All week I’ve been reminded of how, especially once we reach age 50, we tend to rely more and more on our networks — both human networks (communities) and knowledge networks (the places we store what we’ve learned). This is partly due to the fact that we have ever more knowledge to handle, and partly because as we age our short-term memory weakens. Someone once said, famously, when asked how he could command such an enormous store of knowledge, “I keep my knowledge in my networks”.

I’ve started using IM, VoIP, and Google Desktop to recall my know-who (”who should I talk to about X again?”), my know-what (”where was that great tapas bar in Vancouver?”) and my know-how (”what was step 6 in my Innovation Process?”)

With a lifetime’s practice I’ve learned to keep in mind that I am only a complicity, a space through which stuff passes, and that my purpose is to touch the right stuff in just the right way as it passes through, in a way that brings meaning and joy and value to myself and to others in my social networks, my communities. To do this I use a particular process (sense, self-control, understand, question, imagine, offer, collaborate) to address each issue, project, decision, and challenge I face each day.

Much of this process is social, and it is conducted with members of my communities, my social networks. In fact deciding who to include in which networks, which networks to participate in, and how, and which people to invest time in and seek conversation with (and perhaps even which to trust and love) is probably the most important type of decision I make each day.

This week, for example, I decided to meet with Jon Husband for breakfast in San Jose (instead of going back to bed after a 6am media interview on my book). That important breakfast conversation inspired yesterday’s post. And shortly after that I met with Second Life friend Michelle Paradis for lunch in Santa Cruz, as prearranged, and discovered to my delight that she had invited five other fascinating people to join us: strategic change guru (and another Second Life friend) Gary Merrill, creativity and narrative consultants Kenton Hyatt and Cheryl DiCiantis, and Living Strategy advisors (and animal menagerie owners) Arian Ward and Beth Alexandre. Between the seven of us we discovered a remarkable number of connections and common friends (many of which also included some of my Tuesday dinner companions) — to the point we realized that we were all essentially already ‘hidden’ parts of each other’s networks, one or at most two degrees of separation apart. (Thanks so much to the amazing Michelle for arranging all this!)

So I began to think about how we make the decision on whether and how to accommodate new acquaintances in our already time-constrained and attention-constrained networks. After all, a recent study by Tom Davenport concluded that the most effective (i.e. productive) people in organizations tended to be those who had the strongest networks and who somehow were able to invest a substantial amount of time each day in nurturing those networks.

My right sidebar lists what I’ve been calling my ‘gravitational community’ — the people with whom I have gravitated because of common interests and passions, mutual admiration, respect and love. My lengthier blogroll has been moved off my home page to make room of this more important (to me) list of key networks. These are people I allow and even encourage to interrupt me, anytime, for instant conversations — if I had known them before the days of the Internet, they would be the people who I’d invite to drop over unannounced, anytime.

All of this raises some very important questions about networks:

1. How do we best decide who to include in our networks (or to put it another way who are the people we’re meant to be in community with)?
2. How can we learn to accommodate more people and build deeper relationships with those in our networks, without sacrificing other important activities in our lives?
3. How much time should we invest in networks, with which members, in what ways, and how do we make the most of that time?
4. How do we discover the people who should be in our networks, but currently aren’t?

My knowledge networks — the places I store and access knowledge that is important, useful or memorable to me, are somewhat easier to manage, because I use my blog to capture what are to me the important parts of what I read, see, hear, discover, experience and learn, so I can then use Google Desktop or the search bar of my blog to recall what I’ve learned later, and even ‘re-learn’ it quickly.

So much for networks. The mindmap above is an earlier list of the things I believe are most important to learn, the modern ’survival skills and knowledge’ list. I’m an advocate of unschooling (self-directed learning) and I believe that we are naturally able to learn these things ourselves, as soon as we discover they are important to us. But I also sense that the modern education system has stripped most of us of this natural learning ability in order to make us obedient and subservient. The Connectivism discussions make it clear that we’re as puzzled and divergent in our views about learning as we are about networks. This brings us to four more Important Questions:

5.  If learning is, as the instructors of this course contend, nothing more or less than ‘making connections’ (neural, conceptual, and social), how do we learn to learn the things in the chart above and the other things we need to learn to be self-sufficient, useful members of communities — to be who we were intended to be?
6. How do we discover what it is we need to learn?
7. How do we learn to critically assess what we see, hear, and think, and overcome the prejudices, prejudgements and worldviews that block us from being open to new ideas, insights, perspectives and knowledge?
8. We all have learning ‘disabilities’ of one kind or another. How do we recognize and overcome them?

