PKMastery

Personal knowledge mastery

Please tell me about your PKM

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I had the pleasure of a visit from Jon Husband this week, only the second time that we’ve been together. Jon and his wirearchy framework have been an integral part of my views on the network era workplace since 2004. I even have a separate category for wirearchy on this website.

During one of our conversations at a local café, Jon suggested that in wirearchies,  personal knowledge management (PKM) could become the new resumé. One problem with a résumé is that it only looks backwards, on past achievements. Even behavioural interviews look at how we have dealt with past problems. What about how we prepare for new problems?

I think that asking, “What can you do for the organization today?”, would be a better way to start an interview. Considering that in complex, networked environments, where work is learning and learning is the work, would it not be better to find out how people are learning? Imagine an interview beginning with, “Good day, Mister Jones, please sit down and tell us about your PKM.” Other questions could follow:

  • How do you keep your learning up to date?
  • With whom do you learn?
  • How do you capture your learning?
  • How do you narrate your work? Please show us an example …
  • How do you stay current in your field?
  • How diverse is your network? Could you give us some examples?
  • How would you begin to look at the following problem, which is out of your normal scope of work …

Describing how we stay actively engaged in our learning might be a better indicator of future performance, in a world where many answers do not lie in the past, but in how we manage to make connections with the present. To remain relevant, workers need to re-skill and provide services for today’s and tomorrow’s problems, not yesterday’s. We need to think more like artists and look at creating new ways of working, not polishing our previous successes. Showing how we learn, or manage our knowledge personally, keeps us focused on the present. It’s time for HR to start asking about our PKM, and understand its value.

Sharing with discernment

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I was asked to elaborate between collaboration and cooperation in my last post. I responded that in the network era, collaboration specialists need to cooperate. Cooperation is quite different from collaboration, but is necessary for a networked, coherent enterprise. I hope this image makes it clearer.

I also looked at how PKM is a core skill set in a networked enterprise, empowering workers to take control of their own learning. A Seek-Sense-Share framework helps people to seek new contacts in their social networks, and communities of practice. The basic flow goes from outside, to inside, and back out.

First seek information and connections in your social networks and communities of practice. This of course requires that one connects in the first place. Good filtering skills are necessary to ensure a decent signal to noise ratio.

Filtered information can then be used in our sense-making processes. A key aspect of sense-making is creating something. This can be an information product or an action, like a probe, or experimental way of doing something, like a new work practice.

An important aspect of sharing is knowing when, with whom, and how to share. It may be posting to the web, like this blog, or it may be more directed and to a certain community. Sharing using a blog, with permalinks, categories and tags, makes it easier to share when a need arises in your networks or communities. Sharing with intent is curation, while PKM can be viewed as pre-curation. It takes discernment to know when and how to share.

A shotgun approach to knowledge sharing will not work. Showing discernment in knowledge sharing helps to build trust. Becoming a trusted node in your communities and networks (with a good signal to noise ratio) ensures that your voice will be heard.

Connecting learning and work and life

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In discussing how communities of practice can bridge the gap between innovation (new ideas) and getting work done (usually in project or work teams), I derived this graphic. For a detailed explanation of my thinking behind this, see my presentation on communities and the coherent enterprise.

I have observed that what underlies creative and complex work (the future of work in the network era, in my opinion) is  empowered workers who take control of their own learning. This is the premise of personal knowledge management. PKM is not just about finding information, but also connecting to people.

Using the Seek-Sense-Share framework, people seek new contacts in their social networks, and over time (filtering), some become co-members in communities of practice. Communities of practice help to inform our work and life, some of our learning and observations creating new ideas or practices. We can then share these new ideas with our communities, discerning who and how to share with, at the appropriate times. For instance, we may share a new practice first with a professional community of practice before publishing it to our general social networks.

A key part of PKM is connecting our networks, our communities, our work, and our lives together in order to make sense, be more productive, and open ourselves to serendipity. It’s a holistic approach, not one that compartmentalizes work and life, but something that helps us to make sense of the whole messy, complex world we live in. As such, it’s always a work in progress, but it starts by connecting to others.

