PKMastery

Personal knowledge mastery

mastery and models

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Personal Knowledge Mastery

Harvard Business Review described The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge, as one of the seminal management books of the previous 75 years. The five disciplines necessary for a learning organization are:

  1. Personal Mastery
  2. Mental Models
  3. Shared Vision
  4. Team Learning
  5. Systems Thinking (which integrates the other four)

These disciplines have influenced my professional work which is based on individuals taking control of their learning and professional development and actively engaging in social networks and communities of practice. In this article I want to focus on the first two disciplines: Mastery and Models.

Personal knowledge mastery (PKM) is a framework I have developed over the past 12 years. It is an individual, disciplined process by which we make sense of information and our interactions with people and ideas. While it is an individual discipline, PKM is of little value unless the results are shared by connecting to others, and contributing to meaningful conversations. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts as we build on the knowledge of others. As knowledge workers or citizens, PKM is our part of the social learning contract. Without effective PKM at the individual level, social learning has less value.

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pkm à montréal

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Il devient de plus en plus évident que plusieurs de nos structures organisationnelles actuelles et leurs approches de leadership sont inadéquates pour un monde où les réseaux fluides ont remplacé les hiérarchies rigides du passé. Un nouveau paradigme de gestion émerge de cette nouvelle réalité.

Nous devons revoir nos structures et systèmes d’environnement de travail pour le Beta perpétuel — le changement en continu. J’aide les dirigeants et leurs équipes à s’adapter à ce nouveau paradigme. En travaillant sur l’apprentissage social et le leadership connecté, j’offre de l’accompagnement pragmatique et pratique sur la façon de travailler en mode «Beta» perpétuel en utilisant le levier des réseaux sociaux, des communautés de pratique et du PKM, le Personal Knowledge Mastery.

Je présenterai une introduction de mon atelier et ma stratégie PKM pour survivre et vous épanouir dans ce nouvel environnement, à Montréal:

L’atelier du 15 mars 2017 inclura les sujets suivants :

  • Découverte de votre réseau de connaissance
  • Introduction aux stratégies de gestion de l’information pour vaincre l’infobésité
  • Utilisation stratégique et pragmatique des réseaux sociaux à votre avantage

Inscription: http://communautesdepratique.com

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the learning loop

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John Boyd’s OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) was developed as a framework to help pilots make better decisions in battle. Since its inception in the 1970’s it has been adapted for other areas of operations, including business.

“Decision makers gather information (observe), form hypotheses about customer activity and the intentions of competitors (orient), make decisions, and act on them. The cycle is repeated continuously. The aggressive and conscious application of the process gives a business advantage over a competitor who is merely reacting to conditions as they occur or has poor awareness of the situation. Especially in business, in which teams of people are working the OODA Loop, it often gets stuck at the “D” (see Ullman) and no action is taken allowing the competition to gain the upper hand or resources to be wasted.” —Wikipedia

I came across the OODA Loop while in the military and have referred to it a few times, but it was not a major influence on my own thinking, or so I thought.

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pkm 2016

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“Any man who reads too much and uses his brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.” —Albert Einstein

Personal knowledge mastery is the ability to make sense of our digital and physical surround. It is a discipline that effectively filters ‘fake news’ and counters the trend to a ‘post-truth’ era. PKM puts us in charge of our learning. The PKM framework shows the need to develop a knowledge network and connect with mechanical and human filters, curators, and aggregators of information. From this diverse source of information and knowledge each person must develop appropriate sense-making methods. These are many and varied and there is no one correct method. While seeking information, through reading and other methods, is fine, one must do something with it. This is sense-making. It takes time, effort, practice, and reflection.

Validating, synthesizing, and customizing our thoughts are one way to make sense for ourselves. By sharing these thoughts and ideas as concrete artifacts we expose ourselves to criticism, but also provide the opportunity to build upon our knowledge. Sharing openly and as widely as possible increases the opportunities for serendipitous connections that may lead to innovation.

PKM is based on the premise that work is learning, and learning is the work.

