Month: March 2013

No cookie cutters for complexity

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Five years ago I noted that big consultancies were jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon but more nimble upstarts (like me) could now significantly engage in a conversation with our markets using our own tools, like blogs, with which we have developed a certain advanced level of expertise. Jon Husband had written a good observation on how large consultancies work:

Big firms either 1) develop standardized methodologies and practices (their business models depend upon it), or 2) if their business model does not depend upon the standardization, they will charge you a mint and a half (McKinsey?)

The organization(s) [clients] will in my opinion get better advice rooted in critical thinking and experience and focused on results, as opposed to maintaining an expensive dependency on canned rhetoric that may not be based in much experience. For example, what exactly is “Advanced” Web 2.0 technology ? Blogs with lots of colourful widgets?

Five years later, Dave Snowden makes a similar observation, sparked by a KPMG marketing brochure on “cutting through complexity”. Dave concludes:

If a consultancy firm really wants to help their clients then they should support them in living with complexity, riding its potential, avoiding reductionist approaches, engaging customer and staff in a sensing network.  The trouble is that would not allow large teams of recently graduated MBA’s to reuse recipes and documents from over codified knowledge management systems.

cookie-cutterSo while we upstarts may now have a greater voice online, there is still a large demand for cookie cutter solutions. As social learning, collaboration, and even complexity become mainstream concepts, the array of products and services around them are becoming commoditized. Making a value proposition around behaviour and culture change is therefore very difficult.

I have noted in the past year clients wanting more products and fewer customized services. Some of this is due to their own difficulties in facing complexity and not having the time or energy to dig into these concepts. It’s just easier to buy a product, and nobody makes shinier products, such as case studies, than the big consultancies.

Case studies abound in business and many sell for a significant amount. But other than for general education, they’re rather useless. Each organization’s situation is not only different, it’s changing. Case studies and best practices in business are like the arbitrary subjects in our schools. They’re easy to package but don’t transfer well into real life.

Few managers ask the tough questions, like what are the underlying assumptions of how we do business and do they make sense? Are any of our practices self-defeating?

Complex problems require different thinking. In the book, Getting to Maybe, the authors say that in complex environments:

  • Rigid protocols are counter-productive
  • There is an uncertainty of outcomes in much of our work
  • We cannot separate parts from the whole
  • Success is not a fixed address [what I call perpetual Beta]

Rigid protocols are prescriptive and tell you what to do. To understand complex systems one must marinate in them, as John Seely Brown advocates. The problem with best practices is they presume simplicity, like being able to ‘cut through complexity’. The next time you pick up a report on best practices, ask yourself:

  • Has anything changed since this report was written?
  • How is my organization different from these?
  • Who stands to gain from the report?

Many best practices are self-evident. They’ve worked for years and address relatively simple systems. But the business issues that consume us are most likely complex. Instead of looking for best practices, take that time and money to invest in an experiment (a probe).

Beware the cookie-cutter salespeople. They abound, and are aided by marketing departments that do not have a clue about complexity. There are some real advantages in avoiding the large consultancies and going with smaller companies and free-agents. These include:

  • Personal relationship based on knowledge and trust
  • Work is usually done by senior consultants
  • Responsiveness and flexibility
  • Ability to innovate faster
  • Fewer costs to pass on (shareholders, marketing, advertising, bonuses)

One should never bring a knife to a gun fight, nor a cookie cutter to a complex adaptive system.

Only open systems are effective for knowledge sharing

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Seth Godin makes a very good point about trusting the select few to curate information, whether they be leaders, managers, certified professionals, researchers, or any other group of experts.

We have no idea in advance who the great contributors are going to be. We know that there’s a huge cohort of people struggling outside the boundaries of the curated, selected few, but we don’t know who they are.

