PKM in 34 pieces

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One of my objectives with my latest PKM Workshop was to review most of my resources and work on developing new ones. Much of my work on PKM has been inspired by others. I have put these pieces together into a framework that I think makes sense and may be of some use.

This graphic combines the work of several people into a single aide-mémoire on PKM and the Seek > Sense > Share framework.

pkm in practice

The Five forms of filtering by Tim Kastelle are a good way to understand how to approach the digital surround and our way to seeking new knowledge.

Judgement Filters:

  • Naive filtering is what too often happens in our knowledge searching. It’s like prairie-dogging, or standing up in your cubicle and asking those close to you for advice. It’s rather hit and miss and dependent on who works nearby and happens to be listening.
  • Expert filtering worked when knowledge was more stable but in an interconnected, interdependent, digital world we have to ask, who are the experts? Still, good experts are valuable and I use platforms like Twitter to connect to them, like Valdis Krebs on social networks.
  • Networked expertise can be sought through group-sourced information resources, like our curated Working Smarter Daily or in self-created expertise lists like Google+ to create circles of expertise. You can also link to existing communities of expertise/interest such as KMers on knowledge management.

Mechanical Filters:

  • Algorithmic filters can be simple, like typing in a basic search string, or more refined using  techniques like Google’s advanced operators.
  • A good perspective on Heuristic filters is Howard Rheingold’s Crap Detection Skills:

Unless a great many people learn the basics of online crap detection and begin applying their critical faculties en masse and very soon, I fear for the future of the Internet as a useful source of credible news, medical advice, financial information, educational resources, scholarly and scientific research. Some critics argue that a tsunami of hogwash has already rendered the Web useless. I disagree. We are indeed inundated by online noise pollution, but the problem is soluble. The good stuff is out there if you know how to find and verify it. Basic information literacy, widely distributed, is the best protection for the knowledge commons: A sufficient portion of critical consumers among the online population can become a strong defense against the noise-death of the Internet.

James Mangan, in his 1936 book, You Can Do Anything, looked at 14 Ways to Acquire Knowledge. Maria Popova, at BrainPickings.org, reviewed his book and from her I discovered a number of methods of seeking knowledge.

  • Ask: As Maria Popova says, “I really believe our own curiosity is our greatest and most powerful tool for personal growth.”
  • Desire: Seeking without a goal is often just surfing the web, with little to show in the end.
  • Read: There is still a need to read in our digital age. Longer reads, and particularly fiction, and reading novels can make us better thinkers.
  • Listen: Whether it’s in person, on audio, or a video, listening gives us a chance to absorb what others have to say. Too often, our workspace do not allow this. There are many alternate ways of learning.
  • Observe: One learns best by observing from the edge, not the centre of action.

SENSE:

Ross Dawson’s five ways of adding value to information are a good start at sense-making techniques, with my short explanations appended.

  • Filtering: separating signal from noise, based on some criteria.
  • Validation: ensuring that information is reliable, current or supported by research.
  • Synthesis: describing patterns, trends or flows in large amounts of information.
  • Presentation: making information understandable through visualization or logical presentation.
  • Customization: describing information in context.

James Mangan (a very interesting character) identified several skills for acquiring knowledge.

  • Practice: This is absolutely critical. It is primarily through experience – perfomance  – reflection that we learn.
  • Get it from yourself: Sometimes it’s better to work things out for yourself than get a quick answer from someone else.
  • Walk around it: Looking at something from a different perspective, especially away from the mainstream, can give new insights.
  • Experiment: Use a constant probe – sense – respond approach with work and learning.

Finally, Robin Good picked up on this, and added five more curation skills, with my comments:

  • Comparing: With increasing complexity, and obfuscation by competing interests, being able to compare related items becomes more valuable. Imagine if someone could compare all your mobile telephone options in a clear, simple way.
  • Finding related items: Sometimes we forget about the past and it’s important to relate the present to what has transpired. Those who foretold the global financial collapse were in the minority. Good comparisons are quite useful.
  • Illustrating / Visualizing: Good info-graphics are very useful, but too often they obscure. Visualizing takes great skill but can be exceptionally useful.
  • Evaluating: Being able to set criteria and evaluate from a neutral point of view can add real value to what otherwise would just be data. Nate Silver has made a living from this.
  • Crediting & Attributing: While attribution may just seem like a nice thing to do, it is very important to trace how knowledge is constructed. With proper attribution to the original source, you can then make changes if evidence or circumstances change.

