PKMastery

Personal knowledge mastery

trusted filters

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A recent study of over 5,000 US college students — Across the Great Divide — examined how they engage with news media. Not surprisingly, Facebook is a major social media source of news and conservative-leaning students prefer Fox News while liberal-leaning students prefer the New York Times. Faculty play a significant role in getting students to pay attention to news and to look at it more critically.

“It is notable that finding out about news from professors served both purposes — making the classroom an interesting crossroad between academia and daily life. Though professors may not be intentionally teaching news literacy, they may well be demonstrating that familiarity with news is a social practice and a form of civic engagement … Our findings suggest faculty have great potential to use discussions about news to model critical inquiry as a lifelong practice as well as practical ways to ascertain the trustworthiness of news sources. And while faculty may feel ill-equipped to engage students in discussion about highly charged and controversial topics, learning how to have these conversations is itself a valuable learning opportunity.” —FirstMonday

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user-generated content

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Content creation, a subset of sensemaking, is difficult. It takes time and effort. According to a 2019 survey of 213 North American workers conducted by Degreed, most sharing of information is in responding to other content found in the flow of work or learning. A lot of user-generated content is sharing content that has been created by others.

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finding and sharing information

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One of the challenges we face in our professional and personal lives is making sense of the flow of information that passes by us each day and then aligning that with our current priorities and challenges. The seek > sense > share framework of personal knowledge mastery is a simple method to help us stay focused in our sensemaking. The image below shows how information and knowledge can flow when people develop filters to seek information, take time and effort to make sense of it, and then share appropriately, often adding value to what they share.

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working collaboratively and learning cooperatively

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Improving Organizational Performance

Organizational performance improvement is comprised of reducing errors and increasing insights, according to Gary Klein. For the past century, management has primarily focused on error reduction, with practices such as Six Sigma, especially in manufacturing.

“Fifty-eight of the top Fortune 200 companies bought into Six Sigma, attesting to the appeal of eliminating errors. The results of this ‘experiment’ were striking: 91 per cent of the Six Sigma companies failed to keep up with the S&P 500 because Six Sigma got in the way of innovation. It interfered with insights.” —Gary Klein

Learning and development (L&D) practices reflect this priority on error reduction. But knowledge work, especially creative work, is not mere production.

“Visualize the workflow of a physical job: produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce.

Now visualize the workflow of a creative knowledge worker: nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, flash of brilliance, nothing, nothing, nothing.” —Jay Cross (1944-2015)

Based on 120 case studies, Gary Klein identified five types of ‘triggers’ that produced insights.

  1. Contradictions
  2. Creative Desperation
  3. Connections
  4. Coincidences
  5. Curiosity

Most of these five triggers can be enhanced through informal and social learning, and the individual practice of personal knowledge mastery. Insights often come while working, resting, and playing — or even in the shower — but not while undergoing formal education or training.

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sensemaking in a networked world

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It’s a networked world

As we become more connected we should not be cutting out social media, instead we should be using them in smarter ways so that we are sensemaking beyond the outrage.

Don’t teach people how to fish. Teach people to learn for themselves how to fish and then they can learn anything else for a lifetime — citizen sensemaking.

Filter failure is a human failure. It means we are not connected to trusted communities that have the cognitive diversity we need to make important decisions.

We need to organize our workplaces better

Organizations need to make time and space available for conversations inside teams, across teams, and outside the organization —  it’s about finding community.

A combination of curiosity and resolve enables continuous learning while still getting things done. This requires an attitude of life in perpetual beta.

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self-perception of knowledge

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Sensemaking does not have to be a complicated affair. I have recently had several conversations with people who have simplified their sensemaking processes — using fewer tools and streamlining processes — quite often accepting the fact they won’t capture everything. I have described personal knowledge mastery made simple to show that you can start without having to learn a whole bunch of practices and procedures. A core part of PKM is adding value — for yourself, and others. If you are not adding value, you are making noise.

