PKMastery

Personal knowledge mastery

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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agile sensemaking

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“Complex environments represent a continuous challenge for sensemaking in organizations. Continuous ambiguity exerts continuous pressures on organizations to modify their patterns of interaction, information flow and decision making. Organizations struggle to address situations that are precarious, explanations that are equivocal and paradoxical, and cognitive dilemmas of all kinds. This creates a demand for innovative approaches in sensemaking. Since agility is what is required in navigating complexity, we can call these new approaches ‘agile sensemaking.'” —Bonnita Roy

Working in complex environments requires constant sensemaking, connecting outside the organization with the work being done inside. Increasing awareness of new ideas, methods, and processes often comes through serendipitous encounters outside the workflow. Radical innovation can appear here. Radical innovation only comes from diverse networks with large structural holes, according to Steve Borgatti. This is why our social networks cannot also be our work teams, or they become echo chambers. In our work teams we can focus on incremental innovation, to get better at what we already do. This is collaboration. Communities of practice then become a bridge on this network continuum.

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out on the edge

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Last month in Berlin I gave a keynote at the Landing Festival entitled, It’s your Network, Stupid. I explained that to find new ideas and information, loose social networks are best. Weak social ties enable us to find a wide variety of information and ideas, often relatively quickly using networked technologies. In this way a diverse social network can yield a lot of information.

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what they don’t teach at university, but should

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Even after four years of study, many students leave their institutions of higher learning only to find themselves inadequately prepared for what is next. University graduates often go on to get a certificate in an applied area in hopes of getting a job. Frequently graduate students who do not go into academia will find themselves adrift.

So what the heck have these institutions been doing with the valuable time of their students? Four years is a good chunk of time to accomplish something. We are told they are mastering a field. A field that often does not exist outside the institutional walls. But there are portable skills that can be learned WHILE at school. These are skills, like critical thinking, that universities purport to teach but usually do not.

No graduate should leave their institution without a good knowledge of the professional field in which they want to continue. There is no excuse today for students not to be connected to professionals outside their school. Keeping students focused only on their academic studies is akin to a prison sentence, expecting that the same world awaits as the one they left several years earlier.

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PKM made simple

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Here is a simple, but by no means only, method of putting personal knowledge mastery into practice. It is based on the seek > sense > share model.

Seek

  • Use a feed aggregator to collect all your online news and information resources in one place. I would suggest Feedly or Inoreader.
  • Carry a notebook to collect insights as you go through your day. A notes application for your mobile device would work as well.
  • Determine what areas you want to learn more about. Find others from whom you can learn. Identify people who share their knowledge on social media. Follow them and take notes, as above.

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continuous learning to hack uncertainty

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This week I will be speaking at the Landing Festival in Berlin. It is described as Europe’s biggest tech careers event: “two days of intensive learning and networking featuring talks, panels, expert sessions, workshops, a job fair, entertainment activities and a massive boat party to wrap up all the craziness”. My keynote will discuss the need for every professional to develop diverse knowledge networks and engage in communities of practice. The following day I will run a short workshop on personal knowledge mastery and how this discipline can specifically help to engage with social networks and communities. It is the ‘How’, following the ‘Why’ of my keynote. I am assuming this will be a younger audience than I usually present to, so I’m looking forward to possible different perspectives on work and learning.

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a foundation for the future of work

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So what is the future of work and how can we best learn how to adapt to a post-industrial, network economy? There is no shortage of future skills prescribed by various think-tanks and organizations. The World Economic Forum (2016) identified 10 work skills for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. McKinsey & Company (2017) stated that, “We will all need creative visions for how our lives are organized and valued in the future, in a world where the role and meaning of work start to shift”. PwC concluded (2017) that the nature of future jobs is unknown.

“It’s impossible to predict exactly the skills that will be needed even five years from now, so workers and organisations need to be ready to adapt – in each of the worlds we envisage. Inevitably, much of the responsibility will be on the individual. They will need not only to adapt to organisational change, but be willing to acquire new skills and experiences throughout their lifetime, to try new tasks and even to rethink and retrain mid‐career.” —PwC Workforce of the Future (PDF)

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learning to create the future of work

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I recently wrote that when we look at the future of work, the loss of current jobs, and the effects of automation we should use a compass to guide us, not a list of what the jobs of the future may look like. These kinds of maps get dated too quickly. In preparing for this new world of work, policy makers and organizational leaders should look at how they can enhance self-determination for everyone: by fostering autonomy, competence, and relatedness. We are moving into an age of augmented work where much of the value we create is intangible, the knowledge we require to work is implicit, and most of this will be learned informally, outside the classroom.

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constantly learning nodes

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Here are some thoughts about learning that I developed on this blog the past year.

We lack good models for organizing in a networked society. Many people are turning back to older, and outdated organizational models like nationalism and tribalism in an attempt to gain some stability. But most of our institutions and markets will fail to deliver in a network era society because they were never designed for one.

Perhaps the only unit of organization that is up to the task of working and living in networks is the individual human (the node). Change starts from within, yet almost all organizational transformation initiatives look at systems. Too much focus is on digital transformation and not human transformation. How do people transform? By doing things differently.

The biggest challenge we face is in educating citizens for the network era. Marina Gorbis in The Nature of the Future suggests four core skills:

  1. Sensemaking
  2. Social and emotional intelligence
  3. Novel and adaptive thinking
  4. Moral and ethical reasoning

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