Harold Jarche

Preparing for the network era workplace

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My presentation at the Learning Technologies Summer Forum in London two weeks ago concluded with the advice to help people be more explicit in their work. Leading up to that conclusion, I showed how the nature of work is changing. We are moving into a creative economy, as Gary Hamel says. Customized work, with high task variety, is becoming the norm. Routine work is being replaced by software and robots. Formal instruction cannot keep up with workplace needs, so there is an increasing requirement to support informal learning and the sharing of implicit knowledge. Finally, much of what we produce at work today is intangible.

Here is the video recording: enterprise social technologies, learning & performance

 

Learning is too important to be left to the professionals

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profWorkplace learning professionals are in for a shock. Business is waking up to the fact that learning is now mission critical. Will executives continue to allow learning policy to reside in a separate department or some sub-department of HR for much longer? Do you think they will let “learning professionals” maintain sole control? I doubt it; especially if the military, which is either training for war or engaged in one, is an example.

For example, the military lets training specialists and schools run individual training, but even more time and effort is put into collective training that emphasizes social and informal learning. The latter is run by operators (e.g. line of business owners) not learning specialists. I think business is going there as well, if the struggle over control of enterprise social media is an indicator – and the learning function seldom is allowed to run it. Using the 70:20:10 lens, it’s likely that these professionals may only look after the formal 10% of organizational learning. You could say that is being marginalized.

Enterprise social media and external social networks are where more business transactions will occur. They are also where a lot of learning will happen, but not separated from business. The networked business world is subverting the learning and development hierarchy. Scalable learning does not come from a separate departmental function.

The cost and difficulty of coordinating activities across entities, on a global scale, is far lower now. The pace of change is accelerating and the degree of uncertainty increasing. Perhaps a new rationale will be required to drive institutional success in the future. Perhaps we need to move from a rationale of scalable efficiency to one of scalable learning — designing institutions and architectures of relationships across institutions that help all participants to learn faster as more participants join. —John Hagel – HBR

Mainstream media are catching on that in the network era, work is learning and learning is the work. This article from BloombergBusinessWeek is an example of the growing understanding that social learning is a business imperative:

Staff who carry out day-to-day duties—and whose productivity you’re looking to improve—should ultimately be the source for defining what knowledge they need and what knowledge they know is valuable to others.

With learning in the business spotlight, questions will be asked about the efficacy of current methods and practitioners of those methods. We are seeing a growing demand for self-directed and networked professional development. Recently, Craig Wiggins told the ASTD (training & development) community to just stop pretending – “Let’s stop pretending that, at one point or another, we haven’t for a moment wondered if we deserve to be marginalized. (Opinions on learning are never short supply.)” Learning will not be marginalized, but the learning trades, like scribes of old, will be.

The network is the solution

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Our future needs to be focused on learning, not instruction. The key to a flourishing civilization in the network era is sense-making. We have to move from what David Warlick describes as individualized instruction to personalized learning. In the latter, “Literacy becomes a wide range of evolving information skills developed around the activities of learning – the ability to acquire knowledge and skills through the resourceful and responsible utilization of information.” Self-instruction, the basis of personal knowledge mastery, is a necessity in effective peer-to-peer networks, as networks are how we will govern ourselves more and more. David Ronfeldt articulates this with his TIMN [Tribes-Institutions-Markets-Networks] framework.

TIMN has long maintained that, beyond today’s common claims that government or market is the solution, we are entering a new era in which it will be said that the network is the solution (e.g., here and here). Aging contentions that turning to “the government” or “the market” is the way to address particular public-policy issues will eventually give way to innovative ideas that “the network” is the optimal solution.

We all need to understand how to become contributing members of networks, for work and for life. This should be the primary focus of all education.