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closing the learning-knowledge loop

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For 10 years Jane McConnell has been researching organizations in the digital age. The latest report surveyed 311 people from 27 countries, representing a variety of global companies from 18 market sectors. Participants responded to an in-depth online survey of over 100 questions. I was a member of the Advisory Board.

I would like to focus on one finding that Jane discussed recently on LinkedIn Pulse.

11. Learning is easier than remembering.

Learning in the natural flow of work is becoming easier. E-learning, real-time access to experts and communities of practice facilitate learning while working. 56% now say it is easy, compared to 23% three years ago. Responsibility for learning lies primarily with people themselves, rather than their manager or the HR department.

Remembering, or retaining knowledge and know-how when people leave the organization is extremely difficult. In the last three editions of the report, fewer than 15% of organizations expressed confidence in retaining knowledge and know-how when people leave. These organizations differ from the others in several ways, but two primary distinctions are that people tend to work out loud and leadership styles in the organization are open and participatory.

Learning in organizations seems to be easy, while remembering and using knowledge is hard. This highlights the difference between the disciplines of ‘Organizational Learning’ and ‘Knowledge Management’.

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no shortcuts to mastery

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“Teaching and coaching are fundamentally about helping making other people better. Learning to do this can’t be done via shortcuts. It requires a willingness to be patient, to take your time and have a deep desire to develop your craft.” —@IamSporticus

This has been my challenge with personal knowledge mastery. I learned about PKM on my own and through practice, reflection, and connecting with others. I have developed and modified the Seek > Sense > Share model over twelve years. Through this process I have achieved some level of mastery, but I have more to learn.

When I ran my first PKM workshop it was a day-long event through the University of Toronto’s iSchool. But I soon realized that one day was not enough time. Without time to follow-up and reflect, I was merely exposing people to some ideas, and few were able to take any action on them. Later, I developed the online 40 day program and this was well received but many people asked to do it again as they had not been able to do all of the activities. This year I extended the 40 day program to 60 days. Some people excelled with this format. Others still did not have enough time.

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network era km

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I developed the network learning model from various sources over a decade as a way to describe the need to connect outside our workplaces in order to stay current in our professions and to be open to new and innovative ideas. The triple operating system is an organizational perspective on this relationship. In the network era, we need to understand the three network types that enable knowledge to flow: Connectivity Networks, Alignment Networks, and Productivity Networks. Organizations need to support the connections between these three network types, by Weaving, Facilitating, and Coordinating: both inside and outside the firewall. This is network-centric work & learning.

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our post-truth moment

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post-truth (adjective) Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. —Oxford Dictionaries

Social media extend emotion, obsolesce the linearity and logic of print, retrieve oral speech, and when pushed to their limit, reverse into constant outrage. This is the post-truth era. Our society has had a couple of decades to adapt to a shift that has been coming since the telegraph turned words into electrical pulses, but has increased its velocity with the advent of the web. This communications shift to the network era will continue to accelerate. We are the media, and the media are us.

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working out loud in perpetual beta

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So it’s international working out loud week [AKA Narrating Our Work] and this year people are encouraged to follow a seven-day structure.

  1. Share a purpose
  2. Make a connection
  3. Make a contribution
  4. Share your progress
  5. Share a need
  6. Celebrate, Help
  7. Plan next steps

These seven components can help make work teams more effective as they collaborate to achieve some purpose. Narrating Our Work requires purpose, or it’s not work. Collaboration means taking action. In order to learn, people need to share. They need to make connections, between ideas as well as people.

But Narrating Our Work needs people who are actively engaged in learning. If not, the work space can become an echo chamber. Experimentation with alternatives is how we learn to do new things. This is what #wolweek encourages. Doing this outside the work team means it can be more playful and creative. This is why we all need to find communities of practice beyond our work teams.

We also need to be aware of what is happening outside our spheres of influence. We need to be curious and find others who are not like us. This means we have to give without expectation of direct benefit. This is cooperation. Our social networks can provide this diversity and increase the potential for serendipitous discoveries. “Chance favors the connected mind”, says Stephen B. Johnson.

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