Month: October 2011

Third Industrial Revolution – Review

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The future should be networked, writes Jeremy Rifkin in The Third Industrial Revolution. He sees the next industrial age, one bridging industrialism to continental collaboration as the most feasible post-carbon future. This era of networked energy will be based on 5 pillars, all essential for a successful transition:

  1. shift to renewable energy
  2. shift buildings to become local power plants
  3. deploy energy stores locally, especially hydrogen
  4. use the Internet to create a smart energy-sharing grid
  5. shift transportation to plug-in & fuel cell power

Europe is leading the way and Rifkin spends a good part of the book setting up a narrative and understanding for an American audience. There’s lots here on how power is created, controlled and regulated. I was most interested in the way Rifkin connects so many perspectives together. The first part talks about energy but the book continues with sections on economics, politics and education. There is a good review of how many of our current institutions were forged at the beginning of the second industrial revolution, around 1890 – e.g. corporations, schools, utilities.

He discusses how bureaucracies are an outdated form of control. This resonated with me after my presentation on social media to federal assistant deputy ministers only a few weeks ago:

Still, systemic thinking is a difficult task in a bureaucratic environment where there is a strong drive to hold on to turf and protect domains. This is what leads to what I call the DG (director general) abyss – the process by which big-picture ideas, agreed to at the ministerial level and even higher at the head-of-state level, lose their heft and become increasingly smaller and more narrow in vision and scope as they descend down into the departments and agencies, finally ending up as a shadow of their former selves, languishing in the minutia of countless reports, studies and evaluations, whose purposes become increasingly obtuse, even to those tasked with managing them.

The institutions we created to mirror the dominant energy producer of the 20th century, big oil, are a large part of the problem:

The oil age from its onset has been characterized by gigantism and centralization. That’s because harnessing oil and other elite fossil fuels requires large amounts of capital and favors vertical economies of scale, which necessitates a top-down command and control structure. The oil business is one of the largest industries in the world. It’s also the most costly enterprise for collecting, processing and distributing energy ever conceived by humankind.

As the Internet economy has shifted to a distributed and collaborative model, so too must the energy economy. It will be a battle between centralized and distributed energy and how easy it will be for localities to participate and profit. Rifkin provides great detail on how this can be done by 2050 and his model has already been adopted by the European Union while the US and Canada lag behind. The younger generation already understand this model, as the President of Spain noted, “For a younger generation growing up on the Internet and comfortable interacting in social media, the hierarchically organized flow of authority and power from the top down is old school.”

Rifkin includes a good analysis of the education system and its issues, with a section entitled, The Biosphere becomes the Learning Environment. Though I found the first part a bit slow going I really enjoyed the second half and the synthesis it provides on much of my professional work. Near the end, Rifkin summarizes the fundamental communications shifts we’ve experienced, echoing Marshall McLuhan:

All forager-hunter societies were oral cultures, steeped in mythological consciousness. The great hydraulic agricultural civilizations were organized around writing and gave rise to theological consciousness. Print technology became the communication medium to organize the myriad activities of the coal- and steam-powered first Industrial Revolution, 200 years ago. Print communication also led to a transformation from theological to ideological consciousness during the Enlightenment. In the 20th century, electronic communications became the command and control mechanism to manage a second industrial revolution, based on the oil economy and the automobile. Electronic communication spawned a new psychological consciousness.

Today we are on the verge of another seismic shift. Distributed information and communication technologies are converging with distributed renewable energies, creating the infrastructure for a third industrial revolution. In the 21st century, hundreds of millions of people will transform their buildings into power plants to harvest renewable energies on-site, store those energies in the form of hydrogen, and share electricity with one other across continental grids that act much like the Internet. The open-source sharing of energy will give rise to collaborative energy spaces, not unlike the collaborative social spaces on the Internet.

The third industrial revolution paves the way for biosphere consciousness.