“Reed’s Law” posits that value in networks increases exponentially as interactions move from a broadcasting model that offers “best content” (in which value is described by n, the number of consumers) to a network of peer-to-peer transactions (where the network’s value is based on “most members” and mathematically described by n2).  But by far the most valuable networks are based on those that facilitate group affiliations, Reed concluded. – David Bollier

Without sense-making skills, the citizenry cannot understand complex issues, such as individual privacy versus national security. These issues require networked, human intelligence, not broadcast sound bites nor ‘learning objects’.

Sensemaking should drive policy. Policy drives decisions. Decisions, of course, need to be informed. If the People don’t know what makes their world go ‘round, the folks on the Hill sure won’t. Globalized governments can’t. – What the Snowden Case Teaches Us

As David Bollier concludes, “Legitimate authority is ultimately vested in a community’s ongoing, evolving social life, and not in ritualistic forms of citizenship.” Should not education move beyond ritualistic forms of subjects, classes, and certifications and toward ongoing, evolving social learning? How else will we be able to deal with the complexities of this networked, connected sphere that we inhabit?

Jon Husband writes that we are all in this together:

The interconnected Information Age is beginning to show us that we’re all linked together – and that the whole system matters.

This principle applies to organizations, to networks of customers, suppliers, employees and communities, to our societies and to the planet.

New language for this principle is popping up everywhere – knowledge networks, intranets, communities of practice, systems thinking, swarming, social software, social networks, tipping points.

Awareness is the key.  Maintain an “open focus”.

Being aware of yourself, others and the effects of your actions and ways of being in relation to others is a fundamental requirement in these conditions.

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Note: This post was written in order to put a number of ideas together into an initial narrative, mostly for myself. To me, it makes sense, as I have read and tried to unpack the many linked articles. For the casual reader, this may not be so clear. – Harold

Social, Cooperative, Mobile

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Work is an activity, not a place. – NineShift

Is mobile the future of work? Are we social creatures? Social learning is for human work, I wrote in my last post. Staying connected while we move, maintains our social networks. Mobile connections also help us get things done. Mobile devices give access to what we need, wherever we are. All indicators are that mobile work is increasing.

Mozilla now has the Firefox OS phone for the ‘next billion’ people. Many developers design first for mobile, and then for the web. IDC forecasts worldwide tablet shipments to surpass even portable PC shipments this year. At the Mayo Clinic, iPads and iPhones are standard.

Cooperation is becoming necessary to get almost any work done. The majority of people use social tools at work, to communicate with customers, or for professional development. Cooperation differs from collaboration. Cooperation is sharing freely without any expectation of direct reciprocation. It’s what most people do naturally. Mobile enables wider cooperation by being continuously available. Cooperation drives the networked enterprise — customers, suppliers, partners, and beyond. Cooperation strengthens networks by increasing trust between people (nodes). As work gets more complex and value more intangible, cooperation across previous boundaries of time and space will change the nature of work, from place, to activity.

Mobile also provides complementary tools for sense-making, an essential skill not just for work in the network era, but for life. Clark Quinn writes, “That’s why mobile makes so much sense: it decouples that complementary capability from the desktop, and untethers our outboard brain.” If you believe that work is learning and learning is the work, then mobile work requires mobile learning. The future of learning is Social, Cooperative and especially Mobile (SoCoMo).

SoCoMo—

This post is brought to you by Mobile Enterprise 360 Community and Citrix

Note: I retained editorial control and take full responsibility for what is posted. Contract writing is one of the ways I make my living.

Social learning is for human work

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This past week I came across the theme of the changing nature of work several times.

As computers transcend many human capabilities and work is dehumanized, we must focus on the skills and abilities where humans excel beyond any imaginable machine capability. At the heart of those human capabilities are creativity and innovation. – Ross Dawson

“Focus on the human factor,” says Gerd Leonhard, “If our work – and our output – is robotic we will soon be surpassed by intelligent software agents and machines.”

