Want to Master Your Personal Knowledge? Try Sharing It
Seeking information and trying to make sense of the world are not enough to cultivate knowledge.
Knowledge work is never done but it can be mastered. Management consultant and author Peter Drucker coined the term “knowledge worker” in 1966 to describe the post-industrial professional whose capital is applying theoretical and analytical knowledge. We’ve come to think of academics, physicians, lawyers, and computer programmers as knowledge workers, and farmers, factory workers, widget-crankers, and other laborers as non-knowledge workers.
But knowledge work goes beyond business: it’s personal. In the digital age, we’re all called to be knowledge workers in some aspect of our lives. The amount of media a person consumes is now nearing 500 minutes per day, and by at least one estimate, each of us consumes about 100,000 words of information in a day.
“The most valuable asset of a 21st-century institution, whether business or non-business, will be its knowledge workers and their productivity,” Drucker predicted more than 20 years ago.
Processes for Managing Knowledge
No one has ever perfected knowledge work. There’s just too much knowledge to master and most of us have become servants to our knowledge work as followers of social media and search engines, toiling at the mercy of an algorithm.
Knowledge work no longer has boundaries, observed productivity expert David Allen, because almost everything in knowledge can be done better because of the infinite amount of information that’s available. Put another way, as knowledge workers, we never know when the hay is in the barn and it’s time to go home.
There are many models for curating knowledge and information in the digital era. Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology of Capture > Clarify > Organize > Reflect > Engage is a popular approach that inspired author Cal Newport’s Capture > Configure > Control method that he often recommends on his Deep Questions podcast. Another alliterative taxonomy for knowledge management is Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery framework.
“Personal knowledge mastery is a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world and work more effectively,” Jarche wrote.
Jarche’s first two steps of Seeking and Sensing are similar to Allen’s Capture and Clarify, but Jarche’s third step, Sharing, seems antithetical to the “personal” or “individually constructed” practice of mastering knowledge.
As difficult as it is to capture information and make sense of it as knowledge, sharing with our mouth (speaking) and hands (writing) is even more difficult to master.
As knowledge management expert Dave Snowden said, “We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down.”
But sharing is still important, not just as an extension of sense-making. (The Latin phrase Docendo discimus, or the “best way to learn is to teach,” comes to mind.) Instead, by sharing we “work out loud,” according to Jarche’s framework, and “exchange resources, ideas, and experiences with our networks as well as collaborating with our colleagues.” Sharing is less of a professor teaching a class and more like a professor publishing or presenting research for the academic community to build upon it.
Cultivating the Mind
Not all of us are academics, however, and we do most of our sharing on social media — not exactly a rigorous process compared to a peer review, nor a place we often turn to for dialectical thought or Socratic debate.
The way we share knowledge today would seem strange to Socrates and thinkers from oral cultures. Their knowledge mastery was through memorization, formulaic verse, songs, and chants. As Jarche points out, Socrates felt the written language would result in “men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, who will be a burden to their fellows.”
“(In an oral culture) to forget how something is to be said or done is a danger to the community and a gross form of stupidity,” wrote Neil Postman in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves To Death. “In a print culture, the memorization of a poem, a menu, a law or most anything else is merely charming.”
“The written word liberated knowledge from the bounds of individual memory,” observed Nicholas Carr in his 2011 book, The Shallows. However, Carr noticed a regression during the digital era and Internet culture when even a Rhodes Scholar like Joe O’Shea admitted that he doesn’t see a need to read books.
“Why bother, when you can Google the bits and pieces you need in a fraction of a second?” Carr wrote. “What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: we are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest.”
There’s still hope for the continuous process of mastering personal knowledge so that we can be more like cultivators than hunters and gatherers. Here are a few tactics or systems you can implement, inspired by Jarche’s three-step framework:
Step One: Seeking
How do you find information and keep up to date? Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter can be effective, but users should recognize that following/unfollowing social media sources is not enough to control your intake of news and information. As long as companies are making money from your attention and news feed algorithms are tailoring content based on your impulsive activity, your “seeking” is controlled by others and content is homogenized by tribal validation.
Be selective with news feeds you control. A better approach might be to subscribe and test RSS feeds from trusted sources using readers such as Feedly or Inoreader. Using these applications, you can moderate the flow of information and even keep email newsletters and other subscriptions out of your inbox and in a digital space that is more manageable.
Supplement your RSS feeds with apps such as Evernote (for clipping and organizing articles), Pocket (for curating content to read later), and Readwise (for resurfacing book and article highlights through a daily email). That’s how I was reminded of Carr’s and Postman’s ideas while preparing this article.
Step Two: Sensing
How you personalize information and use it begins with organizing and categorizing what you learn. You might tag an article you clipped into an Evernote notebook, assign a task with it to a Trello board, or, for those using low-tech productivity systems, write ideas down in a moleskin journal.
Sensing also includes reflection and asking yourself questions about information you captured. Examples include:
- What does it mean?
- Will I use this later?
- How can this information help me solve a problem?
- Who can benefit most from this information?
- How can I apply this information to serving my clients, employer, family, or community?
- Can this be synthesized with other information I gathered?
- Does this support ideas I already have?
- Does this refute ideas I already have?
Jarche wrote that sensing often requires experimentation because we learn best by doing. This could mean applying knowledge to a business plan, daily routine, home improvement project, or decision model.
Step Three: Sharing
By sharing with others the outcomes of your distilled information, you further refine the knowledge. This creates opportunities for “serendipitous connections, especially across organizations and disciplines where real innovation happens,” Jarche wrote. “(W)e share our creations, first with our teams and perhaps later with our communities of practice or even our networks. We use our understanding of our communities and networks to discern with whom and when to share our knowledge.”
Unlike an academic journal article that takes months to be published, social media platforms like Twitter provide a forum for instant feedback, as well as searchable topics and access to experts. Still, in-person conversations with trusted members of your network are preferred. Ask any journalist, talking to a source is 10 times as effective, or at least efficient, than reading about a topic when it comes to shaping a story and finding truth.
Sir Francis Bacon said more than four centuries ago, “reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.”
In Conclusion
Using systems like Allen’s GTD or Jarche’s PKM will help you make sense of the world and reduce your cognitive load. You need systems in place to best process all your incoming information, but don’t go through the motions of knowledge management and instead respond intentionally for knowledge mastery.
“Knowledge work is not an assembly line, and extracting value from information is an activity that’s often at odds with busyness, not supported by it,” Newport wrote in his 2016 book, Deep Work.
By passively consuming information, you have no control. Mastery is achieved by controlling the process. And by holding ideas captive without sharing them, you limit your personal knowledge from growing.
Knowledge work is never done, but it’s best done out loud.
