Harold Jarche

Talent vs Labour

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Are you talent or labour? The difference may be very important. According to a recent article in the New York Times, talent is getting into a position to be able to push capitalism around, but not labour.

Talent is extracting more of the pie and getting richer. The gulf grows between talent — the high-earning, differentiated workers — and labor, those widget makers who support them.

In the NYT article, Roger Martin, author of “Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes and What Capitalism Can Learn from the NFL“, talks about basic labour getting automated and outsourced, a popular theme on this blog.

Through the 1970s, owners moved jobs to Sun Belt right-to-work states. They automated, outsourced and worked to diminish the power of unions. When Ronald Reagan crushed the air traffic controllers’ union in 1981, it was a clear signal: labor had finally been forced to capitulate entirely.

If you want to be valued (and paid) in the network era, then you need to do work with high task variety, requiring continuous informal learning, and based on mostly implicit (tacit) knowledge that cannot be easily codified or shared. This is how talent gets respect from capital. Talent is not easily replaceable.

We’ve been lulled into the notion that information processing is knowledge work. For instance, we generally assume that all lawyers are knowledge workers (it seems they are not). I like Gary Hamel’s definition of the Creative Economy, where the traditional (industrial) employee traits of Intellect, Diligence & Obedience are becoming commodities (going to the lowest bidder). This Creative Economy requires more independent workers (like musical productions) with traits that cannot be commoditized: Initiative; Creativity; Passion. So “knowledge workers” had best ensure that 1) they have more Task Variety than Standardized Work and 2) they are valued for skills that cannot be turned into commodities.

This may be the post-capitalist era, but it will only be good to those that have talent. Our education systems have to ‘up their game’ to get each person to develop his or her  unique talent. Being able to fill a job is not enough, even if it is an honest day’s labour. The capitalist system is designed to screw labour. But it’s more difficult to screw talent. If we want to help people, we need to help each person become Talent. That means emphasizing creativity, complex problem-solving, and innovation. For those of us in the learning, training, education, or human development business, we are doing a major disservice to society if we are merely preparing labour to be used by capital. OD/HR practices like performance management and competency modelling may just be hindering talent and reinforcing the capital/labour divide.

Update: Joachim Stroh has, once again, created a nice graphic to complement this post.

Update: Soft skills are human skills

PKM Workshops

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The final scheduled personal knowledge management workshop finishes this weekend. With four workshops this year and 110 participants, I have learned as much as anyone else. I have seen examples of seeking, sensing and sharing in a wide variety of workplaces, from the perspectives of freelancers, government workers, corporations, etc. Helen Blunden at Activate Learning Solutions recently offered her views on the last workshop. Stephen Dale also gave his take on PKM. Here is a great explanation from Jack Vinson, who shared his years of KM experience during the workshop:

Personal knowledge management is the idea that individuals have to be responsible for managing to get things done. While organizations around us can help, the essential people and things that I use in my regular work need to work for me. This means that I need to know how to use the resources my organization(s) provide, and I have to bring in additional resources when these are not sufficient for me to succeed.  These resources can be everything from the software and files on my computer to the stuff on the network to the people who will make larger connections for me. Importantly, beyond the simple bits and bytes, PKM is about making connections between these artifacts and the people who create them or influence them. I need access to people in the organization to the people outside the organization who will help me get things done.

PKM is about getting things done.

There are no workshops scheduled at this time, though there has been some interest expressed to me via email and social media. If there is sufficient interest, I will conduct another workshop before the end of the year. Of course, custom workshops are available for organizations who want something tailored to their unique needs and these can be run on-site or online.

If you are interested, please let me know. You can comment on this post, send me a tweet, email or even call me. My contact information is posted here. I would also like to know if you would prefer a two-week or month-long workshop. One person even suggested a 6-week programme.

 

Dysfunctional work silos

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

I am only highlighting one post I came across this week, as I think it is extremely important as an indicator of how work is changing.

Bersin.com: Performance Management As a Part of Daily Life: Work.com Changes the Game – via @C4LPT

But Work.com is more than a performance management system.  It is an integrated part of the Salesforce platform, and as such is located where many employees actually do their work.  Critically, there is no separate system to access.  There is no need for HR to entice employees to use the performance management system.   This is not “performance management” software – it is “work software” – a tool which Salesforce.com hopes will help people work together better.

