Harold Jarche

Connected leadership is helping the network make better decisions

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Organizations face more complexity in the type of work they do, the problems they face, and the markets they interact with. This is due to increasing connections between everyone and everything. To deal with this complexity, organizations must structure around loose hierarchies and strong networks. This challenges command and control management as well as the concept that those in leadership positions are special. It makes the concept of High Potential [HiPo] employees seem rather old-fashioned. Leadership in networks is an emergent property.

In networks, everyone is a contributor within a transparent environment. Effective networks are also diverse and open. Anyone can lead in a network, if there are willing followers. Those who have consensus to lead have to actively listen and make sense of what is happening. They are in service to the network, to help keep it resilient through transparency, diversity of ideas, and openness. Servant leaders help to set the context around them and build consensus around emergent practices.

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preempting automation

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There is a lot of talk in the mainstream media about the increasing automation of work and jobs. I have discussed automation and outsourcing here for several years and it’s fairly obvious that standardized work will keep getting automated, by software or robots. Addressing this technology-driven shift should be a high priority for everyone, from unions, to governments, and human resource professionals. As we move into a post-job economy, society needs to restructure how work gets done and how it is compensated. While this is a macro issue, there are some things that can be done within the enterprise right now. Companies that implement these changes could be in a much better position as the creative economy rises to dominate agricultural, manufacturing, and information economies.

I have written that the future of management is talent development, but what does this mean on a day to day basis? One small change, that could have a major impact, would be to look at everyone’s work from the perspective of standardized versus customized work. Every person in the company, with the help of some data and peer feedback, should be able to determine what percentage of their time is spent on standardized work. If the percentage is over a certain threshold, say 50%, then it becomes a management task to change that person’s job and add more customized work. The company should be constantly looking at ways to automate any standardized work, in order to stay ahead of technology, the market, and the competition. Automation is pretty well inevitable but it does not have to decimate the workforce.

Looking at the overall company balance between standardized and customized work should be an indicator of its potential to succeed. By visualizing the Labour/Talent split, people in the company can take action and make plans before the inevitable shift. This of course means that jobs and roles have to become more flexible and open to change. But this is a post-job economy we are moving toward. We cannot stay tied to the concept of the job as the primary way to work.

Building ways to constantly change roles will be one way to get rid of the standardized job, which has no place in a creative economy. This one small change could have a major impact on any organization. It just requires a slightly new way of looking at work, collecting good data, engaging workers in the process, and being transparent about it all. Most of all, it requires companies and managers who really care about talent development.

The reality that treating workers like Talent, not replaceable and low cost Labour, can actually increase revenue is starting to make an impact, even where it is not quite so obvious – the retail sector. Getting staff to focus on customized work, or dealing with each unique customer need, pays dividends in the long term.

“A better-paid, better-trained worker, she argues, will be more eager to help customers; they’ll also be more eager to help their store sell to them. The success of Costco, Trader Joe’s, QuikTrip and Mercadona, Spain’s biggest supermarket chain, indicate, she argues, that well-paid, knowledgeable workers are not an indulgence often found in luxury boutiques with their high markups. At each of the aforementioned companies, workers are paid more than at their competitors; they are also amply staffed per shift. More employees can ask customers questions about what they want to see more of and what they don’t like, and then they are empowered to change displays or order different stock to appeal to local tastes.” —NYT: Thinking Outside the (Big) Box

Working Socially

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Why should I, as an OD/HR/L&D professional, concerned with the human aspects of organizations, have to understand social media and enterprise social networks?

Saying we don’t need to understand social media is like saying we didn’t need to understand speaking, reading or writing to do our jobs before. With ubiquitous connectivity, more of our work is at a distance, either in space or time. Distributed work is becoming the norm. If we are going to support people doing this kind of work, we need to understand it. However, working in online social networks takes practice to be proficient. It is difficult to understand theoretically. For example, even though I had worked online for over a decade, I did not really understand Twitter until I started using it regularly in 2008.

