Month: October 2011

Networked Learning (PKM) Workshop in Toronto

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Note: this workshop has been postponed until – 30 March 2012.

In just over a month’s time, I’ll be facilitating another one-day workshop on Networked Learning (PKM) at the University of Toronto’s iSchool Institute on Friday, 18 November 2011. The cost for the day is $250.

My consulting work this past year has shown a great need for two aspects of knowledge-sharing in organizations: 1) systems & processes to enable better collaboration & sharing, and 2) individual skills in narrating work and learning in networks. This workshop is focused on the latter.

PKM is an individual, disciplined process by which we make sense of information, observations and ideas. In the past it may have been keeping a journal, writing letters or having conversations. These are still valid, but with digital media we can add context by categorizing, commenting or even remixing it. We can also store digital media for easy retrieval. However, PKM is of little value unless the results are shared by connecting to others and contributing to meaningful conversations. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts as we build on the knowledge of others. As knowledge workers or citizens, PKM is our part of the social learning contract.

Let’s face it, it’s becoming more difficult to make sense of the world by ourselves. Understanding issues that affect our lives takes significant time and effort, whether it be public education, health care or climate change. Even the selection of a mobile phone plan requires more than mere numeracy and literacy.  We need context to understand complex issues and this can come from those we are connected to. The reach and depth of our connections become critical in helping us make sense of our environment and to solve problems. Problem-solving is what most people actually do for a living, so doing it better can have widespread effects. With social learning, everyone contributes to collective knowledge and this in turn can make  organizations and society more effective in dealing with problems. PKM is one of the foundations of social learning because we each need to make sense of the signals coming from our networks, while simultaneously reducing the ever-increasing noise.

If you’re in the Toronto area, this may be the workshop for you or your colleagues.

experience-sharing vs information-sharing

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Interesting finds that were shared on Twitter this past week include:

“You are what you repeatedly do. Excellence is not an event it is a habit.” ~Aristotle – via @simpletonbill

“Innovation – a definition: (in a holistic sense) – the realization of new ideas that contribute to sustainable changes” @JonHusband

“If innovation means we are temporarily incompetent because it’s new, then continuous innovation means continuous incompetence.” @Downes

“the single most important management skill to develop is a tolerance for ambiguity” ~ @TimKastelle

How does the traditional world view of knowledge management fit in the world of social business? by @sumeet_moghe

Useful content doesn’t come up by magic. Content also doesn’t come up as a result of an imposed structure. Content arrives on platforms because some people feel a strong ownership for it and believe that there’s value in sharing it. Over a period of time they use metadata such as tags, ratings and comments to provide a layer of information and commentary to the content. Given a reasonable amount of time, the structure for all the content on the platform starts to emerge. Tag clouds help create a map for users so they can browse through the content. Search engines start throwing intelligent results for searches. User commentary, ratings and flags provide a layer of quality control over the content, helping all members of the community find the best content for the purpose.

Knowledge Management = experience-sharing NOT information-sharing – Knoco Stories

In most of the training courses I run, I ask the question “where does knowledge come from?”
Always, every time, I get the answer “Experience – Knowledge comes from Experience”. Never does anyone answer “Knowledge comes from Information”.
Never
If you don’t believe me, try it yourself. Ask people “where does knowledge come from”? and see what they say.

General McChrystal “we had a frighteningly simplistic view of recent history”

We didn’t know enough and we still don’t know enough,” McChrystal said. “Most of us, me included, had a very superficial understanding of the situation and history, and we had a frighteningly simplistic view of recent history, the last 50 years.”

Is leadership an emergent property?

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Note: this post is in early Beta.

Is leadership an emergent property of people working together (social capital) or is it something delivered, in a top-down fashion by an individual? I was asked about this recently, and immediately thought about the Apache nation that had only situational leaders, Nantans, who were in charge as long as warriors were willing to follow them. Because of this decentralization, they were able to fight the Spanish for a long time, regrouping as necessary, ultimately destroyed by a “benevolent” United States.

Looking at my outboard brain (my blog) I’ve reviewed some thoughts on leadership, which has not really been my focus, but is perhaps more of an emergent property after almost eight years. These are some of the ideas that still resonate with me.

Let me begin with this quote from Peter Levesque, which I picked up in 2004, showing how digital  interconnectedness may change our view leadership:

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.

But an aggressively intelligent citizenry needs access to its own ideas. This in an ongoing battle with the established powers. Open information and access to our common knowledge assets seems to be a required part of any new leadership model.

