PKMastery

Personal knowledge mastery

Seeing What Others Don’t – Review

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Following Gary Klein on his search to find out how insight happens is a pleasurable, even mind-blowing experience. In Seeing What Others Don’t, Klein begins with an open mind and decides that he needs to stay out of the laboratory of puzzle-solving, described in the chapter on how not to search for insights. His perspective is based on what has been my professional practice for almost two decades: performance improvement. Klein says that PI is a combination of reducing errors & uncertainty PLUS increasing insights. Too often in organizations, management only focuses on reducing errors. Klein cites the overemphasis on practices like Six Sigma over the past 30 years as being detrimental to overall innovation; “Six Sigma shouldn’t be abandoned, it needs to be corralled.”

performance improvement klein

In examining 120 cases, Klein found that there are three main paths that insight can follow. [My overview lacks the depth of Klein’s explanations, so please read the book if you really want to understand this.] Klein’s Triple Path Model neatly describes the phenomena of gaining insights. I find the connection path the most interesting because I think it can be enhanced through practices like personal knowledge mastery. Also interesting is that gaining insight is about changing one’s stories. We have stories that we use to explain why we do things. These can be good anchors that give us the right perspective on a situation or they can weigh us down and stop us from gaining insight. For example, the prevailing theory of miasma stopped researchers from seeing that cholera was waterborne or that yellow fever was mosquito borne. It was when some people paid attention to the contradictions, that they gained insight. Once you have insight, that’s it. Klein quotes the author Hilary Mantel; “Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.” Which of course can make those with new insights seem like such a bother to the status quo.

triple path model kleinKlein has some advice on how “to strengthen the up arrow”, or improve insight. He sees stories as a strong way of sharing insight. Loosening the filters through which information and knowledge pass in the organization is another suggestion. I’d call that democracy. He also says that organizations need to increase their willpower to act on insight. This takes a shift in the corporate mind-set.

Klein counters some of the contemporary perceptions around insight in the research community.

The heuristics-and-biases community has provided us with a stream of studies showing how our mental habits can be used against us and make us look stupid and irrational. They don’t offer a balanced set of studies of how these habits enable us to make more discoveries.

I see the examples in this book as a collective celebration of our capacity for gaining insights, a corrective to the gloomy picture offered by the heuristics-and-biases community. Insights help us escape the confinements of perfection, which traps us in a compulsion to avoid errors and in a fixation on the original plan or vision.

I strongly recommend Seeing What Others Don’t, which provides new perspectives for a wide range of disciplines and practices. Finally, one of the best features of this book is the Story Index, making each one easy to find, even in the paper copy.

You can read more about the ideas in this book on Gary Klein’s blog posts at Psychology Today [thanks to Kenneth Mikkelsen for the tip].

Discerning with whom and when to share

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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.

Seek > Sense > Share

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.

Three types of KM

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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.

Little KMPKM 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.

knowledge organizational asset

Institutional Memory and Knowledge Management

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This is a follow-up post on building institutional memory. The basic premises are stated in sense-making for decision memories. This presentation includes additional details and more explanations. It adds many new slides to help with the flow of the narrative, limited as it is with this medium.

The main themes are:

Memories are captured as knowledge artifacts, each limited by what it can convey, depending on its nature and the knowledge of the recipient.

Decision memories have a certain importance for organizations; to understand why decisions were, or were not, taken.

Knowledge management can provide a structure to capture institutional memory, but it requires more than a single approach.

Complex work, which is growing in importance in networked organizations, requires the sharing of implicit knowledge and this presents certain challenges.

We should take complexity into account and develop frameworks for sharing knowledge and storing institutional memory to help organizations deal with current events and prepare for an uncertain future.

institutional_memory

Knowledge Management for Decision Memories

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Institutional decision memories can describe how and why we, as an organization, chose one course of action over another. As Brian Gongol notes:

“If a capital project has an expected service life of 20 to 30 years, it’s entirely possible that people working in an institution in their 20s will be middle or upper-level managers in the same institution by the time the project has to be replaced or upgraded. Unless someone documents the process by which the original decision was made, including notes on the alternatives not taken, the 50-year-old manager who’s been with the institution all along will usually be guided more by 25 years of habits and built-in bias than by a fresh look at the available alternatives. And the situation is likely to be even worse if the 50-year-old manager making the decisions came into the institution recently and doesn’t even have a memory for when the original project was completed in the first place.”

