Month: May 2011

Job automation

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I’ve said it so often now that you may be bored with the notion, but many people do not understand it at all. Simple work is getting automated and complicated work is getting outsourced — Automated & Outsourced.

On top of that, what was complicated yesterday is merely simple today and hence will be automated. Daniel Lemire has an interesting take on what automation will do to not just business but also politics:

In fact, most jobs require little general intelligence:

  • Jobs are highly specialized. You can sum up 80% of what most people do with 4 or 5 different specific tasks. In most organizations, it is a major faux pas to ask the wrong person: there is a one-to-one matching between people and tasks.
  • Jobs don’t require that you to understand much of what is going on. You only need to fake some understanding of the context the same way a spam filter fakes an understanding of your emails. Do you think that the salesman at the appliance store knows why some dishwashers have a shredder and some don’t, and why it matters? Do you think that the professors know what the job market is like for their graduates?

A key part of the problem is the job. Politicians want “job creation” and people want jobs to be able to feed their families and pay the bills. But the job is nothing more than a social construct. I think it’s outlived its usefulness, as I found out last year. The construct of the job, with its defined skills, effort, responsibilities and working conditions, is a key limiting organizational factor for the conceptual economy. We need to get beyond it.

In order to realize the creative potential of individuals we have to cast off old notions of how work gets done. There is no such thing as a generic  job description into which we just drop some “qualified” candidate. Job competencies are a myth. People are individuals. The role of an effective HR department would be to know each person individually. The fact is that everyone can be creative, including the janitor.

Understanding and incorporating humanity back into our work will liberate us from the industrial, scientific management models that inform too much of our work. It will also help us deal with all those complex problems that are really keeping us up at night.

 

iSchool Networked Learning PKM Resources

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This is a follow-up from the Networked Learning (PKM) workshop I conducted for the iSchool Institute yesterday. Here are some of the resources I suggested prior to the course:

Network Learning: Working Smarter, an article I wrote for the Special Libraries Association last year.

Sense-making (shows types of sense-making activities)

Talking about PKM (from the professional KM community)

PKM in a Nutshell (includes many links for further exploration)

Critical thinking in the organization (looking at how PKM fits into the workplace)

PKM categorized posts on this blog & my social bookmarks tagged PKM.

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All the slides are now posted on my Slideshare account and can be downloaded. It was interesting that few people had heard about The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999) when I mentioned that Hyperlinks Subvert Hierarchy (#7).

I opened with a recent short video by Teemu Arina entitled Global, Local, Personal (2011)

We discussed Twitter for professional development and I suggested two weekly chats that might be of interest: #lrnchat & #KMers

Jane Hart hosts two communities, Social Learning (on Yammer) as well as Share and Learn (using the open source WPMU platform). More information and how to join these communities at C4LPT.

In the Share & Learn community, Jane is also hosting a thirty days to use social media to work and learn smarter program starting this Monday, 30 May. Join now.

I also showed a TED Talk by Eli Pariser called Beware of Online Filter Bubbles. This was a great introduction to information/source filters and I based part of the discussion on Tim Kastelle’s excellent post on Five Forms of Filtering.

I talked about my blog as home base for PKM and showed several other PKM processes.

One of the participants even set up a Yammer community on the spot and created a Twitter account. The Twitterers in the crowd included: @brentmack – @marcopolis – @elearningguy – @ruralibrarian

Discussions on what tools people use continued through our lunch and breaks. Evernote, a cross-platform tool to “remember everything” is quite popular.

As Marco Campana commented “If any of these tools don’t make your life easier, don’t use them.” – @hjarche Yup. #netlearn

If I’ve missed something or anybody has more questions or needs help, please contact me here, on Twitter, via email, Skype or send the Pony Express to Sackville (New Brunswick, not Nova Scotia).

Psychopaths and others

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Here are some of the things I found via Twitter this past week.

QUOTES

@RalphMercer – “would (LMS) learning management systems exist if we weren’t trying to make someone pay?”

@PembaTrees – “Was asked for an easy way to start a NGO …. Spend 5 years writing proposals, give talks, start a social enterprise & get a line of credit.”