SHARE:

James Mangan and his 14 ways of acquiring knowledge also showed ways of sharing knowledge.

  • Put in order: This helps those learning something for the first time. Video from CommonCraft are an excellent example of things put in order to enable understanding.
  • Define: The popularity of Wikipedia shows the importance of defining knowledge. It provides a starting point.
  • Teach: The best way to learn something is to teach it. Google is embracing the power of teaching for sharing knowledge amongst its employees.
  • Write: Blogging changed my life for the better. Need I say more?
  • Reason: Putting thoughts out in public forces you to understand the reason why you are doing so.

In addition, Rob Cross and Lee Sproull looked at tacit knowledge-sharing, as described in the quotes below by Nancy Dixon. Cross & Sproull identified five categories of responses that can be given by experienced workers to those needing help in seeking knowledge.

  • Answers:  “The seekers were looking for the application of facts or principles in order to develop a solution.”
  • Meta Knowledge:  “This category was about where to go to get more information on the issue, or conversely where not to go because a certain report was out-dated, or superficial.”
  • Problem Reformulation: “To gain meta-knowledge and/or problem-reformulation requires the source to be willing “to understand the problem as experienced by the seeker and then shape her/his knowledge to the evolving definition of the problem” and is best served by the give and take of conversation.”
  • Validation:  [also identified by Ross Dawson] “Validation also provides seekers the certainty that they have done enough background work, saving the seeker the time it would take to gather further data.”
  • Legitimizing: “As with validation, legitimizing can save the seeker time by reducing the amount of proof or data that may need to be collected before the client is willing to act. It also serves to head off arguments others might raise.”

So there you have it; 34 ways to personally manage your knowledge. Not all are necessary, but it’s a good list to start with.

Pushing and Pulling Tacit Knowledge

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Sense-making is where the real personal value of PKM lies. The knowledge gained is an emergent property of all sense-making activities. In the PKM framework of Seek > Sense > Share, it is often sense-making that is most difficult to master. I often refer to Ross Dawson’s five ways of adding value to information, to introduce sense-making (my examples/descriptions follow):

  1. Filtering (separating signal from noise, based on some criteria)
  2. Validation (ensuring that information is reliable, current or supported by research)
  3. Synthesis (describing patterns, trends or flows in large amounts of information)
  4. Presentation (making information understandable through visualization or logical presentation)
  5. Customization (describing information in context)

PKM adding valueThese are examples of Pushing knowledge, adding value for oneself, that may in the future be useful for others. I have noted before that the difference between PKM and Curation is that the former is personal, while the latter is for an intended audience. I practice PKM for myself and my blog’s primary audience is me. Sharing online  makes it social so that I can learn with and from others.

But sometimes the act of sharing is also a sense-making activity. Knowledge can be Pulled by those seeking answers. Nancy Dixon describes how Rob Cross and Lee Sproull examined tacit knowledge-sharing in a large consulting firm. Even though there was a solid knowledge management (KM) structure in place, most people preferred to have conversations with others when discussing ambiguous issues. Cross & Sproull identified five categories of responses, according to Nancy Dixon:

  1. Answers:  “The seekers were looking for the application of facts or principles in order to develop a solution.”
  2. Meta Knowledge:  “This category was about where to go to get more information on the issue, or conversely where not to go because a certain report was out-dated, or superficial.”
  3. Problem Reformulation: “To gain meta-knowledge and/or problem-reformulation requires the source to be willing “to understand the problem as experienced by the seeker and then shape her/his knowledge to the evolving definition of the problem” and is best served by the give and take of conversation.”
  4. Validation:  [also identified by Ross Dawson] “Validation also provides seekers the certainty that they have done enough background work, saving the seeker the time it would take to gather further data.”
  5. Legitimizing: “As with validation, legitimizing can save the seeker time by reducing the amount of proof or data that may need to be collected before the client is willing to act. It also serves to head off arguments others might raise.”

PKM helping seekersAs knowledge is pulled through these conversations, a good PKM practice would be to record and reflect on these in some way, adding another layer of value and making at least some of the knowledge artifacts retrievable. Seek-Sense-Share is a continuous flow, with fuzzy boundaries, but all leading to better understanding, for ourselves and with others.

We discuss this, and much more, during my online PKM Workshop. Join us and push and pull your own sense-making.

