Kaisen

One of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is a training manual for people who need to do a bit of personal knowledge (or something) management. At the risk of banging on about it, one of the things that struck me about van Riper’s fluid, networked approach to operations was the emphasis on training the nodes in the network. For – in this case – Network Centric Warfare to work, there needs to be a heavy confidence and reliance on the personal ‘nodes’, and part of that seems to be achieved by training them. Good basic training and drill.

So I’ve been thinking presumably, with network-enabled organisation, to optimise efficacy, there needs to be continual basic training of the employees. And if that’s right, then perhaps that training is effectively what PKM is really about, and I wondered, if I were a new employee of one of these network-enabled organisations, what sort of handbook would I like to get to get me started from scratch?

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Well, I’ve just stumbled across a definite contender called kaisen, which has been spotted by Mr Hammersley of Dangerous Precedent fame.

“The five S’s of Keizen – – from Blog Before You Think:

SEIRI: create tidiness. Throw away all unused stuff, file away the rest.
SEITON: keep everything at the right place. Keep the tools you need accessible, hide materials you don’t need regularly.
SEISO: keep your (work-)space clean, remove all traces from the previous task before starting the next.
SEIKETSU: develop a personal sense for organising your things. Develop routines, optimise your system according to your needs.
SHIATSU: stay disciplined doing the above, make it a habit and permanent practice.”

It seems to be common practice in Japan. As Hitoshi comments,

Everyday in my school days, my teacher taught me this 5S!!
Now, my wife tells my daughter this 5S every morning before she goes to school!!

So Basic Training Module 1 in the PKM handbook would probably be Kaisen. Any other contenders? Even better, is there already a handbook?

[UPDATE: I’ve started a knowledgenetworker handbook and put the Kaisen stuff up on the knowledgenetworker wiki as a start -please feel free to add, question and criticise :)]