One fundamental difference about social media is they have a strong influence on the user, very much in a McLuhanesque medium/message/massage way. Those who come to social media for the first time are like adults learning a new language. They cannot start with the same advanced mental models and metaphors that they have in their primary language. The image below shows the effects of enterprise social networks, from a McLuhan tetradic perspective.

tetrad ESNSocial media change the way we communicate and social media can change the way we think. We need to use the tools in order to understand what it’s like to be a node in a social network. There is almost nothing like it in the industrial workplace or school system to prepare us for this. Therefore we won’t know what we’re talking about until we learn the new language of online networks. The only way to learn a new language is through practice.

How do you start the discussion about social networks with senior managers who think of technology as just different products and platforms?

Work today has few time or geographical boundaries. As our water coolers become virtual, social relations online will be the glue that connects us in our increasingly distributed work. Every little tweet, blog post, comment or “like” online shares our individuality and humanity. These actions help us be known to others in the digital surround. They help us build trust to get things done, be productive and innovate. However, we cannot benefit from professional social networks unless we engage in them. This requires more than merely mastering the technology. It means being social in our work. Not using social media to connect, contribute and collaborate is like sitting in a closed office all day.

To stay engaged with interconnected markets, business has to get more social. Social learning, a major activity on social media, is how we get things done in networks.  Most organizational value is created by teams and networks, not individuals working alone. Organizational learning spreads through social networks. Therefore, social networks are the conduit for effective organizational performance.

Blocking, or circumventing, social networks slows learning, reduces effectiveness and may in the end kill the organization. Senior managers need to understand social media in order to support learning in social networks which will enable practitioners to produce results.

Does being social at work mean being highly connected?

Does social mean highly connective? It’s much more than that. Social means human. It is an understanding that relationships and networks are complex. Our industrial management models are based on a belief that our structures are merely complicated, but more of our work is dealing with complex problems, for which there is no standardized approach.

Social bonds keep us together. Much of it is about trust. If I trust you, I might ask you for advice, so trust is essential for collaboration. We lose it if we try to micro-manage knowledge work. The argument that ‘business is business and social is social’ makes little sense today. Business is social because it involves people. Business must be more social the more complex the work and the greater the need for collaboration and cooperation. We foster innovation through social interactions. The idea that a lone person working in a lab can come up with a brilliant idea is largely unfounded. Connections between people drive innovation.

“Connecting ideas is the core of innovation, but without connecting ideas to people, there is no innovation at all. – Tim Kastelle

What kind of changes are needed in the way we organize work?

We need to understand complex adaptive systems and develop work structures that let us focus our efforts on learning as we work in order to continuously develop next practices. The role of leadership becomes supportive rather than directive in this new knowledge-intensive and creative workplace. Artificial boundaries that limit collaboration and communication only serve to drag companies down and create opportunities for more agile competitors.

Most managers would agree that an increasing amount of work and effort is in exception-handling. Social networks are an excellent framework to deal with these, as they enable people to crowd-source problem solving and speed the flow of knowledge.

What does exception handling mean for companies and employees? A practical definition is the time that employees – both management and front line workers – spend managing the non-routine tasks that must be addressed even though they occur outside the realm of standard daily business operations. It’s the things that just come up and disrupt someone’s workflow, requiring special time and attention. – Tim Young: Socialcast blog

To understand social networks, it is best to be able to see them. Visualization, like value network analysis, enables people to see the workplace with new eyes. This in turn can lead to diverse ideas and innovative approaches. Visualizing network relationships can give the initial leverage of getting complex new ideas accepted into general management thinking. Visualization is the fulcrum to widespread understanding of social connections in business.

Finally, it’s rather obvious that many HR policies imply that people cannot be trusted. Almost all IT policies say that. But it’s an interconnected world. Everything is transparent, whether we want it to be or not. Once management realizes that their company is a glass house, they will have to start working differently.

Note: This post is a synthesis and update of several conversations I posted as Organizational Development Talk, in 2011.

The network era transition

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I concluded in my last post that organizations will need to adapt to the network era. Another possibility is that hierarchical organizations, like most companies, will not be able to adapt to the network era. As with the assembly line, the view of the company as an organization chart may become a relic of the past. org chart

In the very near future it is quite possible that most of us will be working in knowledge networks, whether we are farmers or software engineers. A knowledge network in balance is founded on openness which enables transparency. This in turn fosters a diversity of ideas, and can promotes innovation. The emergent property of all of these exchanges is trust.