When it comes to knowledge, we often do not know in advance what will be useful in the future. I discuss this when coaching people how to narrate their work, an essential part of encouraging social learning in the workplace. Overly editing one’s own work is similar to overly editing who does the curation of our knowledge flows. Seth Godin explains it with this graphic.

open v curationIn software programming, the saying is that with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow. Or put another way, the more people who look at a problem, fewer errors will get through. In the case of enterprise knowledge-sharing, an incredibly inexact practice; with enough voices quality will emerge. Only an open system can ensure this, which is why I highlighted the knowledge sharing paradox.

When it comes to knowledge, and learning, only open systems are effective. All closed systems will fail over time, especially if discovery and innovation are happening outside that system. The question for organizational leaders is whether they think they can create an artificial, closed system that can compete with almost 3 billion people connected to that hive mind called the internet.  The good news is that they do not have to. Encouraging cooperation, along with workplace collaboration, ensures more open knowledge sharing.

collab coop

The knowledge sharing paradox

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An effective suite of enterprise social tools can help organizations share knowledge, collaborate, and cooperate – connecting the work being done with the identification of new opportunities and ideas. In an age when everything is getting connected, it only makes sense to have platforms in place that enable faster feedback loops inside the organization in order to deal with connected customers, suppliers, partners, and competitors. It takes a networked organization, staffed by people with networked mindsets, to thrive in a networked economy.

enterprise social toolsGetting work done today means finding a balance between sharing complex knowledge (collaboration) and seeking innovation in internet time (cooperation).

how work gets doneIndividual workers can develop sense-making skills, using frameworks like PKM, to continuously learn and put their learning to work. For example, they can seek new ideas from their social networks; make sense of these ideas by connecting with communities of practice; try new ideas out alone or with their work teams, and then share these ideas and practices.

PKM at workBut there is a major issue that gets ignored, by software vendors, managers, IT departments, and most everyone except the workers themselves. People will freely share their knowledge if they remain in control of it. Knowledge is a very personal thing. Most workers do not care about organizational knowledge bases. They care about what they need to get work done. However, if we are going to build organizational knowledge from individual knowledge-sharing, we have to connect the two.

The knowledge sharing paradox is that enterprise social tools constrain what they are supposed to enhance. Why would someone share everything they know on an enterprise network, knowing that on the inevitable day that they leave, their knowledge artifacts will remain behind? I could not imagine having this blog (AKA my outboard brain) cut off from me. I would not put anywhere near the effort I do now if someone else controlled my access to this blog.

The elephant in the room is human nature. Enterprise knowledge sharing will never be as good as what networked individuals can do. Individuals who own their knowledge networks will invest more in them. I think this means that innovation outside of organizations will continue to evolve faster than inside. It may mean that the half-life of organizations will continue to decrease, as more nimble businesses continuously emerge to compete with incumbents. Whoever creates an organizational structure that bridges the individual-organizational knowledge sharing divide may have significant business advantages.

Friday’s Finds #189

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Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past fortnight. My Friday’s Finds are a collection of what I have found of interest but have not blogged about. I have been curating these collections for several years, this one is the 189th.

“If I were unemployed, I would spend my non-job hunting time learning to code. It’s a skill that can be applied in just about any field.” —Nedra Weinreich

“I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself.” – Rita Mae Brown, via Marcia Conner

O’Reilly Radar: GitHub gains new prominence as the use of open source within governments grows, via JP Rangaswami

When it comes to government IT in 2013, GitHub may have surpassed Twitter and Facebook as the most interesting social network.

The Atlantic: Young people are desperate for learning that is relevant … without it all being mapped for them in advance

It is no wonder my daughter wants to mess around with the guitar and the Internet and pursue some interests at a pace that doesn’t feel like the relentlessly scheduled pressure of school and structured activities. For her, the Internet has been a lifeline for self-directed learning and connection to peers. In our research, we found that parents more often than not have a negative view of the role of the Internet in learning, but young people almost always have a positive one.

