PKMastery

Personal knowledge mastery

Active sense-making

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Yesterday, during my presentation on personal knowledge management to IBM BlueIQ I was asked about the role of blogging in my own sense-making processes. For almost seven years, my blog has been where I try to make sense of my observations. I’ve called it my home base. As I’ve said before, this blog is mostly for me. These are my half-baked thoughts which I make public in order to share and to learn. Many posts get built upon or edited several times and may become part of a longer article or white paper. Most of what is posted here is raw material. Much of the nuance or context is in the flow of the conversations here over the years. The process is often more important than the product.

In my Seek>Sense>Share model, seeking and annotating information is important but cannot stand on its own. As much as I may add feeds into my RSS reader, bookmark web pages or upload photos, these are nothing more than senseless digital constructs until I put them to use. Seeking information is an important foundation to PKM online but it’s of little use without action. The sense-making part of the process requires action and it takes practice to be good at it. How to make sense of one’s experiences is up to the individual. Sense-making is an activity, a regular practice. It can be as simple as creating a list (Filtering) or as complicated as a thesis (Customization). People with better sense-making skills are able to create higher value information and when this is shared, they contribute to their networks. This strikes me as the core of collaborative knowledge work.

I added a sense-making activity about a year ago when I realized I was losing track of what I was finding on Twitter. I could have saved interesting tweets to my social bookmarks but instead I decided to do a weekly review of what I had found. This requires little effort during the week, other than clicking the “favorite” star. At the end of the week, I re-read these tweets and their links and then decide which ones are still of interest. The activity of reading, writing and perhaps commenting helps to internalize some of the knowledge. The result is Friday’s Finds and a byproduct is that some other people find it interesting and useful as well.

Leveraging collective knowledge

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This week, a few related knowledge management (KM) articles crossed my path and I’d like to weave them together.

Here’s a model that shows how KM has progressed over the past 15 years. Nancy Dixon discusses three eras of knowledge management as moving from Explicit Knowledge (document management) to Experiential Knowledge (communities of practice; expertise locators)  and now to Collective Knowledge (social media). This post and Nancy’s previous ones, are well worth the read as a primer on KM.

Leveraging collective knowledge may be our collective challenge but there are no guaranteed solutions at this time. This is still new territory.

“Although the first thinking about Leveraging Collective Knowledge began to appear around 2005, there are only a few leading edge organizations that have developed new practices for making use of their organization’s collective knowledge. Most organizations are still centered in the perspective of the second era and some, who have come late to knowledge management, are still struggling with getting good content management in place.”

The need for KM is evident. In the gorilla illusions, Nick Milton points out that we need to create knowledge artifacts in order to counter the tendencies of our brains to make things up over time. These illusions include:

  • The illusion of memory
  • The illusion of confidence
  • The illusion of knowledge

As Nick concludes, “The implication is that if you will need to re-use tacit knowledge in the future, then you can’t rely on people to remember it.” With more information passing by us from multiple sources, our ability to keep track of it with only our brains is rather limited. We need systems, but more powerful and more flexible ones than currently offered by enterprise software systems like document management, expertise location, learning management or communities of practice.

Each person’s knowledge needs and knowledge use are unique. For example, Owen Ferguson explains that experts shouldn’t design online resources for novices:

The curse of the expert when it comes to online presentation is that they often decide they know better and produce a design that matches their own knowledge map – totally confusing the user. IT experts design the IT part of the intranet, HR experts design the HR part of the intranet, product experts design the product information parts of the intranet and all express surprise that users never seem to use them.

Actually, designing “for” anybody becomes a problem. Valued professional* work is non-standardized, as standardized work today just gets automated and outsourced.  Who really knows what knowledge needs any professional may have? How many levels of novices, journeymen and experts are there in an organization? Hence the need for the mass customization of (knowledge) work processes.

The relationship with personal knowledge mastery (PKM) is clear. The challenge is to enable “small pieces (individuals) loosely joined” – to seek, make-sense of, and share their knowledge. I use a combination of my blog, bookmarks, and tweets to inform my outboard brain so I can retrieve contextual knowledge as I interact with my clients and colleagues. My process works for me, but it cannot be copied as a standardized process. The real challenge is to help each person find a process that works on an individual basis while supporting the organization in leveraging collective knowledge.

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* “A professional is anyone who does work that cannot be standardized easily and who continuously welcomes challenges at the cutting edge of his or her expertise.” —David Williamson Shaffer

A personal learning journey

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I became interested in knowledge management (KM) as I was introduced to it in the mid 1990’s while practising instructional systems design (ISD) and human performance technology (HPT) in the military. In the late 1990’s knowledge management was part of our solution suite at the Centre for Learning Technologies (CLT via The Wayback Machine).

