PKM in 2010

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Personal Knowledge Management

Updated 5 Feb 2010: changed “Filter” to “Understand”

[This post is a continuation of Sense-making with PKM (March, 2009)]

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

Knowledge = the capacity for effective action (know how)

Management = how to get things done

What is PKM?

PKM is an individual, disciplined process by which we make sense of information, observations and ideas. In the past it may have been keeping a journal, writing letters or having conversations. These are still valid, but with digital media we can add context by categorizing, commenting or even remixing it. We can also store digital media for easy retrieval.

The Web has given us more ways to connect with others in our learning but many people only see the information overload aspect of our digital society. Engaging others can actually make it easier to learn and not become overwhelmed. Effective learning is the difference between surfing the waves or being drowned by them.

PKM can be looked at as three types of activities [note: I’ve reduced this from seven activities in my previous articles on PKM as I believe that a simpler process is easier to teach and to begin with].

Aggregate

Filter

Understand

Connect
Observations & Notes

Information

Knowledge

Sources of Info & Knowledge

 Annotate, Tag,

List, File,

Classify, Clarify,

Expand, Question

 People – People


Ideas – Ideas


People – Ideas

Why PKM?

Human knowledge currently doubles about every year and personal knowledge management is one way of addressing the issue of TMI (too much information).

PKM is of little value unless the results are shared by connecting to others and contributing to meaningful conversations. Informal, social learning is the primary way that knowledge is created in the workplace. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts as we build on the knowledge of others. As knowledge workers or citizens, PKM is our part of the social learning contract. Without effective PKM at the individual level, social learning has less value.

A Model

There is more than one PKM process but here is a basic structure that works for me and makes sense to many others I show it to. This post is meant to be descriptive, not prescriptive. Take what you need, as there are no best practices for complex and personal learning processes.

Aggregate Understand Connect

PKM in the context of work:

Individuals have their unique methods of sense-making and by sharing cooperatively or working collaboratively they contribute to the social learning mosaic that creates organizational knowledge.

Aggregate – looking for good sources of information (people) – noting or tagging pieces of information while working collaboratively.

Filter Understand – saving information for later – considering how it may be useful in various contexts – making sense of it – finding the right information, at the right time, in the right format,  from the information repositories of our subject matter networks.

Connect – ongoing conversations while learning and working including connecting ideas and people.

Enhanced Serendipity – PKM increases the chances of serendipitous learning. and as Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favours the prepared mind”. According to Ross Dawson: “You cannot control serendipity. However you can certainly enhance it, act to increase the likelihood of happy and unexpected discoveries and connections. That’s is what many of us do day by day, contributing to others like us by sharing what we find interesting.”

Getting to work

One of the difficult aspects of PKM is triage, or sorting. It’s the ability to separate the important from the useless. Unfortunately, what we view as useless today could be quite important tomorrow. Developing good triage techniques takes time and practice. It depends on the depth and breath of our sources (aggregation), as well as the effectiveness of our filters.

When we find something of interest or value, we need to do something with it. Either file it, save it, add to it, send it on or discard it. Discarding or missing something is becoming less of a problem online because we have powerful search tools and if we participate in cooperative networks, more than one person will notice items of significance. This process also gives us time to make sense of things, to understand.

All of this aggregation and filtering isn’t of much use if we can’t find things later. Putting our knowledge online, in databases that enable tagging, filtering and searching makes it much easier to retrieve it when we need it. For example, I use this blog as a knowledge repository. It is searchable and I’ve added tags and categories. With over 1,500 posts and +4,000 comments, I have a an excellent tool for managing what I’ve learned. Add to this almost 2,000 online social bookmarks and weekly summaries of what I learn on Twitter and I’ve created an outboard brain.

The most important aspect of PKM is making our knowledge not only explicit but public. This is part of connecting. Going public means looking both inward and outward. However, let me add one caveat. Sometimes, just publishing online for our own learning and perhaps later retrieval, is enough. It doesn’t matter if nobody links to it. If we get too focused on what others think, we won’t become good critical thinkers.

