Harold Jarche

What's working in social business

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What’s working in social business in 2012? This is the question that CMSWire asked me to write about. In my opinion, technology sales, marketing campaigns and the speakers circuits are doing well. Implementation and organizational change are lagging far behind.

Like the knowledge management and e-learning hype phases of the 90’s and ’00’s respectively, social business is being led by software vendors. Some are even the same vendors that MIT’s Peter Senge said co-opted the field of knowledge management. I watched as e-learning moved from hope for ubiquitous learning, to the overproduction of self-paced online courses, also known as “shovelware.”

My focus on social business stems from a background in training, knowledge management, performance improvement and social learning. I have learned that the hard work comes after the software has been installed and the initial training sessions are over. Then comes the question, what do we do now?

Transparency

People may say that it’s not about the technology, but that is where a large share of the budget goes in any major change initiative. The bigger change to manage however, is getting people to work transparently. One of the major benefits of using social media is increasing speed of access to knowledge. But if information is not shared, it will never be found, and knowledge will remain hidden. Transparency is a necessity for social business.

While social media enable transparency, they also lay bare a company’s culture. A dysfunctional company culture does not improve with transparency, it just gets exposed. In the transparent social business, there is no place left to hide. This change alone can be enough to cause massive organizational upheaval. Transparency can be scary for anyone who owes their position to the old system.

Social business is not just about using social media but changing routines and procedures. With greater transparency, information now flows horizontally as well as vertically. New patterns and dynamics emerge from interconnected people and interlinked information flows, and these will bypass established structures and services. Work gets more democratic as it becomes visible to all.

With the democratization of information, user-generated content increases. Today, search engines give each worker more information and knowledge than any CEO had even 10 years ago. Pervasive connectivity changes organizational power structures, though the full effects of this take time to become visible. From a transparent environment new leaders and experts may emerge, as it takes different leadership and an understanding of networks to support a social business.

Narration

Agile social businesses need people who can work in concert on solving problems, not waiting for direction from above. Management must ask: how can we help you work in this transparent environment? In social networks we often learn from each other; modelling behaviours, telling stories and sharing what we know.

While not highly efficient, this is very effective for learning. There is a need to model the new behaviours of being transparent and narrating one’s work. Social business also requires power-sharing; for how long will workers collaborate and share if they cannot take action with their new knowledge and connectivity? Changing to more social behaviours takes time, but most of all, it takes trust.

Once social technologies have been installed, modelling new work behaviours becomes the main organizational challenge.

The organization can support this by fostering and supporting communities of practice. These are potential bridges between work teams and the open social networks on the Internet. Narration of work, or learning out loud, is a prime enabler of knowledge-sharing. One indicator that a social business is working is when people at all levels are narrating their work in a transparent environment.

If the daily routine supports social learning, and time is made available for reflection and sharing stories, then an organization is on the right track. One determinant of effective professional communities is whether they actually change practices. Only then will we know if the social business initiative has been successful.

Enterprises adopting social business need to find and support people who can model knowledge-sharing behaviours, not just talk about them. Managers should identify people who already narrate their work, create user-generated content and share transparently. Companies should get advice from people who share power and do most of their work in networks already. Just think, if there is nobody to model social business behaviours in the organization, how will people learn? From their friends on Facebook?

In a social business, work is learning and learning is the work. Social learning needs to be integrated into the daily workflow. Workers need more than technology; they need ongoing, real-time, constantly-changing, collaborative support. Management’s primary responsibility in a social business is supporting organizational learning.

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Originally posted on CMS Wire

Learning and Marketing

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I had a great conversation with the Marketing Tech Blog folks on Blog Talk Radio yesterday.

Listen to internet radio with Marketing Technology on Blog Talk Radio

Douglas Karr and Marty Thompson of DK New Media were gracious hosts. One of the main reasons I accepted their invitation is that I think marketing and learning professionals have a lot to learn from each other. We have to stop thinking of learning as a separate thing from work. When you learn with and from your customers, marketing and learning are the same. Perhaps getting rid of the L word is a start. It’s all learning. Learning-oriented marketing, both internal and external, is both getting the message across and understanding the needs of others.

I’ve been watching marketing & training moving closer, just as work & learning get integrated in the networked workplace. I think many training departments in the future may become part of marketing. A great example of this is at  Intuit, where training is part of the marketing department and involves the customer directly. At Intuit, customers are paid to develop content, and as one person wrote in a chat comment, “The e-Learning has kept my CPA husband loyal to Intuit versus Peachtree, etc.”

