Steve Barth | Reflexions

Does Corporate Failure = PKM?

Nick Milton posted a critique of personal knowledge management, "PKM=Corporate Failure," in which he called PKM a distraction (seems so, since he took time to write).

Having written about questions of PKM for almost 10 years, I wanted to refute his article point by point. But it turns out that I agree with him in almost every way. I'm interested in PKM precisely because, like Nick, I'm interested in building better teams, communities, organizations and societies.

I have to admit, it's something that I find a little disturbing. You see, for me, Knowledge Management is not a personal thing; it's a communal thing.

Clearly, Nick and I don't define PKM in the same way.

From Technologies to Tools

Think about the relationships we have to our communication and information tools, not just through our tools.

Have we gone too far distinguishing knowledge work from manual labor, so that we disconnect knowledge workers from the tools of their trade—and in doing so disrupt their sense of identity?

There is an affective connection between individuals and their tools that is vital to maintain both the productivity and the passion of knowledge work. But there is also a distinction between "tools" and "technologies" that is often missed in the modern workplace.

"Technologies" are systems imposed by the organization that often constrain, disempower and depersonalize knowledge work. "Tools" are extensions of our hands, as much as the hammers or knives of traditional work. They reinforce ownership, craftsmanship, stewardship and professional identity.

Read the article: The Difference between Tools and Technologies

NOTE: Preparing to relaunch my website, I'm designing a reprint template for my old articles. I believe if you want people to learn from any document longer than a few paragraphs, there should be a version that can be printed, read and annotated away from the computer (and recycled later). So I'm creating a template based on my article "Maintaining the integrity of design in a digital world: What is the role of real typographic design in knowledge work?" (still online only).

Please download the attached PDF and let me know what you think about both form and content. Thx.

Universal Remote

"We are inevitably moving towards the Mobile Society, where our mobile devices become the remote control of our daily lives." — Alan Moore, The Glittering Allure of the Mobile Society2008

Peggy Anne Salz uses this quote in her April eContent column about mobile handsets becoming ever more useful as our ubiquitous computing and communications companions. Then she explains the title concept from Mizuko Ito's 2005 Personal, Portable, Pedestrian. In Salz' words:

Ito and her colleagues outline the pivotal importance of the mobile phone based on the fact that it is

• personal (we customize and personalize mobile devices and consider them an extension of our personal identities),
• portable (even the Japanese name for mobile, keitai, which roughly translates to "something you carry with you," stresses the relation between the user and the device and not between the technology and its function), and
• pedestrian (because it is portable it's a perfect fit with life as it happens and with activities that require partial or sporadic attention).

All the right words

Dale Arseneault spotted this definition of knowledge management by the UK National Institute for Mental Health:

Knowledge Management is the cultivation of an environment within which people want to share, learn and collaborate leading to individual, team and organisational improvement.

I like it—even better than my own definitions—because of its unflinching emphasis on culture, as well as its recognition that performance is important at multiple levels. The only change I might make is a very small concession to the tools and techniques that help make this possible, perhaps, "...is the cultivation and facilitation..."

Why is knowledge management "personal"?

In a word, I think personal knowledge management is about citizenship. However, a client recently asked me to expand my definition to a paragraph:

Bringing your best to teams, organizations, communities, jobs and tasks depends on personal mastery of the values, practices, skills and tools required contribute your professional expertise to organizational learning and collective outcomes. shared sense-making, In practice, expertise is expressed through articulation and awareness, as well as interpersonal communication, and information literacy. Over the long term, a knowledge worker takes responsibility for the knowledge accumulated across his/her career and network.

Letter to a young client

Recently a new microfinance bank asked me to explain what knowledge management might mean for their enterprise, what it might look like, and how they should go about developing the capacity. A lot of my consulting in the past few years has been with economic development organizations—particularly related to microfinance. Learning and knowledge management are particularly powerful leverage points for microfinance institutions because growth is so rapid and so much of the activity is at the grassroots level. Here were 7 points that popped out of my head

First, we’ll fire all the introverts!

A friend of mine was telling me yesterday how people are inevitably attracted to social networks, social media and social tools because humans are social creatures. Obviously, if work is going to be more social and collaborative, then knowledge workers certainly need to pay more attention to social and collaboration norms, skills and behaviors.

But what are you going to do, fire all the introverts? We should be very, very skeptical of the social enterprise if it doesn't recognize that a lot of your most valuable and talented employees aren't the ones chatting around the water cooler. Introverts are very often the low maintenance people quietly getting things done, bringing a sudden insight or innovation to the team, or watching your back while you make an ass of yourself at the staff meeting.

I also feel really, really strongly that all of the critical, creative conversations are wasted when people do not balance the increased social time with an equal increase in quiet reflective time to absorb and process new information and ideas. Even extroverts need to sit quietly by themselves every now and then. Conrad said, "We live, as we dream—alone." No matter what anybody says, I still believe that we also learn alone just as much as we learn together. The wisdom of crowds depends not on us all knowing the same things, but on all knowing something that others don't.

My take on the social enterprise is that collaborative work can be more valuable but at the same time, it's often less productive in the short term. I think that successful collaboration in business environments really comes down to two complementary sets of issues.

