Harold Jarche

Marketing for Consultants

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In the article So You Want to Be an E-learning Consultant… I discussed the pros and cons of consultancy as well as the various areas of practice in our field. One area I did not discuss was attracting and retaining clients. As the saying goes, when you’re working, you’re not finding new clients and when you’re looking for clients, you’re not working. I decided to look at a number (32) of my past projects and see how my clients had come to find me. I broke this down into three main categories, with the number of projects shown in brackets:

  1. Direct reference (20) from a member of my business community, defined as someone I know or have met or may have worked for or with previously. This includes follow-on projects.
  2. Indirect reference (9) through one of my professional networks, also known in social media as a “friend of a friend”.
  3. Client found me on the Web (3) via some form of search.

Obviously my closest connections are my best sources of client referrals. I haven’t calculated the revenues from all of these projects but I can say that the third category, while only three projects, generated a significant amount, so passive Web marketing should not be discounted.

ASTD: Blowing Up the Training Department

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Join most of the togetherLearn gang on ASTD’s Pulse of the Profession Webcast:

Blowing Up the Training Department: Make Learning a Management Priority

Are training departments REALLY necessary? Leveraging social networking, informal learning and e-learning are just a few ways to manage learning/training in the 21st Century. The real message–traditional courses are not the best way to link learning with the business or to engage learners.  When will we GET it?

Panelists: Clark Quinn, Jay Cross, and Harold Jarche Moderator: Kevin Wheeler

April 22, 2009, 2:00 P.M.-3:15 P.M. ET

Register here. Member/Non-Member $39.95 (all proceeds support ASTD)

Global 24-hour Workplace Learning Conversation

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For 24 hours starting April 21 at 9:00 am Pacific time, LearnTrends will host a series of online conversations on boosting the performance of organizations through learning. We expect hundreds of people to attend the free, live, online sessions. Conversations will be recorded and made available on the web to foster reflection and continuing discussion. Our Twitter back channel will probably be hopping. The LearnTrends community now numbers more than a thousand members around the globe. Sign up if you are not a member to keep track of what’s going on.

Lots of people have signed on for this event and I’m sure that a good part of the +1,000 members of the LearnTrends community will drop in for some part of this 24 hour online conversation that is available to anyone interested in workplace learning.

Please note that the content is also what you bring to the party. We have some set topics to start and finish. In the interim, if you have some discovery you’d like to spotlight, bring it up in conversation. You can pick a spot on the agenda, click “suggest a topic,” and tell us what and when; we’ll put it on the schedule. Alternatively, you can simply check in during the event and request the microphone.

Effective knowledge sharing

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The mainstream application of knowledge management, and I would include learning management, over the past few decades has got it all wrong. We have over-managed information because it’s easy and we’re still enamoured with information technology. However, the ubiquitous information surround may put a stop to this. As enterprises become more closely tied to the Web, the principle of “small pieces loosely joined” is permeating our industrial walls. More and more workers have their own sources of information and knowledge.

Following on from yesterday’s post, connecting and communicating through effective conversations, I’d like to quote again from Dave Pollard’s experience with knowledge management:

So my conclusion this time around was that the centralized stuff we spent so much time and money maintaining was simply not very useful to most practitioners. The practitioners I talked to about PPI [Personal Productivity Improvement] said they would love to participate in PPI coaching, provided it was focused on the content on their own desktops and hard drives, and not the stuff in the central repositories.

We can add to Dave’s anecdotal evidence the research from  Wharton’s Haas & Hansen in Does Knowledge Sharing Deliver?, via Tony Karrer. The researchers found that the two types of organizational knowledge – codified in a knowledge base and interpersonal sharing – are appropriate to different tasks. Generally speaking, codified knowledge does not help teams to produce any better unless the team is rather inexperienced. Interpersonal sharing can be more effective for some teams but it is time-consuming. According to Haas:

“We find that using codified knowledge in the form of electronic documents saved time during the task, but did not improve work quality or signal competence to clients, whereas in contrast, sharing personal advice improved work quality and signaled competence, but did not save time,” Haas says. “This is interesting because managers often believe that capturing and sharing knowledge via document databases can substitute for getting personal advice, and that sharing advice through personal networks can save time. But our findings dispute the claim that different types of knowledge are substitutes for each other. Instead, we show that appropriately matching the type of knowledge used to the requirements of the task at hand — quality, signaling or speed — is critical if a firm’s knowledge capabilities are to translate into improved performance of its projects.”

