Month: April 2010

Networks and Emergence

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

Some thoughts:

As we learn in digital networks, stock (content) gets smaller, while flow (conversation) gets longer – the challenge becomes how to continously weave the many bits of information and knowledge that pass by us each day.

The challenge for educators and organizations is not how to integrate or adopt web technologies but rather how do we teach, learn and work in networks. Digital networks have changed all hierarchical relationships.

@DavePollard – The Lifecycle of Emergence [if OD, KM, ISD and other siloed disciplines are declining, is there something new emerging?]

Practitioners in a system of influence can even throw ‘lifelines’ or build bridges to invite (or pull) forward those stuck in earlier paradigm thinking, methods and tools — rescuing them from e-mail, for example, by showing them IM, virtual presence and other effective real-time collaboration tools, or showing them new and effective group processes and practices that get them past dissent, disengagement, dysfunctional power dynamics and feelings of helplessness and disempowerment.

Why we need to “kill social media” via @WWWayne

In our view, social media is about the evolution of human communication. Cultural anthropology, sociology, psychology, and linguistics matter in marketing again. Concepts like “social framing,” whereby individuals often perceive issues through the prism of their friends, are starting to help us rethink the way we communicate and the ways people gather, act, and synthesize information. Rethinking social organization through social media is beginning to have a transformative impact on governments and businesses.

Power increases hypocrisy & grace (undeserved merit) decreases it! via @CircleReader

Results: when power (or lack thereof) was legitimate, the powerful also exhibited moral hypocrisy (being less moral themselves but judging others more harshly), while the powerless weren’t – just as before. But when power (or lack thereof) was illegitimate, the powerful didn’t show hypocrisy. In fact, the moral hypocrisy effect not only disappeared but was reversed, with the illegitimate powerful becoming stricter in judging their own behavior and more lenient in judging the others.

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Best humourous tweet of the week:

@shareski: I walked by hotel room 404 and was tempted to hang a post-it saying “Room not Found!”

TLt2010 Presentation on Net Work Learning

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I am presenting at Tlt2010 in Saskatoon this morning. Here’s the overview:

The network era is blurring the lines between working, learning and playing. As we become more connected, our governing models, our business structures, and our ways to support learning are all getting more complex. Social learning is how knowledge is generated in networks – and networks are where many of us will be working. Net work means learning to work anew.

These are the finalized slides, revised this morning. [Re-posted with explanatory notes on 14 May 2010]

Net work learning with notes

I’ve really enjoyed the presentations by my co-presenters, Scott Leslie and David Wiley and of course their insights and comments had me making last-minute changes this morning.

Note: I’m told the video of this presentation will be available in about a week or so. I’ll pass it on via twitter and add the link here.

To be, or not to be a consultant

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I had the pleasure of meeting Jean Gaudry through a mutual friend last week and the subject turned to the life of a freelance consultant. As an executive search specialist, Jean has met many executives who have considered going independent. This is his advice:

Voici le résumé des cinq critères que j’ai présentés un jour dans une conférence intitulée : » Pourquoi devenir ou ne pas devenir consultant » :
1.- Avoir un produit ou service clairement défini et facile à présenter.
2.- Aimer sincèrement travailler avec ce service ou produit.
3.- Se donner sans réserve pour faire la promotion et l’exécution de ce produit ou service.
4.- Avoir un but et un objectif précis pour savoir orienter notre travail au quotidien.
5.- Aimer et trouver stimulant le travail de développement des affaires et la promotion de notre service.

[my loose translation] Here are the five criteria that I presented at a conference entitled, “To be or not to be a consultant”:

  1. Have a clearly defined product or service that is simple to explain.
  2. Sincerely love doing that work.
  3. Be willing to give your all for your work and promoting it [it’s not a hobby].
  4. Have clear long-term objectives and align your daily work to them.
  5. Enjoy doing sales and business development [because you will be doing a lot of it].

