Harold Jarche

story skepticism

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I have been thinking about storytelling lately as a lot of people are talking about it as essential for business, leadership, and whatever ails you. I have discussed it a few times over the years and have reviewed these thoughts. It appears that in the network era, storytelling is being retrieved, especially through podcasting and videos. Stories can be the glue, holding information together in some semblance of order, for our brains to process into knowledge.

We are storytelling creatures. Shawn Callahan noted that, “Our memories evolved to hunt, gather & avoid danger. Now we have great memories for places, faces & emotions. Why stories are memorable.” Stories are a key factor in how we learn, especially socially. Roger Schank observed that, “Comprehension is mapping your stories onto mine.” Stories are how we best remember and a story can be thought of as what happens in the gap between expectations and results.

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complexity and social learning

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As we transition from a market to a network economy, complexity will increase due to our hyper-connectedness. Managing in complex adaptive systems means influencing possibilities rather than striving for predictability (good or best practices). No one has the definitive answer any more but we can use the intelligence of our networks to make sense together and see how we can influence desired results. This is life in perpetual Beta. Get used to it. Preparing for this will require time, social learning, and new management structures.

org characteristics
Image: seeking perpetual beta

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empathy opportunities

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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.

@Tom_Peters: “Average unicorn coder’s goal today: Destroy my privacy to sell me more crap so that founders can add another billion to their net worth … Make no mistake: Google’s animating goal is to destroy my privacy by knowing more about me than I do. The rest is details.”

@dria: “Search results are decreasingly reliable because of SEO polluting top results with junk. I’m going directly to known-good sites more & more.”

Why Theater Majors Are Vital in the Digital Age via @CreatvEmergence

“The aptitude called ‘foresight’, which is the talent to envision many possible outcomes or possibilities, was present in all theater workers (playwrights, directors, designers, actors). When actors try out various line readings or interpretations of a scene, when they improvise or create backstory, they are using foresight … But foresight would be impossible without empathy. The actor’s ability to envision multiple outcomes or motivations in a play must be based on the character’s circumstances, not the actor’s.”

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automate work, not people

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Standardized work continues to be automated, by software and machines.  The re-wiring of work is essential for every part of our economy. The challenge is to identify what work can be automated and focus people on being more creative, both in dealing with complex problems and in identifying new opportunities. Human creativity is a limitless resource. Too often, it is wasted in our organizational structures.

“The family farm is an example of automation being used to free people to do what they do best. As one farmer said, it’s difficult to hire people who want to milk cows everyday at 4:00 am.

While automation is one of the reasons there’s been so many job losses in manufacturing — taking over repetitive tasks, experts in the field says it’s time to re-think the point of jobs themselves.

Despite automation, the Shantz family says cows still need personal attention. And although some farmers are skeptical of robots are taking over jobs, experts in the field say that with technology forging ahead it’s time to re-think the point of jobs themselves.” —The Current, CBC

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bring your own network

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The day when a single person can work alone, without any help from others, is fast disappearing. Some individuals may still be able to freelance and work alone from time to time but most of us will have to work with others in order to get anything done in a networked society. About five years ago I worked for a large company with my Internet Time Alliance (ITA) colleagues, and this comment was written by our client at the end of the project.

“What the ITA group brought to the table in our engagement, in the person of Harold Jarche, was not only his extensive experience and network, but also the expertise of the rest of the Alliance and their networks as well. While we in our organization have networks of our own, the quality and extensiveness of the ITA network added a value that we would not have been able to tap alone, and led us to a superior solution that will better serve our customers.” – Corporate University Manager within Fortune 500 Health Insurance company

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rewiring work

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“Machines that learn (limited AGI) will obsolete ‘jobs’ FASTER than entrepreneurs can make them and people can retrain to fill them.” – John Robb

We need to rewire how we work. The machines are getting much better at the old world of work than we can ever be. Automation is the driver. Offshoring and outsourcing are temporary conditions until all routine labour gets replaced by software and machines.

“Since the processes of automation and offshoring will most likely continue, it is expected that the disappearance of routine jobs in the U.S. will also continue. Understanding the impact of polarization on the labor market is important and remains an active topic of economic research.” – Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis

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learning and leadership thoughts

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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.

“Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.” ― Leonardo da Vinci, via @gfbertini

“Millennials: the landless peasants the founders warned each other would happen.” – @girlziplocked

“Blessed are the weird people …  for they teach us to see the world through different eyes.” – @JacobNorby

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leadership in an age of pervasive networks

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Leadership can be examined from the perspective of Marshall McLuhan’s famous media tetrad. Using the tetrad, explained by Derrick de Kerkchove, co-author of McLuhan for Managers — every technology has four effects:

1. extends a human property (the car extends the foot)
2. obsolesces the previous medium by turning it into a sport or a form of art (the automobile turns horses and carriages into sports)
3. retrieves a much older medium that was obsolesced before (the automobile brings back the shining armour of the knight);
4. flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its limits (automobiles, when there are too many of them, create grid lock)

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sense-making with social media

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“Tweeting during a conference helps me consolidate my thoughts and capture key insights. Facebook helps me share resources. LinkedIn is a useful professional tool. However, it is blogging, such as this post, that is by far my strongest form of learning, as it involves a number of things that are all supported by researched learning theory, and which improve memory and recall:

  1. Reflection
  2. Generation
  3. Elaboration
  4. Retrieval
  5. Interleaved and varied practice
  6. Spaced practice
  7. Imagery
  8. Archiving”

—Donald Clark

What do you do to make sense of your learning? As Donald notes, sharing and posting on social media are weaker forms of learning than longer form blogging can be. However, low utility activities like retrieval and archiving can provide the fodder for higher utility sense-making skills such as generation and elaboration. Mastery comes through varied and spaced practice, supported by reflection. Using social media for learning requires an understanding of how each tool or platform can support your own sense-making.

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social learning for complex work

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“Carnegie Mellon’s Robert E. Kelley … says the percentage of the knowledge you need to memorize to do your job is shrinking rapidly:

  • 1986: 75%
  • 1997: 15-20%
  • 2006: 8-10% estimated

Knowing how to get the answers you need is more important than storing those answers in your head, especially with the shorter lifespan of knowledge these days. What you find when you look something up is probably current. What you already know is more and more likely to be out of date.

A vital meta-learning skill: how to find the answer you need, online or off.”

—Jay Cross (2006)

Where are we in 2016? How do we find the knowledge we need? Is it in our organizational filing systems and intranets, or rather on the Web or in our professional social networks? It’s a question of complexity.

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