Learning informally and socially means connecting our individual work with our teams, communities, and networks. It requires honing our curiosity and seeking out different perspectives and ideas. It takes more than individual sensemaking to understand complex situations, so we have to find others to challenge our assumptions and learn at the edge of our professional abilities. But most importantly we need to use what we have learned in order to resolve challenges and co-create value. As we do this, we continuously share in order to make our communities and networks more resilient and able to make better informed decisions. This discipline is personal knowledge mastery.
One of the challenges we face in our professional and personal lives is making sense of the flow of information that passes by us each day and then aligning that with our current priorities and challenges. The Seek > Sense > Share framework of personal knowledge mastery is a simple method to help us stay focused in our sensemaking. The image shows how information and knowledge can flow when people develop filters to seek information, take time and effort to make sense of it, and then share appropriately, often adding value to what they share.
Establishing a few procedures can simplify the finding and sharing of information, at work, in your communities, or through your knowledge networks.
Machine filters allow information to be pushed to us.