I wrote an article, So you want to be an e-learning consultant? a couple of years ago and I would add Jean’s advice for anyone considering this road.

“What happens in interaction between the parts is more important than the parts”

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Here are some of the things I learned via twitter this past week:

Think Tweets are simple, 140 character messages? Think again via @TammyGreen [interesting annotated map]

With annotations, Twitter could become a platform for sharing anything, not just 140 characters of text. What will developers do with that data? We can only imagine. Perhaps new apps will allow users to share media like photos, videos and music? Or they’ll add more details about a tweeted link? Will you tag your tweets? Share vCards? Create polls? These sorts of innovations will launch shortly and we expect to be surprised and delighted by what the developers come up with.

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@charlesjennings “Less is More: A different approach to learning & development (L&D) in a world awash in information” [requires free membership to access]

So, what are the core skills we need to help people develop so they can operate in this ocean of information?

To be honest, I don’t have a definitive list. But I think I know some of the capabilities L&D should focus on. If we help people develop these, at least they’ll be on a solid footing to extract positive and practical use from the volumes of information they come across each day:

a. Search and ‘find’ skills
To find the right information when it’s needed
b. Critical thinking skills
To extract meaning and significance
c. Creative thinking skills
To generate new ideas about, and ways of, using the information
d. Analytical skills
To visualise, articulate and solve complex problems and concepts, and make decisions that make sense based on the available information
e. Networking skills
To identify and build relationships with others who are potential sources of knowledge and expertise, within and outside the organisation
f. People skills
To build trust and productive relationships that are mutually beneficial for information sharing
g. Logic
To apply reason and argument to extract meaning and significance
h. A solid understanding of research methodology
To validate data and the underlying assumptions on which information and knowledge is based

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@EskoKilpi “I rewrote my post about communication and competition”

Social networks provide problem-solving capability that results directly from the amount of communication and level of diversity in communication. Most organizations would soon fail if all employees thought alike or had little, or no contact. There are two new challenges: First is to understand the need for (net)working with difference. The second challenge is even bigger because of reductionist thinking: our assumption has been that by understanding the parts in detail, we understand the whole. This is simply not possible! What happens in interaction between the parts is more important than the parts. The whole is the emergent pattern of that interaction.

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@dsearls “If we see the Net as a medium rather than as a place, we risk losing it. Here’s why: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes”

We need to make clear that the Public Domain is the market’s underlying geology–a place akin to the ownerless bulk of the Earth–rather than a public preserve in the midst of private holdings. This won’t be easy, but it can be done.

We need to make clear that the Net is the best public place ever created for private enterprise, and that the success of the Net owes infinitely more to personal initiative than to the mesh of pipes in the ground beneath it.

We need to stress the fact that the primary “end” in the Net’s end-to-end architecture is the individual. The Net’s success is due far more to the freedoms enjoyed by individuals than to the advantages enjoyed by large companies whose existence predates the Net.

We need to remind policy makers that the Net’s biggest success stories–Amazon, Google, eBay and Yahoo–are the stories of Bezos, Page, Brin, Omidyar, Yang and Filo.

We need to make clear that the Net is the best public place ever created for private enterprise, and that the success of the Net owes infinitely more to personal initiative than to the mesh of pipes in the ground beneath it.

Instructional or Formal; whatever

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I used this chart, developed a few years ago, to explain in a simplified way the differences between Learning Interventions and Instructional Interventions.

It shows that training & education (in the workplace) should concentrate on addressing a clear lack of knowledge and skills by using appropriate instructional interventions, well-established over the years.

Non-instructional learning interventions are those that provide tools and resources in order to do something we don’t know (or have forgotten) how to do. This is typically the area of performance support but also communities of practice, personal knowledge management, personal learning environments, etc. Informal learning would be another name for non-instructional. Instructional Systems Development (ISD) does not address non-instructional (informal) learning requirements and even the literature on performance support lacks clear design guidelines. Informal learning (or whatever you want to call it) is a major opportunity for improving work performance.

