Personal knowledge mastery

This post is one of many, related to my participation in  Harold Jarche's Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop.

I've been thinking a lot about the elements that prevent us from most deeply practicing Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM) in our lives. A big piece involves fear, the worries that we couldn't possibly know enough, or being talented enough, to contribute anything to the discourse. I'm at the POD Conference this week in San Diego and have been thinking about my own, long-term desire to get better at sketchnotes, while realizing that the only way you do something like that is to start out not-so-good, and establish a regular practice that could contribute to you getting better.

People often use the metaphor of a gap existing between where we are and where we want to be… We forget the value we might possess along the way. Daniel Sax starts out his video called THE GAP by Ira Glass with text that appears on the screen, in the form of a dedication of sorts. The words initially say:

For everyone in doubt

After a few seconds, an additional line of text appears:

Especially for myself

How many of us can relate to those feelings of doubt?

How often do we ponder what they prevent us from achieving?

After that compelling two-line introduction, Sax shows what I think is a printing press in action, though I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking at, during the first part of the video. Ironically, I wrote in my last post about how Bryan Alexander embodied PKM at a dinner, recently, but I didn't write much about the other people who were there. However, I realize now that one of the people is working on her doctoral research and it is on Black women who were printmakers in the 1930s, I believe it was. My mind flashed, as I revisited watching Sax's video, thinking that this doctoral researcher would surely know if what I think I'm seeing here is actually that.

Before now, I hadn't really paid much attention to Sax's video description on Vimeo. However, my curiosity was rewarded, by getting to discover that Sax made this video, because he was inspired by another one and wanted to experiment with his own creation. He writes:

I made it for myself and for anybody who is in doubt about his/her creative career. I also think that Ira Glass' message isn't only limited to the creative industry. It can be applied to everyone who starts out in a new environment and is willing to improve.

I encourage you to stop and watch Sax's video: THE GAP by Ira Glass and reflect on the different ways he conveys his messages and ideas, throughout. I wonder how long it took him to do the spoon full of noodle letters, spelling out his thoughts for that 2-3 second part.

Back to Sax's video description, he ends with a series of expressions of gratitude, to all of those who got him to the point of creating his piece. He thanks David Shiyang Liu, who has a graphical, text-based depiction of Ira's words about storytelling (which really could be about any new pursuit). Sax continues to thank the people who made his video possible (I suggest going to the video description and witness a wonderful example of giving credit where credit is due).

As Jarche begins to wind down the PKMastery Workshop and invites us to start our PKM practice (if we haven't, already), he quotes Tim Kastelle:

The biggest gap is between those doing nothing and those doing something.

Jarche uses his book reviews and Friday’s Finds as examples of his PKM practice lived out. He's been at that for such a long time now, I look forward to each post, as they get released and show up in my RSS feeds. Despite having learned so much over the 10+ years I've been following his work, taking this PKM workshop has accelerated my learning exponentially. There's nothing like doing all the sensemaking and sharing that I set myself up to do when I committed to blogging publicly throughout the six weeks of the workshop.

My PKM

While I've got a ways to go and it is still quite early in my practice, I'm enjoying revisiting books from authors I have interviewed for Teaching in Higher Ed via a new video series I'm calling Between the Lines. This series is helping me experiment more with video as a medium, as well as supporting my ongoing learning about teaching and learning. I also have a playlist of me practicing Mike Caulfield's SIFT framework for fact checking. I'm realizing I probably need to do some more thinking about the playlists as categories of different types of videos, but I also have this playlist of technology for teaching and learning.

Of course producing and hosting the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast is a huge part of PKM for me. Here are some unpolished thoughts about how seek-sense-share shows up through this 11-year adventure.

Seek

I get new guest ideas from past podcast guests, conferences I attend, books I read, PR people I now know from book publishers, and from things that show up on my RSS feeds. The point I'm at in my seeking process is actually more so that I need to find ways to filter out the vast number of ideas for possible interviews that come my way and be more disciplined and discerning about saying no (either to myself, or to others).

Sense

In preparing for interviews, I do a ton of sensemaking, thinking through the themes that are narrow enough to not be all over the place, but also not overly prescriptive, lest I miss what is emerging in the moment. I read digitally and typically highlight way too much of the book. Sometimes I mindmap my ideas, or just type up themes and reorder ideas. Creating the show notes for each episode also helps me extend the learning opportunities from each conversation.

