Harold Jarche

Creating your PKM processes

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In Sense-making with PKM I described some personal knowledge management processes using various web tools. The overall process consists of four internal actions (Sort, Categorize, Retrieve, Make Explicit) and three externally focused ones (Connect, Contribute, Exchange). Personal knowledge management is one way of addressing the issue of TMI (too  much information).

pkm-flow

A sense-making routine can be regularly reading certain blogs and news feeds, capturing important ideas with social bookmarks and then putting ideas out in the open on a blog. The power of this process is realized after many iterations when you have created a personally contextualized knowledge base. PKM takes the notion of a personal journal and extends it significantly.

In Web Tools for Critical Thinking I expanded on Dave Pollard’s critical thinking process, showing how web tools can be used to develop critical thinking skills. Critical thinking is an important aspect of PKM but I had not put the two together explicitly. I created the following table to integrate my PKM process with Dave’s critical thinking process. You may have noticed that I’ve changed the order of  Retrieve & Make Explicit, but this is an iterative and non-linear process, so it doesn’t really matter.

My own PKM process has changed lately with my increasing use of Twitter and this is noted in the tools and strategies column.

PKM Critical Thinking Process Web Tools & Strategies
1 Sort Observe & Study Use an aggregator (feed reader) to keep track of online conversations

Follow interesting people on Twitter
2 Categorize Synthesize & Qualify
 Use Social Bookmarks

Find a Twitter App to suit your needs
3 Retrieve Draw Inferences Now that information is in a DB, use Search, instead of file folders.

Create online (reusable) mind maps,  graphics and text files of your thoughts
4 Make Explicit Form Tentative Opinions Tweet

Write a Blog post
A Connect Identify Missing Information (and people) Connect via Twitter, follow blogs or join Social Networks
B Contribute Develop Supporting Arguments Join in Tweet Chats

Write Blog Comments
C Exchange Analyze & Challenge Arguments Continue and extend conversations from news sources, other tweets or blog posts

Friday’s Finds #9

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Once again, not much blogging but a bit more activity on Twitter. It seems I can blast off 140 characters a lot easier than a complete blog post.

via @robpatrob Rob asks 10 questions for all of those who feel ok with the current food system
Agriculture – Our Delusion – My Questions Please help by answering

via @nprnews – Fight Against Antibiotic Fed Farm Animals All Uphill

via @paullowe Paul interviews jessica dimmock of VII network on intimacy with your photography subject

The importance of deliberate practice Anecdote Blog

via @kanter @peterscampbell – Why SharePoint Scares Me

When Culture Eats Enterprise 2.0 Strategy for Breakfast: Slideshare

How not to train (free registration required) by @charlesjennings

Workplace depression: Your co-worker needs your help (for my MH@W Blog)

If you’re really busy, you can use Twitter for busy people via @MiNutrition

Comments Dead, Twitter Holds Smoking Gun Read/Write Web – my blog stats confirm this


Learning to work smarter

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Anne Marie McEwan’s Smart Working nicely summarizes the shift that is taking place in how we work. These shifts have happened before – when we developed agriculture, moved into cities, or created powered machines. Now we are becoming networked.

The term ‘smart working’ has in recent years been associated with flexible and mobile working, that is ‘anytime, anywhere’ ways of working enabled by communication technologies. Another view, broader than the narrow focus on location and time independence, is that smart working is about flexibility and autonomy in where, when and how people work.

In my view, smart working is the outcome of designing and putting in place systems, working environments and governance principles that are known to be associated with effective business performance, including workforce autonomy and self-determination, and which seek to maximise opportunities to use and develop people’s knowledge, skills.

I’m in the process of putting together several threads as a single article, and this is where I do my thinking in public.

In The Learning Age I said that business models and work practices are becoming networked and global, speeding the rate of time to implementation. The lines between work and leisure are blurring, as with work and learning. Today, about 16% of us can be described as hyperconnected but that is expected to grow to 40%, and I would say those people will be the main drivers of our economies and societies.

