My experience is that communities of practice can help make the transition from hierarchies to networks, or as Jon Husband describes the resulting structure; wirearchy. Communities of practice, both internal and external; can be safe places between highly focused work and potentially chaotic social networking. The Community Roundtable has a Community Maturity Model that describes this transition, in four stages. The model makes it relatively easy to see where your organization stands and where it should go.

The CMM aligns with my own way of looking at the need to balance structured work and the sharing of complex knowledge, with the concurrent requirement for unstructured social networking which can increase innovation through a diversity of ideas. I have added in the four CMM stages to the image below. Communities of practice can link collaboration and cooperation, and help weave the organization and its people into a wirearchy.

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.” - Jon Husband

Getting there may not be easy, but the evidence is showing that it is necessary. For example, here is how Yammer builds its products, according to Kris Gale, VP of Engineering:

Yammer’s biggest rule of thumb is 2 to 10 people, 2 to 10 weeks – which means they generally don’t do projects that are larger or more complicated.  There is a non-linear relationship between the complexity of a project and the wrap-up integration phase at the end.  If you go anywhere beyond ten weeks, the percentage of time in the wrap-up phase becomes disproportionate. - First Round Capital

This sounds like it’s aligned with the general rules of dealing with complexity, developed by Dave Snowden. Each project at Yammer is a probe. It’s also small enough so that the potential ROI does not drive the company off the rails. A small project failure is much easier to deal with than a large one. Yammer understands that working in a hyper-connected economy makes formal and complex work less predictable, so project cycles are kept short. As Gale goes on to explain:

I don’t think you should be building a product.  I think you should be building an organization that builds a product.

Be very wary of only trusting managers with engineering decisions; in fact, you should delegate these all the way down to individual contributors.  If managers are the only ones making decisions as you grow past thirty to forty people, this should be a red flag.  - First Round Capital

Becoming a wirearchy requires new organizational structures that incorporate communities and networks. In addition, they require new ways of doing work, like thinking in terms of perpetual Beta and doing manageable probes to test complex problems. It’s a new way of doing work, within a new work structure. Both are required.

Note: At the Connected Worker, we offer frameworks and coaching to develop these skills for your organization.

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• They improved their communication effectiveness.
• They made an effort to share their knowledge and expertise more widely. 
• They developed a broader perspective.
• They began to encourage cooperation rather than competition.

These four skills, of the nine identified by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, are some of the core skills for connected leaders. Leadership, like culture, is an emergent property of people working together. For example, trust only emerges if knowledge is shared and diverse points of view are accepted. As networked, distributed workplaces become the norm, trust will emerge from environments that are open, transparent and diverse. As a result of improved trust, leadership will be seen for what it is; an emergent property of a network in balance and not some special property available to only the select few. This is connected leadership, or leadership that understands networks.

In complex environments, weak hierarchies and strong networks are the best organizing principle. While many organizations have strong networks, they are too often coupled with strong central control. Letting go of control is what connected leadership is all about.

Here is how a connected workplace should function. It flips the traditional management pyramid.

Networked contributors (whether they are full-time, part-time, or contractors) do the bulk of the knowledge work at the edges of the organization. The narration of work  and PKM are becoming critical skills, as work teams ebb and flow according to need, but the network must remain connected and resilient. A key function of connected leaders is to listen to and analyze what is happening. From this bird’s-eye view, those in leadership roles can help set the work context according to the changing conditions and  work on building consensus.

The connected workplace requires collaboration as well as cooperation. Both collaborative behaviours (working together for a common goal) and cooperative behaviours (sharing freely without any quid pro quo) are needed, but most organizations focus their efforts on shorter term collaboration. However, networks really thrive on cooperation, where people share without any direct benefit. Practising and promoting cooperation is another important leadership skill in the connected workplace.

Connected leaders know that people naturally like to be helpful and get recognition for their work. But humans need more than extrinsic compensation, as our behaviour on Wikipedia and online social networks proves. For the most part, people like to help others. Cooperation makes for more resilient knowledge networks. Better networks are better for business.