Net Work Learning article

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Net Work LearningThe New Security Learning  Foundation held its conference just prior to Online Educa last year in Berlin. I wrote an article, called Net Work Learning, for the journal that is distributed to members and conference attendees. Parts of it have appeared on this site but here is the complete unabridged version as a PDF:

Net Work Learning 2009

I just received a few copies of the print version in the mail this week. Believe it or not, what I really like about print publishing is that an editor makes changes and also decides what to highlight or what works best as a call-out. It’s very good feedback on my writing.

Here are the call-outs from the journal article:

Individuals can act both locally and globally without the aid of formal organizations. That means that the traditional command and control organizational pyramid is getting much more porous.

Change begins when ideas meet new technology.

Command and control matters less and less on the business fringes. Look to business models that understand the importance of community as we become a global village.

If training departments want to remain relevant in this kind of environment, they will need to reconsider their role. In order to help organizations evolve in a networked environment they have to move away from training delivery and focus on connecting and communicating.

No single, sure-fire, cookie-cutter approach can be implemented in a top-down or consultant-driven manner to create a networked workplace performance model that works. No single method will work.

With hyper-linked information and access to expertise, not only are internal departments of less value, they can subvert the organization’s future by not responding quickly and appropriately.

A linchpin culture

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Here is Seth Godin being interviewed by Hugh Macleod:

In a sta­ble envi­ron­ment, we worship the effi­cient fac­tory. Henry Ford or even David Gef­fen… feed the machine, keep it run­ning smoothly, pay as little as you can, make as much as you can. In our post-industrial world, though, fac­tory worship is a non star­ter. Cheap cogs are worth what they cost, which is not much. In a chan­ging envi­ron­ment, you want peo­ple who can steer, inno­vate, pro­voke, lead, con­nect and make things hap­pen. That’s my the­sis. This is a new revo­lu­tion, and just as Marx and Smith wrote about the indus­trial revo­lu­tion, I’m wri­ting about ours.

Godin’s new book is called Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? and he hits the nail on the head that the industrial model for work design is no longer of much use. The work that we will be paid for is the difficult, innovative, one of a kind, creative stuff.

The cynefin model (below) shows that emergent practices are needed in order to manage in complex environments and novel practices are necessary for chaotic ones. We will be facing more complexity and chaos in our work. There are fewer easy answers, easy jobs with good pay, or simple ways to keep a job for life.

I don’t believe that it’s any longer a question of whether standardized work will be outsourced or automated, but when. How much time do we have to prepare people for the new revolution? Any scenario that I consider – peak oil, global warming; globalization; Asian dominance – still requires that the developed world’s workforce deals with more complexity and even chaos. We need to skill-up for emergent and novel practices and that means a completely different mindset toward work.

cynefin linchpin

It’s not enough that I am ready or that you are prepared. We have to be able to deal with change as a society. How can we help get our communities out of their comfort zones or overcome their fears and get their innate creativity flowing? Becoming a linchpin is the first challenge, but enabling a linchpin culture is the greater one.

PKM: aggregate, filter, connect

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Knowledge Squared equals Power Squared, says Craig Thomler:

However the knowledge hoarding model begins to fail when it becomes cheap and easy to share and when the knowledge required to complete a task exceeds an individual’s capability to learn in the time available.

This has been reflected in a longitudinal study of knowledge workers that Robert Kelley of Carnegie-Mellon University conducted over more than twenty years. He asked professionals “What percentage of the knowledge you need to do your job is stored in your own mind?”

In 1986 the answer was typically about 75%. By 1997 workers estimated that they had only about 15% to 20% of the knowledge needed in their own mind. Kelley estimated that by 2006 the answer was only 8% to 10%.

Given that professionals now need to draw 90% or more of the knowledge they need to do their jobs from others, in my view ‘Knowledge equals Power’ is no longer true.

I believe it is now more accurate to state Knowledge Shared equals Power Squared.

I see the basis for sharing knowledge in the connected workplace is personal knowledge management or what I’ve called our part of the social learning contract. You need to have something to share in the first place and that happens when you make your work transparent. This means showing your sources (aggregation) and then what you find important (filtering) and sharing that with others (connecting).