Informal learning needs will continue to grow as more work requires access to contextual knowledge, as Robert Kelley showed over a 20 year study of knowledge workers:

“What percentage of the knowledge you need to do your job is stored in your own mind?”

1986 ~ 75%.
1997 ~ 20%
2006 ~ 10%

We cannot train individuals for that 90% but we can support access to knowledge and expertise across the enterprise. This is an opportunity.  There is much experience available in the fields of knowledge management, organizational design, human-computer interaction and information design that is valid and can be put to good use.

However, practitioners don’t always talk to each other or use the same frameworks and terminology. This is where I see Jay Cross’ concept of workscapes (PDF) going – a way to integrate these fields and use what we already know.

Working smarter is the key to sustainability and perpetual improvement. Knowledge work and learning to work smarter are becoming indistinguishable. The accelerating rate of change in business forces everyone in every organization to make a choice: learn while you work or become obsolete.

The infrastructure for working smarter is called a workscape. It’s not a separate function so much as another way of looking at how we organize work. Workscaping helps people grow so that their organizations may prosper. Workscapes are pervasive. They are certainly not lodged in a training department. In fact, they make the training department obsolete.

Working smarter also means working together but first we have to get out of our disciplinary silos.

Formalized informal learning: a blend we don’t need

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Telling people that we can “formalize informal learning” is a not so subtle way of saying, “it’s OK, you don’t have to make any fundamental changes to the way you’ve been been doing training & development for the past half century”.

I asked the question in February’s eCollab Blog Carnival, with tongue very close to my cheek, because I knew it would stimulate discussion on the role of informal learning in workplace performance. I never thought anyone would seriously adopt it, but on viewing Jay Cross’s slides yesterday, it seems many have.

Here is an excerpt from an interview I did with Jay on the subject:

When asked if we should try to formalize informal learning, Jay responded by saying that it’s the wrong question. It would be like asking if we should “informalize” formal training. A key understanding that Jay wants to get across to everyone in the workplace learning arena is that it’s not an either/or proposition, but rather how much informal and how much formal learning should we support and who is determining what’s to be done. All learning is a bit of both. His promotion of informal learning is not to replace formal training but to open up the possibilities of supporting the other 80% of learning that has been ignored for far too long.

Two core themes in supporting informal learning are control and trust. Managers and supervisors need to give up some control and organizations must learn to trust their people, says Jay. Embracing, encouraging and supporting informal learning is part of a greater workplace cultural change.

Aye, there’s the rub – our organizations actually need to change.

We need to change from this:

To this:

This kind of change is not just adding another “blend” to the training bar-mix. It is a fundamental change required to move from a command & control pyramid to a network. It means a very different training department, if it’s even called that any more, as well as a new framework for informal, social learning in the enterprise. The required role for supporting workers is connecting, communicating & collaborating.

Jim McGee summed up the difference in yesterday’s conversation on a world without KM, the “best argument for Social Networks over Knowledge Management is shift in perspective from static content to dynamic interaction“.

It’s the same for training. Informal learning is dynamic and social (on the fly, just-in-time, self-directed, group-directed, serendipitous) while formal training is static (designed, directed, evaluated). What about a world without ISD (instructional systems design)? The best argument favouring informal learning over formal training is a shift in perspective from static content to dynamic interaction. It also means a loss of control for training departments everywhere. Tough.

Don’t try to formalize informal learning. Just help people do their jobs.

Here’s some final advice from @mneff during yesterday’s KM conversation: “Focus on connection & collaboration. The management of assets is mostly obsolete by the time it is stored.”

Our aggressively intelligent citizenry

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In 2004 I commented on an article by Peter Levesque calling for new leadership for the information revolution. He said that communities have not been as successful as corporations in producing certain kinds of societal benefits as a result of the internet’s enabling connectivity. “I suggest that the leaders will be found among the aggressively intelligent citizenry, liberated from many tasks and obligations by technology freely shared; using data, information and knowledge acquired from open source databases, produced from the multiples of billions of dollars of public money invested through research councils, universities, social agencies, and public institutions.”

