I am obsessed with capturing knowledge, both for myself and for the knowledge generated by groups. This blog entry relates my belief in the importance of filtering and sorting information in order to be more effective at using and acting on that information.
For personal knowledge-building, I take a lot of notes for fear of losing some important idea. Then I like to organize those ideas into categories that make sense for what I’m trying to learn. I’ve played around with multiple technologies and processes to capture ideas and information. For example, I often find it effective to take handwritten notes when I am away from my computer and then re-read and process these notes into digital form by entering the notes into various design documents, todo lists, and calendar entries. The design documents are meant to capture ideas, evolve existing ideas, record decisions, record things that I have learned (such as design principles), and generally advance my thinking on the various projects on which I am working. I find that translating my initial notes is more akin to sifting through the information for the most valuable parts and discarding the rest. It is not unusual for me to discard many of the original notes. The important part is extracting the information into the tools most suitable to handle the type of information. For example, things I have to do go into a todo list with dates and reminder mechanisms or directly into a calendar entry. Where to store the other information (e.g., ideas and resources that might help me do something on my todo list) is more of a problem. I’m constantly in search of better ways to handle this. That problem deserves a deeper discussion, but not now.
The main point I want to make here is the importance of taking unstructured information and categorizing or organizing it in various technologies where it will be more likely to be acted upon. Leaving these notes in a Microsoft Word file, for example, is a poor technology to use since it requires an imposed process to make it work (e.g., one has to remember to keep looking into the file to remember what is to be done).
A similar problem of capturing useful knowledge occurs when groups work together. The problem is compounded by the different views of what is useful versus what is not useful but it seems important to have a process that extracts useful information from the ongoing work of the group.
Meetings are one of the events where extracting information is important but which rarely occurs. Some meeting notes simply summarize the decisions made, or conclusions drawn, and the next actions. Often, these items get buried in meeting notes that are relatively inaccessible. To be most effective, these decisions and conclusions ought to be made visible within the contexts in which they are important (e.g., as new policy posted on a web site). Action items ought to be placed in a calendar, todo list or other project or task-management system so that they can be addressed and tracked. Again, follow up processing is about translating the information into appropriate technologies that enable better collaboration.
