In 2013 I posed this question — ask what value you can add — when it comes to sharing information and knowledge. Ten years later and what has increased is the noise, especially misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda. The release of tools like generative pre-trained transformers (GPT) will only increase the amount of noise online. It is becoming even more important to add value before we share information, especially confirming that the information is valid and reliable. As more machines create ‘answers’ to our questions, we should focus on adding human value.
PKMastery
Personal knowledge mastery
hierarchies, experts, and dogma
Dogma — prescribed doctrine proclaimed as unquestionably true by a particular group — a settled or established opinion, belief, or principle.
In 2021, research concluded that medical orthodoxy, such as ‘droplet dogmatism’, blocked the acceptance that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was mainly transmitted through the air, in spite of knowledge from fields outside infectious disease.
Three fields—political, state (policy and regulatory), and scientific—were particularly relevant to our analysis. Political and policy actors at international, national, and regional level aligned—predominantly though not invariably—with medical scientific orthodoxy which promoted the droplet theory of transmission and considered aerosol transmission unproven or of doubtful relevance. This dominant scientific sub-field centred around the clinical discipline of infectious disease control, in which leading actors were hospital clinicians aligned with the evidence-based medicine movement. Aerosol scientists—typically, chemists, and engineers—representing the heterodoxy were systematically excluded from key decision-making networks and committees. Dominant discourses defined these scientists’ ideas and methodologies as weak, their empirical findings as untrustworthy or insignificant, and their contributions to debate as unhelpful.
Conclusion:
The hegemonic grip of medical infection control discourse remains strong. Exit from the pandemic depends on science and policy finding a way to renegotiate what Bourdieu called the ‘rules of the scientific game’—what counts as evidence, quality, and rigour. —Orthodoxy, illusio, and playing the scientific game
pulling knowledge
Nick Milton discusses the knowledge cycle as you have never seen it before in a 2018 post. He says that most organizational knowledge management processes are focused on ‘Pushing’ knowledge and then discusses an alternative by ‘Pulling’ knowledge.
the fifth discipline redux
Harvard Business Review described The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge, as one of the seminal management books of the previous 75 years. In 2017 I reviewed mastery and models and showed how they still pertain to organizations 30 years later. I concluded that the challenge for learning professionals is to help organizations become learning organizations. It is also to master the new literacies of the network era and promote critical thinking, for ourselves and others.
Questioning existing hierarchies is necessary to create the organizations of the future where power and authority are shared, based on mutual trust. The dominant organizational models need to become network-centric and learning-centric.
“Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively. As such, it is an essential cornerstone of the learning organization — the learning organization’s spiritual foundation.” ―Peter Senge (1990) The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
meaningful work
Kourosh Dini says that, “Mastery and meaningful work develop from guided play.” This is pretty well the direction behind my personal knowledge mastery framework and the notion of ‘half-baked ideas‘.
“There is an error in our focus on productivity. I may even be labeled as a productivity talking-head. I’ve more than likely made the error myself.
The error is that the focus should not be on productivity so much as it is on mastery.
Mastery is a process, a development over time for something you care about. That could be your family or that could be a craft.
This way, you choose the thing or things you are mastering and the remainder of your world is around supporting those. You don’t need to master everything, so much as take them to a point of being strong enough to support what you find meaningful.
Secondly, I strongly believe that mastery absolutely requires play.” —Being Productive 2022-12-05
PKM in perpetual beta
I recently wrote — from platforms to covenants — that I firmly believe that open protocols connecting small pieces loosely joined is a better framework than any privately owned social media platform. Twitter was just too darned easy for many years. I am now connecting more on Mastodon though I have not mastered all of its functions. Mastodon is an open protocol and anyone can put up a server and connect to what is called the ‘fediverse’, a federated network of hosts using the protocol.
During the past decade I have used Twitter as an aid to learn about social networks on my personal knowledge mastery online workshops. As Twitter continues to not only crash and burn but reinstate accounts that promote hatred, I no longer wish to advocate for any use of the platform. I am still there, for now, as I am connected to so many friends and colleagues.
from platforms to covenants
I wrote in agile sensemaking (2018) that radical innovation only comes from networks with large structural holes which are more diverse. This is why social networks cannot also be work teams, or they become echo chambers. Work teams can focus intensely on incremental innovation, to get better at what they already do. Communities of practice, with both strong and weak social ties, then become a bridge on this network continuum, enabling both individual and interactive creativity.
Connecting work teams, communities of practice/interest, and professional social networks ensures that knowledge flows and that people have the information needed to make well-informed decisions, especially when dealing with complexity and chaos. I have noted before that the world has become so complex and interconnected that the individual disciplines developed during The Enlightenment — like medicine — are no longer adequate to help society in our collective sensemaking, especially during global crises.
Experts in all disciplines have to get out of their silos and connect in multidisciplinary subject matter networks. A lone expert, or even a lone discipline, is obsolete in the network era. Only cooperative networks will help us make sense of the complex challenges facing us — climate change, environmental degradation, pandemics, war, etc. In today’s world, connections trump expertise.
open protocols connect small pieces loosely joined
Sturgeon’s revelation states that 90% of everything is crap, which I aligned with the current state of personal knowledge management (not mastery) where we see many offers for proprietary tools to help us with our sensemaking, whether it be better note-taking or creating an online brain. But in every field there is only so much good stuff and a lot of crap. Sturgeon, a science fiction writer who was asked why so much SF was crap, said it was the same in every field of human production.
I concluded that PKM is bullshit only when it is technology-centric, and not a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world and work more effectively. The bullshit is believing in a technology silver bullet. We constantly see that BS sells.
coming full circle
I started my freelance career quite suddenly. I was fired from a rather well-paying job and found myself in a small town in Atlantic Canada with few prospects. My wife, a registered nurse, was a stay-at-home mother for our two pre-teen children. If she went back to work it would mean retraining and then starting at the lowest level in our province, as her previous experience was in another province. This is one of the joys of Canada’s Constitution where provinces are responsible for health services, so skills are not transferable across provincial boundaries.
So I hung out my shingle in June 2003 and later started my blog in February 2004. The US dollar was strong against the Canadian ‘loonie’, so traveling south of the border for networking or professional development was an expensive endeavour. This was when I came across the concept of PKM. It was a framework to connect with other professionals and make sense of our digitally connected world. I embraced it, especially as the financial cost was low.
community finds
I am a member of several private online communities and I also host one — the perpetual beta coffee club. There have been some interesting conversations over the past few weeks and I would like to highlight some online resources that were shared. I learn a lot from these communities.