Liz Strauss.com

So, still imagining with Bloom’s taxonomy . . . ways to achieve company wide understanding through blogging.

Imagine that you use a company blog to track the development of your next product, and that you open the blog for posting by the entire development team. Each part of the product could have it’s own category wiith subcategories. Those categories could carry what was once the emails, meeting notes, and file links for that project part. All developers could login and post as needed to move the project forward. All communication would be in one place for access.

Marketers, key members of the sales force, the warehouse and other stakeholders could have access to the blog address and the ability to comment as the project moves along.

Imagine the benefits of such a situation.

• A significant population has gained an understanding of the project at a deeper level than just “buzz words.”
• Interdepartmental teams begin to see the value and interconnectedness of their job roles in forwarding the vision of the enterprise.
• Communication improves in quality and quantity because information is centralized and not lost in verbal white noise.
• Personal investment in the product increases from all departments who have participated in the exercise.
• The wide pool of folks who truly understand the product, it’s purpose, and it’s key values are available to teach the rest of the enterprise what they know.

This same model can be used in business to teach process or in schools to teach process or skills that children or teachers are attempting to master–students learning from other students and teachers learning from other teachers.

Bloom’s taxonomy highlighted as an explicit goal–that we ensure a small group has complete understanding before moving forward to teach a larger group–can focus our work to bring all members to mastery.

We do that by writing the word understanding into our performance appraisals of each student, employee, teacher, and manager’s work.

Bloom’s taxonomy was meant to be used in this fashion. Folks weren’t meant to move to the next step until they had mastered the one before.

We know that is not what occurs.

We’ve never considered what the world might be like if we used Bloom’s Taxonomy as it was intended. Suppose we tried that now.

What if we showed our students and workforce why taking the time to understand is worth stopping to do. The foundation of such a business would be built on something stronger than concrete and more flexible than aluminum.

A new kind of communication would be the result. A new kind of thinker would be in our midst.

Liz Strauss