PKM Workshop 2013

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There are a few ways to develop skills to be an effective sharer of knowledge in a networked enterprise. You can start, as I did, by researching sense-making and online cooperation in knowledge networks, try out different methods, and then develop your own. My own journey with personal knowledge management began in 2004. You could also get coaching and mentoring from people who have developed good professional network learning skills.

Or you could take a workshop to kick-start your learning. That’s what I have been offering for a few years, and once again, due to several requests, a PKM Workshop (sign up at link) from 28 October to 22 November 2013 is scheduled. It will be online, asynchronous, and self-paced, with just enough structure to help motivated participants learn on their own or cooperate together.

I recently wrote why PKM is important, so if you have never participated in one of these workshops, join the hundreds who have benefited from four weeks of seeking, sense-making, and sharing together. Discounted rates are available to the first 20 participants, so sign up early.

You may also be interested in Jane Hart’s online workshop on collaborative working & learning, beginning on 25 November.

 

Lateral Organizations

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Hierarchical organizational forms have been the norm through much of history, especially the last 2,000 years. Lateral organizations, or more egalitarian structures, have been the exception. In the endless allure of non-hierarchical organizations, David Creelman notes that both forms have their flaws, but says it’s best to thoroughly understand the history of the field.

I once asked Dr. Ed Lawler, an expert on the high-involvement form [lateral organization], why it had not become the dominant type of organization. He speculated that it was a fragile form. It needs trust and a strong culture to work. Any crisis can knock a lateral high-involvement firm back into hierarchical mode. Lateral may be better, but if it is inherently unstable we cannot expect it to become the norm.

Trust is something we don’t see a lot of in our current organizational forms, with many examples cited in the hard costs of low trust:

According to The Economist Intelligence Unit (2010), 84% of senior leaders say disengaged employees are considered one of the biggest threats facing their business. However, only 12% of them reported doing anything about this problem.

Jon Husband’s wirearchy framework has influenced me over the years and I think the game-changer today is the Internet. It brings back the intimacy and connections we had in earlier organizational forms. For example, hunter-gatherer societies were relatively small, and many actively practiced ways of deflating egos and bullies, which enabled trust and a stronger egalitarian culture. They could control this culture within their geographic bounds. This became more difficult in larger societies.

If you observe organizations from a TIMN (Tribal, Institutional, Market, Network) perspective, then looking back at the dominant structures in a T+I+M society, which we have had for many years, may not give much insight. If we are heading toward a quadriform T+I+M+N society, then we may want to adjust our assumptions of what can work and what is now practical. Here is  a quick overview of David Ronfeldt’s TIMN framework:

According to my review of history and theory, four forms of organization — and evidently only four — lie behind the governance and evolution of all societies across the ages:

  • The tribal form was the first to emerge and mature, beginning thousands of years ago. Its main dynamic is kinship, which gives people a distinct sense of identity and belonging — the basic elements of culture, as manifested still today in matters ranging from nationalism to fan clubs.

  • The institutional form was the second to emerge. Emphasizing hierarchy, it led to the development of the state and the military, as epitomized initially by the Roman Empire, not to mention the Catholic papacy and other corporate enterprises.

  • The market form, the third form of organization to take hold, enables people to excel at openly competitive, free, and fair economic exchanges. Although present in ancient times, it did not gain sway until the 19th century, at first mainly in England.

  • The network form, the fourth to mature, serves to connect dispersed groups and individuals so that they may coordinate and act conjointly. Enabled by the digital information-technology revolution, this form is only now coming into its own, so far strengthening civil society more than other realms.

TIMN by David RonfeldtThere are growing examples of new organizational forms testing themselves in the network (TIMN) era (e.g. Automattic; Occupy Movement; Arab Spring). I think there is a lot more testing to do, but we should keep on trying. If not, we will have sub-optimal structures for the challenges that face us as a networked society.

Warren Bennis wrote that hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust. With more lateral organizational structures, trust can emerge.

effective networks are open

Learning is the work

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continued from Why do I need KM? …

Work is learning and learning is the work.

Why?

Because the nature of work is changing. For example, automation is replacing most routine work. That leaves customized work, which requires initiative, creativity and passion. Valued work, and the environments in which it takes place, is becoming more complex. Professionals today are doing work that cannot be easily standardized.

In complexity, we can determine the relationship between cause and effect only in retrospect. Think about that. It puts into question most of our management frameworks that require detailed analysis before we take action. It also shows that identifying and copying best practices is pretty well useless.

