Harold Jarche

Friday's Smorgasbord

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Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past week [as I prepare for a long flight home, with too many stops on the way].

@RalphMercer – “pilot projects are designed to delay good ideas until they are out of date”

Manuel Castells on the rise of alternative economic cultures – via @jonhusband

“We live in a culture of not virtual reality, but real virtuality because our virtuality – meaning the internet networks – are a fundamental part of our reality.

“All the studies on the internet show that people who are more social on the internet are also more social face-to-face.”

@HansdeZwart – Brewster Kahle on “Universal Access to All Knowledge”

They are convinced that it is feasible to store all the world’s knowledge. Texts are being digitized (i.e. scanned) for representation on the screen (see Open Library for examples) and are openly available. The Internet Archive have made their own scanners pushing the costs per scanned page (mostly labour) down to about 10 cents per page. Their scanning centers now have 3,000,000 free ebooks available online (incl. 500,000 for the blind/dyslexic and 250,000 modern books available for lending) and they have about 8 million more to go. They have made a book mobile that can download and print a book for about one dollar.

@Ignatia – European Environment Agency Keynote [my presentation summarized by Inge de Waard]

Moving from local to global
We live in a less barriered world: self-publication, group forming across the world, unlimited information. In the past we linked up with people with similar interests locally, due to simply physical realities… now we can link up with people from around the world. So from a learning perspective our learning group grows (personal addition: this also means that the group that lives inside the personal zone of proximal development grows, as more people can potentially be in this). Groupforming is now becoming networks. This has an effect on mentorship: per mentor you can only have so many learners, but with the growing group more mentors can stand up and the learners themselves can become mentors.

I saw more bicycles in Copenhagen in 2 days than I see at home in 2 months. They are everywhere. Here are some in front of the central department store, Magasin du Nord.

The training world is changing

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From the Citrix GoTo Blog:

Open online courses, talent management, social collaboration: The training world is changing. Traditional training structures, based on institutions, programs, courses and classes, are under pressure. One of the biggest changes we are seeing in online training is that the content-delivery model is being replaced by social and collaborative frameworks.

Here are just some of things happening now that trainers should be prepared to tackle in the new year:

Increasing Complexity

Helping people be more creative and solve complex problems is now a priority. While workers still need to be trained and educated, that alone will not prepare them for a networked workplace that requires continuous learning on the job. Training departments need to add more thought and resources to enable people to learn socially, share cooperatively and work collaboratively …

An Expanded Role for Training and Development

Training professionals will need to help create and support social learning networks, moving out of the classroom to where the work is being done. They will also need to promote continuous knowledge sharing by modeling how it is done and setting the example. Trainers will have to become expert learners …

Learning as a Business Imperative

As work becomes more networked and complex, the social aspects of knowledge sharing and collaboration are becoming more important. Learning amongst ourselves is getting to be the real work in many organizations. Training development professionals should be part of that change.

For a more in-depth list of near-term trends that should be taken into consideration during the next year, download [read] the white paper: https://www.slideshare.net/GoToTraining/whats-working-and-whats-not-in-online-training

EEA Learning Day

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I will travelling and speaking for most of this week but will share what I have learned when I get back. This will be my first time addressing the European Environment Agency in Copenhagen and I look forward to meeting many new people. Here is what I will be talking about:

Keynote: Working Smarter in the Learning Organisation

As complexity increases in the networked economy, we need to integrate learning into the workflow. Communities of practice bridge the gap between getting work done and serendipitously connecting to looser social networks. Learning and development in the networked workplace must move from content delivery to community enablement. Harold Jarche will present a new framework for working smarter which includes the narration of work, transparency and knowledge-sharing to increase innovation.

I will also be running a workshop for managers:

Workshop: Coaching in the Learning Organisation

Harold Jarche will discuss some new approaches to support informal and social learning in the workplace. If problems and environments are becoming more complex, and are changing so quickly that our level of information will always be inadequate, there are some new qualities that learning coaches will need: 

1.       Openness to learning, not only from our peers, but from our employees and their contacts.

2.       Flexibility in our learning approaches; helping people understand how they learn best.

3.       The ability to be a generalist, moving in and out of learning situations as required.

4.       The skill to develop large-scale social networks in order to access help in solving  employee problems.

5.       An understanding of how networks operate in the exchange and development of knowledge.

"If you don’t build your dream, someone will hire you to build theirs"

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

@MichaelYardney – “If you don’t build your dream, someone will hire you to build theirs.”

@Bulldozer0 – “The best way to overcome cynicism and skepticism is with openness and transparency.”

The Myth of Hiring Passionate Employees via @OscarBerg

What really facilitates the benefits of having a passionate employee is rolling out the red CARPET:

Challenges — an employee can use his/her skills to the fullest, such that (s)he must do her best every day
Autonomy — an employee has the freedom to act in accordance with his/her passion
Resources — an employee has the wherewithal to go the extra mile
Professional development — an employee has opportunities to learn and grow in/with the company
Enthusiasm — an employee can share his/her enthusiasm with others and have it reciprocated
Tangible impact — an employee can tell that what (s)he is doing is meaningful and valuable

A suggested plan to confront Death by Administration via @AdrianCheok

One, no meeting is ever convened other than to take decisions.

