The best way to continually improve is to learn and that means developing your own personal knowledge management system (PKMS).
We have wiki’s, documents, training, learning, company intranets, brown bag lunches and more. And they often don’t solve the underlying problem of helping people to develop the skills, experience and knowledge to do their jobs better or progress in their careers.
Personal knowledge management systems can also become nothing more than a process that doesn’t lead to the right results. We can gather all of the information in the world but if we don’t put it in to action we’ll never gain knowledge. Knowledge of what works, what doesn’t, how it can be improved or how we can adapt it to work better.
Let’s start with a wikipedia definition:
“Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a collection of processes that a person uses to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve and share knowledgein their daily activities (Grundspenkis 2007) and the way in which these processes support work activities (Wright 2005). It is a response to the idea that knowledge workers need to be responsible for their own growth and learning (Smedley 2009). It is a bottom-up approach to knowledge management (KM) (Pollard 2008).” Wikipedia
In a nutshell it is a system that a person uses to learn.
Learning doesn’t happen by gathering resources together – it happens by discovering new ideas, blending knowledge together, implementing these new ideas (where possible) and observing and moving forward with what you have learned.
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I’ve been a manger for far too many years and the greatest advantage I had in all this time was a focus on building a powerful PKMS. I’ll share it here, but it’s important to point out that this systems works for me, it might not work for you – hence the term “personal” knowledge management.
I have four distinct activities to own personal system:
Capture
Curate
Crunch
Contribute
Capture
At the start of any knowledge management journey is to gather and capture information. You must feed your brain for it to develop new ideas.
So what information comes in:
At conferences I like to take hand-written notes as I learn more from this process, it’s less frustrating for those around me (less noisy keyboard tapping) and it enhances my learning. I then take a photo of the notes and share to Apple notes app on my phone.
If I find an interesting article on the web I can clip it using the Safaris Apple Notes clipper.
My Kindle clippings get put in to Notes too.
I “share” articles from my iPad straight to notes too.
My notes from doodling in the margins of books are photographed or transcribed – and end up in notes.
If I find myself out and about and have an idea for a blog, book or other project I’ll add the details via the Apple Notes app, or scribble it down in my notebook (and yes, these end up in Notes too).
Every piece of content I would ever want to consume and learn about ends up in Apple Notes.
Consider though that there is a boat-load of misinformation and nonsense on the Internet. Where you choose to source your knowledge will lead to the quality of your knowledge. I stick to about 5-10 decent blogs, 10-20 interesting people on LinkedIn and the rest of my knowledge tends to come from academic papers, books and serendipity of following interesting articles.
Note: 5-10 blogs, 10-20 people, academic papers, books, ideas, etc. Limit the intake!
Curate
Every week or so I go through my notes and curate them.
Everything ends up in the standard All Notes section in Apple Notes. I then simply process everything that has not been allocated to a folder.
Curating content is all about working out the value of each piece of information
Do I still value this piece of information or shall I delete it?
Will I need to refer back to it again?
Is this a key part of information I should crunch with my existing knowledge to move my learning forward?
And of course some notes are just tasks and ideas. If I want to do something with them I’ll move them my task manager (Todoist)
If it’s for further crunching or I’ve not completely read the source I store them in the “Read It Later” folder.
If I’ve processed it, the raw note goes to a folder called “Commonplace” so I can find it again in the future. But before then I spend time extracting relevant learning points in the crunch phase. And then adding this relevant information to my Core Learning Notes.
Note: Commonplace = like that name
Crunch
The majority of my notes end up being crunched. This is my term for studying the information and mashing it together with my existing knowledge.
There are a few core subjects I am trying to learn and improve upon.
Communication Skills – I am a lifelong learner of communication and aim to continue to grow my knowledge until I no longer can!
Light Therapy – I am trying to learn as much as possible about light therapy and how light affects humans at work
Management – my bread and butter skill and a topic with a never ending array of principles, ideas and opinions to digest
Writing, marketing and product sales – I am learning about how to market myself, my product and how to sell!
Publishing – I’ve always needed to publish work (books, magazines, zines, photography, podcasting etc) so I’m reading about how others are doing this and learning
When I add information I am asking a few questions:
Does it counter something else I already believe – how and why and what can I learn from that?
Does it compliment existing knowledge?
Is it a new piece of information?
Is it duplicate – in which case should I delete it?
Crunching is really the learning phase. This is the assimilation of information – it’s about finding a home for it in my mind. Apple Notes is merely a container and model that maps closely to my mind.
Contribution
My favourite way of learning is to put in practice that which I have learned (if possible). So, for example, let’s say I learn of a new way of organising a meeting that is supposed to lead to deeper insights and richer dialogue. I will find an opportunity to try it and see what happens for myself. This is experimentation – which for me is learning.
I could assimilate this new way of running meetings and teach others how to do it without experimenting – but I don’t know the nuances of when and why it works, or in which environments this new way might not work, or whether this approach even works at all.
To gain these insights requires experience. In gaining the experience I am also teaching others about the techniques during that experience (if it’s a shared experience), learning collectively about whether it works and building my knowledge.
With enough experiments under my belt I feel more comfortable explaining the idea to others, suggesting others use it and I am safe in the knowledge that I’ve learned more about it. Just being able to explain a new idea is great, but explaining how it might not work, or what nuances surround it, is the best way to ensure I have learned it.
It’s not always possible to experiment or try (no time, no safe environments for learning, etc) – that’s not a problem, but I will then seek out more knowledge on that subject to find the opposing ideas or examples of others who have expanded their thinking about the subject through experimentation. My goal is to know the other side of every idea or theory too – it’s rare everyone agrees on ideas – certainly in the world of management and communication. By taking on opposing views I build a richer understanding.
Refactor
There is no harm in refactoring, changing or abandoning an idea or theory -in fact, as you grow your knowledge this will happen. The goal is not to collect information for merely repeating it to others – the goal is to grow knowledge and understanding – and teach others. It’s about education, not memorisation.
Tools I Use
Here are some of the tools I use for capture, curation, crunching and contributing.
Apple Notes
IFTTT
Twitter
LinkedIn
Brain Pickings and Farnam Street Blog (Two blogs that are exceptionally good at providing food for my brain – they are doing a wonderful job of curating amazing content and insights)
Hemingway App – Awesome tool for helping you write succinctly
ToDoist – Good Task manager
Bear Writer – Great writing app
Iterate
The key to a successful PKMS is to keep iterating until it feels right. I doubt you’ll ever get it spot on, but you can get close. Close is good. But as soon as it doesn’t feel right again, try something different.
Having control of your own learning is the best way to succeed as a manager. Managers need to learn their way to success and they need to help others learn their way too. Becoming a life long learner opens doors, helps you solve problems and really can boost your career. And the best way to ensure success as a learner is to have a personal knowledge management system that works for you.
I do hope you enjoyed this post.