PKMastery

Personal knowledge mastery

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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framing the narrative

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In smarter networks through better narratives, I noted that there needs to be a dominant narrative to counter “folks who’ve got nothing but conspiracies and medieval fantasies to base their arguments upon.” A new frame is required, not factual counter-arguments. This is how George Lakoff explains it, “1) Repetition strengthens the synapses in neural circuits that people use in thinking 2) Whoever frames first has an advantage 3) Negating a frame activates and strengthens it.” Basically, Lakoff states that whoever frames the narrative first has an advantage and that negating a frame only activates and strengthens it. So responding to trolls and conspiracy theorists, which we often feel compelled to do, only makes the buggers stronger — an understanding of my confusion.

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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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“let the discourse rage without you”

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Joan Westenberg covers a lot of ground in the post the discourse is a distributed denial-of-service attack. I will try to summarize and highlight what I found of importance.

A DDOS is an attack on a web server in an attempt to overload it so it can no longer function. The case that Westenberg refers to is one where thousands of internet devices — not necessarily computers — were pointed at the website of security expert Brian Krebs. As a side note, I would recommend Krebs’ Mastodon feed.

Westenberg goes on to show that the online social media space has become a massive distributed denial-of-service — for our collective brains. There is so much information — not all fake news but a lot of false information shared by people — that vies for our attention and we cannot cope with it.

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continuing to step aside

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I am not ignoring new technologies in the ‘AI’ field, but I believe there is a real need for people to get better at communicating and making sense with other people. Well that is what I wrote early last year in stepping aside. What have I learned since then?

I still have not found any use for generative AI in my own work.

The rush to implement generative AI in the workplace is leading to massive job cuts especially amongst software programmers. The perfect storm of neo-liberalism and automation continues to tear up 20th century social contracts.

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the outrage continues

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Five years ago I wrote about the tendency on the web to tend toward constant doubt and outrage. Now, five years late, that trend continues, exacerbated by the platform monopolists who understand that outrage sells more advertising. I wrote that social media have created a worldwide Dunning-Kruger effect. Our collective self-perception of knowledge acquired through social media is greater than it actually is. And the outrage continues because we ignore our common humanity. We do.

I concluded that as we become more connected we should not be cutting out social media, instead we should be using them in smarter ways. Today we all have to work and live smarter, by connecting to our networks and communities. These are essential to ensure that we do not become drowned out by the noise of the Internet of Beefs.

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meta skills

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[Demis] Hassabis [CEO of Google’s DeepMind, Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry 2024] emphasized the need for “meta-skills,” such as understanding how to learn and optimizing one’s approach to new subjects, alongside traditional disciplines like math, science and humanities. —AP 2025-09-12

In the third bucket I discussed a conversation I had with a senior Human Resources executive at a large corporation in 2016. He noted that when it comes to managing people and their talents, there are three buckets. Two of these are easy to fill, while the third is the real challenge:

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sensemaking through the slop

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The image below is one I have often used in explaining sensemaking with the PKM framework. It describes how we can use different types of filters to seek information and knowledge and then apply this by doing and creating, and then share, with added value, what we have learned. One emerging challenge today is that our algorithmic knowledge filters are becoming dominated by the output of generative pre-trained transformers based on large language models. And more and more, these are generating AI slop. Which means that machine filters, like our search engines, are no longer trusted sources of information.

As a result, we have to build better human filters — experts, and subject matter networks.

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rebuilding trust one catalyst at a time

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I have worked in the fields of human performance improvement, social learning, collaboration, and sensemaking for several decades. Currently in all of these fields the dominant discussion is about using and integrating generative artificial intelligence [AKA machine learning] using large language models. I am not seeing many discussions about improving individual human intelligence or our collective intelligence. My personal knowledge mastery workshops focus on these and leave AI as a side issue when we discuss tools near the end of each workshop. There is enough to deal with in improving how we seek, make sense of, and share our knowledge.

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intractable human problems

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The current hype around ‘artificial intelligence’ in the form of generative pre-trained transformers and large language models is impossible to avoid. However, I have yet to try any of these out other than two questions posed to Sanctum.ai — auto-marketing — on my computer and not on some cloud. So far, these are my reasons for not jumping on this bandwagon.

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