Solving problems is what most knowledge workers are hired to do. But complex problems usually cannot be solved alone. They require the sharing of tacit knowledge, which is knowledge that cannot easily be put into a manual or procedural guide. Research shows that tacit knowledge flows best in trusted networks. Trust promotes individual autonomy and this becomes a foundation for more open social learning. Without trust, few are willing to share their knowledge. An effective knowledge network also cultivates the diversity and autonomy of each worker. Connected leaders know how to foster deeper connections which can be developed through meaningful conversations. They understand the importance of tacit knowledge in solving complex problems.

The power of social networks, like electricity, will inevitably change almost every business model. Those who emerge as leaders need to understand the new connected workplace. Working smarter in this workplace starts by organizing to embrace networks, manage complexity, and build trust.

Learn more about our Connected Leader Workshop, where we understand that you cannot train people to be social; you can only show them what it’s like to be social.

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Much of PKM is about finding balance. In seeking knowledge sources, we have to balance aggregation, or getting as much information as possibile, with filtering, or ensuring that we have more signal than noise. Our networks need to be diverse and varied in order to be exposed to new ideas, but we cannot keep track of everything, so we have to be judicious with our time.  We need to constantly lump things together, such as with a feed reader, while filtering out the good stuff so we can find it again, such as with social bookmarks. It’s like breathing information in and out, while making sense of only a small portion at a time, sometimes built by many grains before trying to express our knowledge in order to make sense of it.

These processes are not taught in schools or training programes. There is no right answer in PKM. There are only processes that work. The test of PKM is whether it works for you. My experience is that a person’s PKM changes over time, and the most important aspect is being aware of how we seek sources of information, make sense of our own knowledge, and then share it at work, in communities or through networks.

As Helen Blunden has noted about her PKM, it’s about continuous learning.

It’s opened up a whole new world and it’s just made me eager to know more.  It’s also made me realise that our learning will never stop – and we should get comfortable with that idea.  (I believe the creativity is now coming from the “Seek” part of the model because information is not one-sided anymore; you get a variety of opinions, perspectives and angles and from a wider expanded network of people from all walks of life – different industries, different skillsets – my curiosity in life also helps me out here).

PKM practices can help make sense of the current environment, whether it be your profession, your job, or your areas of interest. A resilient learning network, that can develop from practising PKM, creates a more resilient framework from which to make decisions about the future. The more you give to your networks, the more you will receive. PKM provides a way to do this in a more structured, but personal, manner. The result is enhanced serendipity, always an advantage in a changing world.

 The next online PKM workshop starts this Monday.

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Some of that alignment is missing between departmental silos though. While Clark says that “learning leaders” should step up to the challenge, there is also a strong need to get aligned with IT, marketing, and operations, to name a few. As Clark concludes:

By aligning the use of technology with business needs in this way, learning leaders are demonstrating the strategic contribution to the organization that the executive suite wants to see. Failing to grasp the opportunity at this inflection point in business operations has a grim prospect. Folks know they can learn on their own and together. If learning leaders don’t get in and facilitate the full learning spectrum, it will happen without them. Then, just what is learning’s role?

What is learning’s role? First of all, in the network era, a coherent organization is one in which learning is no longer a specialty. Much as writing was no longer a specialty when the majority of workers became literate, learning today is more than putting an X in a checkbox. Work is learning and learning is the work. I may have said this many times before but it is the essential change in how we must view knowledge-intensive and creative work in a networked environment.

Learning is not something done to us, it is what we do together. Learning delivery in a constantly changing work environment is an outdated notion. For example, training courses are artifacts of a time when information was scarce and connections were few. It is glaringly obvious in this time of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity that we can get pretty well any information we need whenever we want it. To make sense of this, we need network era literacies, and with these new literacies we no longer need the equivalent of learning scribes. Pulling informal learning, instead of having formal instruction pushed to workers, has to become the workplace norm. By norm, I do not mean something bolted on to a course or some function of an LMS. I mean integrated into the daily work flow.

