Common, Critical, and Urgent - Three Useful Criteria
- Dr. Moria Levy
- Apr 1, 2004
- 1 min read
A doctor once told me how she decides on treating a patient after diagnosing the possible diseases based on the symptoms.
When deciding on further treatment, she examines, from all the possible diseases, those that meet one of three criteria:
Common (what are the most frequent diseases for the mentioned symptoms?); Critical (what is the most critical disease that matches the symptoms?); Urgent (what disease requires urgent treatment, if any)?
These are the ones she treats: administering medications, ordering follow-up tests, or any other relevant type of treatment.
In knowledge management, we are also repeatedly flooded with an excess of options: Which knowledge topics to address? Which knowledge items must be collected (when establishing a content core)? Which sections should be included in a template that keeps getting longer? And so on.
It's possible to apply the three-criteria method to each of the examples mentioned: We examine the knowledge topics/knowledge items/processes according to their level of commonality (how central they are), according to their level of criticality (what will happen if we don't have them), and according to their level of urgency (that we'll need to provide the knowledge in the moment of truth).
It's easy to see that these measures help in the selection process and improve the quality of choice.
And who said we can't learn something from doctors?
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