Organize for Complexity

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Niels Pflaeging read my ebook Seeking perpetual beta and said that “after reading the book one yearns for more from you about the right learning architecture, about how to develop organizations applying this thinking, about how to build learning programs and infrastructure.” Well I think Niels has answered much of that question himself, in his recent book Organize for Complexity. Since I promote the fact that today work is learning, and learning is the work, then if you create better ways of working, you are also improving organizational learning. As Niels writes about the “learning riddle”:

Mastery is the human capability to solve new problems. It can only be developed through practice. We call this “disciplined practice”.

Fads like business analytics, knowledge management, and big data will never make organizations fit for complexity.

This is why I now call PKM: Personal Knowledge Mastery; to separate it from much of the traditional practice of  knowledge management. #PKMastery is disciplined practice.

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What have we learned so far?

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What have we learned so far about personal knowledge mastery?

Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM): A set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world and work more effectively.

PKM workshops have helped people develop their own process of seeking, sense-making, and sharing. Participants are asked to relate activities to their own professional development. Exercises such as network mapping are combined with the narration of work, network weaving, and how these can enable better knowledge connections. Many tools are discussed as participants try new ones or share their personal practices. Examples and anecdotes are provided during the workshop, but the real value is in sharing between participants. I try to guide the process with a gentle hand and provide more resources as the need is presented.

PKM connects what is learned in networks, communities of practice, and work teams.

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Why PKM?

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Here is a short video introduction on why personal knowledge mastery (PKM) is becoming a required skill and mindset for professionals today. We continue to see that labour has diminishing value as routine work keeps getting automated. To remain current in the network era, people must constantly improve their talents and focus on initiative and creativity. When you are only as good as your network, PKM becomes a necessity. The full transcript is available below the video.

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Connecting Companies and Markets

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Management in the Network Era: It is only through innovative and contextual methods, the self-selection of the most appropriate tools and work conditions, and willing cooperation, that more productive work can be assured. The duty of being transparent in our work and sharing our knowledge rests with all workers, including management.

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PKM and small business

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There is one group that probably has the most need for professional development but has the least time – owners of small businesses. My parents owned a small business. They worked seven days a week. They never took any training courses. I am sure that if they were working today, they still would not take any formal instruction, but they might be active searchers on Google or YouTube. They might use Facebook or a website to stay in touch with their customers.

Several years ago I tracked small business blogs with some interesting examples such as a sign company, a coffee roaster, and a metal fabricator.  Some have gone out of business and others have stopped blogging but there a few that continue. One was highly successful. A lot can be learned from all of these. I wonder if many small business owners have looked at what others have done with blogging over the past decade. It’s not about SEO (search engine optimization) it’s about staying connected to customers, suppliers and communities, and continuously learning.

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Good Friday Finds

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Which Comes First: Engaged Employees or Customer Success? via @OscarBerg

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Friday’s Finds #216

You want to have tools to help employees get work done. Those tools are no longer the HR systems of performance management and compensation. — those don’t help to get your work done. What we’re seeing is heavy adoption of work management tools, task management, collaboration, file-sharing and so forth. People need tools to connect, to share knowledge, to build community and culture and, ultimately, to get their work done, which is about serving customers.

@AndrewJacobsLD – One Man’s Magic …

If you have a washing line, do you need to continually update your tumble dryer?
Does not having a tumble dryer put you at a disadvantage?
Is this a problem that learning technology suppliers have – how to sell us a more efficient tumble dryer?
Does knowing which clothes dry best in which circumstances make THAT much of a difference?

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Organizing Talent

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The opposite of ‘routine’ is ‘original’

Labour is routine. Talent is original. Even advanced technical Labour can be in essence routine. As Labour, once you learn how to do something, you are able to repeat it. Labour is the capitalist dream for human effort, because it can be quantified, controlled, and replaced. Labour is viewing humans as resources. What is becoming blindingly obvious is that Labour is increasingly getting automated which is disrupting how most people have worked for the past century, by doing a job.

On the other hand, original work has high task variety and requires continuous learning, as well as significant tacit knowledge that cannot easily be codified. Talent that does original work is difficult to replace. This means that Talent is much more difficult to push around.

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Ten Years, Ten Thoughts

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In compiling my ebook, Seeking perpetual beta: a guidebook for the network era, I tried to cover all the posts that resonated with readers, clients, and colleagues over a decade. Here are some highlights, representing one thought per year.

    1. Taking control of our learning is a challenge for individuals used to working inside hierarchies that demand conformity and compliance.
    2. The mainstream application of knowledge management and learning management over the past few decades was mostly wrong; we over-managed information, knowledge, and learning because it was easy to do.
    3. The basic structure of the job presumes common skills and the mechanistic view that workers can be replaced without disruption.

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Knowledge sharing paradox revisited

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The knowledge sharing paradox is that enterprise social tools can constrain what they are supposed to enhance. People will freely share their knowledge if they remain in control of it because knowledge is a very personal thing. Knowledge workers care about what they need to get work done, but do they care about the organizational knowledge base?

So my conclusion this time around was that the centralized stuff we spent so much time and money maintaining was simply not very useful to most practitioners. The practitioners I talked to about PPI [personal productivity improvement] said they would love to participate in PPI coaching, provided it was focused on the content on their own desktops and hard drives, and not the stuff in the central repositories. —Dave Pollard (2005)

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