Harold Jarche

Training, Performance, Social Workshop Notes

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We launched a new online workshop today called, From Training, to Performance, to Social. It’s a Beta version, at a reduced price, but we have had a good number of participants sign up. I came up with the idea while conducting one of the PKM workshops and noticed that many people either mixed up training with performance improvement, or thought of social learning as merely a bolt-on to a formal course.

The first assignment has started with a bang this week, with many long and thoughtful posts about training and instruction. We will move to performance improvement tomorrow and then focus on social learning all of next week. There is one assignment for Training, two for Performance Improvement, and three for Social; reflecting, in my opinion, their relative importance in any organization. It roughly aligns with the 70:20:10 framework.

We have participants from AUS, NZ, UK & Europe, and North America, from many types of organizations and backgrounds. The workshops are designed to give just enough structure, without constraining personal and social learning. We curate what we think are the essential resources on a topic and also provide additional links and resources for those who are interested. We encourage all discussions to be done in the group area, so that people can learn from each other. Also, participants get my attention for two weeks. I try to find ways to help each person as I see what issues arise in the conversations. Without these conversations, I would not be able to help in an informed way. For those attending the workshops, the more they give, the more they get.

This is my fourth online workshop this year and it seems to be a model that works for me as well as participants. Feedback has been almost universally positive and I find the workload manageable. We will be offering more topics, and suggestions are always welcome. Custom workshops for organizations can also be developed.

courses artifacts

Innovating our way out of the industrial era

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I have frequently said that simple and complicated work is getting automated and outsourced and that the real value in the networked enterprise is in complex (creative) work. Standardized work, that can be done by many, is low value in the network era. See my posts on Job Automation or Exception Handling for further reading.

 Bob Cringely clearly shows how this works in information technology.

Toward the top end of IT the value of individual contributors becomes extreme. There are many IT organizations where certain critical functions are dependent on a single worker. These are complex or arcane tasks being done by unique individuals. You know the type. Every organization needs more of them and it is easy to justify looking wherever — even overseas — to find more.  It’s at this level where the commodity argument breaks down.

The bad news is that routine, standardized work has increasingly lower value. The good news is that almost every person has the capacity to do more complex and creative work. We have been designed as learning organisms. Our main constraints are our artificial structures, especially our schooling systems. Much as we no longer need the majority of the population to grow crops, we no longer need a large workforce of widget makers or data processers. However, we have an infinite demand for creative products and services.

As Cringely concludes:

So we have a standoff. Corporate America has, for the most part, chosen a poor path when it comes to IT labor issues, but CEOs aren’t into soul-searching and nobody can turn back the clock. Labor, in turn, longs for a fantasy of their own — the good old days.

The only answer that makes any sense is innovation — a word that neither side uses properly, ever.

The only way out of this mess is to innovate ourselves into a better future.

Between organizations, innovation can start by increasing connections, as it is obvious there are few connections between labour leaders and CEO’s.  Inside organizations, innovation can be facilitated through narration, transparency and power-sharing. That’s how we can start to get ourselves out of this wicked problem of work in the 21st century.

I came, I saw, I learnt

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What better article to read this past week than 11 lessons about digital communities from Rome by Courtney Hunt.

  1. Capitalize on proven, older designs.
  2. Build the new upon the old.
  3. Sometimes you have to destroy the old to make way for the new.
  4. The past can teach about process (people don’t change).
  5. Rules are only guides.
  6. Sometimes not enforcing rules allows the system to find its own pragmatic balance.
  7. Intimacy and humanity can overcome many design and resource flaws.
  8. Technology does not have to be alienating.
  9. Taking the time to make things beautiful reaps long term benefits.
  10. Manage signal to noise.
  11. People are ingenious.
Sunset at St Peter’s

I was confused on my arrival in Rome, easily getting lost in the labyrinth of streets and alleys in the old city. Hans de Zwart showed me how to let go and learn to flow with the traffic and street patterns. It became much easier, and on the last night I strolled the several kilometers, without a map, back to my hotel. I think many people feel confused at first in online communities. It’s up to the community to help them feel the flow.

The humanity of Rome was also quite surprising, especially after reading all the tourist warnings for the city. Even though there are places filled with vendors of cheap crap trying to take advantage of tourists, for the most part it’s like being in a bunch of connected neighbourhoods. Almost everyone I met was friendly and all merchants were courteous, polite and honest to a fault. One fellow tourist, an older gentleman from Australia, told me that he stopped a pick-pocket who was trying to lift his wallet, on the train. He cried out and grabbed the thief’s hand. As the train came to a stop, the locals on the train created a wall and forced the thief out, while at the same time calling for the police. They then apologized on behalf of their city. Rome is a community that keeps on trying, in spite of its challenges, because its people believe in the city.

Rome: public water fountain

Too often we focus on the technology and not the human relationships in online communities. Rome, and many other physical communities, can give us some insights on where to put our priorities. David Griffiths offers some good questions that anyone supporting online professional communities should ask.