Effective knowledge sharing is essential for all organizations today but the mainstream application of knowledge management, and I would include learning management, over the past few decades has got it all wrong. We have over-managed information because it’s easy and we’re still enamoured with information technology. However, the ubiquitous information surround may put a stop to this. As enterprises become more closely tied to the Web, the principle of “small pieces loosely joined” is permeating our industrial walls. More and more workers have their own sources of information and knowledge.

At an individual level we need to make sense of the ever-increasing signals coming from our networks, while reducing the noise. This is why I developed sense-making with PKM which I am continuing to refine. Just yesterday I explained social bookmarks, feed readers and using Twitter as a search engine to a “digital immigrant” the same age as me. The light went on when I showed how she could connect with a worldwide cooperative community that shared several of her professional interests.

The power of micro-blogging with Twitter so far is quite impressive and I was one who adopted this medium with a fair bit of skepticism. I just noticed that in the past few months Twitter has replaced Google as the prime referring site for visitors here, surpassing Google.

With some individual skills in using social media, the next question an organization may ask is how to start an online community. Of course starting one doesn’t mean it will grow or be useful. Communication does not equal collaboration, and that is a challenge in “building” communities of practice (CoP). Just because the communication tools are in place does not mean that people will automatically collaborate.  You can’t really build a CoP, it has to emerge through practice; but you can put in systems and processes to support CoP’s.  You know you’re in a real community of practice when it changes your practice.

Taking advantage of social networks for business can give a temporary advantage (everything in business is temporary anyway) and help to develop disruptive business models. So that’s it – there are significant shifts in how we work which will require new skills and if used effectively can create new ways of generating wealth. The information age status quo isn’t the same for the learning age.

Community Supported Agriculture

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Dave Cormier is getting started on connecting people with local farmers, using the Web, on Prince Edward Island. This is Dave’s initial plan:

it’s normal, it’s easy and it’s good to buy local

I want a list of people who are interested in finding out where the good local food is WHEN it is ready. Once the system is ready you’ll be able to either get ALL messages of ‘food is ready to come be picked up, bought or picked’ or be able to subscribe to certain kinds of food or certain producers.

I also want to get a group of people together to prove to the local farmers that we are here. So far, the people I’ve talked to think this is a really exciting idea. I’d like to get those people together so that when i meet with farmers i can say “look, these people want your product, and they want to buy locally”.

Since PEI is not far from here, we share many things, such as climate, our rural environment and distance from major markets. I shared with Dave some of what we have learned in the past three years with the Sackville Community Supported Agriculture initiative. For me, it’s about local control and having a more resilient local agriculture infrastructure that can weather the storms of peak oil, climate change and pandemic. As with nature, in diversity is resilience.

Carrots_of_many_colors

Here are some further readings related to CSA’s.

Friday’s Finds #8

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It was a very busy week that left me little time to blog but I still found some gems on Twitter:

via valdiskrebs Nice short article by one of the “key players” in social network analysis — knowledge creation & network structure.

via jmcgee – Mike_Wesely #QUOTE: “Where you find quality, you will find a craftsman, not a quality-control expert.” ~ Robert Brault

via fdomon – jobadge : Social:Learn – a place to organise, share and record learning online in a social way

via JaneBozarth – aenclade – skipzilla : Great exchange between preschooler & her dad: He says he teaches art in college. She puzzles, “You mean they forget?

