Accumulating skills instead of knowledge

Knowledge is relatively easy to accumulate quickly, but it also depreciates quickly. Skills are hard to win, but keep their value a little longer.

David Maister

Knowledge is easy. Crack open a book, peruse your New York Times app, hop over to Wikipedia—all you need is attention and retention. Easy enough!

In the workplace, though, knowledge “depreciates quickly,” in the words of management consultant David Maister. As a marketer with a foot in the business development world, I know what he means: I’ve discovered that it’s an immense chore to retain information about projects and pursuits, clients and business partners. Not only is there an ocean of information out there, but that information is constantly shifting.

I’ve been made to feel foolish more than once peddling outdated information about a project (that has since gone on hold) or a client (who has since quit and moved on) or a consultant (that has since fallen out of favor). You get the picture: gathering a new bit of knowledge is a little like driving a new car off the lot—the moment it enters your brain, it’s losing value in the marketplace.

Skills, though, are different. If knowledge is reducible to mere facts, to who, what, where, or when—then skills are more about the how and why.

My go-to example is Excel formulas. There are plenty of formulas that I’ve used that live as knowledge instead of skills. Why only knowledge? It’s because I never bother to do the extra work, sitting with the how and why of a given formula (in relation to the task I want to execute), so the formula remains a mysterious stew of constants and operators. In short: my knowledge of the formula has depreciated.

Skills, unlike most knowledge, are also transferable. If—unlike my typical habits, outlined above—I actually take the time to understand the ins-and-outs of a given formula, then I can take that understanding and apply it elsewhere when a similar problem comes along. That transfer is what Maister means about how skills “keep their value a little longer.”