Knowledge Worker Productivity: Strategies & Techniques

KM World & Intranets 2007 November 5-8

San Jose McEnery Convention Center, San Jose, CA

In collaboration with Richard Marrs and Eric Mack, I'll be presenting two new sessions on accelerating decisions and innovations and boosting knowledge worker productivity.  Details after the jump...

Ronin Technology: Consumer Devices in the Workplace

For 25 years, my business card was stamped with the word "ronin." As a journalist and later consultant, I saw myself as a wandering, masterless knowledge worker. I have worked independently for most of my professional life. But even when employed by others, I am typically self-motivated to a fault. In the old days, this was often criticized in my evaluations. Recently, of course, it has started showing up as a required trait in job postings.

In particular, one thing I have always pushed was taking responsibility for whatever skills and tools I needed to get my job done. This really took off for me about 10 years ago, when I went to work for a company that actively or passively discouraged things like knowledge management, mobile computing and telecommuting—despite publishing magazines on those exact topics. I ended up using my own laptop, software, subscriptions, etc., just to accomplish the tasks they paid me for.

What are the Koans of Mobile Productivity?

Eric Mack and I will lead a provocative session at the Office 2.0 Conference about The Koans of Mobile Productivity in San Francisco, September 6-7, 2007.

More details about our session will follow, but meanwhile check out an overview of the conference from this press release after the break...

New Fundamentals of Knowledge Worker Productivity

Eric Mack and I will present a new workshop on personal knowledge management at the 11th annual KMWorld & Intranets Conference and Exhibition. New Fundamentals of Knowledge Worker Productivity will be on November 5, 2007 while the main sessions and show are Nov. 6-8. The venue is the McEnery Convention Center, in San Jose, California.

Personal KM explores how expertise and effectiveness scale up to organizational value with a focus on the capabilities and contributions of each and every knowledge worker. PKM starts with individual priorities and processes that lead to self-organization in the workplace with values, skills and tools to build stronger teams and networks from the ground up.

Orders of Social Magnitude

To work effectively in today’s collaborative knowledge environments, we need to have communication, presentation, persuasion, listening and learning skills for different levels of social interaction. I think that, a lot of times, the skills are completely different from one level to the next: 1-1, 1-many, many-many, many-1, and then just 1.

I started to write this list with the infinity symbol, which made me realise that there are degrees of many—orders of magnitude, really. Those range from a few people that you know well (say, a team) to lots (community) to most (culture) to everybody (Web).

Perfection is Messy

Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman have published A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder--How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place. According to Freedman:

It's about why being messy and disordered isn't necessarily as bad a thing as everyone makes it out to be. It explores, for example, why messy desks are highly efficient, how overly ordered managers hold businesses back, the psychology of disorder, the role of disorder in art and urban planning, and why moderately messy homes save time, are more inviting, and are even more healthful for children.

"The Clockless Office"

Check out the cover story in the Dec 11 issue of Business Week magazine: "The Clockless Office." Best Buy started letting people at its Minneapolis headquarters work when and were they wanted to, as long as they got their work done. Productivity is up 35% and turnover is down in some departments as much as 90%.

Your Paperless Future

I'm in Halifax for a global summit on microfinance. While here, the newspapers have been going on about a report by Statistics Canada confirming the folly of the paperless future and other assumptions about the digital age.

Despite the advent of widespread personal computing, consumption of paper for writing and printing doubled between 1983 and 2003.

Hearing important voices online

"Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism:" is a brilliant and important essay by Jaron Lanier published last month in Edge The Third Culture.

The Metaphorical Universe

Mindful that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it's a duck, form this point on we'll adopt the position that since the universe registers and processes information like a quantum computer and is observationally indistinguishable from a quantum computer, then it is a quantum computer. --Seth Lloyd

I'm fascinated by How much do our metaphors shape our perceptions? And what responsibility do we then have to manage our metaphors to manage our perceptions?

There is a nice review/reflection by Margaret Wertheim of MIT Professor Seth Lloyd's 'Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos' (Knopf, March 2006) in today's LA Times Book Review section.

"Throughout history, humans have interpreted the world in terms of things they know. The ancient creator gods behaved like super-humans, coupling and breeding and giving birth to the cosmos, or fashioning its elements from familiar technologies such as weaving or molding clay. Modern scientific accounts also have drawn heavily on familiar contemporary tropes: In the 17th century, the universe was seen as a vast clockwork system. By the 19th, when the study of magnetic and electrical phenomena was hot, it was reconceived as a network of invisible force fields. At the dawn of the age of digital computers, scientists speculated that it was one of these machines," she muses.

Tunneling Out

Found a fascinating Seattle Times magazine article from last November 28. "Life Interrupted" wonders about the "cognitive overload" of our highly efficient connected age.

"Technology helps connect us to friends and, on occasion, soul mates. It prevents phone tag. It sorts and recalls massive amounts of information, simplifies writing, and even aids those who want to mellow out by working from the boonies," writes Richard Seven.

Desktop Search Tools Survey

Here are some of the desktop search tools I've been looking at for the February feature in KM World. So far I think the list is more exploratory than exhaustive. We will be publishing a fairly extensive survey comparing a number of features across this lists.

I'm curious about any user experiences with some of the lesser-known applicatations, and if anyone knows of others worth looking at?

Evolution of Desktop Search

I'm wrapping up a feature on desktop search tools for KM World magazine. It seems to me that there are three lessons from evolution that might easily apply to desktop search species as an emerging genus of KM tool: divergence, convergence and interdependence.