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.
PKMastery
Personal knowledge mastery
a foundation for the future of work
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)
learning to create the future of work
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.
constantly learning nodes
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:
- Sensemaking
- Social and emotional intelligence
- Novel and adaptive thinking
- Moral and ethical reasoning
professional learner’s toolkit
Jane Hart describes a Modern Professional Learner’s Toolkit as having several components: resources, networks, devices, etc. I have used Jane’s framework to look at my own practice.
Browser & Search Engine: I use three browsers (Firefox, Safari, Chrome) and two search engines (StartPage & DuckDuckGo). Each browser has different security and privacy settings, depending on what type of resource I need to access. For example, some sites will not give you access if you use an Ad Blocker. On Chrome I have no extensions, and only use it to access LinkedIn and Google services, which I know track me. On Firefox I have several privacy tools.
Trusted Web Resources: CBC News provides me with a Canadian perspective while The Guardian and BBC give me different ones. I also read Spiegel in English. I ensure online security by using a password manager: 1Password.
Curation Tools: My aggregator of choice is Feedly and I keep social bookmarks in Diigo. Long reads go to Pocket.
Course Platforms: I have not taken a formal course for a very long time.
Social Networks: My preferred conversational and sharing network is Twitter. I am using LinkedIn more frequently but have stopped posting to its Pulse platform and keep all my posts on my blog. I left Facebook many years ago.
Personal Information System: My blog is my main personal information system, hence this post. Other sense-making and reflection is done offline, with handwritten notes or text files kept in an active folder.
Blogging Tool: This blog is built on WordPress open source software, designed and hosted by Tantramar Interactive.
Preferred Office Suite: I use the Apple iWork suite: Keynote especially.
Communication & Collaboration: Zoom for meetings and video conferencing is my preferred platform and I have a Pro account which is well worth the $15/month price. I am also active in communities of practice hosted on Slack and SocialCast.
Smart Device: I have one iPhone, and not even the latest. The most used app is the camera.
how we learn – review
How We Learn by Benedict Carey is focused mostly on memory and learning for recall but it is a good read and there is likely something new about learning here for anyone. Carey is a journalist who went through much of the research on memory in order to make sense himself. By synthesizing and comparing the research on memory and learning, he has done a great service to the non-academic.
One of the first principles discussed is how memory works: “Any memory has two strengths, a storage strength and a retrieval strength.”
‘Yet there are large upsides to forgetting, too. One is that it is nature’s most sophisticated spam filter. It’s what allows the brain to focus, enabling sought-after facts to pop to mind … “The relationship between learning and forgetting is not so simple and in certain important respects is quite the opposite of what people assume,” Robert Bjork, a psychologist as the University of California, Los Angeles, told me. “We assume it’s all bad, a failure of the system. But more often, forgetting is a friend to learning” … Using memory changes memory — and for the better. Forgetting enables and deepens learning, by filtering out distracting information and by allowing some breakdown that, after reuse, drives retrieval and storage strength higher than they were originally.’
Carey, paraphrasing Louis Pasteur, says that, “Chance feeds the tuned mind”. When we are tuned to a problem or topic, our mind sees more related cues. “When we are working on a paper about the Emancipation Proclamation, we’re not only tuned into racial dynamics on the subway car, we’re also more aware of our reactions to what we’re noticing.”
systems thinking
Leyla Acaroglu has an excellent post on Tools for Systems Thinkers: The 6 Fundamental Concepts of Systems Thinking.
“In this series on systems thinking, I share the key insights and tools needed to develop and advance a systems mindset for dealing with complex problem solving and transitioning to the Circular Economy … *There are way more than six, but I picked the most important ones that you definitely need to know, and as we progress through this systems thinking toolkit series, I will expand on some of the other key terms that make up a systems mindset.” —Leyla Acaroglu, 2017-09-07
These are practical tools to improve anyone’s practice of personal knowledge mastery and I look forward to the rest of the posts in the series [scroll to end]. I have taken the six tools and added how they can be used in PKM.
the medium is the message
Hossein Derakhsahn states that with social media platforms like Facebook, “The very idea of knowledge itself is in danger”. He goes on to describe how the web started as a text-based medium but has flipped into a new form of broadcast television.
“Social networks, though, have since colonized the web for television’s values. From Facebook to Instagram, the medium refocuses our attention on videos and images, rewarding emotional appeals—‘like’ buttons—over rational ones. Instead of a quest for knowledge, it engages us in an endless zest for instant approval from an audience, for which we are constantly but unconsciouly performing. (It’s telling that, while Google began life as a PhD thesis, Facebook started as a tool to judge classmates’ appearances.) It reduces our curiosity by showing us exactly what we already want and think, based on our profiles and preferences. Enlightenment’s motto of ‘Dare to know’ has become ‘Dare not to care to know.’” —WIRED 2017-10-19
creating resilient knowledge networks
The personal knowledge mastery framework is a combination of seeking knowledge, making sense of it, and sharing it with others. It can become a long-term discipline of individually constructed enabling processes to help each of us make sense of our world, work more effectively, and contribute to society. Two key variables are how we make sense of knowledge and how we share it, in order to: seek > sense > share.
intellectual craftsmanship
I was recently referred to a most interesting article, Intellectual Craftsmanship, via Nicole Martin who had recently completed my PKM Workshop. It is a part of C. Wright Mills’ larger work, The Sociological Imagination (1959).
“Hailed upon publication as a cogent and hard-hitting critique, The Sociological Imagination took issue with the ascendant schools of sociology in the United States, calling for a humanist sociology connecting the social, personal, and historical dimensions of our lives. The sociological imagination Mills calls for is a sociological vision, a way of looking at the world that can see links between the apparently private problems of the individual and important social issues.” —Google Books
The above description aligns with the personal knowledge mastery framework: PKM is a unified framework of individually-constructed enabling processes to help each of us make sense of our world, work more effectively, and contribute to society.