Another Boston Globe Ideas section article sparked my interest. Garret Keizer has a new book coming out on Privacy, but the item in his article, Privacy: it’s not just about you, said something that caught my eye:
When I’m with a trusted friend, I can speak my mind, which in turn might help me shape my thoughts for a larger audience. That’s an altogether different scenario from having some self-appointed leader tell me that “we’re all friends here” and have “nothing to hide.” In a situation of such ostentatious “openness,” most of us are going to clam up. Any openness mostly has to do with the leader’s mouth.
The reason this is interesting to me today is that I'm participating in Harold Jarche's Personal Knowledge Management workshop this month. Seek-Sense-Share is a central idea in Harold's thinking about PKM: Seeking out ideas and knowledge; making Sense of those ideas; and Sharing that synthesis with others. I have read and thought about this idea many times, as Harold has developed it and his other thinking around PKM.
The new element for me when I read the above passage was that it is not only a "once and done" activity for seek-sense-share. It is iterative and can work at many levels. I might seek and seek and never do any useful sense-making of what turns up, but then the "sense" appears based on some other tangential work - such as a newspaper article turning up. Or I might share out ideas with my friends or colleagues or in a wider public setting (like this blog). But that isn't the end of the Seek-Sense-Share activity. I might share and bat ideas around with someone in private that never end up seeing a wider public discussion. Or those ideas might get recombined with other ideas and other discussions into a different thought that I do decide to publish at a wider level. And of course, I would expect those public ideas to generate more ideas for more passes through that Seek-Sense-Share hourglass. Harold suggests this in the graphic that I've used for this post.
Maybe this is obvious to others, but it brought together some other ideas that have been percolating for me. So, I shared it.
[Note: Image is from Harold Jarche.]