It seems that some of that is happening now, as reported by Stephen Downes:

Congratulations to the Canadian government (yes, you Mr. Harper) for allowing openparliament.ca. And even more to the point, congratulations to Michael Mulley for making it happen. And from David Eaves, “‘Parliament IT staff agreed to start sharing the Hansard, MP’s bios, committee calendars and a range of other information via XML by the end of the year.’

This is great news. Having this data in XML, an open interchange format, means it’ll be far easier for this and other sites to use Parliamentary data, and will really lower the barrier to creating new and innovative ways of sharing information on our democratic system.” It goes without saying what a valuable resource this would be for schools, especially with the XML data feeds.

However, my conclusion from 2004 pretty well remains the same – our management and corporate models need to change even more to allow our “aggressively intelligent citizenry” to lead in business. They need to be free to express their opinions, without fear of losing their livelihood. They need to be able to share data (including information & ideas, which are now represented as data) and build upon them, without fear of being sued.

We are an information society, moving into a knowledge society, while a few corporations own our data and can make profits off it for a very long time. The problem is that we cannot grow as a creative knowledge society without the free flow of ideas. Patenting ideas slows down our collective ability to learn.

Open government data is one step forward, but we also need open business data, especially ideas. From Intellectual Property, Information and the Common Good (1999):

The fundamental problem with intellectual property as an ethical category is that it is purely individualistic. It focuses on the creator/developer of the intellectual work and what he or she is entitled to. There is truth in this, but not the whole truth. It ignores the social role of the creator and of the work itself, thus overlooking their ethically significant relationships with the rest of society. The balance is lost.

Social media, social learning, social business – these all influence the social role of the creator and the work, and cannot be clearly delineated in our hyper-connected society. In a networked world, we need to divorce data from physical property. If not, we will have the worst of both worlds: corporations freely aggregating our crowd-sourced data and then selling it back to us. It’s happening already with Google, YouTube, Facebook and all the other social media sites that use our data, legally own it and profit from it.

Parliament is slowly opening up and communities are waking up, but our wealth-generation models are lagging behind, in spite of the few good examples from WorldBlu. What good is an aggressively intelligent citizenry without access to its own ideas?

Make imperfect copies

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Copying is an underrated business skill says Drake Bennett in Boston Globe’s The Imitation Economy. However, you have to be careful what you copy and from whom:

For example, while it’s tempting to copy direct competitors, especially when they’re doing well, it’s often more helpful to look for models in far-flung fields: It’s ground less likely to have been mined by competitors, but where unfamiliar ideas have already been tested. Shenkar points to how the toy firm Ohio Art has borrowed from the automotive industry and how the medical supply firm Cardinal Health copied the methods of food distributors, but there are plenty of examples beyond the business world: Today weapons designers imitate video game designers, traffic engineers borrow from particle physics, mechanical engineers copy the intricacies of plant structure, architects mimic airplane design, and psychologists use techniques perfected by magicians to design research studies.

In looking at organizational structures for complex environments we could learn something from how nature deals with complexity through copying. Natural selection is basically making multiple copies, with slight variations, of which only the best-suited survive; and then repeating this process over long periods of time. Perhaps organizations need to incorporate the creation of adaptations (slightly imperfect copies) into their business processes. A culture of encouraging the identification of and experimentation with emergent processes would be part of this.

Look at these recent web projects: Twitter is not that different from Jaiku, though only the former is hugely successful. However, Jaiku is now open source and may grow into something else, under Google’s umbrella. Meanwhile, Yammer started making some headway in business micro-blogging, but it’s a proprietary platform that could go the way of Ning and suddenly change its pricing model. Laconi.ca perhaps sees this weakness as an opportunity and has launched open source Status.net as an alternative for organizational micro-blogging. All of these are variations on a basic theme: short, mostly public text messages, with links & attribution.

