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Narrating your work

In 2009, Dave Winer wrote about “Narrating your work” - the practice of providing a brief, running commentary on your work as you do it.

Later, in an extremely helpful article entitled “Do’s and Don’ts for your work’s social platform”, Andrew McAfee also encouraged people to narrate their work:

“Talk both about work in progress (the projects you’re in the middle of, how they’re coming, what you’re learning, and so on), and finished goods (the projects, reports, presentations, etc. you’ve executed). This lets others discover what you know and what you’re good at. It also makes you easier to find, and so increases the chances you can be a helpful colleague to someone. Finally, it builds your personal reputation and ‘brand.’”

Confused about what to write? Simply post about what you’re working on every day. Who you’re meeting with. The research you’re doing. Articles you find relevant. Lessons you learned. Mistakes you made.

PKM

David Snowden's landmark blog post in 2008 was an important event in developing a common understanding of Knowledge Management. By introducing his 7 principles, David reminded us that Knowledge is a difficult, personal attribute, not easy of recall, nor of extraction, nor of codification. These principles are widely quoted, often (sadly) without the commentary found in the original article, which adds considerably to the understanding of the principles.

I would like to offer a few addenda to these principles from my own experience, many of which were implicit in the original blog post. The original principles are in bold italic, my addenda in plain italic, and my commentary in plan text below.
Knowledge can only be volunteered, it cannot be conscripted, but it can be requested. 
This first principle is a vital reminder that the disclosure of knowledge is a voluntary act, but I have met people who take this as meaning that the instigation therefore must come from the knowledge-holder. This isn't the case - as principle 3 shows, there are triggers and circumstances that can deeply influence the knowledge-holder to be forthcoming - to share or volunteer rather than hoard. A sincere honest request will do this - extensive peer pressure will also have a strong effect.
We only know what we know when we need to know it, but recall can be triggered.
In his original commentary, David explains ways in which recall can be triggered, and many effective Knowledge Management practices are based on ways of triggering recall. Group dialogue, storytelling and analysis, interview techniques such as role-playing responses to situations, can all be used as ways of triggering the deep knowledge, and making this conscious.
In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge, and also in other cases where they feel sharing will "make a difference".
I strongly resonate with this principle and believe it to be absolutely true. It is also based on the concept that Pull beats Push as a stimulus for knowledge sharing. However I am not sure that it always has to be "real need", so long as there is an "acknowledged customer" with whom the knowledge sharer can relate, real interest in, and appreciation of, what the sharer has to offer, and belief that sharing will "make a difference". I have seen many teams, workers or experts share openly and generously, with no real immediate need, but rather a belief that this knowledge will be re-used to help others in similar circumstances. The corollary to this, of course, is that if they feel it won't make a difference, and that their contribution will end up in an information junkyard, then they won't bother.
Everything is fragmented.
I have nothing to add to this one. Everything is fragmented, knowledge is dispersed, and effective knowledge management approaches need to recognise this.
Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success, yet repeated failure is stupid, and success breeds success.
There's a lot been written in this blog about the approach to mistakes, and about the role of failure in KM. Individuals learn well from failure, but failure can be very costly. Sincere failure in pursuit of risky goals is fine if treated as a learning opportunity, making the same mistake twice just proves that learning is not happening. Also it is as important to learn from the team that won the deal, as from the team that lost the deal. It is the shining examples, the instances of "positive deviance" which often provide the greatest leap forward in understanding. In our Bird Island exercise, all the participants want to know the secret of the 3 metre tower, and they make their biggest leap in performance once they can copy components of that successful design. Then once they have built their >3m tower, they look at it and think "Wow - I did that, using Knowledge from others". They had to "fail" (build a <1m tower) before they were open to learning, but that combination of failure AND success was crucial. The failure prepared them to learn from the success.
The way we know things is not the way we report we know things.
Absolutely.
We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down, but good facilitated processes can help with both these steps.
I completely agree with principle number 7, and the principle that value and content are lost in a) making knowledge conscious, and b) making knowledge explicit. There will always be that loss, but there are ways to reduce that loss to some. These ways always involve investment of resource and time, but always add value compared to the default "write down what you know" approach.

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Socialization
Sharing tacit knowledge through face-to-face communication or shared experience. Informal social intercourse and teaching by practical examples. An example is an apprenticeship.
Externalization
Trying to convert tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge by developing concepts and models. In this phase tacit knowledge is converted to understandable and interpretable form, so it can be also used by others. Externalized and theoretical knowledge is a base for creating new knowledge.
Combination
Compiling externalized explicit knowledge to broader entities and concept systems. When knowledge is in explicit form it can be combined with the knowledge that has been filed earlier. In this phase knowledge is also analyzed and organized.
Internalization
Internalization means understanding explicit knowledge. It happens when explicit knowledge transforms to tacit and becomes a part of individual’s basic information. Cycle continues now in the spiral of knowledge back to socialization when individual shares his tacit knowledge silently. This is how amount of knowledge grows and the previous conceptions might change.

