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Knowledge Flow Studio
KFlow Chapter Notes
As you read, you may want to capture notes. Or remember, later, where an idea was first introduced. Or, explore a resource or activity you discovered.
Here is a space to capture those. As chapters are published, the AI-generated summaries, activity links and resources will be added here. Edit and add your own!
Use this template for any book or subject you want to explore.
Expand your Resource List as you integrate other books, courses, talks, or subjects.
KFlow Chapters
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Chapter
Summary
Your Notes
Consider
Activity
1
Welcome to Knowledge Flow
This chapter names a familiar but rarely articulated experience of modern knowledge work: the exhausting loop where thoughtful analysis, care, and effort repeatedly fail to translate into shared understanding, good decisions, or lasting change. You do the work, push the rock uphill, and watch the same problems reappear—sometimes rebranded, sometimes accelerated, rarely resolved. This is the Pain Train: a system stuck in its own patterns, endlessly reconstructing itself.
The chapter argues that these failures are not primarily technical, procedural, or individual. They arise from something deeper: the invisible defaults of rationality itself—how organizations frame problems, define knowledge, reward behavior, and structure attention. Most “transformations” fail because they rebuild the same underlying mental models in new language. We optimize tools, processes, and outputs, while leaving the real system—how meaning is formed and decisions are made—untouched.
Open
What are your reasons for reading this book?
What is your experience of the Pain Train? What do you find most exhausting?
If you could change one thing about how your organization operates, what would you change?
What if knowledge isn’t something you have but your ability to develop, design, invent, facilitate, build and architect the flow of knowledge? What would change in your daily life?
Build your studio
2
The Fireswamp: Knowledge Myths
This chapter invites you to move beyond looking at ideas and into experiencing them. Knowledge Flow isn’t a concept you can absorb by reading alone—it’s a practice. Like moonlight, knowledge reveals what we see while hiding its source; to work with it well, we must learn to notice the invisible structures shaping our thinking, decisions, and actions.
You’re introduced to epistemological myths—widely held but often unexamined beliefs about what knowledge is, who has it, and how it works. These myths quietly shape organizations, reinforce power structures, and keep the Pain Train running, even when everyone is working hard and acting in good faith.
Open
Close your eyes for a moment and imagine: An uber nerd who loves coding, talking about technology, playing board games and reading snarky science fiction. Did you mother come to mind? (Who did?)
What was your experience, reading the section on epistemological myths: widely-held but false or misleading beliefs about what knowledge is, who possesses it, or how it works?
Which of the Six Dominant Delusions (of Unusual Size) impact your daily work? How?
Create and Use a Glossary
3
The Tidal Wave: Facing the Six Truths
This chapter is an orientation, not a lesson to master.
If your work often feels like shouting at forces you can’t control—recurring problems, stalled decisions, misaligned teams, endless urgency—you’re not imagining it. You’re experiencing the effects of deeply embedded myths about what knowledge is and how it should work. This chapter introduces an alternative: Knowledge Flow—a way of investing your time, energy, and attention so meaning, insight, and effective action can emerge without constant friction.
Open
How might you stop yelling at the tidal wave and instead, reclaim your time, energy, and attention?
Are you facing a problem that sometimes happens -- dependent on circumstances? How do you figure out the patterns involved?
In what area of work would you like a partner? Someone who thinks differently, whose skills would compliment yours?
In your current situation, think of one word or concept that is often misused or misunderstood. What would help you cultivate shared meaning?
Describe one decision recently made for you that would have been better made by you? How would you restructure the process?
If you could change one "way we do things" ... what would it be? Is there a "truth" about how we work that has never seemed true to you?
Is there a challenge you are facing that would benefit from adding a lightweight “notice → test → reframe → act” loop to make impact visible? How would you describe it to others?
Which of the truths are you already living? Where are the delusions and truths at play in your work? Which truth resonates? Which truth made you want to argue? Describe your reaction.
Spot the Patterns
4
The Easy Things are Hard: Core Skills
This chapter is about the gap between knowing and doing.
Most failures in knowledge work aren’t caused by ignorance or lack of effort—they come from missing what our systems need in order to act. Like drinking water, knowledge isn’t something you “have” because you can Google it. It’s something you embody in the right moment, under real conditions, with the support of a system that makes action possible.
Open
Notice a moment when you jump right into solutioning and consider whether or not you understand the problem.
Notice your first conclusion. Write it down and ask yourself if there are other possibilities.
Notice the impact of the larger environment on a decision you are making. What supports you? What makes it more difficult?
Recognize a discussion that is going around and around without resolution. Are there any concepts or experience that might be diverging?
Recognize an idea that you haven’t validated. Describe three reasons that convinced you it was worthwhile. Is your conclusion sound?
Link relevant information, from within a clutter of information, in a way the brings out a meaningful insight. (Bonus points if you do it again, with the same clutter on information, generating a different meaningful insight.)
Link one perspective to another another, usually unrelated, perspective in a way that generates more meaning.
Transform a moment when your first response to an idea would be “No”. Acknowledge what you’ve heard to ensure you’ve understand correctly, “Yes, and ..” build on it with your experience.
Transform an idea by showing it from three divergent, cross-functional perspectives. Describe the idea with words that make sense to all three.
Transform the relationship between two silo’d parts of an organization by collaborating to generate something that neither part could generate alone.
Share one small adaption that might improve an unsatisfying experience, one impacted by changing circumstances.
Share an insight you gained by pairing with someone who works in a different part of the organization.
What’s your “water story”? An experience where the gap between what you knew and what you could embody revealed new insight?
Explore Core Competencies
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