Knowledge-at-work

Just how social is knowledge?

A reply to Steve Bath

Social influences on our thinking, language, mental models, relationships, ontologies and worldview(s) are pervasive, subtle and often difficult to discern. My POV is 'personal' knowledge, individual decision making and personal innovation tend to overlook, subjugate or ignore the very roots of our being and 'knowing'.

The role of social construction can be seen in cultural bias

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_bias

what we come to 'know', we largely inherit via our exchanges, language, culture or community.

Reality and 'knowledge' is a function of what we build from experience and are 'told' by our peers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_construction

Let's return to Steve's questions:

>>Do your unseen colleagues classify as "deep listening" the intentional misinterpretation and misrepresentation of other people¹s ideas in order to improve the rhetorical efficiency of your claims?

Intentional misrepresentation is rather strong - I'm expounding my assumptions around PKM - clearly you do not agree.

>>Do your peers condone as "creative abrasion" the extreme characterizations designed to create conflict where none need exist?

Holding divergent views does help to surface new perspectives. If we all rush to occupy the center, what will we have gained from the exchange?

>>As far as I can tell, you are the only one who sees discussion of personal knowledge management as a threat to knowledge sharing, creation and exchange.

My issues are with an internal focus, personal branding, organization & arrangement of information objects, voicing 'thoughts' without engaging in dialog, trumpeting the primacy of personal knowledge. This I see as fencing the commons and a common view of PKM.

>>Speaking for myself, PKM is first and foremost about taking personal responsibility for one¹s own individual and participative efforts in learning, sharing and knowledge work.

My position is our knowledge originates, is created, vetted and shared in a social not a private world, that we need to work at improving our aggregate awareness, community inquiry, cultivate safe places and build relationships. Knowledge is a collective skill, you cannot do it alone.

Thanks for engaging

Reflecting on PKM

What exactly is Personal Knowledge Management, PKM?

Core PKM concepts (as I see them)

* Knowledge creation / generation is a personal act! - like learning and innovation, the individual is the origin, center stage, key and decisive entity in all knowledge activity.

* Organize your own house! - without a focus on collecting your thoughts, arranging and having access to your personal collection of pointers, links, articles and contacts, you will make little headway.

* Build your brand! - no one else will do it for you, be strong in your own identity, increase your personal intellectual capital.

* Master the PKM tools! - outliners, PIM, blogs. Build an archive, focus on preservation, develop and adopt a personal ontology / worldview.

An alternative view:

* Focus on shared 'safe' spaces, 'Ba', community, listening and social knowledge creation.

* Build social capital, NOT for leverage or what it returns to you, but to help others, cultivate honest social capital and be empathetic

* Knowledge happens via connections & relationships, deep dialog and emergence, not via the collection, arrangement, organization of information objects or access to personal tools.

* Knowledge flourishes in an ecology, needs diversity exchanges and creative abrasion to be articulated and verified.

There is something oxymoronic about a personal social network - the emphasis is in the wrong place!

More on PKM

Community of one

Personal KM

Steve Barth's view - "his [Denham's] definition and assumptions about PKM are specifically constructed so as to dismiss the whole concept. To do this, he ignores his own key tenets of social-oriented KM, listening and engagement. "

Relationships & knowledge

"Technology does not connect us. Our relationships connect us. We share knowledge because we are in relationship" - Margaret Wheatley, 2001. Knowledge is an aspect of relationship, of interaction between human beings. It doesn't belong to any one of us. If we put what we think is knowledge down in a book, we simply have an artefact. Stacey, 2002.

In my almost 20 of working with expert systems and KM, this is my essential learning - something I have to continuously check myself on as I'm fascinated by technology, eager to experiment and extol new tools and experience mediums always looking for the magic fix that will make communication and connection happen.

Ralph Stacey and Margaret Wheatley helped me to appreciate the importance of emergence, the way knowledge is constructed in dialog & on the fly and 'lives' in the spaces between people rather than in things / objects. This I have come to revere after struggling with the finesse of expert system heuristics, experiencing the difficulties of knowledge adoption when people are not involved in the creation, and facing the brittleness of knowledge in the absence of a community.

The real work of Knowledge Management, Weatley 2001

The impossibility of managing knowledge, Stacey 2002

Knowledge is not a tool! - it is understanding, action and meaning - it is the interaction (and emergence) that is key

Back to patterns

Need to capture experience and expertise?, introduce new ideas into your organization?, want a template to document rationale and good practice?, wish to explain and teach novices?, share solutions that have been tested and validated?, provide a 'language' to convey & improve difficult concepts?

Try Patterns

Patterns are a fundamental knowledge practice that rank alongside lessons learned, after action reviews, yellowpages, social network analysis, knowledge mapping, advanced search and data mining - yet patterns often get little recognition in formal KM publications.

What is a pattern?

Why should I care?

Patterns when applied with energy, adequate social negotiation, critique and sensitivity, represent meta-best practices. They capture the best of the best. An assembly of patterns gives rise to a super language, a high level efficient and very rich discourse. Patterns are part representation , part knowledge artifact (thing), and part compact solutions. Patterns may represent strong reification, they carry meaning and an investment of energy (cathexis). They make for interesting objects and the pattern community displays very useful dynamics.

Pattern power

Comes from the social vetting and testing that happens as part of the emergence of a pattern culture. Writing good patterns, forming a pattern language and collecting anti-patterns is hard but very rewarding knowledge work - an advanced practice for your group or team.

Introduction to patterns

Explore!

On messages, posts & documents

How do we 'best' contribute to our identity?

Is there a subtle hierarchy at play here?

Where do you then belong?

Been thinking about blog ecosystems, networks, relationships, persistence and knowledge spaces.

Clearly my experience and preference for messages and posts is for participation in a central space - a pull place where you lurk, learn and participate in a single virtual location, interact via turn-taking in simulated conversation mode - linear scrolling rather than post insertion, so the 'record' is sequential not topic centric, posts are attributed, there are easy links to an individual profile and an implied context. Not a gated space but a "Ba" where we can connect and build a collective memory from sharing a common virtual geography, it is the subtle affordance of being situated that I find hard to explicate and evangelize

At the other end of the spectrum, I'm very at ease in Wiki culture of 'anybody edits', text annealing, refactoring and extreme writing - no limits editing, fast releases, direct audience feedback, paired or collaborative text development, dramatic shifts in text structure - nothing better than inviting others to improve syntax and correct spellings!.

There is tension here but is the dichotomy between messages and documents something we need to pay attention to? Why does it really matter if you message, post or craft an artifact?

Guess there is an unarticulated unease I experience stemming from strong voicing, individual text control, inequality in 'publishing' rights - allowing comments is just not the same as participation in a group blog or a contribution to crafting a Wiki document, retracting to your own space rather than 'collaborating' and reciprocating in shared dialog in a central space.

There are some very fundamental genre issues to explored here I believe. - your thoughts?