Month: August 2011

"Hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust"

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Here are some interesting things that were shared via Twitter these past two weeks.

I was called a Bandwidth enhancer by @WallyBock – I like that term!

“Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.” ~Peter Ustinov – via @CBurell

“if managers really managed, they wouldn’t need performance consulting. Performance is the managers job.” – @BillCush

(organizational / institutional) “Hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust” … Warren Bennis .. an original leadership guru – via @JonHusband

BPM, overpromised & under-delivered: Programming is the automation of the known. Business processes … are the management & anticipation of the unknown – by @pevansgreenwood

Since Frederick Taylor’s time we’ve considered business – our businesses – vast machines to be improved. Define the perfect set of tasks and then fit the men to the task. Taylor timed workers, measuring their efforts to determine the optimal (in his opinion) amount of work he could expect from a worker in a single day. The idea is that by driving our workers to follow optimal business processes we can ensure that we minimise costs while improving quality. LEAN and Six Sigma are the most visible of Taylor’s grandchildren, representing generations of effort to incrementally chip away at the inefficiencies and problems we kept finding in our organisations.

Social & Workplace Learning through the 70:20:10 Lens – by @CharlesJennings

The shift in focus to workplace and social learning by HR and Learning professionals over the past few years is a significant one. And it’s not just a passing phase or fad. It is reflecting a fundamental change that is happening all around us – the move from a ‘push’ world to a ‘pull’ world, and the move from structure and known processes to a world that is much more fluid and where speed to performance and quality of results are paramount.

The Progress Principle: “One of the best business books I’ve read in many years.” … @DanielPink

[Teresa Amabile] Our survey showed that most leaders don’t understand the power of progress. When we asked nearly 700 managers from companies around the world to rank five employee motivators (incentives, recognition, clear goals, interpersonal support, and support for making progress in the work), progress came in at the very bottom. In fact, only 5% of these leaders ranked progress first – a much lower percent than if they had been choosing randomly! Don’t get me wrong; those other four motivators do drive people. But we found that they aren’t nearly as potent as making meaningful progress.

“And no, there was no need for a training department”; comment by @UFrei on Training Departments will Shrink

And why did these experts spend so much of their valuable time coaching us newbies? … And no, there was no need for a training department (our branch had been too small anyway). But there was an attitude to passing on the expertise from the best SMEs to the ‘apprentices’ and this attitude had been sponsored by senior management.

My conclusion: We need Sponsors facilitating learning (something former ‘Training Departments’ could probably do) and motivated Coaches among the experts with the allowance to spend part of their time to develop new expertise.

It's about networks

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Rob Paterson writes at FastForward Blog on how the UK riots show us that everyone needs to be plugged into the Web to get things done; for good and for bad:

The Police and the community are learning also in real time how to help each other – by also using social media. Citizens are using Twitter and Facebook to help the police have better intelligence and the police are learning this week how best to respond and to monitor.

I noted in a post on Agility & Autonomy that a culture of perpetual Beta is critical. Perpetual Beta means we never get to the final release and that our learning will never stop. Agile organizations realize they will never reach some future point where everything stabilizes and they don’t need to learn or do anything new. Networks are in perpetual Beta too. Unlike hierarchies, they continuously change shape, size and composition. Our thinking needs to continuously change as well.

Euan Semple talks about the power the Web gives us:

This is why I am so passionate about the web and the ability it gives us, to quote David Weinberger, to “write ourselves into existence”, to see the world as made up of connected individuals with the ability to shape their shared future rather than as a mass or ideologically driven herd.

This is also why I feel so motivated to work with the large corporations and institutions that so dominate our modern world. If I can help any of the individuals who make up those organisations to feel a little bit more self aware, a little bit more capable, and a little bit more able to think for themselves and speak for themselves, and to do so as part of networks of others doing the same – then I will have done my job.

I’ve observed that one of the biggest hurdles facing organizations, and people working in them, is to stop thinking of hierarchies and start thinking of networks. Asking, “What do you do for a living?” shows hierarchical thinking, as does “What is your job title?”.  Network-centric questions would be, “What is happening?” or “What are you learning?” or “Who are you learning from?”. No wonder Twitter asks, What’s happening?; Socialcast asks you to share something; Google+ prompts you to share what’s new and Yammer asks, What are you thinking about?

Both Rob and Euan posted their thoughts online today and I have woven them together with my own perspectives. My thinking is a product of my networks. Understanding networks, weaving networks and contributing to networks (the integration of learning & work) are now critical skills in all organizations. Like Euan, I am making progress one person at a time, and there has been progress. I hope it’s fast enough to deal with the increasing complexity and violence.

It’s about networks, stupid, or, as Searls & Weinberger conclude in World of Ends, “We have nothing to lose but our stupidity.

Those hard soft-skills

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Soft skills, especially collaboration and networking, will become more important than traditional hard skills. Smart employers have always focused more on attitude than any specific skill-set because they know they can train for a lack of skills and knowledge. Soft skills require time, mentoring, informal learning and management support. Soft skills for the networked workplace are foundational competencies.

So what are these so-called soft skills?

Participating in a decentralized world/society/economy/business requires trust.

Cooperation – in our work is needed so that we can continuously develop emergent practices demanded by increased complexity. What worked yesterday won’t work today. No one has the definitive answer any more but we can use the intelligence of our networks to make sense together and see how we can influence desired results.

We are moving to an economy that values – emotional intelligence, imagination, and creativity.

Putting yourself out there as a learner first means that you may need to check your attitude before going online.

