Sense-making with PKM

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Latest version: PKMastery

PKM

We may learn on our own but usually not by ourselves. People learn socially. In looking at how we can make sense of the growing and changing knowledge in our respective professional fields, I see two parallel processes that support each other. One is internally focused, as in “How do I learn this?” and the other is external, as in “Who can help me learn this?”.

We constantly go through a process of looking at bits of information and trying to make sense of them by adding to our existing knowledge or testing out new patterns in our sense-making efforts. 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. Effective learning is the difference between surfing the waves or being drowned by them and PKM (personal knowledge management) can be your customized surfboard.

Here is an internal process based on repeating four activities:

Sort Categorize Make Explicit
 Retrieve
Observations & Readings Tag, List, File, Classify Write Look-up as/when needed

These can be combined with three external activities:

  1. Connect – with others via various platforms and extend my reach
  2. Exchange – ideas and observations
  3. Contribute – to conversations

Together, these processes look like this:

These internal and external activities are a way of moving from implicit to explicit knowledge by observing, reflecting and then putting tentative thoughts out to our networks.

Looking Inward

One of the important aspects of PKM is triage, or sorting. It’s the ability to separate the important from the useless. Unfortunately, what you may view as useless today could be quite important tomorrow. Developing good triage techniques takes time and practice.

Categorizing: Once we’ve found something of interest or value, we will need to categorize it. The big change with the Web is that we no longer have to put one object in one file folder, as we did with a physical object or even on your computer desktop. Today, everything is miscellaneous. Tags are labels that can be attached to digital knowledge objects and an objects can have many labels. That means that we can have as many categories as we want.

Making Explicit: There are many ways of making knowledge explicit. We can talk about it, write about, engage in debate, create a video or even develop a hypothesis. The act of making it explicit provides the discipline necessary to examine our thought processes.

Going Public: Even more powerful than making our knowledge explicit is to make it public. This can start some interesting conversations about things that matter to us. Going public makes our professional knowledge much more personal. It also encourages peer discussions and reinforces the outward looking aspect of personal knowledge management. Web tools to help us go public include micro-blogging; blogs and podcasts.

Retrieval: The importance of retrieval becomes more obvious with the passing of time. As years of sorting, categorizing and making explicit develop into a large amount of information we can begin to see its value. These are our thoughts and ideas but they are connected to the ideas that sparked them and have been reinforced or questioned by our peers. The great benefit of using digital tools and Web platforms is that we can retrieve our knowledge artifacts (or information that has special meaning to us) anytime and anywhere. That’s quite a powerful professional asset.

Looking Outward

“No man is an island entire of himself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main …” – John Donne

Connecting: We need to be reading, watching and listening to find out what is happening in our professional fields. There are flows of conversation around us all the time. For those of us with access to the digital surround we have no excuses not to connect. Finding conflicting viewpoints on a subject is as easy as going to Wikipedia and reading the comments on any controversial subject. The variety and depth of our connections are indicators of how seriously we take our sense-making efforts. Who we know helps to improve what we know.

Exchanging: We exchange and note ideas and information all of the time. In the age of print we lent out or gave away books, magazines and newspapers. We exchanged opinions, sometime without knowing it. An empty restaurant on a Saturday night may have indicated that the locals did not think it was any good.

Conversations help us make meaning. The quality of our conversations is affected by the quality of the company we keep. If we seek out interesting people with different ideas we may learn more and broaden our horizons.

A stock exchange is designed to help capital flow and we need to use knowledge exchanges to allow ideas to flow. For centuries, knowledge exchanges were limited to elites but we now have access to world’s largest and most open exchange ever created.

Contributing. Clay Shirky has brought up the concept of a cognitive surplus that is a result of the leisure time that we gained about fifty years ago. As a society we were in a state of shock and did not have the tools to deal with all of this time, so television filled the void. Shirky says that television collectively takes up about 200 billion hours in the US per year. Wikipedia only needed 10 million hours to get to where it is today as the leading online encyclopedia. We are poised to be able to contribute to more Wikipedia-style efforts but many of use just don’t know how. Our institutions have not prepared us to be ongoing contributors to human knowledge, as we have been led to believe that this is the domain of “experts”.

