Richard, thanks for the feedback. I wasn’t aware of Newport’s work, a quick look makes it seem like he taps into Deci & Ryan’s Self-determination theory. Your notion of a ‘deliberate professional’ sounds a lot like Schön’s ‘reflective practitioner’. Thanks for prompting my exploration!

I came across this again as I’m working on some stuff related to PKM and thought I’d just comment again to add a couple of thoughts. I wondered what you might think.

Are you aware of Cal Newport’s work and, specifically, his ‘Deep Work/Life’ concepts? I’ve been focusing recently on how this connects to PKM. I’ve also just come across the concept of a ‘deliberate professional’ (related to deliberate in the sense of ‘deliberate practice’), someone who pays attention to their professional learning and self-directs to learn and improve. Many labels are pointless or obscure, but I think the concept of a ‘deliberate professional’ could be really useful.

Anyway, some thoughts to finish the year. I wish you health and success in life and learning in 2021!

Richard, I do think orgs can facilitate their folks taking on PKM. Yes, it’s personal, but too often folks haven’t had their meta-learning skills developed, but leaving them to chance isn’t in the orgs best interest. And I believe part of Harold’s program is about how to continually monitor and test and develop your PKM skills. So you don’t learn them and set your inputs and sharing approaches once, but you also test them and refine them. Double-loop learning. It’s all very meta ;).

I first came across Harold’s work about ten years ago while studying and trying to make sense of my early forays into the world of online professional development in social networks. My field was, and still is, to an extent, English language teaching. My interest in PKM was how it applied to individuals, whether connected to an organisation or not. In my current role as a freelancer, I’m looking into how the principles of PKM could be applied to a freelance network, rather than as part of an organisational learning culture. That’s my context.

Because of this background, I view PKM specifically as a framework for self-directed personal and professional development driven by individuals rather than by L&D, or similar. A business could organise itself to ‘tap into’ the knowledge of the employees, but the agency is with the individual. So my reflection is on the extent to which an organisation could ‘implement’ PKM. Introduce the idea, foster networked collaboration, encourage sharing and working out loud, yes. But does this fall under the heading of ‘implementing’, as far as you’re concerned? Just wondering!

One potential criticism, or at least doubt, that I can understand, is the extent to which somebody supposedly ‘practicing’ PKM could simply remain at a shallow ‘information management’ level, i.e. sharing of limited value, curating without learning. I think that a valid area of research would be to ascertain the extent to which individuals are truly learning from using the framework and then whether an organisation is benefiting; I suppose that’s a pretty simplistic view, though.

Anyway, thanks again for writing this and giving me something to make sense of!