@B4HOttawa – “Wisdom is like a baobab tree; no one individual can embrace it – African Proverb”

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“Some psychologists have a theory that many of the world’s ills can be blamed on psychopaths in high places.” via @SebPaquet [reminds me of The Gervais Principle]

“Robert Hare, the eminent Canadian psychologist who invented the psychopath checklist, … recently announced that you’re four times more likely to find a psychopath at the top of the corporate ladder than you are walking around in the janitor’s office,” journalist Jon Ronson tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered.

Without Workflow, Social Business Is Doomed – via @bduperrin

The only way to avoid the social death spiral is to make sure that any social/enterprise 2.0/collaboration initiatives you implement tie directly to everyday work, and sit squarely in the middle of key workflows.  This can take many forms, ranging from project management to targeted Q&A for specific critical topics.  What matters is that the work is important, and that the collaboration tool delivers a substantial reduction in the amount of effort required to complete that work.  Improved quality alone is not enough–the only non-monetary payoff most of us pay attention to is extra time.

Most interesting comment of the week: Storytelling Sucks by @DonaldClark to @jhagel on The Pull of Narrative

[Donald] It’s received wisdom in learning that storytelling and narrative are unquestionably good. But is it? Plato warned against filling young minds with fixed narratives and I’m coming round to a similar view, but with a twist. I’ve always been a big fan of sports and more recently of reality TV. Add to this computer games, virtual worlds, blogging, wikis, social networks, email, messenger and skype, and I find that most (not all) of what I really love is relatively unscripted, open, fluid, and often with more than a touch of ‘play’.

The top-down, command and control, baby-boomer culture is really starting to annoy me. The more I watch prescribed movies and TV, with their fixed plot structure, and abandon the publishing hyped ‘modern’ novel, the more I enjoy life. There’s an obsession with ‘stories’ that borders on the manic in learning, the arts and media. They really do want us to open our mouths and swallow.

 

 

Vendor-neutral

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Yes, I have called software vendors snake oil sellers. Last year I wrote, “Now social learning is being picked up by software vendors and marketers as the next solution-in-a-box, when it’s more of an approach and a cultural mind-set.” In 2005, social learning online was a fringe activity that we had to test using open source platforms like Drupal. Now everything is “social”. I remember when we ran our informal learning unworkshops in 2006 while the major enterprise software vendors ignored us or privately told us there was no market for this stuff. Now they use our words to sell their products.

Usually I represent the buyers of enterprise software, not the sellers. I have advised vendors on how to improve their products but my aim is not to make an easy market for their sales. I want to help organizations democratize while simultaneously improving their overall performance. As an independent consultant, I maintain a perspective of vendor neutrality. I do not represent any other companies.

While some people have inferred that I may be vendor hostile, let me tell you what I learned today about a software company – Socialcast. They are not my client and I do not have any stake in the company.

During a web presentation today, I saw that Socialcast gets a critical part of workplace performance right. They understand that collaboration has to be embedded in the workflow. Their “secret sauce” is the ability to integrate with a wide variety of other enterprise software applications. These are tools that workers use every day. Socialcast enables conversations around and between these systems. There is no requirement to leave the workflow to collaborate.

I’ve used Socialcast for several months and must say the learning  curve is negligible. It’s simple and effective. You are up and using it very quickly. This is a company that understands online collaboration and reduces silos instead of creating a new one.

So there you have it. If you want the endorsement of a vendor-neutral consultant, just do a good job and you’ll get noticed.

New Hire Practices

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I know that there are no “best practices” in new hire development, also known as onboarding, as each organization is unique and often rather complex. However, there are some practices that could make onboarding better in certain contexts. I’ve looked at several examples and am very interested in unique practices (outliers) beyond the corporate norm.

I’d appreciate any unique examples if you can share them.

Unemployed Girl by Kazimir Malevich (1904)

Reference: Onboarding bookmarks on Diigo

Here are some of the key themes that I found about onboarding programs across many organizations.

Personal, dedicated coaching for each new hire (Capital One, Nokia).

