One of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is a training manual for people who need to do a bit of personal knowledge (or something) management. At the risk of banging on about it, one of the things that struck me about van Riper’s fluid, networked approach to operations was the emphasis on training the nodes in the network. For – in this case – Network Centric Warfare to work, there needs to be a heavy confidence and reliance on the personal ‘nodes’, and part of that seems to be achieved by training them. Good basic training and drill.
So I’ve been thinking presumably, with network-enabled organisation, to optimise efficacy, there needs to be continual basic training of the employees. And if that’s right, then perhaps that training is effectively what PKM is really about, and I wondered, if I were a new employee of one of these network-enabled organisations, what sort of handbook would I like to get to get me started from scratch?
Funny enough, I was thinking about something like that to translate my PhD research into – simple instruments that people could use. One more reminder about parallel thinking with Piers (btw, Piers, shall we think on some practical way to work on it? ideally not asynchronous ;)
Pierse also links to Kaizen and 5s process, which he thinks is a good place to start:
SEIRI: create tidyness. Throw away all unused stuff, file away the rest.
SEITON: keep evertything at the right place. Keep the tools you need accessible, hide materials you don’t need regularly.
SEISO: keep your (work-)space clean, remove all traces from the previous task before starting the next.
SEIKETSU: develop a personal sense for organizing your things. Develop routines, optimize your system according to your needs.
SHITSUKE: stay disciplined doing the above, make it a habit and permanent practice.
All these makes me thinking hard – something is missing… There are many books on time management and personal productivity, but even if you read them, change is not easy. You can tell me about 5s, GTD or any other approach, and I may even agree, but how to make it work for me? Talking about 5s:
- SEIRI: how do I access what is useful and what not? how do I file something if I think it’s useful, but don’t know yet where it belongs?
- SEITON: what is the right place? what to do if I need many tools together?
- SEISO: and if I’m multitasking?
- SEIKETSU: easy to say… where shall I start?
- SHITSUKE: ah, if you know the trick to make me disciplined, you are welcome…
And now I have to run, so will think it over dinner :)
Tags: GTD, personal knowledge managementArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/02/22.html#a1502; comments are here.
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