This is exactly the message I am trying to convey in the image below. Standardized work (blue) is already being outsourced to the lowest cost of labour and will eventually be automated. This includes knowledge work. Customized work (yellow) is human. Its dominance will mark the end of the industrial era. Talent will replace labour as intangible assets will provide value while machines and software will handle any work that can be standardized.

jobs and workThe learning imperative for the new workplace is not to know more stuff, because software can do that for us, but to become more human. Social learning will help us collaborate and cooperate in doing customized work, requiring thinking and building skills in order to innovate and craft unique products and services.

Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.” –Albert Bandura, Social Learning Theory, 1977

Social learning helps groups of people share their knowledge in non-hierarchical ways and is not limited to the confines of instruction. Training courses take too long to develop and will be obsolete before they are launched. Most organizations today have a 95% informal learning gap they are not addressing. Social learning, using PKM methods and social networks, can address much of this.

Social learning networks enable better and faster knowledge feedback loops, essential for innovation and creativity. In an environment of constant innovation and faster market feedback, social learning is how we will share implicit knowledge and get work done. Social learning is for human work.

social learning is how work gets done

Friday's Finds 195

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Friday’s Finds:

friday2

“Any sufficiently advanced form of testing is indistinguishable from monitoring.” – @shs96c

“A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists either of writing or thinking about writing.” – Eugene Ionesco – via @PascalVenier

Competency Models – HR and Understanding Work in the Network Era – by @JonHusband

Today we know much more about how to function effectively in social networks than a decade ago, and I think much of what we know is portable to the networked workplace.  Off the top of my head ..

Listen to others
Share generously
Add value, but don’t insist on being right
Listen some more
Practice good ‘social hygiene’
Avoid attacking others
There’s a fine line between criticism and negativity .. find it and use it

When Training Fails, Try Learning – via @NickMilton

“There is a necessity to create real learning opportunities that are directly linked to the business and to move away from training driven by other objectives. If any learning initiative is to succeed, there must be a clear understanding among everyone about the necessity of creating, sharing, and managing knowledge for specific business objectives.The right learning interventions provide frameworks and guidelines that allow people to make the right daily decisions” – Margareta Barchan, President and CEO, Celemi

Being a Professor Will No Longer Be a Viable Career | History News Network – via @AdrianCheok

“Average” faculty, [Steve] Weiland [MSU] said, will be subject to the kind of unsympathetic management advocated by foundation heads like William G. Bowen, president emeritus of the Mellon Foundation, who wrote in a recent book that “the days are over when faculty can … expect to have complete control over the tools they use.” Bowen didn’t mean faculty like Nagy or Michael Sandel, Weiland said. He meant professors like Weiland himself, and most of those present at the AAUP.

Becoming explicit

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print to digitalOur old technology — paper — gave us an idea of knowledge that said that knowledge comes from experts who are filtered, printed, and then it’s settled, because that’s how books work. Our new technology shows us we are complicit in knowing. In order to let knowledge get as big as our new medium allows, we have to recognize that knowledge comes from all of us (including experts), it is to be linked, shared, discussed, argued about, made fun of, and is never finished and done. It is thoroughly ours – something we build together, not a product manufactured by unknown experts and delivered to us as if it were more than merely human. – David Weinberger

Helping people become explicit in their work, as David Weinberger suggests in the above article, was my concluding advice to delegates at the Learning Technologies Summer Forum in London yesterday [curated tweets by Martin Couzins]. As learning and work get integrated, the co-creation of organizational knowledge develops from the sharing of our implicit knowledge. This is a messy, never-finished process that requires continuous engagement, usually through conversation. I think it is becoming rather obvious that knowledge cannot be directly transferred, but better understanding can emerge from open sharing. In the digital age, supporting knowledge sharing can be a key role for learning and development in the organization.