Three reasons to keep the name with the knowledge – “personal” knowledge management for organizations, by Nick Milton

When you’re publishing knowledge,there are three main reasons why it’s important to keep the name of the originator attached to the piece of knowledge. Whether it is a blog post, a lesson in a database, a contribution in a call centre knowledge base, or a couple of paragraphs in a Knowledge asset,  it is important tokeep the name with the knowledge.

HBR: How WordPress Thrives with a 100% Remote Workforce. via Florence Dujardin

Not all remote work is the same. To evaluate remote work as a singular idea is a paper tiger. There are many policies to choose from and those choices matter. Managers of remote workers at older companies need to make adjustments to enable remote workers to thrive, especially during a trial period when everyone is experimenting and learning what will work for them. But to try remote work without making any allowances or adjustments is foolish. Any progressive idea can be made to fail if the people in charge don’t support it.

The best ever review of standing desks why and what to buy from Wirecutter, via Robert Paterson. Here is my new standing desk :)

harold jarche standing desk

Military Training and Simulation

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aerospace allianceI’m attending the training and simulation conference, hosted by the Atlantic Aerospace & Defence Industry Alliance in Halifax this week and spent the day getting caught up on what is happening in the Canadian Armed Forces, an organization I left in 1998.

I learned about the current Army training review that is fundamentally changing the existing training system. The military seems to understand the changing times and its challenges. What is interesting is that “learner centric” is a new priority for the Army. What we call mobile & local is what the Army calls “location independent”.

It was noted that legacy software systems will continue to be a barrier to adopting new technologies. This is the same as the other industries I have worked with. There is no money to replace existing expensive existing systems that still work. Even more interesting was an example of open learning resources. The US Army Ranger school has made all of its courses available online with open access for all. This facilitates the distribution of learning resources to all potential students, when and where they need them. The Canadian Armed Forces cannot (or will not) do this. This is a major barrier to access.

There was also a point about using subject matter experts as instructors. I was told that military personnel can get burnt out when employed as instructors at training units. It was questioned by the military if it was worth it to use SME’s in this role, due to the high demands of continuous teaching. Training seems to be a tough business in the military.

The major themes included the need to get agile in personnel development and training, as well as a strong requirement to address the increasing complexity faced by the military. There seems to be a significant impetus to integrate individual with collective training. Currently the two are separate. Military training needs simpler systems, we were told. It was suggested that mass customization for training was becoming an imperative. This means addressing the needs of individual soldiers, sailors and airmen, all within operational constraints. It was obvious that the existing Cold War structures [my time in the military] need to change, especially the Canadian Forces Individual Training and Education System. From the way I see it, the challenge is shifting to a Probe-Sense-Respond perspective on change.

One more thing, I did note that the military still love their massive bulleted lists on Powerpoint slides. Some thing do not change.

From hierarchies to wirearchies

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Work in the network era needs to be both cooperative and collaborative, meaning that organizations have to support both types of activities. This may not be an easy transition for companies based almost uniquely on command and control leadership. But in this emerging network era, cooperative innovation trumps collaborative innovation, writes Stowe Boyd.

My experience is that communities of practice can help make the transition from hierarchies to networks, or as Jon Husband describes the resulting structure; wirearchy. Communities of practice, both internal and external; can be safe places between highly focused work and potentially chaotic social networking. The Community Roundtable has a Community Maturity Model that describes this transition, in four stages. The model makes it relatively easy to see where your organization stands and where it should go.

Community Maturity Model

The CMM aligns with my own way of looking at the need to balance structured work and the sharing of complex knowledge, with the concurrent requirement for unstructured social networking which can increase innovation through a diversity of ideas. I have added in the four CMM stages to the image below. Communities of practice can link collaboration and cooperation, and help weave the organization and its people into a wirearchy.

