Work is learning. Learning is the work.
I have put together two of the major articles on social learning in the enterprise that were posted here this year. A framework for social learning drew on my collaboration with colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance and the evolving social organization was co-authored by Thierry deBaillon.
Please feel free to share this 18 page white paper as I hope it will encourage more conversations on how we can integrate learning and working, a key part of enabling Enterprise 2.0.
The most interesting presentation at last week’s ACCTCanada Directors Forum was, in my opinion, on open innovation by Angus Livingstone, UILO at UBC. Much of the discussion by other presenters focused on patents and other control mechanisms, while Angus showed the shifting paradigms that we are experiencing in university knowledge transfer. He explained that the main shift over the next five years will be from closed to open innovation, in parallel with shifts from outputs to impacts and from transactions to relationships. Angus highlighted the old paradigm:
and showed the new paradigm:
Since hearing that presentation and reflecting on the slides that Angus sent me, I came across Ed Morrison’s paper on how regional innovation clusters form. The initial step is to change the conversation.
The shifting conversation then encourages learning networks to develop, from which can emerge a concerted strategy for innovation. Ed calls the underlying activity, strategic doing:
Networks are complex adaptive systems. We can guide these networks, even manage them, if we follow simple rules. And that’s the point. We cannot guide complexity with complexity. Strategy in complex adaptive systems emerges from following simple disciplines.
Both Angus Livingstone and Ed Morrison show that innovation is dependent on learning in networks. Social learning is about getting things done in networks. It is a constant flow of listening, observing, doing, and sharing. Effective working in networks requires cooperation, meaning there is no fixed plan, structure or direct feedback. Through social learning we can co-develop emergent practices. Social learning is how we move from transactions to relationships and foster knowledge mobilization.
Social learning is not some buzz word from the HR department but is a critical component in fostering innovation and hence prosperity. It’s the ‘how’ of business innovation and is important for decision-makers to not only understand but to embrace by doing. This is why I say that work is learning and learning is the work. Life in perpetual Beta is what every leader and manager needs to understand today.
Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week.
QUOTES
Chance favours the connected mind. by @timkastelle
*****
If your overall strategy depends on speed to market … patents won’t help much. by @timkastelle
Critically, though, if your overall strategy depends on speed to market or quickness of response to changing environmental conditions, patents won’t help much. They’re too slow.
King Gillette: with patent protection he kept prices high; without protection he lowered prices & increased sales & profits: How conventional wisdom can be wrong by @rbgayle
The ‘sell the razor cheap and make money on the razors’ model is really not true at all but has become a standard narrative. Truth is not as important as the narrative, it seems. we do like our stories.
Observable work – more on knowledge work visibility. by @jimmcgee
- What can you do to make your own work more readily observable?
- How might making your work observable be immediately beneficial to you, even if no one else bothered to pay attention?
- Who else benefits if your work is more observable?
- How do you benefit from others making their work more observable?
- What risks and challenges do you need to manage as you make your work more observable?
Enterprise 2.0 is only the next iteration with a fancy new name for research into new ways of working. E2.0 research & the long tail by @drmcewan
The Long Tail does not only apply to books, films and music. There is a long tail in academic research … I also said in my comment that I get frustrated by much of the Enterprise 2.0 conversation, in that it seems as though there is too much focus on novelty and re-invention. That is unfair, though. So much academic research is not easily accessible and written in turgid language. No wonder it is so seldom referenced. It needs to be discovered, translated and made usable.
“The iPad can trap us in the idea that learning is about content delivery” by @CharlesJennings
What is learning about in your opinion?
John Seely Brown, who was the Head of the Xerox Park research center for many years, together with a colleague of his, John Hagel, recently published a book called “The Power of Pull”. It is based around the fact that we live in a world which is information-rich, but generally interaction-poor. In a learning context, it is a world where learning content is ‘pushed’ to people rather than learners ‘pulling’ just the content they need for their learning to take place. Seeley Brown and Hagel map out changes that are taking place as this information economy of push is shifting to a more interactive, ubiquitous and on-demand two-way communication – a world of pull. My colleague in the Internet Time Alliance, Jon Husband, calls this new world “Wirearchy”.
Some qualities of a knowledge worker by @jackvinson
So, what is it that knowledge workers need in order to do their jobs? Merlin talks about three key elements to be great as a knowledge worker in the last two minutes of the talk.
- Tolerance to handle ambiguity, the unknown, and the incomplete;
- know that you have enough information to do the work at hand;
- Courage to work within the uncertainty and the lack of information and still do the job.
Dan Pink discusses Karl Fisch’s classroom techniques in the Telegraph article: Think Tank: Flip thinking – the new buzz word sweeping the US
However, instead of lecturing about polynomials and exponents during class time – and then giving his young charges 30 problems to work on at home – Fisch has flipped the sequence. He’s recorded his lectures on video and uploaded them to YouTube for his 28 students to watch at home. Then, in class, he works with students as they solve problems and experiment with the concepts.
Lectures at night, “homework” during the day. Call it the Fisch Flip.
