PKMastery – Page 21 – Harold Jarche

knowledge is personal

2019-03-062014-12-14 by Harold Jarche

Knowledge management, for me, is personal.

A big conceit of the knowledge management (KM) field is that knowledge can be transferred, but unlike information or data, it cannot. Knowledge is personal. While knowledge cannot really be transferred, our experiences can be shared. Perhaps that is why we love stories. They are a glimpse into others’ knowledge, more nuanced than any other communication medium.

Stories make us human, and the best people to learn from are those who are able to admit that they mismanaged, botched, or bungled something. Of course, this can be a real challenge in organizations that do not discuss failure. Is failure an option in your organization? If not, how can you learn from it? Research shows that our memories get worse over time, but our stories, as we remember them, become much clearer. We have a propensity for self-delusion, something every jury member should always keep in mind. Fiction (story) is much more powerful than non-fiction. Would it not be more effective if we shared knowledge as stories, in education and at work? We hear a lot about the importance of curation in the digital workplace today, but what if our curators were also story tellers?

Friday’s favourites

2016-08-232014-12-05 by Harold Jarche

I wrote my first Friday Find in May, 2009. It was an attempt to make my finds on Twitter more explicit, as I noticed I was sharing and viewing a lot of information but not doing anything with it. My current practice is to summarize what I have found on various social media platforms (Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, private channels) and create a blog post every two weeks.

With Twitter, I use the ‘favourite’ function (star) [Twitter has now changed this to a heart] to mark any tweets I wish to review for later. Some of these are saved for later reading, others get reviewed fortnightly. On review, some make the cut for the Friday’s Finds post, though these are the minority. Any I wish to keep for later are added to my social bookmarks and categorized for easier search and retrieval.

the future will be distributed

2022-12-022014-12-03 by Harold Jarche

Is this the journalism of the future?

“We can conjecture, for example, that the journalism of the future will be distributed — with every individual in society playing a continuous role in providing the function. Indeed, given the primary importance and power of True Information to a well functioning Abundance Society, we might well expect that providing honest and thoughtful evaluation of experiences will become one of the principal activities in the future. Perhaps a main portion of the economy of Abundance will involve having experiences, evaluating them and curating them in a collective effort to ensure that every member of society is consistently presented with the best possible set of experiences for them to encounter at every moment.” —Reinvent Everything

books in perpetual beta

2015-07-202014-12-01 by Harold Jarche

Finding Perpetual Beta is now in production. This new ebook is part of the continuing journey to understand how individuals and organizations can manage fundamental changes in networked society, business, and education. It is a series of reflections on the themes presented in Seeking Perpetual Beta, published in April 2014. It questions the status quo of how organizations are structured in order to get work done. In addition, there is an expanded Part 2 on personal knowledge mastery (PKM), a foundational discipline for working in the network era and a creative economy.

Here are some highlights, covering the main themes in Part 1: The Network Era.

Learning-oriented marketing

2014-11-25 by Harold Jarche

The best way to understand your markets in the network era is by learning together. If markets are conversations, then the quality of your conversations will affect your value exchanges. Your markets will learn with or without your company. But when you learn with and from your customers, marketing and learning become the same. This is often lost in one-way broadcast marketing messages that are not directly connected to customer service or even product development. Network era marketing can benefit from a new learning focus. Marketing has to be connected to the rest of the company as well as the entire value network.

“People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.” – Cluetrain

Inspiration for Working Out Loud

2017-06-112014-11-18 by Harold Jarche

It’s International Working Out Loud Week, also known as #WOLWeek. Working Out Loud is a relatively new term for me, picking it up from John Stepper in 2012. I have used the term, narrating your work, which to me is the same thing, though some may differ. My observation is that combining transparency (in the workplace) with narration (of work) results in increased serendipity, or more chances of fortuitous outcomes. My own working out loud on this blog has resulted in speaking opportunities and meeting interesting clients. The more you give, the more you get; though not in any way how you may have expected it.

Simon Terry recently asked me, “Who inspires you to practice and learn as you work out loud?”

Working and Learning Out Loud

2018-08-192014-11-10 by Harold Jarche

Working out loud is a way to ensure others know what you are doing and to be conscious of your own work. It is being mindful of your work and how it may influence others. But working out loud is nothing if there is no time taken for reflection. Learning out loud takes you to a different level, one that may seem even more precarious. It’s sharing your half-baked ideas with the world. But these ideas, combined with others over time, can build a resilient web of innovation.

Working out loud connects us as professionals and humans. It is a highly social activity. It also exposes us, so it requires trust. While we may get interesting ideas from our informal networks, such as on social media, we still need trusted spaces to test things out. A place to test new ideas is often the missing link between doing work and leisure time. We may see something interesting while engaging on social media at night, but when it comes time to go to work, there is no easy way to make the connection. At work we need to stay focused. We might have a chance for a quick chat over lunch, but for the most part we focus on getting things done.

What are you doing with your 70%?

2014-11-05 by Harold Jarche

The 70:20:10 (Experience, Exposure, Education) Framework is focused on learning at work, not in a classroom, and not in a lab. Charles Jennings has described workplace learning as based on four key activities:

Exposure to new and rich experiences.
The opportunity to practice.
Engaging in conversation and exchanges with each other.
Making time to reflect on new observations, information, experiences, etc.

Studies show that informal learning accounts for between 70 and 95% of workplace learning [USBLS: 70%; Raybould: 95%; EDC: 70%; CapitalWorks: 75%; OISE: 70%; eLG: 70%; Allen Tough: 80%]. Gary Wise extrapolated Josh Bersin’s data from 2009 and found that as much as 95% of workplace learning is informal. Offering only sanctioned courses as professional development is completely inadequate in a complex work environment. It is arrogant to think that we can know in advance what people need to learn on the job today. Everyone needs to experiment, learn from experience, and share with colleagues, as part of their work.

Why mastering personal knowledge is critical to success

2016-11-232014-10-21 by Harold Jarche

This is the synopsis of a webinar for TP3 Australia I presented last evening (my time).

Three major external forces and trends are influencing the future of work:

Technology is changing Expectations … of what is possible
Globalization is changing Value Creation … from tangible to intangible, as culture gets digitized
Social Media are changing Relationships … to a ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate world

Automation is ending the industrial era. Examples include lawyers replaced by software, bank staff replaced by websites, travel agents replaced by apps, and soon drivers will be replaced by robots. Many workplaces are at a break-point between the industrial era and the network era, with industrial era systems and structures unable to adapt to a world of mostly non-standardized, non-repeatable work processes.

Everything Connects

2025-04-202014-09-29 by Harold Jarche

A valuable practice advocated by the authors of Everything Connects is the art and craft of blueprinting, centred on the practice of decision mapping.

As you map decision after decision – and perhaps finding yourself making mistake after mistake – you’ll begin to recognize the elements of your identity, your various strategies, and the assets you’re drawing upon for a given decision.

Being mindful of our actions, like any discipline, takes time to master. This personal discipline can then become the foundation for organizational asset mapping, building something beyond ourselves, to include:

people;
insights;
capital;
infrastructure; and
ecosystem.