Acting & Improvisation:

  • Failure is an Option
  • Practice Passionate Followership
  • Don’t Act, React
  • Go with your Gut
  • Don’t be a Blockhead
  • Trust Others
  • Make Others Look Good

Tolerance for ambiguity – is becoming an important leadership trait in increasingly complex, networked environments.

Noticing: the first step to a learning organization

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Five years ago I suggested that those who teach will not test:

  • Anyone who teaches is not allowed to test.
  • Those who design the tests are answerable to those who learn and those who teach.
  • Those who teach are only responsible to those who learn and are subjected to tests.

Keith Lyons points out some more fundamental questions about the efficacy of providing feedback:

“Royce [Sadler] observed that “feedback is about telling … that is the problem”. He discussed this dilemma and noted its roots in the transmission model of education. He proposed an alternative model in which teachers were the bridge in students’ journeys from what they know to incorporating information they did not know to develop their knowledge.”

Directed feedback and assessment keep learners in a dependent situation whereas the real aim should be to get learners to notice their own progress.

“Royce argued that ‘traditional’ assessment practices require the assessor to judge a problem, repair the response and give advice. Yet these are a student’s responsibility.  He argued forcefully that Noticing is a key to student flourishing.”

My observations are that trades or craft schools often get students to notice their own progress but this is lacking in general education and corporate training. There is still a culture of dependence, stemming from early school years and copied by so many training and educational bodies:

“The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency.  Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do.  It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives.  The expert makes all the important choices; only I can determine what you must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions which I enforce.”

Shifting from external to internal assessment reinforces what we already know about social learning from Albert Bandura:

“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.”

Self-ownership of our learning, taking responsibility for our mistakes, all in a collaborative work environment that helps us learn socially — these are the hallmarks of a real learning organization.

building tolerance for ambiguity

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High tolerance for ambiguity is becoming an important leadership trait in increasingly complex, networked environments, explains Riitta Raesmaa in Systems Intelligence, Serendipity and Listening for the Better Decisions. Three factors that can increase this tolerance are:

  1. Systems Intelligence Theory of Esa Saarinen,
  2. Value and Importance of Serendipity (the weak links and the edges),
  3. Value and Importance of Listening.

I had not heard of Esa Saarinen, but here is how it was described (2007):

By Systems Intelligence1 we mean intelligent behaviour in the context of complex systems involving interaction and feedback. A subject acting with Systems Intelligence engages successfully and productively with the holistic feedback mechanisms of her environment. She experiences herself as part of a whole, the influence of the whole upon herself as well as her own influence upon the whole. By experiencing her own interdependence in the feedback intensive, interconnected and holistically encountered environment, she is able to act intelligently … The Systems Intelligence approach is basically about taking [Peter] Senge’s discipline of Personal Mastery and the systems perspective as fundamental, and considering systems thinking only secondary. —Systems Intelligence: A Key Competence in Human Action and Organizational Life

Riitta’s three associations align with our initial work on core skills for our 21st century leadership project.

An example of “intelligent behaviour in complex systems”, is understanding when using a Probe — Sense — Respond approach would be appropriate, as per the Cynefin framework:

Complex, in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe — Sense — Respond and we can sense emergent practice.

In Solving Tough Problems, Adam Kahane explains what his colleague at Shell, Alain Wouters, told him about complex situations:

There is not “a” problem out there that we can react to and fix. There is a “problem situation” of which each of us is a part, the way an organ is part of a body. We can’t see the situation objectively: we can just appreciate it subjectively. We affect the situation and it affects us. The best we can do is to engage with it from multiple perspectives, and try, in action-learning mode, to improve it. It’s more like unfolding a marriage than it is like fixing a car.”

Enhanced serendipity can be an emergent property of personal knowledge mastery. PKM increases the chances of serendipitous learning or as Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favours the prepared mind”. Steven Johnson says that “Chance favours the connected mind.”  According to Ross Dawson: “You cannot control serendipity. However you can certainly enhance it, act to increase the likelihood of happy and unexpected discoveries and connections. That’s what many of us do day by day, contributing to others like us by sharing what we find interesting.”

Listening, to others and ourselves, often gets lost in the deadline-driven organizational environment. We really need to listen to the environment. My friend Graham Watt shows that when you rely solely on technology in adapting to complex environments, the result can be death:

In Roland Huntford’s book, SCOTT AND AMUNDSEN, a full account is given of Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott’s epic competition to reach the South Pole first. Both parties relied on technologies. However, with the arrogance of so-called civilized societies of the time, Scott believed the Inuit to be savages with nothing to teach, and relied on current technologies as well as the British sentimentality towards animals. They wore Burberry cloth clothing, used gasoline tractors as well as ponies, and forsook dog teams for manly man-hauling of sleds. Amundsen, on the other hand, was a lifelong student of Inuit technologies. His sleds were lighter, he and his team dressed in various phases of Inuit clothing. Amundsen used dogs, a proven source of power in the Arctic, able to curl up and snooze at 50 below, and readily edible. A harsh use of them, but no worse than ponies freezing to death in their own sweat.

In the end, the Inuit-based technologies won, and the Amundsen team returned so comfortably they actually gained weight, and at one point, re-climbed a 1000 foot descent from the glacier in order to have another ski run. Meanwhile, Scott and his party, with admittedly bad weather, perished, Scott’s remaining moments spent penning poignant notes to his and his team’s loved ones. Scott emerged as the perceived romantic hero of the whole affair, instead of signaling the death of imperial arrogance. Ironically, Amundsen, the unbiased user of available technologies suited to the task, was dismissed in British circles as perhaps lacking in feeling.

Thus did glory and icy death trump Aquavit and a thousand years of winter experience.

Roald Amundsen portrait wearing fur skins
Roald Amundsen c. 1923