In my case I use Google Reader as a feed aggregator, with shared items public. I also share articles with my Internet Time Alliance colleagues using Posterous. I filter more with this blog by writing about and commenting on much of what I have read and learned. I also filter information with Twitter and my weekly Friday’s Finds. I connect through this blog and the comments left by others, by leaving comments, via Twitter and in the increasing number of web conferences and discussions becoming available. Essential in all of this are the tracks I’ve left for others and for myself to retrieve as necessary, as I do during my frequent searches of this blog, Twitter favourites and my social bookmarks.

None of this is new, but I think that the three-step process of Aggregate/Filter/Connect is much simpler than my previous model of four internal actions and three external ones.

pkm-flow

A simpler model, inspired by Ross Dawson’s post on enhanced serendipity, may be easier to communicate (and remember).

You cannot control serendipity. However you can certainly enhance it, act to increase the likelihood of happy and unexpected discoveries and connections. That’s what many of us do day by day, contributing to others like us by sharing what we find interesting.

I’ve found that this diagram works better in explaining my PKM process and how it relates to other people, all engaged in similar, but not identical, sense-making endeavours [Updated here: PKM in 2010].

PKM-AFC

Learning socially and being social

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Some of the interesting things I found on Twitter this past week.

Diffusion By Learning. Innovation by Social Learning. via @charlesjennings

3. Social learning. People adopt once they see enough empirical evidence to convince them that the innovation is worth adopting, where the evidence is generated by the outcomes among prior adopters. Individuals may adopt at different times due to differences in their prior beliefs, amount of information gathered, and idiosyncratic costs.

@oscarberg “Organizations can own communities, but nobody can own social networks. They gather on purpose, and interact on the edge of chaos.”

@BFchirpy “The killer learning management system is the Web – silly” [in case anyone is still wondering]

Pondering complexity. Good MIT Sloan article on managing complexity. via @rossdawson

What can we do, the executives asked us, to manage complexity more effectively?

Our advice: Focus on the issues that are making it hard for your employees to get things done, and on building the ability of your work force to cope with the complexity in their roles. For most workers, complications arising from increased M&A activity and regulation matter less than having a simplified organization with clear roles and accountabilities.

Are we too professional: has professionalism gone too far? An excellent read via @AmirKassaei

Over-professionalism is everywhere. Teachers in England are trained to plan lessons in segments of three minutes, a theory which leaves little room for spontaneity in the classroom. They are also often exhausted before term even starts because of the endemic pressure to plan every lesson weeks in advance. It is all too tempting for teachers to sacrifice freshness–which is impossible to measure or record on paper–in favour of form-filling. But can education ever be mapped out in such prescriptive terms? Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College, thinks not: “The erosion of trust in education is sucking the life out of classrooms, teachers and students. You can tick all the boxes under the sun and still be a lousy teacher. You cannot encapsulate the human experience of learning in some mechanistic pedantry.”

Great slide presentation by @sachac on how to be a shy connector – Shows that it’s not necessary to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks:

The Shy Connector

View more documents from Sacha Chua.

The business of information

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I have been discussing business models for information-based businesses and in those talks realized how Tim Kastelle’s Aggregate, Filter, Connect model makes good sense. If you’re in the information or knowledge business, which is any media company, then it’s exceptionally important to master each of these three processes.

You need to aggregate from your network and your suppliers in order to have access to just-in-time as well as just-in-case information. Good aggregation means that you can write an article on short notice or summarize a complex event, such as the situation in Haiti. If you only have have access to limited information, your analysis will be poor.

Filtering is the ability to not only find the needle in the haystack of bookmarks, files, reports and blog posts, but knowing which ones are trusted and most suitable for the task at the hand. The perfect picture for a specific context can tell a great story. We can filter with the assistance of our subject matter networks – knowing who to ask about what and when.

Once again, based on the context of the situation, which still requires mostly human skills, we can connect objects, ideas and people. The more complex the situation, the more important it is to connect the right pieces together. Connecting is getting the best information at the optimal time to those who need it.

Here is part of the presentation that I used in my discussions this past week:

Net Work

View more documents from Harold Jarche.