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For me, it’s quite simple: knowledge is not tangible and is certainly not a commodity. And the noun ‘knowledge’ itself sometimes leads to delusional assumptions about what knowledge is. I find it more fruitful to think of knowledge as two different things:

Knowledge is a latent capacity that we call upon to combine information available with various insights we have from past experiences, and use it in a given context.
Knowledge is also the collection of insights that we have in ourselves, based on information, emotions and intuitions we have. It is in that collection of insights that we tap to use our ‘knowledge capacity’ or our ‘capacity to know’.

PKM KM knowledge

So, what does this mean for all of us?  The message is simple and compelling.  If we are not enhancing flow, we will be marginalized, both in our personal and professional life.  If we want to remain successful and reap the enormous rewards that can be generated from flows, we must continually seek to refine the designs of the systems that we spend time in to ensure that they are ever more effective in sustaining and amplifying flows. As the authors observe, “it is not love or money that makes the world go round but flow and design”

PKM design

What’s holding you back from doing what you want to do or learn?

Take the first step and just begin (try)
Use your curiosity and passion to keep you going
Don’t worry about getting it right, there is no right answer
Put yourself out there, connect with others, ask for help
What’s holding you up?

PKM

Putting myself into places (online and physical places) where serendipitous discoveries can happen is not efficient, and of course, cannot be planned. Serendipity helped me discover people, concepts,  and ideas that I would have never known before. Relationships--online, physical, mixed, new and old--and time and space are not easily planned. Serendipity does not map to set goals or plans. Instead serendipity has surprised me with energy, thoughts, knowledge, ideas, concepts, realizations, experiences, and relationships.

PKM

Hosted by Jane Hart and facilitated by Harold Jarche of the Internet Time Alliance

This online workshop on adapting to the networked world of work includes tools, tips & techniques from two facilitators who have been connecting, communicating and collaborating online for over fifteen years. The workshop is for anyone looking to  understand the digital reality of the connected economy. Whether you are a freelancer, work  in an organisation, or want to connect beyond the corporate walls, this is designed to give you a head start in developing a personal sense-making framework.

PKM

The Three S’s of Content Curation:  Seek, Sense, Share

Content curation is a three-part process:  Seek, Sense, and Share.    Finding the information or “seeking”  is only one third of the task as Mari Smith points out in this video about why curation is important and some tools  for doing it.        Making sense of the information is just as important.  Sense making can be a simple as how you annotate the links your share,  the presentation,  or what you’ve left out.      Sense making can be writing a blog post using the links (like this post) or summarizing the key points in a presentation.    However you create meaning, but it has to support your organization’s communications objectives or your professional learning goals.   Finally, the sharing – is about giving the best nuggets of content to your audience in a format that they can easily digest and apply it

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In summary, business productivity and knowledge inhabits complex networks. It CANNOT be broken down and reassembled. Rather, praxis and phronesis achieve social comprehension, knowledge cohesion, leadership maturity, new capabilities, productivity, growth, business prosperity and optimal outcomes overall.   

PKM

The difference between IM and KM is the difference between a recipe and a chef, a map of London and a London cabbie, a book and its author.  Information is in technology domain, and I include books (themselves a technology) in that description.  Digitizing, subjecting to semantic analysis, etc., are things we do to information.  It is folly to ever call it knowledge, because that is the domain of the brain.  And knowledge is an emergent property of a decision maker – experiential, emotional framing of our mental patterns applied to circumstance and events. It propels us through decision and action, and is utterly individual, intimate and impossible to decompose because of the nature of cognitive processing.  Of course, I speak here of individual knowledge.
First principles, don’t lose sight of how we process our world.
The difficulty is applying this understanding to organizational knowledge.  Knowledge is only in the brain, but organizations have a shared understanding (referred to as ‘knowledge’) as well – humans gathered in groups fit themselves into artificial decision constructs (“collaboration,” “consensus”) in order to leverage the collective individual knowledge to make decisions for the group.  My approach is to understand cognitive science, organizational theory, and information science to understand ways to improve group behaviors.

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However, there is a limit to the power of algorithms. There isn’t an algorithm in the world that will tell you first to read Changing the Game by Roger Martin, then A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.

But that’s exactly what Nilofer Merchant did in the list of books that she put together for the latest TED Conference.

Maria Popova also put together a great set of books for TED too.

This is a form of judgement-based filtering – Expert Filtering.

This form of filtering is based on a few key components including judgement, reputation, and trust. Judgement-based filtering is where you get the out-of-the-blue recommendations – connections that are too obscure or too creative for an algorithm to come up with.

The upshot for me is that because I trust Nilofer’s judgement, I’ll read Mistry’s book.

In setting up your information diet, using effective filters is essential. Algorithmic filtering is great. However, to maintain a balanced information diet, you also need to include some judgement-based filtering.

Howard Rheingold calls building your aggregation and filtering routines Infotention. Since attention is becoming one of the scarcest commodities these days, you need to spend yours wisely.

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1. Obtain a basic understanding of network technology. Networks are facilitated by technology and so a certain fluency with the technology involved is key. Here it's less a call for coding than for understanding the capabilities of services like social networks and the differences and similarities between them.

