The shift from consuming broadcast media to creating interactive media may be engaging a new generation in a new way. Just think of all the hours that used to be spent watching TV can now be used to generate ideas – some good and many bad – but they are being generated on an enormous scale. Just look at YouTube. This is what Clay Shirky calls the cognitive surplus.
Now take this idea one step further and think of all the time wasted in the typical workplace just consuming – listening at meetings; reading directives, waiting for someone to make a decision; commuting; etc. Imagine what could happen if an entire organization decides to tap into its collective cognitive surplus. Very soon, the organization may have no choice.
Domino’s Pizza, a global quick-service restaurant company, understands that workers must be active and engaged in their own learning and development. As described in Introducing PKM to a Corporate Audience, Domino’s learned that “PKM makes learning a real-time activity within the flow of work” but also that “the company needs to clarify what people are allowed and expected to do in terms of learning during the workday.” In addition, information services, and IT security need to be consulted. The job of L&D is to familiarize busy professionals with new tools and realistic examples of how to use PKM at work.
Domino’s focused on helping people in leadership roles to develop PKM practices. This is a good approach as it improves the chances of spreading these habits throughout the enterprise. While the Seek > Sense > Share framework may be simple, it takes time and practice to become a habit. A pragmatic approach for some companies would be to support workers who are already practicing some aspect of PKM. Two identifiable groups are Connectors and Experts.
Connectors are people with many relationships who find it easy to talk to people. The challenge for the organization is to use these skills to improve knowledge-sharing. Connectors can be identified through observation, interviews, or social network analysis. To become knowledge catalysts, connectors need to have good curation skills. They have to know how to add value to knowledge and discern when, where, and with whom to share.
Experts have deep knowledge on a subject but many lack the skills to synthesize what they know in order to share it with a broader audience. It is critical that experts share their knowledge so the organization can make better decisions. This is a leadership responsibility that companies like Domino’s understand. Expertise in a closed room is of little use in a connected enterprise. Experts need to develop skills in working out loud and other sense-making practices. Connectors can help them but first there has to be something to share. Getting experts to share in a meaningful way can take time but first it requires a supportive environment and some basic skills.
If an organization wants to get meaningful results by adopting PKM practices, but does not see how this can be implemented throughout the organization, then an initial pilot should identify two groups: Connectors and Experts. Help these people improve their PKM skills. Get Connectors to add value and be more discerning. Get Experts to simplify in order to share. It will take time and practice but the benefits will be an organization that can use more of its knowledge to make better decisions. More Catalysts in the enterprise may also significantly improve innovation because innovation is inextricably linked to both networks and learning.
Ed Morrison, Advisor for the Purdue Center for Regional Development, says that many of the familiar approaches to management no longer apply, and goes on to provide 7 keys to guiding an open network. I have added my images that support this excellent set of rules.
Click on each image for a link to the supporting article.
Rule 1: Form a core team with distributed leadership roles
Rule 2: To accelerate, go slowly at first [AKA: Probe-Sense-Respond]
Rule 3: Find opportunities by linking and leveraging assets
Rule 4: Create coherence with visualizations and outcomes with success metrics
Rule 5: Adopt simple rules to design and implement strategy
Rule 6: Promote transparency, mutual accountability and success metrics
Last week I spent several hours each day, for four consecutive days, trying to share complex knowledge. I had my understanding of communities of practice, personal knowledge management, leadership, and innovation that I wanted to share. My friend and colleague Christian Renard had his knowledge about marketing, business, and digital power to share. From the time I was picked up at the Gare du Nord we began to share our knowledge through many conversations. But it was not easy, simple, or direct.
Gare du Nord and Metropolitain Entry, Paris Source: User: ‘Jorgeroyan’, Creative Commons A-SA 3.0, wikimedia.org
What proved helpful in our coming to a common understanding was that we both practice a form of personal knowledge management. Each of us has written articles, and more importantly, created images to describe many concepts. These visual metaphors accelerated our knowledge sharing.
Sharing information and viewing it through our individual filters is the best that we can hope for in terms of knowledge transfer. It is a very inexact process. Christian and I shared many stories over the four days and these too helped us come to some common understanding. Most importantly, we trusted each other and did not judge. We were both on similar journeys of understanding and were not trying to sell our ideas.
I was reminded once again of how much time it takes to share complex (implicit) knowledge. Four days, some long car rides, a few meetings with others, and several wonderful meals later, I think we came to a joint understanding of certain concepts. In the hurried pace of many businesses today, this would have been nearly impossible. If most organizations have a real need to share knowledge, which I believe they do, then they have to make time and space available for deep conversations. This may be one of the greatest challenges for organizational redesign as we enter a creative economy.
