PKMastery

Personal knowledge mastery

Talking about PKM

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KMers.org runs a regular TweetChat on knowledge management (KM) issues and today’s was on Personal Knowledge Management, with the following agenda [dead link]:

  • What effective means have we found to aggregate, filter and share information?
  • Is personal KM a good foundation for corporate KM, or are they competing efforts?
  • What are the corporate benefits of individual KM efforts? Should a company deliberately seek to take advantage of individual KM efforts?
  • How do we build a corporate culture in which individuals take responsibility for personal KM or personal sense-making?

It was difficult to keep up with the flow during this intensive one-hour session, so I’ve gone back and picked out some of the highlights [lightly edited for ease of reading].

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@markgould13 For me, PKM is a precursor for social knowledge sharing, so I use Delicious, Twitter and WordPress. Trying enterprise apps.

@mathemagenic blogging! [is an effective means to aggregate, filter & share] however the main problem is the time to be invested now for the future.

@jeffhester @elsua makes a great point about our personal networks being key. Most of the tools mentioned work best when shared.

@dougcornelius I see a distinction between consumption and production. Social Media helps bridge the old gap by combining the two [KM and SM].

@richdurost Although data is stored on the web, going back and finding those knowledge nuggets becomes a huge challenge.

@4KM Just thought of PKM as the narrow point of the hourglass. Reflect, filter, synthesize, organize & go macro again.

@markgould13 I think corporate KM is rapidly losing out to PKM. Good thing too in many sectors.

@VMaryAbraham Perhaps PKM is growing in importance because so few organizational KM methods work for individuals.

@RichardHare Corporate KM still sounds like something done to people, rather than simply the ecology of what exists in an organisation.

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@hjarche: [so I asked the obvious question]: can you have enterprise KM without PKM?

@nitinbadjatia Don’t think so

@markgould13 I think we tried that with KM1.0. Not sure it worked.

@lehawes No. I believe that is one reason we saw 70% failure rates in KM projects 10 years ago. Little focus on PKM then.

@JohnReaves You can have KM without PKM but you shouldn’t.

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@petertwo Incentive for PKM is PCM (Personal Career Management).

@jaycross CIA: From “need to know” to “need to share” as default behavior says Andy McAfee in Enterprise 2.0.

@pekadad Is attention-management a critical piece of PKM? How do I know what to to spend my (precious?) mental time on.

@jaycross @VMaryAbraham So should our focus be on … our focus? Teach priorities and filtering? Good thought, Mary.

@Quinnovator PKM needs to become PKS (Personal Knowledge Sharing).

@lehawes I think all KM is really about sharing, at heart. Need to have something to share, but the act creates the value.

@rickladd As Russell Ackoff used to say – the best way to learn is to teach. Sharing = giving away = getting back exponentially.

@jeffhester PKM is a process. Knowledge flows to me, then through me (as I share with my network and beyond).

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Link to complete Twitter transcript [dead link] at KMers

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I am more convinced now of the importance of Personal Knowledge Mastery 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.

Yes, I do offer workshops on PKM and other topics.

Aggregate Understand Connect

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I’ve changed one word, but doesn’t it make more sense like this?

As I talk about PKM here or with this graphic and discussion, “understand” is more descriptive of the human sense-making activities than “filter” is. Perhaps I should go back and change these posts to reflect what we are actually doing – understanding as part of the sense-making process.

This is inspired  partially by The Problem with DIKW as well as comments by Stephen Downes, but I still want to keep the PKM concept as simple as possible, for business reasons, not academic ones.

Aggregate Understand Connect

PKM in 2010

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Personal Knowledge Management

Updated 5 Feb 2010: changed “Filter” to “Understand”

[This post is a continuation of Sense-making with PKM (March, 2009)]

Personal = according to one’s abilities, interests and motivation (not directed by external forces)

Knowledge = the capacity for effective action (know how)

Management = how to get things done

What is PKM?

PKM is an individual, disciplined process by which we make sense of information, observations and ideas. In the past it may have been keeping a journal, writing letters or having conversations. These are still valid, but with digital media we can add context by categorizing, commenting or even remixing it. We can also store digital media for easy retrieval.