Social filtering

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I started collating these Friday’s Finds because I knew I was learning a lot via Twitter, and later Google+, but I was capturing very little information, and using even less for my own professional development. Setting up a routine to review my favourites every two weeks helps me to make sense of some of the digital flows around me. For me, two weeks is a good interval. All I need to do is use the favourite (Star) function in Twitter whenever I see anything that may be useful for later. This is a minimal incremental habit that I have developed when reading Twitter. I do the same with G+, where I tweet & favourite items of interest from that platform.

In personal knowledge mastery, the key is finding small habits that can be developed, that over time yield big results, like grains of sand. My sense-making here comes through the habit of a fortnightly blog post. Finding what works for you is the focus of my PKM Workshops. The challenge is to find something that works for you and will last over time. This is probably the biggest hurdle in PKM.

friday2@Kasparov63 – “Celebrate victory, but if you do not understand its nature, that victory sows the seeds of your defeat. This is the gravity of past success.”

@EskoKilpi – The third foundation of social business: short path lengths

There are very few isolated geniuses. But there are many bright people who have continued and improved the work of others. Capable people have capable predecessors, people who act as filters connecting people and high quality information. The key concept in the knowledge-based future is acknowledgment of the importance of these messengers beyond what we have been used to so far. Social filtering, curation, is the new search.

@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.

Curate or be curated – via @mcleod

The cure for information overload is coherent curation — data-driven discovery managed by skilled, thoughtful, and in some cases expert curators. Much as the quality of a restaurant is created by the chef, the quality of the curated end-product is going to be made by the curator. And that — without a doubt — creates new jobs, new opportunities, and even new economies in a world of information abundance.

There is no hourly rate on internet time

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Let’s say you are a consultant and have just received a call to do some urgent work. Feel free to replace the term consultant with freelancer, programmer, designer, advisor, or anything else. This post is for people who work for themselves and sell some type of intangible good, whether it be code, advice, reports, strategy, etc. Anyway, you got THE call. Now go ahead and do a little dance to celebrate.

Shortly after you say that you are available, you are asked about your hourly rate. If you say it’s $25, you’re wrong. If you say it’s $250, you are still wrong. Agreeing to work an hour for a given rate plays into the industrial trap, promoted by Catbert’s in HR departments everywhere. Many of today’s HR policies are still based on the Principles of Scientific Management developed in 1911, the dawn of the modern industrial age. These principles were built on F.W. Taylor’s flawed assumptions on how men shoveled iron and coal. And so began some of the modern myths of the management of ‘labour’.

rn coal stoker
Royal Navy Coal Stoker

Time and motion studies, such as those done by Taylor and others, were based on the assumption that certain types of work were of equal value. Labour, as defined by Taylorists, is replaceable. It’s all about standardized work and standardized recompense. But talent is unique. Talented people who set hourly rates give up their uniqueness.

A few years ago I was offered some research work that the client had calculated would take one week at $40 per hour. The total amount was not that attractive to me but I looked at the scope of work anyway. Much of the research was work that I had already done, with my ongoing PKM practices and other projects. I realized that I could complete the report in a few hours, by curating my own blog posts, social bookmarks, and other resources I had. Someone relatively new to the field of workplace learning, the subject of research, would have taken much longer and possibly more than one week to produce something similar. I accepted the work, under the condition that I not be paid by the hour. Why should I have been paid $120 for high quality work that would earn a less experienced person $1,600? Time at work is an antiquated concept.

You are not a ‘Human Resource’ and you do not have an ‘hourly rate’
(repeat as necessary).

I know that it is often the easiest route to just agree to an hourly rate when it comes to securing contracts. But can you really equate an hour of my time with yours? Does it matter? What matters is what is produced.

Instead of agreeing to an hourly, or daily, rate, start by asking a few questions:

  • What does the client want to achieve?
  • How will the client know it has been achieved? What are the indicators?
  • What is the smallest thing that needs to be settled first?
  • Is this something I can do for the client?
  • How much is that worth?
  • Does the client care how long it takes? Then set a deadline.
  • If I take longer, will the client pay me more? [probably not] Then why would the client want to pay by the hour?

Hourly rates only help to put you into a pigeon hole so that HR and Purchasing can easily classify you. You are not a pigeon.

Shifting responsibility by taking responsibility

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About 10 years ago a fictional video, EPIC 2014, forecast the future domination of web media companies like Google and Amazon. The video spread rapidly, with an updated version, EPIC 2015 made as a sequel. The videos describe a future corporation that controls most news on the web; namely Googlezon and its platform called EPIC (Evolving Personalized Information Construct).

