Toolkit Home | Discovery & Identification | Learning from Experts
Learning from experts.
Since there is no set process for starting a legacy program, and most existing legacy business programs are new or still evolving, you and your team may want to reach out to others who have already been through the process. Since the needs for a legacy business program can vary significantly from city to city, your program may not match an already existing one. However, learning from the successes and failures of others who have already done this work can help your program get off to a good start.
In preparing this toolkit, I engaged with several professionals involved in legacy business programs, leveraging LinkedIn and my existing network to gather insights and best practices. The vast majority were eager and willing to lend a hand. Be sure to make time early in your process to reach out and learn from others. Here are a few ways to do that.
Subject matter expert interviews
Speak with people who created, currently implement, or have been impacted by legacy business programs. These interviews are a great way to glean insights and expertise that is often not found in program reports or documentation. Interviews can be done face-to-face, over the phone, or using a videoconferencing tool like Zoom. Videoconferencing is a preferable option because most tools have recording and transcript features to easily capture and retain the interview content.
Photo by Sora Shimazaki.
Photo by Sora Shimazaki.
The best approach for this type of interview is to conduct semi-structured interviews that create an outline for the conversation, allowing the expert to lead the discussion. Since you are speaking with experts, frame the conversation and then let them set the direction. Your questions should be open-ended to allow the expert to expand on the conversation, but they should be roughly the same questions for each participant so that you can analyze the data you collect. It also helps to share your questions or an outline with the expert before the interview.
Resource.
Community Tool Box
Community Tool Box has a valuable online resource for planning semi-structured interviews with subject matter experts and others.
Subject matter expert workshops
Workshops are an excellent way to bring together a large group of experts for collective insight and knowledge sharing. You can host these workshops yourself, or you can sometimes find online workshops or conference workshops for legacy business topics hosted by others. For example, the California Preservation Foundation recently hosted a webinar, “Legacy Business Programs: Strategies, Challenges, and Success Stories,” which enabled experts and novices to discuss the state of legacy business programs together.
To get the most out of your workshop, you should first outline your goals or hypotheses—in other words, what questions are you trying to answer or what solutions are you hoping to create? Once you’ve settled on those, use facilitated exercises and activities tailored to meeting your goals.
Knowledge Mapping Exercise
Knowledge maps are a quick and straightforward way to represent the complex knowledge and information from a group, in this case, experts. It is a great way to visually represent knowledge, map connections, and identify any gaps. For this process, you lay out different topics (e.g., starting a legacy business program, funding sources for legacy businesses, legacy business policies). Experts are then asked to fill in their knowledge or sources for each topic, establish relationships between the content, link processes, or determine risks. They can also brainstorm solutions tied to the content. The American Productivity & Quality Center has a helpful resource called Knowledge Mapping Concepts and Tools (some free and some with membership).
Tool tip.
San Antonio Legacy Business Program
When the Historic Preservation Office in San Antonio was interested in starting a local legacy business program, they held a Living Heritage Symposium and invited members from both the city and the nonprofit that launched the San Francisco Legacy Business program to understand their process and lessons learned. This workshop served as the foundation for the San Antonio program.
Case in point.
Analyze, document, and share
Whether you conduct interviews, workshops, or surveys, it is essential to thoroughly analyze and interpret the results to gain a deeper understanding of your legacy business program. Many of the online survey tools offer analysis tools to simplify the process. With workshops, you can do analysis exercises or discussions with your participants to get real-time interpretations of their responses. Interviews can be trickier because, while the questions may be structured, responses may vary widely and lack consistency. When this is the case, it is a good idea to search for patterns and themes in the responses that can help you understand their meaning. In many cases, research can lead to more questions, so be sure to follow up with your participants when the need arises.
Once you have completed your analysis, be sure to share the results with the participants and your stakeholders. Sharing information with participants helps build trust through a transparent process and mitigates issues of opinion or bias by presenting data from a large sample of people. This same data is a valuable tool when sharing it with your stakeholders, as it prevents them from thinking that program decisions are being made based on opinion or intuition.
Affinity Diagrams
Affinity diagrams are a good tool for examining divergent answers and complex data that comes from interviews and helping to identify patterns and themes.