The Centre for Learning Technologies is an applied research, consulting and resource centre for the use of new media in learning, knowledge management, and workplace performance support.

I continued to work with enterprise knowledge repositories and KM related projects until I started freelancing in 2003 and was faced with the challenge of creating my own knowledge management system with a minimal budget. Luckily the web had evolved and there were consumer alternatives to enterprise systems. I became a consumer and simultaneously a sharer of online knowledge.

Lilia Efimova (2004) was one of my earlier inspirations, “To a great extend PKM [personal knowledge management] is about shifting responsibility for learning and knowledge sharing from a company to individuals and this is the greatest challenge for both sides.” This still sums up the core concept of PKM. As a free agent it was rather easy for me to take responsibility for my learning and knowledge sharing, but it was much more difficult for people working within organizational hierarchies. I saw a need for PKM inside all businesses so I began investigating and practising PKM while reflecting on my own attempts to manage my knowledge.

I had turned my website into my knowledge base (2005) combining blogs, RSS and social bookmarks to help manage my knowledge flows. By explaining my process in public, I hoped to clarify my methods and get feedback from others. I then played with metaphors to explain my emerging processes (2006); “Basically, you can take a few free web tools and start controlling your information streams (Input). Then you can file the good stuff somewhere you can always find it (Filing & Sharing).”

By 2007, PKM had become my best tool and I had once more revised my processes. My own area of interest was PKM with web tools, though of course a PKM system can be unplugged. I was also seeing the similarities with personal learning environments: PLE.

The need for some type of PKM process for people in many walks of life was becoming clear in 2008. However, it was only part of the solution in creating better workplaces and encouraging critical thinking:

Developing practical methods, like PKM and Skills 2.0 (PDF) can help, but at the same time we need to work on creating and supporting new models of work that are more democratic and human. This means that we need to think about and talk about work differently. For myself, I have found that not being a salaried employee has freed my mind in many ways. I know that this is not the answer for everyone, but it’s time to make slogans like, “our business is our people”, a reality.

I forecast (2009) that PKM would be an essential part of workplace learning by 2019, but it now seems that will happen much earlier in many sectors with the cheap abundance of social learning tools.

Workplace learning in 2019:

  • Much of the workforce will be distributed in time & space as well as in engagement (part-time, full-time, contract mix).
  • More learning will be do-it-yourself and gathered from online digital resources available for free and fee. More workers will be used to getting what they need as they change jobs/contracts more frequently but remain connected to their online networks (online/offline won’t matter anymore).
  • Work and learning will continue to blend while stand-up training will be challenged by the ever-present back channel. Successful training programs will involve the learners much more – before, during and after.
  • Conferences, workshops and on-site training will become more niche and fragmented (smaller,  focused & connected online) as travel costs increase and workers become more demanding of their time.
  • The notion of PKM will have permeated much of the workplace
  • These changes will not be evenly distributed.

I also observed that government managers especially needed to develop ways of prioritizing and coping with information flows while leaving space for real time conversations. In 2009 I wrote 34 posts related to PKM on this blog, as it was becoming evident that there was a need and an interest. I came to the conclusion that PKM was our part of the social learning contract as we increasingly engage in online professional and learning networks.

This year, I engaged with the KM community and gained many insights talking about PKM on Twitter: “I am more convinced now of the importance of PKM (or PKSharing) in getting work done in knowledge-intensive workplaces. It is a foundational skill, of which only the principles can be formally taught, and like any craft it must be practised to gain mastery.” My latest metaphor/model  is described in PKM in a Nutshell and of course there are several other models.

I will continue to explore better ways to manage information, encourage reflection and share what we are learning. Technology plays a role in this but changing attitudes is the key.  Learning is a process, not a discrete event and it needs to become part of the work flow, not directed by a separate department, with a separate budget that is itself separate from the work that has to be done. Encouraging and supporting PKM* is one part of this.

*PKM is the term that I have used here, but other terms may become more meaningful to the world at large. I will continue to use PKM but am open to others, especially if they are more useful in getting the work done:

  • personal knowledge sharing
  • personal learning environment
  • personal learning network

Knowledge sharing, one at a time

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“Every amateur epistemologist knows that knowledge cannot be managed. Education has always assumed that knowledge can be transferred and that we can carefully control the process through education. That is a grand illusion.” David Jonassen

While knowledge cannot be managed [at an organizational level*], we can work at managing our own knowledge. That’s what PKM is all about. Individually we can manage information flows, make sense of them and share with others, especially people with similar interests or common goals. Enterprise “knowledge management” initiatives have not been proven to work very well and may even be irredeemably corrupted. Dave Pollard’s experience with knowledge management shows how important it is to personalize our sense-making and how futile standardized methods and practices can be:

So my conclusion this time around was that the centralized stuff we spent so much time and money maintaining was simply not very useful to most practitioners. The practitioners I talked to about PPI [Personal Productivity Improvement] said they would love to participate in PPI coaching, provided it was focused on the content on their own desktops and hard drives, and not the stuff in the central repositories.