Learning together is part of collaborating to get things done while also cooperating in order to participate in knowledge networks. “Strictly business” is less frequently the case in our lives, as our work/life boundaries get fuzzier. Meanwhile the work/learning boundaries also get fuzzier. We no longer limit our learning to classrooms, training centres, workstations, or our official company mobile devices. In this environment, we cannot leave the direction of our learning to a “learning professional”. If today’s learning professionals want to remain relevant in the coherent organization, then they need to participate in collaborative and cooperative work/learning flows. This will be a sea change for the training & development profession, but I am certain it will happen with our without their participation.

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Talent is extracting more of the pie and getting richer. The gulf grows between talent — the high-earning, differentiated workers — and labor, those widget makers who support them.

In the NYT article, Roger Martin, author of “Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes and What Capitalism Can Learn from the NFL“, talks about basic labour getting automated and outsourced, a popular theme on this blog.

Through the 1970s, owners moved jobs to Sun Belt right-to-work states. They automated, outsourced and worked to diminish the power of unions. When Ronald Reagan crushed the air traffic controllers’ union in 1981, it was a clear signal: labor had finally been forced to capitulate entirely.

If you want to be valued (and paid) in the network era, then you need to do work with high task variety, requiring continuous informal learning, and based on mostly implicit (tacit) knowledge that cannot be easily codified or shared. This is how talent gets respect from capital. Talent is not easily replaceable.

We’ve been lulled into the notion that information processing is knowledge work. For instance, we generally assume that all lawyers are knowledge workers (it seems they are not). I like Gary Hamel’s definition of the Creative Economy, where the traditional (industrial) employee traits of Intellect, Diligence & Obedience are becoming commodities (going to the lowest bidder). This Creative Economy requires more independent workers (like musical productions) with traits that cannot be commoditized: Initiative; Creativity; Passion. So “knowledge workers” had best ensure that 1) they have more Task Variety than Standardized Work and 2) they are valued for skills that cannot be commoditized.

This may be the post-capitalist era, but it will only be good to those that have talent. Our education systems have to “up their game” to get each person to develop his or her  unique talent. Being able to fill a job is not enough, even if it is an honest day’s labour. The capitalist system is designed to screw labour. But it’s more difficult to screw talent. If we want to help people, we need to help each person become Talent. That means emphasizing creativity, complex problem-solving, and innovation. For those of us in the learning, training, education, or human development business, we are doing a major disservice to society if we are merely preparing labour to be used by capital. OD/HR practices like performance management and competency modelling may just be hindering talent and reinforcing the capital/labour divide.

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• Questioning: Asking probing questions that impose or remove constraints. Example: What if we were legally prohibited from selling to our current customer?
• Networking: Interacting with people from different backgrounds who provide access to new ways of thinking.
• Observing: Watching the world around them for surprising stimuli.
• Experimenting: Consciously complicating their lives by trying new things or going to new places.

One way to practice these skills would be to promote personal knowledge management (PKM) in the workplace. The Seek-Sense-Share framework aligns with these innovation skills. Seeking includes observation through effective filters and diverse sources of information. Sense-making starts with questioning our observations and includes experimenting, or probing (Probe-Sense-Respond). Sharing through our networks helps to develop better feedback loops. In an organization where everyone is practising PKM, the chances for more connections increases. Innovation is not so much about having ideas, as making more and better connections.

Innovation is inextricably linked to both networks and learning. We can’t be innovative unless we integrate learning into our work. It sounds easy, but it’s a major cultural change. Why? Because it questions our basic, Taylorist, assumptions about work; assumptions like:

A JOB can be described as a series of competencies that can be “filled” by the best qualified person.

Somebody in a classroom, separate from the work environment, can “teach” you all you need to know.

The higher you are on the “org chart”, the more you know (one of the underlying premises of job competency models).