Wirearchy – “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.” – Jon Husband

HCNW

Getting there may not be easy, but the evidence is showing that it is necessary. For example, here is how Yammer builds its products, according to Kris Gale, VP of Engineering:

Yammer’s biggest rule of thumb is 2 to 10 people, 2 to 10 weeks – which means they generally don’t do projects that are larger or more complicated.  There is a non-linear relationship between the complexity of a project and the wrap-up integration phase at the end.  If you go anywhere beyond ten weeks, the percentage of time in the wrap-up phase becomes disproportionate. – First Round Capital

This sounds like it’s aligned with the general rules of dealing with complexity, developed by Dave Snowden. Each project at Yammer is a probe. It’s also small enough so that the potential ROI does not drive the company off the rails. A small project failure is much easier to deal with than a large one. Yammer understands that working in a hyper-connected economy makes complex work less predictable, so project cycles are kept short. As Gale goes on to explain:

I don’t think you should be building a product.  I think you should be building an organization that builds a product.

Be very wary of only trusting managers with engineering decisions; in fact, you should delegate these all the way down to individual contributors.  If managers are the only ones making decisions as you grow past thirty to forty people, this should be a red flag.  – First Round Capital

probe sense respond

Becoming a wirearchy requires new organizational structures that incorporate communities and networks. In addition, they require new ways of doing work, like thinking in terms of perpetual Beta and doing manageable probes to test complex problems. It’s a new way of doing work, within a new work structure. Both are required.

Open as in commons, not garden

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Once again, it’s time to put my money where my mouth is. I have been a proponent of the open web and open source software for the past decade and more. This site was Creative Commons licensed when CC was in its infancy. I have talked several times about the importance of owning your data. I deleted my Facebook account over a year ago, having no more time for this enormous walled garden, and I deleted my LinkedIn account and started to rebuild it last year. The latter was an interesting experience, as I saw how much more controlling and channeling LinkedIn was with new users than when I first joined.

This week Google announced that it will close down Google Reader, an RSS aggregator that I have found useful, after Bloglines went offline and then changed its operating model. Reader is a very important part of my PKM process, especially the “Seek” part. I have just switched to Feedly and will see how it works. At this stage I am more inclined to find paid services than free ones. As they say on the web, if you’re not paying for it, you are the product. For more commentary on Google Reader see Stephen Downes’ posts.

I would not be surprised if Feedburner, another Google service, gets shut down soon as well. Many subscribers here get their email notifications via FeedBurner. As I move away from the Google web domination machine, I will be removing FeedBurner as an option, though existing subscribers will continue to receive notifications until Google inevitably pulls the plug.

In the meantime, I will try to set an example and remove myself from as many walled gardens as possible. Google Plus is probably next, as is Google Analytics. I still get value from Twitter and LinkedIn and will continue to use them, though I am under no illusions that they are serving my interests.

I will also look for good platforms that are either open source, like wordpress.org, which powers this site, or services that charge a fee and cater to their customers. For instance, I gladly pay for my Flickr service.

We are going through another transition of the web and I have no intention of leaving the whole thing to a few corporate interests. This site will remain ad free and open access, not residing on some commercial third-party hosted platform. It’s a very small thing I can do.

open

The right tool for the right job

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The field of Human Performance Technology (HPT) is systemic and systematic, but not very human. For that we also need to support informal andt social learning. However, HPT, especially performance analysis can be a useful tool, if used selectively and appropriately.

HPT does not work well for tasks that require high degrees of tacit knowledge and cooperation to address complex problems. But I find it useful for confirming that training is the optimal solution, as it is often the most expensive option, so it’s best to be sure. Some barriers to performance that are often overlooked when prescribing training include:

  • Unclear expectations (such as policies & guidelines);
  • Inadequate resources;
  • Unclear performance measures;
  • Rewards and consequences not directly linked to the desired performance.

In some cases, these barriers could be addressed and there would be no further requirement for training. Where there is a genuine lack of skills and knowledge, training may be required, but it should only be in cases where the other barriers to performance have been addressed. A trained worker, without the right resources and with unclear expectations, will still not perform up to the desired standard.