Plans, structures and illusions

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 Here are some of the insights and ideas that were shared via Twitter this past week.

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face ~ Mike Tyson – via @DickBeveridge

Working Wikily: “It is ultimately to everyone’s benefit when we see ourselves as a node within a network …”

Say goodbye to the organisational hierarchies please – by @sig

This focus on efficiency over effectiveness should remind us of what Peter Drucker once said: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” And today, thanks to modern IT we do things very efficiently, especially the 60% that which need not to be done at all.

@DavePollard – The Metamovement: Moving Beyond Marches and People in the Street

THE CHALLENGE OF BALANCING GROUP AUTHORITY AND INDIVIDUAL AUTONOMY

From what I have seen, the major challenge the Occupy groups are dealing with is about who is authorized to do what on behalf of, or binding upon, participants, without infringing on individual participants’ autonomy. For example, if someone wants to organize a march, does it need to be put forward as a proposal and agreed to by consensus of the whole? Since it only needs to be agreed to by consensus if it is put forward as a proposal at a General Assembly, does this encourage people to circumvent the collective decision-making process by just saying “I’m going to do this — who’s with me?” instead of putting forward a proposal to the group?

@JeffMerrell – WSJ: Peter Cappelli on why companies aren’t getting employees they need. “The problem is an illusion”

Some of the complaints about skill shortages boil down to the fact that employers can’t get candidates to accept jobs at the wages offered. That’s an affordability problem, not a skill shortage. A real shortage means not being able to find appropriate candidates at market-clearing wages. We wouldn’t say there is a shortage of diamonds when they are incredibly expensive; we can buy all we want at the prevailing prices.

The real problem, then, is more appropriately an inflexibility problem. Finding candidates to fit jobs is not like finding pistons to fit engines, where the requirements are precise and can’t be varied. Jobs can be organized in many different ways so that candidates who have very different credentials can do them successfully.

like a horse and carriage – by @snowded

“Economists and workplace consultants regard it as almost unquestioned dogma that people are motivated by rewards, so they don’t feel the need to test this. It has the status more of religious truth than scientific hypothesis.”

“The facts are absolutely clear.
There is no question that in virtually all circumstances in which people are doing things in order to get rewards, extrinsic tangible rewards undermine intrinsic motivation” (New Scientist, 9 April 2011)

Here again is why I do Friday’s Finds. It’s part of my sense-making process:

I added a sense-making activity about two years ago when I realized I was losing track of what I was finding on Twitter. I could have saved interesting tweets to my social bookmarks but instead I decided to do a weekly review of what I had found. This requires little effort during the week, other than clicking the “favorite” star. At the end of the week, I re-read these tweets and their links and then decide which ones are still of interest. The activity of reading, writing and perhaps commenting helps to internalize some of the knowledge. The result is Friday’s Finds and a byproduct is that some other people find them interesting and useful as well.

Connect, exchange, contribute

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Highlights from Skills for Learning & Development Professionals (an article I wrote for T&D Magazine in 2008).

My experiences over the past three years have shown that these skills are still necessary in the workplace.

Attitude:

Accepting that we will never know everything, but that others may be able to help, is the first step in becoming a learning professional. This is an acceptance of a world in flux and that knowledge is neither constant nor fixed.

Instead of trying to know everything in our field, we can concentrate on knowing who to connect with. The network becomes all-important. That means an attitude of openness and collaboration – joining others on a journey of understanding. Giving up control would be a first step on this journey.

Even reading on the web is quite different from print. Digitally, we have opportunities to engage the writers and make our thoughts known, whether through comments or linking to the original article from our blog.

Having a blog, a permanent presence on the Web, becomes the jumping off point for deeper professional discussions. Producing a blog also opens a person up to criticism, so once again, an open attitude to learning is essential.

Learning:

Learning professionals can no longer rest on their past accomplishments while the field changes and grows. They should be testing Web 2.0 tools so that they can develop optimal processes to support their organizations. If learning professionals are not setting the example of learning online, who is?