Two, nobody is required to go to a meeting unless its decisions affect them.

Three, university managers must begin meetings with discussion of a recent scholarly article or book on any topic — apart from management.

The last one should really reduce meeting time.

Toby Miller is professor of cultural industries at City University London.

What is learning’s role?

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My colleague, Clark Quinn, in Building a Performance Ecosystem states that the benefits of maximum information for people to get work done, combined with minimum barriers to achieve their work goals, are good for the entire organization. “When they [workers] can get the resources they need and the right people to assist when necessary, the performance benefits are obvious.” Alignment is necessary.

Some of that alignment is missing between departmental silos though. While Clark says that “learning leaders” should step up to the challenge, there is also a strong need to get aligned with IT, marketing, and operations, to name a few. As Clark concludes:

“By aligning the use of technology with business needs in this way, learning leaders are demonstrating the strategic contribution to the organization that the executive suite wants to see. Failing to grasp the opportunity at this inflection point in business operations has a grim prospect. Folks know they can learn on their own and together. If learning leaders don’t get in and facilitate the full learning spectrum, it will happen without them. Then, just what is learning’s role?”

What is learning’s role? First of all, in the network era, a coherent organization is one in which learning is no longer a specialty. Much as writing was no longer a specialty when the majority of workers became literate, learning today is more than putting an X in a checkbox. Work is learning and learning is the work. I may have said this many times before but it is the essential change in how we must view knowledge-intensive and creative work in a networked environment.

Learning is not something done to us, it is what we do together. Learning delivery in a constantly changing work environment is an outdated notion. For example, training courses are artifacts of a time when information was scarce and connections were few. It is glaringly obvious in this time of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity that we can get pretty well any information we need whenever we want it. To make sense of this, we need network era literacies, and with these new literacies we no longer need the equivalent of learning scribes. Pulling informal learning, instead of having formal instruction pushed to workers, has to become the workplace norm. By norm, I do not mean something bolted on to a course or some function of an LMS. I mean integrated into the daily work flow.

Learning together is part of collaborating to get things done while also cooperating in order to participate in knowledge networks. “Strictly business” is less frequently the case in our lives, as our work/life boundaries get fuzzier. Meanwhile the work/learning boundaries also get fuzzier. We no longer limit our learning to classrooms, training centres, workstations, or our official company mobile devices. In this environment, we cannot leave the direction of our learning to a “learning professional”. If today’s learning professionals want to remain relevant in the coherent organization, then they need to participate in collaborative and cooperative work/learning flows. This will be a sea change for the training & development profession, but I am certain it will happen with our without their participation.

CoherentOrgExpanded

Enterprise social network dimensions

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Many organizations are using social media and social networks, but how do they know if they are using them appropriately or adequately? Do they have all the aspects of collaboration and cooperation supported in order to succeed as a social business? I started looking at how we can begin to make sense of enterprise social networks from an organizational performance perspective and found a few good sources and have woven these together for what I hope is a useful performance support tool, or at least a conversation starter.

Ian McCarthy’s honeycomb of social media was an initial inspiration, showing how one could quickly and graphically portray differences between social media platforms. The Altimeter Group’s recent report on making the business case for enterprise social networks provided more detail on what happens inside organizations. Finally, Oscar Berg’s digital workplace concretized gave a good picture of what people-centric, service-oriented businesses should look like.

I put these concepts together within the framework of a coherent enterprise that supports both collaborative and cooperative behaviours. I hope it provides some clarity and would appreciate any feedback or further building upon these ideas. Thanks to all those who have shared so that I could play with these ideas, and hopefully create something useful.

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Things are changing

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

@MeriWalker – “Higher education is like a corpse propped up in the corner of a building that’s rotting out from under it.”

@flowchainsensei – “How long will you tolerate domination, coercion and manipulation in the workplace? For as long as they pay you?”

You don’t need a banker – by @robpatrob

This idea was truly “disruptive”. The actual tools were inferior to the opposition. Their context was superior.

THIS is what my new book is all about.

It is a contextual guide that will, I hope, help you see the context and so the mindset issues that can either trap you or empower you.

Exhibit A: Toronto Star: We’re the source material for news

We do 90 per cent of the legwork. For all the budget-slashing, the Star still delivers an enviable package of local, national and international news coverage, plus award-winning investigative reporting, expert analysis and diverse commentary.

Exhibit B: GigaOm: blogs & Twitter picked up journalistic slack

But as Carr points out, it was exactly those Twitter accounts and bloggers who kept the heat on Armstrong and the doping allegations while the mainstream sports press were celebrating his achievements: Twitter users like @TheRaceRadio and @UCI_Overlord, and a relatively little-known blog called NYVelocity — a site run by a commercial photographer and amateur cycle-racer. Since founder Andy Shen didn’t have any connection to cycle-racing, he was free to pursue whatever stories he wanted, and others picked up and redistributed his links and commentary.

