Knowledge Management: A "Soft" Skill that is Actually Really Hard

 Graduate school is tough.  Really tough.  

When you tell people who have never been through the experience this, they assume it simply means that the courses are difficult.  That is certainly part of it, but it's only the tip of the iceberg.  It's also the part that's the easiest to manage.

No, the deep challenges of graduate school are the expectations that you create new knowledge.  By the end of your program, you are expected to show not only that you have a thorough understanding of some central body of facts, but also that, as you were learning all those things you noticed a gap in the scholarly discourse, something concrete that, before you came along, no one noticed was a thing that needed to be known.  Not only that, you're expected to develop some way to fill in that gap, either partially or entirely, execute that plan, and let the world know what you found out.

That's daunting!

It should be daunting.  However, there are a number of things that make it even more challenging than it needs to be.  One of these is knowledge management.  Like time management, knowledge management could be considered a "soft skill."  I hate that term.  "Soft" connotes "easy" or "unimportant."  Most "soft skills," though, are anything but easy, and they're often some of the most important skills needed in professional life.  

No, I think the reason they often get called "soft skills" is because they are skills that no one ever teaches.  They never show up on syllabi.  There are no courses dedicated to learning them.  Students are just expected to figure them out on their own.  Somewhere along the line.  Vital life skills that can make or break a person's career.  Just learn them on your own.  Somehow.

And because these skills are never taught, academics often have no vocabulary to describe whatever systems they've managed to cobble together through the years.  I'd bet good money, in fact, that most successful academics aren't even conscious of the fact that they have developed complex systems that sustain their work in the first place. I don't have any concrete studies I can cite to support this intuition, but I think the fact that so few mentors spend any time at all helping their mentees learn these skills speaks volumes.

What we have, then, is a system that requires students to become experts in some specialized topic, absorbing unfathomable amounts of information along the way.  University libraries provide exquisite tools to help students find relevant information, but neither mentors nor librarians have anything at all to say about strategies students can use to manage all of that information. 

Easily the first three-quarters of a graduate student's experience, then, is spent diving into rabbit holes, voraciously devouring whatever they find there only to discover that it doesn't lead them where they need to go, backing out, finding a new rabbit hole.

Rinse.  Repeat.

Somewhere in all this digging, patterns gradually start to emerge.  However, that creates another level of stress because pieces of this pattern exist in different rabbit holes.  Each time you find a new piece of this pattern, you have to somehow remember which rabbit hole you saw something like it before, which means digging back through piles and piles of unrelated dirt.  And once you do finally find that missing piece you were looking for, chances are good that you've lost the pattern again.

Rinse.  Repeat.

Is it any wonder, then, that graduate students spend so much time feeling like frauds?  That for years they can feel like they haven't done anything worthwhile?  Do we really wonder why mental health among graduate students is so poor?

It's time for a new paradigm, one in which mentors don't assume that students will learn these "soft skills" on their own, one in which mentors help students develop skills in knowledge management so that patterns emerge more naturally, one in which exploring rabbit holes isn't a metaphor for wasted effort, but rather a metaphor for creative synergy.  

To that end, I'm planning a new graduate course in knowledge management, to be launched next summer.  It's an ambitious goal, but it feels right.  It's not just something I want to do.  It's something I can't not do.  This is just too important!