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.
PKMastery
Personal knowledge mastery
PKM and small business
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
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)
Absorbing complexity with PKM
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
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.
Personal Knowledge Mastery
PKM for me was initially a way to keep my professional development costs as low as possible. I wanted to use the open web in the best way to stay current in my field. In 2004 this was by following early bloggers and also by blogging myself. I must say that my posts in the early years were not very good. These past few weeks I have been compiling, updating, and editing my best articles. The earliest post in that selection is from 2007. It took me three years to write a blog post that would stand the test of time.
The road to mastery needs practice and perhaps some guidance. My PKM workshop is a more structured approach to start your practice.
A simple approach to KM
Knowledge management (KM) does not have to be a major enterprise effort. But the lack of a KM strategy can be a drag on innovation or hamper decision-making in a knowledge intensive organization. While not perfect, a simple approach to KM may be better than none at all, and preferable to a flawed and expensive enterprise-wide approach. At least this model can be implemented with relative ease and no costly software platforms.
A simple approach to KM in the organization is to look at it as three connected but independent levels. The simplest is organizational KM, which ensures that important decisions are recorded, codified, and easily available for retrieval. This is mostly explicit knowledge that ensures the organizational memory remains clear on what key decisions were taken and why others were not. Over time, this becomes more valuable. Focusing only on decision memories ensures that enterprise KM does not require significant resources but does yield useful results.
What is your PKM routine?
The most important aspect of PKM is that it is personal. In order to stick with a routine over time, people have to find what works for them. Blogging has been a core part of my sense-making routine over the past decade. When I conduct workshops, my primary aim is help others discover what works for them. I do not have a secret formula, only some general guidelines developed through experience, plus a lot of ideas and suggested areas to explore.
My colleague Jane Hart shared her daily PKM routine recently and it’s different from mine, which of course it should be.
Innovation catalysts
Domino’s Pizza, a global quick-service restaurant company, understands that workers must be active and engaged in their own learning and development. As described in Introducing PKM to a Corporate Audience, Domino’s learned that “PKM makes learning a real-time activity within the flow of work” but also that “the company needs to clarify what people are allowed and expected to do in terms of learning during the workday.” In addition, information services, and IT security need to be consulted. The job of L&D is to familiarize busy professionals with new tools and realistic examples of how to use PKM at work.
Domino’s focused on helping people in leadership roles to develop PKM practices. This is a good approach as it improves the chances of spreading these habits throughout the enterprise. While the Seek > Sense > Share framework may be simple, it takes time and practice to become a habit. A pragmatic approach for some companies would be to support workers who are already practicing some aspect of PKM. Two identifiable groups are Connectors and Experts.
Connectors are people with many relationships who find it easy to talk to people. The challenge for the organization is to use these skills to improve knowledge-sharing. Connectors can be identified through observation, interviews, or social network analysis. To become knowledge catalysts, connectors need to have good curation skills. They have to know how to add value to knowledge and discern when, where, and with whom to share.
Experts have deep knowledge on a subject but many lack the skills to synthesize what they know in order to share it with a broader audience. It is critical that experts share their knowledge so the organization can make better decisions. This is a leadership responsibility that companies like Domino’s understand. Expertise in a closed room is of little use in a connected enterprise. Experts need to develop skills in working out loud and other sense-making practices. Connectors can help them but first there has to be something to share. Getting experts to share in a meaningful way can take time but first it requires a supportive environment and some basic skills.
If an organization wants to get meaningful results by adopting PKM practices, but does not see how this can be implemented throughout the organization, then an initial pilot should identify two groups: Connectors and Experts. Help these people improve their PKM skills. Get Connectors to add value and be more discerning. Get Experts to simplify in order to share. It will take time and practice but the benefits will be an organization that can use more of its knowledge to make better decisions. More Catalysts in the enterprise may also significantly improve innovation because innovation is inextricably linked to both networks and learning.
Related post: PKM Roles
The Seek > Sense > Share Framework
[This article appears in Inside Learning Technologies January 2014]
Simple standards facilitated with a light touch, enables knowledge workers to capture, interpret, and share their knowledge.
Personal knowledge mastery is a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world and work more effectively. But what we loosely call knowledge, using terms like knowledge-sharing or knowledge capture, is just an approximation. We are not very good at articulating our knowledge, says knowledge management expert Dave Snowden: “We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down.”
Becoming knowledgeable can be thought of as bits of knowledge partially shared and experienced over time. It is laborious, hence the reason masters through the ages could only have a limited number of apprentices. But when writing, and later books, came along, we had a new technology that could more widely distribute information created by the wise, and the not so wise. Whether being mentored by a master or reading a book, knowledge does not actually get transferred, but shared observations and information can be helpful to those who have a desire to learn.
Merely being well-read is not enough to be knowledgeable, as possibly first noted by Socrates. Plato wrote in Phaedrus that Socrates felt the written language would result in ‘men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, who will be a burden to their fellows’. Socrates saw a core truth in learning from artefacts like books. We cannot become complacent with knowledge and just store it away. It has a shelf life and needs to be used, tested, and experienced. It should be shared amongst people who understand that they are only seeing a fragment of each others’ knowledge. Because it is so difficult to represent our knowledge to others, we have to make every effort to continuously share it. Once is not enough, as most parents know. Knowledge shared in flows over time can help us create better mental pictures than a single piece of knowledge stock, like a book.
