PKMastery

In response to my post on relevance, my long-time friend Ralph Mercer asked, “Why do I need KM at an institutional level when information is ambient at a global level and personal at a hyper local level?” This illuminates an observation made by Thierry deBaillon, which I have often quoted, “The basic unit of social business technology is personal knowledge management, not collaborative workspaces.” We are surrounded by information and have many ways to collaborate, but unless each person has effective sense-making processes, social business networks are mostly noise amplification.

Collaborative knowledge work must be coupled with cooperative knowledge sharing. Cooperation, or sharing without any quid pro quo, is the foundation of personal knowledge mastery. PKM is based on playfully seeking knowledge, not task-driven searching. It is also about sharing to inspire, not because you have to. The results of PKM can then be used in collaborative work.

Personal knowledge management is the only solid foundation of organizational knowledge management (KM). Without PKM, there is no KM, just databases of (mostly) unused information. Only individual knowledge workers can transcend the divisions between work teams, communities of practice, and social networks. Individuals connect these entities through their participation in them.

PKM is the active process of being cognizant of our networks and engaged in our communities, while still working with our teams. These teams, and the organizations they work in, have an opportunity to harvest some of the PKM knowledge artifacts of their members. However, individuals have to retain control of their own PKM processes, due to the knowledge-sharing paradox.

The gap I see in many collaboration initiatives, enterprise social network software implementations, and other social business projects, is a failure to help develop PKM skills. A course is not the answer. Allowing time to develop skills, and providing feedback, is a much better approach. Developing PKM skills is probably one of the best investments any knowledge-intensive organization can make.

Have you ever tried to find something you saw recently on the Net but don’t remember where you found it? On Twitter, I mark my favourites and review them every two weeks, with the best becoming Friday’s Finds. I think of it as a short-term memory helper.

Go back in time and think about something you researched. Can you find it now? By creating a digital copy, you can retrieve it much more easily. I used the SPATIAL model in my Master’s thesis in 1998. I wrote about it on my blog in 2008 (and then our structures shape us) and was able to find a digital copy. The author even commented on my blog post. In 2012 I used the SPATIAL model to reinforce how important the initial design of an organization is, and gave examples of what happens when you pit a good performer against a bad system.  I was able to share it again, when, in-passing, I was asked if I knew anything about educational ergonomics. I was told that, “this model is ideal for our purposes and I am thrilled to learn of it.”

Are you ever asked for help on a subject? A hot topic in our region is shale gas extraction using hydraulic fracturing. I knew nothing about it but decided to read what I could. Over the past year, I collected articles on the subject and saved them to Diigo, a social bookmarking service. I was recently asked by a friend if I knew of any resources on the subject. I only had to send him one link. I did this for myself, but was able to easily share with others.

Have you ever had to write a briefing note, white paper, or give a presentation to your colleagues? The posts on my blog are often the raw material for my professional writing. I now write blog posts as preparation for presentations. This helps me get my ideas together, in a more manageable format than a full-length paper. By making these public, I often find out about related resources, recommended by readers. I did this recently on the topic of institutional memory, with this series of blog posts that became a three-hour live presentation:

• Institutional Memory
• The Storytelling Animal
• Building Institutional Memory
• Knowledge Management for Decision Memories
• Three Types of KM

Lilia Efimova, the original inspiration for my PKM practices, has said that the main problem with personal knowledge management is that we need to take time now, in order to invest in the future. This is hard to see in advance. With a searchable knowledge base of thousands of blog posts and social bookmarks, all curated by me, I can see the value of PKM every day. It’s much more difficult when you start with a blank slate. That’s why a regular, disciplined process is the best way to start. As Jane Hart shows, if you take 10 minutes a day to learn something new, that’s about 50 hours after one year.

If sense-making is a key part of knowledge work and is also essential for both innovation and creativity, does the average workplace help or hinder sense-making? I noted before that seeking works best with a playful attitude, exploring new possibilities in diverse networks with many connections in order to enhance serendipity. Sense-making, the most difficult aspect, requires a willingness to try new things, empowering through learning. Sharing is necessary in almost all work contexts today and it is through sharing that we can inspire and be inspired.

Barriers to seeking playfully

Jobs:

Jobs are designed around work that can be copied and workers who can be replaced, but anything that can be reduced to a flowchart will be automated. Relying on the job as society’s main wealth-sharing mechanism is a major mistake in the network era, but one that politicians and many others continue to make. We are entering a post-job economy.