PKM is a framework that enables the re-integration of learning and work and can help to increase our potential for innovation. It’s time to design workplaces for individuals, and their Personal KM, instead of getting everyone to conform to a sub-optimal structure that maximizes capital but not labour. Knowledge is the new capital, but it resides in each person’s head.

To address complex problems, businesses have to rely more on individual tacit knowledge, but this type of knowledge is never easy to convey to others. It takes time and especially trust to make multiple attempts at clarification. Accepting PKM, as a flowing series of half-baked ideas, can encourage innovation and reduce the feeling that our exposed knowledge has to be ‘executive presentation perfect’. Workplaces that enable the constant narration of work and learning in a trusted space can expose more tacit knowledge. We can foster innovation by accepting that our collective understanding is in a state of perpetual Beta. This is how we create a culture of innovation.

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1. Shared power: necessary in a networked economy.
2. Autonomy: essential for an engaged workforce.
3. Finally, the social contract for work needs to change.

In one of the best blog posts I have ever read, Venkat Rao discusses The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office”. The initial premise is Hugh Macleod’s cartoon on the company hierarchy, which often elicits a chuckle when I show it to others. The entire article is well worth reading.

I recently listened to a programme on CBC Radio’s Maritime Magazine on work bullies and it only reinforces the premise that sociopaths run too many organizations. “So why do so many bullies rise to a position of power?” asks Jerry West, the radio host. Here is a reference to the answer given:

In 2005, British psychologists Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon at the University of Surrey interviewed and gave personality tests to a number of high-level executives. They then compared their profiles with those of criminal psychiatric patients at Broadmoor, the all-male high-security hospital, home to some of England’s most notorious murderers. The researchers found that three out of eleven personality disorders were actually more common in managers than in the disturbed criminals:

• histrionic personality disorder
• narcissistic personality disorder
• obsessive-compulsive personality disorder

This has led researchers to describe such disturbed executives as “successful psychopaths” and similarly disturbed criminals as “unsuccessful psychopaths”.

And you wonder why I rage against the machine when it comes to hierarchies and institutions? In the CBC programme, a Dalhousie University professor states that in job interviews, no one bothers to look at deviant or counter-productive behaviours. Hiring those who are prone to bullying then leads to a hostile or toxic work environment.  As Jerry West says, “It’s not difficult to find hierarchical work environments that are toxic” and organizations that exhibit this behaviour include Canada’s RCMP.

So what are the options? The programme suggests:

• Conduct interviews that might determine bullying behaviours [easy, but not always effective].
• Leadership & management must stay vigilant and engaged [not often the norm].
• Legislation to protect the bullied in the workplace [will only happen in the long term].

But even these recommendations seem almost futile in many organizations today. While people may be talking about it now, the real challenge is to change our work structures so that it is much more difficult for bullies (sociopaths) to succeed. We need to understand and talk about how our structures shape us.

As Jerry West concludes, “Doing nothing is a choice, too.”

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Here are some questions that personal knowledge management can address:

How do I keep track of all of this information? >> start small

How do I make sense of changing conditions and new knowledge? >> curation

How can I develop and improve critical thinking skills? >> Observe, Participate, Challenge, Create

How can we cooperate? >> freely share

How can I collaborate better? >> learn out loud

How can I engage in problem-solving activities at the edge of my expertise? >> net work skills

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@GeorgeMonbiot: “The “self-made man” fallacy is essentially psychopathic: denies the role of and need for other people.”

“Theatre companies don’t talk of their actors as ‘human resources’ – none of them would work for them if they did. ~ Charles Handy.” via @CharlesJennings

Gary Wise: An Evolving Ground Zero for Training Solutions – via @tmiket

“A cool infographic from @atlassian that shows being productive at work is harder than it seems”, via @DanielPink – email is culprit #1

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Experienced managers who join Google from other companies can find it difficult to operate in a culture where power over subordinates is derived from one’s ideas and powers of persuasion, not job titles, says May. Decisions on promotions and raises are often made by consensus among peers and superiors. An employee isn’t necessarily going to obey a manager just because he or she is a manager. This is radically different from most traditional corporations, which have a top-down, hierarchical style of management. ~ eLearning

This sounds like a wirearchy, “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology.”

