I came across a few very good learning opportunities last week that have helped move some of my thinking about knowledge management further ahead. First, Jane Hart and Harold Jarche (two people well-worth following) had an online conversation about personal knowledge management. Of particular interest to me was the idea of PKM consisting of “seeking, sensemaking, and sharing”:

I was already familiar with the idea of seeking information and sharing that information (maybe its my librarian background), but I hadn’t thought enough about the importance of the sensemaking element. This is the critical area of adding value — where information gets transformed into knowledge (or is at least part of this process). Sensemaking provides value in a couple of ways. First, to me at the centre of my own personal knowledge network, it means that I need to not just consume the information I have discovered (and will probably forget 10 minutes later), but actually need to engage with it, reflect on it, contextualize it, synthesize it with other information, and think about how I might be able to utilize it. Second, for others that I am sharing it with, I’ve added my own piece, enhanced it a little, revealed a bit of myself, and added my own brick to the rising structure of knowledge and understanding.

One of the challenges in doing this, of course, is time. When will any of us find the time to do this? Well, to actually move ourselves and our organizations forward, to grow and develop, I think we need to find the time. Jarche’s responded to this concern by referencing Beth Kanter’s Content Curation practice, which outlines how to systematically do 1 – 2 hours of seeking, sensing, and sharing each day:

For those of us with commutes on public transit, much of this can be done with our mobile devices to and from the office each day. Research shows that most knowledge workers aren’t very productive after 6 hours of straight work anyway, so why not invest an hour or so into this kind of activity with those final less-productive two hours?

There are many ways to add this kind of value to the knowledge we encounter. It could be as simple as adding a few extra characters to a retweet (WHY are you re-tweeting?), adding a thoughtful comment to an online article, or — requiring a bit more effort — writing up your thoughts in a blog post. Harold specifically mentioned the value of narrating your work, both as a reflective tool but also to add value to existing ideas (Harold’s blog is a rich example of this — see his Friday Finds). Image the results if everyone in an organization was actively seeking out information, making sense of it through reflection and writing, and then sharing it with others. I think it would take a pretty profound cultural shift to make this happen, but it is certainly possible, and worth trying.

This leads to the next item that I found helpful this week. In her blog post “Avoiding half-assed knowledge management flops“, Jane Young writes that many knowledge management efforts have failed because they only go half way. Organizations attempting to implement KM have understood the need generate knowledge and to store it (as explicit knowledge), but often fail to explain this knowledge to others or to help others make use of it. This results in the whole concept of KM being discounted — “we tried that and it didn’t work” — when it was never really implemented properly or completely.

What I think needs to happen is to apply Jarche’s personal knowledge management stages of seeking, sensemaking, and sharing to an organizational knowledge management strategy. Organizations seem to be getting the seeking right — they know they need to capture knowledge and store it somewhere. They also understand the importance of sharing — it isn’t of any value if others don’t know about it or can’t find it. The next step though, is to put more time and effort into sensemaking — why is this knowledge valuable? Why should you read this document or report? What does it mean in our organizational context? This kind of sensemaking can help to tap into the valuable tacit knowledge that resides in the heads of knowledge workers, and can be so hard to get at. Asking people to narrate their work (including those at the top of the hierarchy) could provide fascinating insight into what is currently being worked on, what new ideas are emerging, and what new opportunities might be evolving. And, of course, good, old-fashioned, face to face conversations can be an important part of this too (when not prohibited by distance).

From a leadership perspective, introducing organizational seeking, sensemaking, and sharing — developing a knowledge management network based on hundreds of personal knowledge nodes — could have significant long-term implications for enhancing innovation and achieving outcomes. It might (well, probably will) require cultural change and the reorganizing of priorities, but the benefits could potentially be profound.