Harold Jarche

Notes from a Paretian world

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

Why Thinking About Averages Can Be Disastrous – by @timkastelle

If you are operating in a Paretian world but you assume that it’s Guassian, you’re heading for trouble. That’s why thinking about averages can be disastrous. Think about outliers instead.

Polymaths, bumblebees & the expert myth – by @jerrymichalski @aprilrinne

We need a new kind of expert — one whose expertise is hard-won through direct experience and whose point of view is both flexible and principled. We need people who have a deep sense of the world’s inner workings and interdependencies and who are comfortable in multiple settings and speak multiple national and disciplinary languages. These should be people who can absorb new material very quickly, and then improve it as they share it with others. We need to rely on people who are more than just an “expert” on any one topic, but across topics

We don’t need to do away with experts entirely. Instead, let’s update and refine what it means to be an expert in the 21st century.

WSJ: Better Leadership Through Social Media – by @awsamuel

“Join a new online network? I’d love to!”

In 15 years of helping business, government and nonprofit leaders make strategic choices about digital technology, I’ve yet to hear an executive utter those words.

Network Tensions – by @panklam

This tension I noted, is one of the primary ones I exposed in Net Work: “Outcome v s. Discovery.” Tensions, I wrote, “are present all the time; both leaders and members of a network should be aware of how these tensions impact the health of a network. All networks will shift along these lines of tension as they respond to changes in the environment, changes in the demographics of their members, and changes in purpose, structure, and style.”

The only knowledge that can be managed is our own

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“Every amateur epistemologist knows that knowledge cannot be managed. Education has always assumed that knowledge can be transferred and that we can carefully control the process through education. That is a grand illusion.” – Dave Jonassen

The only knowledge that can be managed is our own. In my opinion, knowledge management should be about supporting personal knowledge mastery in networks, with a distributed, not centralized, approach. Net Work Literacy entails self-organized learning while cooperating in diverse networks. Each of us is responsible for our own learning and in this network era we are now obliged to share that learning. If no one shared what they have learned there would be no Wikipedia or other free learning resources on the web.

Shifting to Net Work

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Our first Net Work Literacy session ends this week. There were several reasons why Jane Hart and I decided to offer this two-week online programe. The idea first came to me as I realized how many of my clients and colleagues were not as connected as they could be, too often wasting their time on routine things and not building networks that could help them get work done.

I’ve also noticed that people in their mid to late job careers are woefully unprepared to adapt to a post-job world, where work is simultaneously connected, contractual, part-time, global and local. Once the job is gone, many also lose their professional networks. The Net Work Literacy programme aims at getting people to think in terms of networks, with a focus on taking control of their professional development.

Our programme is global in scope, with participants from four continents so far. However, a key to long term success in learning and working in a post-industrial society is connecting these global learning networks with one’s local community. As energy costs increase, more of our resources will have to be local. Using network skills at the local level, connected to a global support network, is one way to develop a sustainable way of life.

As we continue with the Net Work Literacy programme, I intend on getting more stories about what is happening in various localities and learn how people are dealing with what my friend Bill Draves calls a Nine Shift.

There are 24 hours in a day. We have no real discretion with roughly 12 of those hours. We need to eat, sleep, and do a few other necessary chores in order to maintain our existence. That hasn’t changed much through the centuries, so far.

That leaves approximately 12 hours a day where we, as individuals, do have some discretion. That includes work time, play time, and family time.

Of those 12 hours, about 75%, or 9 hours, will be spent totally differently a few years from now than they were spent just a few years ago. Not everything will change, but 75% of life is in the process of changing right now.

Awareness

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Part of Personal Knowledge Management is seeking sources of knowledge (Seek-Sense-Share).

To be able to seek, first you have to be aware. Wolfgang Reinhardt has looked at knowledge workers, researchers in particular, and examined how they can be aware in their fields of expertise. Wolfgang graciously sent me a copy of his PhD thesis (Awareness: Support for knowledge workers in research networks) which he will be defending on 5 April at the Open Universiteit Nederland in Heerlen.

Wolfgang describes 10 knowledge worker roles that I think are helpful in understanding how all collaborative workers can share their knowledge.

  1. Controller
  2. Helper
  3. Learner
  4. Linker
  5. Networker
  6. Organizer
  7. Retriever
  8. Sharer
  9. Solver
  10. Tracker

Think of these roles, and who will do them, as you start or support a community of practice. There are also 13 different knowledge actions conducted by these researchers, to varying degrees, that Wolfgang has found in his research.