Perhaps we are seeing the future of work appear on the edges of the economy, as Google is definitely a new economy company. Freedom (democracy) seems to be a requirement for success in the network era, as Jason Fried writes about an experiment to let employees decide what they do for a month at 37Signals.

How can we afford to put our business on hold for a month to “mess around” with new ideas? How can we afford not to? We would never have had such a burst of creative energy had we stuck to business as usual.

Bottom line: If you can’t spare some time to give your employees the chance to wow you, you’ll never get the best from them.

John Hagel shows that standardized work is obsolete.

Now, think about this. If we reduce work to highly specified and standardized instructions that can be performed efficiently and predictably, what have we done? We have reconceived work so that it can be performed by computers and robots. In fact, computers and robots are far more preferable than humans because we humans are ultimately unpredictable and have a really hard time following instructions to the letter, day in and day out.

We are moving to a new economy that does not value any work that can be automated & outsourced. Taylorism is dead. Stephen Gill describes how we have to focus on work that cannot be done by robots.

This new robotics “megashift” has huge implications for the workplace. Employers will need workers who are better educated, more willing to change, and more flexible in their schedules and work habits than ever before. These workers won’t be needed for simple, repetitive jobs. They will be needed for computer-assisted jobs and for jobs that require creativity, innovation, and teamwork. They will have to be continuous learners, keeping up with technology, globalization, and new ways of organizing work.

So what’s the point?

1. Shared power is necessary in a networked economy.
2. Autonomy is essential for an engaged workforce.
3. The social contract for work needs to change.

The reason is simple: trust is not a market transaction, it’s a human transaction. People don’t work by supply and demand, they work by karmic reciprocity. In markets, if I trust you, I’m a sucker and you take advantage of me. In relationships, if I trust you, you trust me, and we get along. We live up or down to others expectations of us.

We currently organize around Tribal models, plus Institutions, plus Markets. In the 21st century, Networks are becoming the next dominant organizing model, as explained by David Ronfeldt in this diagram.

As the Network organizational model comes to dominance, I think we will see a return to trust as a lubricant of social and economic exchanges. Trust is an emergent property of effective networks.

If trust is a sign of healthy networks then, as Charles Green says, we are teaching the wrong things at school and at work.

Our public education and culture is loaded with the free-market versions of trust. We teach, “If you’re not careful they will screw you.” We passcode-protect everything. We are taught to suspect the worst of everyone, be wary of every open bottle of soda, watch out for ingredients on any bottle.

Then in business school, we are taught that if customers don’t trust you, you need to convince them you are trustworthy – partly by insisting on our trustworthiness. You can’t protest enough for that to work: in fact, guess the Two Most Trust-Destroying Words You Can Say.

I have noted that there is significant difference between cooperation and collaboration, with the former often overlooked in the workplace. Collaboration works well when the rules (like markets) are clear, and we know who we are working with (suppliers, partners, customers). However, in networks, someone may be our supplier one day and our customer the next. Cooperation is a better behavioural norm because it strengthens the entire network, not just an individual node. Cooperation is also a major factor in personal knowledge management, for we each need to share and trust, as our part of the social business (learning) contract.

In the network era, trust will become much more important, and it is not something that, once lost, we may be able to regain in a world where the network remembers everything, for a very long time. It truly is becoming a global village, for better and for worse. Trust should be taught, discussed, promoted, and practised; in schools and in business.

During one of our conversations at a local café, Jon suggested that in wirearchies, personal knowledge management (PKM) could become the new resumé. One problem with a résumé is that it only looks backwards, on past achievements. Even behavioural interviews look at how we have dealt with past problems. What about how we prepare for new problems?