Over time, these memories can be codified and institutionalized. This is Big Knowledge Management, leveraging the power of enterprise software platforms to store decision, process, and event memories. Process and event memories, like project outputs, are relatively easy to capture and codify. But decision memories are often hampered by our tendency to justify decisions after they have been made, and even create elaborate, and often fictional, stories around them. For this reason, it is important to capture decisions as they are being made, not after the fact.

Explaining why other decisions were not made, should also be normal practice. For example, I was working with a client that made decisions on which chemical compound to develop out of a possibility of thousands. There was a cost to initially create any compound, so not all possibilities could be attempted. Decisions were made by a committee on which compound to pursue. However, the decisions on why the other compounds were not developed were never recorded. Several years later, the situation had changed due to improvements in technology and new research findings, and now some of the rejected compounds may have had potential for development. Unfortunately, no records were available to search the rejected compound database and find ones that met the new criteria. Sometimes our decisions not to do something are just as important as our selected course of action, from the perspective of the future. But we never know this in advance.

Recording and sharing our knowledge on a regular basis is what Little Knowledge Management is about, as it focuses on providing ways for groups to try new methods safely. Examples include curation, communities of practice, and mentoring. For complex work, Little KM is critical, as most of the knowledge required is implicit, and not easy to codify. According to the Cynefin framework, in the Complex domain “the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe – Sense – Respond , and we can sense emergent practice.” Teams working in the complex domain have to make “probes” on a regular basis in order to understand the changing environment. It then becomes essential to develop ways to capture and share the decisions made with each one.

decision memories

Institutional memory, especially the decisions taken over time, has to be part of the workflow of any knowledge worker doing complex work and making decisions. Ewen Le Borgne writes that, “Institutional memory feeds off strong personal knowledge management among individual staff members“. I define PKMastery as a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world and work more effectively. PKM is an ongoing process of filtering information from our networks; creating knowledge individually and with our teams, and then discerning with whom and when to share the artifacts of our knowledge. As Roger Schank states, “Comprehension is mapping your stories onto mine.” PKM helps to put your maps out there for others to see.

We have to remember that all of this “knowledge management” is nothing without people engaged in the process. Viola Spolin, creator of the “Theater Games” actor training system, says that, “Information is a weak form of communication.” But, it can be improved, as Gary Schwartz notes, “Story becomes important in the ordering of all this information.” Stories are the glue, holding information together in some semblance of order, for our brains to process into knowledge.

stories are personal

Related Posts

Institutional Memory
The Storytelling Animal
Building Institutional Memory
An Organizational Knowledge Sharing Framework

Networked Professional Development

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It can sometimes be difficult to see oneself as a node in multiple networks, as opposed to a more conventional position within an organizational hierarchy. We have become used to titles, job descriptions, and other institutional trappings. But network thinking can fundamentally change our view of hierarchical relationships.

For example, I once used value network analysis to help a steering group see their community of practice in a new light. For the first time, they saw it mapped as a network. They immediately realized that they were pushing solutions instead of listening to their community. As a result, they decided to change their Charter and develop more network-centric practices. Thinking in terms of networks can enable us see with new eyes.

effective networks are open

Managing in Networks:

Here are some recommendations for organizations moving to more networked and creative work.

  • Abolish the organization chart and replace it with a network diagram (some new tech companies have done this).
  • Move away from counting hours, to a results only work environment.
  • Encourage outside work that doesn’t directly interfere with paid work, as it will strengthen the network.
  • Provide options for workers to come and go and give them ways to stay connected when they’re not employed (like Ericsson’s Stay Connected Facebook group). Build an ecosystem, not a monolith.
  • Organizations should promote connected leadership.

Learning in Networks:

As we learn in digital networks, stock (content) loses significance, while flow (conversation) becomes more important – the challenge becomes how to continuously weave the many bits of information and knowledge that pass by us each day. Conversations help us make sense. But we need diversity in our conversations or we become insular. We cannot predict what will emerge from continuous learning, co-creating & sharing at the individual, organizational and market level, but we do know it will make for more resilient organizations.

Networked Professional Development:

A professional learning network, with its redundant connections, repetition of information and indirect communications, is a much more resilient system than any designed development program can be. Redundancy is also a good principal for supporting social learning diffusion. There is always more than one way to communicate or find something and just because something was blogged, tweeted or posted does not mean it will be understood and eventually internalized as actionable knowledge. The more complex or novel the idea, the more time it will take to be understood.