2. Craft your network identity. You are who you know, says Hoffman — but also what they know about you. In a networked age, your identity is multivariate and slightly out of your control. Who you know shapes who you are.

3. Understand network intelligence. This is more than simply understanding how to access information. Access is no longer the issue. It's how to find the right information through your network. If someone is trying to connect to someone at Sony, for example, you need to think about the nature of the information needed and find the right connection, as opposed to simply looking for someone with Sony on their CV.

4. Understand network capabilities. People are still focused today on information instead of what Hoffman sees as more important today — communities and networks. Aligning your focus more on the network and surrounding yourself with the right people in your networks will change the way you approach problems and advance through life.

networks PKM

Networks are a critically important source of great ideas. The lone inventor idea is still with us. Here is what Johnson says about networks:
Ideas rise in crowds, as Poincaré said. They rise in liquid networks where connection is valued more than protection. So if we want to build environments that generate good ideas—whether those environments are in schools or corporations or governments or our own personal lives—we need to keep that history in mind, and not fall back on the easy assumptions that competitive markets are the only reliable source of good ideas. Yes, the market has been a great engine of innovation. But so has the reef.

PKM innovation

As information and data grows, the role of the learning and development department is evolving from content generation to content organization. Instead of interviewing a subject matter expert and using technical writing skills to create a presentation or lecture, the content organizer creates architectures and tools that everyone in the organization can use to share, record, discover and discuss information, ideas, and skills.

In this age of information the learning and development specialist is a curator—not with stacks of dusty books and a pocket full of magnifying glasses, but with technology tools and networks of informed colleagues. Creating a workflow for sorting through content, making sense of it internally, and sharing those tools and processes within an organization is happening in real time via the Internet.

PKM KM

What do you do when you are faced with all of the information in the world? To make any sense of it, you have to find the information that is useful to you. So we filter.

As Borges suggests, each piece of information means something to someone, even if it’s gibberish to us. We need to knock out the stuff that’s gibberish. So we find ways to ignore information, by saying things like “Twitter is just 100 million people talking about what they ate for lunch, so why would I waste my time with that?” I do this by ignoring TV (unless I can find a hockey game on). Everyone makes choices about what they should be paying attention to.

The key to dealing with information is to be conscious of the choices that you’re making, and to develop a strategy or a set of routines for handling it. Howard Rheingold has created an outstanding set of resources for his classes on Mind Amplifiers and Infotention. Start with those to develop a filtering strategy.

We’ve always had too much information to handle, and we’ve always dealt with it by developing routines. The real difference now is not that there’s so much more information, it’s that we don’t have good routines to go with the new channels that the information is taking to get to us.

The danger in thinking that we have too much information is that we’ll start missing out on innovation opportunities. After all, the creative part of innovation is about making novel connections between ideas. So we actually have to seek out information that is a bit out of the ordinary (see the end of this post for some techniques for doing this).

If you think that the problem is information overload, then this will seem completely counterintuitive. That’s why it’s a dangerous idea – if you take it seriously, it makes it much harder to innovate.

That’s why I say that there’s no such thing as information overload. Even if that’s not strictly true, we’re better off acting as though that’s the case.

PKM

Have you ever wondered that we face challenges, solve problems, design something new and create opportunities every moment in our lives without explicitly realizing that we do so? Yes, we use our own internal power, capabilities and resources to achieve such miraculous feats day in and day out.  

Why then we don’t think of using this normal and probably natural process to better understand the world around us, do our jobs better, face challenges more squarely, solve problems more effectively, design things with simplicity and beauty and also create new opportunities to not only improve the world around us but also improve our personal lives?

A little thought would show us that things like problems, challenges, opportunities are all “emergences” that appear in our lives constantly as things continue to change all around us.

The purpose of using Nemes and Nemetics is coming to grips with such ‘emergences’, which I believe is well within the reach of almost everyone on the earth. It helps us better understand events in our lives to take actions that change our future to a more ‘desirable’ one.

Let us start by understanding NEME. It is an acronym that stands for:

N = Notice

E = Engage

M = Mull

E = Exchange

PKM

The differences between a useful, cleansing oyster and a disgusting, filthy bookmarker are probably fairly minor.

Blockquote
A bit of context. A bit of scent. A bit of Wadsworth.
Clump
I read this. And it reminded me of that. Plus another one. Now we have a new thing.

Ship
Bookmarks are private. Well-organised, scenty activity is extensible. You can build on them.
My theory here is simple. If I spend just a little more time blockquoting, clumping and shipping, the information from the bookmarks will be a little stickier. And a whole lot more usefuller.

Bookmarking is a mindless activity.

Publishing your bookmarking activity in a form others can use is a mindful act.

PKM

How I use Twitter, search, Diigo Delicious, DEVONthink, Scrivener to find, refine, organize information -->knowledge

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The all-important literacy of determining the credibility of information found on the Internet. A companion to my blog post of the same title. (Voice-over interviewer in some sequences: Betsy Aoki)

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