  1. Acquisition
  2. Analyze
  3. Authoring
  4. Co-authoring
  5. Information search
  6. Dissemination
  7. Expert Search
  8. Feedback
  9. Formal & Informal Learning
  10. Information organization
  11. Monitoring
  12. Networking
  13. Service search

How many of these are done on a regular basis, and with some degree of consistency, in knowledge-intensive organizations? How can this be improved?

Finally, the generic model of awareness describes how “the overall awareness of objects declines the further an object is away from oneself”.

  1. Self-awareness
  2. Awareness of current practice
  3. Awareness of the local research organization
  4. Awareness of the personal research network
  5. Awareness of the research domain

In complex fields, where various researchers are working on similar problems, it becomes rather important to know who has done what. The challenge for distributed research teams is to find ways of understanding what is happening and ensuring it is communicated throughout the network.

Not only does distributed research need collaborative researchers but there must be an understanding of the role that awareness plays amongst knowledge workers. In complex networks, basic management approaches are no longer adequate.

Some final notes from Wolfgang’s defence:

The term “awareness” in Research Networks is a multilayered term that reaches far deeper than just emulating face-to-face situations in distributed collaboration.

Without supporting the awareness of network researchers, innovation, collaboration and knowledge exchange will not reach its potential.

Omitting support for social interactions between stakeholders in scientific events amounts to wasting the opportunity to recommend objects and increase the strength of research networks.

Employees are often laughing

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cluetrain modified

Here’s a modified version of theses 11 to 13 of the Cluetrain Manifesto (1999), for all those corporate personnel support functions (HR, L&D, OD, KM):

People in a networked society have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from the human resources department. So much for L&D rhetoric about adding value to commoditized learning content.

There are no secrets. Networked workers know more than management does about the company’s own products and services. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone. What’s already happened to markets is now happening among employees. A metaphysical construct called “The Company” is the only thing standing between the two.

Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy (Cluetrain #7)

Sharing beyond the classroom and cubicle

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

Brain Rule #2: “There is no greater anti-brain environment than the classroom and cubicle. ~ John Medina” via @chriscognito

“When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course. ~ Peter F. Drucker” via @montberte

@gapingvoid: “Conversations” are fine and dandy, but eventually one actually has to get some work done.”

How creativity works: What Broadway musicals really teach us about collaboration. – via @TimKastelle

[Conclusion]: The global nature of Q—and the difficulty of using global measures to craft local strategies—might be a disappointment for business people who want to use the lessons of Broadway to out-innovate the competition. But it shouldn’t be. The new social science of complex networks is addressing a different kind of problem, a deeper and potentially more important one. This research is concerned less with how to construct teams to maximize their creativity than with the question of what kind of society maximizes everyone’s creativity. And real progress on that front would be something worth singing and dancing about.

[Note on Q]: It’s made up of two parts. The first is the average number of connections you need to join two random people in a network. That number can be surprisingly small, even in a very big network; for example, you can connect two random Facebook users, on average, with a chain that’s less than five friends long. The second part of Q measures the extent to which two people who are connected to the same person are likely to be connected to each other: the “clusteredness” of the network.

Psychology Today: How Da Vinci Got His Ideas – via @marloft

When you make a connection between two unrelated subjects, your imagination will leap to fill the gaps and form a whole in order to make sense of it. Suppose you are watching a mime impersonating a man taking his dog out for a walk. The mime’s arm is outstretched as though holding the dog’s leash. As the mime’s arm is jerked back and forth, you “see” the dog straining at the leash to sniff this or that. The dog and the leash become the most real part of the scene even though there is no dog or leash. In the same way, when you make connections between your subject and something that is totally unrelated, your imagination fills in the gaps to create new ideas. It is this willingness to use your imagination to fill in the gaps that produces the unpredictable idea.

@rushkoff: Whistle-blowers of Goldman-Sachs & Google

In short, the kinds of sustainable, value-creating businesses these corporate escapees are calling for just can’t happen within a corporate model based on borrowing, leverage and expansion. It’s too little and too late for a few corporate whistle-blowers to tell us how the companies they work for are technically incompetent, distracted by revenues or losing the values that once made them great.

On superstition: people believe weird things because of our evolved need to believe nonweird things – via @ValdisKrebs

Through a series of complex formulas that include additional stimuli (wind in the trees) and prior events (past experience with predators and wind), the authors conclude that “the inability of individuals—human or otherwise—to assign causal probabilities to all sets of events that occur around them will often force them to lump causal associations with non-causal ones. From here, the evolutionary rationale for superstition is clear: natural selection will favour strategies that make many incorrect causal associations in order to establish those that are essential for survival and reproduction.”

