PKMastery

Personal knowledge mastery

working smarter with PKM

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Working Smarter with Personal Knowledge Mastery is a field guide for the networked knowledge worker. It is meant to complement the PKM Workshops and help practitioners. At 12 pages it is not designed to cover all aspects of the models, frameworks, and practices that inform PKM, but provide a quick reference, especially for those new to the discipline.

This field guide is made available under a Creative Commons license for easy sharing and is not for resale or commercial purposes. For more detailed explanations, see the Perpetual Beta Series.

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making sense of our digital world

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The spread of the novel corona virus SARS-CoV-2 is having a massive influence on our connected world. Schools are being shut, quarantines are in effect, and airlines have cancelled certain flight routes. So where are we getting our information from? If it’s from Facebook then some secret algorithm designed to maximize advertising revenue is deciding what we see. This does not make for a well-informed citizenry. There are also forces at play that want people to panic. Some misinformation may be designed to push stock prices up or down so profits can be made. Other forces see panic as a way to destabilize competing or warring nations. The digital information sphere is constantly being manipulated and we should understand this and find ways to counter the post-truth machines.

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PKM in practice

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What is cognitive load?

“When the brain has to deal with multiple elements of information, difficult material, and you have to manipulate or process those different elements, working memory can struggle. It imposes a heavy working load on working memory – that is cognitive load … Intrinsic cognitive load is the load complex material places on working memory. It is subjective, intrinsic and there’s not much you can do about it. Extraneous cognitive load is in the designed instruction and can be redesigned to reduce cognitive load.” —Donald Clark

Worked examples can lessen cognitive load, according research by John Sweller, which is reviewed by Donald Clark in the quote above. “A worked example is a step-by-step demonstration of how to perform a task or how to solve a problem”, according to Psychology Wiki. Cognitive load management is one of the four beneficial skills that can be acquired through the practice of personal knowledge mastery (PKM). For example, off-loading some cognitive tasks to an external network or community of practice provides time to focus or reflect.

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RTFM

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If you find that people on social media have a tendency toward anger and outrage there is one action we all can take to diffuse the situation. It’s simple, but first we have to stop and think. If there is but one practice that will help make social media more civil, it is to always read the full article or reference before sharing and especially before commenting. In short — RTFM.

I recently posted a link to an article on Twitter — How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle Class — with this quote, “In effect, management consulting is a tool that allows corporations to replace lifetime employees with short-term, part-time, and even subcontracted workers, hired under ever more tightly controlled arrangements … Technocratic management, no matter how brilliant, cannot unwind the structural inequalities that are dismantling the American middle class.”

I don’t agree with the entire article but there is some truth that large consultancies have helped to get rid of middle management, blocking career growth for workers at the bottom of the hierarchy, and shifting non-management personnel to contracted or part-time workers.

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keep it simple

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It is informative to have your work reflected back by others who have interpreted it in their own ways. This feedback gets integrated into my own continuing development of my sensemaking frameworks. Making these frameworks as simple as possible, but no more, has been my work since 2003 when I decided to become a freelancer and start blogging my ideas ‘in the open’.

“One of the golden rules of sense-making is that any framework or model that can’t be drawn on a table napkin from memory has little utility. The reason for this is pretty clear, if people can use something without the need for prompts or guides then there are more likely to use it and as importantly adapt it. Models with multiple aspects, more than five aspects (its a memory limit guys live with it) or which require esoteric knowledge are inherently dependency models. They are designed to create a dependency on the model creator” —Dave Snowden (2015)

Karen Jeannette showed what PKM and Seek > Sense> Share meant to her.

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working smarter

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For the past several centuries we have used human labour to do what machines cannot. First the machines caught up with us and surpassed humans with their brute force. Now they are surpassing us with their brute intelligence. There is not much more need for machine-like human work which is routine, standardized, or brute. But certain long-term skills can help us connect with our fellow humans in order to learn and innovate — curiosity, sense-making, cooperation, and novel thinking.

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curiosity yields insight

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“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” —Ellen Parr

The core habit to successfully navigate the network era is curiosity. Curiosity about ideas improves creativity. Curiosity about people improves empathy, by understanding others. We cannot be empathetic for others unless we are first curious about them. We cannot be creative unless we are first curious to learn new ideas.