Programmers often say that you are only as good as your code. Credentials and certifications often act as blinders and stop us from recognizing the complexity of a situation. As Henry Mencken wrote, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

One approach to working smarter starts by organizing to embrace diversity and manage complexity.  Diversity is a key factor in innovation and there are few organizations that do not want to improve innovation.

At the Connected Knowledge Lab, we offer a place and time to develop network skills. Our next event will focus on building a professional network, providing resources and feedback for anyone interested in getting started. Our workshops are designed to give just enough structure, without constraining personal and social learning, all at a reasonable price.

Play, Learn, Work

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In my last post I mentioned Nollind Whachel’s sense-making process:

Connect = producing content
Empower = making sense of content patterns
Inspire = leap of logic, the patterns form a story, you see the bigger picture

Steve Scott combined Nollind’s suggestions and suggested this:

Seek + Connect = Play
Sense + Empower = Learn
Share + Inspire = Work

Both of these align with, and add to, the PKM framework of Seek> Sense > Share. 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.

rp_PKM-focus-attitude-result-520x415.png

Here are some suggestions for doing this on your own.

Seek playfully to connect:

  • Stray outside your comfort zone (not your usual networks)
  • Try new activities
  • Test out new tools from time to time
  • Don’t worry about doing it “correctly”
  • Note: one PKM workshop participant cautioned, “There is a risk of getting stuck in seeking and not going further into sensing and acting on information.“

Make sense and be empowered through learning:

  • Test out an expression medium, then try another
  • Find out what others have done, some practices are quite old
  • Make time for reflection
  • Put yourself out there
  • It’s fine to fail
  • Keep trying
  • Think of sense-making as a craft that has to be mastered over time

Share to inspire through your work:

  • Model behaviours of those who have shared and helped you
  • Narrate your work
  • Try to add value to what you share

PKM playfully learning

All things to all people

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It was reported that only 2% of social sharing happens on Google Plus (G+). I too, do not share much on G+. I recently posted on G+ that it did not fit in with my professional use of social media, even though discussions are often fun, interesting, and informative. That G+ post I made now has 52 comments, more than any post on this blog has had.

In that post, Jeff Roach described G+ as “a network that looks like Facebook (media rich) but functions more like twitter (streams etc) but is more friendly to conversations and sharing than both of them.” Joachim Stroh suggested that I create a community on G+ but I countered that I preferred to cooperate in the open, not in another social media walled garden:

I think one of the problems today is that many online social networks are trying to be communities of practice. But to be a community of practice, there has to be something to practice. One social network, mine, is enough for me. How I manage the connections is also up to me. In some cases I will follow a blogger, in others I will connect via Google Plus or Twitter, but from my perspective it is one network, with varying types of connections. Jumping into someone else’s bounded social network/community only makes sense if I have an objective. If not, I’ll keep cooperating out in the open.

Nollind Whachel then weighed-in with several thoughtful comments and Joachim Stroh continued to engage. I stood on the sidelines, and a few others added comments, including one commentator unknown to me who felt I was being unprofessional because I did not understand G+. By the way, all of my G+ posts have been public, so anyone can jump in.

Nollind provided a good way to describe the sense-making process in these online social networks:

Connect = producing content
Empower = making sense of content patterns
Inspire = leap of logic, the patterns form a story, you see the bigger picture

Joachim made an interesting subsequent comment:

So, I’m still looking for the connection to go from unstructured to structured content, without doing a lot of curation. It’s not easy if you are doing this on your own (as you describe), it’s almost impossible to do this collectively (without a CM role).

Nollind added an emergent thought, that I think is important, and is partially what this blog post is all about:

Hmm, just had an interesting thought. It actually may be easier to do the writing and sense making within one community and then do the outlining and structuring in another community.