The network era may revert the role of the organization to merely a supporting one. We might even see corporations bidding for the privilege of supporting knowledge networks. I see evidence of this new approach to work at Change Agents Worldwide, which is firmly based on transparency and trust amongst its current 33 members.

As more people work in distributed networks they may realize how little they have to gain from traditional organizations. Networks that foster autonomy as well as interdependence are a much better vehicle for rewarding work than hierarchical organizations can ever be. Hierarchies, driven by external and formal direction, cannot compete with connected workers working in trusted networks, for they are intrinsically motivated.

In networks, cooperation trumps collaboration. Collaboration happens around some kind of plan or structure, while cooperation presumes the freedom of individuals to join and participate. Cooperation is a driver of creativity. Cooperation is also driven by intrinsic motivation.

No person, no matter where in an organizational hierarchy, has all the knowledge needed to thrive in the network era. Neither does any company. Neither does any government. We are all connected and dependent on each other. Hierarchies divide us.

Managing professional relationships as a network allows each node (person) to be unique. This removes the artificial barrier of the job, which assumes that people are replaceable, and that knowledge flows up and down. Knowledge in a network is about connecting experiences, relationships, and situations.

The latest example of this organizational shift is Zappos, the online shoe company, that is going “holocratic”(R).

“We’re classically trained to think of ‘work’ in the traditional paradigm,” says John Bunch, who, along with Alexis Gonzales-Black, is leading the transition to Holacracy at Zappos. “One of the core principles is people taking personal accountability for their work. It’s not leaderless. There are certainly people who hold a bigger scope of purpose for the organization than others. What it does do is distribute leadership into each role. Everybody is expected to lead and be an entrepreneur in their own roles, and Holacracy empowers them to do so.” – Quartz: Zappos is going Holocratic

“The future has arrived — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”– William Gibson

Talking about the Network Era

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Interesting things happen when hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, as the writers of the Cluetrain Manifesto said in 1999. Wikileaks, Edward Snowden, Arab Spring, and the Occupy Movement are just a few recent examples. Spying on entire populations is another network era phenomenon. In education, the current subversion is the MOOC, which has already itself been subverted by corporate interests. In the labour movement we are seeing things like alt-labour as well as a growing shareable economy. Networked, distributed businesses, like AirBNB, are disrupting existing models, with the inevitable push-back as they become successful.

Networks will transform education, business, the economy, and society even further. In the network era, the creative economy will gain dominance over the information and industrial economies. Professional knowledge distribution will move away from institutionalized business schools into networked communities of practice.

The key to a flourishing society in the network era will be distributed sense-making. Self-instruction, the basis of personal knowledge mastery, will be a requirement in a growing number of peer-to-peer networks. Networked learning will give rise to networked decision making. David Ronfeldt articulates this well, with his TIMN [Tribes-Institutions-Markets-Networks] framework. Anyone raised during the past several decades probably understands tribes and institutions and even market forces. This is a triform society (T+I+M). But what happens as we become a quadriform society (T+I+M+N)?

TIMN has long maintained that, beyond today’s common claims that government or market is the solution, we are entering a new era in which it will be said that the network is the solution (e.g., here and here). Aging contentions that turning to “the government” or “the market” is the way to address particular public-policy issues will eventually give way to innovative ideas that “the network” is the optimal solution.

In the network era we have to understand how to become contributing members of networks, for work and for life. This should be a major focus for all professional training and education.

“Reed’s Law” posits that value in networks increases exponentially as interactions move from a broadcasting model that offers “best content” (in which value is described by n, the number of consumers) to a network of peer-to-peer transactions (where the network’s value is based on “most members” and mathematically described by n2).  But by far the most valuable networks are based on those that facilitate group affiliations, Reed concluded. – David Bollier

Without good sense-making skills, the citizenry cannot understand complex issues that affect us all, such as individual privacy versus national security. These issues require networked, human intelligence, not broadcast sound bites, nor ‘learning objects’.