The Seek, Sense, Share Framework
Capturing knowledge, as crudely as we do, is just a first step. Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM) is a framework for individuals to take control of their professional development through a continuous process of seeking, sensing-making, and sharing.
Seeking is finding things out and keeping up to date. Building a network of colleagues is helpful in this regard. It not only allows us to “pull” information, but also have it “pushed” to us by trusted sources. Good curators are valued members of knowledge networks.
Sensing is how we personalize information and use it. Sensing includes reflection and putting into practice what we have learned. Often it requires experimentation, as we learn best by doing.
Sharing includes exchanging resources, ideas, and experiences with our networks as well as collaborating with our colleagues.
The multiple pieces of information that we capture and share can increase the frequency of serendipitous connections, especially across organizations and disciplines where real innovation happens. As Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From says; “chance favors the connected mind“.
Work is learning and learning is the work
PKM may be an individual activity but it is social as well. It is the process by which we can connect what we learn outside the organization with what need to do inside. Research shows that work teams that need to share complex knowledge need tighter social bonds. Work teams often share a unique language or vocabulary. However, they can become myopic and may lack a diversity of opinions. Social networks, on the other hand, encourage diversity and can sow the seeds of innovation. But it is almost impossible to get work done in social networks due to their lack of structure. PKM is the active process of connecting the innovative ideas that can arise in our social networks with the deadline-driven work inside organizations.
In addition to seeking, sensing and sharing, we need to become adept at filtering information as well as discerning when and with whom to share. Like any skill, these require practice and feedback. Much of this can be provided in communities of practice, a half-way space between work teams and social networks, where trusted relationships can form that enable people to share more openly.
Connecting social networks, communities of practice and work teams, is an important framework for integrating learning and working in the network era. We seek new ideas from our social networks and then filter them through more focused conversations with our communities of practice, where we have trusted relationships. We make sense of these embryonic ideas by doing new things, either ourselves, or with our work teams. We later share our creations, first with our teams and perhaps later with our communities of practice or even our networks. We use our understanding of our communities and networks to discern with whom and when to share our knowledge.
Working Out Loud
Narrating one’s work does not get knowledge transferred, but it provides a better medium to gain more understanding. Working out loud is a concept that is very easy to understand, but not quite so easy to do. Most people are too busy managing in their information age workplaces and have little spare time to try to learn how to work in the network age. The most important step in learning a new skill is the first one. This same step has to be repeated many times before it becomes a habit. I have learned that the first step of starting to work out loud, as part of personal knowledge mastery, has to be as simple as possible.
For example, being able to share is usually not a prime reason why people start using web information capture tools like social bookmarks but it becomes more important over time. Coupled with feed readers (e.g. feedly.com) aggregation makes information flows much easier to deal with. Then you have to connect with people.
So how do you get started micro-blogging on a platform like Twitter? I suggest beginning with an aim in mind, such as professional development or staying current in a specific field. The search function can help find people who post about a specific topics. To start, you should follow between 20 and 30 interesting people. Once set up, beginners should dip into their stream once or twice a day and read through any posts of interest. Over time, as they follow links, they may add or delete feeds. Within a week or two, anyone should be able to sense some patterns and then modify their streams to provide more signal and less noise.
Sometimes we get all caught up in the latest social media tools. Getting started working out loud is not complicated and should not involve a steep learning curve on a complicated system. It is best to start with simple tools and frameworks.
Small pieces, loosely joined
The mainstream application of knowledge management and learning management over the past few decades is mostly wrong; we over-managed information, knowledge and learning because it was easy. Our organizations remain enamoured with the next wave of enterprise software systems. But the ubiquity of information outside the organization is showing the weakness of centralized enterprise systems. As organizations begin to understand the Web, the principle of ‘small pieces loosely joined’ is permeating some thick industrial age walls. More workers have their own sources of information and knowledge, often on mobile devices, but they often lack the means or internal support to connect their knowledge with others to actually get work done. Supporting PKM, especially internal sharing, can help information flow more freely.
A personal knowledge mastery framework helps knowledge workers capture and make sense of their knowledge. Simple standards can facilitate this sharing. Knowledge bases and traditional KM systems should focus on essential information, and what is necessary for inexperienced workers. Experienced workers should not be constrained by too much structure, but be given the flexibility to contribute how and where they think best helps the organization.
We know that formal instruction accounts for less than 10% of workplace learning. The same rule of thumb should apply to knowledge management. Capture and codify the 10% that is essential, especially for new employees. Now use the same principle to get work done. Structure the essential 10% and leave the rest unstructured, but networked, so that workers can group as needed to get work done. Many organizations are too slow and hierarchical to be useful for knowledge-sharing in the network era. Organizations structured around looser hierarchies and stronger networks are much more effective for increasingly complex work.
If you liked this post, check out the perpetual beta series.