My interest in all of this comes down to PKM, and so far, G+ is a mere extension of my PKM processes. Perhaps it could be more, but I strongly believe in the centrality of my blog, which I own and control. I am not ready to give that to Google or any other third party. Nollind also made an excellent comparison of my PKM framework with his own methodology,

Seek = Connect = Play
Sense = Empower = Learn
Share = Inspire = Work

At this time, G+ provides a nice place for deep discussions with people who probably would not post as much on my blog and would be throttled by Twitter’s 140 character limit. I know that others use it much more, adding tags to make search and retrieval easier, and engaging with communities. G+ does add to my weak & diverse ties and even enables the sharing of complex knowledge. Perhaps G+ is trying to be all things to all people, and for those of us with existing PKM processes, that’s just too much.

social ties collaboration cooperationImage: Social Ties for Cooperation & Collaboration

An organizational knowledge-sharing framework

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There is a lot of knowledge in an organization, some of it easy to codify (capture), and much (most) of it difficult to do so. Understanding how best to commit resources for knowledge-sharing should be in some kind of a decision-making framework that is easy for anyone to understand. This is a first attempt to do that.

[This post is a follow-up from my building institutional memory post].

Brian Gongol made an interesting observation on three categories of institutional memory. Decision memories are probably the most important, and likely the most open to rationalization in hindsight. The good decisions always seem obvious after the fact.

  • event memories, which are things like the construction of new facilities or the arrival of new employees

  • process memories, which note how things are done in order to save time and ensure their reliable repetition in the future

  • decision memories, which explain how the institution chose one path or policy or course of action over another

We can expand these three categories with Ewen La Borgne’s observation on the types of artifacts left by work projects. Outputs are quite explicit, while expertise is mostly implicit knowledge. Networks can be mapped, and are therefore explicit, but interpreting them requires implicit knowledge.

  • Information and outputs produced

  • Expertise (knowledge and know-how)

  • A network of connections

Put all of these together in order of difficulty in codifying memories/artifacts and the following graphic is my working interpretation. Explicit knowledge is easier to codify and more suitable for enterprise-wide initiatives, while implicit knowledge requires personal interpretation and engagement to make sense of it. Note that these six categories only serve as examples and are not a complete spectrum of knowledge representations.

codifying knowledge

So what types of knowledge management (KM) frameworks could help us support the codification of these knowledge artifacts? One way to look at it would be from a perspective discussed by Patti Anklam a few years back. Patti explained the differences between Big KM, Little KM and Personal KM and this distinction could be useful. Big KM is good for knowledge that can be easily codified, and Little KM can provide a structure for teams & groups to try out new things (in a Probe-Sense-Respond way). PKM puts individuals in control of their sense-making, but the organization can benefit from this by making it easier for workers to share knowledge.

structuring knowledge

Finally, there are certain types of tools and and platforms that would be more suitable for sharing of each type of knowledge artifact. I describe only a few in this image, but it gives an idea of how one could structure a full spectrum of knowledge-sharing in order to support institutional memory.

knowledge sharing

From here, one can now ask what types of platforms would help to codify and share the knowledge that is important to any organization. For larger organizations, all three types of KM are most likely necessary. Too often, Big KM is seen as sufficient, but in complex work environments, Little KM and Personal KM are also needed and should work in conjunction with Big KM. These are three important pieces, that should remain loosely joined in order for each to do what it does best.

Building institutional memory, one story at a time

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Institutional memory, which I wrote about recently, is a mixture of explicit and implicit knowledge sharing. It can be as explicit as Harvard Business School’s Institutional Memory site, or as implicit as the feeling one gets from a well-known local legend. A lot depends on what the organization wants to preserve. Is it how-to knowledge, like a trade secret formula, or is it certain practices and norms that define the culture? Or is it both? Each institution has to define this for itself.

Implicit knowledge is difficult to share and is usually complex. We know that this type of knowledge cannot easily be codified. However, it’s often what gives institutions sustainability and even competitive advantage. Finding ways to collect and share both types of knowledge is important for institutional memory. Stories can be an effective medium for these exchanges. The Ritz-Carlton provides an excellent example with Stories that Stay with You. Stories do not have to be exceptional to be effective, and simple anecdotes may be better on a large scale, rather than sweeping epics, or one can wind up in the uncanny valley of business storytelling.

stories.001

Institutional memory is a close cousin of knowledge management. Both can be strengthened with a firm foundation of personal knowledge management (Seek-Sense-Share). While seeking and sense-making are mostly individual activities and people should be allowed to use what’s best for them, the organization can overtly support knowledge sharing. One suggestion is to create more opportunities for “people to have coffee together”. Though it’s not the coffee that’s important, the act of gathering, combined with an environment that encourages capturing and sharing knowledge artifacts, serves to build institutional memory.

IM_coffee.001