Sensemaking should drive policy. Policy drives decisions. Decisions, of course, need to be informed. If the People don’t know what makes their world go ‘round, the folks on the Hill sure won’t. Globalized governments can’t. – Gunther Sonnenfeld

As David Bollier concludes, “Legitimate authority is ultimately vested in a community’s ongoing, evolving social life, and not in ritualistic forms of citizenship.” Should not education move beyond ritualistic forms of subjects, classes, and certifications and toward ongoing, evolving social learning? How else will we be able to deal with the complexities of this networked, connected sphere that we inhabit?

Jon Husband says that we are all in this together.

The interconnected Information Age is beginning to show us that we’re all linked together – and that the whole system matters.

This principle applies to organizations, to networks of customers, suppliers, employees and communities, to our societies and to the planet.

New language for this principle is popping up everywhere – knowledge networks, intranets, communities of practice, systems thinking, swarming, social software, social networks, tipping points.

Awareness is the key.  Maintain an “open focus”.

Being aware of yourself, others and the effects of your actions and ways of being in relation to others is a fundamental requirement in these conditions.

To thrive in the network era we need to understand networks – social networks, value networks, information networks, etc. Therefore we will need network era fluency.

network era fluencyNetwork era fluency could be described as individuals and communities understanding and being part of global networks that influence various aspects of our lives. For individuals, the core skill will be critical thinking, or questioning all assumptions, including one’s own. People will learn though their various communities and in doing so, develop social literacy. Information literacy will be developed by connecting to many networks. Diversity of our knowledge networks can foster innovation and improve our collective ability to adapt.

Mass network era fluency will keep our knowledge networks social, diverse, and reflect many communities. This kind of fluency, by the majority of people, will be necessary to deal with the many complex issues facing humanity. We cannot address complex issues and networked forces unless we can knowledgeably discuss them. To understand the network era, we need first to be able to talk about it.

The network era has already changed politics, created new dominant business models, opened up learning, and is now changing how organizations operate – on the inside. Once we are able to talk about networks, we will see that many of our current work practices are rather obsolete. From how we determine the value of work, to how we calculate pay for work; organizations will need to adapt to the network era.

I think business leaders and HR departments do not understand this shift, or the fact that this shift is accelerating, so that in a year or two 75% of peoples’ value will be based on their network performance, their ability to contribute to and accept from others. – Stowe Boyd

Best of Friday’s Finds 2013

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Every second Friday I review what I’ve noted on various social media platforms and post a wrap-up of what caught my eye. I do this as a reflective thinking process and also in order to take some of what I’ve learned and put it on a platform where I control the data. These are my Friday’s Finds.

Here are some of the best finds I made in 2013, on the topics of creativity, complexity, hierarchy, innovation, leadership, learning, models, networks, organizations, work, and the workplace.

Creativity

@TimKastelle – What is the Best Organisational Structure for Creativity?

So why doesn’t everyone organise their company in this way? [like W.L. Gore & Associates] There are a few reasons. One is that it’s hard. It is a lot easier to put up some inspirational posters on the subject of creativity, and hope that works. But it won’t. Restructuring a company to reflect the fact that everyone there has creative skills takes a lot of work. Gore has been built this way from Day 1.

The second reason is that many people still don’t believe that everyone can be creative. The Breed Myth is powerful, and widespread. If you believe it, then you hire special people and put them in special rooms. If you don’t, you have to figure out how to put everyone in your firm into a position to be creative.

Complexity

How Complex Systems Fail [PDF] Complexity, swiss cheese and failure. The classic 1998 article by Richard Cook – via @commutiny

Complex systems contain changing mixtures of failures latent within them.
Hindsight biases post-accident assessments of human performance.
Human operators have dual roles: as producers & as defenders against failure.
All practitioner actions are gambles.
Human practitioners are the adaptable element of complex systems.
Human expertise in complex systems is constantly changing.

Hierarchy

The genesis of a new way of looking at business: Flow is everything – by @sig

The Organisational Hierarchy is kaput – as single purpose executor of the Business Model it requires reorganisation every time you need to get better, an utterly futile exercise most of the time. Replace it.