Share

The podcast gets shared on all the major podcast directories and services. YouTube recently revised their policies to now allow for RSS feeds from audio-only shows to come through on their site (Teaching in Higher Ed podcast on YouTube). Spotify represents a growing Teaching in Higher Ed audience and has some nice features for more engagement than on other platforms, such as being able to ask listeners a question about what they took away from listening.

Hope

My hope is that I'll forever continue to live in the gap and experience the positive benefits of being willing to be fueled by the vulnerability required to learn out loud.

I'm in San Diego at the POD Network conference this week, which means I get to observe myself in action as I attempt to moderate all the wonderful nuggets of potential learning coming my way, while recognizing that I need to keep some type of self restraint, lest I get too overwhelmed with all that is coming at me at one time. This conference brings together people in the field of educational development, who work closely with faculty to heighten teaching effectiveness in a higher education context.

This topic from Harold Jarche's PKM workshop focuses on adding value. Jarche shares 14 ways to acquire knowledge from the quintessential PKM practicer, Maria Popova at The Marginalian, and her review _You Can Do Anything_ by James Mangan, written in 1936. He then categorizes the methods in terms of how they align with PKM in this graphic from Jarche:
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Much of what I have thought of as the seek part of my PKM practice has to do with receiving (which may be classified here as reading and listening). What I realize I have been doing for more than a decade through podcasting also fits well here: asking. Had you asked me to map out my podcasting adventures on top of the seek-sense-share model, I certainly could have given you a rudimentary framework with examples, but I'm enjoying this far more expansive way of thinking about those practices specific to the work I do for the podcast. The PKM I do more as a solo endeavor (reading RSS feeds and bookmarking a bunch of items each day) compliments the more regular, public sharing I do through the podcast.

Since I'm at the POD Conference this week, trying to balance out the desire to capitalize on the many opportunities to connect with a need for alone time, as well, I accepted a dinner invitation that I knew would go past my normal bedtime. I tend to wake up super early and therefore head to bed far earlier than most people. However, I had a sense that this dinner would be worth it and it was.

One of the people I got to sit and talk a long while with was Bryan Alexander. I know him from having interviewed him twice, now, for Teaching in Higher Ed. He brilliantly exemplifies what a long-term PKM habit looks like through his hosting of The Future Trends Forum, the Future Trends in Technology and Education Report (FTTE Report), and his blog. At the dinner, I witnessed Bryan's voracious curiosity and his embodiment of what it looks like to ask, as part of one's PKM pursuits.

Popova writes about asking:

Every person possessing knowledge is more than willing to communicate what he knows to any serious, sincere person who asks. The question never makes the asker seem foolish or childish — rather, to ask is to command the respect of the other person who in the act of helping you is drawn closer to you, _likes you better_ and will go out of his way on any future occasion to share his knowledge with you.

Bryan asked questions throughout dinner and peaked my curiosity about the others' video watching, podcast listening, tv/movie watching, and book reading habits, among other things. I enjoyed adding a couple of items to my Sequel App queue. I wish the app had a listing of items I have added, presented chronologically, as unless I add a note to an item, I don't wind up remembering who suggested something to me. I'm pretty sure Bryan suggested Pluribus to us, though it also easily could have been Tom Tobin, from earlier in the evening. Actually, now that I think about it, whatever Tom had suggested did get a note added to it, at the time, so I've added a h/t note re: Bryan Alexander for Pluribus (h/t = tip of the hat, on internet parlance, as in who do you want to give credit to for suggesting something to you, as you share it).

It may seem strange that I like remembering who recommended things to me, after the fact. To me, that's part of my sensemaking and ongoing relationship deepening habits. In this case, Pluribus is a scifi show, which is a genre I used to think that I didn't like, which I'm quickly realizing was probably never the case, I just didn't explore it much in the past. Since Bryan is a futurist, I'm intrigued by the sorts of fictional works that shape his thinking on an ongoing basis. Now I'm wondering if it was Tom Tobin who recommended the show, or maybe both of them did. Hmmm…

As I review all of the ways Mangan articulated for acquiring knowledge, I'm realizing the extent to which Bryan Alexander embodies all of those in his practice. It was such a delight to get to talk to him for an extended period of time, without the normal nerves of getting ready to press record for a podcast interview, or to have just finished talking with him for an episode and then needing to quickly close down the conversation at the end of our scheduled time together (I could talk with him for hours, which was proven this week!). I'm excited to talk to him at the beginning of December for an episode that will air in January about his forthcoming book:

Peak Higher Ed: How to Survive the Looming Academic Crisis, by Bryan Alexander

He gave a keynote here at POD25 about the book's themes, as well, so between reading it in the coming ten days and having heard him share via his address, I feel that much more excited about our upcoming conversation.

