Please enjoy this blog post authored by Mary Abraham, Principal, Above and Beyond KM.
We are constantly inundated with information, but much of it is not useful. So how do you find the information that will materially improve your life?
Some people deal with this challenge by trying to absorb as much information as possible. This information-gorging approach is exhausting, stressful, and ultimately futile. Other people lean on their firm and their networks to filter information for them, hoping that important information will find them when needed. This information-surfing approach reduces the overload risk but depends on the resources of your firm, the quality of your networks, and the efficiency with which all of them share helpful information. Given the overwhelming flood, both information-gorging and information-surfing require a fair amount of luck to catch the information that matters most. Is this sensible or even safe?
There is a better alternative. Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a practice that can be a lifeline in the information flood. It leverages your experience, intuition, and curiosity to help make sense of the information around you and transform that information into knowledge you can use.
PKM Should Be A Priority For You
Whether you are a technologist or a lawyer, you are a knowledge worker. Your livelihood depends on how useful your knowledge, judgment, and work practices are to your employer and to the market. When those personal intellectual assets are depleted, your employer and the market will move away from you. So it is critical to sustain and grow your personal intellectual assets.
Further, much of what you produce while employed as a knowledge worker belongs to either your client or your firm. Consequently, you have little upon departure except the personal intellectual assets you have built up over time. Like a good education, they cannot be taken away from you.
PKM Should Be A Priority for a Law Firm
A law firm's value is in the collective knowledge and judgment of its people and their ability to put that to use for the benefit of the firm's clients. Yet even the best firm cannot create enough professional development programs to keep its knowledge workers consistently on the leading edge of the market. The distance between that leading edge and your people is the size of your competitive disadvantage. You are only as strong as your weakest link.
While it may be tempting to offload your weak links and replace them with proven stars from other firms, this approach is costly. It creates mounting recruitment and onboarding expenses, as well as a sense of insecurity among your people that may lead the strongest performers to go elsewhere.
The better approach is to strengthen your team. Give your people the training and time they need to develop their ability to filter the information flood, assess the relevant nuggets, and put those nuggets to work for your firm. This is how new practice areas are created; this is how potential risks are averted.
How to Practice PKM
PKM is not a product. It is not a tool. It is a practice that must be learned and developed over time. Here are its core components:
- Choosing: Choose reliable sources that provide a wide range of information. Variety is key. If you are exposed only to the information your colleagues know, your personal knowledge will not advance much beyond theirs. However, if you have access to a wider variety of sources than they do, then you increase your chances of learning something they are less likely to know. These sources begin with the people in your personal and professional networks, but your sources also include the listening and reading you do apart from those networks.
- Filtering: Learn how to sift through information to find the nuggets that matter. Initially, you will rely on your curiosity. Trust it. It is your intuition leading you into areas outside your current working knowledge. That said, test it from time to time. If you find your curiosity is leading you into unexpected areas, ask yourself what is really going on. You may be in need of a change at work.
- Assessing: It is not enough to find interesting information. You also need to assess its value by determining how it is relevant to you and your work. One way to do this is to ask yourself these questions:
- Why did this information pique my curiosity?
- How does it connect to what I already know?
- How might it be useful to me or my firm?
- Creating: PKM's purpose is not to collect random trivia. It is to create a valuable intellectual asset: knowledge you can use. This process involves answering the assessment questions, writing those answers down for future reference, testing them in real life, and then noting the results (in writing) so you can refine your understanding.
- Sharing: Robert Boyce once observed, "Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied." Your PKM goal is not to become like Smaug with a private hoard. While hoarded gold may hold its value, hoarded knowledge does not. It must be used and developed to maintain its value. Sharing knowledge makes it more valuable by putting it in the hands of others who can use it, refine it, and share it further. When a firm facilitates this flow of shared knowledge, the entire firm become smarter and more capable.
- Practicing: We've heard stories of people panning for gold and striking it rich the first time. But their beginner's luck is the exception not the rule. The rest of us need to create and refine our technique. This takes time and practice. A key part of this practice is writing down your new knowledge. The act of writing will clarify your thinking, solidify your learning, and reveal patterns as you apply your new knowledge. If written in clear language, this knowledge can be shared asynchronously within the firm.
How Firms Can Support PKM
Experience shows that people rarely step out of the flow of their work to create stand-alone knowledge artifacts for the good of the firm. This is understandable because most knowledge workers have more on their to-do lists than they reasonably can hope to accomplish in a day. But they need focused time to develop their knowledge. Consequently, the firm should help its people experience the personal productivity value of PKM so that it becomes a priority by:
- Providing Training: All of us were tossed into the ocean of information; few of us were taught how to swim properly. So teach your people how to choose, filter, assess, create, and share information. Training reduces the barriers to experiencing the power of this practice.
- Permitting Portability: As tempting as it is to require that all knowledge be kept safe behind your firm's firewall, this requirement will transform a personally valuable practice into yet another firm obligation to be done after the billable work is complete. This approach rarely works for general law firm knowledge management and will not work for PKM. Instead, ensure your people understand their ethical obligations to preserve the confidentiality of client information, and then let them build their redacted PKM repositories outside the firm's firewall. To make this viable, focus on hiring people of integrity who will not compromise their ethical obligations.
Conclusion
Developing a productive PKM practice is a powerful gift Today You can give Future You. You absolutely do NOT need to boil the ocean of information. Instead, start small. Begin by noticing what piques your curiosity. Ask yourself the assessment questions and write your answers where you can find them anywhere, anytime. Treat it like your personal knowledge garden: plant it, tend it regularly, enjoy its fruits.
PKM is not a 21st-century method to create a 19th-century form file containing random clippings, notes, and exemplar documents. It is not just a dedicated email folder. PKM is a systematic way to assess and adapt new ideas so that you and your colleagues can put them to work. PKM is how you develop a vital 21st-century life skill: staying afloat in a flood of information and building the strength to swim through it to the shore of opportunity.
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