In complex work environments, the optimal way to do work is to constantly probe the environment and test emergent practices. This requires an engaged and empowered workforce. Emergent practices are dependent on the cooperation of all workers (and management) as well as the free flow of knowledge.

future jobs work valueWork in complex situations requires a greater percentage of implicit knowledge, which cannot be easily codified. Research shows that sharing complex knowledge requires strong interpersonal relationships. But discovering innovative ideas usually comes through loose social ties. Organizations need both, and communities of practice can help to connect tight work teams with loose social networks. Communities of practice can provide a safe space for professionals to challenge each other at the cutting edge of their expertise.

Effective organizational knowledge-sharing for this new world of work needs individuals who are adept at sense-making. One framework for this is personal knowledge management.

PKM is a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world, and work more effectively.

Personal = according to one’s abilities, interests & motivation
(not directed by external forces).

Knowledge = connecting information to experience
(know what, know who, know how).

Mastery = getting things done
(not being managed).

PKM connects work and learning, guided by three principles:

  • Seek playfully to connect.
  • Make sense and be empowered through learning.
  • Share to inspire through your work.

PKM is individuals sense-making and sharing their knowledge.

curation to socialThe future of work is customized, complex, and intangible. In this environment, sense-making and knowledge-sharing become critical skills. This will be in our teams, communities, and networks; but mostly it will be individual workers engaged in all three at once.

The most effective learning in the new world of work will be when engaged individuals, working out loud, share their knowledge. Training and education will remain inputs, but minor ones. One concrete result of this sense-making and knowledge-sharing should be performance support. As people work out loud, they can identify and develop tools and techniques to support emergent practices. In the 70:20:10 Framework, Charles Jennings describes workplace learning as based on four key activities:

  1. Exposure to new and rich experiences.
  2. The opportunity to practice.
  3. Engaging in conversation and exchanges with each other.
  4. Making time to reflect on new observations, information, experiences, etc.

This is where learning is the work.

70-20-10

Why do I need KM?

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In response to my post on relevance, my long-time friend Ralph Mercer asked, “Why do I need KM at an institutional level when information is ambient at a global level and personal at a hyper local level?” This illuminates an observation made by Thierry deBaillon, which I have often quoted, “The basic unit of social business technology is personal knowledge management, not collaborative workspaces.” We are surrounded by information and have many ways to collaborate, but unless each person has effective sense-making processes, social business networks are mostly noise amplification.

Collaborative knowledge work must be coupled with cooperative knowledge sharing. Cooperation, or sharing without any quid pro quo, is the foundation of personal knowledge mastery. PKM is based on playfully seeking knowledge, not task-driven searching. It is also about sharing to inspire, not because you have to. The results of PKM can then be used in collaborative work.

pkm connects work learningPersonal knowledge management is the only solid foundation of organizational knowledge management (KM). Without PKM, there is no KM, just databases of (mostly) unused information. Only individual knowledge workers can transcend the divisions between work teams, communities of practice, and social networks. Individuals connect these entities through their participation in them.

PKM is the active process of being cognizant of our networks and engaged in our communities, while still working with our teams. These teams, and the organizations they work in, have an opportunity to harvest some of the PKM knowledge artifacts of their members. However, individuals have to retain control of their own PKM processes, due to the knowledge-sharing paradox.

individuals enable knowledge flowThe gap I see in many collaboration initiatives, enterprise social network software implementations, and other social business projects, is a failure to help develop PKM skills. A course is not the answer. Allowing time to develop skills, and providing feedback, is a much better approach. Developing PKM skills is probably one of the best investments any knowledge-intensive organization can make.

Make it relevant

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John Stepper describes his recent experiences in discussing working out loud in Berlin. The recommendations are those many of us are familiar with:

  1. Make it simple. Just changing someone’s home page can make the platform seem much more accessible. And curated suggestions of people, groups, and content relevant to a person’s division and location make the value more apparent.

  2. Start small. Create situations – such as town halls and other events – where people can find material or ask a question and feel the benefits themselves.

  3. Make it safe. Give every team a private online space to make posting seem less risky.

  4. Leverage social influence. Spend more effort on getting influential people, especially senior management, to model the behavior.

  5. Make it relevant. Provide more content and more integration with daily processes so it’s part of the daily work and not yet another thing to do.

