PKMastery

Personal knowledge mastery

the agile sensemaking model

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“Research shows that teams will organize themselves in different ways in response to how different types of complexity strains their sensemaking capacities. In order to increase their sensemaking potential, teams will reorganize their relationships in recognizable ways. We can think of these as emergent patterns of collective sensemaking.” —Bonnitta Roy

The increasing complexity of work is a result of automation, such as AI & robots, who are taking away any repetitive tasks, leaving barely repeatable tasks for humans. In addition to this automation of any work that can be described in a flowchart, we also have a larger number of human connections to deal with and humans by nature are complex. Robin Dunbar showed that we are only able to have a maximum of about 150 real human relationships before our cognitive capabilities are maxed out. Note that 150 is the size of an infantry company, a standard size that has stood the test of battle and time. But I, and many others, have thousands of connections on social media platforms like LinkedIn. How can we make sense of these?

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sense-making beyond the outrage

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A number of people I know have recently left Facebook and/or Twitter. I can understand why, as I left Facebook about eight years ago. I was an early adopter and thought it was going to help make a better civil society — I was naive it seems. I still find Twitter useful but I have to be more careful on it now, especially so I don’t get mired in some toxic thread. Being able to read the threads (comments) of people you do not follow is a feature that only produces more outrage, but that is what engages people and sells advertising. So of course Twitter will reinforce this outrage.

I think it is essential for every citizen to be involved in sense-making in the emerging network society. Currently most of the platforms are controlled by value-extracting corporations focused on procuring behavioural data, identifying social connections, and selling this information to the highest bidder. This makes it difficult to promote a platform like Twitter in order to learn about social networks. But it is still useful, just not an example of a good corporate citizen.

The two consumer platforms I use most are Twitter, because I like its asymmetry, and LinkedIn because many of my clients are on it. I find LinkedIn useless for sense-making, as it’s difficult to curate or reference what I find. Engaged citizens have to be active in the ‘Wild West’ of consumer social media while also understanding their dark sides. We need to have a way to connect to new, interesting, and even distasteful opinions and ideas. This requires practices that are directly opposed to the algorithms that drive these social media platforms.

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networked social capital

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When FiveThirtyEight published the details of 3 million trolls and bots that were linked to the Russian-based company Internet Research Agency, they were merely providing data. Two researchers initially compiled the data. But by making the data public, FiveThirtyEight was able to engage a diverse group of widely varying expertise in order to make sense of it.

It is only with knowledge that we can examine data and turn it into information. FiveThirtyEight realized that a small group of experts was not enough. These data required a subject matter network to make sense of them. The initial results are interesting but so far there are no actionable insights for the average person or organization. As a society we have some more information but are still none the wiser in knowing what to do next. But it’s a start.

“Many other readers shared their works in progress, and given the sheer size of the data set, there is likely much more to come — as well there should be. Releasing the data was meant to preserve an important historical record, but analyzing it is the only way to understand what happened and bolster national security.” —538-Russian Trolls

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‘we’re living in a very liquid world’

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When I think back
On all the crap I learned in high school
It’s a wonder
I can think at all
And though my lack of education
Hasn’t hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall
—Paul Simon, Kodachrome (1973)

Nothing that you learned in school has prepared you for today. Nothing. You are not ready. For smug Canadians, consider that 2/3 of us think there is a crisis of asylum seekers at our borders. They are wrong. And even more worrying, Russian trolls may be behind this, or not.

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to know is to do

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Do we really understand tacit knowledge?, asks Haridimos Tsoukas in a 2002 paper. He bases his position on the work of Michael Polanyi in that all knowledge is personal and all knowing is through action. Tacit knowledge [I use the term implicit knowledge as it is easier to understand for non-native English speakers] is not merely explicit knowledge that has yet to be codified. Knowledge is personal.