Leaders may be required in hierarchies but are they necessary in wirearchies? The great work of our time may be to design, build and test new organizational models that reflect our democratic values and can function in an interconnected world. Leadership today may be more of an architectural task, or one of setting up the right systems.

We’re now at the stage where we have some new ideas for work (wirearchy, natural enterprises, workplace democracy) and some new technologies (social, nano-bio-techno-cogno). The next step in this evolution is for a new organizational model and that conversation has already started. The ideology will come later.

Ideas lead technology. Technology leads organizations. Organizations lead institutions. Then ideology brings up the rear, lagging all the rest—that’s when things really get set in concrete.

Does ridiculously-easy group forming mean that leadership can now emerge when people get together for collective action? What kind of leadership is there in mass, decentralized, social movements, like the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street movements?

Warren Bennis wrote that hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust. With open systems, trust emerges.

Knowledge workers, collaborate, you have nothing to lose but your managers. This is a statement I made a bit in jest on Twitter, but the truth behind it is that management is less useful to the interconnected, professional, concept worker. With fewer managers and hyperlinks subverting hierarchy, will a different breed of leadership emerge?

It takes different leadership, or leadership for networks, to do the important work in complex work environments, which, in my opinion, is to increase collaboration and support social learning in the workplace.

I haven’t really answered my own question whether leadership is an emergent property of net work, but I have little doubt that we need different kinds of leadership (more open, transparent & diverse) and people with these attributes may emerge as their peers allow them to lead; for the time being.

Spreading social capitalism

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I had the pleasure of meeting Dan Robles at Innotribe and his recent post on It is Time to Evolve, got me thinking and making some connections. Dan starts with the big picture:

How the world really works

The Internet and social media have shifted the factors of production away from land, labor, and capital to a higher order of human organization.  This is what we need to be talking about.  People today produce things with knowledge – social, creative, and intellectual knowledge.  These are the factors of production for that 99% of the value that exists on Earth.

Dan goes on to say:

How can we expect to create any type of fair and rational economy from a bunch of invisible stuff milling around the parks?  There is no escape from Market Capitalism and no path to Social Capitalism without a Knowledge Inventory, period.

The knowledge inventory link above takes you to a video which discusses the three factors of production in social capitalism:

  1. Intellectual Capital (ability to collect, retain & share information
  2. Social Capital (ability  of people to work together)
  3. Creative Capital (ability  to combine diverse ideas)

These reminded me of the Law of the Few and how ideas get connected in communities.

knowledge inventory

Generally, Mavens exhibit the greatest intellectual capital; Connectors have the most diverse (creative) networks and Salespeople get things done (action). I wonder if this metaphor/model would help to get social capitalism “across the chasm”. Identify sufficient Mavens, Connectors & Salespeople (you need all three) and then build up to the 10% critical mass necessary to effectively spread ideas:

“When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. “Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”

Leadership in Complexity

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In organizing for diversity and complexity, I discussed structural changes that are needed in our institutions. Kevin Wheeler has a great slide presentation on leadership in complexity that looks at what is required in such a diverse and complex work world. In the future of leadership development, Kevin describes some new core leadership skill sets (Slides 17-21):

  • Dealing with Ambiguity
  • Dealing with Complexity
  • Dealing with Interdependencies
  • Fostering Creativity
  • Challenging Assumptions

Two shifts are driving the need for a new type of leadership: 1) networks are giving workers the freedom to act and cooperate and 2) the optimal control structure for complex environments is loose hierarchies and strong networks. Leadership, and organizational support functions, need to move from command & control to enable & encourage.

Kevin’s presentation aligns with several of the ideas I’ve been working on. Using terms from his presentation, I would say that a transparent, flexible and open organizational model is necessary so that leaders can listen to and analyze what is happening in real time. In turn, leaders can help set context and build consensus. This is 21st century leadership.

 

Friday's potpourri

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

I have a fairly busy speaking schedule for this year, so this tweet, via @SusanBannister was quite relevant ;)

“This cartoon was in the Times referring to Ed Miliband but could refer to many a keynote speaker perhaps.”

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@Britopian: This is huge! Labor board ruling has businesses buzzing about workplace rules on social media, via @RossDawson

The September decision found that five workers at Hispanics United of Buffalo, a New York social services nonprofit, were fired illegally for criticizing a colleague on Facebook, and should be reinstated because their actions were protected under federal labor law. The case is part of a boom of complaints brought on behalf of workers challenging their employers’ right to fire them for Tweets, Facebook posts and YouTube videos that didn’t sit well with their bosses. But this ruling marked the first time an administrative law judge with the National Labor Relations Board weighed in on the matter.

