Harold Jarche

in an increasingly complex world

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Robert Warwick – Following a comprehensive literature review, heavily influenced by complexity sciences, we came up with seven essential criteria that are important to consider in an increasingly complex world, these were:

    • Go out of your way to make new connections.
    • Adopt an open, enquiring mind-set, refusing to be constrained by current horizons.
    • Embrace uncertainty and be positive about change – adopt an entrepreneurial attitude.
    • Draw on as many different perspectives as possible; diversity is non-optional.
    • Ensure leadership and decision-making are distributed throughout all levels and functions.
    • Establish a compelling vision which is shared by all partners in the whole system.
    • Promote the importance of values – invest as much energy into relationships and behaviours as into delivering tasks.

This is a good set of guidelines (via David Hodgson) and useful for conversations around organizational change.

Connections: develop an active PKM process, which is reviewed from time to time

Open & Enquiring: practice critical thinking, questioning all assumptions, including your own

Embrace uncertainty: think of all your work as in a state of perpetual Beta

Diversity: “Human systems thrive on variety and diversity. ~ Esko Kilpi”

Distribute Leadership: think of leadership as an emergent property of your networks and not a permanent position in a hierachy

Vision: shared vision comes through trusted networks, however a clear vision is necessary, but not sufficient

Values: transparent organizations are better at sharing values but the initial design influences everything

Skills 2.0 redux

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We are now in the second week of our Summer Camp on informal and social learning. The first week’s assignment was to read and comment on an article I wrote in 2008. I wondered what had changed in the last four years and if these thoughts were still pertinent. Here’s what I asked:

  • What has changed?
  • What has not?
  • Do you agree with the thoughts here?
  • What do you think are Skills 2.0, or perhaps even Skills 3.0, for you, your colleagues and your fields of expertise?

One participant said that, “This article is as pertinent to 2012 as to 2008.” Another wrote: One of my favourite quotes from the article is “Being a learning professional is becoming more about your network than your current knowledge.” 

I have noticed with my writing here over the past eight years that timing is very important. Some articles get little notice when originally posted and then are picked up by the network many years later. It’s one reason I never close commenting on my posts. You never know what might be of interest.

Here is the article, Skills 2.0 (PDF).

It’s not complicated, you see

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When Bayer’s Material Sciences Division decided to become more collaborative, they realized that the main challenge in promoting knowledge-sharing across organizational boundaries is culture. They deployed the software platform (IBM Connections) without any formal training, saying that when the tool is simple to use, people focus on collaboration, not the software. Their solution was simple.

I know few enterprise software projects that go without a hitch. These are complicated tools and even after implementation most people only use a few functions from the wide array that are available. As complexity increases, and we keep adding new tools to the workplace, the simpler the tool, the easier it will be to implement, especially since the lifespan of our knowledge tools keeps getting shorter.

simplified design for complexity

Complication is the industrial disease. Understanding the difference between complication and complexity is extremely important in today’s workplace. The Cynefin framework  distinguishes between four domains to describe systems:

  • Simple, in which the relationship between cause and effect is obvious to all, the approach is to Sense – Categorise – Respond and we can apply best practice.
  • Complicated, in which the relationship between cause and effect requires analysis or some other form of investigation and/or the application of expert knowledge, the approach is to Sense – Analyze – Respond and we can apply good practice.
  • Complex, in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe – Sense – Respond and we can sense emergent practice.
  • Chaotic, in which there is no relationship between cause and effect at systems level, the approach is to Act – Sense – Respond and we can discover novel practice.

Most of today’s larger companies have developed complicated structures. To enable growth and efficiencies, more and more processes have been put in place. Management schools aided and abetted this movement. New layers of control and supervision continue to appear, silos are created, and knowledge acquisition is formalized in an attempt to gain efficiency through specialization. To compensate for complicated processes, some enterprises have attempted to become learning organizations, putting significant effort into training (but not learning). But training design & development just got more complicated.