This article shows how a relatively small shift can have some big impacts. I’ve noticed that art schools have used a similar model for years; class (studio) time is for practice & feedback while evenings are for reading. My wife is currently doing her BFA and this is the model for both her photography studio and print-making workshop.
I think the education and training fields can learn much from the arts & crafts, who never abandoned the mentor/apprentice model. With unlimited access to information, we waste our time together if it’s just information presentation. Perhaps this means we’re seeing the final days of the industrial classroom and the rise of the practice/collaboration room. With this flip, people will need to develop as self-directed learners and instructors will have to focus more on coaching, mentoring and activity development.
The notion of a flip is one that the McLuhan’s discussed in detail in the Laws of Media and is explained concisely by Derrick de Kerckhove, Director of the McLuhan Program in Toronto, in this interview:
every new medium:
- extends a human property (the car extends the foot);
- obsolesces the previous medium by turning it into a sport or an form of art (the automobile turns horses and carriages into sports);
- retrieves a much older medium that was obsolesced before (the automobile brings back the shining armour of the chevalier);
- flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its limits (the automobile, when there are too many of them, create traffic jams, that is total paralysis).
Klaus Wittkuhn wrote an excellent article on the systemic approach required in human performance analysis in the March 2004 edition of Performance Improvement published by ISPI.
A key concept in the article is that you cannot engineer human performance. Human performance is an emergent property of an organization, and is affected by multiple variables. Therefore Witthuhn suggests to first address the “Steering Elements”. These “ensure that the right product is delivered at the right time to the right place”, and include – Management, Customer Feedback, Consequences, Expectations and Feedback. Once the steering elements have been addressed, then look at the “Enabling Elements” – Management (again), Design, Resources and Support.
Only after the steering and enabling elements (the non-human factors) have been aligned, should we look at work performance. The rationale here is that it is only within an optimized system that we can expect optimal human performance. As Wittkuhn states:
It is not an intelligent strategy to train people to overcome system deficiencies. Instead, we should design the system properly to make sure that the performers can leverage all their capabilities.
After several years, I still find this is the most succinct operationalization of performance technology that I have read.
A major lesson here for the training/HR/learning & development fields is that all the courses and training in the world will not overcome system deficiencies. Perhaps this is why the training department is usually not part of the C level (executive) conversations in most organizations. Even if training does its job, there’s a good chance it will be ineffective in a flawed organization. I had this realization many years ago, which is why I focus on organizational models and systems design. Training is not an effective lever for organizational change and neither is HR for that matter. In case you were wondering, that’s why these departments are often ignored by key decision makers.
Over the past decade I’ve come to the conclusion that networks are changing everything in our lives. Dealing with networks is the big challenge for leaders, managers and knowledge workers of all types. Because we are all inter-networked, work is learning and learning is the work. We can no longer separate learning and working, and all attempts to do so are fraught with problems. Instructional content developed earlier is quickly out of date. Those who should be attending formal training are too busy working, so they slowly lose their skills and currency and become out of date. This is usually realized just after being downsized and forced to look for new work.
Acceptance of life in perpetual Beta is a necessary attitude to survive and thrive in our networked society. As Jay Cross wrote here several years ago,
No human life goes beyond beta; life is a perpetual experiment and reshaping. Speaking for myself, I recognize that I still have a lot of bugs.
What’s beta and what’s not is a state of mind. Many people try to go into release prematurely: they put defective product on the market. (By productizing people, I mean locking in on attitudes, structure, opinions, etc.: becoming rigid.)
Life as beta is uplifting. You have the opportunity to streamline things, to resond to feedback, to become a killer app.
Lots of alphas are claiming beta status now. They debut on life’s big stage long before they’re prepared to play the part.
As Jay says, Beta is not Alpha. You actually have to do something concrete but you also have to be ready to let it go.
I am seeing a great need for senior managers to get some control over their work in an increasingly complex business environment. Paradoxically, they can gain control by giving up control:
Acceptance of life in perpetual Beta is the first step.
Developing personal strategies for sense-making, such as PKM, is the next step.
Sharing knowledge and participating in professional networks then becomes a necessity for work.
Being willing to create and test emergent practices is next.
Finally, we need to build new structures, like wirearchy, for how we work and learn together.
Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week:
QUOTES:
@GeorgeKao “There’s no such thing as ‘keeping up.’ There’s only checking in at high leverage times.”
@JohnDCook “He who marries the spirit of the age will soon be a widow.”
*****
@JDeragon People are now the engine of change and the fuel is communications. Systemic Impact of Social Technology
System outcomes can be influenced by numerous factors such as:
- Competitor innovation that attracts the market away from your business
- Cost of goods increases and margins shrink. You cut expenses to survive.
- Employee turnover which fuels inconsistency and waste.
- Customer leave due to dis-satisfaction
- Market shifts that you are unaware of and don’t understand
The #1 influence that is threaded through all five examples above is communications.
Knowledge Management = Story Management. Anecdote
How do you organise your stories?
I didn’t realise it at the time but when we started this blog back in 2004 we were creating a type of story bank where we could go back and retrieve great stories to tell.
