Month: February 2012

The initial design influences everything else

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“If you pit a good performer against a bad system, the system will win almost every time.”

This quote from Rummler & Brache in Improving Performance, sums up many of the symptoms of hierarchical systems, whether they be schools, businesses, or even prisons.

The great work to be done at the beginning of this century is the democratization of the workplace. Efficiency and effectiveness are not enough, and too often become mechanistic. It’s time to discard industrial management models that emphasize command and control and ensure that individuals at all levels have opportunities to engage in and question the system.

Without questioning, things can quickly go awry.

Gary Stager discussed the well-known Milgram Experiments, conducted in the 1960’s to see how far people would go in administering electric shocks to learners [some of the methods are now in question]. These experiments were replicated by ABC News and Stager picked up the direct link to public education [please read the whole article]:

‘One of the subjects in the television program was a 7th grade teacher who explained that she didn’t stop shocking the learner because as a teacher she had learned when a student’s complaints were phoney. I thought to myself, “Has she electrocuted many students?”

The teacher asked the researcher, “There isn’t going to be any lawsuit from this medical facility, right?” When told that the teacher was not liable, she replied, “That’s what I needed to know.” It is however worth noting that this was after she induced the maximum shock and the learner demanded that the experiment be terminated.’

This is why we need to change the entire education system – constraining curriculum; compulsory testing; useless homework; irrelevant subjects; classrooms cut off from the world; systemic bullying; etc. More or better teachers won’t help; we need to change the system.

In this interview, Dr. Philip Zimardo discussed the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, where students played their roles as guards or prisoners and abuses started within 24 hours:

“But on the second morning, the prisoners rebelled; the guards crushed the rebellion and then instituted stern measures against these now ‘dangerous prisoners’. From then on, abuse, aggression, and eventually sadistic pleasure in degrading the prisoners became the daily norm. Within thirty-six hours the first prisoner had an emotional breakdown and had to be released, followed in kind by similar prisoner breakdowns on each of the next four days.”

Father John Culkin, in A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan, wrote that, “We become what we behold.
 We shape our tools 
and then our tools shape us.” This reminds me of the question about who is the most important person on board a ship. Is it the Captain, the Navigator or the Engineer? Actually, it’s the Architect, because the initial design influences everything else.

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you cannot change the way things work in an organization. The problem may be the organizational model itself and it may be better to leave and create an alternative model than help keep a flawed one going.

Clay Burell had guest blogger Bill Farren discussing the hidden curriculum of school architectural design. He asked what hidden messages are our schools themselves asking by their inherent design:

  • Did the building’s designers take into consideration its location?
  • Who decided how (if) it should be built?
  • Does the building make an attempt to connect students with their outside world?
  • What does the formal, intentional curriculum teach?
  • How is this formal, intentional curriculum taught?
  • How is the school run?
  • How is security portrayed?
  • What is sold or advertised on campus?

There was an article I read many years ago, but never see cited, about designing learning environments. It’s Rodney Fulton’s SPATIAL model (1991) [my emphasis added]:

“While a body of knowledge does exist that documents the relationships between learning and physical environment, there are problems that need to be resolved before the present level of understanding can be systematically advanced. One problem is that common vocabulary does not exist. Thus, in the literature, concepts are often described with similar but not identical terminology. Conversely, the same terms are used for similar but not exactly the same concepts. But this confusion in vocabulary is only a symptom of the fundamental problem: the lack of a conceptual model that explores relationships of physical environment to learning rather than to behavior in general. Architectural models address built environments, emphasizing both interior and exterior features of building design that allow, encourage, prohibit, or inhibit various behaviors. Psychological models discuss environmental attributes that set conditions for or even control human behavior. Sociological models emphasize the importance of environment in terms of how it facilitates human interactions. By emphasizing individual appreciation of the environment, aesthetic models address the relationship of values to human behavior. Workplace training models, including human factors engineering, emphasize the fit between environment and person and seek out optimal conditions for performance.

Each of these perspectives can add to a global understanding of the learning environment; however, a model that addresses learners in learning environments is a needed first step in refining educational research. The model described here — satisfaction-participation-achievement-transcendent/immanent attributes-authority-layout (SPATIAL) — can serve as a fundamental basis for organizing research designed to identify relationships between and among components of the learning environment and attributes of the learner. Further, this model has potential for weaving together findings from architectural, psychological, sociological, aesthetic, and human factors engineering studies.”

Rodney Fulton responded, when I originally wrote this post in 2008:

I found it very interesting that some 17 years after I published the SPATIAL Model in a Jossey-Bass publication there was discussion that included the model. I am not aware of any significant use of the model or of any real impact on the field of Adult Education in the United States. I have long since moved on from the field of Adult Education and am now very involved in Public Education at the Elementary level in the US. But again, it was gratifying to see my model referenced in 2008. If you know of any other people using or interested in the model, I’d be happy to hear from you. Thanks Rodney Fulton

There is still much structural work to be done

old-school.jpg

Photo by Atelier Teee

Note: this post is an update of two previous posts from 2008

When learning is the work …

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What if your organization got rid of the Learning & Development function? What would the average manager or department head do? What would workers do?

