How can you use AI to codify all that specialized knowledge you’ve built over the years? What does “codifying” mean? Codifying your hard-won expertise means capturing it and making it transferable. This will allow you to grow your business and reclaim more freedom.
In this video and post, I am sharing three tangible tips you can use immediately.
Also, please join me tomorrow for a live Q&A on the topic of AI and your hard-won expertise and wisdom.
The Main Takeaways
Prefer to read over watching the video? Sure, here are the main takeaways, and the full but lightly edited transcript is below:
Why Codifying Expertise is Important
- Allows you to scale your business by spreading knowledge
- Reduces risk of losing knowledge when people leave
- Builds a valuable intangible asset
- Gives you more freedom and time for innovation
3 Tips for Using AI to Help You Codify Your Knowledge (“Brilliance“)
1. Use AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude
- Get the public domain knowledge on a subject or process you want to document – this is a great starting point. That way, you avoid sitting in front of an empty computer screen pondering how to write down what you know.
- Helps surface gaps where you can fill in your unique expertise
- Go back and forth to draw out more unique knowledge – but be careful not to put confidential information in these AI tools
2. Use Notion for Knowledge Management With AI Features
- Store and structure your knowledge – this makes it into knowledge assets you can quickly find, use, and share – use Notion as your “Second Brain” (Tiago Forte)
- An ideal tool for knowledge management and for storing your unique knowledge as you become aware of it
- Utilize built-in AI features (summaries, translation, etc)
3. Record and Transcribe Everything
- Capture all training you do
- Name and store the files s you can find them
- Summarize transcripts with AI – extract the key takeaways
Key Takeaways
- Codifying expertise is critical to scaling your business, reducing costly risk, regaining freedom, and making sure your business is a lasting asset
- AI can help surface and capture undocumented knowledge (“brilliance”)
- Take small steps daily instead of getting overwhelmed and putting it off
- Join the upcoming Q&A call to learn more
The Full Transcript (lightly edited):
Why Codifying Your Expertise is Important
Okay, the camera’s on. Hi everyone. This is Dr. Stephie. Today we’re going to talk about how can you use AI to codify your expertise, your knowledge; all those intangible things that you’ve learned over the years.
Well, what do I mean by codify? Codify means that what you have in your brain becomes a code that other people can use. That could mean it becomes checklists or written down systems or video training or learning management systems or what have you.
But before you get overwhelmed with that, let’s talk real quick about why it is important. Then I promise you that I’m going to give you 3 tips that you can use right away to make a substantial difference in your business, growing your business while at the same time getting more of your freedom and your life back.
Why is codifying, basically writing down your expertise and making it shareable, why is that important?
You can grow your business. You can scale up your business. You reduce the risk. Also, you’re building a real asset because did you know that 85% of businesses are not really a sustainable businesses? That is because as soon as a key person drops out of the picture, the business is in real trouble. In fact, if that key person is you, the founder or the owner, then often the business has no choice but to shut down.
Let’s focus on expertise that is in the tricky realm of expertise – things that you have learned over the course of many years.
- It’s expertise that can’t just be looked up on the internet somewhere.
- It’s expertise that you often wring your hands, and ask yourself, “How am I going to teach this to my team quickly?” – especially the younger people who haven’t been with you that long?
- Even some of the people who have been with you for a while keep coming back asking lots of questions. You are thinking, “I love it, but I can never get away. I wish I had more time to be at the innovative edge, which is what drew me to start this business in the first place.”
Ultimately, there is no way around it that the things that you have in your brain, the ones that are essential for your business, have to somehow be codified.
They have to somehow be written down or be on video or something that other people can understand, fully understand so they can execute what you can execute, at least nearly as well as you can. That’s the goal.
I know that’s a high standard to get to, but let’s see how we can get there.
Here are the three tips I promised:
Tip 1: Use AI Tools Like ChatGPT and Claude
One tip is to use an AI tool like ChatGPT (I would recommend 4.0 rather than 3.5), or perhaps even better Claude. I’ve been playing with both.
Have you ever been in the situation where you’re thinking, “Oh gosh, I have to write this thing down and I don’t even know where to start.“
What you can do is you can come up with a prompt for ChatGPT or Claude and say, “I want to write down a process or an area of knowledge. Can you help me with that?” Of course, you have to say exactly what you want. And you can see what it can come up with.
You will probably look at the result and say, that’s partly right. Actually, it might be pretty good, but there are definitely some gaps in what this AI tool will give you. Those gaps that you see, those are actually areas you can fill in with your smarts.
Now you don’t have that blank slate anymore. Now you have something you can edit and flesh out. What you’re getting from the AI tool is public domain knowledge. What we’re after is your unique knowledge, which I call “brilliance.”