The performance analysis process shown below is based on Mager & Pipe’s book, Analyzing Performance Problems. According to this chart, training is only warranted when there is a clear lack of skills & new knowledge and the person has not done anything like this before. If there is any doubt, one should confirm that there are no obstacles to performance; there are adequate resources; NOT performing is not being rewarded; performance is not being punished; and performance does matter. My experience is that individual performance issues are often the result of inadequate resources or conflicting messages from management.

Here is my updated graphic, as the previous one, made several years ago, was a bit hard to read.

performance analysis process chart

Having enough tools, and knowing which ones to choose, is important for any discipline. In organizational performance, it is critical because we are always dealing with complex adaptive systems. We should consider that all models are flawed, but some may be useful. But we shouldn’t get too attached to our models.

In many cases, when training is prescribed for a work performance issue, it is a case of assuming it is a “training problem” without any further analysis. I can think of two examples in my own business experience.

In one case, e-learning was prescribed to address the performance needs of nurses changing to a new nursing care methodology. In that instance, I was able to convince the client that a quick performance analysis could be used to confirm the assumption that e-learning was the solution. As a result of the analysis, we changed the intervention to the development of an online diagramming tool, because we determined that nursing staff already had 80% of the necessary skills and knowledge, but they didn’t know how to use the new diagramming and reporting procedures. The initial e-learning program was greatly reduced and job aids were created.

In another case, training was prescribed in order to get staff up to date with a new organization-wide policy. Each person received an average of 17 days classroom training. As an observer for part of the training, I would estimate that all of the classroom training could have been done in less than a week, had the new procedures and some job aids been first developed. The total cost of training approached millions of dollars, plus the cost of missed work. The change in performance appeared to be minimal, but the training provider generated significant revenue.

The right tool, for the right job, in the hands of an experienced practitioner, can often ensure that the right problem is addressed.

Work is already a game

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAI came across a statement saying how it would be a good thing to ‘gamify social learning‘, or words to that effect. I’d like to unpack that short statement. What does ‘gamify’ really mean? It could mean that people can be more engaged while playing games and therefore could learn while playing. Star Trek fans may think of the holodeck as the ultimate game-based learning platform.  I have spent a fair bit of time working with flight simulators and can attest to the value of simulation and emulation when it comes to learning how to fly aircraft. There is also significant research to show how epistemic games can be used for learning.

David Williamson Shaffer’s book, How Computer Games Help Children Learn, is mostly about epistemic games, or “games that are fundamentally about learning to think in innovative ways”. He begins the book by showing the fundamental weaknesses of our Industrial School System, another game:

“Not surprisingly, the epistemology of School is the epistemology of the Industrial Revolution – of creating wealth through mass production of standardized goods. School is a game about thinking like a factory worker. It is a game with an epistemology of right and wrong answers in which Students are supposed to follow instructions, whether they make sense in the moment or not. Truth is whatever the teacher says is the right answer, and actions are justified based on appeal to authority. School is a game in which what it means to know something is to be able to answer specific kinds of questions on specific kinds of tests.”

Shaffer shows the need for teaching how to think and how to be creative, instead of how to memorize, and lays the argument for the use of games in learning. Most of his examples are outside of the classroom because it is obvious that these kinds of epistemic games would disrupt classes and learning management. The games that are discussed are called monument games, or exemplars of good practice. The ideas and concepts presented are critical for anyone who wants to use games in learning, not just playing bingo and using words or figures out of context. The latter does not help learning. That’s a different sort of ‘gamification’.

The major problem with the ‘gamification’ of professional learning is that work is already a game. It is an artificial construct that society has created, and many of us have to play. Adding badges, or other extrinsic motivators, to professional learning only detracts from the real game. It also creates incentives that, when removed, may result in going back to previous behaviours.