Connecting each new hire to to key contacts in the organization (Capital One, Nokia). Note that Nokia will even pay for new hires to travel to other locations to meet their key contacts and co-workers.

Ensuring new hires understand the shadow or informal part of the organization through the use of tools such as network maps (Jon Katzenbach, Senior Partner of Booz & Company, author of The Wisdom of Teams).

Pairing with another worker or even tripling with two experienced workers and getting to work immediately, in order to reduce formal training (Menlo Innovations)

Two actions that can begin even before a formal offer is made:

  1. Providing access to an online knowledge base.
  2. Connecting to an internal social network to connect online & ask questions.

Embedding collaboration from the start by co-developing an individualized new hire program.

Giving time for new hires to just look around and talk to people (Semco SA; New Seasons Market)

Having weekly/monthly new hire welcome breakfasts, lunches & Happy Hours which all managers attend.

Other common qualities of good programs are that they are – informal; extend over time (up to 2 years in some cases); and involve active participation by supervisors/managers

Some companies, like Zappos, will pay people ($2,000) to leave after onboarding, so that only motivated workers stay.

The Networked Workplace

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The networked workplace is the new reality. It’s always on and globally connected. This is where all organizations are going, at different speeds and in a variety of ways. Some won’t make it.

First you connect people inside the workplace, then you connect organizations, and then you connect the world. That’s where we are today.

Look at how work gets done. First, simple work keeps getting automated. Many years ago the typing pool was made redundant. Today lawyers are on the block, tomorrow it may be you.

Then complicated work gets outsourced. Complicated work is that which can be analyzed and broken down into its component parts. It’s ripe for outsourcing. That used to mean overseas, but today, overseas is getting closer to home. These shifts will continue.

What’s left is complex work, but this requires passion, creativity and initiative. These cannot be commoditized. This is where the main value of the networked workplace will be made. It’s a constantly moving sweet spot. Today’s complex work is tomorrow’s merely complicated work.

At the edge of the organization, where there are few rules; everything is a blur. It’s chaotic. But opportunities are found in chaos. Value emerges from forays into the chaos. In such a changing environment, failure has to be tolerated. Nothing is guaranteed other than the fact that not playing here puts any organization at a significant disadvantage.

Two major changes are needed for the networked organization to capitalize on simultaneously working in simple, complicated, complex and chaotic environments.

First, power must be distributed. It’s a move toward democracy without losing the entrepreneurial zeal. Some companies are already there. There are no answers or cookie cutter approaches here, so don’t try to copy anyone.

Distributed power enables faster reaction time so those closest to the situation can take action. This is often the case in complex and chaotic environments where there is no time to write a detailed assessment of the situation. Those best able to address the situation have marinated in it for some time. They couldn’t sufficiently explain it to someone removed from the problem if they wanted. Shared power is enabled by trust.

Second, transparency must become the norm. Transparency ensures there is an understanding of what everyone is doing. It means narrating work and taking ownership of mistakes. Transparency helps the organization learn from mistakes. Of course this is very difficult for any command and control organization, with its published organization chart and sacrosanct job titles, to embrace.

Power-sharing and transparency enable work to move out to the edges and away from the comfortable, complicated work that has been the corporate mainstay for decades.  There’s nothing left in the safe inner rings. It’s being automated and outsourced. But the outer rings are scary and workers can’t be controlled out there or they’ll be ineffective. Aye, there’s the rub. Deal with it, or others will.

Jobs, networks and economics

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Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week.

QUOTES:

@sandymaxey – “Hierarchical networks appear incestuous, perpetuate mindless incrementalism, reinforce stagnant thinking. Need inclusivity for disruption.”

Carl Sagan: “It is suicidal to create a society dependent on science and technology in which hardly anybody knows anything about science and technology.” via @MarionChapsal

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via @loyalelectron – Wow. 72% of Indians, 81% of Chinese now say economic opportunities are superior in their native countries than in US. – Wall Street Journal:

A new study by researchers at U.C. Berkeley, Duke and Harvard has found that, for the first time, a majority of American-trained entrepreneurs who have returned to India and China believe they are doing better at “home” than they would be doing in the U.S.

