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.

These days I look at it on two levels:

First, it's about taking a measure of personal responsibility for the learning, sharing and productivity required of a knowledge worker to deliver on the ever-increasing channels of obligation in our networked world of work. At the most basic, it's knowing what you know, who you know, what they know and need, and so on. No one has just one boss or one customer anymore. Collaboration requires more from each of us, not less.

Second, however, I've begun to ask neglected questions about how the individual fits into organizations in this new world. How can you be a better node in your network? What do you bring to the collective in order to make a contribution, so that the whole might be greater than the sum of the parts? How do leaders emerge as needed at every level of organization? What does a high-performing team, community or society need from its members?

Increasingly, I've come to see that the key value behind successful personal—and organizational—KM is citizenship rather than selfishness. It's voting and serving and even tithing, not just calling the embassy when you get picked up in a barfight somewhere overseas.

KM lies in seeing knowledge not as personal property, to be held, hoarded or traded personally, but as community property to be sought, shared, reused and refreshed in community.

I share Nick's naiveté that we don't manage knowledge in order to get ahead in the world. But I have noticed that hasn't stopped corporations from claiming ownership over my thoughts.

…The more people involved in the creation and reuse of knowledge, the more valuable that knowledge will be.

Absolutely. I notice that he specifically mentions people, sometimes referred to as "persons" being expected to show up. PKM is all about showing up.

It's easier to reorganise your personal information habits, than it is to change the culture of a company.

Yes, and overwhelmingly, we do this because we get tired of promises that the company will change—meanwhile we have work to do; people are counting on us.

It's easier to be personal, than it is to work in community. But for me, working KM as a personal issue just does not deliver the value.

I'm not completely sure what "being personal" means here. Since everyone I know who is interested in PKM is, in fact, working in many communities. (If it's not working for you, Nick, you might not be doing it right.)

Here's the thing. Neither your social network nor certainly your employer will have much patience if you cannot deliver value. But few social and professional endeavors come with a user's manual for how to do that. Research has repeatedly shown that the professional networks through which work gets done are networks based on personal relationships and trust.

Many people develop PKM habits out of frustration.

This I agree with, for at least two reasons. First, there are plenty of people who do hoard their knowledge because they are selfish or untrusting, out of greed or more likely having been burned by colleagues or by the company. (Lots of consultants sell trust-building; nobody mentions trust-repairing) But hoarding isn't PKM—it's just hoarding.

PKM is taking responsibility for how you share. That includes stewarding your knowledge so that it will not be misused. When I decline to upload my contact files to the CRM system, it's often because I don't want people in my trusted network to be spammed with sales calls.

Anyway, the main reason people practice PKM "out of frustration" is that the community or company has failed to provide a collective means of sharing knowledge that isn't more trouble than it's worth. So if I give up rephrasing my search query or rebooting after the conferencing app crashed me again, and just walk down the hall and ask the question my own way, is my practice anti-social?

It may give the individual more efficient access to information and documents, but it does not give access to better knowledge.

In short, people aren't all "doing PKM" to get ahead of others. Most of the time, they do it to get their job done.

…all you are doing is introducing information and knowledge silos at the level of the individual.

Aside from the fact that Nick is equating KM with repositories here, this just doesn't make sense. I have many thousands of messages and documents stored on my laptop. And the number one reason that my archive has value is so that I can reference it either to write about it or to forward context-appropriate resources to clients and collaborators who need it. If I dump that stuff into a massive collective bin, it isn't much difference from Googling, is it?

Because it still means something when a colleague who knows your knowledge needs better than Google does, sends you a message that says "Not that one, this one."

If the company is doing Knowledge Management properly, and making communal knowledge transparently available at the point of need, then you would not need PKM.

Here's where I think Nick is spot on. The history of both organizational change management and information technologies remains so abysmal that people don't have much choice, do they? When they make a personal decision to use desktop or social tools—against company policy—in order to collaborate, they are practicing personal KM.