So yes, good games, and especially epistemic games, can help people learn. The military has engaged in simulated exercises for millennia. However, adding a game layer to our work does nothing more than take us away from our work. As Dan Pink showed in his book, Drive: rewards, consequences and motivation at work, much of what we have taken for granted about work is just not supported by the research. Extrinsic rewards [gamification] only work for simple physical tasks and increased monetary rewards can actually be detrimental to performance, especially with knowledge work.

The keys to motivation at work are for each person to have a sense of Autonomy, Mastery and Sense of Purpose, as shown in this video. Pink’s work is based on the original research that developed self-determination theory, which states that relatedness — the universal want to interact, be connected to, and experience caring for others — is a primary psychological need, instead of a sense of purpose.

Where the ‘gamification’ movement could focus its efforts is on epistemic games, simulations, and meaningful contextual practice, not badges or making points.

Keep democracy in education

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Modern Education was the Result of a Shotgun Wedding

I liken our dominant educational structure as the offspring of a shotgun wedding between industrialists who needed literate workers to operate their machinery, and progressives who wanted to lift up the common person from poverty and drudgery. It wasn’t an easy marriage, and the children are a tad dysfunctional now. The union was never able to clearly identify the guiding principle of education. One book that has influenced many of my opinions on public education is Kieran Egan’s, The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape our Understanding. Egan says that Western education is based on three incompatible principles, where all three can never be achieved in a single system.

  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)

If you put emphasis on one of these principles, the others get ignored. The industrialists would have preferred education as socialization and the progressives would have leaned toward education as learning about truth. We have seen some attempts, like Waldorf schools, to develop systems that promote education as discovery of our nature, but that does not go well with a standardized curriculum, whether it has a corporatist agenda or a progressive one.

As Egan says:

“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.”

Shotgun Wedding 2.0

I think we may soon get invited to another shotgun wedding, this time between techno-utopians, with financial speculators as bridesmaids, and libertarians, who feel the state and teachers have screwed-up education. It’s education as socialization, but socialization to the dominant business paradigm. But any problems with the education system are a result of the governance and economic environment in which it resides. It is through democracy, all of us, that we can improve education. Public education does not need a VC-backed Silicon Valley start-up to be saved. It needs more of us to participate in it. It needs democracy.

deweyIf social business is merely a hollow shell without democracy then the same goes for the new social education, currently manifested as xMOOC’s, those backed by large institutions or private interests. Audrey Watters provides a good overview of the flaws around the notion that our new education couple will be any better than the last arranged marriage:

“Hacking Your Education advances the notion that education is a personal (financial) investment rather than a public good. The School in the Cloud project posits that education is a corporate (financial) investment rather than a public good. Why fund public schools when we can put a kiosk in a tech company’s annex? Why fund public schools when you can learn anything online?

The future that TED Talks paint doesn’t want us to think too deeply as we ask these questions. But what happens,when we “hack education” in such a way that our public institutions are dismantled? What happens to that public good? What happens to community? What happens to local economies? What happens to social justice?

As such, the vision for the future of education offered in Stephens’ new book is an individualist and incredibly elitist one. It contains a grossly unexamined exceptionalism, much like the Hole in the Wall which, at the end of the day, worked best for the strongest boys on the streets.

So despite their claims to be liberatory — with the focus on “the learner” and “the child” — this hacking of education by Mitra and Stephens is politically regressive. It is however likely to be good business for the legions of tech entrepreneurs in the audience.” —Audrey Watters

We have not yet been able to effectively integrate democracy and business. Our current education systems, while flawed, still have some democratic oversight. In a networked world, our society needs to be more democratic, not less. Just as some business leaders are beginning to realize the potential of democracy in the enterprise, now is not the time to remove democracy from education. If work is learning, and learning is the work, there is little hope for democratic business if education becomes a business. For our future to remain democratic, both education and business need to be based on its fundamental principles. We are at a crossroads. Let’s cancel this wedding.

France_in_XXI_Century_School