Luis Suarez prefers the term knowledge sharing to knowledge management. If this helps us move away from central digital information repositories (Knowledge Management, Document Management, Learning Content Management Systems, Content Management Systems, etc.) then I’m all for it.  I’m not advocating tearing down any existing IT infrastructure (yet); but we need to enable a parallel system that can handle the distributed nature of work in addressing complex problems, namely weaker central control and better distributed communications and decision-making.

The best first step in getting work done is to help each worker develop a PKM process, with an emphasis on personal. As each person seeks information, makes sense of it through reflection and articulation, and then shares it through conversation, a distributed knowledge base is created. It’s messier and looser than traditional KM, but it’s also more robust. This is what many of us already do. If you take all the published resources of my colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance you will see a loosely connected knowledge base of thousands of assets. They can be found, sometimes by searching and frequently by asking the person who created them. We each use different systems and connect with the open protocols of the web, like RSS, hyperlinks, OPML, etc.

The way to implement organizational knowledge sharing is already visible on the edges of the workplace. Many bloggers are doing it and have been for years. All it takes is getting everyone to do some form of PKM, on their own terms. Once most everyone is seeking, sensing and especially sharing, it’s a relatively easy task to start harvesting and analyzing our collective knowledge. For instance, take what Tony Karrer has done with eLearningLearning and expand this to include social bookmarks and synthesized micro-sharing, like my weekly Friday’s Finds on Twitter.

The real value of PKM is when enough people in an organization do it and create a critical mass of diverse conversations. PKM is our part of a social learning contract that makes us better off individually and collectively. For workers to be engaged over the long term, PKM must remain personal, and the organization must use a gentle hand at all times.

Using open Web systems ensures that not only will the organization get access to valuable information flows, but workers will be able take their piece of it if they leave. A little give and take will go a long way. Allowing the tools to be portable will ensure commitment and engagement without any coercive action on the part of the organization.

The collective sharing of PKM in the enterprise has the potential to create a dynamic knowledge base for idea management that can drive innovation.

* added to give clarification, in case of any confusion

PKM: Working Smarter

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In PKM in a Nutshell, I linked my various posts on personal knowledge management to make the framework more coherent. My ITA colleague, Jane Hart has just released an extensive resource that correlates nicely with the PKM framework. It is called A WORKING SMARTER RESOURCE: A Practical Guide to using Social Media in Your Job and includes seven sections (my annotations on how they connect to PKM):

1. Finding things out on the Web (SEEK)
2. Keeping up to date with new Web content (SEEK)
3. Building a trusted network of colleagues (SEEK & SHARE)
4. Communicating with your colleagues (SHARE)
5. Sharing resources, ideas and experiences with your colleagues (SHARE)
6. Collaborating with your colleagues (SHARE & USE)
7. Improving your personal productivity (SENSE & USE)

Here’s the a description and rationale for adopting PKM, individually and within organizations:

  • PKM is a way to deal with ever-increasing amounts of digital information.
  • It requires an open attitude toward learning and finding new things (I Seek).
  • PKM methods can help to develop processes of filing, classifying and annotating for later retrieval.
  • PKM leverages  open web-based systems that facilitate sharing.
  • A PKM mindset aids in observing, thinking and using information & knowledge better (I Sense).
  • Transparent PKM helps to share ideas with others (We Share).
  • After a while, you begin to realize you’re in a community of practice when your practice changes (We Use).
  • PKM prepares the mind to be open to new ideas (enhanced serendipity, or chance favours the prepared mind).

Leading through turbulent times with PKM

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In what BP’s oil spill says about management today [dead link] the author talks about the need to deal with increasing complexity, concluding:

Navigating a business successfully through turbulent times requires the ability to deal with ambiguity, be resilient in the face of adversity, be authentic and have the innovative capacity to anticipate and respond to the unpredictable environment. Consequently, leading through permanent whitewater requires an ability to sense, make sense, decide and act quickly. It requires a sharp mind, humility and an openness to new experiences.

It’s what I call life in perpetual Beta and one way to deal with it is by developing a personal knowledge management process. Seek, Sense & Share in order to handle the complexity of the networked age. This isn’t a “nice-to-have”, optional approach to organizational learning. It’s a necessity. BP sure could use PKM at all levels.