L’innovation pédagogique

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Voici ma présentation hier soir à Moncton pour l’ouverture du colloque de l’ACDEAULF.

Résumé : Les médias sociaux, la dissémination du travail et l’information illimitée modifient nos relations en milieu de travail. Nous sommes désormais capables d’entrer en communication avec n’importe qui et n’importe où, et de trouver pratiquement toute l’information que nous recherchons. Les hyperliens réduisent à néant les hiérarchies, rendant superflues de nombreuses pratiques de l’éducation industriel.

Pourtant, nous nous accrochons aux méthodes traditionnelles d’évaluation du travail. Les compétences professionnelles étaient fondées sur des tâches stables et mesurables. Les cours sont le vestige d’une époque où l’information était peu abondante et les relations limitées. L’avenir du travail réside dans l’intégration de l’apprentissage et des méthodes de travail. L’avenir, c’est apprendre à travailler plus intelligemment.

It’s about value creation

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There’s always something thought-provoking on Sigurd Rinde’s blog. His latest post, the information age fallacy, looks at the amount of time wasted in managing information flows, instead of creating anything new. The problem with information technology, as Sig describes it, is that IT, “has mostly produced faster ways to do exactly the same we did two thousand years ago.”

“The figures are rather simple – knowledge work stands for about 60% of the world’s value creation while knowledge workers spend on average about 2/3rd of their time on managing the flows. If we could automate that management and spend that time on value creation instead – i.e. change “what” we do – we would look at approximately 120% GNI growth world wide.”

The amount of time at work wasted doing certain non-productive tasks can be up to 50%, according to some studies, and this does not even include time wasted in meetings.

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Adapting to a networked economy and workplace takes time. This time has been overlooked in our race to get the next shiny piece of technology. Oscar Berg summed it up on Twitter recently and said that the main reason for our technology-centric approach to work is that we are hoping “for a silver bullet that will kill all our problems in one shot.” Obviously, the evidence shows that the next piece of technology will not solve our problems and may actually compound them.

Value is created by workers with creativity, curiosity, and empathy. Value creation in the 21st century is having ideas, connecting people and ideas, and trying new things out based on these ideas. Not only do these activities take time, they are highly social, as success often depends on who we work with. Spending time on merely managing data flows saps our energy and drive for doing creative work.

Maybe we need to look at productivity differently. Instead of asking, what have you done for the company this week, we should be asking what ideas you have had and what have you done to test them out? It might get us away from measuring and doing things that should be automated in the first place. Automation is not a bad thing if you know what to do with the extra time it provides, so let the droids do the boring stuff, and let’s focus on value creation.

A coherent path to social business

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Thierry de Baillon and Ralph Ohr, in their post on Business Model Innovation as Wicked Problem, conclude the following:

An ever increasing pace of change leads to a decrease in life time of operating business models. Companies are therefore forced to reinvent themselves more frequently by creating new business models. Entering new businesses through open business model innovation exhibits a wicked problem structure. In order to properly address those problems, companies have to follow emergent strategies and need to put decentralized, self-organizing structures in place. Social business brings an answer to the urgent necessity to successfully tackle corporate reinvention and to enhance strategic adaptability by connecting individual human stakeholders.

What kinds of “emergent strategies and decentralized, self-organizing structures” can be put in place? I think it boils down to three things: Openness, Knowledge-sharing, and Diversity.

1. Openness can be encouraged through the use of social networks and enterprise social platforms. People need to know what others are doing and the default mode has to be sharing. If workers cannot connect with anyone they need to, then the knowledge needed to address a problem may never be revealed to those who need it. Opening communications to everyone is the antithesis of bureaucracy, where lines of control are ever-important.  Bureaucracies are the enemy of innovation, as they favour self-preservation over change. They are self-serving. They are also reinforced by the notion of jobs. Openness means getting rid of jobs, which subvert openness, innovation and emergent practices. Social networks, powered by social media, help to remove bureaucracy and antiquated ways of working.

2. Just because a system is open does not mean that a learning organization will emerge. People need to practice knowledge-sharing through the narration of work and personal knowledge mastery. Both are simple concepts to understand but take time to become daily practices throughout an organization.

3. Finally, any organization needs to have a diversity of opinions in order to remain innovative and deal with the wicked problems described by Thierry and Ralph. “Connections drive innovation“, according to Tim Kastelle. “We need input from people with a diversity of viewpoints to help generate innovative new ideas. If our circle of connections grow too small, or if everyone in it starts thinking the same way, we’ll stop generating new ideas.” This means giving access to social networks, eliminating tribes such as departmental silos, and actively looking for people with different backgrounds and experience.

Putting all of this together, is what we at the Internet Time Alliance call a coherent organization.

The Coherent Organization:
Cooperation & Collaboration flowing between work teams & social networks
via communities of practice