I’m hoping that the Connectivism course will help answer these questions over the next nine weeks. If it does, it will be an extraordinary accomplishment. If it succeeds, it will probably be due not to the catalyzing questions and readings of the course ‘instructors’, but to the collective conversations of the hundreds of people engaged in thecourse, with each other, in community. I’m hanging in to find out.

It’s tempting to blame this on the facilitators, but with a couple of exceptions the facilitation of these sessions was done brilliantly. It’s equally tempting to blame it on the audience, saying they weren’t the right people, or lacked some of the critical capacities needed by the collective group for breakthrough thinking, or fell victim to groupthink, or weren’t engaged, or lacked energy. Open Space has a rule that “whoever comes are the right people” but also asserts the importance of a well-crafted invitation and getting that invitation out to the people you hope to draw to the event.

So it was interesting to hear Dave Snowden say the other day that self-managed facilitation events like Open Space “punish mavericks” — their ideas are usually too complex or too difficult to grasp or too difficult to articulate clearly, and therefore get ignored or even ridiculed. Could this be the problem with these methods? I’ve had several experiences where the most brilliant ideas I heard at an event were not even recorded in the official or unofficial record of the event. I’ve even used mindmaps, displayed at the front of the event or breakout room, to record what I’ve heard being said, only to be challenged by those who ‘heard’ something completely different.

I’m always surprised at the response to my own ideas at such events. Half the time they are simply not heard, because the group has preconceptions of what the event or outcomes would or should be, and my ideas just didn’t fit with them, and so were considered ‘out of scope’ or even ‘out of order’. The other half the time they are embraced with such zeal (one of my distinctive competencies is my ability to imagine possibilities that others don’t seem to be able to come up with) that I feel guilty for having hijacked the process and ‘bullied’ the group into adopting my solution without thinking it through adequately and without properly making it theirs. This is not a robust innovation process.

Or does the problem perhaps lie in the very nature and premise of facilitation — the belief that the facilitator can really remain objective and avoid steering the supposedly self-managed group in a direction that betrays the facilitator’s bias (or the facilitator’s sponsor’s bias)? Can we really be objective, or does our presence as part of the event inevitably colour it? Just as the observer’s very presence is said to affect quantum outcomes, does the facilitator’s very presence affect the event outcomes? Some of the most popular current research and analysis methodologies stress the importance of being ‘fact-based’ or ‘evidence-based’ — euphemisms for ‘objective’ — but the world’s best researchers will tell you the defining characteristic of world-class research is asking the right (sometimes ‘naive’) questions, and such questions are inevitably provocative and subjective.

There are some (a growing number, it appears) who believe that it is impossible to be objective, and that all news and information is inherently biased, not least by the selection of precisely what information, and details, to report and to not report. George Lakoff’s work tells us that we see and interpret everything through a personal worldview that colours what we accept and how we react to it. Perhaps, these objectivity-deniers might argue, the so-called facilitators should just present their own (or their sponsors’) context and hypotheses, as a ’straw man’, and let the participants start with those, and alter or challenge them as they deem appropriate.

When I start to ‘redesign’ such methodologies to try to accommodate these objections, the most experienced practitioners tend to shout foul, arguing that these methodologies have been honed to be functional yet as simple as possible from years of practice and experience, and if they don’t work perhaps a different methodology should be used rather than adulterating an established methodology.

But I can’t resist tinkering nevertheless. Here are some early thoughts on things that I think might make a methodology like Open Space work better:

1. In accordance with Snowden’s complexity model, set the initial conditions for the event, and interject attractors (things that encourage certain desired, productive behaviours) and barriers (that discourage other, counterproductive behaviours) at appropriate times to ‘manage’ the initial and emerging direction of the event without interfering with the actual content — the ideas, knowledge, insights, perspectives and intentions that come out. If you’re going to do this, however, you have to, as facilitator, be open to challenges that your initial boundaries and subsequent interventions help rather than hinder the process. So much for the pretence of objectivity.
2. Constantly adjust the balance and volume of critical thinkers versus creative thinkers. The best facilitated events I’ve participated in have got this balance just right, but it’s tough to sustain. Think orchestra conductor rather than improviser — an approach that these days is unfashionable.
3. As a corollary to the above, actively squelch the bullies and manipulators, and draw out the wallflowers. At the same time, when groupthink emerges rather than consensus, call it for what it is.
4. Allow time — set expectations and objectives at a level modest enough that sufficient time is available for new ideas to emerge and be articulated, for people to think and reflect, for new information and ideas to sink in. This is a horrifically difficult task in today’s time-starved attention-deficit society. I don’t know how you solve this — maybe events need to have a series of sessions spread over weeks or months with some momentum-sustaining and reflection and rethinking time in between, to provide enough time for real ideation and understanding and meaningful intention to emerge.
5. Teach participants the capacities they need to be productive participants in this type of event. Ideally in advance, have self-directed learning events and resources available to learn and practice holding oneself open, letting go, brainstorming, creativity, imagination and innovation skills and processes, and consensus-building and conflict resolution. Reinforce this learning by pulling participants clearly lacking these skills aside for some just-in-time one-on-one instruction.

