Month: August 2010

Active sense-making

by

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.

Agility through collaboration

by

Instead of factory-style production teams, agile programming uses far fewer, but better, programmers. The principles of communicating, focusing on simplicity, releasing often and testing often are also applicable to developing good instructional programs. Does instructional systems design (ISD) need more agility? An ISD project team should be able to return to the Analysis or Design phase and make changes while instructional content Development is taking place. If not, changing conditions cannot be accommodated and the programme is outdated before it’s even finished. I wonder how many content development shops actually have a process that enables them to rebuild after the design specification has been signed off.

The root of the problem is that ISD views instruction as separate from work. Instruction is perceived as something that can be designed, developed and delivered as a programme, not integrated with the work to be done. Subject matter experts are consulted, but the ISD professionals remain in control. It’s a good model when things change slowly. The current fascination with rapid e-learning only exacerbates the problems with ISD. Rapid is just a faster version of ADDIE, with less time for reflection and feedback: Garbage-In; Garbage-Out.

I think that ISD and agility are fundamentally incompatible. Clark Quinn proposes a better approach, collaborative co-design:

Things are moving so fast, and increasingly the work will be solving new problems, designing new solutions/products/services, etc, that we won’t be able to anticipate the actual work needs.  What we will need to do, instead, is ensure that a full suite of tools are available, and provide individuals with the ability to work together to create worthwhile working/learning environments.

In short, tying back to my post on collaboratively designing job aids, I think we need to be collaboratively designing workflows. What I mean is that the learning function role will move to facilitating individuals tailoring content and tools to achieve their learning goals.

Collaborative co-design is one more way to integrate work and learning, and give our organizations more agility. Embedding the principles of communicating, focusing on simplicity, releasing and testing often; just make sense in an increasingly complex workplace. Once again, the major barrier, like Enterprise 2.0 or social media for work, is that the traditional gatekeepers have to give up control.

Changing times

by

Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week.

Why focus on informal & social learning? by @CharlesJennings | Related Slide Presentation

In many cases non-formal and social approaches will replace formal learning. In a few cases they won’t.

There are 8 drivers for this change:

1. There is a strong imperative for continuous learning – the world is changing so fast that we need to continually update our knowledge, skills and productivity. Doing it in discrete steps just doesn’t work any more – even if the steps are small ones. We all need to develop the mindset of continuous, always-on learners. Informal and social learning approaches fit this need better than staccato formal learning …

via @roundtrip – 10 ways the “world of work” will change in the next 10 years @Gartner_inc “non-routine” work = adaptive innovative

  1. De-routinization of work
  2. Work swarms
  3. Weak links
  4. Working with the collective
  5. Work sketch-ups
  6. Spontaneous work
  7. Simulation & experimentation
  8. Pattern sensitivity
  9. Hyperconnected
  10. My place

@johnniemoore Is there a real innovator’s dilemma in an age of abundant creativity. Or just a bureaucrat’s dilemma pretending otherwise?

From HBR: Higher education is overrated; skills aren’t [as I wrote in the university myth]

Foolish New York Times stories notwithstanding, education is a misleading-to-malignant proxy for economic productivity or performance. Knowledge may be power, but “knowledge from college” is neither predictor nor guarantor of success. Growing numbers of informed observers increasingly describe a higher education “bubble” that makes a college and/or university education a subprime investment for too many attendees.

via @nomad411 New Zealand rejects software patents.

In updating its policy position, the New Zealand government acknowledged the growing importance of open source, and the logical reasons for excluding software from the list of patentable inventions.

Evaluating knowledge workers – a cartoon essay by @tonykarrer

Ten reasons

by

Jane Hart posted a tongue-in-cheek video on 10 reasons to ban social media with the caveat, “Be careful who you show this video to – they might actually believe it  ;)”. One comment to her blog post really struck me:

Strange thing is that I wasn’t laughing as he is far too near the truth – the senior management and IT departments that I know DO think like this. What is now needed is a rebuttal of this video. Not just saying that’s not the case but giving good cogent business arguments to each of the 10 (or indeed 11) points. How for instance would you answer this one. “What sort of learning process takes place in the minds of learners when using Twitter?” Just saying communication, keeping up to date, exchanging information is not enough for these doubters. It may seem ludicrous to suggest it but how do we link social learning with the bottom line? We had to do that for e-learning….

I must say that “good cogent business arguments” abound, but first they must be read and then understood and then put into contextual practice. Many people, including my partners at the Internet Time Alliance, have been discussing and using social media for business and publishing frequently on how increasing networks and complexity are influencing workplace design and human performance. Here is just a sampling of what’s already been discussed, much of it via social media.

10. Social media is a fad. Social media are an extension of the Internet and the Web, and are becoming embedded in our work and leisure time. If the Net is a fad, then so are social media – place your bets.

9. It’s about controlling the message. Networks, the new organizational model, mean giving up control and our hierarchical work models are no longer effective nor efficient.

8. Employees will goof off. What looks like goofing off, such as Twitter, may actually be knowledge work.

7. Social Media is a time waster. Not if you use some methods and processes (like PKM) to make sense of all those networks [that’s how I’m able to write this post so quickly].

6. Social media has no business purpose … other than to foster innovation and collaboration.

5. Employees can’t be trusted. The knowledge economy is the trust economy, so you either have to hire new employees or change your business model. More resources at The Trusted Advisor.

4. Don’t cave into the demands of the millennials. The whole idea of digital natives is dying – the changing workplace affects everybody.

3. Your teams already share knowledge effectively. Really? Homeland Security: information sharing is still not where it should be. How about BP?

2. You’ll get viruses. Not if you use a Mac ;) Dave Snowden: “Since I’ve left IBM I’ve had fewer virus attacks working in an open Web environment than I did in a secure corporate environment.”

1. Your competition isn’t using it, so why should you? Unless your competition is one of the thousands of start-ups coming to market, or incumbents like Cisco or IBM. Even dairy farmers use social media. You can be sure your markets are using social media to talk about your products and services.

Leveraging collective knowledge

by

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.

—

* “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

by

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