The inability of expensive enterprise knowledge management systems to deliver broad results is similar to the 80-20 funding ratio between formal and informal learning. We’ve been putting too much money in the wrong place.

A way forward for KM and Informal Learning 2.0

We should move away from central digital information repositories (KM, Doc Mgt, LCMS, etc.). I’m not advocating tearing down any existing IT infrastructure; just enabling a parallel system, which may exist already, to grow. Some suggestions:

  • Develop measures that can help experienced knowledge workers capture and make sense of their knowledge.
  • Support the sharing of information and expertise between knowledge workers, on their terms, using personalized knowledge management methods & tools.
  • Keep only essential information, and what is necessary for inexperienced workers, in the organizational knowledge base – keep it simple.

Connecting and Communicating through Effective Conversations

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What if a company creates an IT infrastructure but nobody uses it? This is one of the questions posed by Dave Pollard in What’s Next after Knowledge Management? Dave’s work has helped me develop practical  processes for knowledge workers, such as sense-making with PKM and his observation that most workers want the company knowledge-base to be very personal informs this work.

So what have our efforts in enterprise knowledge management (KM) since 1975 yielded so far? According to Dave, only three information technologies were adopted wholesale by enterprises (fax, e-mail, intranets) with minimal results in the management of information or knowledge.

In other words, in adding to the volume and complexity of information systems, we have added relatively little value, and in some cases actually reduced value. The reason for this is simple:

  1. We have not done anything to substantively improve the ability of senior management to manage the business (i.e. to manage cash flow, share price, risks or opportunities).
  2. We have not done anything to substantively improve the effectiveness of any of the information flows … that matter in organizations, or the quality of the information.

We have, in short, implemented a solution that addressed no problem. We introduced new KM tools because we could.

Dave predicts the future organization may look more like this:

The IT department is still responsible for maintaining security around the organization’s proprietary information, but very little content is left in this category.

The KM department still manages the purchase of external information, though almost all information in 2025 is free; information producers have realized that their business model is to apply that information to specific customers’ business environment, in consulting assignments, rather than trying to sell publications.

Most of what the KM department does now is trying to facilitate more effective conversations among people within the organization and with people outside the organization, including customers.

And, when the organization holds sessions and conferences on strategy, risk, innovation or customer relationships, the KM department is on hand to do advance and just-in-time research.

The issue of the relevance of KM is not that different from the future of the training function. Both are support functions that have to be integrated with 1) the organization and 2) the individual. As workers become more nomadic (more jobs & contracts over a lifetime) they will be taking their networks and productivity tools with them. Connecting the organization’s networks to the individual’s, and vice versa, is the new organizational management challenge. In the diagram below, I show that Connecting & Communicating should be the focus of the training function, which is pretty well what Dave says is the role of the new KM department.

One of the approaches we’ve suggested at togetherLearn is Informal Learning 2.0 – supporting collaborative and self-directed work – very much like the new KM which is about facilitating more effective conversations. We’re all in this together and support functions (KM, IT, HR, T&D, OD) had better start working together. Now that’s a conversation worth having.

Push the Reset Button

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Charles Jennings made a comment on Corporate Learning Trends that got me thinking about the need for a reset of the whole training function:

Baldwin, Ford and Weissbein’s research (20 and 10 years ago, respectively) showed that the USA spends around $100 billion on training every year, but only about 10% of the expenditures result in transfer to the job. I’m sure if the research was re-run today the results would be similar, whether in the US, in Western Europe or anywhere else, for that matter.

In other words, if CLOs were in any other ‘C-Level’ jobs they wouldn’t last long. One look by the CEO/President at their P&L statement and they’d be shown the door…

The current economic situation is being called by some The Great Reset, or a time to re-evaluate our financial and economic systems. This is also an opportunity to reset our notions of learning and working. Face it, training and anything else that comes under the industrial umbrella of Human Resources are always secondary to operations. It doesn’t have to be that way, but sticking to “tried & true” methods is not going to get any breakthroughs in how we integrate learning and working, an essential part of thriving in a networked economy, in my opinion. Organizational learning and human performance need a great reset as well.

