PKMastery

Personal knowledge mastery

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

PKM and competitive intelligence

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What’s competitive intelligence? The Wikipedia says:

“A broad definition of competitive intelligence is the action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers in making strategic decisions for an organization.”

Several years ago I advised a client on how to develop a CI process:

1. Start by asking questions internally and seeing what kind of answers you get. Use your existing social media tools to do this.

2. As a distributed team, each person can be responsible for a specific information source that is monitored regularly. This should be narrated and posted for all to see and comment.

3. Ask a weekly question and see who can get some information that may be able to answer part or all of it.

4. In the feedback to these questions people may ask you to re-frame the questions. Continue to learn and refine this process for your unique context. Better questions will make for better CI. Keep this process visible.

5. You may not need to hire anyone else to collate the data, but if you do, keep your team (who have industry knowledge) involved.

6. Don’t just hand CI over to a junior staff member. CI should be part of the conversational flow in the company. Marketing, sales, developers and management should be actively involved.

7. The process of asking questions, seeing if there are answers and in turn asking questions about the questions can hone the team’s ability to gather competitive intelligence.

8. If you decide to purchase access to information sources, only buy one at a time. Use that source as much as you can (squeeze it dry) until you realize you should eliminate it or augment it with another purchased source.

CI, like knowledge management, needs people to be continuously involved and engaged. CI is really just a focused type of knowledge management. Therefore, people with good PKM skills should also be better contributors to CI.

In How to Map Sources for a Competitive Intelligence Project, Cate Farrall provides a basic set up guide to those practicing CI, and describes a 3 step process.

competitive-intelligence-project-source-map
Image: Cate Farrall

This map can also be used as a way to initially set up the Seek part of a personal knowledge mastery framework. Once your PKM objective(s) is/are clear, then identify one or more resources from each part of the map. This should give a fairly broad selection of knowledge resources.

The network is the solution

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Our future needs to be focused on learning, not instruction. The key to a flourishing civilization in the network era is sense-making. We have to move from what David Warlick describes as individualized instruction to personalized learning. In the latter, “Literacy becomes a wide range of evolving information skills developed around the activities of learning – the ability to acquire knowledge and skills through the resourceful and responsible utilization of information.” Self-instruction, the basis of personal knowledge mastery, is a necessity in effective peer-to-peer networks, as networks are how we will govern ourselves more and more. David Ronfeldt articulates this with his TIMN [Tribes-Institutions-Markets-Networks] framework.

TIMN has long maintained that, beyond today’s common claims that government or market is the solution, we are entering a new era in which it will be said that the network is the solution (e.g., here and here). Aging contentions that turning to “the government” or “the market” is the way to address particular public-policy issues will eventually give way to innovative ideas that “the network” is the optimal solution.

We all need to understand how to become contributing members of networks, for work and for life. This should be the primary focus of all education.

“Reed’s Law” posits that value in networks increases exponentially as interactions move from a broadcasting model that offers “best content” (in which value is described by n, the number of consumers) to a network of peer-to-peer transactions (where the network’s value is based on “most members” and mathematically described by n2).  But by far the most valuable networks are based on those that facilitate group affiliations, Reed concluded. – David Bollier

Without sense-making skills, the citizenry cannot understand complex issues, such as individual privacy versus national security. These issues require networked, human intelligence, not broadcast sound bites nor ‘learning objects’.

Sensemaking should drive policy. Policy drives decisions. Decisions, of course, need to be informed. If the People don’t know what makes their world go ‘round, the folks on the Hill sure won’t. Globalized governments can’t. – What the Snowden Case Teaches Us

As David Bollier concludes, “Legitimate authority is ultimately vested in a community’s ongoing, evolving social life, and not in ritualistic forms of citizenship.” Should not education move beyond ritualistic forms of subjects, classes, and certifications and toward ongoing, evolving social learning? How else will we be able to deal with the complexities of this networked, connected sphere that we inhabit?

Jon Husband writes that we are all in this together:

The interconnected Information Age is beginning to show us that we’re all linked together – and that the whole system matters.

