PKMastery – Page 16 – Harold Jarche

the learning loop

2021-03-142017-01-09 by Harold Jarche

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.

pkm 2016

2017-02-102016-12-21 by Harold Jarche

“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.

closing the learning-knowledge loop

2019-01-012016-12-08 by Harold Jarche

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’.

no shortcuts to mastery

2018-08-022016-12-05 by Harold Jarche

“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.

custom pkm workshops

2016-12-212016-11-29 by Harold Jarche

Do you need to develop and support a digitally savvy workforce that can continuously learn? Personal knowledge mastery develops four critical future work skills, as identified by the Institute for the Future: sense-making, social intelligence, new media literacy, and cognitive load management. PKM feeds working out loud and organizational knowledge management.

network era km

2016-11-21 by Harold Jarche

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.

our post-truth moment

2016-12-202016-11-18 by Harold Jarche

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.

working out loud in perpetual beta

2019-08-302016-11-07 by Harold Jarche

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

Share a purpose
Make a connection
Make a contribution
Share your progress
Share a need
Celebrate, Help
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.

it’s not a skills gap

2018-12-142016-11-03 by Harold Jarche

The lack of skills is not the main problem facing most organizations today, in spite of what many managers and executives might say.

Researchers Dave Swenson and Liesl Eathington identified several factors contributing to hiring challenges, but a widespread lack of skilled workers was not one them … The Iowa researchers’ conclusion? “When employers say there’s a skills gap, what they’re often really saying is they can’t find workers willing to work for the pay they’re willing to pay,” —GE Reports

Neither is a lack of tools the core issue in organizational performance. Many organizations have more tools than they need. I worked with a company that had several hundred software platforms and programs at its disposal. It still had issues around sharing knowledge, managing institutional memory, and collaborating across departments.

Tools and skills are easy-to-fill buckets, but meta-competencies of learning to learn and working in digital networks take significant time, effort, and support to fill. A long-term strategy to support these meta-competencies is lacking in most organizations today. Everyone wants a quick fix. Projects are designed around clear short-term deliverables. Few measure competencies for the long term.

the neo-generalist

2019-06-262016-09-07 by Harold Jarche

A neo-generalist is somewhere between a polymath and a hyperspecialist. One metaphor used by the authors of The Neo-Generalist is ‘frequency hopping’, “wandering, accumulating, sampling, mixing, putting into practice what they learn.” Kenneth Mikkelsen and Richard Martin have written a book that defies the formula of most business and management books. Instead of one or two easily understood ideas, they offer a cornucopia of ideas, perspectives, and opinions. If you just read all the books they mention, you would be much the wiser.

“The jack [of all trades] is a lifelong learner, a trickster who will acquire the skills to navigate multiple domains … It is why this book is called The Neo-Generalist rather than The Neo-Specialist. It is about people who can specialise as the context requires it but whose personal preferences lie in the area of polymathic generalism, where they are able to exercise their curiosity and pursue diverse interests by choice, through the confluence of both preference and context.”