Harold Jarche

Some thoughts from 2012

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Here is a review of the five most popular posts here this past year, with a short synopsis of each. One year, distilled into a few paragraphs.

Informal Learning: The 95% Solution

Informal learning is not better than formal training; there is just a whole lot more of it. It’s 95% of workplace learning, according to the research reviewed by Gary Wise.

To create real learning organizations, there is a choice. We can keep bolting on bits of informal learning to the formal training structure, or we can take a systemic approach and figure out how learning can be integrated into the workflow – 95% of the time.

You simply cannot train people to be social

Effective organizational collaboration comes about when workers regularly narrate their work within a structure that encourages transparency and shares power & decision-making.

Creating a supportive social environment is management’s responsibility.

My experience is that changing to more collaborative, networked ways of work requires coordinated change activities from both the top and the bottom. It has to be a two-pronged approach and it will take some time and effort.

Three Principles for Net Work

Narration of Work – Transparency – Shared Power

The high-value work today is in facing complexity, not in addressing problems that have already been solved and for which a formulaic or standardized response has been developed. One challenge for organizations is getting people to realize that what they already know has increasingly diminishing value. How to learn and solve problems together is becoming the real business advantage.

The Learning Organization

  1. Learning is not something to “get”.
  2. The only knowledge that can be managed is our own.
  3. Learning in the workplace is much more than formal training.
  4. When we remove artificial barriers, we enable innovation.
  5. Learning and working are interconnected.

Cooperation trumps Collaboration

In networks, cooperation trumps collaboration. Collaboration happens around some kind of plan or structure, while cooperation presumes the freedom of individuals to join and participate. Cooperation is a driver of creativity.

Shifting our emphasis from collaboration, which still is required to get some work done, to cooperation, in order to thrive in a networked enterprise, means reassessing some of our assumptions and work practices.

Collaboration is only part of working in networks. Cooperation is also necessary, but it’s much less controllable than our institutions, hierarchies and HR practices would like to admit.

enhancing innovation

PKM: the basic unit of social business

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True collaborative networks do not rely so much on teams than on individuals, as B. Nardi, S. Whittaker and H. Schwartz have shown. The main benefits for networked organizations do not lie in the outcome from teams, but in individual knowledge acquisition, in the ability to connect with the right people and to access the right information at the right time. Instead of focusing on teams and communities, we must concentrate our efforts in providing workers with the right resources and knowledge to build their own connections. The basic unit of social business technology is personal knowledge management [PKM], not collaborative workspaces. – Thierry de Baillon, The Tainted Narrative of the Workplace

Teams are for sports, not knowledge work

Teamwork is over-rated. For instance, it can be a cover for office bullies to coerce fellow workers. The economic stick often hangs over the team; “be a team player or lose your job”. Empowered individuals working in networks, not teams, will give organizations the flexibility they need to be creative and deal with complexity.

Teams seldom take into consideration the uniqueness of individuals. Usually individuals have to fit into the existing team like cogs in a machine. Team members can be replaced. The team, like the gang, rules.

People are more complex and multi-faceted than the simplistic view of Homo Economicus. Our lives have psycho-social aspects. We are more than our jobs and we are more than our teams. Teams promote unity of purpose, not diversity, creativity, and passion. The team, as a unit of work, is outdated in the network era.

As much as organizations advertise for “team players”, what would be better are workers who can truly collaborate and cooperate, inside and outside the organizational walls. There are other ways of organizing work than in teams. Orchestras are not teams; neither are jazz ensembles. There may be teamwork on a theatre production but the cast is not a team. It is more like a social network. Teams are what we get when we use the blunt stick of economic consequences as the prime motivator. In a complex world, unity is counter-productive.

Small pieces, loosely joined

The mainstream application of knowledge and learning management over the past few decades has had it all wrong. We have over-managed information because it’s easy and we remain enamoured with information technology. The ubiquity of information outside the organization is showing the weakness of centralized enterprise systems. As enterprises begin to understand the Web, the principle of “small pieces loosely joined” is permeating thick industrial walls. More and more workers have their own sources of information and knowledge, often on a mobile device. But they often lack the means or internal support to connect their knowledge with others to get actually get work done.