Life, on the Net, is too short

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Hugh Macleod at gapingvoid.com has decided that, after 10 years, he will no longer blog his cartoons:

But like a lot of the folk who have been blogging for a long time, I’ve started to feel that over the last few years, that the blogosphere has just gotten too big, noisy and anonymous. I’ve started longing for the days when things were ‘smaller’, ‘clubbier’, intimate and, well, human. When the people I met were truly like-minded.

Like many bloggers, I’ve used Hugh’s cartoons to illustrate my posts and presentations and today’s reflects the zeitgeist, especially amongst my fellow free agents:

life is too short

Hugh’s decision reminds me of Virginia Yonker’s observations about blogging:

I am feeling that I am coming into the middle of a conversation (or the end of a conversation) that was started somewhere else (such as twitter or facebook). It appears that blogging is the reflective or summary of those conversations. Karyn Romeis still has a very conversational style, but she will refer to other conversations she has had on facebook. Harold Jarche will refer to others at aggregated blog sites where he is collaborating with colleagues. As a result, I don’t feel that there is as much “conversation” on blogs as there used to be. In addition, I have noticed that Michael, Harold, Karyn, and Tony all have easy access to Twitter on their sites. Ken Allan has moved into a different rhelm this year: 2nd life. His posts often include graphics taken from 2nd Life. In fact, some blogs that I have been reading for the last couple of years either took hyatises or have not had posts in months.

It’s amazing that as new as blogging is, it’s already feeling old. These changes in media are only going to speed up and soon we’ll be wishing for the good old days of Facebook and Twitter. I don’t think that the answer is to constantly look for the next big thing, but each person has to find their own rhythm in the digital flow. Life in perpetual Beta is interesting, if nothing else.

Connect, aggregate, filter; then train

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The primary role of the “training” department [or whatever it becomes] for any knowledge-based business is to Connect & Communicate. As workers co-develop emergent processes they need to be supported through updated information, tools and processes to do their work. This model looks at knowledge flows inside the organization:

invert pyramid

Looking at knowledge flows outside the organization, Tim Kastelle says that successful businesses in digital environments need to Aggregate, Filter & Connect:

Connecting is critically important both in journalism and in education. So that makes three value adding activities in the digital economy: aggregating, filtering, and connecting. The lesson to take from the current states of both the music industry and journalism is that you have to have a clear understanding of how you’re creating value so that you build and protect the correct parts of your business model. Perhaps universities can learn this lesson before educational business models are disrupted as well.

Information-based businesses, like education, media, research or consulting organizations, are in the business of working with both information Stocks & Flows. Where revenue is made depends on several changing factors, as many industries are discovering. Understanding the overall flow of sense-making and intangible value creation is important and one framework for success in a digital universe is to create learning networks using social media.

Social media are also the means by which we can share our tacit knowledge through conversations to co-develop emergent work practices. Connecting, aggregating and filtering can be used to describe the cycle of workplace informal learning. This business process does not require formal training other than as a supplementary input. Training is only beneficial when it addresses a clear lack of skills or knowledge, not as a replacement for better work practices.

Informal, social learning is the primary way that knowledge is created in the workplace. The graphic below is a start to “put the horse before the cart” and situate training in the supportive role where it should be.

Connect – ongoing conversations while working collaboratively.

Aggregate – tracking, noting or tagging pieces of information while working collaboratively.

Filter – finding the right information, at the right time, in the right format,  from the information repositories of our subject matter networks.

Training – when there is an identified gap in knowledge and skills, then training can augment collaborative work practices and this can inform the conversations of workers.

A-F-C

Social learning and social networking are growing in importance for many businesses, often as customer support, branding or marketing initiatives. However, HR or T&D are not driving social media use in most organizations. Learning through social networks is becoming an integral part of business and many learning professionals are missing out on it.

There is an opportunity for those who can combine an understanding of business, communication technologies and human learning to develop better social business models. We are in a period when learning professionals are needed more than ever but many lack technology and business skills and cannot help their organizations. The challenge is to get out of the traditional training mindset and open up to the 92% of the business that is currently being ignored.

Learning is the Work

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construction

Here are some of the interesting things I found on Twitter this past week.

