For Harold Jarche’s PKM workshop, I list up to four things I’m curious about in each of my roles, from professor to parent, and how PKM fuels that curiosity.

There is no right answer in PKM. There are only processes that work. The test of PKM is whether it works for you. A person’s PKM practices will change over time, and the most important aspect is being aware of how we seek sources of information, make sense of our own knowledge, and then share it at work, in communities, or through networks. —learning & the future of work (2015) > It might seem harmless – it’s just another AI assistant! To-do app! PKM tool! – but it will catch and keep you in an endless cycle of vocabulary changes that never shape or produce the words you so desperately want to share … I’ve started to see the loudest voices and influencers in the productivity space as little more than productivity tourists; the travel influencers of the various Getting Things Done cults, all of whom pronounce that they’re becoming better people for their experience and documentation of the world, and none of whom stay in one place long enough to absorb anything meaningful. —JA Westenberg (2026) _“simple enough to be boring”_ — that’s my PKM framework: **Seek > Sense > Share** That’s it.

Please read this comment from Stan Garfield first: _Harold, that article appears to have been written using GenAI, with multiple errors. Here is one example (since corrected after I wrote to the author), that related to you:_ _“Meena Arivanantham is a knowledge management specialist at the United Nations Development Programme and one of the most experienced practitioners of knowledge management in international development contexts. She presented at the SIKM Leaders Community in May 2024 on sense-making in complexity, demonstrating the application of KM principles to the particularly challenging environment of large multilateral organisations working across dozens of national contexts simultaneously.”_ _Her correct name is Meena Arivananthan (not Arivanantham), she is not at UNDP, and she never presented to the SIKM Leaders Community. A GenAI tool seems to have partially taken this from the title of your February 2024 SIKM presentation on Sensemaking in Complexity._ _Meena and Bruce Boyes pointed out errors by replying to the LinkedIn post linking to the article, as did I._ See the comments below. A lengthy article on organizational knowledge and the people in the field highlights a number of common mistakes, all of which I have witnessed in my almost three decades of professional practice. 1. Treating organizational knowledge as an IT problem. This is evident in the budget for the technology purchase compared to human implementation. The latter often has no budget. 2. Focusing on explicit knowledge and ignoring tacit knowledge. This often comes in the form of offering a training course to cover the new knowledge of a system with no thought to helping people discuss how they will use the new system. 3. Ignoring the need for trust in order to share knowledge. As I have noted for years, knowledge flows at the speed of trust. No imposed system will generate trust. 4. Launching a KM initiative without visible leadership support. I have often seen organizational knowledge initiatives launched for the good of employees but with no engagement by executives. The lack of leadership by example dooms the project. 5. Underestimating the knowledge loss that happens during workforce transitions. With knowledge loss not evident in the next fiscal quarter, executives often ignore its impact. The author also covers four good observations about project implementation. 1. Start with one question: _“What knowledge do we not capture that we could not afford to lose?”_ I saw this with a pharmaceutical company that realized, too late, that they had captured why they had selected certain compounds for further research but not why they had rejected the others. When their knowledge about selection criteria changed, they could not go back and find other suitable compounds. 2. Choose a community. One of our most successful projects was involving the rather small community of Extension Agents at the University of Nebraska to develop ways of networked knowing. 3. Start somewhere small and visible. This is the only approach, in my experience, and is part of strategic doing. 4. Develop your vocabulary with your leadership team. This is critical, as you may think everyone understands concepts equally, but they usually do not. I often start by comparing collaboration with cooperation. Some organizational knowledge clients since Jarche Consulting was launched in 2003. Logos trademarks of each organization. ### Related Posts * unintended consequences * filter failure is a human failure