The example of putting your own learning process out in public or on your intranet shows that you are willing to learn from others. As new tools are introduced, learning professionals should be early adopters, leading the way in testing them out. We are in an age of “walking the talk”.

Collaboration:

Through sharing and exposing their work on the Web, learning professionals can connect to communities of practice and get informal peer review. There is no way to stay current with the technology, the neuroscience or the pedagogy all by ourselves.

With blogs and other collaboration methods, each of us can become a participatory node in various communities of practice. The whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts, and knowing who to call becomes more important than having the right answer. But we are all humans and we relate on a human level. That means that we first have to get to know others and develop a level of trust before real sharing can happen. Collaboration is a two-way street and a blog can get you moving.

Flow [from original transcript and not published in T&D article]

Imagine walking into a cocktail party that has been going on for a few hours and jumping into the conversation. Blogs and activity streams (e.g. Twitter) are like that. They flow along and different people join in the conversation from time to time. One can monitor dozens of blogs and hundreds of streams, not necessarily reading each post. You can then have a general idea of what’s flowing by, so that it’s easy to join the conversation when something interesting pops up.

To use blogs and streams for learning effectively, you have to jump in and go with the flow for a while. Understanding what is behind the writing, as well as the conversations around each post, provides the necessary context. Learning with online media isn’t just about finding a useful fact here or there, but requires an engagement with multiple stories that flow by, sometimes mixing and other times diverging. Following these flows is an acquired skill. It’s a meta- learning skill for the Internet age that is worth developing. Jumping in is the first step.

Critical Thinking

A part of critical thinking is the questioning of underlying assumptions, including our own. There are several Web 2.0 tools that can help develop critical thinking in the four areas of:

1. observing and studying our fields;
2. participating in professional communities;
3. building tentative opinions; and
4. challenging and evaluating ideas.

Connect, exchange, contribute

In many workplaces today, anyone can connect with almost everyone. Each of us can be a contributor to the network. Who you know becomes as important as what you know. Conversations help people make meaning, and the quality of our conversations is affected by the quality of our networks.

If we limit our conversations to only those in the same office, we’re missing out. People with larger and more diverse networks have an advantage as learning professionals and in dealing with change. This constant flow of sense-making through conversations in our workplace networks makes the idea of learning as a fixed event in a specific place look obsolete.

Knowledge filters

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filters
This graphic is part of the Seek > Sense > Share PKM model and is based on Five forms of filtering by Tim Kastelle. Here’s a review of the five forms.

  1. Naive filtering is what too often happens in our knowledge searching. It’s like prairie-dogging, or standing up in your cubicle and asking those close to you for advice. It’s rather hit and miss and dependent on who works nearby and happens to be listening.
  2. Expert filtering worked when knowledge was more stable but in an interconnected, interdependent, digital world we have to ask, who are the experts? Still, good experts are valuable and I use platforms like Twitter to connect to them, like Michael Geist on Canadian copyright law or Valdis Krebs on networks.
  3. Networked expertise can be sought through group-sourced information resources, like the curated Working Smarter Daily or in self-created expertise lists like Google+ to create circles of expertise. You can also link to existing communities of expertise/interest such as Dave Gurteen on knowledge management.
  4. Algorithmic filters can be simple, like typing in a basic search string, or more refined using techniques like Google’s advanced operators. However, they are all based on someone else’s ideas of what is important, programmed in from the start. These filters are beginning to look very dangerous unless you know the underlying logic.
  5. A good perspective on Heuristic filters is Howard Rheingold’s Crap Detection Skills:

“Unless a great many people learn the basics of online crap detection and begin applying their critical faculties en masse and very soon, I fear for the future of the Internet as a useful source of credible news, medical advice, financial information, educational resources, scholarly and scientific research. Some critics argue that a tsunami of hogwash has already rendered the Web useless. I disagree. We are indeed inundated by online noise pollution, but the problem is soluble. The good stuff is out there if you know how to find and verify it. Basic information literacy, widely distributed, is the best protection for the knowledge commons: A sufficient portion of critical consumers among the online population can become a strong defense against the noise-death of the Internet.”