Nature’s own stimulus package via @SandyMaxey

To shorten the recession, we’ll need to teach better and work smarter. Students learn better when schools promote place-based learning in the largest classroom of all: the natural world. In Scandinavian countries, where “all-weather” schools require students to spend time outside every day, kids get fewer colds and flu. And outdoor classrooms cost less than brick and mortar.

A Master’s Degree in Leadership and Organization Development, and Coaching, by @MarkFederman

What I think will distinguish the program we are developing from others that nominally offer a similar focus is a fundamental philosophy that organizational leadership has no meaning without the context of organization development. By this I mean that contemporary leadership does not stand on top of, in front of, or in any way apart from the uniqueness that is the organization-in-relation, that is, the valence-conceived instance of an organization. Contemporary leadership must be thought of as being embodied and enacted by process-and-people throughout the entire organization among all its member constituencies, integral to its continual emergence and autopoiesis. In this sense,leadership development and organization development are one and the same, enabled by approaches to individual and collective coaching that are not simply tied to sports-metaphor-laden, rah-rah, motivation-of-the-minute.

"the truth is utterly concealed"

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From The Economist — Bosses think their firms are caring. Their minions disagree.

Tragicomically, the study found that bosses often believe their own guff, even if their underlings do not. Bosses are eight times more likely than the average to believe that their organisation is self-governing. (The cheery folk in human resources are also much more optimistic than other employees.) Some 27% of bosses believe their employees are inspired by their firm. Alas, only 4% of employees agree. Likewise, 41% of bosses say their firm rewards performance based on values rather than merely on financial results. Only 14% of employees swallow this.

It’s like the aristocracy prior to the French revolution or the 1% sipping champagne while the 99% occupy Wall Street. This kind of disconnect is not good. Common language and metaphors are essential for understanding. When one group sees the glass half full while the other has no glass, how can there be meaningful dialogue? ‘Leadership by walking around’ or getting executives off their butts and out of their offices and board rooms would be a good start. The business world is changing and nobody is going to understand what’s happening from inside the walls and filters of the C-suites.

As soon as you create a reporting chain, you add information filters. Too many filters and reality gets distorted. As Tim Harford wrote in his book, Adapt: Why success always starts with failure:

There is a limit to how much honest feedback most leaders really want to hear; and because we know this, most of us sugar-coat our opinions whenever we speak to a powerful person. In a deep hierarchy, that process is repeated many times, until the truth is utterly concealed inside a thick layer of sweet-talk.

I hope organizational leaders wake up soon, for their sake and ours.

The new knowledge worker

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What are knowledge workers? Are they a new breed or just a variation of the 20th century professional class? Neal Gorenflo, co-founder and publisher of Shareable Magazine, has identified (a very preliminary idea) a certain type of knowledge worker:

  • Knowledge workers understand information as currency. Sharing is a core strategy for success even in a corporate context. This can bring knowledge workers to the commons. 
  • Their worldview is informed by systems thinking or is polyglot. It’s not informed by a single political ideology.
  • They understand that influence depends on the ability to persuade, and that choice of language is important. They will not use political language that has been marginalized. They’re all in this sense salespeople.
  • Knowledge workers can become moderate radicals, meaning they believe that fundamental change is needed but are politically a mixed bag, they borrow ideas from left and right, from religion, from science. And they have friends and relatives on both side of the political spectrum.
  • They do not have stable identities or their identities are not wrapped up in a single belief system. They are always wondering who they are. This is a source of angst.  But what they lack in identity, they make up for in opportunity. They have options.

My first reaction to this list was how obvious it is that these knowledge workers practice critical thinking; questioning all assumptions, including their own. These knowledge workers are united by networked and social learning and connected more so to the external environment than whatever internal team they happen to be working with. They have the long view, often unencumbered by dogma, but also short on quick, simple answers. They see the humour in H.L. Mencken’s comment that, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

If this is the new knowledge worker, what could that mean for the 21st century workplace?

  • We are already seeing the knowledge worker (creative, passionate, innovative) marketplace becoming more competitive.
  • Organizations may have to become more flexible and caring to attract good talent.
  • Organizations & corporations may have to become more ethical and less politicized.
In the long run, this should be a good thing; but what about the rest of the workforce? Stories from the economic edge indicate frustration and desperation with a broken system. How do we get to a state of enlightened organizations in a transparent environment providing meaningful ways for people to contribute to society? The new knowledge workers may have some of the answers, if they decide to flex their minds and their networks. As a knowledge worker, with the luck and skill to be in this situation, there are some big responsibilities to shoulder very soon. Is it time to lead, follow, or get out of the way?