Curiosity about online sensemaking led me to Lilia Efimova’s research on personal knowledge management in 2004. From this I developed the personal knowledge mastery (PKM) framework driven by my situation of working remotely. Remote as in finding work, finding partners, and doing the work. Living in Atlantic Canada I was geographically removed from any economic centre. Therefore I made my focus global. Distance on the internet was not an issue. All I lacked were connections, and PKM became my way of making these.

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the workflow of learning

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I was asked today about my sensemaking routine. I try not to talk too much about how I do things because I believe that a practice — like personal knowledge mastery — has to be personal, or it will not last. But perhaps I can give some details to help others find their own way. The question was asked during the current PKM Workshop.

One of the things I’m trying to figure out is the most efficient workflow for moving from reading >> notes >> sensemaking >> drafts >> publishing articles. Right now, the pieces feel really disconnected for me, and I don’t see many people talking about their process in detail.

In my own case, I collect (seek) information through my social networks and then collate them in my social bookmarks or my blog posts, especially my Friday’s Finds. These blog posts over time may get connected into longer articles or updated posts. Since 2014 I have written e-books which are edited and revised collections of blogs posts. I write about one a year now, with the latest in December 2018 — Life in Perpetual Beta. Small pieces gradually become bigger ones and then some may congregate as more polished works. For me, it is easier to write smaller pieces, and then later connect and edit them into a coherent framework and story. But as they say in automobile advertising — your mileage may vary.

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filter success

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Clay Shirky’s statement — “It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure” — is an oft-quoted line when discussing online sensemaking. I was discussing filters last week during an interview on personal knowledge mastery which will be used to inform a program we are developing for a client organization, a large global corporation. The interview reminded me that it’s time to refine my work on knowledge filters because times have changed since I first wrote up the work of Tim Kastelle and his five forms of filtering in 2011. I slightly revised these knowledge filters in 2018 and recently discussed the importance of trusted filters.

One current challenge with machine filters (heuristic & algorithmic) is that in most cases the end-user does not know what logic or code is driving them. One machine filter that many of us use is Google Translate, which you could say is either the result of the wisdom of crowds, or the blind leading the blind — you choose.

“The main issue is the mechanism used by Google Translate itself. It does not actually translate anything, but it scours the web for similar or identical translations performed in the past, constantly learning and building upon what it has learned. This might sound great, but this also means that any time you plug your word, phrase or paragraph, or upload a document into Google Translate, it then becomes public domain.” —Robert Gebhardt

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insights over processes

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Process improvement, like Six Sigma, stifles innovation. Process improvement is a tool set, not an overarching or unifying concept for an organization. Process improvement is a means — for certain contexts like manufacturing — and not an end in itself. The fundamental problem with all process improvement methodologies is that you get myopic. The evidence is clear.

“Since Frederick Taylor’s time we’ve considered business – our businesses – vast machines to be improved. Define the perfect set of tasks and then fit the men to the task. Taylor timed workers, measuring their efforts to determine the optimal (in his opinion) amount of work he could expect from a worker in a single day. The idea is that by driving our workers to follow optimal business processes we can ensure that we minimise costs while improving quality. LEAN and Six Sigma are the most visible of Taylor’s grandchildren, representing generations of effort to incrementally chip away at the inefficiencies and problems we kept finding in our organisations.” —Peter Evans Greenwood

“But simply following the steps of a process is no longer a guarantee of success, if it ever was. Business is increasingly complex and interconnected, and it seems unlikely any single system can tame it. The smart enterprise of the future will need a constantly evolving rotation of systems and skills, employed by adaptable and flexible workers. They will be harder to teach in a course, but they may outlast all the fads and fashions that preceded them.” —Whatever Happened to Six Sigma?

“Fifty-eight of the top Fortune 200 companies bought into Six Sigma, attesting to the appeal of eliminating errors. The results of this ‘experiment’ were striking: 91 per cent of the Six Sigma companies failed to keep up with the S&P 500 because Six Sigma got in the way of innovation. It interfered with insights.” —Gary Klein

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