Taking the time to cross the chasm

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I was asked by Ryan McClure, a regular reader of this blog, to “have a go at the fear of change by addressing it directly“. He was referring to situations where senior executives seem to be on a different plane of reality. For example:

  1. The CEO who doesn’t see the value of social networks and lumps them all into the “Facebook for fun” category.
  2. The successful business leader who is milking the current cash cow and sees the Internet as frivolous and of no interest to his customers.
  3. The President who gets others to handle his information needs without understanding the underlying technology infrastructure that is hampering knowledge-sharing and collaboration across the enterprise.

I addressed some of these issues in social media for senior managers, as Michael Cook had asked a similar question. I concluded that blocking social networks slows learning, reduces effectiveness and may in the end kill the organization. Senior managers need to understand social media in order to support learning in social networks which will enable practitioners to produce results.

But that’s probably not enough to change the status quo.

I work on these issues in two ways. One is by showing the big picture. These are patterns that, with any luck, are difficult to ignore. Most executives agree that their work and business environment is getting more complex. I try to show that we need to organize for complexity and diversity in new ways. A different corporate culture is required. Both of these will take some time, so it’s best to balance this message with specific practices that can be started right away.

I will demonstrate the benefits of networks in getting things done. Many times I have shown how simple tools, like social bookmarks, can make professional information gathering and sharing much more efficient. I explain how the organization should leverage collective knowledge from varied individual practices of personal knowledge management (PKM).

This is done by telling stories, showing examples and modelling behaviours, usually over a significant period of time. There is a lot of repetition. It’s also worth revising your message, based on feedback and observation. PKM made sense to my clients only once I had it boiled down to three alliterative words: Seek – Sense – Share. This took a few years to develop.

It takes time to cross the social business chasm.

Grist for the cognitive mill

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A book that influenced many of my opinions on education is Kieran Egan’s, The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape our Understanding. Egan says that Western education is based on three incompatible ideas:

  1. Education as Socialization (age cohorts, class groupings, team sports)
  2. Education as learning about Truth & Reality, based on Plato (varied subjects, academic material, connection to culture)
  3. Education as discovery of our nature, based on Rousseau (personal sense-making, teacher as facilitator)

One of these ideas may be dominant at any given time but no education system can foster all three at once. Therefore we keep trying to re-balance something that can never be balanced. It’s a constantly shifting three-legged stool. In addition, each one by itself is inadequate in a modern society, writes Egan.

Socialization to generally agreed norms and values that we have inherited is no longer straightforwardly viable in modern multicultural societies undergoing rapid technology-driven changes. The Platonic program comes with ideas about reaching a transcendent truth or privileged knowledge that is no longer credible. The conception of individual development we have inherited is based on a belief in some culture-neutral process that is no longer sustainable.

I think Egan’s recommendations for a different system make more sense than any other I have read over the years and it’s a shame his work has not been picked up by educators. However, my aim in this post is not to review these. I’m interested in a conversation Dave Cormier has initiated because this is what Egan has articulated in the first chapter of his book. Dave asks:

 The why of education should be the first question that we answer in any discussion in the field. The answer to the ‘why of education’ question should be debated, mulled and hammered, on and on, and be at the centre of the work that we do. Sadly, it seems to be very difficult to say anything about “what learning is” and “why we educate our children”.

I don’t think it can be adequately answered because our society has not gone beyond the initial three incompatible ideas. Until we address these, we will keep spinning in circles. Dave suggests a shift to a nomadic education model and this might work, but not without addressing the baggage of the three core ideas. Maybe we need three distinct school systems. Perhaps we can examine Egan’s model that breaks from the three core ideas and suggests one where there is no set curriculum and any subject is “grist for the cognitive mill”.

