This website covers knowledge management, personal effectiveness, theory of constraints, amongst other topics. Opinions expressed here are strictly those of the owner, Jack Vinson, and those of the commenters.

Personal KM and problem solving

Joe Firestone (co-author of The New Knowledge Management) has started a blog in which he carefully discusses some interesting ideas. PKM and the Theory of Problem Solving covers a lot of ground, including:

Personal knowledge management can overlap with interpersonal knowledge management, group-level knowledge management, and organizational knowledge management. For one thing, we identify with groups and organizations we are participants in, and sometimes take group and organizational level problems as our own. For another, our efforts at personal knowledge management, may be part of a more comprehensive pattern of group or organizational knowledge management without our knowing that they are, and without our intending to make such a contribution. So, personal KM, group-level KM, and organizational KM, are not disjoint sets of activities. Moreover, groups and organizations may decide to reinforce personal KM in order to enhance KM at the group or organizational levels; and some analysts, like myself, are of the opinion that enhancing personal KM enables individuals to improve self-organization around knowledge processing, in each of the three areas of problem solving.

I like this idea, and I have thought variations of it myself. In my current planning for business, I have been sensing that personal knowledge management and good group-level knowledge management are heavily dependent upon one another. If I come into a group that does this well, I will learn from them and mimic many of their behaviors to contribute to that group. If a group forms of people who are experts within their own PKM spaces, then the group has a much better chance of "storming" to its goals.

My knowledge is certainly not "mine," in the sense that I arrived at them in a vacuum. I've read and talked and thought, just as anyone else might have, and have come to conclusions that seem reasonable to me at the time. As I continue to do this, I come to still other conclusions and potentially even contradict myself. That's the nature of learning.

Projects are people

KM discussion at FC