The first four are pretty typical of any change initiative: start simple, small, safe & social. I have done this with clients, and these are usually good ways to get going, especially on limited budgets and competing priorities. I would like to focus on the fifth point: relevance. This is what makes a new change initiative become a different way of doing things all the time.

This is where KM, L&D, OD and many other projects break down. It’s also where enterprise software initiatives can fail. They are not relevant to the daily work being done because the change project never really looked at that.

working out loudThink about the term, “working out loud”. It’s what I call narration of work. The primary focus is on work. You don’t work out loud in a classroom because it’s not “work”. You don’t work out loud on stuff that isn’t really work. That’s just practice.

This is why I strongly advocate that work is learning and learning is the work. Working out loud has to be part of the work. Bolting anything on to the workflow just shows what it really is: an impediment to work. As John says, “Even getting people to simply login to a collaboration platform remains a challenge.” If the collaboration system is not also the work system, then it’s just a bolted-on appendage.

To make collaboration, and working out loud, work, the same tools must be used. This is why I am not the most popular person amongst LMS vendors, as I believe the underlying principle of learning management systems is in direct conflict with collaborative and cooperative work. Changing the way that daily work is done, how knowledge is shared, and what gets communicated, are the important things to focus on in improving knowledge work.

The criticism I hear most frequently about any learning or knowledge management project is that it lacks relevance. Maybe before starting the next major initiative, conduct a secret poll and see how many people think it’s relevant.

Friday's Finds 202

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friday2Fridays Finds:

@EskoKilpi – “Theory and practice are starting to catch up with the changes brought about by the loosely coupled, modular nature of creative work.”

@humoratwork – “Tomorrow (noun): A mythical land where 99% of all human productivity, motivation, and achievement is stored.”

@MITSMR – The CEO experience trap

Out of the 501 CEOs we looked at, 19.6% had at least one prior CEO job. Our research found that these prior CEOs performed worse than their peers without such experience. Being a prior CEO was negatively and significantly associated with three-year average post-succession return on assets.

Can Citizens Roll Back Silent Army of Watchers? – via @mgeist

It’s not just that someone might find out things about us that they have no need to know — important though that is — it’s that government and corporations intercept and analyze our data, sorting us into categories for differential treatment. Can you name your threat-risk assessment (TRA) at CSIS or your postal-code-based consumer segment? No. But those classifications can make a big difference to your actual choices and life chances.

 

Learning is the work week

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It’s Learn @ Work week in Canada. A related article in the HuffPo states that, “Simply put, a culture of learning is nothing more than workplace leaders providing opportunities for learning in a supportive environment.” Is that really it?

learning is the workFor me, it’s never “Learn @ Work” week. It’s always, “Learning is the Work” week.

Thinking of learning as something additional to work is plain wrong in a knowledge-based, creative, networked society and economy.

It is not enough for workplace leaders to merely “provide opportunities for learning”. They need to model learning themselves. But it’s not just about those in leadership positions, as networked organizations need everyone to think and learn for themselves.

Organizational resilience is strengthened when those in leadership roles let go of control, because leadership in networks does not come from above, as there is no top. Leadership is an emergent property of a network in balance and not some special property available to only the select few. As networks become the dominant organizational principle, networked learning is essential to do any work of value. A real learning organization requires leadership from everyone – an aggressively intelligent and engaged workforce, understanding that:

Why PKM?

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Have you ever tried to find something you saw recently on the Net but don’t remember where you found it? On Twitter, I mark my favourites and review them every two weeks, with the best becoming Friday’s Finds. I think of it as a short-term memory helper.

twitter favesGo back in time and think about something you researched. Can you find it now? By creating a digital copy, you can retrieve it much more easily. I used the SPATIAL model in my Master’s thesis in 1998. I wrote about it on my blog in 2008 (and then our structures shape us) and was able to find a digital copy. The author even commented on my blog post. In 2012 I used the SPATIAL model to reinforce how important the initial design of an organization is, and gave examples of what happens when you pit a good performer against a bad system.  I was able to share it again, when, in-passing, I was asked if I knew anything about educational ergonomics. I was told that, “this model is ideal for our purposes and I am thrilled to learn of it.”

Are you ever asked for help on a subject? A hot topic in our region is shale gas extraction using hydraulic fracturing. I knew nothing about it but decided to read what I could. Over the past year, I collected articles on the subject and saved them to Diigo, a social bookmarking service. I was recently asked by a friend if I knew of any resources on the subject. I only had to send him one link. I did this for myself, but was able to easily share with others.

