PKMastery

Personal knowledge mastery

network literacies

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Distributed governance was part of the conversation at RESET18 in Helsinki last month, where I discussed networks, communities of practice, knowledge-sharing, and sense-making, in the context of the Finnish civil service. I concluded that a network society needs networked models for organizing and for learning. Governments and their departments need to transition to the network form. Each network form will be different, so there are few best practices to follow. New practices have to emerge from those testing the new methods.

New practices, and literacies, are needed to maintain our democracies and to help each citizen thrive in this newly connected world. Frameworks like personal knowledge mastery provide the key concepts and vocabulary to become network literate.

“The complexity of the media landscape today places high demands on our own digital and media literacies and the role of adult education, and indeed the entire education sector, is crucial if we are going to raise awareness of both the dangers and the opportunities of the digital world that is forming around us.

However, the task of enabling citizens to make sense of and navigate today’s ever-changing media landscape (i.e. media and information literacy) depends on a major coordinated investment in training and research involving many sectors of society. For this to happen we need coordination and incentives from governmental level, something that may be difficult in countries.” —Alistair Creelman

While in Helsinki I was interviewed on a number of questions that had been provided by civil servants, to inform part of a public sector training program. These interviews were put together as a five-part video and are available free online at eLearning Finland [eOppiva].

1. Civil servants using networks
2. Seek > Sense > Share model
3. Differences in working and learning in networks
4. Efficient networking
5. Civil servants in external networks

Several graphics are included in the presentation and I have put these together as a PDF — PKM for Civil Servants.

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podcasts

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I have been encouraged by several people over the years to start podcasting. So far, I prefer blogging as my main public sense-making platform, but I am open to be interviewed or have a discussion on other people’s podcasts. Two podcasts done in the last year were:

  1. Teaching in Higher Ed
  2. Pushing Beyond the Obvious

Tom Palmer recently interviewed me for his Wired Roots podcast.

“In this conversation, Harold and I talk about how his 21-year career in the Canadian military influences his work as a consultant, how Amazon excels in team learning, and how L&D professionals can break through organizational short-sightedness by becoming skilled networked learners and gaining personal knowledge mastery.”

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helping make the network smarter

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In what is likely the best example of my mantra that ‘work is learning and learning is the work’, Nokia’s Chairman Risto Siilasmaa describes how he learned about machine learning because everyone was talking about it but he still did not understand it enough to describe it. Frustrated, he was acting like many of his fellow executives

“I spent some time complaining. Then I realized that as a long-time CEO and Chairman, I had fallen into the trap of being defined by my role: I had grown accustomed to having things explained to me. Instead of trying to figure out the nuts and bolts of a seemingly complicated technology, I had gotten used to someone else doing the heavy lifting.” —HBR 2018-10-04

The result of what Siilasmaa learned is an excellent example of the integration of learning and work, a necessity in the network era workplace.

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learning as we work

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In an essay on cognitive coaching, Gary Klein recommends six mind shifts that trainers can use to help improve cognitive skills.

  1. From criticism to curiosity
  2. From following procedures to gaining tacit knowledge
  3. From getting through the material to encouraging curiosity
  4. From providing thorough explanations to providing focused explanations
  5. From explaining to discovering
  6. From evaluating to training

In section 2, seeing the invisible, Klein recommends several strategies to improve tacit thinking.

  1. Subtle cues
  2. Hindsight perspective
  3. Anticipating
  4. Shifting focus
  5. Fixation
  6. Hypothesis Testing
  7. Workarounds

Klein’s essay is written as advice for trainers but do we really need trainers or coaches to implement these recommendations? I have shown how the discipline of personal knowledge mastery, AKA agile sensemaking, can help people gain better insights and even help see contradictions by seeking disconfirming data. These are based on Klein’s book, Seeing What Others Don’t.

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a personal learning model

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The Seek > Sense > Share framework of personal knowledge mastery was the result of many iterations over almost 15 years. It is simple to understand but under it are many layers. You can keep digging for a lifetime as each part reveals deeper aspects — algorithms, heuristics, complexity, critical thinking, media literacy, cognitive load management, network analysis, etc.

Many people have shared their PKM routines and it is great to see variations on the theme, as there is no lock-step method or recipe to mastery. We must each find our own path as we likely will not keep to another person’s path over time. PKM is personal.

Clark Quinn has taken my Seek > Sense > Share framework and added a layer that makes it easier to understand. It is not too detailed but gives extra value. Clark has ‘added value‘, a key part of PKM.

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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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