Personal knowledge mastery [PKM] frameworks can help knowledge workers capture and make sense of their knowledge. Organizations should support the individual sharing of information and expertise between knowledge workers, on their terms, using PKM methods & tools. Simple standards, like RSS, can facilitate this sharing. Knowledge bases and traditional KM systems should focus on essential information, and what is necessary for inexperienced workers. Experienced workers should not be constrained by work structures like teams but rather be given the flexibility to contribute how and where they think they can best help the organization.

We know that formal instruction accounts for less than 10% of workplace learning. The same rule of thumb should apply to knowledge management. Capture and codify the 10% that is essential, especially for new employees. Now use the same principle to get work done. Structure the essential 10% and leave the rest unstructured, but networked, so that workers can group as needed to get work done. Teams are too slow and hierarchical to be useful for the network era. Organizations structured around Loose Hierarchies & Strong Networks, as described in the image below by Verna Allee, are much better for increasingly complex work.

cynefin networks verna allee

Social businesses should leave teams for the sports field, and managing knowledge for each worker

Living with contradictions

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A three-part series on Foucault and Social media, by Tim Raynor, ends with this conclusion:

Foucault would recommend an artistic approach to managing the contradictions in our online and offline lives. We should imagine ourselves as works of art in progress. Works of art are not simple things; they pull together substances, practices, and social worlds. So do you. If you use social media creatively, you can use it to explore different aspects of your person, your potentials and singularities. If you feel fragmented, follow Walt Whitman’s lead:

‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes’ Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)

maple leafEngaging with social media can let us be better works in progress, or embrace perpetual Beta. While the problems inherent with playing to an online crowd are much discussed in this essay, I have found that social media are more liberating and controlling. I find it interesting that many critiques of online engagement, whether it be for learning, working, or just finding others with similar interests, come from people who live in large urban centres. For me, the Internet has been liberating, as I am no longer limited to rural Atlantic Canada. My son has said that his online activities, gaming, socializing & blogging, made high school bearable. I remember life before the Web, and it was nowhere near as interesting as it is today.

Social media have helped me explore different aspects of my learning and my profession, much more than I could have on my own or in my community. I do not think that it is unnatural to feel more affinity for some of my online connections than for my local neighbours. Living with contradictions can help develop critical thinking. As social media enable more of us to live like artists, constantly redefining ourselves and our work, traditional hierarchical institutions will continue to feel threatened. I think we will see greater backlash against the “evils” of a network-mediated life, as power continues to move to the edges. But there is great good that can be done with two billion people connected to each other.

I intend on continuing to embrace contradictions, explore new ideas, and be a work of art in progress. Much of this I will do while connected via the Net. As more of us do so, we can strengthen our commons, work for a better society, and promote democracy. The past decade of living a very active online life has helped me contain more multitudes. I would highly recommend it.

Starting to work out loud

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John Stepper discusses how people can get started working out loud and shows examples of different types of networks that one could connect with. It’s very easy to understand, but not quite so easy to do. Most people are too busy managing in the industrial/information age workplace and have no slack to try to learn how work in the network age.

But they probably won’t. Because they’re already busy. Because they’re afraid to make a mistake or unsure of their writing or speaking skills. Because they’re simply not used to working this way.

The most important step in learning a new skill is the first one. This same step has to be repeated many times before it becomes a habit. As John concludes:

For these people I offer some very simple advice: Schedule time in your calendar for working out loud. Start with simple contributions. Keep shipping.

Over time, you’ll develop the skills you need to be effective and the habits you need to do it regularly.

I strongly suggest that the first step of starting to work out loud, as part of personal knowledge management, has to be as simple as possible.

first step

Free Your Bookmarks: This is a very simple shift that only requires a slight deviation from a common practice: saving bookmarks/favourites on your browser. Using tools like Diigo, or Delicious moves them off a single device, makes them more searchable, and (later) makes them shareable. Being able to share is usually not a prime reason why people start using social bookmarks.

