PKMastery

Personal knowledge mastery

from knowledge worker to master artisan

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A Foundation for Modern Work

My Personal Knowledge Mastery model of Seek > Sense > Share is focused on helping individuals work better in teams, and contribute to professional communities by developing and engaging their social networks to continuously learn. This approach has been used in several organizations. Today, it is critical to take control of your own learning and build a professional network. Engaging with other people, especially those different from us, is the key to making sense of information.

One reason the PKMastery framework is getting attention now is because work in the network era is changing the nature of the job. PKMastery requires that individuals take more responsibility for their learning, and that organizations give up some control. Automation is removing routine work from people’s jobs, leaving only non-standardized and more complex work. In this network economy that thrives on creativity, people have to not only stay current but create unique ways of operating and connecting.

The discipline of PKMastery helps to ensure that we remain connected to our human networks in order to maintain our curiosity and develop empathy for others. It is only by empathizing that we can truly understand the relationships in our social networks. Machines can analyze but only humans can feel.  The network economy is seeing the rise of knowledge artisans, who create new meaning through cooperation and building value with their peers.

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human networks connect through empathy

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We are only as good as our networks. Our decisions reflect the diversity of our networks. Complex problems usually do not have simple solutions but require a deep understanding of the context. How do we understand the complexity of social networks? Empathy puts us in other people’s shoes. We try to understand their perspective. Empathy is a requisite perspective for the network era. Empathy means engaging with others. The ability to connect with a diversity of people is the human potential of the Internet.

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knowledge catalysts add value

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In the article, The Creative World’s Bullshit Industrial Complex, Sean Blanda says the main interest of too many writers and pundits “is not in making the reader’s life any better, it is in building their own profile as some kind of influencer or thought leader”.

“The bullshit industrial complex is a pyramid of groups that goes something like this:

Group 1: People actually shipping ideas, launching businesses, doing creative work, taking risks and sharing first-hand learnings.

Group 2: People writing about group 1 in clear, concise, accessible language.

[And here rests the line of bullshit demarcation…]

Group 3: People aggregating the learnings of group 2, passing it off as first-hand wisdom.

Group 4: People aggregating the learnings of group 3, believing they are as worthy of praise as the people in group 1.

Groups 5+: And downward….

The Complex eventually becomes a full fledged self-sufficient ecosystem when people in group 4 are reviewing books by people in group 3 who are only tweeting people in group 2 who are appearing on the podcasts started by people in group 3.”

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collecting broken images

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Do you remember that piece of research that informed your thesis 18 years ago? I do, it’s called the SPATIAL model and is no longer online, except on this blog (part of it).

I was asked by a friend if I could recommend some online resources for students to help with research and studying. It took me one click: my social bookmarks on Student Resources.

Could you write a 10,000 word paper, with citations, on a subject you know fairly well: in the next 24 hours? I can and I have done it for clients. I can do it on Leadership, Social Learning, Innovation, and several other topics. I have thousands of half-baked ideas that can be transformed into a coherent narrative, given a serious editing effort with a clear objective.

Could you quickly recommend the core people who are influential in one of your professional areas? I can, with my Twitter lists — PBCC & pandemic.

These examples show how personal knowledge mastery is a discipline that makes my professional life easier and my work more effective. As Stephen B. Johnson says, “chance favors the connected mind”. We all have the tools available to create our outboard brains and offload some of the cognitive load of the network era, or as Dion Hinchcliffe recommends, “let the network do the work”.

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PKM in the Summer

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This is the third year of conducting my Personal Knowledge Mastery 40-day online workshops. The idea was to provide enough structure to get started on developing a PKM routine, some guided support, and time for reflection. Several people have found 40 days too little time and have taken the workshop more than once. This Summer I am initiating an experiment to see if a longer period of time makes a difference. The PKM in the Summer workshop will be 60 days, starting on 27 June 2016. There will be two activities per week, over nine weeks. This should accommodate any conflicting work and vacation schedules. As this is an experiment, the workshop is offered at a special price of $(US) 279.

We have had participants from around the globe over the past two years: AU, BE, CA, CH, CN, DE, ES, FR, IE, IN, IT, KR, NL, NO, UK, US, & ZA. Given time zone issues, having more time between activities may help people stay up to date. I find it valuable for everyone to get different cultural and geographic perspectives from the varied cohorts. My experience has also confirmed that doing these activities as a cohort is more effective than an individual self-paced program.

