In this episode of the book series, I talked to Harold Jarche, a specialist when it comes to learning and work. Drawing on over 20 years of leadership and training experience in the Canadian Army, Harold has served as a consultant to organizations around the world since 2003. After observing how most workplaces were organized, he developed the Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM) Framework to help professionals improve collaboration, knowledge sharing, and sensemaking in complex environments. His work is guided by a simple yet powerful principle: work is learning, and learning is the work.
For a quarter-century, Harold has written a blog on learning and knowledge work. What began as a practical necessity after he became an independent consultant in a remote region of Canada gradually evolved into a public thinking laboratory and the foundation for his Perpetual Beta series, where ideas are continuously tested, revised, and recontextualized.
In our conversation, we explored how writing has shaped Harold’s thinking and how blogging functions as a core sensemaking practice. He shared how the rhythm of writing helps him navigate disorientation (an essential stage of learning) and why being comfortable with not knowing is a prerequisite for genuine understanding. From there, we discussed the evolution of the Seek > Sense > Share model, how it emerged from real client work.
We also reflected on the current state of the internet and the growing tension between human thinking and AI-automated content. Harold explained why he has chosen to focus on human intelligence rather than artificial intelligence, prioritizing depth, reflection, and community over scale and algorithms. This shift has led him increasingly toward smaller but trusted networks where knowledge can be shared more meaningfully.
Finally, this interview invites us to reflect on how mastering our personal knowledge can help us better understand our contexts, challenges, and, more broadly, rethink what it means to contribute to knowledge building in times of social, political, and ecological uncertainty.
As in my previous interviews, I like to start by asking what motivated the author to start their project. For you, blogging has been a lifelong commitment. What was the initial spark that led you to start your blog, and how has your core motivation for writing changed over the decades?
I was never a good writer, before I mean, I had a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, and I wrote because I had to, but writing was never really something that I did a lot of. I did more speaking, because that was required for officers.
I was in the Army for 23 years, so I did a lot of public speaking. Back then, I lived in a very small town on the east coast of Canada, so I was 800 kilometers away from Montreal, which is the nearest major city, and about 900 kilometers from Boston, going down to the United States. It was kind of a remote area, with lots of small towns. There are no companies’ headquarters here or anything like that.
So, in 2003, I suddenly became an independent consultant. My wife was a stay-at-home mother. We had two little kids, 9 and 11 years old, at the time. I had an educational technology and training design background from the military as a training development officer with the Air Force. That was kind of my core skill, training design. But there wasn’t a whole bunch of work in the local area where I lived. I was looking at cheap ways for professional development and cheap ways for marketing to get things started. Then a friend suggested, “Why don’t you do a blog?”
My current blog started in 2004. It was a way for me to reach out and to talk to people, and in those days of blogging, there were a lot of people who were helping others out, because there were so few of us, particularly in the educational technology area, where I was doing a lot of writing initially, and later in knowledge management. I became a writer out of necessity. Obviously, this was before other social media platforms. Facebook was created in 2004, and Twitter came a little bit later. In those early days, the only way to communicate with people was in the blogosphere. I guess that’s where I sort of sharpened my ability to write.
So, the “why” was because I had to. And after doing it for a couple of years, I realized that my writing had gotten a lot better, and it became a way in which I could connect to people. In a lot of cases, especially in my international consulting work, it was thanks mostly to my blog’s content. People knew me through the blog. It became my business card: “Do you want to know something about me? Go to my blog, read some articles, see what you think, and then maybe you want to hire me after that.”
My blogging activity peaked about 5 years ago. Around that time, I started seeing this effect of enshittification of online platforms. Before Musk bought Twitter, it was the number one source of visitors to my blog. I had 20k followers on Twitter at the time, and I noticed that these platforms were starting to use the algorithm, filtering things down.
I also started seeing things like my website getting scraped by Google and LLMs, which made me drop my writing a lot. But this year, I decided that I would get back in the game. My objective is to write one blog post per week. I’ll be happy if I can do that. But I’m also conscious that anything that I put up is going to be scraped, which makes me sort of think that I’m feeding the beast, but there are a number of people who have asked me to keep writing.