One might think that someone who knows as much as Bryan does would be the person doing the most talking at the dinner table. However, close observation of Bryan's conversational habits would quickly reveal his heightened curiosity in settings like that, taking in what's being shared, and setting up even more possibilities for each person to engage in the conversation.

I'm going to look forward to returning to these 14 ways to acquire knowledge and considering even more the ways in which I get to witness them in practice during events like the one I'm at this week.

PS. My deep gratitude to Olivia from OneHE who extended the invitation for the wonderful dinner with such curious, interesting people, including Bryan. 

This post is one of many, related to my participation in  Harold Jarche's Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop.

As we round down our time in the PKMastery workshop, I'm now presented with a topic that is both familiar, yet still incredibly challenging for me: systems thinking. One of the best books I read in my MA was The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization. I discovered that I didn't have a digital copy (where I like to keep highlights) and was fortunate to find it on sale for $1.99, plus a digital credit that made it “free”.

The key dimensions of the disciplines of the learning organization are listed by Senge in the introduction:

• Systems thinking: He describes here how rain happens, with a bunch of different events that happen across distance, time, and space, yet: “… they are all connected within the same pattern. Each has an influence on the rest, an influence that is usually hidden from view. You can only understand the system of a rainstorm by contemplating the whole, not any individual part of the pattern.” We use systems thinking to be more effective at seeing the full picture and associated patterns, as well as to find ways to facilitate change.
• Personal mastery: Senge distinguishes the multiple meanings of the word mastery. Yes, it can mean dominance over another, yet can also have to do with proficiency. He defines personal mastery as, “…the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively.”
• Mental models: These baked in assumptions, over-generalized beliefs impact how we understand and explain what happens and the actions we take as a result of those paradigms.
• Building shared vision: Organizations that achieve great things do so through leadership capacity at developing a shared perspective on where the organization is headed. Senge describes: “When there is a genuine vision (as opposed to the all-too-familiar “vision statement”), people excel and learn, not because they are told to, but because they want to.”
• Team learning: Senge encourages us to look to the Greeks' practice of dialog vs discussion. When we are in dialog, our ideas are free-flowing and we can build a capacity to suspend our assumptions and actually think together. In contrast, the word discussion has ties with word like “percussion” and “concussion” and the idea of competitive ideation can take place.

Senge describes how the fifth discipline is systems thinking, because it weaves together the other disciplines toward intentional transformation. When we can visualize something better, we can understand it more effectively, as Jarche illustrates in a story about when NASA first released a picture of the earth, taken from space. He writes how:

There are many ways to use visualization to understand data better. The real value of big data is using it to ask better questions. Visualization can be a conversation accelerator.

Taking existing systems and using visualization to surface the ways the various parts of the system shape the other parts is vital in increasing our individual and collective abilities to learn.

What Holds Us Back From Being a Learning Organization

In chapter two, Senge writes about what he calls organizational learning disabilities. I'm not sure he communicates in such a way to support more of an asset-based framework for disability that many of us have become familiar with today. But I still want to list and describe them here, as this was my biggest takeaway from the book, reading it more than twenty years ago.

1. “I am my position”

“When asked what they do for a living, most people describe the tasks they perform every day, not the purpose of the greater enterprise in which they take part. Most see themselves within a system over which they have little or no influence. They do their job, put in their time, and try to cope with the forces outside of their control. Consequently, they tend to see their responsibilities as limited to the boundaries of their position.”

2. “The enemy is out there”

“When we focus only on our position, we do not see how our own actions extend beyond the boundary of that position. When those actions have consequences that come back to hurt us, we misperceive these new problems as externally caused. Like the person being chased by his own shadow, we cannot seem to shake them.”

3. The illusion of taking charge

“All too often, proactiveness is reactiveness in disguise… True proactiveness comes from seeing how we contribute to our own problems. It is a. product of our way of thinking, not our emotional state.”

4. The fixation on events

Senge describes how we evolved out of societies where people had to be focused on events to survive, like watching for the saber-toothed tiger to show up and be able to respond immediately.

“Generative learning cannot be sustained in an organization if people’s thinking is dominated by short-term events. If we focus on events, the best we can ever do is predict an event before it happens so that we can react optimally. But we cannot learn to create.”