The new China? BMW, Daimler, VW, Siemens & IKEA go to Southern US because labour’s cheap & workers have no rights – via @CWNH

But slumming in America is fast becoming a business model for some of Europe’s leading companies, and they often do things here they would never think of doing at home. These companies – not banks, primarily, but such gold-plated European manufacturers as BMW, Daimler, Volkswagen and Siemens, and retailers such as IKEA – increasingly come to America (the South particularly) because labor is cheap and workers have no rights. In their eyes, we’re becoming the new China. Our labor costs may be a little higher, but we offer stronger intellectual property protections and far fewer strikes than our unruly Chinese comrades.

@SteveDenning: “The real jobs crisis is that most jobs suck” via @SebPaquet

This is not just a matter of keeping the workers happy. In today’s knowledge economy, the motivation of workers is a key determinant of productivity. The lack of passion in today’s workforce is a fundamental cause of the continuing sharp decline in the performance of the Fortune 500.

@nineshift: “We say teleworkers are 25% more productive than office workers”

Industry Canada reports productivity gains of up to 50% by Teleworkers. (Trade-Marks Branch)

IBM Canada had Teleworker productivity improvements of up to 50% per teleworker. (IBM, Canada)

Boeing finds that Telework helps to increase their employee’s productivity an average of 15-30% and, “The quality of the work done has improved even more!” (Boeing Case Study provided by Telecommute Connecticut)

@lemire: conventional peer review system (filter-then-publish) has disastrous consequences:

In the conventional peer review system, you seek to please the reviewers who in turn try to please the editor who in turn is trying to guess what the readers want. It should not be a surprise that the papers are optimized for peer review, not for the reader. While you will eventually get your work published, you may have to drastically alter it to make it pass peer review. A common theme is that you will need to make it look more complicated.

@etiennewenger: New paper on assessing value creation for communities and networks: A Conceptual Framework (PDF) – via @NancyWhite

We will use the term “community” as a shortcut for community of practice, which we define as a learning partnership among people who find it useful to learn from and with each other about a particular domain. They use each other’s experience of practice as a learning resource. And they join forces in making sense of and addressing challenges they face individually or collectively.

We use the term network as a shortcut for social network. The term refers to a set of connections among people, whether or not these connections are mediated by technological networks. They use their connections and relationships as a resource in order to quickly solve problems, share knowledge, and make further connections.

We see communities and networks as two aspects of the social fabric of learning rather than separate structures.

 

Social learning for collaborative work

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The authors at Human Capital Lab say that social learning makes little sense and we should really be focused on collaborative learning:

In its simplest form, collaborative learning is a model based on the idea that knowledge can be created through the interaction and collaboration of individuals. It is not driven by a specific tool, or learning plan, but is driven by the need for information and the accountability that those engaged have to one another. Where we decided to move from the verbiage “social learning” comes from the attempt to really define the term and realized that the focus continually goes back to “social” (and often social media tools) rather than to “learning.” It’s not about the tool, it’s about the learning and collaborative method by which it is accomplished.

I disagree.

Social learning is based on the understanding that we are social animals, as described by Albert Bandura in the 1970’s:

The social learning theory of Bandura emphasizes the importance of observing and modeling the behaviors, attitudes, and emotional reactions of others. Bandura (1977) states: “Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.” (p22). Social learning theory explains human behavior in terms of continuous reciprocal interaction between cognitive, behavioral, an environmental influences.

Our social networks have a significant influence on our behaviour, as clearly shown in research by Nicholas Christakis and others.

Image: Smoking in a Face to Face Network (2000) by Nicholas Christakis

Calling social learning, collaborative learning misses out on the fact that all learning happens in a social context.

We collaborate because we have a reason to do so (such as in the workplace).

We learn socially because we are wired to do so.

In a workplace context, social learning is how we share tacit knowledge so that we can work collaboratively. They go hand-in-glove but are not the same. It’s leadership’s responsibility to create structures that encourage social learning in order to do collaborative work.