PKM is not a technology

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My definition of personal knowledge management is quite short:

PKM: A set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world, work more effectively, and contribute to society.

PKM is not a technology, an enterprise system, a piece of software, or a platform. If anyone is selling you a PKM system, they do not understand it. Walk away before you waste your money. The best technology for enabling PKM is the Internet. People don’t need anything else, other than getting rid of barriers that impede their learning. These barriers include social media policies, firewalls, inefficient work practices, defining people by their job, and many others, too numerous to name. Usually the barriers stem from the organizational structure or from management.

PKM 2008

For me, PKM really means:

Personal – according to one’s abilities, interests & motivation (not directed by external forces).

Knowledge – connecting information to experience (know what, know who, know how).

Management – getting things done [not being managed].

PKM 2010

It is not PKM if there is no additional value created. In other words, PKM is not about collecting things and filing them away, no matter how fancy it looks on some software platform. PKM is creating a sense-making process that works for you, and that you regularly use. PKM is beyond the workplace, just as workers are not always at work, but are always learning.

For me, it’s using writing, particularly here on my blog, to make sense of concepts, theories, experiences, and opinions related to my professional life. Sometimes my non-professional life gets involved, and that’s just fine with me. For you, it’s probably something else, and that is the wonderful thing: there is no single PKM system for all. People practising PKM, in their own ways, add to the diversity of thinking in organizations and society. A single system would kill diverse thinking, which in turn would destroy any potential for change or innovation.

Why is PKM important?

Formal training only accounts for 5% of workers’ learning needs.

Training courses often assume a dependent learner as passive recipient. This can kill creativity and motivation.

PKM builds reflection into our learning & working, helping us adapt to change and new situations. It can also help develop critical thinking skills.

Active PKM practices help to make each person a contributing node in knowledge networks. It is the foundation for social learning, which drives social business.

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Note: My next online PKM Workshop (technology-agnostic)

PKM starts new workshop series

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So far in 2012, I have hosted three online workshops on personal knowledge mastery (PKM), as well as a Summer Camp that included one week on the topic. Over 125 people have participated in these online sessions, compared with about a dozen who came to the on-site classroom course that I offered through the University of Toronto’s iSchool Institute for the past two years. I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves.

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Reducing email

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I noted last year that workers waste a lot of time doing useless activities, like managing unwanted communications, and suggested that the cause of the problem, digital overload, was also the potential solution: social media. The ROI for social media in business is quite obvious: reducing wasted time. That’s how we can also find the time for networked learning.

The Atlantic Monthly reports a similar study that shows workers spend 28% of their time managing email. They also spend another 33% of their week managing communications and gathering knowledge, which can probably be done more effectively and efficiently, if my observations are indicative of most businesses. Without becoming industrial-era efficiency experts or doing detailed time & motion studies, we can still look at redundant work tools and habits and find ways to replace them.

Reducing email seems to be a very good place to start, as Luis Suarez has described in a world without email.

Skills 2.0 redux

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We are now in the second week of our Summer Camp on informal and social learning. The first week’s assignment was to read and comment on an article I wrote in 2008. I wondered what had changed in the last four years and if these thoughts were still pertinent. Here’s what I asked:

  • What has changed?
  • What has not?
  • Do you agree with the thoughts here?
  • What do you think are Skills 2.0, or perhaps even Skills 3.0, for you, your colleagues and your fields of expertise?

One participant said that, “This article is as pertinent to 2012 as to 2008.” Another wrote: One of my favourite quotes from the article is “Being a learning professional is becoming more about your network than your current knowledge.” 

I have noticed with my writing here over the past eight years that timing is very important. Some articles get little notice when originally posted and then are picked up by the network many years later. It’s one reason I never close commenting on my posts. You never know what might be of interest.

Here is the article, Skills 2.0 (PDF).

PKM as pre-curation

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The most important part of personal knowledge mastery (PKM), in my opinion, is the need for active sense-making. Merely seeking and sharing information does little other than create more noise online. Sense-making takes time, discipline, and effort.

