When things go wrong, people have a tendency to want to blame someone, often as soon as possible. It makes us feel better to find the culprit or get the ‘bad apple’. We have the opposite tendency when it comes to ourselves. The cognitive dissonance of not meeting our self-image or expectations can be so powerful that we make up stories to cover our failures. And we actually believe them. This happens to judges, lawyers, doctors, nurses, and many other professionals. But it happens less frequently with pilots. Why? It’s all about the systems they work in.
PKMastery
Personal knowledge mastery
seeking and sense-making
How do you make sense of your work? Many of us subscribe to newspapers, magazines, web feeds, blogs, and other forms of push information. In themselves, these are low sense-making activities and often are difficult to share, due to digital rights management restrictions, or because of the format. I use Feedly to organize my web feeds and Diigo to capture what I find on the web. The key is to subscribe to a diverse assortment of perspectives and opinions.
implementing a useful model – 70:20:10
The 70:20:10 framework is a useful model based on observations that generally, people learn 70% of what they need to do their job from experience. About 20% is learned from exposure to new tasks or environments. Only 10% is learned through formal education. These numbers are not firm but they provide a rule of thumb, especially for planning and resource allocation to support learning at work.
The most important aspect of 70:20:10 is that it requires leadership to hold the space so that workplace learning is connected through experience, exposure, and education. Leaders have to promote learning and themselves master fast, relevant, and autonomous learning. There is no other way to address the many wicked problems facing us today. If work is learning and learning is the work, then leadership should be all about enabling learning. Holding space means protecting the boundaries so that people can work and learn.
Personal knowledge mastery is the core competency for each person working in the networked era. But organizations have to provide the support and remove barriers to learning. Leaders need to provide the space for learning.
the core competency for network era work
I developed the personal knowledge mastery (PKM) framework of Seek > Sense > Share from a need to stay current as a working professional. As a framework it is not a defined set of practices nor a recipe book, as there are many unique PKM routines. Since first writing about PKM in 2004, I have continuously worked at improving the model, identifying emergent practices and tools, and promoting the need to let people manage their own learning in the workplace. My conclusions in 2004 remain today:
My conclusion for a while has been that knowledge cannot be managed, and neither can knowledge workers. It will take a new social contract between workers and organizations in order to create an optimally functioning enterprise. Adding management and technology won’t help either. This is the crux of everything in the new “right-sized, lean, innovative, creative” economy – getting the right balance between the organizational structure and the knowledge workers.
the execution of education
“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.
thinking critically
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:
- Observing and studying our fields
- Participating in professional communities
- Building tentative opinions
- Challenging and evaluating ideas
co-creating knowledge
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
learning and the future of work
“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 simpler approach to km
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