“Community or Network?   Organic or stagnant?  Are you focused on solving the problem, or what lies behind the problem?  Reactive or Proactive? Ask yourself, what is the purpose for CoP and how do you know if they are working?”

An online community should be much more than a place for economic man to get things done  (collaborate). A community needs the attracting power of a greater sense of purpose so that people will regularly try to do the right thing for the long term benefit of all (cooperate). We can learn something from a city that is 2,765 years old.

All connections lead to Rome

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Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter, and also heard in passing at ICALT 2012 this past week in Rome.

@rosariocacao – “@adriancheok at ICALT: you don’t have time to make explicit your tacit knowledge”

@britz – PKM = People, Simplicity, Discipline

@AdrianCheok – “How to cope with email overload” – [nice succinct summary]

@cufa – “Serious case of info overload/illegible pics on too many slides at #icalt2012 – are we not meant to be learning and teaching experts?”

@RichardTheGeek – The Lord of the Phones – 3 phones to bind them [at ICALT 2012]

ICALT 2012

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I leave for Rome today and will be presenting a keynote at IEEE’s ICALT 2012 (International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies). Here is what I will talking about.

Integrating Learning into the Workflow

The challenge for 21st century businesses is not saving 20th century jobs that will be automated and outsourced anyway, but focusing on creating more opportunities for creative work. For institutions, employers, educators and workers, that means giving up control and co-creating a new social contract for the creative, networked economy. For all businesses this means integrating learning into the workflow. There are practical models and frameworks that all businesses can use to connect work and learning. Harold Jarche will challenge some traditional ideas about workplace learning.

Our current models for managing people, training and knowledge-sharing are insufficient for a workplace that demands emergent practices just to keep up. Formal training has only ever addressed 20% of workplace learning and this was acceptable when the work environment was relatively stable. Knowledge workers today need to connect with others to co-solve problems. Sharing tacit knowledge through conversations is an essential component of knowledge work. The effective use of social media enable adaptation, and the development of emergent practices, through conversations.

As our work environments become more complex due to the speed of information transmission via ubiquitous networks, we need to adopt more flexible and less mechanistic processes to get work done. Workers have many more connections, to information and people, than ever before. But the ability to deal with complexity lies in our minds, not our artificial organizational structures. In order to free our minds for complex work, we need to simplify our company learning structures.

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I am really looking forward to making some connections with people I know online (some for many years) but our physical paths have never crossed. Many roads lead to Rome this week, it seems.

Hans de Zwart
Sebastian Fiedler
Robin Good
Allessio Jacona

Aligned principles for an open, networked society

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Via Ross Dawson, here are Don Tapscott’s four principles for the open world:

Collaboration. The boundaries of organizations are becoming more fluid and open, with the best ideas often coming from outside.

Transparency. Open communication to stakeholders is no longer optional, as organizations become naked.

Sharing. Giving up intellectual property, including putting ideas into the commons, is a massive source of value creation.

Empowerment. Knowledge and intelligence is power, so as they are distributed, we gain freedom.

And, here are my three principles for Net Work, or getting stuff done in this open world:

Narration, Transparency and Power-sharing

Narration is making one’s tacit knowledge (what one feels) more explicit (what one is doing with that knowledge). Narrating work is a powerful behaviour changer, as long-term bloggers can attest.

Transparency is an easy concept to understand but much more difficult to implement in an enterprise. It means switching the default mode to sharing. This can be enabled by social media, but social media also make the company culture transparent. A dysfunctional company culture does not improve with transparency, it just gets exposed.

Distributed power enables faster reaction times so those closest to the situation can take action. In complex situations there is no time to write a detailed assessment. Those best able to address the situation have marinated in it for some time. They couldn’t sufficiently explain it to someone removed from the problem if they wanted to anyway. This shared power is enabled by trust. Power in knowledge-based organizations must be distributed in order to nurture trust.

Cooperative finds

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

“The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation ~ Bertrand Russell” – via @JenniferSertl

@MickSainsbury – PKM feeds the intellectual capital of an organisation

Organisations should be facilitating a culture of PKM and promoting its value to its people as a significant strategy for capacity building, continuous improvement, innovation, renewal, reconstruction and engagement.

PKM feeds the intellectual capital of an organisation.

@TomSpiglanin – Social Net Work and the Workplace Professional

This is the concept of net work: individual nodes who connect work teams to vast social networks through communities of practice, making the work teams significantly more productive and effective. If there is power in a single connected node, imagine the increased power of multiple nodes connecting the workplace to individually cultivated communities of practice. The net work product has the potential to grow exponentially better.

@JayCross – Learn Informal Learning Informally. Experiential

This workshop is not a course. It’s more like Outward Bound meets Oxford. You learn by doing.

