PKMastery – Page 37 – Harold Jarche

personal knowledge management & wisdom

2016-12-292010-03-18 by Harold Jarche

PKM consists of practical methods for making sense of the increasing digital information flows around us. There is no procedural method to go from data to wisdom. On this Stephen Downes and I agree, though he thinks I adhere to the DIKW model.

That said, while this is a much better model than this, I think it stays true to the original ‘filtering’ vision, where you go from data to wisdom through successive filtering processes. And while there are different ways to think of knowledge — processed, procedural, propositional — this model I think adheres to a more basic view.

Here are some images from a presentation on PKM I will be giving at our local university tomorrow and including in a workshop next week. Data does not create information, information does not create knowledge, and knowledge does not create wisdom. People use their knowledge to make sense of data and information. People create information that represents their knowledge, which can then be more widely shared.

DIKW

Data + Knowledge = Information

Seek, Sense, Share: Find

PKM is an approach for dealing with information by making our thoughts more explicit through filing, classifying, commenting, writing, presenting, conversing, mashing, etc. PKM itself will not make us any wiser, just as accumulating knowledge does not equate to wisdom.

The ways of adding value to information I described in my last post (Filtering; Validation; Synthesis; Presentation; Customization) are not a series of steps, only some of the ways we can make sense of information, for ourselves and for others.

Sense-making

2010-03-17 by Harold Jarche

The term personal knowledge management (PKM) isn’t about management in a business sense but rather how we can manage to make sense of information and experience in our electronic surround.

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.

PKM is an individually created process. Tim Kastelle has discussed how important it is to Filter, in the process of Aggregate-Filter-Connect. I have recently used Seek-Sense-Share to describe PKM.

The critical part of PKM is in personalizing information and experience, or to use a business term, adding value. Ross Dawson shows five ways to add value to information (my examples/descriptions follow):

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)

Terms such as Filter or Sense don’t adequately describe the sense-making process in PKM. Looking at it from an outside perspective though, as Ross Dawson has done, gives another way to describe some of what is happening in our minds. We are adding value (and context) to information so that we can later retrieve it and perhaps use it. Whatever we make transparent is value-added information for others, especially if we do it consciously and well.

The image below shows an expanded description of sense-making in the context of PKM.

A basic tool I’ve described for PKM is social bookmarking to file information. It’s simple but doesn’t add a lot of value, just a few text comments. A tweet is also simple and cannot add much value with a 140 character limit. A blog post can be much more informative especially if one takes time to research, link and compose. A collaborative document that aggregates information and shows it from a different perspective could also be valuable. Developing a slide presentation with carefully selected graphics could be seen as higher value information. More difficult to produce and perhaps adding more value to basic information, could be a narration with the slideshow. I have noticed that the process of developing higher-value information helps to sharpen one’s own thinking.

Once again, I want to point out that people with better PKM skills, an ability to create higher value information, and a willingness to share it, will become more valued members (nodes) in their professional networks.

PKM: a node in the learning network

2010-03-07 by Harold Jarche

Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, or, in other words, digital networks enable multiple connections, so organizational communications are no longer just vertical. Somebody else, outside the hierarchy, is only one click away, and perhaps easier to deal with and a better source of information and knowledge. This is becoming obvious in the business world and frameworks such as Social CRM (customer relationship management) are one attempt to address it.

Too often we think of learning as school, training as something that is delivered, and complex problems as solvable with enough effort and resources. We are wrong on all three counts.

Social learning is about getting things done in networks. It is a constant flow of listening, observing, doing, and sharing. Effective working in networks requires cooperation, meaning there is no plan, structure or direct feedback. This can scare managers and organizational leaders because no one is in change of social learning and there is no end-state or final learning objective. But social learning in networks can help us deal with complexity by providing a platform to test out ideas and learn from and with each other.

Jane Hart has described five types of learning using social media, the lubricant of learning in digital networks. Then she looked at how they relate to formal/informal learning as well as the spectrum of dependent/independent/interdependent learning.

I have circled those activities at the bottom of this grid to show what personal knowledge management (PKM) enables. I have described PKM as our part of the social learning contract and the more I look at implementing social learning, social CRM or social business models, the more convinced I am that PKM is a foundational skill-set.

Keeping knowledge in our heads is not of much use in getting things done, though that is what most of our training and development efforts have focused on for the past century. Individual training, stemming from the military systems approach to training, addressed skills and knowledge acquisition, as directed by those in change. The organization wanted to drive stuff into our heads.

In networks, though, one of our main jobs now is getting stuff out of our heads and sharing with others.

PKM is focused on accidental, serendipitous, personal-directed, informal, independent learning.

PKM enables group-directed, intra-organizational, interdependent learning.

PKM enriches formal, structured learning and helps learners be less dependent.

PKM is taking control of our learning, as well as making much of it transparent. It makes us a valuable node in our various networks. We share our learning riches without diminishing them. If more people start seeking, sensing & sharing then we’re on the social learning path. Notice how I did not mention that you need some special “social learning” technology platform to do this?

Sensing and Thinking

2010-02-16 by Harold Jarche

Tim Kastelle (a great source of knowledge on innovation) discusses how it’s better to have a good idea than a large network to fire off any old idea. Good ideas have better acceleration.

This is an important innovation lesson as well. We don’t need more ideas, we need better ideas. In many ways this is a stock and flow problem – if we only focus on stocks of ideas, we’re less able to get them connected to people. We need to think about our idea flow. As the story of these two posts illustrates, the quality of an idea has a lot to do with how well it flows through our networks. It is yet another example of the greater importance of quality, not quantity.

The notion of aggregating/filtering/connecting for innovation is one that I have looked at for personal knowledge management. I have revised this to Seek/Sense/Share in my quest to find a good metaphor/model to introduce PKM.

We can seek out (aggregate) all the sources of information on any subject and share them with the world, but if we don’t make sense of them, they’re worthless.

The narrow point of the hourglass is where less gets through, it’s under greater pressure and it’s what makes the act of sharing valuable – our special context.

PKM isn’t just collecting and filing bits and pieces of information for later retrieval. There is an ongoing sense-making process that, through practice, develops cognitive skills. It’s knowledge management, not information or document management.

Seek Sense Share

2017-03-262010-02-11 by Harold Jarche

Note: my blog is where I hammer out ideas, so you may be finding some of these posts a bit repetitive. Sorry about that ;)

My working definition of personal knowledge management:

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 also an enabling process for wirearchy: ” a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results enabled by interconnected people and technology”

Some Observations:

PKM is part of the social learning contract.
PKM works best when knowledge is shared.
Organizational Knowledge Management (KM) is dependent on effective PKM processes.
Standardizing PKM destroys it.

Explaining PKM:

I have looked at the PKM process as:

Sort-Categorize-Make Explicit-Retrieve
Connect-Contribute-Exchange
Aggregate-Filter-Connect.

Currently I use:

Seek > Sense > Share

Talking about PKM

2020-11-272010-02-10 by Harold Jarche

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].

—

@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).

—

Link to complete Twitter transcript [dead link] at KMers

—

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

2010-02-04 by Harold Jarche

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.

PKM in 2010

2010-01-27 by Harold Jarche

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?

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.

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

2010-01-25 by Harold Jarche

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.

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].

On knowledge

2009-12-23 by Harold Jarche

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.