I’m not too sure what direction my writing is going to take. You know, 10 years ago, I was very optimistic about the two-way web, the social web, and how it enabled people to connect, and I’ve made a lot of really good friends. But more and more, a lot of the people that I know have quit blogging. There aren’t many people who’ve been blogging for 20+ years as I have. I don’t know if that helps a bit or not.
You have recently written a post titled “writing by humans, for humans.” In an era of increasing automation and AI-generated content, how do you ensure your blog remains an authentic space for human sensemaking and professional development? Also, has your perception of writing changed somehow because of that?
Well, I’m writing more in private communities. For example, I host a private community with about 40 global members. It’s focused on knowledge management, collaboration, sense-making, that kind of stuff. Because it’s private, we share a lot more there. We do a monthly Zoom call, and then we have a Slack space where we chat. I also belong to two other private groups like that.
Quite often, I’ll share a draft in my private community before I post it publicly. I think the only real change to my writing style and my focus is that I was doing less of it. The other thing is that, given the state of the world right now, every once in a while, I question if what I’m writing about is really important. Who knows? Canada might become the 51st state. We may be sending troops to Greenland shortly. It’s very scary to live so close to the United States right now. It sort of puts everything in perspective.
On top of that, I might be moving into retirement soon, so the question will be, “Do I keep writing through my retirement or not?” I haven’t done any major consulting lately. I’m running my workshops, doing some writing, hosting my community, and taking vacations. So, who knows?
I know that you have extensive archives in your blog. It serves as a chronological history of your intellectual development. You’ve been thinking and writing all these years, and I imagine you can actually see this evolution in your thinking, right?
Well, the blog posts are kind of the raw material. I could make observations working with clients, maybe not necessarily about the client, but about what was happening around them. Then, I would reflect on that and write that up on my blog, which gave me a place to put ideas down. I call them half-baked ideas. Just throw it out there. I would get feedback sometimes, but never as much as I want. Then, I could reflect on that back with my client’s work, which kept evolving.
The e-books that I published, for example, are years’ worth of blog posts, where I take the best ones, synthesize them, and put them together into a better product. The first book that I published was after 10 years of blogging. I took all these 10 years’ worth of content and launched the Perpetual Beta series. Then, I’ve added several to that. The last e-book was launched in 2024, and that was more of a questioning of what the heck is going on, because that was where AI was starting to rear its ugly head and everything.
Right now, I have a book in progress with Clark Quinn. Clark and I have known each other for 20 years, and it’s based on PKM, but it’s more of a how-to manual, right down to the actual process of personal knowledge mastery. The working title is Seek and Share, but we’ll see where it goes. So, we’ve been working on that for several months now.
Apparently, writing in your blog has been the testing ground for the Seek > Sense > Share framework. How does the regular writing help you move beyond simply collecting information to discovering the deep patterns and actionable insights you provide for organizations?
The Seek > Sense > Share was an idea. I’d actually mapped out PKM, and I had 7 different processes, 4 external and 3 internal, and I played with that. I don’t know when the idea came to me. I just thought that alliteration sometimes works, so I came up with this framework, which seemed to really reflect what the process was. I mentioned it on a client engagement, which was several days long. They were developing a new strategy for collaboration, and somebody in the group said, “It’s just like Seek > Sense > Share.” And I thought, “Okay, I got something here. I’m sticking with this one.” Finally, it’s stood the test of time, just like the whole PKM practice has.
Well, PKM is not actually my idea. There are other people who are writing about personal knowledge management. I changed it to mastery because I wanted to move away from the knowledge management world, which was too much about big systems and big databases. I wanted to focus on what I, as an individual, do, and what we as a community or a network do. For example, how do we enable that kind of collaboration and cooperation? So, personal knowledge mastery just became the term because it is about mastery, and you never master it completely, right? It’s like any discipline, a lifelong thing. You continuously try to get better. One of my latest posts was about disorientation and exploration. How the heck do you make sense without seeking first? PKM isn’t necessarily about disorientation, but it is a tool for exploration. You can then get to a point of reorientation, which may not be complete, and then be able to take action or make it actionable.
