My PhD is a constant struggle with definitions and terms. This time it’s about personal perspective at work.

For me (knowledge) work practices are shaped by at least three different contexts: personal (me as a human being), social (my networks and communities) and organisational (a company I work for).

However, when I start talking about personal there are all kinds of misunderstandings, since it could mean both individual and private and I don’t like both terms in relation to my research:

• Individual means ‘not social’, while I’d like to focus on ‘me’ which has both sides.
• Private (when you talk about it in a work context) is usually perceived as ‘not work-related’, while I’m interested in ‘me’ as a whole (the one who goes to work and then goes home :).

I have stressed many times that I’m interested in knowledge work from personal, actor-centric perspective (it’s just a matter of focus), however this doesn’t mean that I want to exclude social and organizational sides of it. Even more, I’m interested how things in the middle are shaped by the interactions between two (or all three) perspectives.

Of course, the area in the middle is full of problems as well. For example, I was asked recently to separate in my analysis of work practices organizational and personal concerns. With some things it could be done easily: there are things that are imposed on you by the organization (e.g. working hours) and those that come from your being a person with specific preferences (e.g. preferred modes of communication).

However, the most interesting things at work can’t be separated so easily:

• If you do your work faster or better – is it for yourself or for your company?
• If you come up with a good idea – is it to make more money for the business or because it makes you feeling empowered or just fun?
• If you manage to sustain a good relationship with a customer after your product breaks – is it in order not to lose the contract or because you actually like the challenge and can’t stand making people unhappy?

I think in those cases it’s a sliding scale between ‘me’ and ‘my company’, where the specific ratio between those two is defined by many factors (e.g. situational choices or longer-term work-life balance practices of an employee). I don’t see an easy way to describe all instances of balance of organizational vs. personal interests in relation to that scale and, to be fair, given my focus I don’t believe it adds much value. What I’m trying to do instead is to describe the extremes and types of decisions that are made in the middle zone.

But all this thinking doesn’t make my PhD life much easier: I’m still trying to figure out how to talk about personal perspective without getting into ‘individual’ and ‘private’ and how to talk about all those sliding scales between three perspectives that define how work is actually getting done.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/06.html#a1851; comments are here.

• On personal preferences that shape research
• Personal vs. business dimensions of employee blogging: other bloggers
• Challenges on writing literature overview on business blogging (or another turn on researcher vs. blogger)

From Three thousand communities of practice by Steve Barth

But for me, the accusation that personal knowledge management is somehow antisocial or discounts the importance of collaborative learning and innovation is entirely inappropriate. The whole point is that collaborative work requires more of the individual—not less. And we are ill-equipped to handle those obligations and responsibilities.

The more people there are in a formal or informal network, the more connections and interactions each of us are likely to have. The more interactions we have, the more kinds of interaction we have, and therefore, the more kinds of interaction we have to be capable of handling. Meanwhile, the more interactions we have, the more obligations we have to share our knowledge with other people in the network.

No two members of the community will see that community in the same way. Each of us is the center of our own universe. Even if our communities have the same members, the difference between my community and your community is that I’m in the center of my network and you’re the center of your network. We can each only perceive our networks from the perspective of our own nodes.

I’m 100% agree and to be fair I do not understand (again) why Denham contrasts personal and social sides in PKM instead of looking for synergies between them:

[source] PKM to me is a paradox — knowledge in my world is socially constructed — it is not about organizing your thoughts, learning to use tools or developing individual competences — it is about dialog, community and collaboration.

[source] Getting into a personal huddle, organizing your thoughts and reflecting on the personal past can easily take you away from awareness of real flow and emergence – where it all happens.

I made an updated version for my personal something management model, I’ll call it personal KM until we come up with a better label. I place conversations in a middle (because, as Denham, I think they belong there), but I believe we have to account for the things around it as well. For me personal KM is about being aware of conversations you engage in (both actively and by being exposed to as a lurker), relations that enable them, and ideas that you take from and bring into these conversations.

And I’d love to hear from Denham what’s wrong with this pucture (conversations with him is my very important source of inspiration ;)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/02/16.html#a1089; comments are here.

• What pragmatists might want to know about blogging
• Information overload workshop
• Personal <i>something</i> management

This is a long story :) Once upon a time…

I was looking for something to share my life with my family and friends. Most of them are far enough to rely on Internet, but I’m too lazy to build a web-site.

I was also looking for something to make my learning easier. I had so many notes on pieces of paper, in files, in yellow outline of print-outs, in books, in collections of links of references, in my head… I needed one point access for collecting those notes, relating them, reflecting, sharing and discussing.

Then I saw livejournal. That was “Aha!”.

Then I read grassroot KM through blogging at elearningpost. That was enough to start looking for use of blogs for learning and knowledge management and to get ready to start one.

The name came two days ago from brief about matemagenic processing [the original page is missing, but its content is reposted later]:

In the mid-1960′s, Rothkopf (1965, 1966), investigating the effects of questions placed into text passages, coined the term mathemagenic, meaning “to give birth to learning.”

I can’t think about better title…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2002/06/21.html#a3; comments are here.

• KM & learning: why?
• Methodology chapter: posting parts online
• KM and HRM: an article