B.H. Liddell Hart, military historian, wrote that “The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is getting an old one out.” And so with the educator’s mind.

Learning, changing and thinking

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Here are some of the observations and insights shared via Twitter this past week. 

In a Complex World, Continuous Learning & Simple Truths Prevail by @CharlesJennings

Despite the sophistication, the big brains and the resources available to the traders and executives in Lehmann Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and the rest, it appears they failed to see this simple truth. That no matter how smart you are, you still needed to carry on learning.

It also appears they were unaware of another simple truth – that continuous learning is the only sustainable asset in a world of constant change.

This study of 25,000 people across 19 countries debunks some assumptions about Gen Y work preferences – via @aaronsilvers

For example, we frequently hear that Gen Y are beating the drum for new working practices – demanding the freedom to work remotely, make use of stimuli such as social networks and to continually have the latest ‘must-have’ technologies.

But the study found that the reality is very different. In fact, younger staff expressed 15-20 per cent less desire than their older colleagues to choose their time and place of work – they actively seek out every opportunity to be in the office in the closest proximity to their boss.

Siri: the hole in the dam for natural language computing –  by @DonaldClark

1. Talking means better learning
E-learning usually puts something between the learner and content – a device. It can be a keyboard, mouse, touchscreen, joystick… whatever. This physical device requires cognitive effort and almost certainly distracts and diminishes the cognitive bandwidth available for attention and processing by the learner. Ideally, there would be no such device. Voice is, in fact, how most everyday communication takes place. We see and speak to each other without any interloper. You didn’t have to learn to speak and listen but you did have to spend years learning how to read, write and use computers. It’s good to talk as it’s how we learn.

Hans de Zwart: 1) Technology is not just a tool, it is not “neutral” 2) You can help change technology for the better – thoughtful presentation on digital civil rights:

 

P2K

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My blog acts as part of my outboard brain. It’s where I can rough out ideas. Narrating my work in public helps keep me connected to reality. I connect to my other web media from my blog. Bookmarks, photos and activity streams may change, but my blog is home base. I search my blog almost daily, looking for something I wrote during the past seven years, so that I can reflect on it, re-use it or modify it.

Regular blogging has sharpened my writing and thinking skills. Some of my blog posts have been expanded and turned into articles, published in a variety of venues. Most of my thoughts on complexity, organizational learning and technological change have been formed here. I have also expanded from a focus on learning, work & technology to leadership, networks and other areas.

I’ve met some close friends though my blog. Blogging connected me to Jay, my business partner at the Internet Time Alliance and subsequently to Clark, Jane, Charles and Paul. I met Jon Husband and was introduced to wirearchy through blogging. I now have people I would call friends on every continent. Contrary to what many social media pundits have said, blogging is not dead, at least not for me.

So why is this post called P2K? Because it’s number 2,000 [inspired by @cbmackay].

Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to comment and create another connection on my blog’s neural network!

Why do we need social business?

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The Dachis Group’s latest XPLANATiON of the attributes of a socially optimized business is a pretty good answer to the question, “What is social business?”

Looking just at the key differences in the info-graphic, I’d like to dig into “Why” these differences are necessary:

Greater acceptance of risks & failures: This is how complex problems are addressed, and all businesses are dealing with more complexity. As I mentioned in leadership emerges from network culture, a Probe-Sense-Respond approach is necessary. Dave Snowden underlines the fact that over half of your probes will fail and hence the need to have a culture where failure is an option. It’s what Dave calls “safe-fail”: “We conduct safe-fail experiments. We don’t do fail-safe design. If an experiment succeeds, we amplify it. If an experiment fails, we dampen it.” Failure is not just an option, it’s a common occurrence.

Clear guidelines allow everyone to speak openly on behalf of the company. That’s because hyperlinks have subverted hierarchy. Everyone is connected. In hierarchical organizations, workers are more connected when they go home than when they’re at work. This is a sure sign of the obsolescence of many management control systems.  The Internet has changed everything.