I think that asking, “What can you do for the organization today?”, would be a better way to start an interview. Considering that in complex, networked environments, where work is learning and learning is the work, would it not be better to find out how people are learning? Imagine an interview beginning with, “Good day, Mister Jones, please sit down and tell us about your PKM.” Other questions could follow:

• How do you keep your learning up to date?
• With whom do you learn?
• How do you capture your learning?
• How do you narrate your work? Please show us an example …
• How do you stay current in your field?
• How diverse is your network? Could you give us some examples?
• How would you begin to look at the following problem, which is out of your normal scope of work …

Describing how we stay actively engaged in our learning might be a better indicator of future performance, in a world where many answers do not lie in the past, but in how we manage to make connections with the present. To remain relevant, workers need to re-skill and provide services for today’s and tomorrow’s problems, not yesterday’s. We need to think more like artists and look at creating new ways of working, not polishing our previous successes. Showing how we learn, or manage our knowledge personally, keeps us focused on the present. It’s time for HR to start asking about our PKM, and understand its value.

How Narrating Your Work Helps You Become More Effective by Saving Precious Time – by @elsua

Basically, social networking tools like blogging, or microblogging, that Bertrand mentioned above as examples, to open up our interactions, to free ourselves from the email and meetings yokes, to become more transparent on what we do, because as he mentioned on that article he put together, the more open and transparent we become in the workplace working out loud the much easier it would be for everyone else to help you when you would need it. This is, exactly, what I have been advocating for myself for a long while, along the lines of this quote: “How can I help you, if I don’t know what you are doing? How can I help you, if I don’t know you, your work, and what you are trying to achieve? Help me please to understand your work, so that I can do my fair bit and help out where I can”.

App.net is just an identity provider – via @pevenasgreenwood

App.net doesn’t provide decentralization. If one company has access over all of your “social media data” that’s not decentralized.

What we really need is an open standard that uses an also open protocol to manage all this data. If we take a look at E-Mail Servers, that’s could be one way to built a decentralized “Social Grid” that doesn’t depend on one company.

Copyright v creditright by @JeffJarvis via @DavidGurteen

* When copyright changes, the idea of plagiarism changes. As I said in the Medium post, the old sin was not rewriting enough; the new sin is not attributing *and* linking. All newspaper and magazine articles should carry footnotes to their sources. I learned that ethic of linking in blogs and the practice of footnoting in writing Public Parts. There’s every reason that other media should take it up. Readers deserve it. Sources and creators deserve it. The record deserves it.

* When creditright takes over, then fair comment becomes a different beast. No longer do we fight over how much — how long an excerpt – is necessary and fair for comment. Now, the more comment the better. Just credit.

The Supreme Court of Canada Speaks: How To Assess Fair Dealing for Education by @mgeist

While the Court provides guidance on all aspects of fair dealing, its decisions have also articulated three guiding principles to assist with the analysis.

“fair dealing is a users’ right that must not be interpreted restrictively”

“technological neutrality requires that, absent evidence of Parliamentary intent to the contrary, we interpret the Copyright Act in a way that avoids imposing an additional layer of protections and fees based solely on the method of delivery of the work to the end user.”

“Persons or institutions relying on the s. 29 fair dealing exception need only prove that their own dealings with copyrighted works were for the purpose of research or private study and were fair.”

We work together on projects, public speaking, workshops, and writing. I am starting to think that our customers and our clients are diverging. The people who could really use our help are managers and individual knowledge workers. For example, we have had incredibly positive feedback from individuals attending our workshops at the Social Learning Centre. We intend to continue to grow this community.

However, organizational budgets are often controlled by people who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Requests for Proposals are usually aligned to a certain solution type. For instance, asking for advice on selecting the appropriate LMS does not ask the deeper question of why you need an LMS in the first place. Requesting help to add informal learning learning to formal instruction does not look at whether the training courses are actually useful to begin with. As my colleague Charles Jennings says, knowing is not doing.

The thinking that hard-wires ‘knowing’ to ‘learning’ has set our efforts to build high-performing organisations back many years.

Learning and knowing sometimes coincide, but they are different beasts.