Have you ever had to write a briefing note, white paper, or give a presentation to your colleagues? The posts on my blog are often the raw material for my professional writing. I now write blog posts as preparation for presentations. This helps me get my ideas together, in a more manageable format than a full-length paper. By making these public, I often find out about related resources, recommended by readers. I did this recently on the topic of institutional memory, with this series of blog posts that became a three-hour live presentation:

Lilia Efimova, the original inspiration for my PKM practices, has said that the main problem with personal knowledge management is that we need to take time now, in order to invest in the future. This is hard to see in advance. With a searchable knowledge base of thousands of blog posts and social bookmarks, all curated by me, I can see the value of PKM every day. It’s much more difficult when you start with a blank slate. That’s why a regular, disciplined process is the best way to start. As Jane Hart shows, if you take 10 minutes a day to learn something new, that’s about 50 hours after one year.

Barriers to Knowledge Work

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If sense-making is a key part of knowledge work and is also essential for both innovation and creativity, does the average workplace help or hinder sense-making? I noted before that seeking works best with a playful attitude, exploring new possibilities in diverse networks with many connections in order to enhance serendipity. Sense-making, the most difficult aspect, requires a willingness to try new things, empowering through learning. Sharing is necessary in almost all work contexts today and it is through sharing that we can inspire and be inspired.

Barriers to seeking playfully

Jobs:

Jobs are designed around work that can be copied and workers who can be replaced, but anything that can be reduced to a flowchart will be automated. Relying on the job as society’s main wealth-sharing mechanism is a major mistake in the network era, but one that politicians and many others continue to make. We are entering a post-job economy.

Project Management:

Executives may believe that they want insights and innovations but are most receptive to new ideas that fit with existing practices and maintain predictability [e.g. project plans]. Business organizations treat disruptive insights and innovation with suspicion. – Gary Klein in Seeing What Others Don’t

Barriers to empowered learning

Designated learning & development specialists:

Staff who carry out day-to-day duties—and whose productivity you’re looking to improve—should ultimately be the source for defining what knowledge they need and what knowledge they know is valuable to others. – BloombergBusinessWeek

Training as a separate activity

As work becomes more networked and complex, the social aspects of knowledge sharing and collaboration are becoming more important. Learning amongst ourselves is getting to be the real work in many organizations. – The New Challenge for Learning Professionals: (PDF)

Barriers to inspiration through sharing

Individual performance measurement:

Performance appraisals are like academic grades and keep the focus on the individual. In the collaborative, social enterprise this is counter-productive. There is no place for this practice in doing net work. In today’s enterprise, work is learning and learning is the work, and it has to be done cooperatively.

Enterprise software:

When it comes to knowledge, and learning, only open systems are effective. All closed systems will fail over time, especially if discovery and innovation are happening outside that system.

Doing the right thing

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Here is a letter I wrote to the local newspaper, which was published today. I think it has broader application, so I’ve posted it, with additional links and photos.

Doing the right thing

It’s easy to do things right. Today, machines and software can be designed to do things right. But in complex, human relationships, it’s better, and more difficult, to do the right thing. Even with modern technology, machines cannot be programmed, nor laws written, to ensure that we always do the right thing.

Town Council and the Tantramar Planning Commission did things right by enforcing by-laws and revoking the patio licence for the Black Duck Coffee House this week. However, they did not do the right thing.Sarah and Al by DeeSquaredSarah & Al, BDCH owners: Photo by DeeSquared

The right thing would have been subtle and nuanced. It would have considered that the owners, in less than one year, have purchased their coffee cups from a local potter, bought only local produce, hired a stone mason, as well as carpenters, labourers, and baristas, all the while injecting money into the local economy. The right thing would have been to understand the influence that one small café has had in bringing together people and attracting many others from out of town. The right thing would have been to see that the Black Duck Coffee House is a signal of potential economic growth for Sackville, bringing new people and new ideas to a town in desperate need of them. The right thing would have been a human, not a mechanical response. The right thing would have involved many conversations.

I ask our public servants and those who represent us to try to do the right thing. It may be difficult, complex, multi-faceted, and even fuzzy. But doing the right thing is something only people can do.

black duck coffee house doorNote: After all the positive feedback from the community [above], the coffee house will re-open on 30 September, after some renovations.