Harold Jarche

a decade of digital transformation

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With a focus on improving collaboration, sensemaking, and knowledge sharing in teams, communities and networks, I have had the privilege of working with a wide variety of clients.

Ten years ago I tried to convince senior federal public servants of the importance of social media and how they would have to change their relationship with citizens. This presentation fell on deaf years. I had much more success working with Dominos in incorporating personal knowledge mastery into their leadership training.

Other companies like Cigna, AstraZeneca, and ING Bank were open to changing their approach to supporting learning in the workflow and enabling cross-departmental cooperation. Carlsberg added PKM and social learning to their year-long global leadership program. More recently I worked with Citi to develop a global social learning program based on PKM.

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the moral minority

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The elites in charge of organizations and institutions like to think they take into account the opinions of experts, but as this pandemic has shown, that is often not the case. The pandemic response in many countries is political, not guided by the best public health knowledge.

“On any particular issue, people at the bottom can usually claim the most expertise; they know their job best. And when someone at the top has to make a difficult decision, they usually prefer to justify it via reference to recommendations from below. They are just following the advice of their experts, they say. But of course they lie; people at the top often overrule subordinates … Elites like to pretend they were selected for being experts at something, and they like to pretend their opinions are just reflecting what experts have said (“we believe the science!”). But they often lie; elite opinion often overrules expert opinion, especially on topics with strong moral colors.” —Overcoming Bias

If there is a moral aspect to the decision, elites feel even more justified in their decisions for doing the ‘right’ thing in spite of contrary evidence.

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connect, challenge, create

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Education won’t counter populism — changing education might

Slovakia’s president, Zuzana Caputova, was elected in March 2019, and surprisingly showed a way out of the populist quagmire that many countries find themselves in. The tribal affiliations retrieved by the previous corrupt government, particularly via social media, were what Caputova had to counter in order to get elected.

She addressed these tribes not by creating a new tribe, but by discounting the tribal perspective and focusing on the population’s common humanity instead. In this case, it worked. Understanding The Laws of Media, especially the retrieval quadrant gives us a tool to counter the negative effects — or potential reversal — of new technologies like social media. This is real media literacy.

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sensemaking in turbulence

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence — it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” —Peter Drucker

“Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.” —Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook

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working smarter 2020

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In 2010 we conducted a project to cultivate a fully engaged, high performing workforce through rapid, collaborative, informal, & self-directed learning at a US-based health insurance company of about 20,000 employees. It is summarized in the working smarter case study.

Jump ahead a decade and similar issues continue to face large organizations.

My recent client challenge with Citibank in 2019/2020 can be summed up as — How do you improve collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and sensemaking in a globally distributed company with over 200,000 employees?

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walking the leadership talk

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I was a speaker at Amazon’s Global Learning Day in 2016 and one thing that struck me was how often one of the 14 principles of leadership would crop up in regular conversations I had during my three days in Seattle. As this event was focused on learning, someone made up stickers for principle #5 — Learn and Be Curious.

“This is perhaps the most important Amazon leadership principle as it sets the foundation of the entire business structure. Leaders are never satisfied with their product, the word, ‘perfect’ is not in their dictionary. It’s curiosity which helps them to achieve new feats. They are never done learning and always look to improve themselves. They are curious to know all the possibilities and acts to explore them. They are never satisfied at any point in their business development which makes them interesting. Some example questions from amazon leadership principles in this regard are: Tell me about a time when you:

Solved a problem through just greater knowledge or observation?
Influenced a change by only asking questions?
Went through that changed your way of thinking?
Curiosity helped you make a smarter decision?

and:

Tell me about the most significant and imperative lesson you learned in the past year from your experience?”
—Louis Carter

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six ways to make sense

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One of the big consultancies is promoting ‘six ways’ to make sense of these complex times, or words to that effect. If you believe you are getting leading-edge thinking from these types of businesses, think again. Here is a story about a major consulting company, from one of its own.

“Despite having no work or research experience outside of MIT, I was regularly advertised to clients as an expert with seemingly years of topical experience relevant to the case. We were so good at rephrasing our credentials that even I was surprised to find in each of my cases, even my very first case, that I was the most senior consultant on the team …

I got the feeling that our clients were simply trying to mimic successful businesses, and that as consultants, our earnings came from having the luck of being included in an elaborate cargo-cult ritual. In any case it fell to us to decide for ourselves what question we had been hired to answer, and as a matter of convenience, we elected to answer questions that we had already answered in the course of previous cases — no sense in doing new work when old work will do.” —The Tech 2010-04-09

Is this what clients really want?

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nursing care performance analysis case study

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This was a presentation I gave to the Canadian Society for Training and Development in 2005.

e-Learning and Communities of Practice in Healthcare

During 2003 to 2004, we worked with a Montreal area hospital to implement online learning for nurses as they adopted the new McGill nursing care methodology, as well as the creation of virtual communities of practice for social workers. From the initial performance analyses conducted on the hospital wards, to the implementation of the open source Moodle and Mambo technology systems, the consultants worked closely with the hospital staff in the development of their knowledge base, using domain ontologies.

  • Learn about the need to conduct a performance analysis prior to recommending any e-learning intervention

  • Learn how ontologies can help with the creation of shared professional knowledge bases

  • Learn about the benefits of using open source software for workplace performance support

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a breath of fresh air

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Yes. It’s really only since wireless networks got fast enough to stream pictures to portable devices that everything changed, & enabled each individual person to live twenty-four/ seven in their own personalized hallucination stream.” ―Neal Stephenson, Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell

We’re in a guerrilla information war and everyone is a participant.

Here are pertinent rules that apply to the current moment —

a) every single physical event, is won or lost online.

b) this is an asymmetric conflict.

c) you can’t participate if you can’t connect.
—@JohnRobb

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retrieving the cooperative imperative

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The biggest challenges facing us today are climate change and environmental degradation. The current pandemic is a symptom of these situations. These are complex issues without simple answers or explanations, because with complex problems the relationship between cause and effect is only seen after the fact. As H.L Mencken stated, “Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.” Thinking in terms of neat and plausible answers only feeds the post-truth machines.

The best way forward is through cooperation and the engagement of a diverse set of human abilities. Cooperation is freely sharing among equals in order to benefit the greater whole. Hierarchies, such as those found in most institutions and organizations are useless in the face of complexity. As Yaneer Bar-Yam explains in Complexity Rising, hierarchies have diminishing usefulness as complexity increases.

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