PKMastery

One of my objectives with my latest PKM Workshop was to review most of my resources and work on developing new ones. Much of my work on PKM has been inspired by others. I have put these pieces together into a framework that I think makes sense and may be of some use.

This graphic combines the work of several people into a single aide-mémoire on PKM and the Seek > Sense > Share framework.

The Five forms of filtering by Tim Kastelle are a good way to understand how to approach the digital surround and our way to seeking new knowledge.

Judgement Filters:

• Naive filtering is what too often happens in our knowledge searching. It’s like prairie-dogging, or standing up in your cubicle and asking those close to you for advice. It’s rather hit and miss and dependent on who works nearby and happens to be listening.
• Expert filtering worked when knowledge was more stable but in an interconnected, interdependent, digital world we have to ask, who are the experts? Still, good experts are valuable and I use platforms like Twitter to connect to them, like Valdis Krebs on social networks.
• Networked expertise can be sought through group-sourced information resources, like our curated Working Smarter Daily or in self-created expertise lists like Google+ to create circles of expertise. You can also link to existing communities of expertise/interest such as KMers on knowledge management.

Mechanical Filters:

• Algorithmic filters can be simple, like typing in a basic search string, or more refined using  techniques like Google’s advanced operators.
• A good perspective on Heuristic filters is Howard Rheingold’s Crap Detection Skills:

Unless a great many people learn the basics of online crap detection and begin applying their critical faculties en masse and very soon, I fear for the future of the Internet as a useful source of credible news, medical advice, financial information, educational resources, scholarly and scientific research. Some critics argue that a tsunami of hogwash has already rendered the Web useless. I disagree. We are indeed inundated by online noise pollution, but the problem is soluble. The good stuff is out there if you know how to find and verify it. Basic information literacy, widely distributed, is the best protection for the knowledge commons: A sufficient portion of critical consumers among the online population can become a strong defense against the noise-death of the Internet.

James Mangan, in his 1936 book, You Can Do Anything, looked at 14 Ways to Acquire Knowledge. Maria Popova, at BrainPickings.org, reviewed his book and from her I discovered a number of methods of seeking knowledge.

• Ask: As Maria Popova says, “I really believe our own curiosity is our greatest and most powerful tool for personal growth.”
• Desire: Seeking without a goal is often just surfing the web, with little to show in the end.
• Read: There is still a need to read in our digital age. Longer reads, and particularly fiction, and reading novels can make us better thinkers.
• Listen: Whether it’s in person, on audio, or a video, listening gives us a chance to absorb what others have to say. Too often, our workspace do not allow this. There are many alternate ways of learning.
• Observe: One learns best by observing from the edge, not the centre of action.

SENSE:

Ross Dawson’s five ways of adding value to information are a good start at sense-making techniques, with my short explanations appended.

• Filtering: separating signal from noise, based on some criteria.
• Validation: ensuring that information is reliable, current or supported by research.
• Synthesis: describing patterns, trends or flows in large amounts of information.
• Presentation: making information understandable through visualization or logical presentation.
• Customization: describing information in context.

James Mangan (a very interesting character) identified several skills for acquiring knowledge.

• Practice: This is absolutely critical. It is primarily through experience – perfomance  – reflection that we learn.
• Get it from yourself: Sometimes it’s better to work things out for yourself than get a quick answer from someone else.
• Walk around it: Looking at something from a different perspective, especially away from the mainstream, can give new insights.
• Experiment: Use a constant probe – sense – respond approach with work and learning.

Finally, Robin Good picked up on this, and added five more curation skills, with my comments:

• Comparing: With increasing complexity, and obfuscation by competing interests, being able to compare related items becomes more valuable. Imagine if someone could compare all your mobile telephone options in a clear, simple way.
• Finding related items: Sometimes we forget about the past and it’s important to relate the present to what has transpired. Those who foretold the global financial collapse were in the minority. Good comparisons are quite useful.
• Illustrating / Visualizing: Good info-graphics are very useful, but too often they obscure. Visualizing takes great skill but can be exceptionally useful.
• Evaluating: Being able to set criteria and evaluate from a neutral point of view can add real value to what otherwise would just be data. Nate Silver has made a living from this.
• Crediting & Attributing: While attribution may just seem like a nice thing to do, it is very important to trace how knowledge is constructed. With proper attribution to the original source, you can then make changes if evidence or circumstances change.

SHARE:

James Mangan and his 14 ways of acquiring knowledge also showed ways of sharing knowledge.

• Put in order: This helps those learning something for the first time. Video from CommonCraft are an excellent example of things put in order to enable understanding.
• Define: The popularity of Wikipedia shows the importance of defining knowledge. It provides a starting point.
• Teach: The best way to learn something is to teach it. Google is embracing the power of teaching for sharing knowledge amongst its employees.
• Write: Blogging changed my life for the better. Need I say more?
• Reason: Putting thoughts out in public forces you to understand the reason why you are doing so.

In addition, Rob Cross and Lee Sproull looked at tacit knowledge-sharing, as described in the quotes below by Nancy Dixon. Cross & Sproull identified five categories of responses that can be given by experienced workers to those needing help in seeking knowledge.