5. The parable of the boiled frog

“Learning to see slow, gradual processes requires slowing down our frenetic pace and paying attention to the subtle as well as the dramatic… The problem is our minds are so locked in one frequency, it’s as if we can only see at 78 rpm; we can’t see anything at 33-1/3. We will not avoid the fate of the frog until we learn to slow down and see the gradual processes that often pose the greatest threats.”

Remember that this is meant to be a metaphor to help us explain this phenomenon. No frogs were harmed in sharing this boiling frog apologue.

6. The delusion of learning from experience

“Herein lies the core learning dilemma that confronts organizations: we learn best from experience but we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important decisions. The most critical decisions made in organizations have systemwide consequences that stretch over years or decades.”

7. The myth of the management team

“All too often, teams in business tend to spend their time fighting for turf, avoiding anything that will make them look bad personally, and pretending that everyone is behind the team’s collective strategy—maintaining the appearance of a cohesive team. To keep up the image, they seek to squelch disagreement; people with serious reservations avoid stating them publicly, and joint decisions are watered-down compromises reflecting what everyone can live with, or else reflecting one person’s view foisted on the group. If there is disagreement, it’s usually expressed in a manner that lays blame, polarizes opinion, and fails to reveal the underlying differences in assumptions and experience in a way that the team as a whole could learn from.”

Senge goes on to describe what Chris Argyris from Harvard calls “skilled incompetence” (gift, non-paywalled article from HBR)- groups of individuals who get super good at making sure to prevent themselves from actually learning. Since we're talking frogs a lot in this series of PKM posts, I can't help but bring up another illustrative story having to do with skilled incompetence.

The cartoon character Michigan J Frog would only dance and sing when the man who found him was alone. Any time that someone else entered the picture, the frog just sat there, making normal frog noises. Here's a look at his antics:

Looks to me like skilled incompetence and also some seriously skilled frog theatrics (but only when no one is looking).

What Comes Next

The next part of The Fifth Discipline is something Senge calls “the beer game.” It is a memorable look at what happens when we are unable to see the entire system, but only one part of it. Let's just say there's a supposed shortage of beer, and then lots and lots of beer. But you should read it, as I'm nowhere capturing the marvelous metaphor that is the beer game.

Readers are also instructed how to map systems in this book, though it is a practice that I never mastered. Jarche links to Tools for Systems Thinkers: Systems Mapping, by Leyia Acaroglu. which gives a great introduction and series of maps to use to explore complex ideas. Acaroglu illustrates their value by describing:

As a practicing creative change-maker, I use systems mapping tools like this all the time when I want to identify the divergent parts of the problem set and find unique areas in which to develop interventions. I also use them to gain clarity in complexity, and find it especially useful when working in teams or collaborating because it puts everyone on the same page.

I pretty much want to take every class that Levia and her team have available on the Unschool of Disruptive Design site. I'm also thinking I had better settle myself down a bit and wrap up this PKMastery course before biting off anything more. That, plus a couple of big conferences coming up I still need to prepare for…

This post is one of many, related to my participation in  Harold Jarche's Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop.

Jarche informs us that when we narrate our work, we don't experience knowledge transfer, but what we do get is greater understanding. Our individual, self-directed learning is difficult to codify, he explains, and is more focused on relationships and expertise. When we narrate our work, focusing on decisions and processes, we make that work more visible to others. This means we can experiment and share knowledge, learning together in real time. The results of this thinking together results in enterprise curation, where we can more easily codify knowledge and experience the results of our earlier efforts.

The value of social bookmarks are hard to see, at first. However, over time, especially when combined with the use of feed aggregators and readers, we eventually get to witness the power of PKM as a discipline. I've been using Raindrop.io bookmarks for years, now, and enjoy having shareable bookmarks (which I can surface, when a situation encourages that practice), yet most of my collections are private. One that is now public is my growing collection of AI articles, in both an RSS feed and just a browsable page.

I do find myself cringing a bit as I save items there, knowing that I certainly don't endorse each link I save and the topic of AI is so controversial and polarizing. I've got everything up there from the world as we know it is crumbling to its core to fun hacks to use AI to build you a rocket ship to the moon (or load your dishwasher) or some such thing.

Jarche states that our emphasis when we narrate our work should be on making our thinking accessible, but to avoid disrupting people with what we choose to share. He writes:

The key is to narrate your work so it is shareable, but to use discernment in sharing with others. Also, to be good at narrating your work, you have to practice.