Aggregate: Driving as many information sources as possible through a feed reader such as Google Reader or Feedly, saves time and helps stay organized. It’s amazing how many people do not understand RSS or how to grab a feed and save it. Aggregation makes information flows much easier to deal with.

Connect: How do you get started micro-blogging on a platform like Twitter? I suggest beginning with an aim in mind, such as professional development or staying current in a specific field. Use the search function to find people who post about your area of interest. Then follow no less than 20 and no more than 30 interesting people. Dip into the stream once or twice a day and read through any posts that interest you. Over time, as you follow links, you may add or delete feeds. Within a week or two, you should be able to sense some patterns and then can modify your stream to help you in learning more about the areas that interest you.

Sometimes we get all caught up in the latest social media tools. Getting started working out loud is not complicated and should not involve a steep learning curve on a complicated system. Start with simple tools and frameworks and then use your experience over time to modify them.

Friday's Finds 183

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Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past week.

Leadership: To survive a shock to the system, become an unplanned organization – by @rbgayle

We see this again and again throughout history, as well as in our most entrepreneurial companies: the person who is best suited for dealing with one sort of shock (war, raising capital) is seldom the best for dealing with another shock (peace, shareholders, etc.) Since we cannot know what shocks are in store, nor what is really fragile in an organization, a robust solution to a world of shocks is to create a group of diverse and somewhat redundant talents with leadership dispersed in a way to allow the right talent to rise up when a particular shock hits the system.

Compounding Intelligence: learning social skills leads to better decision making – by @quinnovator

The point being that learning social skills, using good meeting processes, and emphasizing diversity, all actions similar to those needed for effective learning organizations, lead to better decision making. If you want good decisions, you need to break down hierarchies, open up the conversation channels, and listen.  We have good science about practices that lead to effective outcomes for organizations.

“microblogging is the closest we have to human conversation” – by @RossDawson

One of my most consistent messages is that high-performance organizations are increasingly driven by the quality of their networks. Microblogs, through their ease of participation and the breadth of their visibility, are excellent facilitators of organizational networks. Staff can easily get a better sense of activities, capabilities, and personalities across the firm. After 15 years of ‘expertise location’ being on the agenda, microblogs are proving to be one of the simplest and best ways to find the relevant expertise in the organization to address a problem or opportunity.

BBC News – Nokia decline sparks Finnish start-up boom – via @tar1na

Miki Kuusi of Start-Up Sauna – a non-profit programme that coaches entrepreneurs before connecting them with investors – likens Nokia to a big tree in a very small forest.

“Now that Nokia is doing worse the ecosystem around it is developing,” he says.

“Some people even say that the current downfall of Nokia is the best thing that’s happened to this country because it’s challenged us to come up with new ways to have a foundation for our welfare.”

cooperative competencies

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Last month I wrote a post that included a presentation on enterprise social dimensions. It was based on three different perspectives I had come across. I recognized certain patterns and put these together to create a lens that could be used to determine if a selection of enterprise social network tools covered the spectrum of performance/learning needs in a networked workplace. The presentation has been well-received and so far I have not seen a similar approach.

In working with the framework, I realized that not only do the seven facets address tool requirements, but they can also be used to look at workplace competencies in the digital workplace. I am not a fan of competency models but these facets might be handy in creating professional development plans. The seven facets align with several parts of Jane Hart’s Smart Worker model, specifically – encouraging employee generated content; learning and sharing with others; and developing trusted networks of colleagues.

smart worker

Both collaborative behaviours (working together for a common goal) and cooperative behaviours (sharing freely without any quid pro quo) are needed in the network era. Most organizations focus on shorter term collaborative behaviours, but networks thrive on cooperative behaviours, where people share without any direct benefit. This is the major shift we need in creating Enterprise 2.0 or social businesses. Being “social” means being human, and humans are much more than economic units. We like to be helpful and we like to get recognition. We need more than extrinsic compensation and our behaviour on Wikipedia and online social networks proves this. For the most part, we like to help others. This is cooperation, and it makes for more resilient networks. Better networks are better for business.