Tom Gram answers LCB big question in depth: it’s still about improving performance

Elizabeth May Advocates Against “Crazy Copyright Laws”

University campuses must be among the most inefficient uses of land and real estate imaginable

Tetrads

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According to Derrick de Kerckhove, Director of the McLuhan Program in Toronto, the McLuhans’ tetradic Laws of Media state that every new medium (or technology in the broader sense of the word):

extends a human property (the car extends the foot);

obsolesces the previous medium by turning it into a sport or an form of art (the automobile turns horses and carriages into sports);

retrieves a much older medium that was obsolesced before (the automobile brings back the shining armour of the chevalier);

flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its limits (the automobile, when there are too many of them, create traffic jams, that is total paralysis)

For example, I looked at the emerging practice of commons-based peer production, such as open source software projects, with this perspective and saw that this democratization of work:

  • Extends each individual’s reach worldwide
  • Obsolesces the middle men (accountants, lawyers, traders, brokers)
  • Retrieves the barter system or the bazaar – (I can set my own rules for buying & selling)
  • and Flips, when extended to its limits, the Commons into a whuffie economy

Tom Haskins uses the tetradic framework to examine the effects of pervasive connectivity, with this image:

Haskins_Tetrad

What I find most interesting is that with new lenses we can see the world in a different way. Finding appropriate lenses and metaphors to help make sense of our world is an important part of facilitating learning. Too much training and education consists of information delivery (e.g. key content areas in the curriculum) but getting people to look at something from a new perspective enables change. This may be something to consider when first developing course material.

Here is another lens that helps to view disorientation in learning and is especially useful for adult learners.

Skills for learning professionals

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In a Learning 2.0 world, where learning and performance solutions take on a wider variety of forms and where churn happens at a much more rapid pace, what new skills and knowledge are required for learning professionals?

That’s the LCB big question, and my article on Skills 2.0, written one year ago, addressed this very question. So when this question was posed I had to make sure that I hadn’t changed my perspective in the interim. My basic premise was that working and learning in networks is an important aspect of professionalism:

Today, active involvement in informal learning, particularly through web-based communities, is key to remaining professional and creative in a field. Being a learning professional in a Web 2.0 world is becoming more about your network than your current knowledge.

I said that the main skill needed by learning professionals is attitude, especially being open to continuous learning and opening up your learning to public view in order to collaborate with other professionals. I’ve called this life in Beta.

In the past year, I’ve found that an open attitude is becoming more important. The people who blog or connect on Twitter can get things done quicker, find answers, get advice and can be more effective for their organizations. While working for a client this past week I used my online networks to quickly get advice that was important for the project. But you can’t do this without a network and it takes time to build trust. People usually have to know something about you before they help you out. Without some persistent point of presence (blog, Twitter, podcast), you’re invisible online unless you’re already famous.

Putting yourself out there as a learner first means that you may need to check your attitude before going online. People who pontificate or don’t help others may not be able to build a trusted network. This is even more evident on Twitter with its asymmetry, where people you follow don’t have to follow you back. Having no followers may be a sign that you don’t have much to give back to your network. That could make it more difficult to get information and advice when you need it. Twitter has amplified many aspects of blogging. You can follow more people, send out more (short) messages and get really quick feedback. This amplification will likely continue with future social networking technologies.

Last year, I concluded:

If we limit our conversations to only those in the same office, we’re missing out. People with larger and more diverse networks have an advantage as learning professionals and in dealing with change. This constant flow of sense-making through conversations in our workplace networks makes the idea of learning as a fixed event in a specific place look obsolete.

This year, I would add that it’s not just an advantage to belong to diverse professional networks but that the situation has tipped so that it is now a significant disadvantage to not actively participate in social learning networks.

Friday’s Finds #7

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From the Twitter files this past week:

via @c4lpt – 10 Strategies for Integrating Learning and Work (part 3)

via @1ernesto1 – Cheater or Collaborator?

via @johnsgunn – Canadians have no legitimate expectation of privacy when they use the Internet

via @kdwashburn –  Florida school boosts achievement by jettisoning textbooks

ROI:

Productivity in a Networked Era: Not Your Fathers ROI  CLO article

Flexibility has it’s own Return on Investment

Connecting ideas with communities

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I use the chasm model to explain my professional work of 1) seeing what is ready to cross the chasm by 2) staying connected to the innovators & being an early adopter so that 3) I can help mainstream organizations. It’s a good graphic summary of my consulting practice.