This principle applies to organizations, to networks of customers, suppliers, employees and communities, to our societies and to the planet.

New language for this principle is popping up everywhere – knowledge networks, intranets, communities of practice, systems thinking, swarming, social software, social networks, tipping points.

Awareness is the key.  Maintain an “open focus”.

Being aware of yourself, others and the effects of your actions and ways of being in relation to others is a fundamental requirement in these conditions.

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Note: This post was written in order to put a number of ideas together into an initial narrative, mostly for myself. To me, it makes sense, as I have read and tried to unpack the many linked articles. For the casual reader, this may not be so clear. – Harold

Sense-making in practice

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Maria Popova at BrainPickings.org does an excellent review of the 1936 book, You Can Do Anything by James Mangan. She covers in detail the section on 14 Ways to Acquire Knowledge. These align nicely with the Seek > Sense > Share of personal knowledge mastery as shown below.
doing-pkm

I placed Write & Reason into the Share category, but they can also fit into Sense-making. Sense-making is the necessary value-add of PKM. Without it, there is no knowledge to share, only others’ work to be re-broadcasted. Looking at PKM as pre-curation shows how important a personal sense-making process is in order to be of service to one’s networks, whether personal or professional. PKM is each person’s part of the social learning contract. Mangan’s 14 ways to acquire knowledge provide another set of possibilities on how to develop a unique PKM process. There are no best practices in PKM, only principles and examples to draw inspiration from.

For another perspective on this theme, Chris Brogan advises people to Read, then Act.

I recently purchased a bunch of different fitness magazines. The experience was interesting. I pulled the following actionable information from what I learned:

* If there was a long article with someone, it was useful. If it was a “tidbits” kind of article, it was rarely useful (usually the questions were fluff).

* If there was a “recipe,” as I like to call them, the articles were useful. If it was just “informative,” I couldn’t actually remember the lesson.

* If the article suggested other resources, the information suggested was always helpful in deepening my understanding.

* Articles that prompted an action instead of a thought process got me to take the action more often. Articles that wanted me to think a certain way were easy to forget.

Sense-making is acting on one’s knowledge. In my own work, if I did not have client projects to test out some of the ideas I have developed, my knowledge would have stagnated. In the case of PKM, it was an interesting idea that I personally put into practice at first. However, it was in explaining this concept to others, then running workshops and coaching people, that I really understood PKM well and learned much more.

“To be is to do.” – Socrates

This is my work

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The ability to learn is the only lasting competitive advantage for any organization. Hyper-connected work environments require people with better sense-making, collaboration, and cooperation skills. Social learning plays a significant role in this. Democratic workplaces that foster trust can share knowledge better and faster. To this end, I am a keen subversive of many of the last century’s management and education practices.

jarche services

Collaborative Work

Social Learning

Connected Leadership

Personal Knowledge Management

Adapting to perpetual Beta

Enterprise Social Tools

Communities of Practice

Activate your knowledge

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PKM is much more than processing information. It’s about ideas, conversations and especially relationships. Most of all, PKM is a framework to actually do knowledge work. It is a framework that helps move from an awareness of knowledge to activation of its use in the context of getting work done.

My earliest inspiration on the power of personal knowledge management came from Lilia Efimova and her research on blogging as knowledge work. Lilia’s knowledge framework, as explained in her doctoral dissertation: Passion at Work, shows that knowledge work is done within a context and that awareness of context can be developed through ideas, conversations and relations.

PKM EfimovaActivation of knowledge happens in the context of tasks and so the cycle continues.

The top sector represents the domain of developing ideas, which requires the filtering of vast amounts of information, making sense of it, and connecting different bits and pieces to come up with new ideas.
In this process physical and digital artefacts play an important role (Halverson, 2004; Kidd, 1994; Sellen & Harper, 2001), so knowledge workers are faced with a need for personal information management (Landsdale, 1988) to organise their paper and digital archives, e-mails and bookmark collections.
– The sector of conversations reflects the social nature of knowledge work (Brown & Duguid, 1996; Lave & Wenger, 1991) and incorporates the spectrum from passively followed conversations to collaboration with others focused on performing specific tasks. Conversations contribute to both developing ideas and relations with others.
– The lower sector represents the domain of relations, since effective knowledge development is enabled by trust and shared understanding between the people involved (Cross, Parker, Prusak & Borgatti, 2001). For an individual, this means a need to establish and maintain a personal network (Nardi et al., 2002), to keep track of contacts (Whittaker, Jones & Terveen, 2002), or to make choices about which communities to join and which to ignore. [Passion at Work, page 11]