The image below shows an initial set of competencies that focus not just on collaboration, but also cooperation.

digital competencies ITA

organizational relevance

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Peter Evans-Greenwood has had some good articles lately. This is from his latest, is your organisation irrelevant?

“However, the environment we operate in today is a lot more fluid than the environment of the past, the environment where the vast bulk of our current organisational theory was formulated. Information flows much more rapidly than it used to while the world seems to change every year rather than every generation. The traditional static view of the organisation – one where it has a well defined and stable structure (someone leads, others follow, even if you’re leading from the bottom) – is starting to look a bit long in the tooth.”

hyperlinks-subvert-hierarchy
Peter concludes:

“Leadership is no longer part of a job description: something anointed on the chosen few. Leadership is a role to be adopted when needed, and then passed on when the need has gone. It’s a dynamic thing, moving around the organisation, reshaping the organisation as it passes from individual to individual, team to team.”

leadership-pyramid

Leadership is an emergent property of a network in balance. In this post-information era, organizations need to really understand networks, manage for complexity, and work on building trust. But almost all workplace systems, in organizations of any size, are at cross purposes to this. Networks, for the most part, are seen as something relating only to the IT department. The constant demand for more controlled processes (compliance training, for example) fails to build resilience into the organization. Every time the organization deals with an exception using a standard method, and fails to account for the unique situation of the employee or customer, it erodes trust.

The answers are so simple they are ignored by minds numbed by +100 page reports that tell us nothing. Give people a job worth doing, the tools to do it, and recognition of a job well done. In a transparent, diverse & open organization, management can then get the hell out of the way. This is how organizations can remain relevant.

hyper-connected pattern seeking

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Here is more confirmation that work is learning, and learning is the work. From a recent post by the BBC:

Crucial in surviving all of these unpredictable variables is the use of network design tools – software suites that can simulate what happens at the point of disaster.

“This helps when decisions need to be made in the next couple of days – maybe even the next couple of hours,” explains Tim Payne, research director for Gartner analysts.

“The processing speed at which they can run through a plan or simulation can take seconds — rather than having to run it over night.”

It means companies can take a highly-educated guess at how their decisions will immediately impact their supply chains – and their ability to meet their customer’s demands.

As feedback loops get faster with increased connectivity, the ability to learn and ‘spin on a dime’ becomes paramount. The BBC article discusses the use of technology to analyze data and spot potential risks and trends. But what about people? Technology is only a small part of creating more nimble companies. Workers have to be able to recognize patterns in complexity and chaos and be empowered to do something with their observations and insights.

The Principles of Networked Unmanagement provide an initial framework.

It is only through innovative and contextual methods, the self-selection of the most appropriate tools and work conditions, and willing cooperation that more productive work can be assured. The duty of being transparent in our work and sharing our knowledge rests with all workers.

Innovative and contextual methods mean that standard processes do not work for exception-handling or identifying new patterns. Self-selection of tools puts workers in control of what they use, like knowledge artisans whose distinguishing characteristic is seeking and sharing information to complete tasks. Equipped with, and augmented by, technology, they cooperate through their networks to solve complex problems and test new ideas. This only works in transparent environments.

If learning, and unlearning, are not integrated with the daily work flow then opportunities, such as the Duchess’s dress cited in the BBC article, will be missed. Organizations and their ecosystems that can learn and adapt quickly will be able to capitalize on the myriad opportunities that are constantly presented in a hyper-connected economy. This is nothing new, but it is becoming much more crucial for business survival.