The Web has given us more ways to connect with others in our learning but many people only see the information overload aspect of our digital society. Engaging others can actually make it easier to learn and not become overwhelmed. Effective learning is the difference between surfing the waves or being drowned by them.

PKM can be looked at as three types of activities [note: I’ve reduced this from seven activities in my previous articles on PKM as I believe that a simpler process is easier to teach and to begin with].

Aggregate

Filter

Understand

Connect
Observations & Notes

Information

Knowledge

Sources of Info & Knowledge

 Annotate, Tag,

List, File,

Classify, Clarify,

Expand, Question

 People – People


Ideas – Ideas


People – Ideas

Why PKM?

Human knowledge currently doubles about every year and personal knowledge management is one way of addressing the issue of TMI (too much information).

PKM is of little value unless the results are shared by connecting to others and contributing to meaningful conversations. Informal, social learning is the primary way that knowledge is created in the workplace. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts as we build on the knowledge of others. As knowledge workers or citizens, PKM is our part of the social learning contract. Without effective PKM at the individual level, social learning has less value.

A Model

There is more than one PKM process but here is a basic structure that works for me and makes sense to many others I show it to. This post is meant to be descriptive, not prescriptive. Take what you need, as there are no best practices for complex and personal learning processes.

Aggregate Understand Connect

PKM in the context of work:

Individuals have their unique methods of sense-making and by sharing cooperatively or working collaboratively they contribute to the social learning mosaic that creates organizational knowledge.

Aggregate – looking for good sources of information (people) – noting or tagging pieces of information while working collaboratively.

Filter Understand – saving information for later – considering how it may be useful in various contexts – making sense of it – finding the right information, at the right time, in the right format,  from the information repositories of our subject matter networks.

Connect – ongoing conversations while learning and working including connecting ideas and people.

Enhanced Serendipity – PKM increases the chances of serendipitous learning. and as Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favours the prepared mind”. According to Ross Dawson: “You cannot control serendipity. However you can certainly enhance it, act to increase the likelihood of happy and unexpected discoveries and connections. That’s is what many of us do day by day, contributing to others like us by sharing what we find interesting.”

Getting to work

One of the difficult aspects of PKM is triage, or sorting. It’s the ability to separate the important from the useless. Unfortunately, what we view as useless today could be quite important tomorrow. Developing good triage techniques takes time and practice. It depends on the depth and breath of our sources (aggregation), as well as the effectiveness of our filters.

When we find something of interest or value, we need to do something with it. Either file it, save it, add to it, send it on or discard it. Discarding or missing something is becoming less of a problem online because we have powerful search tools and if we participate in cooperative networks, more than one person will notice items of significance. This process also gives us time to make sense of things, to understand.

All of this aggregation and filtering isn’t of much use if we can’t find things later. Putting our knowledge online, in databases that enable tagging, filtering and searching makes it much easier to retrieve it when we need it. For example, I use this blog as a knowledge repository. It is searchable and I’ve added tags and categories. With over 1,500 posts and +4,000 comments, I have a an excellent tool for managing what I’ve learned. Add to this almost 2,000 online social bookmarks and weekly summaries of what I learn on Twitter and I’ve created an outboard brain.

The most important aspect of PKM is making our knowledge not only explicit but public. This is part of connecting. Going public means looking both inward and outward. However, let me add one caveat. Sometimes, just publishing online for our own learning and perhaps later retrieval, is enough. It doesn’t matter if nobody links to it. If we get too focused on what others think, we won’t become good critical thinkers.

PKM: aggregate, filter, connect

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Knowledge Squared equals Power Squared, says Craig Thomler:

However the knowledge hoarding model begins to fail when it becomes cheap and easy to share and when the knowledge required to complete a task exceeds an individual’s capability to learn in the time available.

This has been reflected in a longitudinal study of knowledge workers that Robert Kelley of Carnegie-Mellon University conducted over more than twenty years. He asked professionals “What percentage of the knowledge you need to do your job is stored in your own mind?”

In 1986 the answer was typically about 75%. By 1997 workers estimated that they had only about 15% to 20% of the knowledge needed in their own mind. Kelley estimated that by 2006 the answer was only 8% to 10%.

Given that professionals now need to draw 90% or more of the knowledge they need to do their jobs from others, in my view ‘Knowledge equals Power’ is no longer true.