Perhaps marketing and learning can work together and figure out how best to deal with complex issues and problems without a “how-to” guide. Think of the future of learning as a business, not just a supporting department. It also keeps the learning function customer-focused and not merely process-dependent.

Emergent learnings

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

@JamieNotter – “Key lesson: for people to give energy to these new things, they need to stop doing other things.”

@AnnaFMackenzie – “I agree. Writing is writing – it takes practice and discipline to write well. I find blogging helps thesis writing.”

@dominicad – “A richer organization has more options for slack time.”

«Il n’y a pas d’éducateurs, «mais seulement des gens qui montrent aux autres comment ils s’y prennent pour s’éduquer eux-même. ~ J. Guitton »  – via @PascalVenier

Team Wikispeed, where learning really is the work – via @jhagel

You can certainly gain knowledge by reading a textbook, but acquiring “tacit knowledge,” education that comes from first-hand experience, is a much more powerful and effective way to learn. Talent development in firms today typically comes in the form of stale training courses and presentations rather than a focus on tacit knowledge development. At WIKISPEED, however, the team learns almost entirely through hands-on experience. Volunteers work in pairings of inexperienced and experienced individuals who take on small projects. Not only does this help novice volunteers learn faster, it also reduces the time and cost of documenting every process because knowledge is exchanged between peers rather than consolidated in formal training programs.

90% of companies with >1,000 employees recently changed their organization structure. <50% were successful! – via @JostleMe

“an alarming statistic, and one with perilous implications. Apart from the high costs and squandered opportunity, a failed reorganization can leave an enterprise even worse off than it was before, with lost productivity, a weakened market position, and a disengaged workforce, among other impacts.”

 culture is an emergent property of all the little things you do – via @JDeragon

We are accustomed to thinking that the intangibles of life exist separately from tangible things; material things separated from spiritual, personal things distinct from commercial. This is not so. The knowledge economy has taught us how intangibles like intellectual property and design can be converted into money. Consider how much of the cost of a computer covers its tangible components versus how much you are paying for its technology and software. Tangibles and intangibles are often interchangeable. Material wealth can buy intangibles like lifestyle, time, rich human experiences, and education. In the same way, intangibles like knowledge, wisdom, culture, and caring can generate tangible wealth, too.

@TomSpiglanin – Why would I need to manage my own knowledge in the first place? 

At the end of the day, we are individually responsible for our own professional development, not our employer. After all, the only knowledge we can truly manage is our own.

When cooperating, people perform together (co-operate) while working on selfish yet not-conflicting goals. by @StoweBoyd

As swift trust and ad hoc project teams become the dominant form factor for working over the next few years, we will see the transformation of large businesses away from monolithic power and belief systems, to something much more of a mosiac. In  this not-too-distant future businesses may principally be organized around helping every employee find and achieve their personal meaning for work, instead of trying to indoctrinate workers to a corporate agenda.

In networks, cooperation trumps collaboration

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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. Stephen Downes commented here on the differences:

collaboration means ‘working together’. That’s why you see it in market economies. markets are based on quantity and mass.

cooperation means ’sharing’. That’s why you see it in networks. In networks, the nature of the connection is important; it is not simply about quantity and mass …

You and I are in a network – but we do not collaborate (we do not align ourselves to the same goal, subscribe to the same vision statement, etc), we *cooperate*

We are only beginning to realize how we can use networks as our primary form of living and working. David Ronfeldt has developed the TIMN framework to explain this shift – Tribal; Institutional; Markets; Networks. The TIMN framework shows how we have evolved as a civilization. Ronfeldt sees the network form not as a mere modifier of previous forms, but a form in itself that can address issues that the three other forms could not. This point is very important when it comes to implementing social business (a network mode) within corporations (institutional + market modes). Real network models are new modes, not modifications of the old ones, and cooperation is how work gets done. Some examples:

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Work is learning and learning is the work

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We have come to a point where organizations can no longer leave learning to their HR or training departments. Being able to understand emerging situations, see patterns, and co-solve problems are essential business skills. Learning is the work.

I had mentioned that I was talking to a financial advisor at a bank the other day and I asked her what kind of professional development she did. The bank has a central online learning portal where employees can take ‘courses’, particularly compliance training. The financial advisor told me she just went to the end of each course and did the test. She found it rather useless.

I talked about some of the communities that we have supported for sharing professional development, like my workshops, and she said it would be great to have access to something like this, but it most likely would be blocked. It is a major business mistake when learning is not connected to working.