Five years ago I looked at a couple of models (Rogers & Gladwell) in the Dummies Guide to Change and came up with a model on how you might be able to effect a change in a population. It wasn’t tested, it was just an idea. One of the core ideas was the law of the few, or the notion that a few key types of people help to speed social communication. As Charlene Croft puts it [looking at how Twitter is used]:

Connectors are individuals who know lots of people and who use those connections to their advantage.  Connectors are people who have invested in social, cultural and identity capital and who can convert those intangible resources into pretty much whatever they decide to.

Mavens are the senders and receivers of information.  They are the people who always have the pulse on the good deals and breaking stories of the day.  Mavens are the trendsetters and the people who you turn to to find out about this thing or that.  Citizen Journalists are types of Mavens, often scooping the mainstream media in reporting “from the ground”

Salesmen are the persuaders of society.  They are the people who dedicate a great deal of their lives to selling people on their ideas.

I figured that if you want to foster large-scale change in an organization or even a network, then you would:

  1. connect the right Mavens with the potential Innovators,
  2. target the Early Adopters via the Connectors and then
  3. find the Salespeople who will influence the Early Majority

I also figured that the Late Majority and the Laggards were not worth the effort, time and resources.

I’ve noticed that this is what has happened with some of the ideas that I’ve worked with in those five ideas. For example, informal learning in the organization was an idea five years ago. Jay Cross (maven) published one of the first business books on the subject in 2006 – Informal Learning. Many connectors, especially educational technology and business bloggers, took the idea and spread it. Then in 2009 we see it being discussed as the core idea of the ASTD opening keynote, and moving into the mainstream by several salespeople (vendors, service providers) looking for business opportunities.

This is just a working model but it may help in looking at how you can get your new ideas into the mainstream.

Management Rewired – Review

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Management Rewired: Why feedback doesn’t work and other surprising lessons from the latest brain science by Charles Jacobs covers many of the areas discussed here, such as learning, management models and democracy in the workplace. Jacobs covers a variety of studies in science and management but this book is not a dry academic treatise but a good read sprinkled with many of the author’s personal stories. Much as Gary Hamel’s The Future of Management showed the need for new business models, Jacobs shows leaders what actually works when dealing with other people. A consistent theme is to let people manage themselves, because that works:

Rather than limit decentralization to the top of the hierarchy, why not drive it down into the organization as far as possible? Modern information technology makes such “radical decentralization” much easier now than it was in [Alfred] Sloan’s day.

Such an approach enables people to control their own destinies. From a Darwinian perspective, it’s aligned with the urgings of our selfish genes. From a market perspective, it’s more efficient and effective. From a cultural perspective, virtually every organizational innovation since the Western Electric Hawthorne studies has been aimed at fostering democracy and initiative in the workplace because it’s good for both people and the business. Moving to an entrepreneurial organization is just the next step.

Jacobs shows the overwhelming evidence that “reward, punishment and feedback don’t produce the results we intend or produce the opposite” (now there’s a message for the HR department).  Methods that work are creating cognitive dissonance in order to get a shift in thinking that changes behaviour. Changing behaviour is not enough. Transforming an organization means shifting our paradigm and this is best done through stories. The most effective stories are about plans and expectations gone awry. Forget pay and bonuses, or better yet, let workers decide amongst themselves; communication is the only effective tool that leaders have.

Becoming more participative may be easier said than done, as the author shows how most 360-degree reviews have managers consistently ranking themselves as more participative than their employees do. We’re not as open as we think we are.

Management Rewired is a welcome addition to the field and should be read by anyone working in or with organizations. It’s nice to get corroboration, and a good set of reference notes, to reinforce my own work on the new nature of the firm.