Here’s what I see for the great learning reset:

  • Think and act macro (what to do) and leave the micro (how to do it) to each knowledge worker.
  • Become a part of the business not a peripheral department – if you’re in Ford’s HR department, your business is cars & trucks, not human resources.
  • Throw away all notions of “delivery” and focus only on solving organizational challenges – training is a solution looking for a problem – just solve the problem.

Learning has to become part of the organizational and individual DNA and during a reset that may require learning specialists, but in the long run the learning function should be absorbed. That leads to the future role of the “learning specialist”. I would say it is to continuously make yourself redundant. Teach people how to fish and move on to the next challenge. If you’re maintaining a steady state, such as developing courses as requested, then you’ve failed in integrating learning into the work.

What is America?

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A couple of times each week I head down to our local coffee shop and discuss politics, economics and our community with my friend Graham Watt. I’ve posted several of Graham’s articles on this blog, the latest being O Canada, so obviously I respect his opinions. For my birthday, Graham gave me a copy of Ronald Wright’s What is America?, and appended the sub-title, and why?

What is America? should be added as a text book to any course on the history of the Americas. Of course, it reads better than most text books because it is not designed to be one. Even with a degree in History and at least one US history course, I learned, re-learned, and un-learned as I read this excellent book. It would also make a fine addition to my virtual Global Civics program.

The book reminded me of Howard Zinn’s A people’s History of American Empire but with a much earlier start. Also, Wright makes sure that Canadians don’t get too smug, considering our own genocidal tendencies. What I found most interesting was the thread of history that Wright covers. First, the Americas had great cities and political systems north of the Rio Grande before the arrival of Europeans. They only became nomadic tribes after the invasions.  Early Indigenous Americans were wiped out mostly by disease (±90%), used consciously as a weapon by all Europeans.

Also, the founding principles of the US constitution owe more to the Iroquois Confederacy than any European traditions.

The most likely theory, in my opinion, is that the word [caucus] is of Algonquian origin. An authority on Native American languages, Dr. J. H. Trumbull, suggested in the “Procedures of the American Philological Association” in 1872 that the word might be derived from an Algonquian word, “cau´-cau-as´u,” mentioned in the writings of Capt. John Smith in the 17th century. The word was said to mean “one who talks with or advises.” —Grammarphobia 2006

Furthermore, the conquest of the Americas was funded by its own wealth — crops (e.g. potatoes) and gold & silver — which fueled the European industrial revolution. Europe would not have been able to sustain the industrial revolution without these imports on a massive scale.

Wright also takes to task the cultural amnesia prevalent throughout American history:

“America could not bear to take a hard look at itself, especially the inconvenient truths of slavery, dispossession and genocide. Religion and profit, ‘jumping together,’ had little time for introspection. The slaveholder, the frontiersman and the fundamentalist all hated the historian — and anti-intellectualism has been a strong force ever since.”

The Historian by E. Irving Couse
“Digital scan of a color plate of painting. Printed with the following caption: 1902 by E. Irving Couse, A. N. A.; The Historian; The Indian Artist is painting in sign language, on buckskin, the story of a battle with American Soldiers. When exhibited at the National Academy this picture was considered one of the most important paintings of the year.” —Wikimedia Commons

Creative time

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Being self-employed, I never complain about being too busy. Of course, there are periods when I’m not busy and these give me time to write on this blog or on togetherLearn or pick up an interesting book. I have even taken up reviewing books for some publishers because I can usually find the time to do so and it’s cheap professional development for me. My friend and colleague, Michele Martin talks about the breathing room we independents have for thinking or “creativity” that many salaried workers just don’t have the time for:

But  it’s easy to focus on doing cool things in new and different ways when you have some breathing room. When you don’t, I can see where it’s just annoying to hear people tell you that you should be open to new ideas. Hello–I’m just trying to get through the day here. I have no time for your “creativity.”