There is still a huge focus on ‘knowing’ in organisational learning. We build formal classroom courses and eLearning programmes that consist of pre-tests and post-tests. We then assume that if we gain a higher score after some formal learning process (almost invariably assessed through a test/examination/certification based on knowledge recall) than we did before, then learning has occurred.

Most of us know deep down that this is bunk.

Passing knowledge tests immediately following a course tells us little about real learning. It may tell us something about short-term memory recall, but real learning can only be determined by observable long-term changes in behaviour.

I often feel like a doctor in the days before diagnostics. The preferred solutions were the prettiest or the most expensive (and least effective). In this kind of system, it took a long time for doctors to start washing their hands or give up on practices like blood-letting. I was told by someone at a large multinational company that it is easier to hire a brand-name consulting firm to deliver what many in the company know they do not need, than to engage a much cheaper and more effective group like the Internet Time Alliance to try a novel approach. In many ways, it seems that the brands have successfully mounted the bandwagon. What they lack in skills and experience, they make up in marketing.

But every once in a while we meet a client who is open to innovative ideas, or at least trying a few probes in the spirit of addressing complexity. These clients have self-confidence and a sense of adventure. They are not afraid of the concept of failure. If something is guaranteed to be a success, it should not require much attention from management anyway.

We are not just an alliance amongst ourselves but we are building a wider network of individuals and organizations who know that we should create better work environments for society in the network era. We have learned that complex problems require different thinking and innovative solutions. There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution. We know that each organization’s situation is not only different, it is continually changing. We are not your average consultancy. But who would want one in times of great change anyway?

I also looked at how PKM is a core skill set in a networked enterprise, empowering workers to take control of their own learning. A Seek-Sense-Share framework helps people to seek new contacts in their social networks, and communities of practice. The basic flow goes from outside, to inside, and back out.

First seek information and connections in your social networks and communities of practice. This of course requires that one connects in the first place. Good filtering skills are necessary to ensure a decent signal to noise ratio.

Filtered information can then be used in our sense-making processes. A key aspect of sense-making is creating something. This can be an information product or an action, like a probe, or experimental way of doing something, like a new work practice.

An important aspect of sharing is knowing when, with whom, and how to share. It may be posting to the web, like this blog, or it may be more directed and to a certain community. Sharing using a blog, with permalinks, categories and tags, makes it easier to share when a need arises in your networks or communities. Sharing with intent is curation, while PKM can be viewed as pre-curation. It takes discernment to know when and how to share.

A shotgun approach to knowledge sharing will not work. Showing discernment in knowledge sharing helps to build trust. Becoming a trusted node in your communities and networks (with a good signal to noise ratio) ensures that your voice will be heard.

According to Kim:

The densest cluster is the organizational development cluster, which is left of center. There are a bunch of skills here that are tightly interconnected, largely centered around leadership development, coaching, and group transformation.

The other large, dense clusters — management consulting, participatory processes, design thinking, and collaboration / technology — are largely distinct, although there is some bridging, mostly around learning-related skills. This makes sense: A high-performance group is a group that learns, a conclusion that you should draw regardless of your starting point.

The last sentence underlines my own focus for the past decade or more. Work is learning and learning is the work. Collaboration and learning go hand in glove.

Training, HR, OD, KM, IT, etc. use different models, speak different languages and go to separate conferences. However, they’re all in the business of collaboration. They just don’t do it with each other. Given the imperatives for continuous growth today, these disciplines need to give serious consideration to recombining their organizational DNA.

Just read a few professional journals and blogs and you will see that the same workplace issues are being faced by HR, IT, OD, KM, Marketing, Communications and T&D departments. Similar complaints and parallel strategies are being developed in isolation in each of these areas. We really need to get away from our self-imposed tribes and adopt network thinking and practices.

All levels of complexity exist in our world but more of our work (especially knowledge-intensive work) deals with complex problems, whether they be social, environmental or technological. Complex environments and problems are best addressed when we organize as networks; our work evolves around developing emergent practices; and we cooperate to achieve our goals. In the network era, collaboration specialists need to cooperate. Cooperation is quite different from collaboration.

