Mike McGarry, president of Socratic Arts demonstrated how a sophisticated indexing system supports decision making by bringing relevant stories to users as needed. Taking on the challenge of delivering tacit knowledge just in time, he will demonstrated ExTRA (Experts Telling Relevant Advice) as it's being used in healthcare to support patients facing a variety of health decisions.

1. EXTRA
(Experts Telling Relevant Advice)
Mike McGarry
President, Socratic Arts
April 22, 2014

2. AGENDA
1 KM Open Discussion
2 The Value of Stories
3 The Role of Stories in Remindings
4 ExTRA Concept
5 An Example

3. KM OPEN DISCUSSION
Strengths Shortcomings

4. People exchange STORIES
• Stories are the essence of how people conceive
of the world
• Stories are memorable – rules and abstract
information are NOT
• The stories of others add to our repository of
cases and experiences
So real learning is story-based

5. THE VALUE OF STORIES
• Human decision-making is based on prior experience and
experiences are stored as “stories”
• The best advice is typically offered in the form of a story
• Experts have lots of experiences or “stories”
• Organizations have thousands of good stories
• How do we best share them???

6. WHY STORIES? HOW ARE THEY USEFUL IN REMINDINGS?
 The idea is simple and is based on everyday human interaction; people talk about their
problems and those with whom they are speaking offer solutions from their own
experiences, usually in the form of a story.
 Experts behave similarly when they offer advice, willingly telling stories they feel are
germane to the concerns of the listener.
Stories are the way we have always learned about the world.
My favorite
vacations have
always been
those when I
stayed home…
Where should I go
on vacation?The worst trip I ever took
was an all inclusive package
where I didn’t have any
choices once I got there…
My most relaxing
trip ever was a
cruise…
Did I ever tell you
about the time I
went to Maine
during mud
season?
I once threw a
dart at a map to
decide…

7. REMINDINGS
• Tell Me a Joke
• Steak and a Haircut

8. WHAT IS EXTRA?
 EXTRA (Experts Telling Relevant Advice) is a knowledge management system that stores and
retrieves digitally recorded stories.
 EXTRA has one intention -- to get a story to a user that will help him or her make a decision
just at the time that they are about to make a decision. These decisions could involve how to
fix a mistake, how to deal with a new situation, how to plan for the future, etc.
EXTRA is a Knowledge Management System

9. LIKE TYPICAL HUMAN INTERACTION, ONLY BETTER.
 In the old days, the advice you could get was limited to who you knew. Today the
world is different and new technology allows us to do something much better.
 Video technology allows us to capture the best stories from all an organization’s
experts.
 EXTRA organizes the stories and links them together based on common themes,
goals, problems, and outcomes and gives users a way to retrieve relevant stories that
match the situations they are facing.
 EXTRA feels like a conversation with an expert.
We can collect the relevant advice that any expert or corporation might
want to provide to anyone at any time and
deliver that advice to a person at just the right moment.

10. HOW DOES EXTRA WORK?
 To help users make decisions, EXTRA presents the most relevant stories it has to the user. These
stories might be directly related to the user’s problem, e.g., if the user is trying to make a decision
about drug development, the user might see stories from experts about situations where they were
facing similar problems or decisions with regard to drug development, and how these situations
played out.
 But, after the first drug development story is found and after EXTRA is reminded of, and offers,
more stories from the same domain, it can do something else.
 EXTRA, when it is has been fitted with stories from many domains of knowledge can find analogous
stories from one domain to another and can offer stories from different domains that might add a
new perspective for decision making. So for example, if a user is making a decision about whether
or not to move forward with the development of a drug, they might see an analogous story from a
restaurateur deciding whether to open another restaurant. These analogous stories can offer
completely new ways of seeing and solving problems and making decisions.
EXTRA relies on storytelling as the vehicle to impart knowledge.

11. AN EXAMPLE
Medical ExTRA Demo

12. ©2013 Socratic Arts. All Rights Reserved.