I believe that this “breathing room” makes me a much better consultant to my clients. I have the time to read or research a topic in depth. I can spend time trying out a new tool or platform. This “luxury” is my business advantage. No one pays for this learning time, only my productive time, but in many cases I’ve spent a fair bit of time on a generic problem before I’m contacted by a client. At the risk of putting consultants out of business, I would even suggest that employees be given more time to think and even play so that they can become internal consultants for workplace change. As Michele says:

Creativity shouldn’t–can’t–be a luxury, though. It can’t be something that we bring to a problem only when we have the space and time for it, because more often than not, we will be in situations where we lack both.

Communities, networks and etiquette

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What’s the difference between a community and a network? Is a community of practice a network or a community?

Clark Quinn looks at social media, and asks, “… how often we call them online communities, but the question is: are they really?” I’m not going to go into network theory or definitions in this post but I think that the difference, perceived or otherwise, between networks and communities is of importance to anyone engaging with web social media, especially for professional purposes. Understanding what you define as a community or a network can help develop your personal rules for connecting, linking, friending, following and of course unfollowing.

Dave Cormier discusses social networking with Twitter and makes a clear distinction between his network and his community on this medium:

The final issue i wanted to discuss was the management of your network. There are many theories about this, and I wont claim any supremacy for mine other than to say that it is how i stay effective with the degree of networkedness that I have created for myself. I am a constant gardener of my network, following people, unfollowing people, paying more attention to some people for a while and then moving on to others. This is the critical difference between a network and a community… My community members i stay with, my network is something more practical.

Many of us are connected to people in our networks who over time have become members of a closer community, whether it be through shared experiences or shared interests. We probably didn’t notice when connections became colleagues or friends. It just happened.

I’m sure that most people don’t think too much about the distinction between networks and communities but they know when someone has crossed the line of acceptable behaviour. Making network habits explicit can help when your networks get very large or when someone challenges you on a behaviour – e.g. Gee, I never thought about that! The larger someone’s network, usually the more explicit their policy on connecting. If you don’t set some rules you will probably be overwhelmed by noise from the network.

If social media are going to be an integral part of our professional and personal lives, all of us will need to become more explicit about our online etiquette. I’m not sure we need an Emily Post type of online etiquette guide but I’m certain many people will make money telling others what to do in the Networked Age.

Photo by alana jonez

Changing how people and organizations interact

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Jon Husband has recently published a paper, What is wirearchy? In case this is a new term, the definition of wirearchy is was posted on the top right of my site. In the paper, Jon starts with the origin of the framework:

In that context of ubiquitous impact, reams have been written about the erosion of the effectiveness of command-and control as the dominant model for leading and managing purposeful organized activities in business, education, government and governance, politics, culture and the arts … all the areas in which humans act together to create and get things done. That mode of getting things done is evolving to champion-and-channel … championing ideas and innovation, and channeling time, energy, authority and resources to testing those ideas and innovative possibilities).

There is little doubt that rigid, hierarchical command and control is not working very well in any field, including its originators: the military and the church. On Twitter yesterday the togetherLearn gang discussed the roots of human computer interaction (HCI) and how we need something akin to “human organizational interaction” as a similar combined field of practice for the post-industrial workplace. I see wirearchy as a framework for practitioners of such a new discipline as HOI.

For instance, Jon gives some specific advice for leaders, managers, employees and citizens. Taking from each of these, I would suggest something like the following for organizational performance professionals (HR, T&D, OD, IT, etc):

Understand the scope and reach of interconnected markets, people and flows of information. Learn how and why people are connecting, talking and sharing information by doing so yourself. Listen, set an example and be a coach in your work. Be responsible, accountable and transparent in all you do.

Jon concludes his paper with the “Fundamental Sociology of Networked Knowledge Work”:

An adult-to-adult model (rather than parent-child) is emerging – with all of the attendant responsibilities for both parties in the relationship.

Many workers, as well as supervisors and managers, will find this kind of a transition rather difficult as too many of our structures have been developed from an opposite sociological perspective. That does not mean that a restructuring of how we organize our work is not neccessary, it will just be difficult in some cases.