<p>I started using Twitter in late 2007, at the urging of several friends, who felt that as a blogger it would be a good way to extend my reach. And it did. From 2012 to 2021 Twitter (Tweetbot) was one of my <a href="https://jarche.com/2024/08/top-tools-2024/">top three tools for learning</a>. It dropped to fourth place after Musk bought the company and then it dropped completely off my list.</p> <p>Over the years I have noted that the micro-blogging platform let me stay in loose touch with many people. I wrote that next to my blog, Twitter was my best learning tool and allowed me to stay connected to a diverse network [SEEK &amp; SHARE]. For several years Twitter was the largest source of visitors to this blog. It even eclipsed Google search.<span id="more-27108"></span></p> <p>Beginning in 2022 it was becoming obvious that Twitter would no longer be the place where movements like Arab Spring or Black Lives Matter could grow. The move to becoming a fascist-promoting rage-inducing factory was quite obvious in 2022 and it is blindingly obvious now.</p> <p>In 2022 I had about 20,000 followers and being connected to a network that diverse was a powerful incentive for me to stay on X. Now I have much better conversations and very few trolls on <a href="https://mastodon.social/@harold">Mastodon</a> — <a href="https://jarche.com/2022/11/from-platforms-to-covenants/">from platforms to covenants</a> . I do not miss the <a href="https://jarche.com/2020/01/constant-doubt-and-outrage/">constant doubt and outrage</a> of Twitter either, even though I used to think I could get around that by carefully curating who I followed. That is impossible now and even blocking does not work on X because those you block can now read your feed, thanks to the new ownership.</p> <p>My <a href="https://jarche.com/category/fridays-finds/">Friday’s Finds</a> have come mostly from Mastodon over the past two years and now nothing will come from X. And that’s not a bad thing.</p> <p>Farewell little bird. You were once a very important place for learning, sensemaking, and understanding others.</p> <figure aria-describedby="caption-attachment-27109" class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_27109" style="width: 790px"><img alt="Screen shot of Harold Jarche's Twitter (X page just before deleting it. Background banner is the statue of a Mastodon at Mastodon Ridge, Nova Scotia, Canada. Image of Harold is him pretending to scream beside Munk's painting, The Scream, in Oslo." class="wp-image-27109 size-large" decoding="async" fetchpriority="high" height="780" sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" src="https://jarche.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/hjarche-twitter-800x780.png" srcset="https://jarche.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/hjarche-twitter-800x780.png 800w, https://jarche.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/hjarche-twitter-520x507.png 520w, https://jarche.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/hjarche-twitter-768x749.png 768w, https://jarche.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/hjarche-twitter.png 892w" width="800"/><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-27109">My account page, minutes before I deleted it</figcaption></figure> <div class="wp_rp_wrap wp_rp_vertical_m" id="wp_rp_first"><div class="wp_rp_content"><h3 class="related_post_title">Related Posts</h3><ul class="related_post wp_rp"><li data-poid="ex-in_21921" data-position="0" data-post-type="own_sourcefeed"><a class="wp_rp_thumbnail" href="https://jarche.com/2019/07/getting-in-front-of-the-post-truth-machines/"><img alt="confronting the post-truth machine" decoding="async" height="150" src="https://jarche.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/agnotology-150x150.png" width="150"/></a><a class="wp_rp_title" href="https://jarche.com/2019/07/getting-in-front-of-the-post-truth-machines/">confronting the post-truth machine</a></li><li data-poid="ex-in_19288" data-position="1" data-post-type="own_sourcefeed"><a class="wp_rp_thumbnail" href="https://jarche.com/2018/01/the-coffee-club/"><img alt="the coffee club" decoding="async" height="150" src="https://jarche.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/coffeeshop1-150x150.jpg" width="150"/></a><a class="wp_rp_title" href="https://jarche.com/2018/01/the-coffee-club/">the coffee club</a></li></ul></div></div>

Knowledge flows at the speed of trust, I wrote in 2022, further stating that when trust is lost, knowledge fails to flow. This happens in organizations. It also happens at a societal level. Networks of trust are what create value at all levels for human society. The onslaught of generative AI and large language models is destroying our trust in much of the information that informs our knowledge. My last post on organizational knowledge was based on an article that was written with the help of AI. It was only through my trusted human knowledge network that I found out. Not only did I lose trust in the author but I think I eroded the trust of my readers here. I will have to be more careful if I continue to blog here and I am wondering what the future of my writing will be. Andrew Trickett wrote in what the enlightenment can teach us — _“We don’t often think about trust until it’s gone — rather like electricity. The moment the lights flicker, we realise everything depended on it. And today, in knowledge management, communities of practice, and this strange new world of AI, trust is flickering badly in society and in our workplaces.”_ When the network on which we share our knowledge cannot be trusted — or at least requires considerable effort to check every link and source — how can we have trusted conversations online? This is an existential question for the practice of personal knowledge mastery and is why I am halting my workshop series after the October 2026 cohort. I still do not have a plan for 2027 and beyond. Sensemaking in the age of AI slop will be a challenge. We can still read books, after ensuring they were written by humans, and we can get together in trusted online spaces. But what will happen to larger social conversations? Now that technology has connected most of humanity, are the platform owners and their AI data centres going to control all of our conversations? Our only real hope is that we collectively push back by not using AI, opting for open platforms like Mastodon, and using human-controlled tools. So far, that does not look likely for the near future, given how many people are still on platforms like X and Meta and mindlessly letting generative AI do their thinking for them. > In the past, I would have embraced any seemingly revolutionary new technology. And yet, today, I avoid using AI as much as possible. I am wary of cognitive offloading, as tempting as it can be to turn over certain tasks to a machine so I don’t have to think so much. Thinking is the point. I don’t want to get into the habit of avoiding it purely for the sake of convenience — I avoid AI tools because thinking is supposed to be hard. It’s what makes us human by Wendy Liu _Image from_ Seeking Perpetual Beta _(2014)_