It may give the individual more efficient access to information and documents, but it does not give access to better knowledge.

So we're in agreement that most corporate tools are inefficient at accessing the explicit—and likewise inefficient at locating the tacit—while a host of personal or personally accessible social tools do it quite well for much less money?

Nick's 100% correct that PKM is a sign of failure for most corporate KM—or more appropriately, a sign that corporations continually fail to understand what their knowledge workers need to do their jobs. He never actually said it was a cause, did he?

The debate, as I've said before, isn't between social or personal. It's really between those who think knowledge management (like learning and knowledge) has to be either personal or social and the people who think it has to be both personal and social.

Be careful however, when people narrow the definition of PKM or anything else to make it easier to attack. Be suspicious when people say they find this talk of personal responsibility "a little disturbing." Chances are they're trying to scare you away from exploring your options in order to sell you something that doesn't work.

Don't let anybody tell you that bottom-up knowledge sharing is somehow more threatening than top down. Don't let them trick you into thinking that personal is somehow the same as private or anti-social.

As a citizen, stand up for your rights… and responsibilities.

Comments

[Nick Milton]

Hi Steve - thanks for the critique! All comments welcome

You may well be right - you and I may well be defining PKM differently, but most of the people I find speaking about PKM, seem to be speaking about "individual" management of knowledge, rather than acting as persons within communities. If you see it differently, then I apologise for tarring you with the same brush.

Perhaps the difference comes when people see PKM as "management of knowledge personally" rather than "management of knowledge through personal relations". It is the former which I see to be a failure of corporate KM.

In fact, most of the people who mention "PKM" to me are talking about individual management of documents and information, which to me is personal information management, rather than personal knowledge management, but perhaps that is a diversion.

The alternative to personal information management/PKM is not "dump that stuff into a massive collective bin", but to build the shared knowledge based on collective experience, whether this knowledge base is codified into processes and strcutures, stored in guidelines and process descriptions, or held collectively as community tacit knowledge. There are processes of validating, distilling, comparing, cross-referencing, high-grading etc before knowledge becomes collective, which are vital, and are teh antithesis of "dumping"

Anyway, my main conclusion is happily the one you agree with the most, which is that PKM is a sign of failure for most corporate KM—or more appropriately, a sign that corporations continually fail to understand what their knowledge workers need to do their jobs.

(I most certainly don't see KM as "all about repositories" by the way, either on a personal or a collective level! Far from it. Back in the BP days in the 90s, we worked out that Connect and Collect are both vital components of KM, to be addressed in balance, and that is still firmly my belief).

[Mary Abraham]

Steve -

Great post. It led me to wonder if there was, perhaps, a middle path. I'm very focused on personal knowledge management. To me it is something 21st century workers should master, just like personal hygiene. Once knowledge workers begin doing their share of finding, filtering, storing and retrieving information for themselves, then the savvy enterprise can set up systems that allow those workers to share what they have easily, or can create systems to "skim the cream off the top" of the PKM systems (with the permission of the individuals, of course). This allows workers to do what they need to do for personal effectiveness and efficiency, and allows the enterprise to operate efficiently as well.

- Mary

[Steve]

Steve Richards said a bunch of things I should have said (if I handn't been too busy masking sarcasm in politesse) bravo!
http://steves.seasidelife.com/2009/05/14/does-corporate-failure-pkm/
You simply don't have the right to make all of your knowledge public or leave the decision up to the corporation... such as candid thoughts sent to you in a confidential email.
Your experience and insights span mutliple employers or clients (serially or in parallel)... but your trusted relationships do too. Bringing in old contacts on a new job cannot abdicate responsibility for treating them with respect.
The context and value of personal collections is often lost on upload... and just imposes more information overload for others.
And yes, above all, see them as complementary, not contradictory. But I think the "failure" thing comes up because few enterprise KM systems come anywhere close to holding up their end of the bargain.
It isn't so much that personal systems are better, but as personal systems, we can adapt them to our needs so much faster.