I’ve been thinking about this for a while. When work is learning, and learning is the work, training that is pushed from outside has less relevance. The L&D department is supposed to ensure that training is appropriate for the job, but with jobs constantly morphing into something else, a major disconnect is developing between the doers and the trainers. How many people take courses that are not relevant to their current work or are provided at the wrong time?

Let me propose some things managers and knowledge workers can do without a Learning & Development department.

Observe how people are learning to do their work already. Find these natural pathways and reinforce them.

Connect any “how-to” learning to the actual task. Show and tell only works if it can be put into practice. The forgetting curve is steep when there is no practice.

Make it everyone’s job to share what they learn. Have you ever noticed how easy it is to find “how-to” videos and explanations on the Web? That’s because someone has taken the time to post them. Everyone in the organization should do this, whether it’s a short text, a photo, a post, an article, a presentation with notes, or a full-blown video.

Make space to talk about things and capture what is passed on. Get these conversations in the open where they can be shared. Provide time and space for reflection and reading. There is more knowledge outside any organization than inside.

Break down barriers. Establish transparency as the default mode, so that anyone can know what others are doing. Unblock communication bottlenecks, like supervisors who control information flow. If supervisors can’t handle an open environment, get rid of them, because they are impeding organizational learning and it’s now mission critical.

If you do have an L&D department, share what you are doing and perhaps they will help you become more self-sufficient for your organizational learning. If they don’t, ignore them, as they will be going away anyway.
illuminated crowd

Friday's finds in February

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

@JaneBozarth – “Setting up only private internal social media platforms is like having phones that won’t call outside the building.”

On perpetual Beta & Social Learning: Are You Learning as Fast as the World Is Changing? – via @TimKastelle

Finally, and most personally, successful learners work hard not to be loners. These days, the most powerful insights often come from the most unexpected places — the hidden genius locked inside your company, the collective genius of customers, suppliers, and other smart people who would be eager to teach you what they know if you simply asked for their insights. But tapping this learning resource requires a new leadership mindset — enough ambition to address tough problems, enough humility to be willing to learn from everyone you encounter. Nobody alone learns as quickly as everybody together.

Clueless in Davos – “A very interesting article in the Foreign Policy magazine about the relevance of Davos – via @AdrianCheok”

… the forum’s two major flaws. The first is that the Davos meeting is a gathering of the global establishment. By definition, establishments are slow and even unable to see and understand developments that run contrary to the orthodoxy of the establishment. One should never expect the unexpected from an establishment institution. The second flaw is even more serious. It is that the theory of globalization underlying the Davos concept is false. That theory holds that globalization is a win-win economic movement that will enrich the whole world and thereby lead the nations to democracy and eternal peace.

Going Mainstream by @reubentozman via @quinnovator

The next change required is to stop talking about “performance support” as though it were a job aid or a little something you use to support a training effort. We need to start talking about performance support as though it were the very essence of what we do and look at training as something that may be used when required. We also tend to use performance support to talk about “just-in-time” training. In the world of business process mapping and systems thinking, everything is “just in time.” All of our interventions need to come when required as dictated by the system. The questions we need to continually ask ourselves are how do we strengthen the system? What interventions and when will lead to better performance of the system?

QR Codes: bad idea or terrible idea? – via @KevinMarks

The only place you should use QR codes is if you have a dedicated reader for them, like a classic barcode scanner, and a workflow that is designed for this that actually saves time. If you do empirical research on using QR codes for the public, you’ll likely see 80% worse performance than text, like this museum did. By all means try the experiment and report your results. Put up a QR code and a printed URL and see which gets the most usage.

Photo by Scott Blake

Enabling Innovation – Book

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I had the pleasure of writing an article for the book, Enabling Innovation: Innovative Capability – German and International Views as a follow-up to some work I did with the EU’s International Monitoring Organisation. An interesting aspect of this book is that major articles are written by German researchers and then shorter comments or additions are presented from an international perspective. My article was in response to a weighty paper by Sibylle Peters, entitled, New Forms of Project Organisation and Project Management – Dynamic and Open.

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Abstract
The increasing structuring of work and organizational processes by forming project involves new challenges to the handling of knowledge work and expands the scope to generate innovations. The classic project management alone is less and less able to manage complex, uncertain, knowledge-based processes. Through alternative approaches social, actor-oriented topics of management will be adressed.

If all you want to read is my short article, then let me save you the $189.00 list price for this book.

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Managing in Complexity

In New Forms of Project Organisation and Project Management – Dynamic and Open a key theme discussed is the lack of flexibility of traditional project management methods in dealing with complexity.

With increasing requirements for complex and creative work we need new models to get things done. Many of our practices are still premised on work being simple or complicated. Simple systems are easily knowable, whereas complicated systems, while not not simple, are still knowable through analysis. These can be easily managed. However, complex systems are not fully knowable though they can be partially understood through interaction with them. This is antithetical to many of the control protocols of traditional project management.