One practice Jarche mentions under his tips and links section is to keep a journal. While I've not been good at this practice since my teenage years long ago, I did find many of these 6 Ways Keeping a Journal Can Help Your Career compelling. In Episode 425 of Teaching in Higher Ed, I share Viji Sathy's and Kelly Hogan's suggestion to keep a “Starfish” folder. There are variations of the beloved story of the starfish, including this Tale of the Starfish page from the Starfish Foundation with a powerful video describing the power in making a difference for a single starfish, even if we can't rescue them all.

I have kept up with digital encouragement folders for years now, both on my email accounts, as well as in my file directories (across my personal and professional domains). While not a journal, exactly, these stories and words can bring me encouragement during difficult times.

I've been paying for the Day One Journal App for years now, though entirely languish in my practice of journaling. I would switch over to Obsidian, which has the benefit of future proofing any notes I take using Obsidian, since they are just text files sitting wherever I want them to be (as in if the app went away, the text files are still there and readable).

However, Day One brings together all the TV and movies that I've watched, all my social media posts and images, and all the videos I've favorited on YouTube. I use Sequel to track what I want to watch, which then optionally integrates with the free Trakt service, which allows for an IFTTT rule to add an entry to Day One each time I mark something as watched in Sequel. In case you're wondering about how I accomplish this, I found these two automations on IFTTT and never had to change a thing.

• IFTTT applet – If watched a new episode, then Create Journal Entry
• IFTTT applet – If watched a new movie, then Create Journal Entry

Perhaps someday I'll go down a rabbit trail of trying to figure out a longer-term, non-subscription based model for collecting all those memories across all those different services and not locking myself into DayOne. For now, I'm enjoying revisiting this glimpse of these two upside down kind of people from 2017….

…and then having this song from Jack Johnson start playing on the soundtrack of my mind for what I'm sure will last at least a few hours.

This post is one of many, related to my participation in  Harold Jarche's Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop.

Sometimes we think we need experts, sure. But we shouldn't dismiss the power of finding fellow seekers. There are times when an expert might help us, but also times they leave us behind or otherwise are unable to contribute to our growth. They may not have sufficient beginner's mind or childlike curiosity. We may need the empathy and lack of judgement that can be possible with someone who is still wrestling through these same ideas, themselves.

I've often tried to coach students in showing them the ways that they can help their professors, when they often think their only possible role is as one being the receiver of help. Similarly, when we are in a seeking role, we aren't able to see the ways we can add value to the learning process for ourselves and others. We can wrestle with trying to give the appearance of competence versus staying in the seeker's mindset and focusing on curiosity and wonder. This hesitance at potentially looking foolish to others in our incompetence can not only hold us back from learning, but also cause us to feel alone. It is vital to connect with other seekers and experience the benefits of those roles within our networks.

Jarche writes:

Your fellow seekers can help you on a journey to become a Knowledge Catalyst, which takes parts of the Expert and the Connector and combines them to be a highly contributing node in a knowledge network. We can become knowledge catalysts — filtering, curating, thinking, and doing — in conjunction with others. Only in collaboration with others will we understand complex issues and create new ways of addressing them. As expertise is getting eroded in many fields, innovation across disciplines is increasing. We need to reach across these disciplines.

I sure hope Harold is right about cross-disciplinary innovation expanding, as we need that more than ever. In Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein instructs:

Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you. Everyone progresses at a different rate, so don’t let anyone else make you feel behind. You probably don’t even know where exactly you’re going, so feeling behind doesn’t help. Instead… start planning experiments.

The Value of Experiments

What are experiments? Epstein describes them by introducing physicist Andre Geim and his “Friday night experiments” (FNEs). It was through these endeavors that Geim won not a fancy Nobel Prize, but an Ig Nobel (which Geim shares with collaborator M V Berry via their Of Flying Frogs and Levitrons piece, available through the Internet Wayback Machine). The Ig Nobel is bestowed on those who at first seem like they're doing something ridiculous. From Wikipedia:

The Ig Nobel Prize (/ˌɪɡ noʊˈbɛl/) is a satirical prize awarded annually since 1991 to promote public engagement with scientific research. Its aim is to “honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.” The name of the award is a pun on the Nobel Prize, which it parodies, and on the word “ignoble”.