 

networked unlearning

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Our nature – our bias towards an inward focus based on tradition and the past, or an external focus on what we’re seeing around us – cuts across age. Those of us who are willing to question our assumptions will find that we can unlearn (and relearn) at any age. Those who put more weight on what they already know will struggle to change at any age. Today’s digital native will be tomorrow’s digital dinosaur if they are unable to unlearn. That bleeding edge agile practitioner who dogmatically insists that they won’t work with unless you follow these four (in their view) essential agile practices has more in common with their older colleagues still clinging to waterfall methodologies than they are comfortable admitting. —Peter Evans-Greenwood

How can we avoid becoming dogmatic? I think social media can help a lot. Today, we can easily connect to networks that offer diverse views. Inge de Waard uses the example of research tribes: “When joining forces with people that have a common language – but different viewing angles – everyone learns as there is some kind of zone of proximal development there, or it can be created based on mutual conversation and dialogue.” Social media are tools that can help us develop emergent practices. They enable conversations between people separated by distance or time. Social media can facilitate the sharing of tacit knowledge through conversations to inform the collaborative development of emergent work practices. Conversations that push our limits enable critical thinking, which boils down to questioning assumptions, including our own.

One way to build a cognitive web toolbox would be to start with each of the four critical thinking categories shown in the image above. Each sub-category is just an example, and includes many different tools. One can start unlearning by finding and mastering tools that allow you to critically observe and study your field, participate in conversations that  push your understanding, challenge your assumptions, evaluate others’ arguments, and make tentative opinions that in turn will be challenged.

Unlearning takes practice. Living in a state of perpetual Beta can also be uncomfortable. The key is to be engaged in your learning. It requires strong opinions, loosely held. That means going out on a limb knowing you may be criticized. It also means putting forth half-baked ideas, which over time and exposure may develop into something more solid.

But finding and weaving our knowledge networks is getting easier with over two billion of us connected by the Internet. This scale and diversity is an advantage, not something to be concerned about. There is no such thing as information overload. I have yet to see someone completely filled with information. The real challenge is finding the right information. The more I learn, the more I realize I have to learn even more.

As Peter says in the article quoted above, “… it’s not learning that is the challenge, it’s our ability to unlearn that’s holding many of us back.” But we don’t need to unlearn alone. Our networks can help us unlearn; if they are are open, transparent, and most importantly, diverse. A more descriptive term for Personal Knowledge Mastery might just be Networked Unlearning or connected critical thinking.

Friday's Dutch Treat

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Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past week.

During a client workshop in the Netherlands this week, I explained how I use Twitter favourites to collect items of interest during the week and then review these before posting my regular Friday’s Finds post on this blog. I will often tweet an article and then add it to favourites so that I pick it up during my weekly review. The key to PKM is to find a routine that works for you. KM has to be personal to work in the long run.

For example, earlier this week @MHHoekstra had written a blog post that was pertinent to the workshop. I quickly looked at Maarten’s post, a conscious learning process, when it was tweeted by @C4LPT and then added it to my favourites to review later. Two days later, I have read the post and refer to one of the graphics below:

Also, via @nilofer I came across an article in The Atlantic that has me confirming many of my thoughts on work being automated and outsourced. Higher-value manufacturing work, requiring greater task variety and hence more tacit knowledge and informal learning, is actually coming back. But standardized work, with high task standardization, is not. The piece is entitled: The Insourcing Boom.

What’s happening in factories across the U.S. is not simply a reversal of decades of outsourcing. If there was once a rush to push factories of nearly every kind offshore, their return is more careful; many things are never coming back. Levi Strauss used to have more than 60 domestic blue-jeans plants; today it contracts out work to 16 and owns none, and it’s hard to imagine mass-market clothing factories ever coming back in significant numbers—the work is too basic.
Appliance Park once used its thousands of workers to make almost every part of every appliance; today, every component GE decides to make in Louisville returns home only after a careful calculation that balances quality, cost, skills, and speed. Appliance Park wants to make its own dishwasher racks, because it can, and because the rack is an important part of the dishwasher experience for customers. But Appliance Park will likely never again make its own compressors or motors, nor is it going to build a microchip-etching facility.

Finally, here is a photo from my last day in Amsterdam. For more information on the Latin inscription, see this short description from File Magazine.