In many ways it’s a case of the blind men and the elephant. We are constrained by the blinders of our profession’s models. That’s why I like to take my models from a variety of fields, as no single discipline has a network perspective. Everyone is struggling to keep up with change but most are using outdated tools and models. As Lou Sagar commented on Umair Haque’s 2009 post, ” … the emergence of new business models are ahead of the organizational framework to embrace and manage the impact.” Not much has changed. That pretty well sums up the problem in my mind. We are all blind men unable to understand the new realities of work.

I have observed that what underlies creative and complex work (the future of work in the network era, in my opinion) is empowered workers who take control of their own learning. This is the premise of personal knowledge management. PKM is not just about finding information, but also connecting to people.

Using the Seek-Sense-Share framework, people seek new contacts in their social networks, and over time (filtering), some become co-members in communities of practice. Communities of practice help to inform our work and life, some of our learning and observations creating new ideas or practices. We can then share these new ideas with our communities, discerning who and how to share with, at the appropriate times. For instance, we may share a new practice first with a professional community of practice before publishing it to our general social networks.

A key part of PKM is connecting our networks, our communities, our work, and our lives together in order to make sense, be more productive, and open ourselves to serendipity. It’s a holistic approach, not one that compartmentalizes work and life, but something that helps us to make sense of the whole messy, complex world we live in. As such, it’s always a work in progress, but it starts by connecting to others.

@DalaiLama – “We need an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religion and can be equally acceptable to those with faith and those without.”

@cgosimon – “‘Lessons Learned’ is a huge misnomer. It implies the lesson has been actually learnt rather than the problem documented.”

@JeremyScrivens – “So many of my HR colleagues are being forced to work in risk adverse cultures. Back end compliance has taken over from creativity.”

@euan – “Head of internal communications too often means Head of meaning neutering!” Meaning Matters: We make the very documents that matter the most, less trustworthy by appearing to make them more objective.

How Not to Steal People’s Content on the Web – via @RobinGood

So to clear up any confusion and ensure you (and anyone you do business with) is following proper internet etiquette, this post will outline proper methods of source attribution on the internet to guarantee the right people get credit for their hard work and ideas. It’s just the polite way to do business on the internet!

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 not a technology, an enterprise system, a piece of software, or a platform. If anyone is selling you a PKM system, they do not understand it. Walk away before you waste your money. The best technology for enabling PKM is the Internet. People don’t need anything else, other than getting rid of barriers that impede their learning. These barriers include social media policies, firewalls, inefficient work practices, defining people by their job, and many others, too numerous to name. Usually the barriers stem from the organizational structure or from management.

PKM 2008

For me, PKM really means:

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 [not being managed].

PKM 2010

It is not PKM if there is no additional value created. In other words, PKM is not about collecting things and filing them away, no matter how fancy it looks on some software platform. PKM is creating a sense-making process that works for you, and that you regularly use. PKM is beyond the workplace, just as workers are not always at work, but are always learning.

For me, it’s using writing, particularly here on my blog, to make sense of concepts, theories, experiences, and opinions related to my professional life. Sometimes my non-professional life gets involved, and that’s just fine with me. For you, it’s probably something else, and that is the wonderful thing: there is no single PKM system for all. People practising PKM, in their own ways, add to the diversity of thinking in organizations and society. A single system would kill diverse thinking, which in turn would destroy any potential for change or innovation.

Why is PKM important?

Formal training only accounts for 5% of workers’ learning needs.

Training courses often assume a dependent learner as passive recipient. This can kill creativity and motivation.

PKM builds reflection into our learning & working, helping us adapt to change and new situations. It can also help develop critical thinking skills.

Active PKM practices help to make each person a contributing node in knowledge networks. It is the foundation for social learning, which drives social business.

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Note: My next online PKM Workshop (technology-agnostic)