I believe it is now more accurate to state Knowledge Shared equals Power Squared.

I see the basis for sharing knowledge in the connected workplace is personal knowledge management or what I’ve called our part of the social learning contract. You need to have something to share in the first place and that happens when you make your work transparent. This means showing your sources (aggregation) and then what you find important (filtering) and sharing that with others (connecting).

In my case I use Google Reader as a feed aggregator, with shared items public. I also share articles with my Internet Time Alliance colleagues using Posterous. I filter more with this blog by writing about and commenting on much of what I have read and learned. I also filter information with Twitter and my weekly Friday’s Finds. I connect through this blog and the comments left by others, by leaving comments, via Twitter and in the increasing number of web conferences and discussions becoming available. Essential in all of this are the tracks I’ve left for others and for myself to retrieve as necessary, as I do during my frequent searches of this blog, Twitter favourites and my social bookmarks.

None of this is new, but I think that the three-step process of Aggregate/Filter/Connect is much simpler than my previous model of four internal actions and three external ones.

pkm-flow

A simpler model, inspired by Ross Dawson’s post on enhanced serendipity, may be easier to communicate (and remember).

You cannot control serendipity. However you can certainly enhance it, act to increase the likelihood of happy and unexpected discoveries and connections. That’s what many of us do day by day, contributing to others like us by sharing what we find interesting.

I’ve found that this diagram works better in explaining my PKM process and how it relates to other people, all engaged in similar, but not identical, sense-making endeavours [Updated here: PKM in 2010].

PKM-AFC

On knowledge

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Some things I learned about knowledge this past year.

About  knowledge management: Codified knowledge (documents, lists, reports, best practices) is effective in organizations that have mostly new staff or high turnover, like a pizza franchise. It does not help teams to produce any better unless the team is rather inexperienced. Interpersonal sharing can be more effective for some teams but it is time-consuming and requires “slack time” for experienced team members to take advantage of it. Lesson: You cannot run your senior staff at full-steam all the time and no amount of electronic documentation is going to help except to get inexperienced people up to speed.

From Peter Senge:

The average life expectancy of large companies is about 30 years, but some are over 200 years old. What is the reason for this? Organizational learning! Basically, individual learning in organizations is irrelevant. Work is almost never done by one person alone. Almost all value is created by teams and networks of people.

Knowledge is the capacity for effective action (know how) and it is the only aspect of knowledge that really matters in life. While learning may be generated in teams, this type of knowledge comes and goes. Learning really spreads through social networks [in French, this is the difference between connaissance and savoir faire].

A few decades ago the field of knowledge management was co-opted by information technology vendors, and became useless for organizational learning.

How does personal knowledge management relate to social learning?

PKM is an individual, disciplined process by which we make sense of information, observations and ideas. In the past it may have been keeping a journal, writing letters or having conversations. These are still valid, but with digital media we can add context by categorizing, commenting or even remixing it. We can also store digital media for easy retrieval. However, PKM is of little value unless the results are shared by connecting to others and contributing to meaningful conversations. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts as we build on the knowledge of others. As knowledge workers or citizens, PKM is our part of the social learning contract. Without effective PKM at the individual level, social learning has less value.

Managing what matters.

Learning and becoming knowledge-able are now basic requirements for every worker. These are also basic requirements for life, as much as food and water. We don’t manage what or how our employees eat and we don’t need to manage their knowledge or learning. We can make it easier for them to learn and share knowledge though, just like putting in a cafeteria or a water fountain. Workers need support and tools to develop these personal processes but the organization should stay out of the business of knowledge and learning and instead focus on collaboration.

PKM Overview

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admit one

I will be presenting on personal knowledge management (PKM) for LearnTrends 2009 on Tuesday, 17 November at 12:00 noon Pacific (15:00 EST & 20:00 GMT). In preparation, I’ve created a 5 minute presentation (MP4) of the topic, summarizing many of the posts I’ve written on the subject (click link below to launch video).

