Learning

Learning

organizational knowledge

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Please read this comment from Stan Garfield first:

Harold, that article appears to have been written using GenAI, with multiple errors. Here is one example (since corrected after I wrote to the author), that related to you:

“Meena Arivanantham is a knowledge management specialist at the United Nations Development Programme and one of the most experienced practitioners of knowledge management in international development contexts. She presented at the SIKM Leaders Community in May 2024 on sense-making in complexity, demonstrating the application of KM principles to the particularly challenging environment of large multilateral organisations working across dozens of national contexts simultaneously.”

Her correct name is Meena Arivananthan (not Arivanantham), she is not at UNDP, and she never presented to the SIKM Leaders Community. A GenAI tool seems to have partially taken this from the title of your February 2024 SIKM presentation on Sensemaking in Complexity.

Meena and Bruce Boyes pointed out errors by replying to the LinkedIn post linking to the article, as did I.

See the comments below.

A lengthy article on organizational knowledge and the people in the field highlights a number of common mistakes, all of which I have witnessed in my almost three decades of professional practice.

  1. Treating organizational knowledge as an IT problem. This is evident in the budget for the technology purchase compared to human implementation. The latter often has no budget.
  2. Focusing on explicit knowledge and ignoring tacit knowledge. This often comes in the form of offering a training course to cover the new knowledge of a system with no thought to helping people discuss how they will use the new system.
  3. Ignoring the need for trust in order to share knowledge. As I have noted for years, knowledge flows at the speed of trust. No imposed system will generate trust.
  4. Launching a KM initiative without visible leadership support. I have often seen organizational knowledge initiatives launched for the good of employees but with no engagement by executives. The lack of leadership by example dooms the project.
  5. Underestimating the knowledge loss that happens during workforce transitions. With knowledge loss not evident in the next fiscal quarter, executives often ignore its impact.

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end of the line

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In 2014 I started the first of the online PKM workshops, based on a model of three activities per week over six weeks to be done as a cohort with a common start and finish date. I would be available to respond to participants and provide support as required, including video calls.

It’s now the end of the line.

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it’s political

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Everything is political — even the learning organization.

Peter Senge’s development of the fifth discipline has informed much of my work around workplace learning for three decades. Sheila Damodaran takes a deep look at this seminal book.

The Five Disciplines were not assembled aesthetically. They were assembled structurally — each closing a vulnerability left open by the others, each compensating for a failure mode observable in real institutions.

—Systems Thinking prevented local optimisation from masquerading as improvement.
—Personal Mastery prevented aspiration from collapsing under institutional pressure.
—Mental Models prevented inherited assumptions from hardening into policy dogma.
—Team Learning prevented the conversation from degenerating into positional defence.
—Shared Vision prevented purpose from fragmenting into departmental ambition.

Remove one, and drift begins.

Emphasise one at the expense of others, and imbalance follows.
—The Fifth Discipline at Thirty-Five — Lineage, Surge, and Scale

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perpetual beta interview

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I was recently interviewed by Felipe Zamana which was published under the aptly named title of perpetual beta. It’s been a while since I have had an interview so it was a chance to reflect on where I have been, where I am, and perhaps where I am going.

tl;dr …

First of all, I noted how my blog gave me everything, a theme I have riffed on a few times here over the past 23 years. I also described how those heady days of connecting through blogs, and later Twitter, have now morphed into something much less captivating and often concerning. Felipe refers to my recent post on writing by humans, for humans which reflects my current thoughts on learning out loud through the written medium. I also talked about how the Seek > Sense > Share framework has recently helped me make sense of the complexities surrounding a proposed methane gas-burning electric generating station in our town and my involvement with the Protect the Chignecto Isthmus Coalition.

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learning really is the work

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Knowledge flows at the speed of trust. What happens when we cannot trust the sources that inform our knowledge? How much information is now polluted with AI slop? Was that image we just saw manipulated or created by generative AI tools?

In this world of mass information manipulation, learning really is the work. That learning is becoming more dependent on trusted relationships with other people. As organizations large and small rely more on generative AI tools to produce media, we need to become story skeptics. As we continue to encounter more disorientation we have to rely on communities and networks of trust to make sense.

But communities can have their dark sides — they can strengthen bias, reinforce prejudice, and even make hate socially acceptable. Diverse knowledge networks can counteract the group-think that may emerge in communities. To make sense of our complex, chaotic, and fake-media-rich world, we need both networks and communities.

Finding and participating in communities needs to be coupled with a willingness to explore messier networks to understand different perspective. Real learning is not abstract. It can be painful. It requires engagement with others. Real learning is how we are going to somehow get through the messes we all face today — it’s called personal knowledge mastery.

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disorientation and exploration

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“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” —Father John Culkin (1967) A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan

Disorientation and exploration are essential for human learning. By using Generative AI (GPT/LLM) are we bypassing these two stages of learning in search of efficiency and robotic productivity?

“John Nosta, founder of the NostaLab think tank, says AI trains humans to think backward by providing answers before they understand.” — link via Archiv.Today

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learning as rebellion

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Is human learning now an act of rebellion?

Since 2017 I have made the following observation — For the past several centuries we have used human labour to do what machines cannot. First the machines caught up with us, and surpassed humans, with their brute force. Now they are surpassing us with their brute intelligence. There is not much more need for machine-like human work which is routine, standardized, or brute.

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writing by humans, for humans

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Recently I have found it difficult to maintain my writing pace of +20 years. There are 3,700 blog posts published here but few in the last year. The fact that large language models (LLM) have scraped my website and continue to do so has had me feeling less motivated to share my thoughts. But maybe the best act of rebellion against AI slop is to keep writing and not let the silicon valley bastards grind me down.

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making time

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In the past year many workers in the tech sector have lost their jobs, often replaced by the vision of what generative AI can do instead. I know of lay-offs in bio-tech as well and now we are seeing massive firings in the US civil service. One consequence of all of these job losses is that fewer people will have to do more work. My observations of medium to large organizations has been that most people are busy, most of the time. Back to back meetings are not uncommon as well as overflowing email in-boxes.

This is a challenge for performance improvement, learning, and knowledge management initiatives. Any new attempts to improve these will be seen as extra work on top of a demanding work load. While those of us in the field of organizational performance improvement know the long-term value of better knowledge sharing, collaboration, and cooperation, getting over the short-term pain can be insurmountable. I have learned that it’s important to first find and make more time and space for knowledge workers.

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learning is not something we got

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I came across an older blog post today that reminded me about the year 2001. That was when I left my university-based job at the Centre for Learning Technologies (which was closing) and joined a small local e-learning company that had developed a learning management system (LMS) where I was the head of professional services.

I joined in February of that year and we attended a major trade show, Online Learning 2001 in late September. This was only a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks. We flew through Newark airport and during our stopover had a clear view of the smoking Twin Towers. It was eerie and quiet as few people were traveling at this time. Many other local learning companies traveled to this event as our pavilion was hosted by the New Brunswick government. On arrival we attended a reception hosted by the Canadian consulate and each person was given a lapel pin with crossed US and Canadian flags which we all gladly wore in solidarity with our American neighbours.

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