PKMastery – Page 23 – Harold Jarche

Learning to breathe in the network era

2019-07-142014-06-22 by Harold Jarche

The networked workplace is the new reality. It’s always on and globally connected. This is where all organizations are going, at different speeds and in a variety of ways. Some won’t make it. In many organizations the outside world is better connected than inside the workplace. This makes it difficult to connect at the boundaries, which is where we have the best opportunities for serendipity and potential innovation.

At the edge of the organization, where there are few rules; everything is a blur. It may even be chaotic. But opportunities are found in chaos. Value emerges from forays into the chaos. In such a changing environment, failure has to be tolerated. Nothing is guaranteed other than the fact that not playing here puts any organization at a significant disadvantage.

People and the Wild Internet of Everything

2018-03-112014-06-17 by Harold Jarche

“Cisco’s view is that IoE technically differs from the Internet of Things; IoT is composed of connected objects, while IoE encompasses the networks that must support all the data these objects generate and transmit. “Software by itself won’t get the job done,” Chambers said at Interop in October, arguing that IoE demands data center software and hardware that work in concert.” – Information Week

Software is part of the solution. Hardware is part of the solution. People are the other part. Humans can connect complex things together better than any software or hardware system. It remains that the only practical interface with complexity is the human brain. It’s why the Turing test, to the chagrin of technology marketers, has never been passed by a machine.

ESN as knowledge bridges

2019-01-252014-06-16 by Harold Jarche

An effective suite of enterprise social tools can help organizations share knowledge, collaborate, and cooperate – connecting the work being done with the identification of new opportunities and ideas. In an age when everything is getting connected, it only makes sense to have platforms in place that enable faster feedback loops inside the organization in order to deal with connected customers, suppliers, partners, and competitors. It takes a networked organization, staffed by people with networked mindsets, to thrive in a networked economy.

Enterprise social networks (ESN) are growing in usage in most large organizations. More employees are sharing knowledge through activity streams on platforms by IBM, SAP, Jive, Yammer, and Socialcast, to name a few. But ESN can constrain what they are supposed to enhance. Due to the very personal and intimate nature of implicit knowledge, people will only freely share it if they feel they are in control. A single enterprise network does not provide much individual control.

Work Out Loud Week

2014-06-10 by Harold Jarche

Sharing complex knowledge requires trust, but developing trusted knowledge networks does not happen over night. It requires a combination of actively engaged knowledge workers, using effective communications tools, all within a supportive organizational structure.

In complex work environments, the optimal way to do work is to constantly probe the environment and test emergent practices. This requires an empowered workforce. Emergent practices are dependent on the cooperation of all workers (including management) as well as the free flow of knowledge.

What have we learned so far?

2017-06-042014-04-29 by Harold Jarche

What have we learned so far about personal knowledge mastery?

Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM): A set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world and work more effectively.

PKM workshops have helped people develop their own process of seeking, sense-making, and sharing. Participants are asked to relate activities to their own professional development. Exercises such as network mapping are combined with the narration of work, network weaving, and how these can enable better knowledge connections. Many tools are discussed as participants try new ones or share their personal practices. Examples and anecdotes are provided during the workshop, but the real value is in sharing between participants. I try to guide the process with a gentle hand and provide more resources as the need is presented.

PKM connects what is learned in networks, communities of practice, and work teams.

Why PKM?

2016-12-192014-04-27 by Harold Jarche

Here is a short video introduction on why personal knowledge mastery (PKM) is becoming a required skill and mindset for professionals today. We continue to see that labour has diminishing value as routine work keeps getting automated. To remain current in the network era, people must constantly improve their talents and focus on initiative and creativity. When you are only as good as your network, PKM becomes a necessity. The full transcript is available below the video.

PKM and small business

2018-08-132014-04-20 by Harold Jarche

There is one group that probably has the most need for professional development but has the least time – owners of small businesses. My parents owned a small business. They worked seven days a week. They never took any training courses. I am sure that if they were working today, they still would not take any formal instruction, but they might be active searchers on Google or YouTube. They might use Facebook or a website to stay in touch with their customers.

Several years ago I tracked small business blogs with some interesting examples such as a sign company, a coffee roaster, and a metal fabricator. Some have gone out of business and others have stopped blogging but there a few that continue. One was highly successful. A lot can be learned from all of these. I wonder if many small business owners have looked at what others have done with blogging over the past decade. It’s not about SEO (search engine optimization) it’s about staying connected to customers, suppliers and communities, and continuously learning.

Knowledge sharing paradox revisited

2019-03-012014-04-15 by Harold Jarche

The knowledge sharing paradox is that enterprise social tools can constrain what they are supposed to enhance. People will freely share their knowledge if they remain in control of it because knowledge is a very personal thing. Knowledge workers care about what they need to get work done, but do they care about the organizational knowledge base?

So my conclusion this time around was that the centralized stuff we spent so much time and money maintaining was simply not very useful to most practitioners. The practitioners I talked to about PPI [personal productivity improvement] said they would love to participate in PPI coaching, provided it was focused on the content on their own desktops and hard drives, and not the stuff in the central repositories. —Dave Pollard (2005)

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Absorbing complexity with PKM

2023-04-012014-03-24 by Harold Jarche

Have you ever heard of the Law of Requisite Variety? Anne Marie McEwan explains its effects, in Why Your Network is Your Life Support System:

The concept implies that organisations that fail to distribute responsibility for absorbing complexity will eventually cease to be viable – they will not be resilient against shocks coming at them from their external environment.

Scaling knowledge

2019-04-242014-03-20 by Harold Jarche

Most organizations grow from simple to complicated structures and in so doing keep adding layers of control. These complicated organizations usually wind up getting industrial disease. On the other hand, networked organizations can scale because they do not need to control every connection. People who participate in structures like open source software projects can join and connect to others at will. Designers of these open organizational structures understand that in complex un-order, loose hierarchies and strong networks are best.