It seems that social media are influencing how people read, especially when viewing links and summaries in a news feed. My own experience is that only 0.04% of people who view my Tweets on Twitter click on the link to read the full article. It is reported that 67% of Americans get their news from social media, particularly Facebook [I am not on Facebook], however —

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methods for mastery

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I recently came across two methods to implement aspects of personal knowledge mastery. The first, by Angelika Mittelmann, uses my Seek > Sense > Share framework to create a ‘fitness circuit’ which includes warm-up, starting, and sustaining exercises. These are quite detailed but are good for people looking for inspiration to start the PKM discipline. Mittelman concludes, and I agree, “As every person is different, there is no standardized PKM.”

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“taking responsibility for our own work and learning”

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“To a great extent PKM [personal knowledge management] is about shifting responsibility for learning and knowledge sharing from a company to individuals and this is the greatest challenge for both sides. Companies should recognise that their employees are not ‘human resources’, but investors who bring their expertise into a company. As any investors they want to participate in decision-making and can easily withdraw if their ‘return on investment’ is not compelling. Creativity, learning or desire to help others cannot be controlled, so knowledge workers need to be intrinsically motivated to deliver quality results. In this case ‘command and control’ management methods are not likely to work.

Taking responsibility for own work and learning is a challenge for knowledge workers as well. Taking these responsibilities requires attitude shift and initiative, as well as developing personal KM knowledge and skills. In a sense personal KM is very entrepreneurial, there are more rewards and more risks in taking responsibility for developing own expertise.” —Lilia Efimova (2004)

Lilia’s writing about personal knowledge management was my inspiration to create a framework for sensemaking in this digitally networked world. I was looking for a way to connect and build my knowledge networks. The personal knowledge mastery concept led me to test out and develop ways to inform my own practice. I saw my blog as a platform to make implicit knowledge (e.g. not codified or structured) more explicit, through the process of regularly writing out my thoughts and observations.

Lilia’s 2010 post on teams, communities, and networks inspired my many versions of the perpetual beta model.

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filter failure is a human failure

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There was an explosion on social media over an incident between school boys, on an official school trip to demonstrate in Washington DC, shown in a video vocally berating a Native American elder. Here is one of the latest articles about it, showing additional video — don’t doubt what you saw with your eyes. Mainstream media, like our own Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, are trying to establish a very difficult-to-find middle ground. I have opinions on what I have seen and read but I am not ready to share these in public. I am talking about them in private with some trusted friends and colleagues. I will share if and and when it is appropriate.

“It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure”, wrote Clay Shirky a decade ago. As the online space of social media gets more polluted and manipulated by trolls, bots, and hidden agendas, then filters become critical. Sensemaking cannot be done alone. Every thinking person has to find ways to understand issues of importance. If professional journalists can be co-opted by bots, what about the rest of us?

“Using bots to seed a divisive meme is akin to lightly blowing on an ember to start a fire. In a healthy society, that ember quickly burns out, starved for fuel. In a society in transition, the landscape is littered with desiccated institutions and ideas, ready to ignite.” —John Robb

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learning in complexity and chaos

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Most of our current work structures are designed to address complicated situations, such as constructing a building, launching a campaign, or designing a piece of equipment. But more of our challenges are complex and cannot be solved in a standard way —  inequality, refugees, populism, racism. Whenever people are involved, within a global context of climate change, the situation is likely complex. In complex situations there is less reliance on detailed plans and analysis and a greater emphasis on continuous experimentation coupled with good observation and tracking. We have to learn constantly in complexity.

Complexity & Chaos

According to the Cynefin framework we should Probe > Sense > Respond when dealing with complexity, as opposed to Analyze > Sense > Respond when the situation is complicated. Mechanical systems are complicated, but human systems are complex. It means that we cannot over-plan, though planning itself prepares us to deal with what emerges as we probe complex situations and environments. In complicated conditions we can rely on established good practices, but in complex ones we need to continuously develop our own emergent practices.

In Chaos: A User’s Guide, Bruno Marion concludes that the world today is not just complex, but even chaotic.

“Never in the history of humanity has a single human being had so much power. Never in the history of humanity have YOU had so much power!

Optimistic or pessimistic, it is like being a spectator of a film of which we seem to know the ending, whether happy or unhappy. Today one must cease to be a passive spectator but an actor in this fast-changing world.”

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