “In the five countries we studied, knowledge workers experienced search-related productivity gains of up to $117 billion, flowing from faster and more accurate access to information.”

There are two ways to get new knowledge into a small business – either generate it yourself internally through experimentation, questioning and learning, or by bringing it in from outside through consultants or, more cheaply, by reading books and articles or by searching the internet and talking with outsiders.

bquest does both! How?

Firstly, put aside any reservations you may have from stories you have heard about the quality of information on Wikipedia or in online discussion forums, or about the time you need to sort the gold from the dross. In my experience, you can quickly learn searching skills so you can:

• search quickly by choosing the right key words and combinations of key words, by skimming the results and by getting to know which sites are useful and which not;
• validate the information you find by getting several answers from different sites, by checking the data for currency, and by talking with relevant people in person or on discussion forums;
• organise the mass of information into something that makes sense.

Any person leaving school should be able to do this – more or less well – because children now learn to do searches from an early age!

In bquest developmental projects – the learning contracts – each employee has a structured approach to learning that involves the full cycle of experiential learning: Theorising, Planning, Action and Reflection. Internally to the company, employees generate new knowledge for the company.

But when doing their learning contracts they also bring new knowledge in from outside. They develop some of the attributes of the ‘resource investigator’ as the famous British researcher Meredith Belbin would call them.

For example, in some current learning contracts that employees are doing, they have searched and found hugely valuable information, new to the company, on such diverse topics as:

• changes to international quality criteria;
• developing a new way to negotiate and write simple contracts that apportion risk;
• guidance on improving lean manufacturing;
• how to look at the company as a ‘soft system’ so as to understand all its complexities and to make fundamental changes;
• managing the difference between problems of employee performance and conduct;
• tips on raising sales;
• using a database for storing R and D results.

All quality, reliable and free information that will be of great value to the company!

Chris Argyris, one of the greats of management learning, began his 1991 seminal article for Harvard Business Review, ‘Teaching smart people to learn’ with:

“success in the marketplace increasingly depends on learning, yet most people don’t know how to learn. What’s more, those members of the organization that many assume to be the best at learning are, in fact, not very good at it. I am talking about the well-educated, high-powered, high-commitment professionals who occupy key leadership positions in the modern corporation.”

He argues that learning is not just about solving problems, but it should make managers and talented employees examine their approach to identifying and solving problems since doing having the ‘wrong’ approach often turns out to be a major cause of problems. How often do you see people solve a problem only to find it is the wrong problem which is solved? Or they just tackle the sympton and not the cause? Or how often does solving one problem cause another problem somewhere else to emerge?

bquest uses an action learning approach to development, more precisely a ‘managed’ action learning approach where you don’t learn by trial and error – yes, learning from mistakes is important, but it can be wasteful and damaging! – but where your trial of ‘new’ actions is based on some form of recognised good practice that has worked elsewhere but which is adapted to the local context to give it good chance of being successful first time.

When reviewing their trial of new actions, the employee reflects in a structured way with the help of the bquest coach. Which new actions worked, which didn’t, why? What can be done better next time? This structured reflection looks at the ‘problem’ and how it was or, if still ongoing, is being solved. But the bquest coach also asks the employee about how they went about planning their new actions, what model of good practice or theories were they using, why they chose one approach over another. They examione what Argyris calls their ‘theories in action.’

They then go back even further and ask why the problem that they thought needed new actions was seen as a problem in the first place; some problems don’t need ‘learning’ to be done, they simply need to be looked at in a different way, and some problems weren’t actually problems.

By following Argyris’s ideas, bquest makes employee development deeper and helps the employee become more capable of meeting new challenges (and opportunities) more effectively and efficiently for themselves.

This is a long-lasting capability any business should want from its key employees.