8) So what have I learned that will help us change our own experience of work? That knowledge is becoming more abstract, conceptual, distributed and complex.
9) We know what social and thinking skills are needed for complex contexts – we know how to hone these skills through practice.
Update from Down Under
I’m sitting in the Toronto airport, waiting for the last leg of my journey home from Australia. I presented and ran workshops at AITD and talked at the Amplify Festival, in addition to taking a few days off and enjoying Sydney. Here are some updates from this week.
Reinventing Organizations – Review
What is a “Teal Organization”? Frédéric Laloux, in Reinventing Organizations, uses a colour scheme, based on Integral Theory, to describe the historical development of human organizations: Red > Orange > Green > Teal. Laloux lists three breakthroughs of Teal organizations:
- Self-management: driven by peer relationships
- Wholeness: involving the whole person at work
- Evolutionary purpose: let the organization adapt and grow, not be driven
Friday’s Finds Down Under with me Mates
Fridays Finds this week have been curated by the PKM workshop in Sydney, NSW. (Marion Louvel, @chemenesinson, @michelleockers, @soozietwits, Siobhan Sutherland Rogers, Julia, Elizabeth Robinson)
AITD National Conference 2014
I will be speaking tomorrow at the AITD national conference in Sydney, NSW. Here is the interview I had with the staff prior to leaving Canada.
AITD: Without giving too much away can you tell us about your Work is learning and learning is the work keynote address?
Work is learning and learning is the work, because the nature of work is changing. For example, automation is replacing most routine work. That leaves customized work, which requires initiative, creativity and passion. Valued work, and the environments in which it takes place, is becoming more complex. Professionals today are doing work that cannot be easily standardized.
In complexity, we can determine the relationship between cause and effect only in retrospect. Think about that. It puts into question most of our management frameworks that require detailed analysis before we take action. It also shows that identifying and copying best practices is pretty well useless.
In complex work environments, the optimal way to do work is to constantly probe the environment and test emergent practices. This requires an engaged and empowered workforce. Emergent practices are dependent on the cooperation of all workers (and management) as well as the free flow of knowledge. It also requires learning as part of everyone’s workflow.
These changes mean that the role of training and development must change, or become obsolete.
Learning in a connected enterprise
In 2003 I was suddenly unemployed, jettisoned shortly before the learning technology company where I was CLO went bankrupt. Look where I live, in Sackville. My network in 2003 was quite small and mostly Canadian. So how did I get to Sydney, NSW today? How did I learn to do what I now do? The same way everyone will be learning as the network era emerges. I learned by doing; but mostly through sharing, especially on this blog. Today at the Amplify Festival I spoke about this journey and discussed how learning is becoming something we may not even be talking about in the future, as everyone will be doing it as part of their work.
Re-wiring for the Complex Workplace
Note: The following article appears in Inside Learning Technologies & Skills – May 2014. This is the “No Flash Required” version.
Complexity is the new normal
We are so interconnected today that many cannot imagine otherwise. Almost every person is connected to worldwide communication networks. News travels at the speed of a Tweet. Meanwhile, inside the enterprise, reaction times and feedback loops have to get faster to deal with markets that can create multi-billion dollar valuations seemingly overnight. But are they getting faster?
Expectations for digital competencies for workers keep increasing, without much of a clue from management what these really are. Today’s workplace demands emergent practices just to keep up, but there is little time or thought provided to develop these. In most cases our current models for managing people and supporting their knowledge-sharing are ineffective.
Most socially-shared
“I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.” – Groucho Marx
I usually ignore “best of” lists that tell us the “Top XX” people in a field. Too often there is no methodology given, and it’s either a popularity contest or just a marketing scheme. I was surprised when I got a note that someone saw my name on a list that actually used data. In this case it was the Center for Management and Organization Effectiveness:
A world of pervasive networks
According to Derrick de Kerckhove, Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture, the McLuhans’ tetradic Laws of Media state that every medium (or technology in the broader sense of the word) has four major effects:
- extends a human property (the car extends the foot);
- obsolesces the previous medium by turning it into a sport or an form of art (the automobile turns horses and carriages into sports);
- retrieves a much older medium that was obsolesced before (the automobile brings back the shining armour of the chevalier);
- flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its limits (the automobile, when there are too many of them, create traffic jams, that is total paralysis)