Thinking for a Living

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Developing Individual Knowledge Worker Capabilities

Most interventions to improve performance in business are at the organizational or process level, but it doesn’t have to be that way. We can also improve individual capabilities. Ultimately, knowledge worker performance comes down to the behaviors of individual knowledge workers. If we improve their individual abilities to create, acquire, process, and use knowledge, we are likely to improve the performance of the processes they work on and the organizations they work for.

Of course, some of the organization-level initiatives I’ve described also can improve individual performance, so what’s the difference? Individual knowledge work improvement initiatives have two attributes. First, they ...