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PKM: to learn is to do

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I have called #PKMastery a swiss army knife for the network era because the concept is simple but the ways it can be used are almost limitless. Multinational companies, like Domino’s, are using the PKM framework for leadership development, ensuring senior staff improve their sense-making and media literacy skills. It is used in schools, universities, and by practitioners in many professions. While the concept of Seek > Sense > Share is relatively simple, developing mastery takes time. PKM is a discipline that requires practice.

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“modelling is the best way to teach”

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When we teach through modelling behaviour, the learner is in control, whereas teaching by shaping behaviour means the teacher is in control. In Western society, shaping has been the dominant mode for a very long time. But in other societies, it has not been the norm. For instance, Dr. Clare Brant (PDF) was the first Indigenous psychiatrist in Canada and a professor of Psychiatry at the University of Western Ontario. In 1982 he presented Mi’kmaq Ethics & Principles* which included an examination of the differences in teaching between native and non-native cultures.

Now the Teaching; Shaping Vs. Modelling

“This is a more technical kind of thing. The white people use this method of teaching their children – it’s called ‘shaping’. Whereas the Indians use ‘modelling’. Shaping is B.F. Skinner’s ‘Operant Conditioning’, if you want to look into that one. Say a white person is teaching a white kid how to dress – he uses the shaping method, one way being ‘rewarding successive approximations’ of the behaviour he wants. Some are really complicated; for instance, if a white woman wants to teach her kid how to dress, she puts his sock on halfway and encourages him to pull it up, finishes dressing him and says he’s a good boy having done that much. The next day he learns to pull the whole sock on, then the other sock. Now that process takes about six weeks. But the white mother who does not have all that much to do can take that time to do that sort of thing every morning to teach her kid how to dress. So in this group that we ran, with these young Native people in London, we started to sniff this out, and there is nothing random about this, as a matter of fact. I asked Mary, a Native person, how she taught her kid to dress and she said, ‘I didn’t, he just did it.’ And I said, ‘Well, what do you mean?’ It came to me that she did it until he was four or five years old, and then one day when the kid felt competent, he took over and did it himself. He did it then ever after, unless he was sick or regressed in some way.”

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enabling enterprise social networks

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Mark Britz says that, “your organization already has an enterprise social network (hint, it’s people not technology). A platform just exposes it.” But it’s not not about the tools either, as in many cases the medium changes the message. When the AgileBits team found they were using Slack for everything, it became overwhelming, much as email and its inevitable inbox overload, is common in too many organizations.

“Slack was simply too good for us to resist and as a result we preferred using it over all the other tools at our disposal … All of these interactions would happen in Slack, despite there being many other tools that are better suited. Tools like bug trackers and wikis would allow answers to be preserved so future questions wouldn’t even have to be asked but they weren’t as fun.

We all knew how great it would be to have a repository of knowledge for people to find their answers, but Slack was simply too good at providing the quick fix we all needed. Copying these answers from Slack to a permanent location didn’t release the same endorphins provided by Slack, so it seldom happened.” – Curing Our Slack Addiction

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bring your own network

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The day when a single person can work alone, without any help from others, is fast disappearing. Some individuals may still be able to freelance and work alone from time to time but most of us will have to work with others in order to get anything done in a networked society. About five years ago I worked for a large company with my Internet Time Alliance (ITA) colleagues, and this comment was written by our client at the end of the project.

“What the ITA group brought to the table in our engagement, in the person of Harold Jarche, was not only his extensive experience and network, but also the expertise of the rest of the Alliance and their networks as well. While we in our organization have networks of our own, the quality and extensiveness of the ITA network added a value that we would not have been able to tap alone, and led us to a superior solution that will better serve our customers.” – Corporate University Manager within Fortune 500 Health Insurance company

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unified models for work and learning

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There are two models that I regularly use when explaining how organizations need to integrate learning and working in the network era. Individuals need to master the ability to negotiate social networks, communities of practice, and teams doing complex or creative work. Personal knowledge mastery is the individual skill, while working out loud helps groups stay in close contact with the work flow. Everyone needs to be adept at cooperating in the openness of social networks in order to be open to possible innovative ideas. At the same time these workers have to be focused on co-creating value at work. They also need to find a trusted middle ground to test new ideas. Communities of practice become a business necessity and a professional development imperative. This is the network learning model.

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