Downloading the Expert’s Brain: How to Decode Knowledge and Encode it into Solutions

A team from WELL Labs showcasing the playbooks to gather user feedback and test the playbooks on the field.

Rural development practitioners possess a wealth of experiential knowledge. They also work hard to plan and customise development interventions to local contexts. This process is often an interesting combination of data, facts, information, wisdom, and ‘jugaad’ or out-of-the-box, improvised solutions. But all of this knowledge is usually not captured adequately. It might exist in dry and output-oriented technical manuals and project reports, but is largely unavailable to stakeholders who can benefit from it.

A part of Green Rural Economy (GRE)’s work is to bring out this knowledge to a wider circle in innovative, accessible ways.

Transforming ‘knowledge’ into ‘solutions’

A shift GRE wishes to bring about is to move from documenting the ‘outcome’ to focusing on the ‘solution’, which can then be disseminated for the wider good. Recognising the tacit knowledge that resides in these organisations as solutions offers a powerful shift in perspective. This can help change the outlook towards routine documentation of projects, which is seen as mundane paperwork and not allocated enough time and effort.

We have partnered with Axis Bank Foundation (ABF) to identify and document knowledge that resides within grassroots institutions and with practitioners. We found that often knowledge is structured as a package of practices and not an outcome of active problem solving. We are helping reframe this knowledge as solutions that address specific pain points of users, a process we term as solutionisation. As a part of this engagement, we create ‘playbooks’ that document these tested and proven solutions, in simplified formats that can be shared widely. Our approach emphasises shareability, scalability, and adaptability, making knowledge more accessible and relevant to others.

Given that the social sector has experts with many different areas of focus, this documentation is an opportunity to simplify complex issues for peers, both within and outside their organisation. It enables them to present their experiences as an adaptable pathway, which other organisations can draw from for their own work.

How did we start?

Different knowledge solutions lend themselves to different formats to enable effective dissemination. Assessing the nature of knowledge can help arrive at the right way to encode this information. This makes the captured knowledge more user-focused, increasing its dissemination. To start off, we ask the following questions:

• Who is the solution intended for? Is it an individual, a family, a community?
• How will they access this solution?
  What is the scale of the solution – household, village, watershed?
• How long does this solution take to be implemented and reap rewards?

Looking at the knowledge product through this lens can help arrive at a more refined, relevant output.

Now, let’s come to the knowledge itself: this exists within organisations in many different forms, such as:

• Methods/Processes: Technical or scientific documentation of factual knowledge, put together by thematic experts.
• Practice handbooks, brochures or briefs put together by organisations.
• Training modules for capacity-building to help people implement interventions.
• Best practices for a particular region or theme, that have been gathered by experts over years of practice.

In our workshops with different organisations, we have gathered some more insights about the nature of tacit knowledge.

• Knowledge often resides in the experts’ brains: It is through detailed sets of questions and careful enquiry that we are able to unravel different aspects of the solution offered.
• It is important to probe the relevance of the solution: Asking questions about the solution with respect to the present-day context gives insight into the viability of the solution.
• The knowledge needs to be relevant to the user: While the organisation may have an extensive amount of knowledge, understanding the user persona is important. This will help extract the knowledge that’s most useful, and to decide the most suitable format for the use-cases and playbooks.

How can the solution be presented?

Based on these questions, we draw out a plan of action. We visit the sites where the solutions are implemented, meet the knowledge-seekers (users), and talk to the knowledge providers (practitioners and experts). We have arrived at a few possible ways to package the solution.

• The ‘Recipe Book’: These books have real-time instructions, and lay out components required to take up the solution. They are graphic heavy, helping the user to visualise the solution in a step-by-step manner, reduce the cognitive load, and ease comprehension.
• Decision tree: A decision tree helps the user make a decision or prediction, by visually evaluating their options on a flowchart. The decision-making process is simplified by breaking it down into manageable steps. We lay down certain factors and eligibility points for the user to decide whether they can adopt the solution.

Here are a few examples of playbooks we have worked on:

• Presenting the facts: One of our playbooks shows the adoption of the Machan farming technique, a multi-tier farming technique being advocated by a grassroots organisation, Trust Community Livelihoods (TCL). To help the user understand its applicability, we first presented in the playbook the factors needed to make this decision: soil type, minimum land requirement, and preferred irrigation channels.

A page out of a playbook on enhancing income with multi-layer farming (machan kheti) we created for TCL. Here, we introduce the need for the playbook, who this playbook is for, and the circumstances under which it can be used and adopted.

• Checklists and worksheets: In another playbook for Ibtada on designing rural entrepreneurship projects for women, we incorporated checklists and worksheets that let the user record their progress, observations, and insights as a part of village surveys. There is also a checklist for programme managers on how to shortlist eligible entrepreneurs for the programme.

A page out of a playbook on designing entrepreneurship programmes for rural women in North India, created for Ibtada. This checklist can help users ensure they have covered all the bases when it comes to implementation.

• Creating a narrative: Playbooks can be created to paint a narrative through the eyes of the primary character, and their journey to implement the solution. This can help the user relate to the character, walk through every step of their journey, and immerse themselves in the solution. They can visualise first hand the ups and downs of the journey.

A page out of a playbook on making bio-inputs for soil health and nutrition that we created for TCL.

One or more of these approaches can be used to encapsulate the essence of a solution in a playbook. Through our engagements with three grassroots organisations under the ABF project, we have been able to understand the most helpful ways to communicate the solution and experiment with different formats.

We’ve found that the same playbook can take different forms depending on the user persona and use case. For example, a playbook for establishing a multi-layer farming model might become a visual flipbook for farmers, and a technical handbook for specialists. Stories that are more locally relevant and meant for farmers can use a story-based approach, while a recipe book or decision tree can be directly handed to practitioners.

The process of ‘decoding the expert’s brain’ brought us several important insights. We found that a lot of this knowledge was being discussed as ‘solutions’ for the first time in front of the rural practitioners. While these processes and case studies are often recorded for funders’ reports and monthly documentation, the actual process of problem solving which is important for the next phases of intervention, are never written out in a comprehensible manner. They are encoded in conversations, or the practitioners’ diaries, and many a times, in their brains.

‘Downloading’ this encoded knowledge from the practitioner’s brain and presenting it in accessible ways has helped GRE understand better ways of knowledge creation and management for development organisations.

The digital disconnect question

Tech solutions are being touted as a way to rapidly upskill people out of poverty. Videos are often pitched as the best way to scale learning. While digital tools and knowledge products can be valuable assets, we must acknowledge their limits in rural areas where technology is still out of reach for a large share of the rural population.
For a grassroots NGO, the last mile of information flow is between a community resource person (CRP) and a community member. CRPs may have access to their smartphones. But from our observations from field studies in Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan, most community members, particularly women, do not. Digital literacy, data costs, device access, and electricity affect women’s adoption of knowledge products. These factors also impact women CRPs. We found that of the few women farmers who used phones, most didn’t have them exclusively, and shared them with family members. When they used their phones, they preferred to do so for entertainment (YouTube Reels and Whatsapp). Their phone usage was also affected by power supply and data use.
We also found that informational videos are streamed to farmers only during their training and awareness sessions, which happen monthly or fortnightly. There is also a significant lack of infrastructure (like mini-projectors) for distributing video content.

Hence, designing with a primarily digital lens is not enough to bridge information asymmetry. Often, a mix of online tools and the power of community is essential. Besides creating the solutions, it is important to find ways for the community to use them, create awareness on the availability of digital tools (for example, chatbots), and to help people develop a habit of using these tools to their benefit.

Related Posts