In a connected world it is getting much easier to contribute, whether it be with words, pictures, music, or actions. Not only that, it may be our social responsibility to be contributors to our common knowledge.

How else will we be recognized as professionals in our fields unless we actively contribute to them?

TOOLS EXAMPLES
OS = open source		 INWARD
SUPPORT		 OUTWARD
SUPPORT
Aggregator Bloglines

Google Reader

 Sorting

Categorizing

 Connecting
Social
Bookmarks		 Delicious

Diigo

 Sorting

Categorizing

Making Explicit

 Connecting

Exchanging
Micro-blogging Twitter

Jaiku (OS)

Yammer

 Sorting

Making Explicit

 Connecting

Exchanging
Blogging Blogger

Typepad

WordPress (OS)

 Making Explicit Contributing
Photo-sharing Flickr

Photo Bucket

 Sorting

Categorizing

Making Explicit

 Exchanging

Contributing
Social
Networking		 Facebook

LinkedIn

Elgg (OS)

 Making Explicit Exchanging

Contributing

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What I have found out over several years of using PKM methods and tools is that I have been creating a powerful resource. My annotated bookmarks and my blog are the first places I search when I have an article or report to write. My PKM process has given me a digital library brimming with my own sticky notes that I can easily find.

I also offer workshops on how to develop PKM processes that work in various organizational contexts.

A longer view

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Economy getting you down? Maybe the economy is someone else’s story and not yours. From Neal Stephenson’s Anathem (book) [more on Wikipedia entry]:

So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes [cars], and tried to fathom what it would be like. Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. Fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day’s end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were.

Perhaps this is a good time to take back the long view on our own story.

Seeing with new eyes

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The idea that training is not a separate function has already gained some momentum, with many internal departments called something like Learning & Development now. Luis Suarez, writes in Learning & Knowledge – Partners in Learning:

For a good number of years, both Knowledge Management and Learning have always been associated with one another and overlapping quite a bit. Plenty of organisations are eventually using terms like Learning & Knowledge to refer to that process of knowledge sharing and collaborating; and, in a way, with the emergence of social software within the corporate environment, I am sure we will be seeing both disciplines come together even more!

I commented on Luis’s post that learning, development, KM, OD, etc, should take what’s best from each and create a more pragmatic offering for the networked workplace. I see that web-based practitioners especially are already doing this kind of cross-pollination. Both Luis and I view ourselves as cross-practitioners, as do several of my colleagues. In our networked world there is a need for more inter-disciplinary cooperation as exponential innovations can occur when examining one field through the lens of another. Merging our fields of practice will let us see with new eyes.

Informal learning works for new hires

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Todd Hudson discusses how the New Seasons Market chain uses a very informal approach not just for senior employees (where it seems to be a more natural fit) but for new hires as well. Criticism is often leveled against informal learning methods in that they don’t work for basic skills training. The New Seasons Market, with nine outlets, shows otherwise:

At New Seasons, you won’t see new hires crammed into three days of New Employee Training that’s so common today. After their Day One Orientation, New Seasons newbies are pretty much set free in their departments. “New Seasons’ training is like a Waldorf School experience. There’s no codified way for people to learn most jobs. People are told to look around, figure it out and ask for help when they need it,” said Charla [HR Director].

The company starts its hiring based on attitude, “We look for candidates more interested in genuine human interactions than in an ‘items per hour’ ratio”. I recommended in soft skills are foundational competencies that hiring for attitude makes more sense because you can always train for skills later.

This is a succinct real-world case for informal learning (book) in the workplace, what Todd Hudson calls Lean Knowledge Transfer (PDF), and reminds me of Guy Wallace’s more comprehensive Lean ISD (book) [also available as a free 404-page PDF at http://www.eppic.biz ].

The Community Manager

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In re-building the training function, we’ve recommended a move from content delivery to Connecting & Communicating. One role that will likely gain importance is that of Community Manager. As the electric media become embedded in our lives, we will all be constantly connected to many communities. Some of these will overlap.