Complexity is the new normal. Because everything is interconnected by networked technologies today, systemic changes are sensed almost immediately. Reaction times and feedback loops have to get faster and more effective to deal with this. Formal training addresses a mere 5% of workplace learning, and our current models for managing people, training, and knowledge-sharing are insufficient for a workplace that demands emergent practices just to keep up. Knowledge workers today need to connect with others to co-solve problems, but complicated policies, procedures, and guidelines often stop them.

In a short interview, via Luis Suarez, Steve Jobs describes how Apple deals with complexity through simplified design. First of all, there are no committees. Secondly, only one person is responsible for each area (simplified leadership). Finally, teams communicate and collaborate with other teams on an ongoing basis. Jobs says that Apple is run like a start-up.

Organizations need to embrace complexity, instead of treating it as mere complication. We know that  innovation can abound in start-ups, but why not in larger organizations? One problem is that growth creates sustainable efficiencies, which get embedded and codified. These efficiencies can lead to greater market share, which companies become addicted to, not seeing that they are simultaneously becoming less innovative.  A Probe-Sense-Respond approach, or perpetual Beta releases, is necessary to deal with complexity, through constant learning by doing. Continually probing via many new, small initiatives means that organizations have to abandon complicated command and control systems, trust workers, and give them the space to learn while working.

probe sense respond

The challenge is to get the addicts (companies) to stop their lifelong destructive behaviours, which are now catching up with them. It won’t be easy, but it’s not complicated. It’s actually simple ;)

Marketing and learning are the same

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When you learn with and from your customers, marketing and learning are the same. If companies are focused on their customers, why are learning resources not customer focused? Google’s power-searching course is an excellent example of marketing integrated with learning. As Jay Cross described:

This has to be one of the least expensive marketing campaigns ever devised. The only tools required are a video cam and the free Google suite of applications. Other out-of-pocket costs are employee time to design and create the course, and a little more time tending the Google+ sessions and answering questions.

Everything is connected to everything else

The big lesson of the 21st century thus far is that everything is connected to everything else. It’s all one big network, folks.

No corporation is an island. (Everything’s a node.) A corporation and its connections form an extended enterprise.

For Us to prosper, we have to be on the same wave length as our connections in the extended enterprise. Since the environment of our enterprise is forever changing and learning is the way we adapt to change, we all need to be learning together. Otherwise, someone will be falling behind, and our combined performance will suffer.

I’m going to call learning with other players in the extended enterprise co-learning. If I were an instructional designer in a moribund training department, I’d polish up my resume and head over to marketing. Co-learning can differentiate services, increase product usage, strengthen customer relationships, and reduce the cost of hand-holding. It’s cheaper and more useful than advertising.

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Busy finds

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

Supreme Court of Canada: copyright law should not stand in the way of technological progress – via @mgeist

Trust in the professionalism of your workforce is the only thing that scales across the entire org – by @nickcharney

The Unanticipated Benefits of Content Curation – by @kanter

Curation has nothing to do with personal expression or sharing nor with collecting links, tweets or blog posts that you may find interesting.   Curation is all about helping your audience dive in and make sense of a specific topic, issue, event or news story.  It is about collecting, but it is also about explaining, illustrating, bringing in different points of view and updating the view as it changes.   It is also about sharing with your community – not passing along stuff that you have not read or contextualize or shooting out links.  But engaging in dialogue to help them make sense.

Four ways social networking has forever changed the way we work – by @joemckendrick

Companies have means to better leverage the knowledge coursing through their corporate veins to turn around distressed lines of business.

Unlike the traditional model for outsourcing firms contracting out functions or processes to an outside firm individuals are starting to outsource their problem-solving and their own professional development.

The 9-to-5 rut had been withering on the vine for a number of years, and social networking is putting the final stakes in the industrialized, command-and-control model of management.

Close to seven out of ten respondents (69%) report that their companies have gained measurable business benefits [italics mine], including more innovative products and services, more effective marketing, better access to knowledge, lower cost of doing business, and higher revenues.

 Why are we always so ‘busy’ without reflection time? via @jimbobtyer

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.

What, me, busy?