We need to encourage social learning because things are changing too fast and it’s the only way we can keep up, by learning socially and working collaboratively.

Image: by Ross Dawson: Corporate Directors Understand Change (n = 500)

Network Learning PKM Workshop Notes

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The Network Learning workshop will be held in Toronto on 27 May 2011. It is focused on mastering social media for networked learning, and is based on my work with PKM (personal knowledge management) since 2005.

I use Seek-Sense-Share as an initial framework to explain how to set up a personalized PKM  process:

1. Finding things out on the Web (SEEK)

2. Keeping up to date with new Web content (SEEK)

3. Building a trusted network of colleagues (SEEK & SHARE)

4. Communicating with your colleagues (SHARE)

5. Sharing resources, ideas and experiences with your colleagues (SHARE)

6. Collaborating with your colleagues (SHARE & USE)

7. Improving your personal productivity (SENSE & USE)

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To begin, I would recommend reading Network Learning: Working Smarter, an article I wrote for the Special Libraries Association last year.

Here are some more detailed posts for anyone keen to get started early:

Sense-making (shows types of sense-making activities)

Talking about PKM (from the professional KM community)

PKM in a Nutshell (includes many links for further exploration)

Critical thinking in the organization (looking at how PKM fits into the workplace)

For those who want to dig even deeper, they can explore the PKM categorized posts here or my social bookmarks tagged PKM.

The workshop itself will be as participatory as possible, with an emphasis on skill development and enabling everyone to develop a roadmap of what they want to do next. It will also be an introduction to several communities of practice for further learning.

For workshop participants, feel free to ask any questions in the comment field or send me an email.

 

Jobs? We ain't got no jobs

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If contract work seems like the only option, then start networking with co-workers and competitors. Band together as a guild or association and help each other out. Think of it as a freelancers union and look into group health care, joint marketing and shared administration. You can’t do this working 40 hours a week for The Man. The deck is stacked with laws supporting either employers and employees but the future of knowledge work is free-agency. The powers that be, corporations and unions, won’t change to help out freelancers, we have to help ourselves.

That was my conclusion two years ago in Freelancers Unite. In many ways, it’s easier to be a freelancer than it was when I started 8 years ago. Here’s my marketing advice for free-agents.

There seems to be a growing acceptance of freelancing as a career option, as explained in this recent GigaOm article:

Attitudes toward freelancing have shifted over the past few years, with many more people now prepared to consider it as a long-term career choice. It’s a shift that has certainly been helped by online freelance marketplaces such as Elance and Odesk, which have made it much easier for freelancers to find work worldwide. While some people may have initially tried freelancing out of necessity due to the economic downturn, many people now choose to freelance because it gives them the flexibility to pursue their lifestyle of choice.

In the USA, this shift is being called the 1099 [contract worker] Economy. William Fulton says this shift requires a different way of looking at economic development.

As a result, savvy economic developers who want to tap into the 1099 economy must recognize that they must focus on a different version of the basics. Visiting existing large businesses in the community remains important because your largest businesses are probably where your future entrepreneurs currently work. But you also have to know the subtle ebbs and flows of your local economy, especially where the clusters of small business activity are located. You have to stay in touch with your educational community, especially your community colleges, to understand what skills your labor force has and needs. And, of course, you have to read all those Craigslist ads that my daughter is reading.

In my short stint as a contract employee last year, I noted that JOB is a four-letter word.

I wrote in 2004, early in my life as a freelancer, that knowledge work requires new structures, including the concept of the job:

Perhaps the actual structure of work, especially the Corporation itself, is an obstacle to knowledge work. Instead of tweaking the mechanisms of the corporation, through job redesign or cultural initiatives, we should be re-examining the basic structure of the corporation. It is an industrial age creation, designed to maximize physical capital and may not be optimal for maximizing “knowledge capital”.

The network, with its dynamic conversations, is where a lot of knowledge work gets done, and we should be looking at new laws to recognise networks in a similar way that we recognise corporations as legal entities. Is anything like this happening?

At the end of a jobless recovery, are we now ready to make some of these changes?