Harold Jarche

Catching the Zeitgeist

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From SocialCollider.net (via @gsiemens):

With the Internet’s promise of instant and absolute connectedness, two things appear to be curiously underrepresented: both temporal and lateral perspective of our data-trails. Yet, the amount of data we are constantly producing provides a whole world of contexts, many of which can reveal astonishing relationships if only looked at through time.

This experiment explores these possibilities by starting with messages on the microblogging-platform Twitter.

And here is what I found when looking at @hjarche on Twitter for the last week:

This visual shows that what we post (tweet) can take on a life of its own in the network and that we may not always consider this. We are not in control of our information once it’s on the Net.

Social media without the BPR

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Last night at ThirdTuesdayNB the conversation came around to how to implement social media in large, bureaucratic organizations without creating a white elephant type of project that takes years to implement. Michele Martin just posted some social media baby steps that have worked for her, particularly:

Static website => blog

Wikis for committee work to replace/reduce e-mail

Other small steps that I think can work without major business process re-engineering (BPR):

  • Use e-mail only for contractual/legal/official communications that need to be tracked, and add an internal Jaiku or Yammer instance of Twitter for business conversations inside the firewall.
  • Use social bookmarks and tags (Delicious or open source variants) to highlight external information, once again to replace e-mail and to open everyone’s browser “favorites” to the rest of the organization.
  • Replace multi-recipient e-mails with internal blog posts and send the link via e-mail or IM. All comments get added to the blog post and if the position holder leaves, the replacement takes over the blog. Great for non-sensitive discussions like training schedules.

New roles for the networked workplace

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The best definition of a professional I’ve seen comes from David Williamson Shaffer, author of How computer games help children learn [not really about children] as:

anyone who does work that cannot be standardized easily and who continuously welcomes challenges at the cutting edge of his or her expertise

Let’s face it, no professional can know everything and is dependent on others for knowledge and expertise, hence the growing need for effective networks in our work and learning. Our networks are becoming all-important in our work and this requires an attitude of openness and collaboration, not the norm in industrial corporations nor command and control organizations.

If you agree that networks are more powerful and flexible than closed hierarchies, especially in complex environments, what should the support departments (HR, OD, KM, L&D) do to make their organizations more networked?

Jay Cross suggests some new roles for the networked workplace: “When my colleagues and I advocate cutting back on workshops and classes, we don’t suggest firing the instructors. Rather, we recommend redeploying them as connectors, wiki gardeners, internal publicists, news anchors, and performance consultants.“

In looking at our current organizational roles that support the enterprise we should ask, how do these help to strengthen our networks? If they don’t, then it may be time to change, abolish or create new roles.

Communities of Practice

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I’m reviewing my resources on communities of practice and synthesizing some of the articles I’ve come across and added to my social bookmarks or blogged about on my Communities Thread.

One of the best sources of practical knowledge on online community building is Anecdote from Australia. In Building a Collaborative Workplace, they discuss three types of collaboration – Team, Community and Network. As they say, “Our purpose is to provide an understanding of the type of culture required to support collaboration.”

Anecdote’s collaborative framework:

Another Australian resource I found via Jack Vinson is three tiers of collaboration from Column Two, a good model to examine organizational readiness regarding – Strategy, Capability & Capacity.

Peter Bond’s article, which I referred to in 2005, on Communities of Practice and Complexity is still worth reading to see how communities can be viewed from a biological perspective and that communities don’t have to continue forever:

This suggests that the process of CoP development be approached as if they were transitory organisational phenomena that may act, but only for a finite period, as the source of the motivation for change and as the vehicles for change.

My 2006 post on the failure of online communities has some good comments and is worth a read if you’re thinking of setting up an online community. I also posted on an unsuccessful community of practice case study. Even with these failures, some think that we may be hard-wired for collaboration (good comments on this one).

Last year I used the Company Command model for a community of practice prototype. The advice on who to get involved in building it was useful:

  1. Initial Core Team of two or three people who desire to share knowledge.
  2. Early Adopters who are members of the community that you are serving, especially those who are already well-connected.
  3. Mavens with deep knowledge in an area that is valued by the members.

For anyone interested in the technology, I discussed how to select social network platforms as we were conducting our Work Literacy workshops. A wider variety of tools are listed on Robin Good’s Mind Map of best online collaboration tools.

Sense-making with PKM

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Latest version: PKMastery

PKM

We may learn on our own but usually not by ourselves. People learn socially. In looking at how we can make sense of the growing and changing knowledge in our respective professional fields, I see two parallel processes that support each other. One is internally focused, as in “How do I learn this?” and the other is external, as in “Who can help me learn this?”.

We constantly go through a process of looking at bits of information and trying to make sense of them by adding to our existing knowledge or testing out new patterns in our sense-making efforts. The Web has given us more ways to connect with others in our learning but many people only see the information overload aspect of our digital society. Effective learning is the difference between surfing the waves or being drowned by them and PKM (personal knowledge management) can be your customized surfboard.