This is a form of Brilliance Mining™ – you see what is the public domain knowledge, and you get it very quickly. You can do this at midnight if you want to. It doesn’t require a person, and you can go around and around with it as long as you want.
By the way, regarding which prompts you use with AI tools…. there are all these places that want to sell you AI tool prompts. That’s not a bad investment to make (I’ve seen them offered for $27, $37). Sure, buy one of those prompt libraries. But that is just a starting point. As time goes on, you’re going to get better at coming up with the right starting prompt.
Someone said it to me like this – it’s like a graduate student who knows a fair amount and is eager, sometimes too eager, but needs guidance. That’s how AI tools operate at this point.
You have to give it multiple inquiries, go back and forth, and give it feedback, and it gets better and better. Don’t take the first output, take the 6th or 7th one, and along the way, flesh it out. You will begin to see your unique brilliance emerge.
As I said, you can use ChatGPT or Claude to help you see where you have knowledge that’s not equal to the public domain knowledge. It can be helpful in unearthing your unique knowledge. It’s not going to get everything, but it’s gonna get you a long way. Alright? So then Notion to store it.
Tip 2: Use a Tool Like Notion
The second tip is I love to use a tool called Notion. You could say it is a note-taking app, but it’s so much more because it accepts pretty much any and all formats of information that you want to throw at it, from text to images, databases, tables, links, all kinds of things. Furthermore, you can tag your information in there.
But what’s also cool is it does have a growing list of AI features in it. For example, you can capture information either out of your brain or from the internet. You can summarize it. You can even translate it. There are all kinds of tools – those tools in AI, those AI tools in Notion are extremely helpful.
First of all, before we even go to those AI tools in Notion, it is a great knowledge management tool where you store your knowledge. I love the “second brain” concept by Tiago Forte. If you don’t know about this, look it up.
If we had stored all the knowledge we ever encountered and thought our future self still wanted to know about in Notion … if we had done that all our lives, then Brilliance Mining and digging for that information wouldn’t really be necessary because it would all already be there.
But given that we didn’t do this all our lives, I recommend that it’s two things:
- You capture new information as you learn it, and you use Notion for that.
- The other bits of information, which there are a lot of, some of it is conscious, some of it is not conscious – you extract it out of your brain, and codify it. And that’s what I call Brilliance Mining. That is the main area we teach to business owner and their teams, and we offer implementation support as well.
Tip 3: Record and Transcribe Everything
Tip 3 is very simple but very powerful. Record all your training; record everything. You can always still throw it away, but record it. Then give it a name and store it ina way so you can find it again.
In fact, use Notion or some kind of system you know, to store and keep track of these recordings. Nowadays, it’s so easy to get a transcript from those training videos and then use AI to very quickly summarize it, i.e., break it down into the main points.
Put it all into Notion, and assign useful tags to it. Now you’re starting to pull out of your brain more and more of that knowledge that’s not to be found anywhere else. This knowledge makes you unique and makes you stand out in this AI-driven era. You’re using AI tools in a smart way to help you do this Brilliance Mining™ faster than ever.
Why Is Mining Your Unique Knowledge (“Brilliance”) Now More Important Than Ever?
Brilliance Mining™ is more important than ever, meaning codifying the unique knowledge you hold in your brain. This means you have to get at the parts you don’t even remember that you know them. But you do know them, and you use them when the situation calls for it. (That is the trigger we are simulating with AI in Tip 1).
Brilliance Mining™ is more important than ever now because of AI, because of people retiring at faster rates than ever (baby boomers are retiring), and because of the fact that the young people don’t tend to stay as long at their jobs now.
Therefore, we don’t have the luxury of training them for many years knowing they’re going to stick around for many years. That’s just not generally happening anymore. It’s the exception rather than the rule at this point.
But the good news is that the smart use of AI tools is helpful for accomplishing Brilliance Mining™ faster than ever.
The important thing is to get started with a little step rather than looking at the whole picture of this and saying, “Man, that’s just utterly overwhelming. So, I guess I’ll think about it tomorrow, next week, next month or next year“, because, usually, that next something doesn’t come.
There’s a lot of really interesting conversation about AI, the use of AI, how it’s going to impact our businesses, and how we can use it for Brilliance Mining, meaning codifying your knowledge so you can scale your business.
Join My Free Virtual Q&A – It Is Interactive!
We’re going to talk about this in a free virtual Q&A tomorrow at 12 o’clock CST, and I would love to see you there. Press the golden button to register.
Live brilliantly,
P.S.: I appreciate you commenting and sharing this Treasure Tuesday with others. Thank you!