For example, in the local area where I live, we have a government-owned electric power company. About 6 months ago, they announced that they were putting in a gas plant just about 20 kilometers away from here. The gas plant comprises 10 gas turbines that are basically jet engines that are turned up, and they will use that to stabilize the grid as they need it. So, these things fire up, creating huge amounts of pollution and noise and light and everything like that. I volunteer at the Wildlife Institute, where we do rehabilitation and education work around displaced wildlife. I’ve been volunteering there for about 20 years. We’re just down the road from this power plant. We get all this information that comes out, and they’re talking about peaker plants, and condensers, and kinetic energy to stabilize a grid, and I’m going like “what the heck is all this about? I’d better put on my PKM hat and learn about this stuff.” I did a very intensive self-education system to figure out how electric grids actually work. Are these people telling the truth, or are they stretching it a little bit? I was reading, connecting with different people, different organizations, reading about that, and then sharing that with our group.
We now have a group of about 15 organizations that are fighting this, particularly because we are in a very sensitive wildlife environmental zone. We live on an isthmus: a narrow piece of land that connects two larger pieces and is surrounded by water. The isthmus that we live on connects Nova Scotia to the rest of Canada, and it’s only 25 kilometers wide, inhabited by a number of endangered species. It’s also a migratory route for birds that fly beyond the Atlantic, basically from the Arctic all the way down to Patagonia. We also have other animals going east-west along that land. It’s a very sensitive area, and that’s the reason that we’re fighting this.
I had to do some quick learning. I’m not an engineer. I didn’t know that electrical grids needed to have kinetic energy to stabilize them. I didn’t have a clue about any of that. So anyway, that was my PKM in progress at the local level.
I would guess that sensemaking is not always easy, and we can feel disoriented, as you mentioned. When you feel “lost” in your own sensemaking process, how does the rhythm of blogging help you navigate that?
I don’t know if you can actually learn if you’re not disoriented at first. I think that’s a necessity. Are you familiar with the Cynefin framework, created by Dave Snowden? It’s a sense-making framework as well, but there’s a part where Dave talks about aporia: a state of puzzlement or disorientation, until you finally get to the point where you actually understand what you don’t know. First, you don’t even know what you don’t know, because everything is confusing. And then, through exploration, you get to a certain point where you think, “Okay, I don’t understand this, now I’ve got to learn about that.” So, I actually know what I don’t know, and now I can go into it and take some action. That’s where the actionable part comes. And part of that, too, is being comfortable with being disoriented. We see the opposite in the education system. If you are disoriented as a student, quite often you don’t tell the professor or the teacher that. You don’t want people to think that you don’t know what’s going on, right? You fake it until you make it.
I think that being comfortable with not knowing is part of blogging. Sometimes I’m putting stuff out there, and I don’t know if it’s any good, I don’t know if it makes any sense, but I gotta get it out there, and let’s see what happens. There’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t go any further than a blog post. It is what it is. It’s my process of trying to make sense of things.
Yeah, with the structures we have right now, in companies and in schools, it’s not easy to actually say out loud “I don’t know what is going on or how it works”. You have to fake it, as you said. But your work always touches on replacing outdated management practices with collaborative networks, right?
I’ve tried that for 20 years, but I don’t think I’ve been overly successful. Well, I have been trying, and I think I’ve touched some people individually. I’ve had some successful projects where we actually got something where we could see the benefits of what we were doing. I’ve also written reports and developed things for companies that then just sort of put them on the shelf and leave them there. That happens a lot, too. And I think that’s the nature of capitalism and governments. No one wants to change.
The guiding principle of your blog is, “work is learning, learning is the work.” I love it. It’s a brilliant quote. How does this principle act as a filter for your curiosity, helping you decide which topics are worth exploring on the blog and which ones you choose to ignore?