EPIC stores and categorizes not only news, but the demographics, political beliefs, and consumption habits of every user. At its best, EPIC is “a summary of the world—deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything ever available before … but at its worst, and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue.” EPIC is so popular that it triggers the downfall of the New York Times, which goes offline and becomes “a print newsletter for the elite and the elderly. —Wikipedia

This week, it became public that Hell had indeed frozen over, with Google now selling Facebook advertising. We seem to be moving closer to what is described in EPIC 2014/2015. But diversity of information is necessary for a functioning democracy and I would say just as important for social businesses. In early America, “… news was considered crucial to an informed electorate, the first major postal law, passed in 1792, allowed newspaper printers to send each other newspapers for free, facilitating the spread of national and foreign news outward from the seat of government.” (Universal Service and the Postal Monopoly: A Brief History PDF). Both news and its distribution have changed and today the US Postal Service is under threat of privatization. While newspapers did not guarantee freedom of the press, the emerging power of web media companies makes newspaper barons look like amateurs.  With the age of print almost over, it is ironic that we may get even less diversity of news and opinions in the age of networks. Hyperlinks cannot subvert hierarchy, as the Cluetrain claimed, when those hyperlinks are controlled by only a few corporations.

With the consolidation of web media companies, where many, and soon, most of us will be getting our information, it will be increasingly important to build diversity into our own personal and professional learning networks. This may get difficult as more mainstream sites amalgamate their feeds and sources into something similar to Googlezon. Therefore, in this emerging network era, we will need to connect to other people, not centralized information sources, for our own sense-making. Diversity of people in our networks will ensure diversity of thought. This is something that even web media companies cannot control, as long as we maintain control over who we connect to.

Knowledge workers collectively make the relationship capital that creates value in the network era. They need to be not just knowledgeable, but creative as well. How can they do so when information sources are getting more concentrated? Where will the diversity of ideas needed to drive innovation come from?

Knowledge workers need to take control of their networked learning. As corporate Push gets stronger, then social Pull has to counteract it. But there has to be something of quality to pull, and that comes from each and every one of us. We need to build our own knowledge networks; seeking out others, sense-making, and sharing.

effective networks are openSense-making, in the growing surround of advertising-sponsored trivia, will become ever more important to maintain democracy and civil society. I think that the principles of PKM can be the foundation for an aggressively intelligent citizenry that manages its own media.

To a great extent PKM [personal knowledge management] is about shifting responsibility for learning and knowledge sharing from a company to individuals and this is the greatest challenge for both sides. —Lilia Efimova 2004

You see, Organizations Don’t Tweet, People Do. Organizations don’t create or manage knowledge either, people do. But people first need the skills and then a cooperative environment to practice these.

The weakness of large-scale knowledge management (KM) as a field is that it is practiced only by a small group of professionals and is controlled by management. It is an enterprise practice. KM is difficult to scale to the masses. PKM, on the other hand, is for everyone.

PKM, in its aggregate and practiced by many, cannot be controlled. It is a technology-neutral framework to promote common understanding through ongoing conversations. PKM is based on mostly manual (mental) practices that are independent from “black-box” technologies like the fictional EPIC 2015. This is PKM’s strength. It is a simple framework that needs experimentation and practice to master, but mostly it requires sharing. Practicing PKM means taking responsibility for knowledge-sharing, one person at a time.

If you are interested in getting an assisted start, see my PKM workshops with an international group of participants. PKM Share

 

A keen subversive

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I’ve been described as “a keen subversive of the last century’s management and education models”. Here are some of my past words on this site that may help to reinforce this description ;)

JOB is a four-letter word.

Knowledge workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your managers.

Creative workers don’t need managers, they need executive assistants. It’s time to reverse the relationship between contributors and coordinators.

Process improvement is bad for innovation. It makes you myopic.

It’s not a question of what keeps managers awake at night, it’s what can we do to make sure they are awake to their networks during the day.

In complex networks, current management approaches are no longer adequate.

Management is the problem and management is also the solution, if you change it.

Organizations don’t need heroes, they need learners.

Courses are artifacts of a time when information was scarce and connections were few.

Sense-making in the network era is connecting to people, not merely accessing information sources.

Social media are new languages and the only way to learn a new language is through practice.

Once you realize that you live in a glass house, you start thinking differently.