My Comments

This should be a wake-up call to work support specialists (L&D, OD, HR) that ‘net work’ has to be integrated. For vendors, the days of stand-alone learning, talent, or performance management systems are numbered. It should also be a clear indication that industrial/information age work structures, and the disciplines they begat, are losing. relevance.

If systems like Work.com are integrated with the lines of business, there may be less need for specialized HR practitioners or at least fewer of them. Managers may begin to ask why they need HR, when they can manage 80% of performance management themselves. And PM is just the start. Why not learning management, when the vast majority of learning happens on the job?

We are moving toward a unified performer-facing work support model, one that does not differentiate between HR, OD or L&D. The only differentiation is between those doing the valued work, and those supporting it. With integrated software systems, we can now see who is doing what and how much value they add. Work is becoming transparent, and highlighting the dysfunction of our work function silos, created in a time when information was scarce and connections were few. That time has come to pass.

work-silos

Enterprise 2.0 transition

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The E20 Meetup in Paris today discussed the role of “Organizational Development” (OD) and “Human Ressource Management” (HR) in the Enterprise 2.0 game play. The discussions focused on how and in what manner OD and HR can support adoption & transformation processes. Bjoern Negelmann was the host.

Jon Husband and I attended via Google Hangout. Others in attendance included some people I know online, such as Thierry deBaillon and Anthony Poncier, as well as many I have yet to meet, like Marc Bramoullé, Gregory Lefort, Claude Super, and Clemence BJ. It was a good series of deep conversations, mostly conducted in French. Here are my thoughts on some of the questions that were discussed.

What are the obstacles in the Enterprise 2.0 transition?

I have not seen organizations move toward a more social business model without changing management. That may mean reducing the number of managers; empowering people who are customer-facing; or significantly opening up the workflow and making it more transparent. Management is the problem and management is also the solution, if you change it.

Enterprise 2.0 will not fulfill its potential unless its foundation is more than just web technologies or connected businesses. We need to integrate democratic organizing principles into our discussions on Enterprise 2.0 as this is really what it is about,  democratizing the workplace, because in the long run, hyperlinks do subvert hierarchy.

Perhaps the largest obstacle for OD/HR at this time is that few in this field understand the nature of networks. They are mentally trapped in the “org chart/job/role/task” trap. I shared this image by Joachim Stroh to show that “matching roles” is a more network-centric perspective than “filling positions”. This got Jon Husband explaining the +50 year history of HR competency models, their inheherent problems, and how they significantly influence all work in large organizations today.

What is the difference between the adoption & transformation process?

Culture is an emergent property of people working together. Designing a new work system is only part of the solution; it merely sets the stage. Marinating in the resulting complex adaptive system is essential. Monitoring all systems by engaging with them is how we can understand the organization as organism. It cannot be done by managers or OD/HR disconnected from the work being done. It cannot be done from behind a desk. To know the culture, people have to become the culture. One cannot engineer human or organizational performance. [I noticed that the gardener metaphor to explain a new  OD/HR role was used more than once during our discussions]

What is the role of OD & HR within the Enterprise 2.0 transition process?

OD/HR need to connect with the work being done. First hand observation means getting out of the office, where a higher level perspective can help with pattern recognition not possible by those involved in the work. OD/HR should help identify gaps in knowledge networks and play the role of network weavers. They need to model network learning behaviours, such as learning out loud, personal knowledge management, and the narration of work.

What are the OD/HR implications for the Enterprise 2.0 transformation process?

The future will not likely be “HR 2.0” but rather a new organizational development approach, where learning is integrated into the workflow, and OD/HR is much less directive. Many departments outside OD/HR are already staking this new ground and building their expertise, with social media as an enabler. It is like the Wild West and there may not be a role for those who do not understand and actively participate in the networked workplace. OD/HR may get left on the sidelines with Enterprise 2.0 if they do not engage now.

Update: Here is a newer version of the graphic by Joachim Stroh

The Connected Company Review

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I received a copy of Dave Gray’s The Connected Company from O’Reilly books and must say that Dave has done a great job. It is a comprehensive read, covering complexity and networks, and how they are changing business. The book also includes a lot of detail (almost 300 pages) on how to shift to becoming a connected company as well as how to lead one. In addition, the book is sprinkled with Dave’s great illustrations, making the complicated much simpler to understand. It is not a light read, but it is well written and easy to follow. There is so much detail and good information that it should be picked up by anyone managing, running, or advising any organization today.