The aim of knowledge-sharing in an organization is to help make implicit knowledge more explicit. It’s important to understand that each of us only has an approximation of knowledge in our understanding. Knowledge should be seen as a fluid, not a solid. The cumulative pieces of information, or knowledge artifacts, that we create and share can help us have better conversations and gain some shared understanding. Our individual sense-making can be shared and from it can emerge better organizational knowledge. For organizations to share knowledge, even organizations of just two people, individuals have to have the bits necessary to put together. Knowledge is like electricity, with many small particles that enable flow. PKM helps to create the bits that will enable the conversational flow.
To really share complex knowledge takes a willingness to listen as well as the time and space to do so. Jon Husband’s definition of wirearchy is an excellent framework for organizations to start with:
Wirearchy – “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.”
While speaking at the Learning Technologies conference in London, I went downstairs to see the trade show. The exhibition hall had hundreds of booths and I was told that 12,000 people had signed up. When I arrived, it looked like all 12,000 were there. I quickly got a feeling of sensory overload and tried to filter the signal from the noise, but could not.
Then I came alongside the Reed Learning booth and saw a series of booklets in racks on the exterior posts. They immediately caught my eye and I took one. This is significant, because I try very hard to leave any trade show with nothing physical in my hands. I hate carrying extra paper products that usually get thrown out, but I really liked the look and feel of this one so I put it in my bag and returned to the much quieter conference floor.
The next day I showed the little book of inspiration to Jane Hart, who also thought it was quite attractive. As we thumbed through it, we realized that we each had written articles for the book, but I had completely forgotten about it. The best part of the book, in my opinion, is how each article has its own artwork and typography. Everyone to whom I have shown the book likes it.
It’s always good to remember that old technologies can still serve an important function in our digital world. Paper products can provide a tangible connection to our words that is not available online. By the way, I got 10 copies, in exchange for a copy of The Social Learning Handbook ;)
Engaged for Work – The Little Book of Inspiration – by Reed Learning
Here is the link to the online version of my article: Engaged for Work
The Little Book of Inspiration is available as a PDF from Reed Learning
Simple standards facilitated with a light touch, enables knowledge workers to capture, interpret, and share their knowledge.
Personal knowledge mastery is a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world and work more effectively. But what we loosely call knowledge, using terms like knowledge-sharing or knowledge capture, is just an approximation. We are not very good at articulating our knowledge, says knowledge management expert Dave Snowden: “We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down.”
Becoming knowledgeable can be thought of as bits of knowledge partially shared and experienced over time. It is laborious, hence the reason masters through the ages could only have a limited number of apprentices. But when writing, and later books, came along, we had a new technology that could more widely distribute information created by the wise, and the not so wise. Whether being mentored by a master or reading a book, knowledge does not actually get transferred, but shared observations and information can be helpful to those who have a desire to learn.
Merely being well-read is not enough to be knowledgeable, as possibly first noted by Socrates. Plato wrote in Phaedrus that Socrates felt the written language would result in ‘men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, who will be a burden to their fellows’. Socrates saw a core truth in learning from artefacts like books. We cannot become complacent with knowledge and just store it away. It has a shelf life and needs to be used, tested, and experienced. It should be shared amongst people who understand that they are only seeing a fragment of each others’ knowledge. Because it is so difficult to represent our knowledge to others, we have to make every effort to continuously share it. Once is not enough, as most parents know. Knowledge shared in flows over time can help us create better mental pictures than a single piece of knowledge stock, like a book.
The Seek, Sense, Share Framework
Capturing knowledge, as crudely as we do, is just a first step. Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM) is a framework for individuals to take control of their professional development through a continuous process of seeking, sensing-making, and sharing.
Seeking is finding things out and keeping up to date. Building a network of colleagues is helpful in this regard. It not only allows us to “pull” information, but also have it “pushed” to us by trusted sources. Good curators are valued members of knowledge networks.
Sensing is how we personalize information and use it. Sensing includes reflection and putting into practice what we have learned. Often it requires experimentation, as we learn best by doing.
Sharing includes exchanging resources, ideas, and experiences with our networks as well as collaborating with our colleagues.
The multiple pieces of information that we capture and share can increase the frequency of serendipitous connections, especially across organizations and disciplines where real innovation happens. As Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From says; “chance favors the connected mind“.
Work is learning and learning is the work
PKM may be an individual activity but it is social as well. It is the process by which we can connect what we learn outside the organization with what need to do inside. Research shows that work teams that need to share complex knowledge need tighter social bonds. Work teams often share a unique language or vocabulary. However, they can become myopic and may lack a diversity of opinions. Social networks, on the other hand, encourage diversity and can sow the seeds of innovation. But it is almost impossible to get work done in social networks due to their lack of structure. PKM is the active process of connecting the innovative ideas that can arise in our social networks with the deadline-driven work inside organizations.