When I work with clients I often bring the perspective of other fields to the organization. Like the copying cited above, you can learn from different disciplines but you have to understand the underlying patterns and structures and see how they can be used in your own context. The lesson from The Medici Effect is that old associative patterns must first be broken down and then new combinations can be found. Author Frans Johansson suggests [I suggest]:

diversifying occupations [abolish standard job competencies]

work with diverse groups of people [make everything transparent to as many people as possible]

Go intersection hunting [encourage reading outside one’s field and regularly “straying off the path”]

These are simple changes, made at the lowest levels of the organization, that when applied consistently and over time, can have major influences on the business. In dealing with complexity, we don’t need to add more complication to our business models, we need to make small, but fundamental changes to how work is done.

Working online is different

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With volcanic ash grounding most flights in northern Europe, I’ve been thinking about web conferencing and distributed work. I work predominantly at a distance, using networked communications (what we used to call computer supported collaborative work), and have been doing so for over a decade. I have never met several of my clients in person and the same goes with some of my business partners. I can go many months without stepping foot in an airport. Flight cancellations don’t have much direct influence on my work, though I do understand the economic ramifications of the current situation.

Over the years I’ve used a lot of different technologies, from video conferencing to collaborative work spaces. Currently, my favourites are Zorap, Skype, and Google Documents. I give more presentations online than I do in-person and I must say that online presenting has some real advantages — backchannels, ability to send links, engaged participants who can help others, etc.

But it’s not about the technology. The real issue is getting people used to working at a distance. For instance, everything has to be transparent for collaborative work to be effective online. Using wikis or Google Documents means that everyone can see what the others have contributed. There is no place to hide. For example, I once developed a Request for Proposals with a large group distributed across several time zones. Everyone could provide input for a specified period of time and then that issue was closed. Later, some people complained that their requirements were not being addressed. I was able to look at the revision history of the wiki and show that they had not even contributed on those issues. This stopped the complaints and we were able to move on.

I now take for granted my online personal knowledge mastery processes, such as social bookmarking, blogging, and tweeting, but these habits make online collaboration much, much easier. However, these habits and practices have taken several years to develop and may not come easily to many workers.  If  economic conditions and events that disrupt air traffic drive organizations to use more online social tools, many people may be in for a shock. Work, as they know it, will change.

Emergent Social Media

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Four major types of social media (SM), according to Patti Anklam are:

  • Media SM – news, commentary & opinions
  • Customer SM – listening to customers, responding to market needs
  • Enterprise SM – provide the conditions for enabling knowledge & action to emerge
  • Personal SM – learning, creating, co-creating, sharing, weaving

Patti also asks, what’s the fifth SM? — “the networked, community, purposeful use of social media to bind networks, causes, and events.” Ideas include: Cause; Crowd & Community SM. My suggestion would be Emergent SM, because it is not separate but a result of activities in the other four.

Learning is described as an essential part of Personal SM but really it is part of all four. In networks, learning cannot be pulled out as a separate activity. We have to stop thinking of learning as a separate thing/area/silo. As I have said before, when you learn with and from your customers, learning and marketing are the same. Perhaps getting rid of the L word is a start. It’s all learning.

Here’s my perspective:

Personal SM facilitates cooperation in networks. It is self-directed.

Enterprise SM enables collaboration inside the organization and focuses on shared objectives.

Media & Customer SM are specialized areas for certain organizational objectives and are market focused.

Emergent SM develops as continuous learning, co-creating & sharing become the norm, at the individual, organizational and market level. As Esko Kilpi states:

Complex organizations are neither products of random experimentation, nor can they be perfectly designed beforehand  and managed efficiently top down. The Internet could not have been designed top down, nor can any living organism be planned from outside.

What is going on in these cases is called emergence. Interaction itself has the capacity to create emergent structure, coherence, consistency and change.

Emergent SM is the combination of self-directed learners and learning organizations who connect as a network that learns: Networking = Learning