So what is a connected company? A connected company is a complex, adaptive system that functions more like an organism than a machine. To design connected companies, we must think of the company as a complex set of connections and potential connections: a distributed organism with brains, eyes, and ears everywhere, whether they are employees, partners, customers, or suppliers. Design for connection is design for companies that are made out of people. It’s design for complexity, for productivity, and for longevity.

Connected companies are all about learning, writes Dave, and this is music to my ears. I have been saying that Work is Learning & Learning is the Work for so long now that it’s really nice to hear it from others. Seeing the prominence of learning as a business imperative is refreshing.

The learning challenge for the company comes from the dynamic relationship between the two forms of knowledge. Tacit knowledge is where the action is, and in most cases, it’s the people with the tacit knowledge that deliver the results. But the only way tacit knowledge can be broadly shared is by translating it into explicit knowledge — a very difficult task that very few companies have mastered.

As Chapter 8, Connected Companies Learn, concludes:

Most importantly, a connected company must be able to respond dynamically to change—to learn and adapt in an uncertain, ambiguous, and constantly evolving environment. A connected company is a learning company.

At the end of the book are discussion questions for each chapter. For chapter 16: How connected companies learn, the questions are: “How does our company learn and grow over time? How does individual and team learning become company learning? How do we share knowledge across the company? How might we do it better?” These are the questions I have often helped my clients to ask. This is an excellent business book for the network era, and one that I would highly recommend for learning and performance professionals as well.

PKM and innovation

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In the FastCoDesign article, How do you create a culture of innovation? the authors note four skills that most successful innovators exhibit:

  • Questioning: Asking probing questions that impose or remove constraints. Example: What if we were legally prohibited from selling to our current customer?
  • Networking: Interacting with people from different backgrounds who provide access to new ways of thinking.
  • Observing: Watching the world around them for surprising stimuli.
  • Experimenting: Consciously complicating their lives by trying new things or going to new places.

One way to practice these skills would be to promote personal knowledge mastery (PKM) in the workplace. The Seek-Sense-Share framework aligns with these innovation skills. Seeking includes observation through effective filters and diverse sources of information. Sense-making starts with questioning our observations and includes experimenting, or probing (Probe-Sense-Respond). Sharing through our networks helps to develop better feedback loops. In an organization where everyone is practising PKM, the chances for more connections increases. Innovation is not so much about having ideas, as making more and better connections.

Innovation is inextricably linked to both networks and learning. We can’t be innovative unless we integrate learning into our work. It sounds easy, but it’s a major cultural change. Why? Because it questions our basic, Taylorist, assumptions about work; assumptions like:

A JOB can be described as a series of competencies that can be “filled” by the best qualified person.

Somebody in a classroom, separate from the work environment, can “teach” you all you need to know.

The higher you are on the “org chart”, the more you know (one of the underlying premises of job competency models).

PKM is a framework that enables the re-integration of learning and work and can help to increase our potential for innovation. It’s time to design workplaces for individuals, and their Personal KM, instead of getting everyone to conform to a sub-optimal structure that maximizes capital but not labour. Knowledge is the new capital, but it resides in each person’s head.

To address complex problems, businesses have to rely more on individual tacit knowledge, but this type of knowledge is never easy to convey to others. It takes time and especially trust to make multiple attempts at clarification. Accepting PKM, as a flowing series of half-baked ideas, can encourage innovation and reduce the feeling that our exposed knowledge has to be ‘executive presentation perfect’. Workplaces that enable the constant narration of work and learning in a trusted space can expose more tacit knowledge. We can foster innovation by accepting that our collective understanding is in a state of perpetual Beta. This is how we create a culture of innovation.

#itashare

Do not wait to take control of your professional development

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What happens when freelancing becomes the norm?

The US is no longer an industrial-based society where you can count on having a job for life and a sparkly new watch at your retirement party. (And forget about that pension.) According to the Freelancers Union, one in three workers are now toiling as freelancers, temps, “permalancers”, perma-temps, contractors, contingent workers, etc. That amounts to some 42 million freelancers in the US – people who are working without the benefit of employer-sponsored health insurance, 401k plans and flexible spending accounts. – How America is becoming a nation of freelancers

Meanwhile in the UK, self-employment is on the rise.