Marsh Wren by Simon Pierre Barrette

Flatter hierarchies require deeper skills

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The writing is on the wall.

Most people manage themselves with great success: they manage to get out of bed in the morning, they manage to get dressed, they manage to get to the office on time.

Then, at the office, they meet the “manager” that will manage them until end of the day. That’s at best a paradox, at worst a devastating error. – Let the Managers Go

At this point, our entire company is flat.  With no hierarchy, everyone leads within their areas of stewardship and responsibility.  Many will have excess capacity and offer to help another teammate or even go to another department to ask how they can help. (Yes, this really happens—in some cases, it happens every day.) – The End of Middle Managers (And Why They’ll Never Be Missed)

In an interconnected work environment, people with only broad skills are no longer required. People with general management skills are becoming less valuable to the organization. Many of the coordination activities of managers are being replaced by software or circumvented by connected workers. Take a look at the new global powerhouses like Apple or Google. They have far fewer employees (and fewer managers) than 20th century titans like GM or Exxon. The trend to smaller companies, many with shorter life spans, only seems destined to continue for the near future.

I think this indicates major changes for any support function (including learning & development) in organizations. If support functions do not contribute to the company’s value creation, then they will likely be reduced, replaced, or just closed. For middle managers and support functions, this should be a warning. You need to have business skills in addition to general ones. For example, if you are a learning specialist for a software company, it might make sense if you could also do some graphic design, scripting or coding. Billable skills come in handy when the pressure is on.

The future manager, or support specialist, will have to have a T-shaped set of skills. Broad  knowledge & skills in what was once their specialty, and deep knowledge & skills in a business area (preferably billable). These deep skills will differentiate the generalist from the person who gets hired and stays hired.

 

I come not to bury training, only to put it in its place

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I’ve taught ABCD objectives (audience, behavior, condition, and degree) on many continents, and in universities, companies, and government agencies. I promise you that students of instructional design appreciate ABCD. They rely on the mnemonic to help them produce and screen their efforts. Admittedly trickier is demonstrating where objectives come from, establishing that valuable link between the tasking, analysis, goals, and objectives. That is a story for another time. —Allison Rossett

Methods like ABCD work very well when you know what you are trying to achieve and understand the systems you are operating in. They work well when you have established best or good practices to base the training on. But what happens in complex environments, when “the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance”? This is the situation many workers find themselves in today.
cynefin education training
In complex environments, a Probe-Sense-Respond approach is required, and this is something that training and education programmes, designed in advance and directed by management, cannot address. While people still need to be trained and educated, that alone will not prepare them for a networked workplace that demands the integration of learning and working.
probe sense respond
The increasing complexity of our workplaces means we have to accept the limitations of training and education as we have practiced them. There is a growing need to help people be more creative and to solve complex problems, on a daily basis and in concert with others. Even the best training programmes cannot help here. Organizations (HR, L&D, OD, KM, etc) need to add significantly more thought and resources to enable people to learn socially, share cooperatively, and work collaboratively.  Work is changing, and so must learning support. Making better carriages will not help.

Communities of practice enable the integration of work and learning

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COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE

  • Our world is getting more complex as everything gets connected.
  • Complex problems require more implicit knowledge, which cannot be codified.
  • Implicit knowledge can only be shared through conversations & observation.
  • Collaborative and distributed work is becoming the norm.
  • Knowledge-sharing and narration of work make implicit knowledge more visible, especially in distributed work teams.
  • Transparent work processes foster innovation.
  • New ideas come from diverse networks, often outside the organization.
  • Learning is part of work, not separate from it.
  • Communities of practice enable the integration of work & learning.

So what is a community of practice? Maybe we should start with what it is not:

  • It is not a help desk filled with subject matter experts.
  • It is not a work group, or even task focused.
  • One is not appointed by management to join a community of practice.

Some characteristics of communities of practice:

  • People want to join them.
  • They usually have a higher purpose, that one person alone cannot achieve.
  • People feel affinity for their communities of practice.
  • There are both strong and weak social ties.
  • You know you are in a community of practice when it changes your practice.

community-of-practice-change

Friday the 13th Finds

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

@RalphMercer – “Consensus, the general agreement to fail together.”

