Knowledge workers (enough with the learning already)

This presentation by Stephen Collins on Knowledge Worker 2.0 is pretty cool. SC is absolutely to correct that knowledge work needs to be seen in a broader context and we need to look beyond processes & tools. Stephen also comments on this post by David Armano on Synthesizers. David is not talking about Moogs or Fairlights - but rather individuals who are good at creating new stuff fro existing stuff or Knowledge Workers as Stephen would call them.

I like David's image but as I've been pondering critical thinking and collective learning, I would have to add two things to David's model:

• A synthesizer is as good at identifying people and their skills/experience/knowledge as she is data. And she will collaborate with those people as she finds patterns in the data. She will not only tell you the future, she will make it happen with you.
• A synthesizer will get better at their synthesizing. They will learn iteratively from each attempt to develop the future (because that is the job of the synthesizer - to give you a future). There's a feedback loop in there somewhere.

Pondering this some more, much of the talk around knowledge workers has isolated them as "widgets" (as SC notes). We need to think of our knowledge worker ecologies. And we can find out about these ecologies using social software. Our enterprises are already social, we just need more ways of seeing that...