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Charming finds on Twitter

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

“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. ~ Oscar Wilde” – via @PeterWinick

Cheating” is (finally) recognized as a 21st century learning skill – via @rbgayle

The IEEE’s Computer and Reliability Societies recently published “Embracing the Kobayashi Maru,” by James Caroland (US Navy/US Cybercommand) and Greg Conti (West Point) describing an exercise in which they assigned students to cheat on an exam — either jointly or individually. The goal was to get students thinking about how to secure systems from adversaries who are willing to “cheat” to win. The article describes how the students all completed the exam (they all cheated successfully), which required them to provide the first 100 digits of pi, with only 24h to prepare. The students used many ingenious techniques as cribs, but my heart was warmed to learn that once student printed a false back-cover for my novel Little Brother with pi 1-100 on it (Little Brother is one of the course readings, so many copies of it were already lying around the classroom).

[I really enjoyed the book Little Brother, and so did my sons]

@RosabethKanter – “If can’t have certainty about outcomes, try fast achievable projects & certainty of process.”

Clouds eventually give way to clarity. What separates the best from the rest is whether leaders communicate, improve, engage, invest in relationships, and remain true to principles. This can make the difference in getting stuck or emerging triumphant.

@TheEconomist – “There is a remarkable tendency to trust experts, even when there is little evidence of their forecasting powers”

There may be another, psychological, reason why investors want to pay for advice: the avoidance of regret. If you choose to put all your money into technology stocks on the back of your own research, and such stocks collapse, you only have yourself to blame. But if you have listened to the advice of an expert, then the decision is not your fault.

@edCetraT – “couldn’t make it to #IEL12 ?No worries @LnDDave curated the shared resources for you”

Note: I talked about the future of the training department at IEL12 but no one picked it up, so here is a picture, which should be worth 1,000 words ;)

 

@sjgill – “A learning organization needs tools that people can use to discover information”

So the question becomes, “How do we make work and learning part of the same process?” One way is to help people develop new knowledge in the course of their work when faced with a new task or a new challenge, whether that is operating a new tool or becoming an effective leader. This is done by making information accessible and by making the tools to create knowledge from that information accessible, too.

@gwynnek – “Remember when people only lurked? Now 76% of Twitter users post status updates. Up from 47% in 2010. ht @mbjorn”

Informal rule of thumb

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I was talking to a financial advisor at a bank the other day and I asked her what kind of professional development she did. The bank has a central online learning portal where employees can take “courses”, particularly compliance training. The financial advisor told me she just went to the end of each course and did the test. She found it rather useless. I talked about some of the communities that we have supported for sharing professional development, like our workshops, and she said it would great to have access to something like this, but it would be blocked by the IT department.

I have heard similar stories from many professionals in different industries and government agencies over the years. Developing all of this compliance training must account for a significant amount of revenue for the e-learning industry (anyone have figures on this?). It cannot be very satisfying though. It’s probably demoralizing to think that most of these courses are actually detested by the end-users. But then humans have excellent coping mechanisms for cognitive dissonance.

One reason I support the 70-20-10 framework is that it can change management’s focus.  It’s a way to see the forest and not just count trees. First, let me say that 70-20-10 is a rule of thumb, not a recipe.

A rule of thumb is a principle with broad application that is not intended to be strictly accurate or reliable for every situation. It is an easily learned and easily applied procedure for approximately calculating or recalling some value, or for making some determination. ~ Wikipedia

This rule of thumb is supported by evidence though. Studies show that informal learning accounts for between 70 and 95% of workplace learning  [USBLS: 70%; Raybould: 95%; EDC: 70%; CapitalWorks: 75%; OISE: 70%; eLG: 70%; Allen Tough: 80%]. I have previously referred to Gary Wise and his extrapolation of Josh Bersin’s data from 2009. According to Gary, as much as 95% of workplace learning is informal.

Many organizations only offer sanctioned courses as professional development. This is completely inadequate in a complex work environment. It is like the central planning policies of the Soviet Union. It is arrogant to think that we can know in advance what people need to learn on the job today. For example, roles like online community manager did not exist a few years ago.

In complex environments, the people who know best are those doing the work, which is why we need loose hierarchies and strong networks. The job of learning professionals, in my opinion, is to help build strong learning networks. We need to let workers learn and instead support the work being done.  Frameworks like 70-20-10 can start the conversation by asking what are we doing about the other 90%. It’s a big number; bigger than that 10% for formal instruction. Consider 9:1 a rule of thumb.

