Work is learning. Learning is the work.
Personal knowledge mastery
“it pisses me off that business schools virtually ignore sales, while fawning over marketing” – Tom Peters
Marketing is relatively easy to teach. Doing sales takes time, practice, and feedback. It’s fairly obvious why universities prefer to teach marketing. I don’t know of any programs where students do real sales calls. I guess that’s for after graduation.
Critical thinking – the questioning of underlying assumptions, including our own – is becoming all-important as we have to make our way in the network era. Critical thinking can be looked at as four main activities:
The are many ways we can add value to information and knowledge. I have described 14 ways of sense-making as part of personal knowledge mastery. One of these is the use of infographics, such as one on PKM published here. Recently, Tanmay Vora created a visual description of learning and leadership, based on an article by Kenneth Mikkelsen and me.
“One of the crucial leadership skills for today and future is ability to learn constantly from various high quality sources, synthesizing information and collaborating with a community to get a better grasp of the constantly changing reality.” – Leadership, Learning & PKM
“Work is learning, learning work” — that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Our increasing inter-connectedness is illuminating the complexity of our work environments. More connections create more possibilities, as well as more potential problems. On the negative side, we are seeing that simple work keeps getting automated, like automatic bank machines. Complicated work, for which standardized processes or software can be developed, usually gets outsourced to the lowest cost of labour. On the positive side, complex work can provide unique business opportunities. Because complex work is difficult to copy and creative work constantly changes, these are where long-term value for human work lies.
A recent posting for a six-week knowledge management contract was posted by the UNDP. When it comes to requests for proposals, if you ask for something, you will definitely get offers to produce it. But is this what they need?
“Conduct initial research on industry standards for KM measurement to inform the design of UNDP’s KM performance measurement, and develop tailored metrics for monitoring and measuring UNDP performance;
Identify and recommend suitable tools and mechanisms to collect the data necessary for KM monitoring;
Formulate standard operating procedures for data collection and monitoring and analysis of KM metrics.” —UNDP
A key part of the Seek > Sense > Share framework for PKM is to find new ways to explain things, or add value to existing information. Metaphors help us understand new concepts, as do visuals. When the folks at Venngage asked if they could create an infographic on PKM I saw it as another opportunity to make sense of the framework. I also like the fact that someone else made it, so that it was not just my perspective or priorities.
If you want to learn something about a field you know little about, what do you do? There are many areas where I know very little, and learning about them in depth would be a major time commitment. Is there anything we can do do to make it easier? I think so.
When I started writing this blog almost a dozen years ago, I was pretty excited to connect with people in other countries. Just over a year ago I launched the first ‘PKM in 40 days‘ online workshop. The idea was hatched in the Netherlands, inspired by my friends at Link2Learn. Now, after only six workshops, the global audience of PKM practitioners is growing. We have had individual participants from 21 countries, in addition to an international audience through UCLG who participated in a custom, private workshop this year.
An article in Time magazine on engineering serendipity discusses ways to create better physical environments as well as the push for software that will improve innovation by increasing the potential for serendipitous encounters. The author, Greg Lindsay, concludes that social networks are the key.
“Serendipity is the process through which we discover unknown unknowns. Understanding it as an emergent property of social networks, instead of sheer luck, enables us to treat it as a viable strategy for organizing people and sharing ideas, rather than writing it off as magic. And that, in turn, has potentially huge ramifications for everything from how we work to how we learn to where we live by leading to a shift away from efficiency — doing the same thing over and over, only a little bit better — toward novelty and discovery.” —Greg Lindsay, The Aspen Institute
