Knowledge Worker Information Processing – an Overview
The goal behind this series of posts about knowledge working and knowledge workers is to understand something of the audience that most of the efforts of organizational learning and development professionals are targeted at; the knowledge workers (KWs) themselves. Today, I’m will wrap up the series by concluding my analysis of the William P. Sheridan’s How to Think like a Knowledge Worker (2008).
I believe that knowledge working is intimately bound within the organizational context: knowledge workers use their skills and experience to innovate solutions to real-world problems. One of the primary conditions of knowledge working is the social aspect – knowledge workers typically collaborate with their peers, whether they are individuals with similar skill assets, such as application development teams working in an agile software development environment, or in project teams which require knowledge workers from different disciplines (technical architects, business analysts, and product consultants, for example) to cooperate in the implementation of the solutions on a customer site.
Figure 1. Human Knowledge Mindmap (after Sheridan)
In this context, Sheridan uses the Human Knowledge MindMap (see Figure 1. to converge the skills and knowledge of domain experts to look at the internal processes a knowledge worker uses to codify and utilize information in a fashion to what Donald Schon calls reflection-in-action.
We can say that the purpose of the mindmap is to enable KWs to “think effectively” (p.13). Most peoples’ thinking, is not clear, focused, or systematic enough to perform knowledge work competently. The purpose of the Human Knowledge MindMap is one approach that enables users to do this. Whether during learning, or on a job, effective thinking consists of a set of components as characterized in the mindmap.
Table 1 Knowledge worker thought processes
Sheridan suggests that to carry out this activity, the worker should do the following:
- Pick a situation, problem, challenge, decision or choice of interest or concern (on whatever basis you regard as appropriate).
Then proceed with the following steps:
- Identify which aspects are of most interest or concern to you.
- Prioritize (rank) your interests or concerns.
- Using the Human Knowledge MindMap as a visual guide, apply the relevant concepts to the most important (prioritized) aspects of your interest or concern (limit it to the top three aspects on your list to begin with).
- If you don’t recall whether or nor a particular concept is relevant, refresh your memory by re-reading the one-page outline.
- From this point apply the methodology as outlined above (this may, in addition to other things, require reading more materials to acquire the necessary depth of understanding in the issues you are trying to deal with).
________________
References:
Sheridan, W.P. How to Think like a Knowledge Worker:A guide to the mindset needed to perform competent knowledge work. United Nations Public Administration Network, New York. [Internet] Available from: http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/unpan/unpan031277.pdf [Accessed 24 August 2008]
September 12 2008 04:19 pm | e-learning
I see value in many of...
Deb Brahma. on 03 Feb 2010 at 8:24 am #
Great Blog.
Regards,
Debashish Brahma.