In the developed world, simple work is constantly getting automated (e.g. automatic bank tellers) while complicated work is outsourced to the cheapest labour market (e.g. off-shore call centres). If companies want to remain competitive in the global market, they need to focus on complex and creative work. Much of complex work is in exception-handling and when exceptions are the rule, rigid rules must become the exception.

We have to understand complex adaptive systems and develop work structures that let us focus our efforts on learning as we work in order to continuously develop next practices. In a knowledge-intensive and creative workplace the role of leadership becomes supportive and inspirational rather than directive. Artificial boundaries that limit collaboration and communication only serve to drag projects (and companies) down and create opportunities for more agile competitors.

While agile methods for project management are discussed in New Forms of Project Organisation and Project Management, an overall agile mindset is also required. This can be fostered in a culture of perpetual Beta. Perpetual Beta means we never get to the final release of our work and that our learning will never stop. Agile organisations realize they will never reach some future point where everything stabilizes and they don’t need to learn or do anything new.

In additional to a mindset of agility, workers need a skillset of autonomy. However, we are trained early in life to look to authority for direction in learning and work. The idea that there is a right answer or an expert with the right answer begins in our schools. Too often, the message from the workplace continues to be that good employees wait for their supervisor to tell them what to do. This is counter-productive in dealing with complexity and working in perpetual Beta. It destroys creativity.

When we move away from a “design it first, then build it” mindset, we can then engage everyone in critical and systems thinking. Workers in agile workplaces must be passionate, adaptive, innovative, and collaborative. Autonomy is the beginning.

Fostering autonomy and agility means that we talk about work differently. For example, dropping the notion of being paid for time is one way to start this change. An hourly wage implies that people are interchangeable, but no two minds are the same. Being paid for time fosters neither autonomy nor agility. There are many other human resource practices should be questioned and dropped, such as job competencies.

The new networked workplace requires collaboration and cooperation. Complex problems cannot be solved alone. Tacit knowledge flows in networks through social learning. Learner autonomy is a foundation for effective social learning. It is the lubricant for an agile organisation. Agility becomes a necessity as we deal with increasing complexity. In order to develop the necessary emergent practices to deal with complexity we therefore need to cultivate the diversity and autonomy of each worker. We also must foster richer and deeper connections which can be built through meaningful conversations. This is social learning in the workplace.

Even in project management, learning is the work.

One example of encouraging social learning is the government of British Columbia, Canada which developed an interactive intranet in order to foster collaboration and communication.

The success of a social intranet ultimately has less to do with technology than with planning, governing and managing change. Walsh [B.C.’s Manager of Creative Strategies] had these lessons to share.

Ditch perfectionism [perpetual Beta]

Communicate! Communicate! Communicate! [social learning]

Trust your team [Autonomy]

Not your government’s voice

As traditional core activities get automated or outsourced, almost all high value work will be done at the outer edge of organisations. At the fuzzy edge of the organisation life is complex and even chaotic. On this periphery, where things are less homogenous, there is more diversity and more opportunities for innovation. Individuals, project teams and organisations have to move operations to the edge to continue learning and developing. In agile organisations, a greater percentage of workers will be on the edge. The core will be managed by very few internal staff. What does this mean for project management? No matter what model one prefers, it will have to be more open, networked and cooperative.

Change and complexity are becoming the norm in our work. We already see this with increasing numbers of freelancers and contractors. Any work where complexity is not the norm will be of diminishing value.

Embracing complexity and chaos is where the future of work lies.

MSF Lessons Learned

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Medecins sans frontières [MSF], or Doctors Without Borders, is marking its 40th anniversary with a collection of stories exposing what it’s like to confront those difficult decisions. The book is called Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience and it comes out later this month.

CBC’s program The Current covers the uncomfortable compromises that humanitarian aid workers regularly face. As The Guardian reports:

Marie Noelle Rodrigue, operations director of MSF in Paris, said: “The time has come to explain the fragile equilibrium between the price it is necessary for an organisation to pay so that you are helping the victims.

“Often that means making a compromise to a degree where you are helping the authorities. This is a question that no-one has wanted to examine and it is good that MSF have looked into it and I think we are happy that we’ve done it honestly.”

MSF is keenly focused on learning from its mistakes and this book is part of that process. Some of those lessons:

Everything is political and influences medical assistance.

Gut feeling is very important to assess complex situations.

Finding common ground between parties in conflict is very difficult and too often simple, but ineffective, solutions are chosen.

The situation is always changing and there is a need for constant reflection, as individuals and at an organizational level.

Impartiality [trust] is the “red line” that cannot be crossed.

Every action is a compromise.

Conflicts are messy & dirty – therefore the humanitarian assistance is messy & dirty.

Learning through constant discussions is critical for all members of the organization.

MSF has a culture of debate and exposing the truth and this lets the organization move forward.

MSF follows the principles of narration and transparency to ensure it stays a viable organization facing complex, messy situations. Many organizations who are trying to adapt to the network era could learn from MSF.