There is no normal anymore.

retour ala normale

Sense-making for success

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networks-n-nodesimage by @gapingvoid

Once upon a time …

By the second decade of the 21st century, the nature of work had changed. Even so-called knowledge workers were being regularly downsized, as the corporations called it.  A lot of work was getting automated but a few creative, and lucky, people became almost overnight successes. Many others were able to carve out new niches in this connected economy by getting rid of the middlemen and going straight to their customers, who were now all over the world. Work was getting more complex.  But how could people make sense of it all? Part of the answer was in taking control of their learning and professional development, once the sole purview of institutions. Another part of the answer was in connecting with other, like-minded, and interested professionals. Those who succeeded were able to seek and build new networks in order to make sense of the changing environment, and then share with their new peers, scattered across the globe.

Whether you call yourself a knowledge artisan or are just trying to keep up with your profession, you have to take charge of your own learning and development. I have created an updated 15-minute video overview of PKM, the seek-sense-share framework, and some ideas on how to do-it-yourself, with the help of your network.

Online Personal Knowledge Mastery Workshops are scheduled throughout the year.

Complexity, swiss cheese and failure

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friday2Friday’s Finds:

@TomGram1 – “Resources not courses”. A new mantra.

“5% of interactions account for 90% of misery” – Rob Cross on how energy spreads across an organization. – via @ActivateN

@austinkleon – Why I make no distinction between Big Writing (books) and little writing (tweets): Twitter as a machine for book invention

In my experience, stock is best made by collecting, organizing, and expanding upon flow. You gather your bits, combine them, and then turn them into something new. But this process requires being able to get at your flow.

For some of our most-read findings, see 20 facts from Pew Research Center – via @zecool

65% of Americans say news organizations focus on unimportant stories rather than on important ones (28%).
Nearly one-third—31%—of people say they have deserted a particular news outlet because it no longer provides the news and information they had grown accustomed to.

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.

 

Future of work is complex, implicit and intangible

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The relationship between intangibles and tangibles reminds me of the implicit/explicit knowledge continuum. The explicit/tangible side is easier to measure, so that is where most management methods have concentrated their efforts. But as organizations, markets, and society become networked, intangibles create more of our value and this is much more difficult to measure. With the increasing complexity that networks bring, implicit knowledge-sharing becomes more important as well, but this is often ignored by both training and knowledge management programs.

Today, intangible assets are over 80% of current market value. Because intangible assets do not have to be shipped and stored like real assets do, they increase the volatility of the marketplace, with larger and more frequent fluctuations over perceived value. Unlike tangible assets, intangible assets can be lost and gained quite quickly. At the same time, we are witnessing that company lifespans are decreasing, which also increases market volatility.

Smarter Companies offers methods to look at intangible asset calculations. I recently spoke with Jay Deragon at Smarter Comanies about intangibles and the influence of technology on learning. A recent example of an intangible asset calculation is Mary Adams’ summary of Twitter’s valuation.

“Human Capital: 2,000 employees. No clear leader. No woman in senior leadership
Relationship Capital: +100 million Daily Active Users, +Advertisers, 3 million websites that integrate Twitter, 6 million Registered Twitter Apps.
Structural Capital: 6 patents, the platform, and related data about use of the platform
Strategic Capital: 85% revenue on advertising; 5% sale of data. Model still isn’t profitable.”

Mary Adams concludes that Twitter is most dependent on its relationship capital, which could be lost if investors try to extract too much tangible value that detracts from it. Another perspective on intangible, or intellectual capital is from Jay Cross, who says that; “Intellectual capital is largely a matter of mind and relationships”.

“Intellectual capital comes in several forms. Human Capital is the know-how and abilities of an organization’s people; Relational Capital is personal and business links to customers, partners, and suppliers; and Structural Capital is the infrastructure, processes, culture, and intellectual property that define how the organization operates.”

From an operational perspective, we can see that improving relationship capital is important for companies that offer intangible services. These types of companies need to invest in structuring work so that implicit knowledge can flow, not just between employees, but throughout the ecosystem. If most goods and services are intangible, the only way to stay current with their true value is to remain connected to those who influence relationship capital. These are employees, customers, suppliers, and partners.

To do this effectively, all support systems (OD, HR, Finance, Sales, Marketing, IT) need to understand how to support the implicit knowledge-sharing that is essential in creating the intangible value. Almost all valued work today is customized. We have seen this shift over the past three decades, as middle-skill jobs have disappeared. Low-skill (standardized work) jobs still exist where the work cannot be automated, but these are jobs with little advancement. High-skill (customized work) jobs have also increased and it is from these workers that much intangible value is derived. The new workplace of intangible assets is a complex environment, and one where traditional analytical methods no longer work. The future of work is complex, implicit, and intangible.

complex implicit intangible