Managing is a waste of time. Leadership I need, getting out of bed in the morning I can do myself.

Innovation

Deconstructing Innovation: a complex concept made simple; by @ShaunCoffey

So it is important to understand that there is no one-size-fits-all philosophy in terms of successful innovation. The one constant is that you have to be open to change and new points of view. Innovation is continuous.

Successful innovators and entrepreneurs all embrace change and the risks that they pose. In fact, innovation is the poster child of the mantra that there are no rules. Only by trying out new things, by failing, by discovering what works and what doesn’t, do you gain answers to the innovation question.

Leadership

“By the excessive promotion of leadership, we demote everyone else.” – Henry Mintzberg – via @flowchainsensei

“Everyone is a born leader … We were all leaders until we were sent to school to be commanded, controlled, and taught to do likewise.” – Dee Hock – via @Jan Höglund

Knowledge Leadership in the Era of Convergence – via @JonHusband

In an environment where speed, access, and tools allow workers to seamlessly collaborate across time zones, store massive amounts of data, and crowdsource the answers to difficult organizational issues, organizations that trend toward openness in the knowledge management arena will be better able to use new technologies and react to cultural and business changes. This makes leaders responsible for developing an open, collaborative culture, and suggests that inspiring these attitudes toward knowledge management will have positive individual and organizational consequences.

Learning

@DonaldClark : Failure led, spaced practice is better than training

Over nine months, 500 people in Booz Allen were initially given three types of training:

1.       Placebo
2.       Page-turning
3.       Interactive

All three groups were then given surprise:
Three simulated phishing emails with remedial help if they failed i.e. spaced practice, learn through failure exercises.
>Based on actual simulated attacks, they discovered no significant difference between training and no training!

Knowledge

@DavidGurteen – “PKM is actually what KM is really all about.”

World Bank: Knowledge Management is not mere dissemination:

KM should be conceived less as a purely technical information-based area and more as a communication and behaviour-change area, because putting knowledge to practical use needs a certain degree of behaviour change on both sides. Knowledge producers need to package the product in a way that can be easily applied, [e.g. PKM & Curating] while the users need to be “persuaded” to conceive knowledge as a practical tool that can be applied in their field. In other words, KM should close the gap between the theoretical and conceptual constructs and the practical applications.

Models

“Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.” – George Box [1919-2013] via @fhuszar

Networks

“Networked minds” require a fundamentally new kind of economics – via @eprenen

Networked minds create a cooperative human species

“This has fundamental implications for the way, economic theories should look like,” underlines Professor Helbing. Most of today’s economic knowledge is for the “homo economicus”, but people wonder whether that theory really applies. A comparable body of work for the “homo socialis” still needs to be written.

“While the “homo economicus” optimizes its utility independently, the “homo socialis” puts himself or herself into the shoes of others to consider their interests as well,” explains Grund, and Helbing adds: “This establishes something like “networked minds”. Everyone’s decisions depend on the preferences of others.” This becomes even more important in our networked world.

Organizations

Peter Kruse: Transforming Organizations into Social Brains | sense-making strategy – via @toughloveforx

Organizations that do not develop connectivity, arousal (or engagement) and collective valuation facility will have a poor chance of survival in the competition with organizations that do.  That includes the organizational approach to strategy, leadership and communication, whose main task will be to enable neural facility (or at the very least not stand in its way!)
Success in the neural world will depend strongly on social empathy and an ability to work with social resonance phenomena, that steer and focus attention and energy through the net (Kruse—part 4).

Work

TechCrunch: America has hit peak jobs – via @sardire

Paul Kedrosky recently wrote a terrific essay about what I call cultural technical debt, i.e. “organizations or technologies that persist, largely for historical reasons, not because they remain the best solution to the problem for which they were created. They are often obstacles to much better solutions.” Well, the notion that ‘jobs are how the rewards of our society are distributed, and every decent human being should have a job’ is becoming cultural technical debt.