If you don’t make sense of the world for yourself, then you’re stuck with someone else’s world view. Personal knowledge management is not so much about creating knowledge but rather the development of conscious regular activities from which can emerge new knowledge. The knowledge artifacts created along the way are only as good as the use to which they are put. My idea of Seeking > Sense-making > Sharing is similar to many other descriptive processes about learning and working.
I’ve mentioned on this blog:
Fluctuating Support Networks: Finding & Likening > Igniting Passions > Mutual Engagement
The Evolving Social Organization: Listen > Create/Converse > Co-create/Formalize
Critical Thinking: Observe/Study > Tentative Opinions > Participate/Evaluate/Challenge
These are all different ways of looking at learning to learn and learning to work; as individuals, with groups and in networks.
Jack Vinson asks: “Can anyone point me (and my friend) to some better resources around doing ‘competitive intelligence’ by asking people within the company to work together to develop the intel? I’ve pointed him to the Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals.”
I was introduced to CI by Conor Vibert about 10 years ago and I discussed on this blog how I did some small scale intelligence collection, collation and dissemination, five years ago. In Conor’s competitive intelligence class at Acadia University, he has students giving presentations on a business, while others are going online to question their claims, and other students are using chat to discuss the points without interrupting the speakers. It’s exciting to watch Conor’s classes in action. Last year, I suggested to a client, a small technology company, how they could set up a CI process. [The company is no longer in business, so I don’t consider this confidential information any more]
Conor wrote a book on CI — A framework for web-based analysis and decision making.
Recommendations:
Developing an internal Competitive Intelligence process:
1. Start by asking questions internally and seeing what kind of answers you get. Use your existing social media tools to do this. A blog or a wiki would work.
2. As a distributed team, each person can be responsible for a specific information source that is monitored regularly.
3. Ask a weekly question and see who can get some information that may be able to answer part or all of it.
4. In the feedback to these questions people may ask you to re-frame the questions. Continue to learn and refine this process for your unique context. Better questions will make for better CI.
5. You may not need to hire anyone else to collate the data, but if you do, keep your team (who have industry knowledge) involved.
6. Don’t just hand CI over to a junior staff member. CI should be part of the conversational flow in the company. Marketing, sales, developers and management should be actively involved.
7. The process of asking questions, seeing if there are answers and in turn asking questions about the questions can hone the team’s ability to gather competitive intelligence.
8. If you decide to purchase access to information sources, such as Hoover’s, only buy one at a time. Use that source as much as you can (squeeze it dry) and until you realize you should eliminate it or augment it with another purchased source.
I had the recent pleasure of meeting Judith Holton, a colleague at Mount Allison University. Judith passed on a couple of papers which I found most interesting, as she has looked deeply into the theory behind the need for what I would describe as social learning networks. Judith uses the term, “fluctuating support networks”. In Exploring the informal organization in knowledge work: A grounded theory of fluctuating support networks (2008), Judith concludes [my emphasis]:
The study contributes to management praxis by raising awareness and offering insights into the practical value of fluctuating support networks and their power to rehumanize the knowledge workplace. As an informal response to the formal organization, fluctuating support networks deviate from the conventions of the formal organization and provide network members with a venue for fulfilling unmet social and psychological work-related needs. Knowledge and understanding of such networks may enable managers to understand their functionality in resolving knowledge workers’ concerns and needs in response to persistent and unpredictable change and may offer managers an additional resource for achieving strategic organizational goals, especially those goals that require cross-functional integration and non-conventional perspectives to address increasingly complex organizational problems. Adopting the basic social process of rehumanizing as a conceptual framework may assist managers and human resource professionals in developing organizational strategies that support a broader humanistic paradigm. Such perspective also highlights the value of the informal organization, and fluctuating support networks in particular, as important psychological infrastructure for the knowledge workplace.
Rehumanising Knowledge Work through Fluctuating Support Networks [PDF] (2005) describes the three stages of rehumanising (Finding & Likening; Igniting Passions; Mutual Engagement). I was most surprised when I noticed that each of these steps parallels the three parts of personal knowledge management, namely: Seeking; Sense-making & Sharing. I’ve added some of my previous statements on working smarter, after the colon:
Finding & Likening, which is serendipitous or intentional: PKM prepares the mind to be open to new ideas (enhanced serendipity)
Igniting Passions, which amplifies causal looping process: Aids in observing, thinking and using information & knowledge (I Sense)
Mutual Engagement, which facilitates creative problem solving: “You know you’re in a community of practice when your practice changes” (We Use)
Judith Holton’s research confirms my observations and readings over the past decade. Knowledge workers cannot work effectively within the confines of hierarchical structures that are beset by change from within and without. Social networks, facilitated by social media, provide the fluctuating support networks that are necessary. The problem is clear:
Knowledge workers identify this increasing sense of dehumanisation in their work and work environments as a particular concern. The loss of the human dimension in workplace interactions is characterized by a work environment that is compressed, fearful, isolating, bureaucratic and legalistic; by interactions that are atomised and inauthentic; and, by work assignments that erode autonomy and identity. (Holton, 2008)
Once again, I see that social learning in informal networks is key to getting things done in today’s knowledge-intensive workplace.