Here is an internal process based on repeating four activities:

Sort Categorize Make Explicit
 Retrieve
Observations & Readings Tag, List, File, Classify Write Look-up as/when needed

These can be combined with three external activities:

  1. Connect – with others via various platforms and extend my reach
  2. Exchange – ideas and observations
  3. Contribute – to conversations

Together, these processes look like this:

These internal and external activities are a way of moving from implicit to explicit knowledge by observing, reflecting and then putting tentative thoughts out to our networks.

Looking Inward

One of the important aspects of PKM is triage, or sorting. It’s the ability to separate the important from the useless. Unfortunately, what you may view as useless today could be quite important tomorrow. Developing good triage techniques takes time and practice.

Categorizing: Once we’ve found something of interest or value, we will need to categorize it. The big change with the Web is that we no longer have to put one object in one file folder, as we did with a physical object or even on your computer desktop. Today, everything is miscellaneous. Tags are labels that can be attached to digital knowledge objects and an objects can have many labels. That means that we can have as many categories as we want.

Making Explicit: There are many ways of making knowledge explicit. We can talk about it, write about, engage in debate, create a video or even develop a hypothesis. The act of making it explicit provides the discipline necessary to examine our thought processes.

Going Public: Even more powerful than making our knowledge explicit is to make it public. This can start some interesting conversations about things that matter to us. Going public makes our professional knowledge much more personal. It also encourages peer discussions and reinforces the outward looking aspect of personal knowledge management. Web tools to help us go public include micro-blogging; blogs and podcasts.

Retrieval: The importance of retrieval becomes more obvious with the passing of time. As years of sorting, categorizing and making explicit develop into a large amount of information we can begin to see its value. These are our thoughts and ideas but they are connected to the ideas that sparked them and have been reinforced or questioned by our peers. The great benefit of using digital tools and Web platforms is that we can retrieve our knowledge artifacts (or information that has special meaning to us) anytime and anywhere. That’s quite a powerful professional asset.

Looking Outward

“No man is an island entire of himself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main …” – John Donne

Connecting: We need to be reading, watching and listening to find out what is happening in our professional fields. There are flows of conversation around us all the time. For those of us with access to the digital surround we have no excuses not to connect. Finding conflicting viewpoints on a subject is as easy as going to Wikipedia and reading the comments on any controversial subject. The variety and depth of our connections are indicators of how seriously we take our sense-making efforts. Who we know helps to improve what we know.

Exchanging: We exchange and note ideas and information all of the time. In the age of print we lent out or gave away books, magazines and newspapers. We exchanged opinions, sometime without knowing it. An empty restaurant on a Saturday night may have indicated that the locals did not think it was any good.

Conversations help us make meaning. The quality of our conversations is affected by the quality of the company we keep. If we seek out interesting people with different ideas we may learn more and broaden our horizons.

A stock exchange is designed to help capital flow and we need to use knowledge exchanges to allow ideas to flow. For centuries, knowledge exchanges were limited to elites but we now have access to world’s largest and most open exchange ever created.

Contributing. Clay Shirky has brought up the concept of a cognitive surplus that is a result of the leisure time that we gained about fifty years ago. As a society we were in a state of shock and did not have the tools to deal with all of this time, so television filled the void. Shirky says that television collectively takes up about 200 billion hours in the US per year. Wikipedia only needed 10 million hours to get to where it is today as the leading online encyclopedia. We are poised to be able to contribute to more Wikipedia-style efforts but many of use just don’t know how. Our institutions have not prepared us to be ongoing contributors to human knowledge, as we have been led to believe that this is the domain of “experts”.

In a connected world it is getting much easier to contribute, whether it be with words, pictures, music, or actions. Not only that, it may be our social responsibility to be contributors to our common knowledge.

How else will we be recognized as professionals in our fields unless we actively contribute to them?

TOOLS EXAMPLES
OS = open source		 INWARD
SUPPORT		 OUTWARD
SUPPORT
Aggregator Bloglines

Google Reader

 Sorting

Categorizing

 Connecting
Social
Bookmarks		 Delicious

Diigo

 Sorting

Categorizing

Making Explicit

 Connecting

Exchanging
Micro-blogging Twitter

Jaiku (OS)

Yammer

 Sorting

Making Explicit

 Connecting

Exchanging
Blogging Blogger

Typepad

WordPress (OS)

 Making Explicit Contributing
Photo-sharing Flickr

Photo Bucket

 Sorting

Categorizing

Making Explicit

 Exchanging

Contributing
Social
Networking		 Facebook

LinkedIn

Elgg (OS)

 Making Explicit Exchanging

Contributing

—

What I have found out over several years of using PKM methods and tools is that I have been creating a powerful resource. My annotated bookmarks and my blog are the first places I search when I have an article or report to write. My PKM process has given me a digital library brimming with my own sticky notes that I can easily find.

I also offer workshops on how to develop PKM processes that work in various organizational contexts.

