“Do you remember that document I sent you and briefed you about?” … “No, I didn’t think so.”
PKMastery
Personal knowledge mastery
organizational transformation through pkm
“Those of us who work in organizational development and change management need to move to the edge, and quickly. You have been warned.” – Helen Bevan
Five Seismic Shifts are changing the world of work:
- Disruptive change is becoming the norm
- Digital connection is revolutionizing communications
- Work complexity is increasing
- Hierarchical power is diminishing
- Change is coming from the edges of the organization
my pkm story
It has been over 10 years that I have examined, practiced, and developed models for personal knowledge management/mastery. Here are some reflections on how my thoughts have evolved over that decade.
PKM shifts responsibility
I started down the path of personal knowledge mastery in 2004, inspired by Dave Pollard, Denham Gray, and others.
“To a great extent PKM [personal knowledge management] is about shifting responsibility for learning and knowledge sharing from a company to individuals and this is the greatest challenge for both sides. Companies should recognise that their employees are not “human resources”, but investors who bring their expertise into a company. As any investors they want to participate in decision-making and can easily withdraw if their “return on investment” is not compelling. Creativity, learning or desire to help others cannot be controlled, so knowledge workers need to be intrinsically motivated to deliver quality results. In this case “command and control” management methods are not likely to work.
Taking responsibility for own work and learning is a challenge for knowledge workers as well. Taking these responsibilities requires attitude shift and initiative, as well as developing personal KM knowledge and skills. In a sense personal KM is very entrepreneurial, there are more rewards and more risks in taking responsibility for developing own expertise.” —Lilia Efimova
are you prepared?
Major technological advances, like the printing press or the Internet, create economic volatility. This in turn changes the existing social contract. A common assumption for the past century has been that with education and effort, you can get a job and earn a decent wage. This is no longer the norm.
Consider that some or all of your current work will be automated in the next five years, probably to be replaced by software. As with agriculture last century, fewer people are needed to do manufacturing, information, or service work today. We are entering a post-job economy. Our careers will be shorter as our lives get longer. Companies are no longer the stable source of employment they once were.
“Half a century ago, the life expectancy of a firm in the Fortune 500 was around 75 years. Now it’s less than 15 years and declining even further.” – CS Investing
In the next five years, many professionals will have to change not only who they work for, but what they do. Are you prepared?
becoming collectively smarter
We are in the midst of a nano-bio-info-techno-cogno revolution. We are entering the network era and change is coming fast, which may sound like a cliché, but consider the last major shift we went through. We had lots of time for our institutions to adapt.
When markets came about, we had a few hundred years to move from the Hanseatic League, adopt double-entry bookkeeping, and progress to high frequency trading. We also were able to develop education systems, from one-room schoolhouses, to public universities, and later business schools to fuel the new corporations. Today, we are seriously lagging behind in learning how to deal with the scientific advances of the network era. We do not have the time afforded to us during the last shift to a market society. We have to jump from following state-established curriculum to creating our own learning networks: in this generation. People need to learn and work in networks, shifting their hierarchical position from teacher to learner, or from manager to contributor. They need to not only take control of their professional development but find others who can help them. It is becoming obvious in many fields that we are only as good as our knowledge networks. We have to become collectively smarter.
finding perpetual beta
New! Purchase the latest version of ‘life in perpetual beta’.
knowledge is personal
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
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
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
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.