If it’s not solved, then in the coming decades you can expect a self-perpetuating privileged elite to accrue more and more of the wealth generated by software and robots, telling themselves that they’re carrying the entire world on their backs, Ayn Rand heroes come to life, while all the lazy jobless “takers” live off the fruits of their labor. Meanwhile, as the unemployed masses grow ever more frustrated and resentful, the Occupy protests will be a mere candle flame next to the conflagrations to come.

Workplace

I found the best ever review of standing desks from Wirecutter, via @robpatrob. As a result of what I learned via social media, I had a standing desk built in March 2013, that I now use as my primary workstation. The desk was made from locally sourced yellow birch, by John Crawford. Desk surface is 36″ x 24″ and stands 42″ high. The monitor stand is a locally made box built from century-old recovered wall laths.

harold jarche standing desk

 

The changing nature of work

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In 2013, I was able to spend some time looking at the changing nature of work. I continued to read from many sources, and I observed what and where I could. I used this blog to help make sense and engage with my professional learning networks. Here is a single-paragraph summary of what I see as the major issues affecting the management of work.

First of all, it is becoming obvious that the fundamental nature of work is changing as we transition into a post-job economy. The major driver of this change is the automation of procedural work, especially through software, but increasingly with robots. The drivers behind the post-job economy are also changing our work structures. Organizations will need to become more networked, not just with information technology, but how knowledge workers create, use, and share knowledge. This new workplace also will require different leadership that emerges from the network and temporarily assumes control, until new leadership is required. Giving up control will be a major challenge for anyone used to the old ways of work. An important part of leadership will be to ensure that knowledge is shared. But moving to a knowledge-sharing organizational structure will be difficult, because of the knowledge sharing paradox; which is that the more control is exerted, the less knowledge is shared. All of these challenges need to be addressed, and rather quickly, as software continues to eat jobs, and income disparities get wider.

nature of work is changingReferences:

the-post-job-economy

from-hierarchies-to-wirearchies

connected-leadership-is-not-the-status-quo

organizational-knowledge-sharing-framework

the-knowledge-sharing-paradox

Engaged for work

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There is a real change in how work is getting done today. It’s not just factory workers but many professionals whose work will be automated by software and robots.

Procedural work will keep getting outsourced to the lowest cost of labour. The industrial world deskilled work to its component parts, and today these parts continue to get automated or crowd-sourced. Traditional jobs will not come back.

So how will anyone be able to make a living? Get creative. Creative work cannot be automated. “Focus on the human factor,” says futurist Gerd Leonhard, “If our work – and our output – is robotic we will soon be surpassed by intelligent software agents and machines.” Human creative work is not just art, design, and the like, but includes making valuable things for a specific context, need, or market. The internet makes finding these markets much easier.

So how can anyone learn and prepare for this world of work? We know that training works well to learn a defined skill, such as how to drive a car. You can also train for a field, such as carpentry. But training does little for creativity.

First of all, learn real skills, not just how to make it in an organization. Artists first learn the skills of their field. Learn how to code, bake, or some other defined skill. Master it, and then start breaking the rules. This is the Picasso approach. “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” [attributed].

At the same time, learn how to cooperate in networks. Start right now in engaging in diverse professional learning networks. Put yourself out there, for in this new world of work, you are only as good as your network.

Cleric-Knight-Workman
Image: Cleric — Knight — Workman

Think of yourself as a freelancer for life and always nurture your networks, no matter what. Avoid getting lulled into a false sense of security. To stay engaged, take control of your professional development. The alternative is rather feudal.

PKM and MOOC

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Workplace training and education too often resemble modern playgrounds:

“safe, repeatable, easily constructed from component parts, requiring that the child bring little of their own to the experience” – Johnnie Moore

When adults design for children they have a tendency to dumb things down. Perhaps the notion that there is no such thing as writing for children should be extended to workplace training and education design. In the workplace, thinking of co-workers as “learners” actually may be a barrier to learning.

The real value of the MOOC (massively open online course/content) could be its potential to remove the barrier between learners, designers, and instructors. Its workplace learning potential may be greater than its academic value. But if one thinks of the MOOC as a course, designed by one party for another party, then it really is nothing new.