My interpretation of this over the years resulted in the — Seek (filter) > Sense (discern) > Share — framework, showing PKM as a process of moving ideas and conversations through relationships of people in networks, communities (CoP), and work teams.

PKM at workPKM is completely contextual. That’s why it’s so personal. PKM is rather useless if it is separate from work. PKM is a way to integrate learning and work. PKM is pretty well the antithesis of formal education and training. Knowledge only emerges through the work, it is not predetermined. With PKM, there is no curriculum. Work is learning and learning is the work. This is relatively simple to understand but often difficult to put into practice. I run workshops on PKM but the most important part is putting ideas into practice. We have found through experience that it usually takes at least a month of practice, with reflection and feedback, to become proficient at PKM.

The Connected Workplace

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The Connected WorkerToday’s digitally connected workplace demands a completely new set of skills. Our increasing interconnectedness is illuminating the complexity of our work environments. More connections create more possibilities, as well as more potential problems.

On the negative side, we are seeing that simple work keeps getting automated, like automatic bank machines. Complicated work, for which standardized processes can be developed, usually gets outsourced to the lowest cost of labor.

On the positive side, complex work can provide unique business advantages and creative work can help to identify new business opportunities. However, complex work is difficult to copy and creative work constantly changes.

But both complex and creative work require greater implicit knowledge. Implicit knowledge, unlike explicit knowledge, is difficult to codify and standardize. It is also difficult to transfer.

Implicit knowledge is best developed through conversations and social relationships. It requires trust before people willingly share their know-how. Social networks can enable better and faster knowledge feedback for people who trust each and share their knowledge. But hierarchies and work control structures constrain conversations. Few people want to share their ignorance with the boss who controls their paycheck. But if we agree that complex and creative work are where long-term business value lies, then learning amongst ourselves is the real work in organizations today. In this emerging network era, social learning is how work gets done.

Becoming a successful social organization will require more than just the implementation of enterprise social technologies. Developing, supporting, and encouraging people to use a range of new social workplace skills will be just as important. Individual skills, in addition to new organizational support structures, are both required.

Personal knowledge mastery (PKM) skills can help to make sense of, and learn from, the constant stream of information that workers encounter from social channels both inside and outside the organization. Keeping track of digital information flows and separating the signal from the noise is difficult. There is little time to make sense of it all. We may feel like we are just not able to stay current and make informed decisions. PKM gives a framework to develop a network of people and sources of information that one can draw from on a daily basis. PKM is a process of filtering, creating, and discerning, and it also helps manage individual professional development through continuous learning.

Collaboration skills can help workers to share knowledge so that people work and learn cooperatively in teams, communities of practice, and social networks. In order to support collaborative working and learning in the organization, it is important to experience what it means to work and learn collaboratively, and understand the new community and collaboration skills that are involved. “You can’t train someone to be social, only show them how to be social.” Practice is necessary.

The power of social networks, like electricity, will inevitably change almost every existing business model. Leaders need to understand the importance of organizational architecture. Working smarter in the future workplace starts by organizing to embrace networks, manage complexity, and build trust. The 21st century connected enterprise is a new world of work and learning.

For example, traditional training structures, based on institutions, programs, courses and classes, are changing. Probably the biggest change we are seeing is that the content delivery model is being replaced by more social and collaborative frameworks. This is due to almost universal Internet connectivity, especially with mobile devices, as well as a growing familiarity with online social networks.

Work is changing and so organizational learning must change. There is an urgent need for organizational support functions (HR, OD, KM, Training) to move beyond offering training services and toward supporting learning as it is happening in the digitally connected workplace. The connected workplace will not wait for the training department to catch up.

#itashare