Learning is the Work – original artwork by @RalphMercer

the feral creative mind

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“The feral creative mind, in panic to find a truth, jumps back and forth, turning over stones, sniffing the air, all at once, up and down, a niggling doubt removed, another rising, something far away related, something not, a howl in the night, until, through all the crumpled paper in a cluttered mind a light is struck that’s soon so bright a problem fades, and a feral creative mind can live another day.” ~ The Curmudgeon

shifting control

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In The Learning Workplace [dead link], Anne Marie McEwan describes “four profiles of learning workplaces according to structure, global reach, knowledge type, workstyle and social complexity”: Traditional, Emergent, Networked & Hyper-networked.

Many, if not most, companies today face the challenge of moving from a Traditional profile to what I would call “more networked” or somewhere between profiles 2, 3 & 4. This “shift to the right” includes:

  • Developing work structures that are less hierarchical, allow for more individual autonomy and some level of networked responsibility.
  • Expanding reach to be more global, as the Internet seeps into all aspects of business.
  • Incorporating ways of sharing increasingly complex knowledge.
  • Shifting away from a focus on place of work and number of hours worked toward more virtual and mobile connections with workers.
  • Enabling complex social interactions to develop trusted relationships across distances.

These shifts are corroborated by much of the current literature on social business. The big question is: how do we get there? While an even more pressing question may be: how do we get started?

Look at what is common across all these factors – control.

I was chatting today with a friend of mine who works for a large multinational corporation. His main frustration is the level of control throughout the company. Many days he spends most of his time dealing with one support department or another, which has control across the company. Each time an exception occurs, the control measures are inadequate to deal with it and the central authority lacks any local contextual knowledge. My friend gets frustrated, as this is often at the expense of the client. He also says that these exceptions are steadily becoming the norm.

First Step: An initial audit of control measures that no longer make sense would be a good place to start the voyage from a traditional to a networked workplace. Just ask those who do the work where less control would help get the job done.

  1. What authorizations (budget, vacation, time off, travel, etc.) require more time than they are worth?
  2. How can we make it easier to connect with co-workers who are not at your workplace?
  3. How can we make it easier to share and access know-how?
  4. When and where would you prefer to work to be more productive?
  5. Who do you need to get to know better to enhance your work? (customer, supplier, co-worker, etc.)

Second Step: Now take that information and start doing something about it.

Social business drives workforce development

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In a workscape perspective I described how new frameworks help management, HR and L&D professionals get away from the trees to see the forest of workforce development.

Earlier, in Bridging the Gap; Working Smarter, I explained how loose external networks are necessary to have access to diverse opinions, while work teams need to share complex knowledge and therefore have to build strong, collaborative relationships.

Communities of practice are the bridges between the work being done and diverse social networks, fostering cooperation without hierarchical structure.

Basically, collaboration is necessary to do complicated, but manageable, project tasks; while a looser form of cooperation helps to understand more complex and not yet manageable problems. Cooperation is moving from a soft skill to a required hard skill.

From this perspective, the best way to develop internal workforce support structures (what used to be called learning & development) is from the outside in.

Start with what is being constantly learned in professional social networks and harvest it for insights.

Discuss these ideas cooperatively in communities of practice and then test out ways to enhance collaboration (Probe-Sense-Respond).

Through collaborative work, get feedback on where performance support may be required and if training is needed.

In this way, the externally focused social business, and everyone in it, drives the development tools and methods to support the work being done.

Everyone is involved in what used to be the instructional design process, but now there is a focus on collaboration first, performance support when needed, and training as the last choice.

A workscape perspective

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There are few best practices for the network era workplace, but definitely many next practices to be developed. A good place to start is with an integrative performance framework that puts formal training and education where they belong: focused on the appropriate 5%.

Jay Cross calls the new performance environment a workscape:

Workscape: A metaphorical construct where learning is embedded in the work and emerges in “pull” mode. It is a fluid, holistic, process. Learning emerges as a result of working smarter. In this environment learning is natural, social, spontaneous, informal, unbounded, adaptive and fun. It involves conversation as the main ingredient.

Workscapes are not new structures but rather holistic ways of looking at and reformulating existing business infrastructure. They use the same networks and social media as the business itself, but technology is never the most important part. Foremost are people, their motivations, emotions, attitudes, roles, their enthusiasm or lack thereof, and their innate desire to excel. Technology connects people.

Workscapes go far beyond traditional training and instructional services. Jane Hart has developed a comprehensive framework for the support of workplace learning and performance. Note in the centre that “learning needs to be embedded in the workflow“. This is the premise from which all organizational support must flow.

Another perspective, from Charles Jennings, uses the 70-20-10 framework to prioritize performance support. “If you keep people in the workflow, and provide them with facilities and support for learning, the learning is more effective, faster and efficient.”

A workscape perspective can help management, HR and L&D professionals get away from the trees to see the forest,  because business is a complex, interconnected ecosystem today.