Masterful Classes

Masterful Classes are about harvesting Industry wisdom
to shape future Industry leadership

“The value of ‘know how’ is measured in practical situations: how well applied knowledge and experience are able to support the solving of real-life problems”

Frank Wyatt

The Masterful Classes are designed to provide you with access to the tacit knowledge – the ‘know how’ - of an Icon chosen from your Industry sector or company.

So what is tacit knowledge?

When the relevant facts are scarce, leaders tend to rely on hunches, instinct, intuition and perceptions; these are the tacit wisdom of such leaders. Such wisdom is not convertible to symbols and cognitive knowledge it is learned by modelling what leaders do. Leaders also use these same capabilities to assess situations, people and opportunities.

Knowing that leaders use this tacit knowledge enables us all to relate to their wisdom and to use it to bring into great awareness our own tacit knowledge and to learn to use it in more sophisticated ways. For example, we know that the greater our self awareness the great our behavioural freedom as we move from automated responses to aware responses.

Half of what employees know about their jobs is learned informally from the people they work with.

Tacit knowledge represents the ‘know-how’ in an expert’s work, but it can be difficult to articulate. It typically becomes implanted in an individual’s routines and company’s culture and is thus hidden. Yet, it is precisely this personal kind of knowledge that can be obtained from direct experience of working in a community of practice or by modelling the tacit knowledge of someone who has done it all in his/her career.

We all tap into our tacit knowledge regularly as it has worked for us in the past and we trust it to work again in the future. This is often an unconscious approach that when activated relies merely upon what we did yesterday to solve today’s problems.

Everyday experience is a source of the development of tacit knowledge which plays an important role in expert performance.

Leaders will be judged on what they choose to approach, when they approach it, how and with whom; we can learn from modelling their approach.

The more choice you have in the models you adopt, the greater your ability to lead and the more options you have to build influence with others

In a changing world we need to make our tacit knowledge explicit in order to bring about intentional learning and organisational development.

It is this tacit knowledge that all leaders use
as their internal competence for leadership.

The Masterful Classes use the Icon chosen for your industry or company to provide you with a mirror to your own tacit knowledge.

The Icon will be someone who is, by virtue of their experience, their knowledge and their leadership, an Industry Icon.

Learn more about our Masterful Classes (80KB, PDF)