 You work surrounded by the knowledge of others, Why on earth would you not use it?

Objection 4. “Our people are too busy for this. It will take too much time”
Too busy to learn, but not too busy to reinvent wheels, rework solutions, and revisit old problems? You need to explain that KM is a time-saver, that it cut project times by up to 16%, that it’s the lazy person’s way to work. As one of my colleagues said “You work surrounded by the knowledge of others, Why on earth would you not use it? It will save money and time, it will make your life easier, and you will do a better job”. Basically, if people are so busy, there is not argument NOT to introduce KM.

@JohnnieMoore – Strip out the strategising and you may create the conditions for swift trust

Of course in big organisations, talking strategy can be a high status activity – those who are seen to be good at it get the big bucks. That presents a pretty serious impediment to more agile processes happening inside the hierarchy. But it’s not going to stop them happening outside.

PKM Book Update 1

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I have been very pleasantly surprised at how well my request to fund the PKM Book Project has been taken up by the community at large. So far, 30 people have sponsored at the basic $10 level. This is where I hoped to have the most support, as it is not a lot of money but shows that people are willing to pay a bit to get a book published that will then be made available for free to anyone who wants it.

I have been even more surprised that some people have purchased more than one basic sponsorship (thanks Dave Ferguson & Leah Good) and that I also have two Bronze level sponsors ($100) – Steve Dale & Mark Brewer – and one Gold Sponsor ($500) – Tantramar Interactive. There are two more Gold sponsors pending. This is much bigger than I anticipated.

I will take some time this Summer (now that I can afford it) to write the outline and pull several new threads together. The PKM Workshops have provided me with great feedback on how personal knowledge management is understood and used by others. Thanks to everyone for a great start and for giving me the incentive to get going on a project I have thought about doing for several years!

Beyond collaboration

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In A Wicked Problem, I said that all levels of complexity exist in our world but more and more of our work deals with real complex problems (in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect), whether they be social, technological, or economic. Complex environments and problems are best addressed when we organize as networks, work to continuously develop emergent practices; and cooperate to advance our aspirations.

Jay Rosen talks about covering wicked problems and describes how journalists could address this “beat”. I think that these approaches align quite well with my Collaboration/Cooperation – Work/Learning framework, based on the working smarter  graphic here.

Rosen says that the beat must be global and networked. This is why we must cooperatively engage in external social networks to understand the complexity of wicked problems. He also talks about the need for narrative, pattern-based understanding of multiple disciplines, and becoming a learning machine. This is the role that communities of practice can play. They are more constrained spaces, yet  still open to diversity of opinion. Work teams, filled with experts, remain good at solving Tame Problems, or those that can be constrained.

Rosen’s is one more perspective on the need to reframe our work structures to incorporate intentional connections beyond traditional business. The answers lie outside, not inside, the organization. As Rosen concludes:

The wicked problems beat is not a View from Nowhere thing. It starts from the limits of professional expertise. It is a reflection on unmanageable complexity. It preaches humility to the authorized knowers. It mocks the one best answer and single issue people. It seeks to deliver us from denial.

Organizations need to extend the notion of work beyond collaboration, beyond teams, and beyond the corporate fire wall. They need to make social networks, communities of practice, and narrative part of the work. It’s a big leap but we need to change the business conversation away from confident military terms (target market, strategic plan, marketing campaign) and instead talk in terms of complexity, wicked problems and cooperation. As Rosen writes, “Cliché is the vernacular in its spent state. Savage clarity is the vernacular coming alive again.” Let’s bring some savage clarity to the modern enterprise.

Cooperation as a strategy

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Martin Nowak, a mathematical biologist, concludes The Evolution of Cooperation with the following winning strategy:

What I find very interesting in these games of conditional reciprocity, direct and indirect reciprocity, we can make the point that winning strategies have the following three properties:  they must be generous, hopeful and forgiving.

Generous in the following sense: if I have a new interaction, now I realize (and this is I think where most people go wrong) that this is not a game where it’s either the other person or me who is winning. Most of our interactions are not like a tennis game in the US Open where one person loses and one person goes to the next round. Most of our interactions are more like let us share the pie and I’m happy to get 49 percent, but the pie is not destroyed. I’m willing to make a deal, and sometimes I accept less than 50 percent. The worst outcome would be to have no deal at all. So in that sense, generous means I never try to get more than the other person.  Tit-for-tat never wins in any single encounter; neither does Generous Tit-for-tat.

Hopeful is that if there is a new person coming, I start with cooperation. My first move has to be cooperation. If a strategy starts with defection, it’s not a winning strategy.

And forgiving, in the sense that if the other person makes a mistake, there must be a mechanism to get over this and to reestablish cooperation.

This strategy aligns with my thoughts on how cooperation differs from collaboration. To be generous, hopeful, and forgiving  will in the long run make for stronger networks and communities. It works in nature, as Nowak shows.

cooperation