In addition to seeking, sensing and sharing, we need to become adept at filtering information as well as discerning when and with whom to share. Like any skill, these require practice and feedback. Much of this can be provided in communities of practice, a half-way space between work teams and social networks, where trusted relationships can form that enable people to share more openly.
Connecting social networks, communities of practice and work teams, is an important framework for integrating learning and working in the network era. We seek new ideas from our social networks and then filter them through more focused conversations with our communities of practice, where we have trusted relationships. We make sense of these embryonic ideas by doing new things, either ourselves, or with our work teams. We later share our creations, first with our teams and perhaps later with our communities of practice or even our networks. We use our understanding of our communities and networks to discern with whom and when to share our knowledge.
Working Out Loud
Narrating one’s work does not get knowledge transferred, but it provides a better medium to gain more understanding. Working out loud is a concept that is very easy to understand, but not quite so easy to do. Most people are too busy managing in their information age workplaces and have little spare time to try to learn how to work in the network age. The most important step in learning a new skill is the first one. This same step has to be repeated many times before it becomes a habit. I have learned that the first step of starting to work out loud, as part of personal knowledge mastery, has to be as simple as possible.
For example, being able to share is usually not a prime reason why people start using web information capture tools like social bookmarks but it becomes more important over time. Coupled with feed readers (e.g. feedly.com) aggregation makes information flows much easier to deal with. Then you have to connect with people.
So how do you get started micro-blogging on a platform like Twitter? I suggest beginning with an aim in mind, such as professional development or staying current in a specific field. The search function can help find people who post about a specific topics. To start, you should follow between 20 and 30 interesting people. Once set up, beginners should dip into their stream once or twice a day and read through any posts of interest. Over time, as they follow links, they may add or delete feeds. Within a week or two, anyone should be able to sense some patterns and then modify their streams to provide more signal and less noise.
Sometimes we get all caught up in the latest social media tools. Getting started working out loud is not complicated and should not involve a steep learning curve on a complicated system. It is best to start with simple tools and frameworks.
Small pieces, loosely joined
The mainstream application of knowledge management and learning management over the past few decades is mostly wrong; we over-managed information, knowledge and learning because it was easy. Our organizations remain enamoured with the next wave of enterprise software systems. But the ubiquity of information outside the organization is showing the weakness of centralized enterprise systems. As organizations begin to understand the Web, the principle of ‘small pieces loosely joined’ is permeating some thick industrial age walls. More workers have their own sources of information and knowledge, often on mobile devices, but they often lack the means or internal support to connect their knowledge with others to actually get work done. Supporting PKM, especially internal sharing, can help information flow more freely.
A personal knowledge mastery framework helps knowledge workers capture and make sense of their knowledge. Simple standards can facilitate this sharing. Knowledge bases and traditional KM systems should focus on essential information, and what is necessary for inexperienced workers. Experienced workers should not be constrained by too much structure, but be given the flexibility to contribute how and where they think best helps the organization.
We know that formal instruction accounts for less than 10% of workplace learning. The same rule of thumb should apply to knowledge management. Capture and codify the 10% that is essential, especially for new employees. Now use the same principle to get work done. Structure the essential 10% and leave the rest unstructured, but networked, so that workers can group as needed to get work done. Many organizations are too slow and hierarchical to be useful for knowledge-sharing in the network era. Organizations structured around looser hierarchies and stronger networks are much more effective for increasingly complex work.
Like most professionals, I have many facets to my life in addition to my business. For the most part I do not discuss these here on my blog. However, I mentioned my community work recently to Christian Renard, and he suggested that I write about it.
I have had the privilege of serving as Chairman of the Board of Renaissance Sackville (RS) for the past five years. This not-for-profit organization was created 20 years ago when our town faced economic uncertainty. Several large businesses had recently closed, such as a foundry and a grocery distribution centre, leaving Mount Allison University as the only major employer. RS started as a forum to increase economic activity, including tourism.
When I joined the board, our focus had changed a bit, due to changing circumstances and our previous successes. Our current mission is: to help Sackville become a vibrant, economically and environmentally responsible, aesthetically pleasing, caring, friendly and gracious community. We receive about $50,000 annually from the Town of Sackville and get special project funding from other sources, such as Heritage Canada for the town’s 250th anniversary celebrations in 2012.
RS acts mostly as a seed funding agency for small projects that test new ideas. For example, we provided some funds to Community Forests International, an organization active in Africa and Canada, and as a direct result they are now headquartered here in Sackville, generating more economic development. Other recent examples include a bike co-op, a car share program, and a video camp for teenagers. One key aspect of our funding is that we do not expect a direct return on our investments. We believe in seeding as many ideas as possible, knowing that some will flourish and some will not, but we can learn something from each of them.