Democratization of information: User-generated content is ubiquitous and much of it is very useful. Search engines give each worker more information and knowledge than any CEO had 10 years ago. Pervasive connectivity will change traditional power structures, though the full effects of this are not yet visible.

Leaders and experts can easily emerge: It takes different leadership, or leadership for networks, to do the important work in complex work environments, which is to increase collaboration and support social learning in the workplace. If the main point of the internet is to remove “barriers to socializing”, then shouldn’t leadership in a networked, social business strive for a similar objective?

Team-oriented, much flatter, exists beyond the org chart: This is another result of a networked society but I’m not sure if team is the best term for social business and I would use collaboration instead. This is the objective of Wirearchy: a dynamic multi-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology.

Greater business visibility, info flows vertically and horizontally: There are emerging patterns and dynamics related to interconnected people and interlinked information flows, which are bypassing established traditional structures and services. It’s part of wired work.

Comfortable with outward facing communication: Most of the action in business is moving to the edge and a greater percentage of the workforce will be customer-facing.

Leadership emerges from network culture

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Even five years ago it was not the norm to work at a distance. Employers wanted to keep workers on-site, when it made no sense, as this post from 2005 noted: virtual work, but we need you onsite. Virtual work is no longer limited to mostly free-agents, as many salaried employees today work at least part-time off-site. It’s becoming the norm and bringing change with it, even though that change may not be visible.

When people work at a distance, an implicit shift occurs. They have to be trusted to get the work done. Management also shifts from measuring time to measuring results. A new culture emerges. It becomes more trusting. Trust is the glue that holds creative organizations together, not rules and regulations.

Culture is an emergent property of people working together. Leadership is also an emergent property, I am becoming more convinced, as I recently wrote. This post received a lot of attention and Johnnie Moore referred me to an interesting, though rather expensive, book on Managing Without Leadership:

I propose that we consider the phenomenon of leadership in like manner, and conceive of it as part and parcel of organisational practice. In a naturalistic redescription of the phenomenon, we might view it as an emergent, self-organising property of complex systems. There would then be no need for engaging in more leadership studies: instead, we could redirect our attention to the study of the fine-grained properties of contextualised organisational practice.

Donald Clark also passed on a post he made a few years ago on Leadership Training:

Leadership Training: Complex behaviours and skills are reduced to simple geometric diagrams, a pyramid here, an interlocking circle here, a four quadrant typology there. Leadership training became a byword for contradictory theories and over-simplification. A few choice quotes are thrown in, preferably from historically famous leaders, some interactive exercises, straight out of traditional management courses and you’re off.

One way to look at leadership in our complex work world is through the lens of improvisation. In improv, nobody is in charge and leadership is shared. John Moore [not Johnnie] says that from improv, one can also learn how to:

  • be a passionate follower;
  • be a better listener and reactor;
  • make instinctive decisions and deal with the consequences;
  • trust others; and
  • make others look good

These all seem like good advice for organizational leadership as well. Everyone can practise improv skills and everyone can exert leadership in the organization. John Moore says that a major benefit of embracing improv skills for business is that failure is an option, which aligns with Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework, that advises organizations to Probe-Sense-Respond in order to manage in complexity.

Dave also underlines the fact that over half of your probes will fail and hence the need to have a culture where failure is an option. It’s what Dave calls “safe-fail”: “We conduct safe-fail experiments. We don’t do fail-safe design. If an experiment succeeds, we amplify it. If an experiment fails, we dampen it.” Failure is not just an option, it’s a common occurrence.

As networked, distributed workplaces become the norm, trust will emerge from environments that are open, transparent and diverse. As a result of improved trust, leadership will be seen for what it is; an emergent property of a balanced network and not some special property available to only the select few. This shift may give us the real democracy our organizations need to realize their full creative human potential.