Shannon Smith

Most speakers on knowledge transfer come from one of two directions: they are researchers who have studied expert performance in controlled settings, or they are consultants who have observed it from the outside. Shannon approaches it from both directions at once, and from the inside. She holds dual graduate training in instructional design and industrial-organizational psychology, which means she reads the same problem through two disciplinary lenses simultaneously: how people learn and transfer knowledge, and what actually drives behavior, judgment, and performance in organizations. That combination is not common in the speaking space. She also works daily as a senior staff development trainer inside a large organization. The problems she speaks about are problems she manages in real time. That grounding is the difference between a talk that sounds credible and a talk that is credible. Her Expertise Translation Method is built on a documented finding: experts omit 40 to 70 percent of what they do when asked to describe their own process. That finding creates a coherent problem statement for organizational audiences. Asking your top performers to write it down will not work, because the people you are asking to do it genuinely cannot see their own expertise clearly enough to complete the task. Shannon's sessions reframe the problem and show what actually changes the outcome. For organizations in regulated industries managing AI adoption, leadership transition, or succession risk, the research-practitioner combination is not a credential flourish. It is what makes the work applicable rather than aspirational.