Eide Neurolearning: Remembering inhibits learning

In an interesting study, researchers from Duke University found that learning and remembering compete when both are made to occur at the same time.

@sjgill – How to create a learning culture in organizations

That is, organizational learning is not about training. Rather, it’s about a community of workers sharing in a process of constantly seeking improvement through new knowledge, new skills, and new applications of knowledge and skills to achieving the goals of the organization. They examine what they do, compare that to what needs to be done, reflect on what they have learned, and make the needed change in the organization.

Forbes: The End of Middle Managers (And Why They’ll Never Be Missed) – via @bdupperin

The captains don’t “manage” every day. They have just one meeting as captains per week. That meeting determines the deployment of strategy. We hand off to the captains—then they hand off to the teams, who hand off to the individuals who deploy day to day, and then they get out of the way (as they resume their own production roles, side by side with their teams.)

At this point, our entire company is flat.  With no hierarchy, everyone leads within their areas of stewardship and responsibility.  Many will have excess capacity and offer to help another teammate or even go to another department to ask how they can help. (Yes, this really happens—in some cases, it happens every day.)

@changethinking – The Dirty Little Secret Behind the 70% Failure Rate of Change Projects – via @LucGaloppin

The inconvenient truth is that after many years of applying our craft, with plenty of opportunities to have an impact and more than enough practitioners to make a difference, there is no hard evidence that we have made even a dent in the appalling prognosis for executing change. The latest research continues to show what the original findings revealed—7 out of 10 projects still fail to reach their stated intentions.

Adam Scislowicz – Brokerage Rules & Trust:

 @brianinroma – Want to end email hegemony? Follow these simple tips.

PKM as pre-curation

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The most important part of personal knowledge mastery (PKM), in my opinion, is the need for active sense-making. Merely seeking and sharing information does little other than create more noise online. Sense-making takes time, discipline, and effort.

One strength of PKM is the “manual” nature of sense-making activities. The act of writing a blog post, a tweet, or an annotation on a social bookmark all force you to think a bit more than clicking once and filing it to an automated system. Other sense-making routines, like my weekly review of Twitter favourites and creating Friday’s Finds, can encourage reflection and reinforce learning.

Sense-making, or placing information into context, is where the real personal value of PKM lies. The knowledge gained from PKM is an emergent property of all its activities. Merely tagging an article does not create knowledge. The process of seeking out information sources, making sense of them through some actions, and then sharing with others to confirm or accelerate our knowledge are interlinked activities from which  knowledge (often slowly) emerges.

Robin Good has a similar perspective on curation, as shown on this mindmap on curation for training & education.

Content curation is NOT the same as social sharing, reposting/retweeting, liking or favoring a specific content item.

Robin says that, “Curation is about making sense of a topic/issue/event /person/product etc. for a specific audience.”

The difference between PKM and Curation is that the former is personal, while the latter is for an intended audience. I practice PKM for myself and my blog’s primary audience is me. Sharing online  makes it social so that I can learn with and from others. Sense-making (as described by Ross Dawson)  is the most important aspect in both cases:

Filtering (separating signal from noise, based on some criteria)

Validation (ensuring that information is reliable, current or supported by research)

Synthesis (describing patterns, trends or flows in large amounts of information)

Presentation (making information understandable through visualization or logical presentation)

Customization (describing information in context)

The connection, in practice, between PKM and curation seems quite obvious to me. I can practice PKM and over time develop a wide variety of knowledge artifacts. For example, I have 2,182 blog posts and 2,858 social bookmarks. These have all been curated by me and for me. However, if I want to curate these artifacts for an intended audience, I can quickly search these artifacts and find suitable resources. I frequently do this for my clients, where I may compile a list of a few blog posts related to some aspect of our project.

I think that people who have a professional PKM framework have some of the skills and knowledge needed to be good curators. Their sense-making processes are already developed. I would consider PKM as a form of pre-curation.