One strength of PKM is the “manual” nature of sense-making activities. The act of writing a blog post, a tweet, or an annotation on a social bookmark all force you to think a bit more than clicking once and filing it to an automated system. Other sense-making routines, like my weekly review of Twitter favourites and creating Friday’s Finds, can encourage reflection and reinforce learning.

Sense-making, or placing information into context, is where the real personal value of PKM lies. The knowledge gained from PKM is an emergent property of all its activities. Merely tagging an article does not create knowledge. The process of seeking out information sources, making sense of them through some actions, and then sharing with others to confirm or accelerate our knowledge are interlinked activities from which  knowledge (often slowly) emerges.

Robin Good has a similar perspective on curation, as shown on this mindmap on curation for training & education.

Content curation is NOT the same as social sharing, reposting/retweeting, liking or favoring a specific content item.

Robin says that, “Curation is about making sense of a topic/issue/event /person/product etc. for a specific audience.”

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. Sense-making (as described by Ross Dawson)  is the most important aspect in both cases:

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)

The connection, in practice, between PKM and curation seems quite obvious to me. I can practice PKM and over time develop a wide variety of knowledge artifacts. For example, I have 2,182 blog posts and 2,858 social bookmarks. These have all been curated by me and for me. However, if I want to curate these artifacts for an intended audience, I can quickly search these artifacts and find suitable resources. I frequently do this for my clients, where I may compile a list of a few blog posts related to some aspect of our project.

I think that people who have a professional PKM framework have some of the skills and knowledge needed to be good curators. Their sense-making processes are already developed. I would consider PKM as a form of pre-curation.

PKM Book Update 1

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I have been very pleasantly surprised at how well my request to fund the PKM Book Project has been taken up by the community at large. So far, 30 people have sponsored at the basic $10 level. This is where I hoped to have the most support, as it is not a lot of money but shows that people are willing to pay a bit to get a book published that will then be made available for free to anyone who wants it.

I have been even more surprised that some people have purchased more than one basic sponsorship (thanks Dave Ferguson & Leah Good) and that I also have two Bronze level sponsors ($100) – Steve Dale & Mark Brewer – and one Gold Sponsor ($500) – Tantramar Interactive. There are two more Gold sponsors pending. This is much bigger than I anticipated.

I will take some time this Summer (now that I can afford it) to write the outline and pull several new threads together. The PKM Workshops have provided me with great feedback on how personal knowledge management is understood and used by others. Thanks to everyone for a great start and for giving me the incentive to get going on a project I have thought about doing for several years!

In the beginning was the blog

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Chris Brogan, co-author of Trust Agents, has a number of insights on blogging and engaging online. I have been blogging here for eight years and before that experimented with a few other blogs. I thought I’d compare my experience with Brogan’s recent 21 point primer for blogging.

First of all, I strongly agree with the first 14 points, which basically say that you should focus on a topic/theme, write regularly and develop your own style through practice. At Rule #15, Brogan says that, “My best (most popular) posts were the ones I spent the least time writing“. I have had the opposite experience. My popular posts are the long detailed ones that can double as white papers. For example, one of my most popular posts for 2012 is Three Principles for Net Work (1,500 words). My most visited post last year was Learning, Complexity and the Enterprise (5,300 words). Each of these took a while to write. They were not done in half an hour.

This reinforces Brogan’s Rule #21, “There’s not a single rule on this list that isn’t breakable. Break all the rules you want and enjoy yourself.” As we start the Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop this week, the topic of blogs has already come up. For me, this blog is a central part of my online sense-making. I know that for others, a blog is not the best medium. However, you will never know until you try. Social media are like languages; they take practice to develop mastery.

My experience shows that only a small percentage of the population will take to blogging. When the only online social media were blogs, we all thought they were wonderful; and they are. But other media, like Twitter, have shown greater participation levels. I usually recommend micro-blogging as a start to online sense-making. The benefits are visible quicker and the effort is not as great. No single medium is best for everyone and today people have many choices. As much as I value blogging, I would not try to get everyone doing it. There are a lot of dead blogs floating around the Web. I hope their owners are still engaging online, perhaps with videos, slideshows, or podcasts. On the Internet, the written word is no longer our only option, and that’s a good thing.