Self-employment rose by 101,000 to 4.12 million in the three months through November and accounts for 14.1 percent of total employment, figures released by the Office for National Statistics today show. It has grown about 8 percent since the start of the recession in 2008, while the number of employees has fallen 3 percent. – UK self-employment driven by desperation

The automation and outsourcing of work is becoming our wicked problem to deal with as we move into the network era. Most workers have no control over the economy or the changes in the means of production. They just have to roll with the punches, which are coming faster and faster. However, there is one area where workers can take control; relatively easily and inexpensively. They can take control of their professional development.

Most recruiters will tell you that the time to build your network is before you become unemployed. It’s the same with professional development. If the only knowledge-building activities you do are ones mandated by your employer, then you may be in trouble. Developing a network of thoughtful people who can help in your professional life would be a good start. For example, mapping and understanding your network is the first activity in my PKM workshop. I suggest that everyone needs to develop Net Work Skills.

If you think there is a possibility of spending some time in the future as either unemployed, contractual, or freelancing, then now is the time to build a professional development network. Seek out people who can help you; begin habits of regular sense-making activities; and start to share, because only by sharing will you meet the people you should be seeking in the first place.

There are many barriers to directing your professional development from inside your organization, but almost none outside the workplace, other than time and motivation. As Donald Taylor advised, when I asked for suggestions about how to prepare for an unexpected career change, “My advice: always foster your whole network and give as well as take. Don’t wait until you need them. I always say “Never let your first message to someone be a demand for help.” Derek Warnick suggested, “Don’t wait another year to make the change…” With almost limitless access to shared knowledge, it’s easier today than any time before to take control of your professional development.

from training to performance to social

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This past year I conducted an online workshop called “from training, to performance to social“. In November I will be running one on moving from training to performance support, and this will be followed by a workshop on social learning for business.

I have tried to put together the main themes in a slide presentation that covers some of my experience as well as recommendations I have implemented with my clients. My experience is that it is difficult to move a traditional training organization directly to a social learning focus and it is easier to start with performance consulting and then expand to social and collaborative learning. If you are interested in discussing these ideas, then join one of the workshops or contact me to deliver an online or onsite session with your organization.

training performance social.001

  • HJ: Harold Jarche
  • JH: Jane Hart
  • CJ: Charles Jennings

Message for email subscribers

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At last count, there were 565 people subscribed to this blog via email. This service was provided by FeedBurner, a Google company. There used to be a place on the right side of my Home page where you could subscribe. However, Google has stopped development on Feedburner and rumours are that the service will shut down on 20 October 2012, so I have removed that option. As of yesterday, the Feedburner email subscription service was still working. I am not sure how much longer it will be up, given that Feedburner tells me I have zero subscribers.

I have recently added a subscription notice widget powered by WebFish, but it only gives you the link to the new post, not the entire post in the email itself. At this time, this is all I have found that is available. If you would like to continue to receive updates by email, I would suggest subscribing to the new notification system located on the right column of the Home page.

Friday's Finds 172

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

“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.” – E.O. Wilson – via @jhagel

“If you want to know who rules over you in society, find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” – Voltaire – via @marciamarcia

“A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.” – Albert Szent-Györgyi, Hungarian physiologist – via @marciamarcia

 Why doesn’t everyone share their knowledge? by @JohnStepper

The biggest barrier is that each department, and very often individual teams, cling to their proprietary knowledge bases. They’ve created systems and processes optimized for tracking activities instead of increasing user satisfaction and the speed of finding answers. (This is particularly true when help desks are outsourced.) And they’re loath to change what they do for the greater good.

Why do people share? by @OscarBerg

In the New York Times science article “Will You Be E-Mailing This Column? It’s Awesome“, author John Tuerney describes how researchers at the University of Pennsylvania spent 6 months studying the most e-mailed articles from New York Times. The researches found that people preferred to share long positive articles on intellectually challenging and engaging topics, especially such that inspired awe. Furthermore, surprising and emotional articles were more likely to be shared.

Interactive competence – by @EskoKilpi

Creative learning is the new productivity. In creative, interactive work, productivity cannot be measured in quantitative terms or as a difference between input and output, but as the speed and quality of creative learning.

The management task is not to better understand people but to better understand what happens between people. Our world is co-created in relations.