A longer view

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Economy getting you down? Maybe the economy is someone else’s story and not yours. From Neal Stephenson’s Anathem (book) [more on Wikipedia entry]:

So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes [cars], and tried to fathom what it would be like. Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. Fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day’s end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were.

Perhaps this is a good time to take back the long view on our own story.

Seeing with new eyes

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The idea that training is not a separate function has already gained some momentum, with many internal departments called something like Learning & Development now. Luis Suarez, writes in Learning & Knowledge – Partners in Learning:

For a good number of years, both Knowledge Management and Learning have always been associated with one another and overlapping quite a bit. Plenty of organisations are eventually using terms like Learning & Knowledge to refer to that process of knowledge sharing and collaborating; and, in a way, with the emergence of social software within the corporate environment, I am sure we will be seeing both disciplines come together even more!

I commented on Luis’s post that learning, development, KM, OD, etc, should take what’s best from each and create a more pragmatic offering for the networked workplace. I see that web-based practitioners especially are already doing this kind of cross-pollination. Both Luis and I view ourselves as cross-practitioners, as do several of my colleagues. In our networked world there is a need for more inter-disciplinary cooperation as exponential innovations can occur when examining one field through the lens of another. Merging our fields of practice will let us see with new eyes.

Informal learning works for new hires

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Todd Hudson discusses how the New Seasons Market chain uses a very informal approach not just for senior employees (where it seems to be a more natural fit) but for new hires as well. Criticism is often leveled against informal learning methods in that they don’t work for basic skills training. The New Seasons Market, with nine outlets, shows otherwise:

At New Seasons, you won’t see new hires crammed into three days of New Employee Training that’s so common today. After their Day One Orientation, New Seasons newbies are pretty much set free in their departments. “New Seasons’ training is like a Waldorf School experience. There’s no codified way for people to learn most jobs. People are told to look around, figure it out and ask for help when they need it,” said Charla [HR Director].

The company starts its hiring based on attitude, “We look for candidates more interested in genuine human interactions than in an ‘items per hour’ ratio”. I recommended in soft skills are foundational competencies that hiring for attitude makes more sense because you can always train for skills later.

This is a succinct real-world case for informal learning (book) in the workplace, what Todd Hudson calls Lean Knowledge Transfer (PDF), and reminds me of Guy Wallace’s more comprehensive Lean ISD (book) [also available as a free 404-page PDF at http://www.eppic.biz ].

The Community Manager

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In re-building the training function, we’ve recommended a move from content delivery to Connecting & Communicating. One role that will likely gain importance is that of Community Manager. As the electric media become embedded in our lives, we will all be constantly connected to many communities. Some of these will overlap.

The role of community manager in an organization will be to manage  organizational communities of practice, communities of interest and have an understanding of some of the other communities that touch each of us. In his Valence Theory of Organizations, Mark Federman identified “several specific forms of valence relationships that are enacted by two or more people when they come together to do almost anything; these are economic, social-psychological, identity, knowledge, and ecological.”

Effective collaboration brings all of these aspects into consideration. The communities we belong to address some or all of these valances. Workplace-related communities often address only the knowledge and economic aspects but as human beings we need more.

Because digital media are so easily reproduced and appropriated there are few walls between our online communities. Even our offline communities are getting digitally captured, by someone. Look at how difficult it is to maintain a clear line between LinkedIn and Facebook contacts. Even though many of us use the former for business and the latter for more personal communications, few are able to maintain two distinct groups of contacts. These lines will continue to blur (e.g. Twitter) and our online identities will be a composite of activities in several communities / teams / groups / networks.

The effective community manager will be less of a manager and more a well-connected node in many networks of importance to the organization. David Wilkins takes this a step further and says that the entire business should be run as a community:

It’s not about customer communities or workplace communties.  It’s about recognizing and fostering connections, and enabling information flow and information capture from multiple constituents.

If you can incorporate the best of eLearning; Human Performance Technology; Organizational Development; Knowledge Management; Communications and a touch of Marketing, then you may have the makings of a Community Manager. It seems like a pretty exciting place to be for the near future.

Management experts recommend Wirearchy

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Some of the best known management experts were brought together last year to “lay out an agenda for reinventing management“. Their premise was that 1) management models are important social technologies; 2) that the current models are out-of-date; and that 3) we need to develop more human models for the near future.

The 25 recommendations included more community, democracy and diversity as well as redefining control and leadership. The experts also recommended that organizations, “Reinvent strategy-making as an emergent process. In a turbulent world, strategy making must reflect the biological principles of variety, selection, and retention.” This aligns with our recommendations to restructure the training department based partially on complexity theory [in complex environments we need to develop emergent practices as best & good practices are inadequate].

In reviewing all 25 recommendations it is clear that Wirearchy, as an overarching framework, is a perfect fit:

a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology

Since we already have a unique and well-researched conceptual framework, we can now get on with how to implement Wirearchy for the workplace.