“Indeed, I was struck by a recent comment from someone with 15 years of experience in designing face-to-face, blended and online credit programs: I am trying to understand what MOOCs can offer that my understanding of educational design, learning design and online and distance education does not include. I’m afraid that the answer continues to be: ‘Nothing’, at least for the moment.” – Tony Bates

But the MOOC can foster emergent learning, which makes it an optimal form for understanding complex issues. This is something that a curriculum-based, graded, course is not well suited to support. With the MOOC, especially one focused on being massive and open, there is a greater possibility for serendipitous connections, such as what happened with participants becoming instructors in the early MOOC we conducted in 2008.

If we think of the MOOC as a vehicle for shared understanding, and not content delivery, it becomes the collective equivalent to personal knowledge mastery. It is group learning, with some structured content, and good facilitation; but most importantly, space for sense-making. In the complex domain, combining PKM with more structure for social learning, using the MOOC format, can be an important addition to how workplace learning is supported.

Update: several possibilities for corporate MOOC’s from Donald Clark.

PKM is making sense of complexity

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This is what you find on the first page of most searches for PKM:

Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a collection of processes that a person uses to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve, and share knowledge in his or her daily activities – Wikipedia

It is interesting to note that this definition comes from a study on manufacturing and artificial intelligence.

The paper tries to bridge gap between knowledge management and artificial intelligence approaches proposing agent-based framework for modelling organization and personal knowledge. The perspective of knowledge management is chosen to develop two conceptual models—one describes the intelligent enterprise memory, another models an intelligent organization’s knowledge management system. The concept of an agent-based environment of the knowledge worker for personal and organizational knowledge management support is introduced. – Agent based approach for organization and personal knowledge modelling: knowledge management perspective (2007)

In my practice of PKM, and the Seek > Sense > Share framework, there is nothing artificial at all, and looking for automation only detracts from the real power of PKM.  In the same Wikipedia article, reference is made to Dave Snowden’s issues with the concept.

Dave Snowden has asserted that most individuals cannot manage their knowledge in the traditional sense of “managing” and has advocated thinking in terms of sensemaking rather than PKM.

I agree. Dave has published a recent article on the Cynefin framework, which I think shows clearly where PKM can play a critical role. It is in making sense of complexity.

Cynefin is not intended as a crude categorisation model, although it has been used as such with some utility.  It is as much about dynamic movements.  So in the model shown here the prime dynamic is shown in red.  The idea is that ideas emerge in the complex domain and are then constrained to shift them into complicated. As you start to impose constraint you see if it creates repeatability, if not pull back.  If it works then you shift from exploration to exploitation.  Periodically you relax the constraints again to allow new possibilities to emerge.  From time to time the dynamic may have ossified in which case a reset is need; the blue line known as a shallow dive into chaos.   Only when change is no longer plausible is it shifted to Obvious [green] – Great is the power of steady misrepresentation

Cynefin_Dec_13_DaveSnowdenCynefin image by Dave Snowden

“Ideas emerge in the complex domain …” which is where creative knowledge workers in a network economy need to be active, probing, and playing. We also need to do shallow dives into the Chaotic domain. Neither of these activities will be helped through automation. If anything, automation will make us lazy, or unaware.

The process of seeking out people and information sources, making sense of them by taking some action, and then sharing with others to confirm or accelerate our knowledge, are those activities from which we can build our knowledge. Managing and sharing information, especially through conversations, are fundamental processes for sense-making in the complex domain. Sense-making is acting on one’s knowledge.

A key principle of PKM is that no one has the right answer, but together we can create better ways of understanding complex systems. We each need to find others who are sharing their knowledge flow and in turn contribute our own. It’s not about being a better digital librarian, it’s about becoming a participating member of a networked organization, economy and society.

Sense-making consists of both asking and telling. It’s a continuing series of conversations. We know that conversation is the main way that tacit knowledge gets shared. So we should continuously seek out ideas. We can then have conversations around these ideas to make sense of them. Sharing closes the circle, because being a personal knowledge manager is every professional’s part of the social learning contract. Without effective sense-making at the individual level, social learning at the organizational level is mere noise amplification.

So ask what value you can add ->

adding value