The Power of Personal Knowledge Management for Managers

I recently read an amazing new book by Tiago Forte called Building a Second Brain. I have been evangelizing its merits ever since.

Forte introduced me to the concept of Personal Knowledge Management, or "PKM", and the principles he’s taught to thousands of students for managing their ideas and increasing their creativity and productivity. 

His whole mission, and the field of PKM, is about leveraging your knowledge – which is what this newsletter is all about. At the simplest level, to leverage your knowledge, you need something to lever. That means growing your knowledge base for the long game. 

In today’s world where all of us are responsible for more and more strategic thinking, planning, and project management, PKM can be that missing link. We need to use our brains for thinking and our systems (our “Second Brains” in Forte’s framework) to collect and manage our personal knowledge base. 

As a long-time practitioner of documentation for client projects, I think of PKM as “Little d” (i.e., personal, everyday) rather than “Big D” (i.e., formal, corporate) documentation. That is, it's the critical human dimension needed to make projects and organizations successful.

In the modern PKM world, there is a lot of discussion about apps and digital notetaking. But PKM isn’t just for digital note nerds. It’s really for any “manager” – and by that, I really mean everyone in the business world. (And that means you.)

Since most managers and leaders are new to PKM, let’s explore why everyone should embrace it for ourselves, our teams, and our organizations as a whole.

What Is PKM?

PKM is an intentional, structured way of capturing your own private collection of information and thoughts. Your PKM system could be your notebooks, files, templates, digital note apps, and other tools. 

The information you collect could be from the articles or books you read, the work you do, podcasts you listen to, presentations you hear, the ideas in your head, or many other sources.

You can use this “system” to capture what is meaningful to you or what you are or want to be an expert in, to process what you learned, and draw links across what you have collected. When designed well and consistently, it can speed your workflow, elevate your expertise, and generate a more original and higher level of work—with less stress.

PKM is exploding in the knowledge-based gig economy. Knowledge workers today need to take control of their knowledge, and this goes beyond where you went to college, your degree or designations, or the courses you take. 

The Great Resignation is expanding the number of knowledge workers, which will increase the demand for PKM in the future. But the roots of PKM go way back.

PKM as a term has appeared in academic papers since 1999. But it has been practiced for centuries, as Forte explains, by the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, Virginia Wolf, John Locke, and Octavia Butler. For these intellectuals and artists, their PKM systems were called “commonplace books” which are a combination of notebooks, filing systems, or diaries of ideas and inspiration that could be referred to, shared, and combined to generate new insights and creative leaps. 

Why Should You Practice PKM?

There are practical reasons to adopt a practice of Personal Knowledge Management, at least conceptually, to help your work, your career, and the teams and organizations you work with.

It’s good for us as individuals.

PKM helps you with your short-, medium-, and long-term goals. It could be about collecting information for a project or a presentation you are working on. But the information you collect serves you beyond an immediate project or the job you are in. As a repository of knowledge and your best ideas, it serves your career – even your life – and helps you to pivot into new roles, projects, interests, or fields.

I adopted PKM recently to help me with my writing, specifically with generating more ideas for articles in less time. I started modestly with a few topics and by taking notes on the books or articles that I read and ideas that came up during the day. Having this information more organized has already helped me write more, more often, and more quickly.

I have begun to see PKM as an interesting way to explore the intersection between what you like and are interested in, how you make money, and your future. And I’m only beginning.

It’s good for our teams.

The better your team members are at collecting and curating information, the better they share their knowledge and resources with each other.

While we don’t talk about PKM in the corporate world, at least yet, teams do practice it in their own way (e.g., collection of materials from projects, notes from seminars, lessons learned from projects).

A simple example of PKM-like practices is the saving of templates. While templates can’t do the work or thinking for you, they are a great source of ideas. And that is the point.

When teams have access to shared collections of templates or other detritus through libraries, sites, or sharing sessions, my experience is that they work better together. In my own business, even minor efforts to save and share materials—such as memos, past projects, reports, conference materials, processes, diagrams, and best practices – have resulted in better collaboration.

It’s good for our organizations.

PKM should be the precursor to formal Knowledge Management programs. Not the other way around.

Groupthink runs rampant in the corporate world, and people need to think independently of the biases baked into their organizations.

They say that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Organizations are the chains and people are the links. Largescale systems and change management efforts won’t “stick” without the individual (or “Little d”) knowledge and thinking of the people within our organizations.

To build knowledge within our organizations so that we can leverage it for bigger things, we need to build the knowledge of our people first. An investment in PKM training could be a part of the solution.