Knowledge flows at the speed of trust, I wrote in 2022, further stating that when trust is lost, knowledge fails to flow. This happens in organizations. It also happens at a societal level. Networks of trust are what create value at all levels for human society. The onslaught of generative AI and large language models is destroying our trust in much of the information that informs our knowledge. My last post on organizational knowledge was based on an article that was written with the help of AI. It was only through my trusted human knowledge network that I found out. Not only did I lose trust in the author but I think I eroded the trust of my readers here. I will have to be more careful if I continue to blog here and I am wondering what the future of my writing will be. Andrew Trickett wrote in what the enlightenment can teach us — _“We don’t often think about trust until it’s gone — rather like electricity. The moment the lights flicker, we realise everything depended on it. And today, in knowledge management, communities of practice, and this strange new world of AI, trust is flickering badly in society and in our workplaces.”_ When the network on which we share our knowledge cannot be trusted — or at least requires considerable effort to check every link and source — how can we have trusted conversations online? This is an existential question for the practice of personal knowledge mastery and is why I am halting my workshop series after the October 2026 cohort. I still do not have a plan for 2027 and beyond. Sensemaking in the age of AI slop will be a challenge. We can still read books, after ensuring they were written by humans, and we can get together in trusted online spaces. But what will happen to larger social conversations? Now that technology has connected most of humanity, are the platform owners and their AI data centres going to control all of our conversations? Our only real hope is that we collectively push back by not using AI, opting for open platforms like Mastodon, and using human-controlled tools. So far, that does not look likely for the near future, given how many people are still on platforms like X and Meta and mindlessly letting generative AI do their thinking for them. > In the past, I would have embraced any seemingly revolutionary new technology. And yet, today, I avoid using AI as much as possible. I am wary of cognitive offloading, as tempting as it can be to turn over certain tasks to a machine so I don’t have to think so much. Thinking is the point. I don’t want to get into the habit of avoiding it purely for the sake of convenience — I avoid AI tools because thinking is supposed to be hard. It’s what makes us human by Wendy Liu _Image from_ Seeking Perpetual Beta _(2014)_

I am not ignoring new technologies in the ‘AI’ field, but I believe there is a real need for people to get better at communicating and making sense with other people. Well that is what I wrote early last year in stepping aside. What have I learned since then? I still have not found any use for generative AI in my own work. The rush to implement generative AI in the workplace is leading to massive job cuts especially amongst software programmers. The perfect storm of neo-liberalism and automation continues to tear up 20th century social contracts. As I read the stream of posts on LinkedIn [I am no longer on Facebook, Twitter, or other consumer social media platforms] I feel the conversations are drifting toward meaningless attempts to game the system and garner more views. It is becoming more evident that human skills and human connections are valuable, beyond the transactional economy. Generative AI is showing that transactional relationships are easily replicable. Universities and schools that view the use of AI as cheating have to come to terms with the transactional nature of their institutions. Writing an essay or taking a test never showed true understanding of a subject. Meanwhile, students are re-evaluating the value of a degree. Why get a degree that does not lead to a job? Only a small percentage of the student body is there purely for the joy of learning. The social contract promoted by higher education is cracking. Some professors are changing their teaching and testing but it’s a huge effort within institutions that have not changed in the face of ubiquitous student use of AI. In my PKM workshops this year — which I had considered shutting down — I learned from participants that there is a continuing and perhaps growing need for sensemaking skills and learning in communities and networks. As Bonni Stachowiack said after the last workshop, _“Mastery is not an endpoint, but a habitual practice of learning, sharing, and growing. The real power of PKM shows up not at the end, but in the consistent rhythm of seeking, sensing, and sharing.”_ So let’s seek, sense, and share amidst the growing tide of AI slop. > I will ask chat GPT > I will boil the last of our drinking water > Salt the soil of the scrub-lands > Tear the pages from books and feed them to my fire > > I will ask copilot > I will scramble your library > reanimate and puppet the faces of your dead ancestors > I will bury you in poor copies of your dreams > > I will ask grok > I will fall silent and never speak to you > I will talk only to myself lost in a maze of my own fantasies > I will forget all who cannot compliment me > I will decouple my soul from this world. > > —@futurebird Image: Aimee Cozza ### Related Posts * beyond the market * constantly learning nodes

The image below is one I have often used in explaining sensemaking with the PKM framework. It describes how we can use different types of filters to seek information and knowledge and then apply this by doing and creating, and then share, with added value, what we have learned. One emerging challenge today is that our algorithmic knowledge filters are becoming dominated by the output of generative pre-trained transformers based on large language models. And more and more, these are generating AI slop. Which means that **machine filters** , like our search engines, are no longer trusted sources of information. As a result, we have to build better human filters — experts, and subject matter networks. As search engines and productivity tools keep regurgitating the same — or a variation of — slop, we move toward _“an orthodoxy that ruthlessly narrows public thought”_ (John Robb). Generative AI and their hidden algorithms are hacking away at three things that human organizations need to learn, innovate, and adapt — diversity > learning > trust. We need to ditch these sloppy tools and focus on connecting and communicating with our fellow humans. Keep on producing human-generated writing, like blogs, and use social media that is not algorithmically generated, like Mastodon. We have just finished a PKM workshop with a global cohort and the consensus from participants is that skills such as media literacy, critical thinking, and curiosity are still essential for making sense of our technologically connected world. ### Related Posts * open protocols connect small pieces loosely joined * connected thinking

Or: why — and how — good policies create “places” worth living in