Learning & Development is still stuck in the course paradigm [multi-way discussion]. via @c4lpt

Are instructional designers like buggy whips? Courses are buggies; obsolete learning vehicles for the Internet. Back-to-front e-learning via @BFChirpy

The situation in the workplace is even worse than most critics of formalized training & schooling say [good references in this article by Gary Wise]:

Training (formal learning) takes place in controlled environs that can include classroom (face-to-face and virtual distance learning) and/or asynchronous on-line, self-paced events. Nothing wrong with any of these methods. Unfortunately, these formal events equate to a mere 5% (+/- depending on your industry) of a learner’s 1,080 hour work year – another Bersin research finding. That equates to about 54 hours per year spent in training.

Work context represents the other 95%. Are we spending 80% of our training dollars on only 5% of a learner’s work year? Work context, therefore, represents our greatest opportunity to leverage informal learning. In order to include the other 95%, it becomes important to include key attributes exclusive to the downstream work context where the learner actually performs their work.

Next time someone asks for the Return on Investment (ROI) of [social learning?] … I’ll kindly ask them to listen to @dmscott’s epic rant on ROI. via @jonhusband @elsua

One of the most effective mechanisms for knowledge transfer which has emerged in human history is the apprentice scheme. via @snowded

Highly ritualised in medieval times with the apprentice walking the boards once they had reached a certain level of competence to become Journeymen. Then, for some the execution of the master work to become one of the company masters. Dress changed at each stage as did obligation. The educational model was also community based. Journeymen also educated apprentices and were often better able to do so than the masters. While in the early stages of knowledge transfer there was a degree of rote learning, increasingly the apprentice learnt by practice and by tolerated failure. They did not copy the master, they adapted with variance and as such the body of knowledge progressed, it was not transferred as a static entity – something all too common in most KM [knowledge management] programmes – but as a living, breathing and changing practice.

@JaneBozarth “How did I miss this before? The fabulously articulate @quinnovator on bridging formal/informal learning.”

@BFchirpy to @JaneBozarth & @usablelearning “Re: Killer Learning Management System – it’s the web, silly.”

Work is learning, learning work

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My Twitter bio reads, “Work is learning, learning work – that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know [apologies to Keats]. That’s pretty much what I believe will be a necessity for the post-industrial and post-information era that we are beginning to enter. Some call it the knowledge economy or perhaps even the learning age. Whatever it will be called, our networks of networks are making life and work more complex. We need to adapt to better ways of working with abundant information and expanding connections, as I said in sharing tacit knowledge:

Our current models for managing people, training and knowledge-sharing are insufficient for a workplace that demands emergent practices just to keep up. Formal training has only ever addressed 20% of workplace learning and this was acceptable when the work environment was merely complicated. Knowledge workers today need to connect with others to co-solve problems. Sharing tacit knowledge through conversations (the only way to do this) is an essential component of knowledge work. Social media enable adaptation (the development of emergent practices) through conversations.

Emergent practices are developed collaboratively while solving problems for which there are no definitive answers. For instance, what’s the “best” Internet business model? Where once we could document knowledge and develop guidelines and practices followed by most workers, we now need to let workers develop their own practices, according to their particular context, which is constantly in flux. This is a very different approach from the way we designed jobs and training in the past.

Social media are the tools that can help us develop emergent practices. They enable conversations between people separated by distance or time. The organizing framework for using social media for business is the learning network. Learning networks are not just for what we used to call training & development, but can also help us engage (not target) our markets. Chris Koch, marketing and sales strategist, shows no doubt with: There is only one objective in social media: create learning networks

The purpose of social media is to create learning networks that buyers want to join. The enticements are ideas and education. That means social media are extensions of our content development and dissemination processes. By creating content that offers relevant, timely, and useful ideas and education for buyers at all stages of the buying process, we create the incentives for buyers to engage with us in conversation and community. Whether it’s blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, or private communities that we build ourselves, the common thread is that by focusing on learning we build and retain buyers’ interest.

Social media are the vehicles by which we can share our tacit knowledge through conversations to inform the collaborative development of emergent work practices.

emergent practices