In the beginning was the blog

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Chris Brogan, co-author of Trust Agents, has a number of insights on blogging and engaging online. I have been blogging here for eight years and before that experimented with a few other blogs. I thought I’d compare my experience with Brogan’s recent 21 point primer for blogging.

First of all, I strongly agree with the first 14 points, which basically say that you should focus on a topic/theme, write regularly and develop your own style through practice. At Rule #15, Brogan says that, “My best (most popular) posts were the ones I spent the least time writing“. I have had the opposite experience. My popular posts are the long detailed ones that can double as white papers. For example, one of my most popular posts for 2012 is Three Principles for Net Work (1,500 words). My most visited post last year was Learning, Complexity and the Enterprise (5,300 words). Each of these took a while to write. They were not done in half an hour.

This reinforces Brogan’s Rule #21, “There’s not a single rule on this list that isn’t breakable. Break all the rules you want and enjoy yourself.” As we start the Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop this week, the topic of blogs has already come up. For me, this blog is a central part of my online sense-making. I know that for others, a blog is not the best medium. However, you will never know until you try. Social media are like languages; they take practice to develop mastery.

My experience shows that only a small percentage of the population will take to blogging. When the only online social media were blogs, we all thought they were wonderful; and they are. But other media, like Twitter, have shown greater participation levels. I usually recommend micro-blogging as a start to online sense-making. The benefits are visible quicker and the effort is not as great. No single medium is best for everyone and today people have many choices. As much as I value blogging, I would not try to get everyone doing it. There are a lot of dead blogs floating around the Web. I hope their owners are still engaging online, perhaps with videos, slideshows, or podcasts. On the Internet, the written word is no longer our only option, and that’s a good thing.

Meet Zedfast

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Living in a small town in Atlantic Canada (pop. 5,000), it’s not often I find people in my community who understand what I do, let alone work in similar fields. Zedfast, founded by Steve Scott, is the exception.

Zedfast is currently focused on developing eLearning content in HTML5 and Flash. They even have a Fortune 500 client, which is not bad, given our town’s distance from any major commercial centre. According to MacGregor Grant, building the app from scratch typically involves using the storyboards, source images, and audio files from the client to produce the course. Zedfast then continuously streamlines the conversion process. So far, most of Zedfast’s content has been developed for the iPad.

Here are MacGregor and Steve hanging out at the local café, which doubles as my downtown office ;)

This company, which has three full-time staff here in Sackville and another ±30 contractors in North America and Europe, is not just focused on e-learning. Several new project ideas are on the agenda, including wireless networks, mobile payments, and even social games. In addition, Steve is helping to create a work-sharing space in our community (a Commons), which is something I’ve tried to do a few times.

Great guys, great company; in a great little town.

The work of many

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In Twitter and the Law of the Few, I mused how Twitter as a social network can be great for Connectors, Mavens & Salespeople. Later, in adapting to a networked world, I concluded that Mavens can deeply understand a situation, Connectors are needed to get the word out, while Salespeople have to convince those in control to take action. All three are needed to mobilize a network. I then looked at this from the perspective of spreading social capitalism. Generally, Mavens exhibit the greatest intellectual capital; Connectors have the most diverse (creative) networks and Salespeople get things done. I wondered if this metaphor/model could help to get social capitalism “across the chasm”. You could first identify sufficient Mavens, Connectors & Salespeople (it seems that all three are needed) and then build up to the 10% critical mass necessary to effectively spread ideas.

Dave Gray has a written about the anatomy of a network and the work of Ron Burt. Dave states that, “The power of an individual node in any network can be considered along three dimensions: Degree, closeness and betweenness”, and then explains this with one of his great sketches:

Degree: (number of connections) Is this a major attribute of Connectors?

Closeness: (how easily a node can connect with other nodes) Is this a major attribute of Salespeople?

Betweenness: (the degree to which a node forms a critical link to other nodes) Is this a major attribute of Mavens?

Dave concludes that:

Thus, the most powerful person or organization in any network is one that has a high number of potential connections, all of which which are relatively close and thus easily accessible, while at the same time enjoying a position within the network such that it can choose to block or grant access to other nodes.

That “powerful person” is likely three or more people, as Dave notes when he says, “person or organization”. This highlights the importance of cooperation and collaboration for net work, in my opinion. It is not often that one person is simultaneously a Maven, a Connector, and a Salesperson. In a network, the work of many is needed.