The nature of work is shifting. The dominant framework is moving from corporations to networks. As I explained in my presentation, knowledge networks are optimized when they are based on openness, which enables transparency, and in turn fosters diversity, thus reinforcing the basic principle of openness. Over time, trust emerges. Openness can be supported through social networks, as they are non-hierarchical by design, allowing anyone to connect to everyone. Supporting social networks becomes a business imperative, and a potential role for learning & development staff. They can also help people develop personal knowledge mastery skills, a foundational competence for the connected workplace. As the graphic below shows, becoming explicit can have a direct impact on innovation.

becoming explicitBooks gave us the illusion that knowledge was stable. It never was. Now it’s time to think of organizational learning as a process of shared attempts to become explicit. As Gerd Leonhard remarked in the opening keynote yesterday, a critical skill in the near-future workplace will be sense-making. I could not agree more.

our words

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A strange thing I’ve noted in the past few years of social media proliferation is that blogs seem to be becoming fewer but more powerful. One indicator is that for the first time, I am being paid to blog (not this post). Original thoughts are getting harder to find, as everyone is Liking, Pinning & Retweeting. While this is good for me in some ways, it also shows the value of a unique voice.

Marcia Conner talks about turning words into swords, inspired by Douglas Rushkoff, who makes an interesting conclusion:

“My advice is to focus on groups over individuals, and verbs over nouns. It’s not the heroes who matter so much as the groups that have modeled their behavior; it’s not the things that matter so much as the actions we take.” —D. Rushkoff

Our training and education systems and establishments focus on individual skills. But what really changes organizations and makes them effective is group behaviour. So it’s not the lone blogger who is powerful but the network of bloggers who can build upon ideas and take action. One blogger is a mere scribe, but a blogging culture builds transparency and trust. Changing to a culture of work narration is not merely developing writing skills but embracing openness.

Writing is doing, especially if done frequently. Modelling narration can help change group behaviour. In the end it doesn’t matter how good one person is, it’s how good our societal networks are. The more effective these knowledge networks are at transmitting ideas and taking action from them, the less susceptible we will be to corporate shills, government agencies purporting to protect us, and many others who pretend to speak on our behalf. If ‘we’ can show that ‘we’ are connected, engaged, and will take action, then ‘we’ will be in a real democracy at home, or at work.

democracy puzzlePhoto by S_K_S : CC-By-NC-SA

my Net

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Ten years ago I started out on my own. I took a bit of a gamble – no job, two school-age children, no clients. I was an optimist.

I live in the middle of nowhere as far as the business world is concerned, and without the internet I would not be able to do my work, or even have a living. For the moment, the following statement is basically true:

“The elite have power over just about everything. The internet is a rare, untamed exception” – Truthout

Maybe I was wrong to be optimistic – but I’m still hopeful, in spite of some evidence to the contrary that the next middle class will be quite different. The latest news about state surveillance operations, here and elsewhere concerns me as well, but I think current events may help open the internet again. This just might be the beginning of the end of techno-utopia for educators, as well as the impetus for a more open internet, particularly coming from outside North America.

fishing-netsThe internet was essential in building my business. It’s my net. Now it looks like it could become nothing more than a fishing net for any state security organization. But I’m still optimistic that things can change for the good. Connecting +2 billion people for the first time in history is going to have some emergent effects that nobody can predict or control. It’s life in perpetual Beta, for people and for institutions, no matter how powerful they may be. In the network era, I don’t take anything for granted, and neither should the elites.

Getting the suds out of the bathtub

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What did the industrial era look like, and how did it differ from the network era? The industrial era epitomized rational, centralized control, replacing local, customized ways of doing things. The network era opens communications so wide that control is no longer possible. For instance, in the network era, leadership is about giving up control.

disconnected to high dynamicImage: From disconnected to centralized to networked

In Organize for Complexity by the BetaCodex network, the authors show the result of centralization on markets as a bit of an anomaly over time. Both decentralized and networked markets are dynamic, while centralized markets are not. In some ways, we are returning markets back to their pre-industrial state.

market dynamics betacodexImage by BetaCodex network

One clear example of this shift is shown by one of my favourite markets – beer. The US Brewer’s Association created this graph of the number of breweries over time. It shows the “Taylor Bathtub” effect very clearly (other than the Prohibition dip). This is just one more indicator that the industrial era is over. I’ll drink to that!

125_Brewery_Count