PKM Overview

References:

Sense-making with PKM (explains processes in more detail)

Creating your PKM Processes (some suggestions)

Other PKM Processes (includes diagrams)

Learning and Micro-blogging (all about Twitter)

Web Tools for Critical Thinking (with diagrams)

Learnstreaming and PKM

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Dennis Callahan has a most interesting Posterous site, called LearnStreaming. His latest post shows this graphic, which I find reflects many of the concepts of personal knowledge management, but with some additional aspects that may make it easier to understand and do:

learnstreaming_denniscallahan

Dennis has a clear and simple definition for Learnstreaming – publishing your learning activities online for the benefit of you and others. This is the basis of many blogs in our field and learnstreaming continues to expand with all the new applications such as micro-blogging, social bookmarks, and “life-streaming” platforms like Posterous.

Using  a related concept from Jay Cross, I would say that learnstreams are the water that allows learnscapes to grow.

scape_big

PKM: our part of the social learning contract

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Why is social learning important?

It is becoming more difficult to make sense of the world by ourselves. Understanding issues that affect our lives takes significant time and effort, whether it be public education, universal health care or climate change. Even the selection of a mobile phone plan requires more than mere numeracy and literacy.  We need context to understand complex issues and this can be provided by those we are connected to. The reach and depth of our connections become critical in helping us make sense of our environment and to solve problems. Problem-solving is what most people actually do for a living, so doing it better can have widespread effects. With social learning, everyone contributes to collective knowledge and this in turn can make  organizations and society more effective in dealing with problems.

How does personal knowledge mastery relate to social learning?

PKM is an individual, disciplined process by which we make sense of information, observations and ideas. In the past it may have been keeping a journal, writing letters or having conversations. These are still valid, but with digital media we can add context by categorizing, commenting or even remixing it. We can also store digital media for easy retrieval. However, PKM is of little value unless the results are shared by connecting to others and contributing to meaningful conversations. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts as we build on the knowledge of others. As knowledge workers or citizens, PKM is our part of the social learning contract. Without effective PKM at the individual level, social learning has less value.

knowledge-management

Image Source: iKnowlej Personal Knowledge Management

PKM – start small

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Tony Karrer responded to my question yesterday on what aspects of PKM I should consider for the LearnTrends conference:

Harold – my question is what organizations should be doing around this? What skill building?

The challenge is that it’s personal and quite different based on roles. Going around and coaching seems too expensive.

How do you begin to move an organization forward?

I still think that the easiest way to share knowledge is to make visible some of what we already do, without adding extra work or effort. Pretty well anyone with a personal computer saves web sites to their Favorites/Bookmarks. Changing that simple annotation process to something that can be shared is relatively easy. I’ve explained it before in Free Your Bookmarks.

If an organization or department decided to put everyone’s bookmarks into a social application it would make for a large repository of links. There may be some effort in going through these bookmarks and adding more descriptive tags but it could be spaced over a period of time. The department responsible could then look at all of these bookmarks, which might be on a variety of systems (e.g. delicious, diigo) and bring them together with RSS and publish them to a central web page. The page could include a visual tag cloud for easier searching. This is an example of the role of connecting & communicating that I advocate for the training department of the 21st century. [Note to self: Diigo looks to be much more collaborative than Delicious, and I have to test it out some more].

It’s doubtful that everyone will be good at sharing bookmarks that are relevant, annotated and appropriately tagged. I think that in a large enough group some people will shine at this and, once again, the leaders of the initiative should support them. The examples provided by peers will have more chance of influencing workplace behaviour than rules and regulations from above, so allow methods to develop over time. The early adopters of social bookmarking may become facilitators for some of the other knowledge sharing activities I’ve previously  suggested (and I haven’t even mentioned twitter):

Aggregate

Converse

Reflect

However, in organizations where there is little history of online collaboration, I would wait a while before initiating these. For a lot of workers and organizations, the leap to online social bookmarks will be big enough.

PKM for LearnTrends

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Another free, LearnTrends professional development event is gathering steam for November.

lt2009_ad468x60_thumb5

Like past LearnTrends events, there will be a great variety of presentations and conversations over the three days. I’ll be presenting on Personal Knowledge Management. The entire schedule should be out on October 15th.  I’d appreciate any input or suggestions on what to focus on for the half hour or so I’ll have to present.

Here are some of my existing resources on PKM:

The most recent overview: Sense-making with PKM

One example: Creating your PKM Processes

More examples: Other PKM Processes

Also, Patti Anklam just concluded a three-part series on knowledge management, with The 3rd KM: Personal Knowledge Management.