Lessons from basketball applied to the art of passing knowledge.
Many of the things we do at Guidde are inspired by professional sports teams - we borrow ideas on roster construction, playing style (thank you Daryl Morey), skills development, coaching, and yes, even practice. For example, our sprints are named after sports teams (right now we’re in the European football season and are on the Fiorentina Sprint going to Hamburg and from there Inter Milan).
We built Guidde to be the Best Way to Pass Knowledge to Your Customers and Your Team. Our inspiration comes from one of the most beautiful aspects of team sports - the pass.
(For the entrepreneurs out there, there is another type of pass that’s far less pleasant, but today we’re going to focus on the sports type and specifically, basketball).
Passing teams are winning teams - in sports and in business. Coaches in every level of sports preach passing as a means for success and even score-first gunners like Carmelo Anthony recognize the importance of passing in winning teams.
“It’s kind of a domino effect. It becomes contagious.” Anthony said. “Guys see that other guys are willing to make the extra pass and turn down a good shot for a great shot. That becomes contagious. That builds momentum on the basketball court. That builds streaks out there.”
Today’s high performing organizations, and sports teams, strive for collaboration of knowledge - where one “knowledge pass” leads to another and as in sports it becomes contagious. Smart organizations are ones where employees take pride in passing knowledge to each other empowering their teams as a whole. The knowledge passing skill set is even more important when passing knowledge to customers and partners outside the company - a knowledgeable customer can utilize your products in a better way and become internal ambassadors of your product in their own organizations while creating knowledge passing of their own.
The key question becomes, then, how to pass knowledge in an efficient manner, or in other words, what makes for a great passing of knowledge from person to person? To answer that, we thought we could refer to the fundamentals of basketball 101 of the USA Basketball Association. According to the USABA when teaching passing, points of emphasis should be:
- A good pass is a pass a teammate can catch.
- When passing, step toward your receiver.
- When catching, step toward the pass.
Let’s explore how these principles apply to knowledge organizations and specifically to passing knowledge to customers:
1. A good pass is a pass a teammate can catch.
Caption - Jason “White Chocolate” Williams with perhaps the greatest pass I’ve ever seen
This sounds like basic common sense but when we’re talking about passing knowledge, there is a lot to uncover here.
It starts with picking the right medium for the pass. Our focus at Guidde is about software applications and we are firm believers that the right medium for passing software knowledge is using video. Video combines an audio track that can be transcribed and made searchable - a huge benefit for creating a library of shared knowledge between an application provider and customers and partners. Couple that with the actual image frames composing the video which allow for direct assimilation of knowledge (without having to convert text to image on the receiver side). Video also unlocks easy capturing of knowledge before the pass on the creator side - with a simple one-click record over zoom or an extension anyone can capture a knowledge snippet without requiring any coding or training.
It’s then about matching the information to the receiver’s knowledge level and capabilities. Just like in basketball pass - you want the knowledge pass to have the right pace, not too hard, not too soft and to hit the target exactly when they get to their spot. For knowledge, this typically means short video snippets, under 3 minutes long, focused around a specific sub-topic. At other times, when an audience is completely fresh to an app, for example, during initial onboarding, the pass may be a collection of knowledge pieces, or in Guidde’s terminology, a playlist.
2. When passing, step toward your receiver.
The passer always needs to anticipate where the receiver will be and in knowledge, it’s about understanding what will be the receiver’s Point of Need (PoN). The PoN changes throughout the lifecycle of a person’s interaction with the software. In some cases, it may be completely outside the software itself (e.g. over email/Slack/folders when a potential customer is assessing an application). At other times it can be the first time a person logs into a platform during initial onboard, while frequently it’s during ongoing use of an application. The passer needs to make the information readily available at the PoN, regardless of where it is.
Video again serves as a fantastic medium for an ever-changing PoN as it’s highly portable and is perfect for knowledge sharing. Videos can be embedded in-app (for example using Guidde Inside SDK). They can be sent over email when a customer is running into an issue. They can also be curated into a complete video library of shared knowledge where software users can find it themselves. It means that multiple team members - product, pre-sales, customer success, technical support - can all leverage video knowledge assets and step toward their receiver at the right point of need. In addition, the content needs to match the specific scenario at hand which could vary wildly between customers - it allows for tacit knowledge sharing with the audio track serving as a live narrator of the events showcased at the scene.
Stepping towards the receiver, in some cases, also means you want to place the pass where only the receiver can catch it. In the knowledge world, this means placing a high emphasis on security and privacy - while some material may be great for sharing broadly, other material can be private to specific audiences - your knowledge passing solution should be able to address both types.
3. When catching, step toward the pass.
For many years, software applications have opted for a knowledge PUSH medium, leveraging in-product “low-code” tours that meet the customer typically during onboarding. The experience was hit-and-miss at best, with consumers chafed too often by bad product tours and choosing to X them out, opting to try out the software by themselves without any assistance. What has been going on instead, was a phenomenon where users have found themselves looking for answers outside applications - in places like YouTube - leveraging a PULL mechanism with video as the source. At Guidde, we strongly believe that this is the right approach, that empowers the users to know when they need assistance and “step towards the knowledge pass”. We chose to enable this motion by enabling instant searchability of video-based knowledge directly from within the apps. Let your customers PULL the knowledge at their Point of Need and receive it, in the format they want - video.
Passing knowledge well requires practice and the right toolset that allows you to deliver it with ease. If done right, it becomes a joy - for both sides of the pass. The receiver of knowledge can perform in software what they sought out to do at their PoN. And for the passer, it’s the joy of delivering knowledge that they possess to others while inspiring them to use your software properly. It also motivates the rest of the team to replicate that success - as Melo said, it becomes contagious and spreads. Over time, we’ve seen organizations where some team members emerge as knowledge passing experts (think of a local version of “Point God '' Chris Paul) where the best practices are to harness their skills as creators of video knowledge while other team members are the final passers of knowledge. When things are really clicking is a diffusion of knowledge where everyone is suddenly in the know - the software vendor, its partners, and customers. It makes good organizations great.
It’s a beautiful thing to see kind of like Tim Duncan era Spurs’ or modern day Dubs’ ball movement.
* Shoutout to Ben Detrick and Andrew Kuo for the inspiration for the title of this post - one of my favorite books of the year