Of course, even if these complications of the facilitator’s role are desirable, there’s a question whether they don’t so complicate that role as torequire a small army of facilitators to manage.

It should be an interesting discussion on Monday and Tuesday. Stay tuned.

THE NEW ROLE OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT (& ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING) IMPROVING PERSONAL PRODUCTIVITY ïFacilitating PCM: helping people to self-find, self-filter, self-publish, self-subscribe, and self-organize ëstuffí ïTeaching research skills: methods, not tools IMPROVING CONNECTION ïFacilitating conversations: with new simple, real-time connectivity tools (IM, screen-sharing, desktop video, Open Space) ïFacilitating JIT canvassing: helping people discover who knows what and connecting them IMPROVING CONTEXT ïStory teaching/recording: show don’t tell; let learners look over the master’s shoulders ïEnvironmental scanning: discovering and communicating whatís new, whatís risky and whatís important ïSense-making: assessing and communicating what it means, what people think about it, whatís being done, what should be done, who should be talking with whom, what is important to learn (see chart above)

Week 2 of the CCK08 Connectivism and Connnected Learning course was mostly about “types of knowledge”, not of great interest to me, especially since my current KM riff is about the need to switch attention (and resources) From Content to Context and from Collection to Connection.

So here I am among 2000 participants from around the world, all focused on knowledge and learning and how we can improve them. There is a lot of content being shared, but there is a clear struggle to make meaning of it, to put it into context that is useful. To do that, what is needed is conversation and connection. The conversations I have witnessed so far are mostly those among somewhat bewildered students of the course trying to figure out what to do. It’s the classic teacher-student co-dependence played out on a massive and virtual stage: Teachers need students to make a living. Students expect teachers to tell them something that they can credentialize, get ‘credit’ for that will improve their resume. They want ‘tests’ that will allegedly demonstrate who has learned the most.

Of course, tests don’t demonstrate anything of the sort. They demonstrate, mostly, which student was cleverest and most knowledgeable about the subject matter before the course began.

Most of the people in this massive open online course (MOOC) are not taking the course for credit (though I suspect many will claim it as personal PD). Most will not do the written assignments. Many, I suspect, will either drop out over the course of the twelve weeks when they cease to get anything more substantive out of it, or will peer back in every week or two and invest enough time to satisfy themselves they aren’t missing anything important. I may well be one of them.

But in the meantime I’m investing four hours a week in thinking and conversing about learning and knowledge transfer, because I think the subject is important. The two slides above (from my presentation next week at KMWorld & Intranets in San Jose) show where I’m coming from on this.

Knowledge Management was coopted, early on, by a combination of librarians and researchers (who thought it was all about knowledge content), corporate trainers (who thought it was all about learning content), and Intranet/Internet corporate webmasters (who thought it was all about web and groupware content). It took a decade before disgruntled users made it clear that they still learn and share knowledge the same way they always did: by picking up the phone or walking down the hall or getting on a plane and having context-rich real-time conversations. It was, and is, all about context and connectivity. So as my slide above shows, the seven most important initiatives of KM 2.0 are context-building, connection-building, and personal productivity initiatives — facilitating better, more informed conversations with the right people.

So far this course has not focused on that. But some of the later sessions are focused on the changing role of educators, which ties in to the seven initiatives above. Regular readers know I’m a fan of unschooling — of self-directed and self-organized learning, that is facilitated (coached), not taught. We learn through conversation, and through direct observation, with people who know more or different, from whence we pick up knowledge, ideas, insights, and new capacities. As much as I hate most of the content-focused KM 1.0 technologies, I love some of the context-focused, real-time KM 2.0 technologies (IM, screen-sharing, video capture/conferencing, Open Space) which can enable such facilitation, and enhance learning.

If the Connectivism course can show other ways to make this happen, I can hardly wait.

Now if only I could find some more robust ways to connect with the other participants, peer-to-peer!