Well, for one, I’ve decided that I’m not looking at AI for similar reasons that, at the beginning, I used to talk about my consulting as a learning consultant, what I called ABC Learning, “Anything But Courses.” There were enough people building courses, and the world did not need one more course builder or one more person teaching you how to build courses.
I was very interested in social learning and informal learning, and how people do that. I feel the same way about generative AI and LLMs, like ChatGPT. There are enough people talking about that, and there are enough people doing that. I’m focused on Human Intelligence. HI, not AI. And I think that there’s definitely still a need for people to make sense, for people to understand, without looking at the tools. I’m sure the tools can be useful for certain things, and I know some cases where they are. But it’s just that I’ve decided that my niche is anything but AI on that.
You mentioned that many of your blog posts begin as small moments of curiosity and questioning about the world around you and your clients’ experiences. Similar to how you developed the Perpetual Beta series, how did you go about transforming these fragmented daily observations and experiences into a coherent educational model for your Personal Knowledge Mastery course?
Basically, the blog is the testing ground for the most part, plus the private communities. As a matter of fact, the term personal knowledge mastery was an idea I floated in one of these communities. I got feedback from a number of people, and they said, “Yeah, because it’s about mastery, it’s not about management. This should be your focus, change the name.” That was in that trusted community. I don’t know if I would have put that idea out initially in public, particularly on social media, which is getting so nasty. I left Facebook 10 years ago and left Twitter 2 years ago. The only platform I’m on now is LinkedIn. And even there, some days I think that maybe I should get off it, too. I mean, the algorithm has changed so much. Here’s an example: a post I put on LinkedIn about 3 years ago got 29k views. Now, I’m lucky to get 1k views. That’s what the algorithm is. I have around 7k followers on LinkedIn, and I’m only getting 1k views? You know that the algorithm is just squeezing it down, and I’m not a paying member of LinkedIn, so…
You mentioned your book series called Perpetual Beta. In what ways does treating your writing as a “perpetual beta” allow you to stay more flexible and responsive to the complexities of the modern workplace?
That’s one reason I publish these as e-books, and not through a publisher. You know, the e-books basically were a way for somebody who wanted to read my content in a book format, with a flow to it and things like that. But I haven’t been married to any of the ideas. I mean, there are some core principles that haven’t really changed. The idea of complexity and the need for sense-making haven’t changed. I was working in knowledge management at one time, but I really don’t do that anymore.
Also, every workshop that I run is different, so that’s part of the perpetual beta. And there are a couple of reasons. One is that I want it to reflect what is happening currently, but also, I noticed several years ago that every large consulting organization in the world – McKinsey, Bain, PwC, Microsoft, IBM, you name them – has put somebody on my workshop. Not once have any of these people ever said anything. They just took the workshop, but I know what they’re doing. They’re taking the workshop, scraping everything off of it, and then using it to inform their consultant work. That’s another reason why I keep changing it. If you scraped something 5 years ago, that’s not what the workshop is right now. That’s part of my business strategy, too.
Of course, keep moving so they can’t catch it. Talking about moving, what are your plans for the next steps? Where do you see the PKM framework heading next, or what is the next major challenge in sensemaking that you plan to tackle through your writing?
Blogging for the next year, for sure. I have two workshops planned for this year, one in February and one in October. I’m reducing the number of workshops because the number of participants was going down, so I thought it might be better to have a core group at two different times of the year.
Also, because I volunteer at the Wildlife Institute, I’ve just signed up to help somebody transition some forest land. I’m going to help her with that. I’m thinking that probably my future is going to be less international and more local. It’s kind of where I’m at. I’m 66 years old, and my wife and I want to travel a little bit. I was flying across the ocean several times in 2018 and 2019. I was working in Europe and Australia, and did some work in South Africa, too. It was fun and exciting, yes, but I don’t think I really want to do that anymore. I guess what I’m saying is that I’m going into a quieter mode and with more of a local focus, and hopefully I can take some of my international experience and use that at the local level. Beyond that, I don’t know.
You can learn more about Harold Jarche’s work at his website and blog. You can also connect with him via LinkedIn and Mastodon.