Harold Jarche

knowledge is personal

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Knowledge management, for me, is personal.

A big conceit of the knowledge management (KM) field is that knowledge can be transferred, but unlike information or data, it cannot. Knowledge is personal. While knowledge cannot really be transferred, our experiences can be shared. Perhaps that is why we love stories. They are a glimpse into others’ knowledge, more nuanced than any other communication medium.

Stories make us human, and the best people to learn from are those who are able to admit that they mismanaged, botched, or bungled something. Of course, this can be a real challenge in organizations that do not discuss failure. Is failure an option in your organization? If not, how can you learn from it? Research shows that our memories get worse over time, but our stories, as we remember them, become much clearer. We have a propensity for self-delusion, something every jury member should always keep in mind. Fiction (story) is much more powerful than non-fiction. Would it not be more effective if we shared knowledge as stories, in education and at work? We hear a lot about the importance of curation in the digital workplace today, but what if our curators were also story tellers?

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sharing some ideas

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Here are some observations and insights that were shared on social media this past fortnight. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“as soon as a company has a Chief Innovation Officer you know that company has a problem” – Tim Cook – via @BrunoGebarski

@C4LPT – “You don’t get “big data” in workplace learning – only “little data”. But beware – it is usually incomplete.“

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We are the media, now what?

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One of the potential downsides of a network society is that deception, especially by those with power over the communications platforms, will become all-too-common. John Pilger takes a look at this, focusing much of the blame on professional journalists in War by media and the triumph of propaganda.

Why has so much journalism succumbed to propaganda? Why are censorship and distortion standard practice? Why is the BBC so often a mouthpiece of rapacious power? Why do the New York Times and the Washington Post deceive their readers?

Why are young journalists not taught to understand media agendas and to challenge the high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the essence of so much of what’s called the mainstream media is not information, but power?

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the democratic advantage

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Three billion people around the world are now connected with ubiquitous digital technologies that keep improving. They also keep getting cheaper. History shows  that technology can be an enabler of democracy. Distributed communications subvert gatekeepers. John Gilmore said that, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” As networks become the new companies, we may be moving toward a more democratic future of work, with authority distributed throughout the network. One significant counter to this trend is the emergence of platform capitalism.

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Friday’s favourites

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I wrote my first Friday Find in May, 2009. It was an attempt to make my finds on Twitter more explicit, as I noticed I was sharing and viewing a lot of information but not doing anything with it. My current practice is to summarize what I have found on various social media platforms (Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, private channels) and create a blog post every two weeks.

With Twitter, I use the ‘favourite’ function (star) [Twitter has now changed this to a heart] to mark any tweets I wish to review for later. Some of these are saved for later reading, others get reviewed fortnightly. On review, some make the cut for the Friday’s Finds post, though these are the minority. Any I wish to keep for later are added to my social bookmarks and categorized for easier search and retrieval.

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the future will be distributed

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Is this the journalism of the future?

“We can conjecture, for example, that the journalism of the future will be distributed  — with every individual in society playing a continuous role in providing the function. Indeed, given the primary importance and power of True Information to a well functioning Abundance Society, we might well expect that providing honest and thoughtful evaluation of experiences will become one of the principal activities in the future. Perhaps a main portion of the economy of Abundance will involve having experiences, evaluating them and curating them in a collective effort to ensure that every member of society is consistently presented with the best possible set of experiences for them to encounter at every moment.” —Reinvent Everything

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books in perpetual beta

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Finding Perpetual Beta is now in production. This new ebook is part of the continuing journey to understand how individuals and organizations can manage fundamental changes in networked society, business, and education. It is a series of reflections on the themes presented in Seeking Perpetual Beta, published in April 2014. It questions the status quo of how organizations are structured in order to get work done. In addition, there is an expanded Part 2 on personal knowledge mastery (PKM), a foundational discipline for working in the network era and a creative economy.

Here are some highlights, covering the main themes in Part 1: The Network Era.

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Black Friday Finds

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Here are some observations and insights that were shared on social media this past fortnight. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@doctorow – “Once you admit that luck was crucial to your success, you have to confront the terrifying possibility that your luck may run out someday.”

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Learning-oriented marketing

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The best way to understand your markets in the network era is by learning together. If markets are conversations, then the quality of your conversations will affect your value exchanges. Your markets will learn with or without your company. But when you learn with and from your customers, marketing and learning become the same. This is often lost in one-way broadcast marketing messages that are not directly connected to customer service or even product development. Network era marketing can benefit from a new learning focus. Marketing has to be connected to the rest of the company as well as the entire value network.

“People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.” – Cluetrain

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Anarchists in the Boardroom

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“I remember regularly reiterating the question, while out at the pub with fellow disillusioned colleagues, or after conferences with newfound allies from other dysfunctional NGOs, How have we ended up creating organisations that are meant to create good in the world, but make so many of those involved in them so miserable in the process?” – Liam Barrington-Bush

Anarchists in the Boardroom, by Liam Barrington-Bush, is a comprehensive read showing how organizations can apply the 3 principles of ‘more like people’ organizations:

  1. Humanity: What can we learn from ourselves?
  2. Autonomy: Trusting ourselves and others to be brilliant
  3. Complexity: Moving from cogs to consciousness

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