The role of community manager in an organization will be to manage  organizational communities of practice, communities of interest and have an understanding of some of the other communities that touch each of us. In his Valence Theory of Organizations, Mark Federman identified “several specific forms of valence relationships that are enacted by two or more people when they come together to do almost anything; these are economic, social-psychological, identity, knowledge, and ecological.”

Effective collaboration brings all of these aspects into consideration. The communities we belong to address some or all of these valances. Workplace-related communities often address only the knowledge and economic aspects but as human beings we need more.

Because digital media are so easily reproduced and appropriated there are few walls between our online communities. Even our offline communities are getting digitally captured, by someone. Look at how difficult it is to maintain a clear line between LinkedIn and Facebook contacts. Even though many of us use the former for business and the latter for more personal communications, few are able to maintain two distinct groups of contacts. These lines will continue to blur (e.g. Twitter) and our online identities will be a composite of activities in several communities / teams / groups / networks.

The effective community manager will be less of a manager and more a well-connected node in many networks of importance to the organization. David Wilkins takes this a step further and says that the entire business should be run as a community:

It’s not about customer communities or workplace communties.  It’s about recognizing and fostering connections, and enabling information flow and information capture from multiple constituents.

If you can incorporate the best of eLearning; Human Performance Technology; Organizational Development; Knowledge Management; Communications and a touch of Marketing, then you may have the makings of a Community Manager. It seems like a pretty exciting place to be for the near future.

Management experts recommend Wirearchy

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Some of the best known management experts were brought together last year to “lay out an agenda for reinventing management“. Their premise was that 1) management models are important social technologies; 2) that the current models are out-of-date; and that 3) we need to develop more human models for the near future.

The 25 recommendations included more community, democracy and diversity as well as redefining control and leadership. The experts also recommended that organizations, “Reinvent strategy-making as an emergent process. In a turbulent world, strategy making must reflect the biological principles of variety, selection, and retention.” This aligns with our recommendations to restructure the training department based partially on complexity theory [in complex environments we need to develop emergent practices as best & good practices are inadequate].

In reviewing all 25 recommendations it is clear that Wirearchy, as an overarching framework, is a perfect fit:

a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology

Since we already have a unique and well-researched conceptual framework, we can now get on with how to implement Wirearchy for the workplace.

CSTD Presentation References

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Here are the links for my presentation today on The Future of the Training Department for the Canadian Society for Training & Development:

Main Article co-authored with Jay Cross

Slideshare presentation

Wirearchy framework

Cluetrain Manifesto

Cynefin framework

Delicious bookmarks on Personal Knowledge Management

Creative Commons search engine for shareable images

Wikimedia Commons for shareable and copyright-free images

GapingVoid cartoons

In response to questions from participants:

Twitter in plain English

ROI of Social media

Why the Government of Canada needs PKM

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David Eaves writes in Why the Government of Canada needs Bloggers:

“One theme that came up was that public servants feel they are suffering from information overload. There is simply so much going on around them and it is impossible to keep up with it all. This is especially true of those in the senior ranks.”

I saw this when I was working on the Advanced Leadership Program with the Canada School of Public Service last year. I can’t discuss any specifics of what I observed, but there is no doubt that senior public servants are inundated with information and that their time is not their own, with many days filled with meetings and other time-consuming activities.

However, blogging is not enough because managing information overload is more a question of attitude than skills. We need to understand that we’ve been in a state of information overload since the 15th Century when there were more books than one person could read in a lifetime (watch Clay Shirky’s interview on FastForward). Blogs, or their equivalent, are only one part of the knowledge management equation.

I think that public servants really need PKM (personal knowledge mastery). PKM is a way to help make sense of the information flows that face us and I’ve written about PKM many times. It is basically a process of:

  1. Sorting & Filtering (e.g. Feed Readers & following on Twitter )
  2. Annotating and Filing (e.g. social bookmarks)
  3. Tentative Sense-making (e.g. Blog posts & Twitter Posts)
  4. Engagement and conversations in these venues and others

The bottom line of web-based PKM is to develop a process of sense-making. It’s much like the discipline of maintaining a professional journal, attending lectures or reading good books and does not negate any of these activities.