• Answers:  “The seekers were looking for the application of facts or principles in order to develop a solution.”
• Meta Knowledge:  “This category was about where to go to get more information on the issue, or conversely where not to go because a certain report was out-dated, or superficial.”
• Problem Reformulation: “To gain meta-knowledge and/or problem-reformulation requires the source to be willing “to understand the problem as experienced by the seeker and then shape her/his knowledge to the evolving definition of the problem” and is best served by the give and take of conversation.”
• Validation:  [also identified by Ross Dawson] “Validation also provides seekers the certainty that they have done enough background work, saving the seeker the time it would take to gather further data.”
• Legitimizing: “As with validation, legitimizing can save the seeker time by reducing the amount of proof or data that may need to be collected before the client is willing to act. It also serves to head off arguments others might raise.”

So there you have it; 34 ways to personally manage your knowledge. Not all are necessary, but it’s a good list to start with.

Sense-making is where the real personal value of PKM lies. The knowledge gained is an emergent property of all sense-making activities. In the PKM framework of Seek > Sense > Share, it is often sense-making that is most difficult to master. I often refer to Ross Dawson’s five ways of adding value to information, to introduce sense-making (my examples/descriptions follow):

1. Filtering (separating signal from noise, based on some criteria)
2. Validation (ensuring that information is reliable, current or supported by research)
3. Synthesis (describing patterns, trends or flows in large amounts of information)
4. Presentation (making information understandable through visualization or logical presentation)
5. Customization (describing information in context)

These are examples of Pushing knowledge, adding value for oneself, that may in the future be useful for others. I have noted before that the difference between PKM and Curation is that the former is personal, while the latter is for an intended audience. I practice PKM for myself and my blog’s primary audience is me. Sharing online  makes it social so that I can learn with and from others.

But sometimes the act of sharing is also a sense-making activity. Knowledge can be Pulled by those seeking answers. Nancy Dixon describes how Rob Cross and Lee Sproull examined tacit knowledge-sharing in a large consulting firm. Even though there was a solid knowledge management (KM) structure in place, most people preferred to have conversations with others when discussing ambiguous issues. Cross & Sproull identified five categories of responses, according to Nancy Dixon:

1. Answers:  “The seekers were looking for the application of facts or principles in order to develop a solution.”
2. Meta Knowledge:  “This category was about where to go to get more information on the issue, or conversely where not to go because a certain report was out-dated, or superficial.”
3. Problem Reformulation: “To gain meta-knowledge and/or problem-reformulation requires the source to be willing “to understand the problem as experienced by the seeker and then shape her/his knowledge to the evolving definition of the problem” and is best served by the give and take of conversation.”
4. Validation:  [also identified by Ross Dawson] “Validation also provides seekers the certainty that they have done enough background work, saving the seeker the time it would take to gather further data.”
5. Legitimizing: “As with validation, legitimizing can save the seeker time by reducing the amount of proof or data that may need to be collected before the client is willing to act. It also serves to head off arguments others might raise.”

As knowledge is pulled through these conversations, a good PKM practice would be to record and reflect on these in some way, adding another layer of value and making at least some of the knowledge artifacts retrievable. Seek-Sense-Share is a continuous flow, with fuzzy boundaries, but all leading to better understanding, for ourselves and with others.

We discuss this, and much more, during my online PKM Workshop. Join us and push and pull your own sense-making.

image by @gapingvoid

Once upon a time …

By the second decade of the 21st century, the nature of work had changed. Even so-called knowledge workers were being regularly downsized, as the corporations called it.  A lot of work was getting automated but a few creative, and lucky, people became almost overnight successes. Many others were able to carve out new niches in this connected economy by getting rid of the middlemen and going straight to their customers, who were now all over the world. Work was getting more complex.  But how could people make sense of it all? Part of the answer was in taking control of their learning and professional development, once the sole purview of institutions. Another part of the answer was in connecting with other, like-minded, and interested professionals. Those who succeeded were able to seek and build new networks in order to make sense of the changing environment, and then share with their new peers, scattered across the globe.

Whether you call yourself a knowledge artisan or are just trying to keep up with your profession, you have to take charge of your own learning and development. I have created an updated 15-minute video overview of PKM, the seek-sense-share framework, and some ideas on how to do-it-yourself, with the help of your network.

Online Personal Knowledge Mastery Workshops are scheduled throughout the year.

There are a few ways to develop skills to be an effective sharer of knowledge in a networked enterprise. You can start, as I did, by researching sense-making and online cooperation in knowledge networks, try out different methods, and then develop your own. My own journey with personal knowledge management began in 2004. You could also get coaching and mentoring from people who have developed good professional network learning skills.

Or you could take a workshop to kick-start your learning. That’s what I have been offering for a few years, and once again, due to several requests, a PKM Workshop (sign up at link) from 28 October to 22 November 2013 is scheduled. It will be online, asynchronous, and self-paced, with just enough structure to help motivated participants learn on their own or cooperate together.

I recently wrote why PKM is important, so if you have never participated in one of these workshops, join the hundreds who have benefited from four weeks of seeking, sense-making, and sharing together. Discounted rates are available to the first 20 participants, so sign up early.

You may also be interested in Jane Hart’s online workshop on collaborative working & learning, beginning on 25 November.

 

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.