Tsoukas states that:

“we do not so much need to operationalise tacit knowledge (as explained earlier, we could not do this, even if we wanted) as to find new ways of talking, fresh forms of interacting, and novel ways of distinguishing and connecting. Tacit knowledge cannot be ‘captured’, ‘translated’, or ‘converted’ but only displayed, manifested, in what we do. New knowledge comes about not when the tacit becomes explicit, but when our skilled performance – our praxis – is punctuated in new ways through social interaction.”

This is important for anyone working in training, education, knowledge management, and the various growing fields of ‘artificial intelligence’. Knowledge cannot be transferred. We can observe how people use their knowledge but even they cannot explain all of it.

“Although the expert diagnostician, taxonomist and cotton-classer can indicate their clues and formulate their maxims, they know many more things than they can tell, knowing them only in practice, as instrumental particulars, and not explicitly, as objects.”

It is only when we no longer think about something, like hammering a nail, that we can concentrate on the next level, like fixing the roof. We are constantly creating mental black boxes to lessen our cognitive load.

“Knowledge has, therefore, a recursive form: given a certain context, we blackbox – assimilate, interiorise, instrumentalise – certain things in order to concentrate – focus – on others.”

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teaching in higher ed podcast

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I was recently interviewed by Bonni Stachowiak, host of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast. The subject was my personal knowledge mastery framework which Bonni uses in her university teaching. You can listen to or download the podcast. Here are some lightly edited highlights of a very pleasant conversation with Bonni.

Knowledge

We can talk about knowledge bases and things like that, but for me, knowledge is that human sense making of experience, and exposure, and everything, and messy interactions, and feelings, and culture and all and all those kinds of things. And that’s really what knowledge is. Knowledge is the stuff that we use from which we take action. I use my knowledge to do whatever it is I’m going to do, to go to work, to make a decision, to do anything like that. Maybe it’s not a wonderful dictionary description of it, but it’s kind of a fuzzy place to start.

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knowledge-sharing paradox redux

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Knowledge-sharing in the Enterprise

An effective suite of enterprise social tools can help organizations share knowledge, collaborate, and cooperate – connecting the work being done with the identification of new opportunities and ideas. In an age when everything is getting connected, it only makes sense to have platforms in place that enable faster feedback loops inside the organization in order to deal with connected customers, suppliers, partners, and competitors. It takes a networked organization, staffed by people with networked learning mindsets, to thrive in a networked economy.

Getting work done today means finding a balance between sharing complex knowledge to get work done (collaboration), and innovating in internet time (cooperation).

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learning for the next industrial revolution

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Jesse Martin has posted a good article on Learning in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the era many say we are entering. It appears to be an era driven by “cyber-physical systems” . So what will the new learning systems look like in this era?

“I see a learning system that will arise based on the technologies that are forming the basis for the fourth industrial revolution. I believe that learning will play a central role throughout our lives, and the basic foundation will focus almost entirely on the general higher order thinking skills. The skills that teach us how to think, be creative, keep an open mind about what is going on around us, and provide us with the self awareness to know what we need to know and do to succeed.”

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making your education

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When I first encountered the web I was certain it would change the world. Today there is little doubt that networked society is developing into a very different world than the pre-internet days. My personal knowledge mastery (PKM) framework developed out of a need to master the exponentially growing information flows and personal connections enabled by digital networks. I developed my own ways to Seek > Sense > Share information, knowledge, and experiences. This framework is now used by many other people around the globe. I created my PKM methods out of necessity 14 years ago. Today, sensemaking frameworks are needed by everyone. As Steven B. Johnson says, “Chance favours the connected mind”. This has never been more true in our connected world.

The writers of Age of Discovery say that we are living in a period similar to the Renaissance of the early 1500’s. “I am still learning,” Michelangelo said in his eighties. He and Leonardo da Vinci epitomized the Renaissance, pushing against traditional boundaries and expanding knowledge and understanding. The Renaissance brought wonderful new discoveries (universities, astronomy, print) as well as new challenges (the pox, war, mass slavery). Our age is bringing similar discoveries (nano materials, gene therapy, artificial intelligence) and new threats (Ebola, extremism, climate change).

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