A serious researcher, Geim is (as of 2025) the only person to both win a Nobel and an Ig Nobel prize. Those who are in line to potentially win an Ig Nobel are first informed, such that they can determine if the satirical nature of the designation might be detrimental to their research careers. For his FNEs, Geim was experimenting with levitating frogs with magnets and was awarded the satirical prize for that less “serious” work. Through another FNE, Geim wound up developing “gecko tape,” which was based on the properties of geckos' feet. These less serious experiments contributed to his more “serious” research, which ultimately led to his prestigious receipt of a Nobel Prize.

This 2010 image of a lump of graphite, a graphene transistor, and a tape dispenser, items that were given to the Nobel Museum by researchers Andrew Geim and Konstantin Novoselov to reflect their Nobel research. Before their discoveries, it was believed to be impossible to create material that could conduct electricity in such thin layers as graphene is now able to, which has opened up even more possibilities in both material science and electronics.

In his first-person narrative from his 2010 Nobel Prize, he describes how his Russian literature tutor critiqued his writing for trying too hard to parrot experts vs trusting his own intuition. Geim writes:

My tutor said that what I was writing was good but it was clear from my essays that I tried to recall and repeat the thoughts of famous writers and literature critics, not trusting my own judgement, afraid that my own thoughts were not interesting, important or correct enough. Her advice was to try and explain my own opinions and ideas and to use those authoritative phrases only occasionally, to support and strengthen my writing. This simple advice was crucial for me – it changed the way I wrote. Years later I noticed that I was better at explaining my thoughts in writing than my fellow students.

I once was able to interview a recipient of the Ig Nobel for Teaching in Higher Ed: Episode 591 – Rethinking Student Attendance Policies for Deeper Engagement and Learning with Simon Cullen and Danny Oppenheimer. Danny is the one of these two collaborators with this great honor. Take a look at the incredible title of the piece that won him the Ig Nobel: Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly, by Daniel M. Oppenheimer Imagine how bummed I was that despite me being so excited to ask him more about it, my nerves got the best of me and I entirely forgot to ever mention it during our conversation for the podcast.

Researching Versus Searching

Epstein describes in Range the ways in which the novice mindset gets weaved together with the expert mindset in such transformative ways. He reveals how us being willing to be vulnerable in our not knowing and early experimentation through an art historian's description of how Geim is emblematic of this willingness to stay in the not knowing longer. Epstein tells how:

Art historian Sarah Lewis studies creative achievement, and described Geim’s mindset as representative of the “deliberate amateur.” The word “amateur,” she pointed out, did not originate as an insult, but comes from the Latin word for a person who adores a particular endeavor. “A paradox of innovation and mastery is that breakthroughs often occur when you start down a road, but wander off for a ways and pretend as if you have just begun,” Lewis wrote.

My friend, Naomi, and I always joke with each other about our “rabbit trail” emails back and forth to each other. I often wish there were a better expression that more precisely evokes the delight that can come from a diversion. Two years before he won the Nobel, Geim was asked to explain his research process. He described how instead of always going deep, he likes to stay in the shallow and move around. He described:

I don’t want to carry on studying the same thing from cradle to grave. Sometimes I joke that I am not interested in doing re-search, only search.

Seeking as Doing

Jarche illustrates how when trust is low that doers, connectors, and catalysts can address the limitations of credibility that exist in the roles of professors, stewards, and experts. He asserts: We Need Less Professing and More Doing. He describes how someone like Zeynep Tukekci can be not a medical professional herself, but so gifted at weaving “knowledge from many disciplines into a coherent narrative.”

Jarche stressing the doing part made me think of Mike Caulfield, who says that novice fact checkers need not to solely focus on critical thinking, but he would rather we all get far better at teaching critical doing skills. I've been having a blast following Mike's own critical doing skills as he documents his experiments with in what ways AI may be able to help with critical thinking/doing. He is in the process of learning out loud, as he identifies the less helpful approaches for trying to use AI for fact checking and where he sees promise for achieving better results than most people would be able to come up with, themselves.

In a lot of ways, I'm seeing Harold Jarche's Personal Knowledge Mastery Workshop as my own set of small experiments. In Dave's recent Coaching for Leaders Episode 747, he interviews Laure Le Cunff, author of Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. Le Cunff explains how:

The secret to designing growth loops is not better knowledge or skills, but your ability to think about your own thinking, question your automatic responses, and know your mind.

Sounds a lot like PKM to me… Until next time. For now, it is dinnertime around here and we ordered Cheesecake Factory. It's good to be back home. In the meantime, here's for our individual and collective ability to see clearly now, as we practice PKM together.