Project Management:

Executives may believe that they want insights and innovations but are most receptive to new ideas that fit with existing practices and maintain predictability [e.g. project plans]. Business organizations treat disruptive insights and innovation with suspicion. – Gary Klein in Seeing What Others Don’t

Barriers to empowered learning

Designated learning & development specialists:

Staff who carry out day-to-day duties—and whose productivity you’re looking to improve—should ultimately be the source for defining what knowledge they need and what knowledge they know is valuable to others. – BloombergBusinessWeek

Training as a separate activity

As work becomes more networked and complex, the social aspects of knowledge sharing and collaboration are becoming more important. Learning amongst ourselves is getting to be the real work in many organizations. – The New Challenge for Learning Professionals: (PDF)

Barriers to inspiration through sharing

Individual performance measurement:

Performance appraisals are like academic grades and keep the focus on the individual. In the collaborative, social enterprise this is counter-productive. There is no place for this practice in doing net work. In today’s enterprise, work is learning and learning is the work, and it has to be done cooperatively.

Enterprise software:

When it comes to knowledge, and learning, only open systems are effective. All closed systems will fail over time, especially if discovery and innovation are happening outside that system.

Nick Milton talks about why knowledge does not get “re-used” very easily. Even if knowledge is captured it is not always used by others and Nick cites several blockers:

• the knowledge was not to hand when they needed it

• they had no time to go looking for the knowledge

• they may not trust the provenance of the knowledge

• the knowledge did not solve an immediate pain, but was more of a long term benefit (see blog post on why some ideas spread and others don’t).

• they could get away with doing things the way they had always done, even though the new way was better.

In the PKM framework of Seeking, Sensing & Sharing, the latter may seem easy but it does not always equate to other people finding the knowledge artifacts that you have created while seeking & sense-making. For example, I can quickly find something on my blog in the thousands of posts here, that would take someone else much longer. I have the contextual memory of having created each post. This is why it’s also important to incorporate what I call the discern component of sharing.

Since it is easier for me to find something I have created, then I should be open to opportunities to share, in order to optimize knowledge management in my workplace. My knowledge artifacts are almost always more “at hand” to me than to others. This is why PKM practices are so important in organizational knowledge management, but are often overlooked. So far, only humans are good at recognizing all the contextual signals in the workplace, making implicit connections, and then identifying something that might be useful to share.

One example of discernment is in “closing triangles“. This is when one person introduces two unknown associates to each other, thus closing the triangle. Discerning when to do this is also important. It would not make sense to make professional introductions as one person is going on a long vacation or when the other is extremely busy with an unrelated project. Sensing the right time and place to make connections is important in network weaving. It’s the same with sharing knowledge.

Integrating PKM practices with organizational knowledge management can help knowledge to flow better and not remain knowledge stock in some database. This takes time, practice, and a good sense of what others are doing. Discernment, like PKM,  requires mindfulness.

In an organizational knowledge sharing framework, I put together several ideas to show how knowledge could be shared and codified. As I explain this to others I realize that these ideas go against many established assumptions about knowledge in organizations. For example, knowledge management is not a software system, but really three processes that are conducted in parallel and support each other; namely Big KM, Little KM and PKM [Patti Anklam].

Big KM is needed in larger organizations that have a lot of outputs, events and processes to keep track of. For instance, a company like P&G has a lot of history and many brands that each have a story. Just keeping track of all these products is a significant effort. This requires enterprise-wide systems. Big KM also provides the institutional knowledge that is needed to have common understanding amongst those working in the organization. It consists of the big, important stories.

Little KM helps groups make decisions given the knowledge they have at the time, but learning from each subsequent decision. By creating “safe-fail” experiments, they can try out new ways of working, with minimal risk. Little KM practices ensure that much of what is learned is shared and as much codified as possible. These feed into Big KM, institutional knowledge.

PKM is what individuals practice in order to fully participate in Little KM. I would say that PKM is the most important to keep organizational learning alive. Individuals who are actively engaged in their sense-making will likely be more participative in Little KM, and their sharing (as in Seek-Sense-Share) will contribute to Big KM. Imagine an organization where everyone blogs professionally. It would be very easy for an organizational curator to weave together the narrative threads from all employees, thus feeding into a Big KM system.

My experience is that Big KM is ‘relatively’ easy, but it does not guarantee knowledge-sharing. On the other hand, PKM is an individual skill that can be developed with practice. It benefits both the individual and the organization. Little KM, where teams share their learning and note their failures as well as success, is the most difficult. In large organizations, who probably have a Big KM system, I would focus next on PKM. Then, once sufficient people have PKM skills, Little KM (knowledge-in-action) can be put into practice. In the long run, it takes all three to ensure good institutional memory as well as a culture of learning.