So I would say that public servants, especially in senior positions, need more than blogs and that they need their own, individual PKM process, incorporating various web social media tools. If the Indonesian Minister of Defence has been able to maintain a blog for the past fours years, our public servants can do that and maybe a bit more, n’est-ce pas?

Soft skills are foundational competencies

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Aaron Chua at Wild Illusions sees financial measurements as no longer able to tell the complete story. He mentions various other areas for measurement, including “talent development” but in a different context from the tired “talent management” perspective we’ve heard for several years:

This means a total redefinition of what talent development means in organisations. The first implication is of course to throw out the idea of having a talent development unit. Instead, we need to think about ways to rebuilt how talent is truly developed via connections to the resources at the edge, connections to different organisational competencies that plugs their gaps, connections that increases cognitive diversity and brings about unexpected learnings et al. All these are rich areas for a new breed of talent development companies to think about and to create new products/services upon.

If you buy into Richard Florida’s concept of the Creative Class (which I mostly do) then it becomes obvious that for organizations to succeed they will have to nurture creativity in their workforce. Creative people are at all levels, including the janitor, and are not ‘human resources’ but individuals who have the capability of  gaining wisdom. From the Creative Class Blog is an article on The Workplace in a Wiki World, with this idea about the changing emphasis for workers:

Therefore, for an individual to succeed in a wiki-corporation or wiki-organization it will increasingly require being more than an engineer, programmer, economist, or accountant. It will also require the “soft skills” to do media relations or “wiki” relations, interacting daily with a range of customers and outside contributors, as well as collaborating with others in the company.

Here’s my speculation on workplace learning in ten years.

Soft skills, especially collaboration and networking, will become more important than hard skills. Smart employers have always focused more on attitude than any specific skill-set because they know they can train for a lack of skills and knowledge. The soft skills require time, mentoring, informal learning and other environmental supports. Once you have the soft skills to perform in a networked workplace, you’ll have foundational competencies.

I think many people will say of course we’ve known this all along, but in a workplace where our networks are as important as our skills, it will be more difficult to hide the fact that you’re a highly skilled jerk.

Workplace learning in ten years

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The LCB Big Question for March is, What will workplace learning look like in 10 years?

I’ll start by going back 10 years to my workplace and see what is different from early 1999:

  • I was still using a paper-based Day Timer, so I can’t quickly see what I was doing at that time. I switched to a Handspring (Palm) in 2001.
  • I had high-speed Internet access at work ( a university) but not at home until 2003.
  • We had digital cameras at work but our camera at home used film.
  • My professional network was the people at work, our clients and partners and a very few people (e.g. Jay Cross) who were blogging and giving me a way to interact with them without having met.
  • To set up a collaborative work space for our clients, Lotus Notes was one of the few options. Most of our clients balked at the idea of online collaborative work and preferred e-mail or the telephone (some things don’t change).
  • We were pushing workplace learning options like EPSS, KM, and CSCW but most of the money was being invested in online courses, LMS, and LCMS.
  • Big conferences, like OnlineLearning, were attracting thousands of attendees.

In the intervening decade I wondered about some of the technological changes. We now have practically unlimited digital storage, increasing bandwidth, almost ubiquitous connectivity, and the ability to digitally capture and share everything we see and hear. I’ve also had the ability to work on my own, from a small town in Atlantic Canada, because of our networked infrastructure. This was not really possible in 1999 but by 2003 it was feasible, though a challenge.

Workplace learning in 2019:

  • Much of the workforce will be distributed in time & space as well as in engagement (part-time, full-time, contract, mix).
  • More learning will be do-it-yourself and gathered from online digital resources available for free and fee. More workers will be used to getting what they need as they change jobs/contracts more frequently but remain connected to their online networks (online/offline won’t matter anymore).
  • Work and learning will continue to blend while stand-up training will be challenged by the ever-present back channel. Successful training programs will involve the learners much more — before, during, and after.
  • Conferences, workshops and on-site training will become more niche and fragmented (smaller,  focused, & connected online) as travel costs increase and workers become more demanding of their time.
  • The notion of PKM will have permeated much of the workplace.
  • These changes will not be evenly distributed.