Work is learning. Learning is the work. Without AI.
Personal knowledge mastery
PKM = personal knowledge mastery
Most of us work with others. We cannot do everything alone. We need advice and guidance on complex matters. This requires a knowledge network. We most readily take advice from people we trust. By building a network and getting to know people with expertise we can learn and have access to knowledge beyond ours. Successful people have diverse, but select professional social networks.
“Perhaps the most central thrust in KM [knowledge management] is to capture and make available, so it can be used by others in the organization, the information and knowledge that is in people’s heads as it were, and that has never been explicitly set down.” —KM World
Knowledge management is a mixture of explicit and implicit knowledge sharing. It can be as explicit as an organizational knowledge base, or as implicit as the work culture. A lot depends on what the organization wants to preserve. Is it how-to knowledge, like a trade secret formula, or is it certain practices and norms that define the culture? Or is it both? Every organization has to define this for itself.
To be effective, knowledge management has to be part of the workflow. The people doing the work and making decisions how to do it must be involved. This starts with the discipline of personal knowledge mastery (PKM): a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world and work more effectively. PKM is an ongoing process of filtering information from our networks, creating knowledge individually and with our teams, and then discerning with whom and when to share the artifacts of our knowledge. PKM helps to put our personal knowledge maps out there for others to see.
Thank Goodness It’s Monday. Now that’s something we freelancers appreciate :) As part of the wonder of Monday, I am starting a series of posts, similar to Friday’s Finds, but posted on the best day of the week: Monday. I have no intention of making this a regular feature but from time to time on Monday, I will share something I think may be useful. This week I am sharing some of my social bookmarks that relate to personal knowledge mastery. Just look below the cartoon …
Last week I attended the Arts in a Digital World Summit in Montréal. The event launched the four-year funding program of $88.5 million aimed at amplifying “the quality, scale and sharing of Canadian art through digital technology”. One aspect of this fund that gives me confidence is the desire to fund many small projects of around $10,000 and also the willingness to invest in risky projects. Given the complexity of the challenge, using a probe-sense-respond approach only makes sense.
The presentation by Astra Taylor, author of The People’s Platform, was a highlight for me. Astra stated that the digital advertising model, which is the force behind platform capitalism, only reinforces economic inequity. She urged the audience to ‘occupy the internet’ especially since artists are those with the power to change society.
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:
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.
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 :
Inscription: http://communautesdepratique.com
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.
“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.
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’.
“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.