For me, one great attribute of RS is our ability to pay our beneficiaries very quickly, sometimes in less than 24 hours. The board works very well together, and in addition to our monthly meetings, we have discussions and make decisions using web-based tools. For small projects, where quite often a young person has taken the initiative, we know they cannot afford to be out of pocket for any length of time. We will even hand-deliver the cheque!
The measure of success for RS is in its aggregate work, not any specific project. Over time, we have been involved in every aspect of our community. This enables the board to make very informed decisions. We know the applicants and what they have done in the community. We do not expect short-term success. We want to make Sackville, population 5,000, a better place to live, work, and play. In the past five years, I have not come across another organization like RS that works independent of politicians and town officials, yet stays closely connected to the entire community. As a volunteer, it has been a pleasure to serve on the board of RS.
I think our operating model can be adopted by other communities in order to distribute economic and community development decision-making. I will try to add some more details and stories about Renaissance Sackville here over time, and I invite any questions, especially from other small communities. I may not be able to provide all the answers but I really think this is a much better way to grow a more resilient community for less than the cost of one full-time municipal employee. Our independence, with transparent processes, ensures we stay agile and able to test out many new projects and programs.
But new research has led biologists to a different view. We didn’t adapt to a particular Stone Age environment. We adapted to a newly unpredictable and variable world. And we did it by developing new abilities for cultural transmission and change. Each generation could learn new skills for coping with new environments and could pass those skills on to the next generation.
As the anthropologist Pascal Boyer points out in his answer, it’s tempting to talk about “the culture” of a group as if this is some mysterious force outside the biological individual or independent of evolution. But culture is a biological phenomenon. It’s a set of abilities and practices that allow members of one generation to learn and change and to pass the results of that learning on to the next generation. Culture is our nature, and the ability to learn and change is our most important and fundamental instinct.
Freelancers often work independently, but being “on your own” doesn’t mean “going it alone.” Freelancing successfully means building a network to line up new gigs, passing assignments to others when things are busy, and getting referrals from friends when they’re not.
In the information-and-hyperlink saturated workplace social networks we now inhabit, clarification, confirmation, and collaboration are but a click or two away. It’s mission-critical for individuals, groups, and organizations to be able to discern what kind(s) of personal learning strategies are necessary to survive and thrive in our new world of permanent information whitewater.
There just isn’t any choice other than continuous learning because ongoing change—permanent whitewater—is our only remaining constant.
In the past, media provided a filter. If something was on the front page or the evening news, it was considered important. If not, it wasn’t. Yet today, anyone can broadcast—whether it be a distraught mother or a crusading journalist. Nobody needs to ask for permission, even in a corrupt, authoritarian country.
And that’s why social media is playing an increasing role in shaping events. A small group of passionate people can influence others that are slightly more reticent, still others take notice and also join in. Before you know it, a movement ensues …
You have to wonder how the world got to where it is today where we have to FORCE people to be INDEPENDENT. Two words that look weird together in a sentence. It’s come to this – you have to force people to be independent? Isn’t that something that would create mistrust or curiosity in people?
On Friday morning we left Delft and headed into The Hague by bicycle, the only practical way to travel in the Netherlands, as my hosts Sibrenne and Russell assured me. I would be facilitating a PKM master class, designed for people who already had some experience with using web technologies for personal professional development. The session was held at a wonderful location, in a 42-story modern office building. These co-work spaces are called seats 2 meet and also offer meeting rooms at a cost of €60 per person.
Cycle-commuting from The Hague to Delft
The day focused on the needs and objectives of the participants, with only a little information presentation on my part. All participants had watched my short PKM intro video and several had taken the web-based workshop, that finished on the same day. We spent time looking at how we used various technologies, our daily work routines, and also how to make decisions on how to connect with others. Russell made a point that my Seek > Sense > Share framework is a multi-layered model, that is very simple to understand, but difficult to master as one sees more and more aspects of it over time. I had taken this for granted and appreciated getting first-hand feedback from the group. An advantage of face to face sessions is that you can have more nuanced conversation. Of course we were working in most participants’ second language, so that was a bit of a barrier in discussing complex ideas.
I have decided to cease offering the online PKM workshops as they now exist, and have started on a new program, that should be ready in about forty days. In addition, I will further develop the on-site PKM master class, as well as another one focused on leadership in networks. I look forward to making some announcements in a month or two. In the meantime, I will only offer basic PKM workshops to groups of 10 or more.
I write this post as I ride the TGV to Paris. It’s been a while since I’ve been on a European train and staying connected makes for a more productive trip. Our world is changing but I think practices like PKM, and active sense-making, can help us individually and collectively.
I am presenting on enterprise social technologies, learning and performance at the Learning Technologies conference in London today. Most large organizations have something like Microsoft Sharepoint, an intranet, or perhaps a social tool such as Socialcast. But how can you tell if these tools are right for the job? How can these tools support a coherent social strategy across the enterprise?
Working Out Loud