Sense-making glossary

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PARC offers a glossary of quite useful sense-making terms. Sense-making is what the second part of the Seek-Sense-Share PKM model is about.

Sense-making – The process by which individuals (or organizations) create an understanding so that they can act in a principled and informed manner …

Source-linked sensemaking – In conventional media, a document about a topic may cite a list of references. In source-linked sense-making, the report is an active document with active links for retrieving the sources used …

Examples of sensemaking operations are abstracting, annotating, assumption linking, classifying, clustering, comparing elements or schemas, concept splitting, making a cross product, detailing, document mining, emitting, extracting, format stripping, foraging,  fusing,  goal shifting, instantiating schemas, linking, matching,  negotiating meaning, perceiving order, re-encoding, refining, retrieving, segmenting, shifting representations, source linking, summarizing, stemming, structuring, transforming, and zoning.

Resumable sensemaking is the sensemaking analog of life-long learning, that is, it embodies the idea that (at least potentially) the process of making sense is never done.

Many of the definitions are framed around report writing but these can easily be expanded into the broader areas of personal knowledge management or personal learning environments.

All models are flawed but some are useful

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Silvia Andreoli has added to my last post on PKM and created this graphic to show the individual as well as the social aspects of personal knowledge management. I like its simplicity and the way it shows the flows. My only minor issue is that I would replace “knowledge” with “personalized information”. Knowledge is an emergent property of the entire system, in my opinion.

Silvia’s graphic has some similarities with one of my earlier representations, which included four internal processes and three external ones:

I found over time that even this representation was too complicated to get the idea across quickly and people did not remember it, so I developed the more simplistic Seek-Sense-Share graphic. For people steeped in knowledge management or learning models, a more complicated representation is likely better, but as an introduction, I will keep to the simpler representations. Silvia’s graphic makes an excellent addition to these models.

Critical thinking in the organization

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Even the mainstream training field is realizing that reduced layers of bureaucracy mean decision-making gets pushed down the organization chart. This is the message of the AMA in the promotional video – Critical Thinking: Not just a C-suite skill.  However, wirearchy takes this one important step further by advocating a two-way flow of power and authority. In both cases, the need for critical thinking is evident. Here is Edward Glaser’s definition:

“Critical thinking calls for a persistent effort to examine any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the evidence that supports it and the further conclusions to which it tends. It also generally requires ability to recognize problems, to find workable means for meeting those problems, to gather and marshal pertinent information, to recognize unstated assumptions and values, to comprehend and use language with accuracy, clarity, and discrimination, to interpret data, to appraise evidence and evaluate arguments, to recognize the existence (or non-existence) of logical relationships between propositions, to draw warranted conclusions and generalizations, to put to test the conclusions and generalizations at which one arrives, to reconstruct one’s patterns of beliefs on the basis of wider experience, and to render accurate judgments about specific things and qualities in everyday life.”

A personal knowledge mastery process can help to develop critical thinking skills, where sense-making includes observing, studying, challenging (especially one’s assumptions), and evaluating. Developing these skills takes practice, appropriate feedback and an environment that supports critical thinking.

seek sesne share critical thinking

Several web tools can be used to develop critical thinking skills; the foundation of PKM:

critical thinking tools

Flattening the organization is one way to open communications and delegate responsibility but asking employees to engage in real critical thinking, and accepting the resulting actions, will not work unless there is a two-way flow of power and authority. Critical thinking is not just thinking more deeply but also asking difficult and discomfiting questions. Without power and authority, these become meaningless.

So yes, critical thinking is not just for the C-suite, but unleashing it requires a new framework for getting work done. Wirearchy as the organizational framework, coupled with active personal knowledge management processes, is a step in that direction.

PKM in a nutshell

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Personal Knowledge Management:

  • A way to deal with ever-increasing digital information.
  • Requires an open attitude to learning and finding new things (I Seek).
  • Develops processes of filing, classifying and annotating for later retrieval.
  • Uses open systems that enable sharing.
  • Aids in observing, thinking and using information & knowledge (I Sense).
  • Helps to share ideas with others (We Share).
  • “You know you’re in a community of practice when your practice changes” (We Use).
  • PKM prepares the mind to be open to new ideas (enhanced serendipity).

PKM is related to Personal Learning Environments and Personal Learning Networks. They are different ways of addressing similar issues:

How do I keep track of all of this information?

How do I make sense of changing conditions and new knowledge?

How can I develop and improve critical thinking skills?

How can we cooperate?

How can I collaborate better?

How can I engage in problem-solving activities at the edge of my expertise?

Update: More recent posts: My Personal Learning Journey & Network Learning: Working Smarter (2010)