This week we have one more issue dedicated to the 6 skills of Personal Knowledge Management. If you lost the previous issues, read them here:

• ​6 PKM skills​
• ​Active note-taking​
• ​Active reading​
• ​Idea Management​
• ​Networked Reading​

Hello Reader,

Have you ever heard the expression “Explain to me as if I was 5 years old”?

The intention is to ask the other person to simplify their thinking, but I always question myself: Why 5?

I think it is starting to make sense to me.

I travelled through Chile and Brazil in the last weeks so my toddler (now 3 years old) could meet our family. He is now in that phase where he asks 100 times a day: What is this? What does it do?

Being in different places and meeting more people than he had ever met in his entire 3-year-old life supercharged his curiosity. It was super tiring to keep answering his questions, but also very interesting (and personally rewarding) to learn how to simplify a “what” explanation so that a 3-year-old could understand.

Now.. imagine when my son arrives at the 5-year-old mark… that’s when the “why” phase is supposed to start:

• Why does the sky change colour?
• Why do we grow nails?
• Why can't I play until 11 pm? (Is saying "because I say so" still valid? It never worked for me and my mom 😅)

Although my answer to most questions would be “I don’t know. What do you think?” or “Let’s investigate together”, I believe it will still be a rewarding experience.

That’s because we will practice together one of the most important skills for research communication. That is, argumentation.

Argumentation simply means providing the reasons for our belief that something is the way it is.

Our intention may be to:

• Justify a belief: Why we believe we can derive a certain conclusion from certain data, observation, or experiment.
• Explain a phenomenon: How we believe a situation comes to be the way it is.
• Persuade someone: Why someone should de-fi-ni-te-ly fund your research proposal (or purchase your product).

Most research communication is an argument.

I, of course, don’t mean the type of argument teenagers have with their parents. Also, I don't vibe with the idea of “winning an argument” as if it was all a fight of egos. On the contrary, I could present my argument about why I completely agree with your thinking. I could simply justify why I think a given way.

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When it comes to Personal Knowledge Management, argumentation is the 5th skill in our PKM for Research stack.

Argumentation appears as the ability to create claims and lines of argument, and to support our reasoning with research. This ability indicates what should go into our notes (examples, data, observations) and when you should be writing “claim notes” rather than descriptive notes only.

When creating arguments, we start changing (again) how we interact with our notes. Here are 5 changes you may start noticing:

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1. Creating idea notes about claims

Claims (or “propositions”) are also ideas. An idea note for a claim describes what we mean by the claim (like any idea), but it also invites us to justify why we believe the claim to be true (or likely to be the case).

That’s when we connect examples, data, experiments, observations, and other propositions to our notes to help us strengthen the claim.

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2. Building storylines

The connections between idea notes are stories waiting to be told.

Argument lines create clear storylines within the network of our notes, and these storylines become more visible when you work with visual boards. You can see the whole path from the premises to the conclusion and notice if the argument doesn't make sense or if a step missing.

Also, when building arguments you may take advantage of having idea notes (over document notes). Using idea notes, one idea may participate in multiple storylines, whereas with document notes the idea is trapped in a single storyline.

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3. Using conceptual zoom

Idea notes are the most “zoomed in” form of access to an idea. They allow us to focus on a single idea and have just enough context to understand and discuss it.

But what if I want to visualise a whole argument line created with multiple ideas? What if I want to visualise two different arguments for the same conclusion? What to do?

We need some way to zoom out without getting overwhelmed or losing our focus on all the other ideas around. That's when we can use boards as zoomed-out contextual views of the same idea (each board holding a different context). So the same idea can be explored in multiple contexts.

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4. Considering the audience

Arguments will change depending on the audience, your intention as a speaker, and the context around a piece of communication.

When we consider different contexts, we start noticing nuance. We start questioning how the ideas we previously held don’t seem “the same” when applied to a new context. This is the time to decide, is it still the same idea or there is a slightly nuanced idea being born here?

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5. Separating idea notes from output notes

An argument is a form of communication with an audience. When it is finally time to communicate an argument using our notes, we need to “linearise” a storyline.

Output notes contain the sequence of ideas (in the form of links to each idea note) that we want to use to write a given communication piece. They contain a sequential explanation of a full argument

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The need to create arguments is what pushes our Personal Knowledge Management practice to evolve. So rather than starting with a complex system that confuses us more than helps, we can start with the simplest possible system and expand it as needed.

That’s why I now divide the PKM for Research practice into 6 skills, where each skill builds on the previous one to ensure the practice evolves without overwhelming.

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Want a refresher on the PKM for Research course? Renew your membership before Monday, April 29th and participate in a live refresher course on the Foundations of Idea Management. Renew My Membership

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In the next issue, we will discuss knowledge creation, the last skill in our PKM skills series.

Meanwhile, I keep learning how to express myself "as if others were 5", a difficult feat but worth pursuing 😊

As always, if you have any questions don’t feel shy. Just reply to this email and let’s chat. I take some time to reply but I reply to all emails 😊

Talk to you soon.

Until then, take care.

Bianca

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