@CelineSchill — “We’ve hired & promoted generations of managers with robust analytical skills & poor social skills, and we don’t seem to think that matters.”
@flowchainsensei — “At all levels ‘leaders’ have no answers for our problems. We have to find our own solutions, together.”
@DocOnDev — “People cannot both follow orders without question and take responsibility for their own actions.”
@JohnRobb — “You can either compete with technology for a job, or use it to help you make a living outside of a job. Your choice.”
After all, with one simple yet brilliant experiment, researchers had proven that the conceptual link between thinking outside the box and creativity was a myth.
Luckily, humans are very good at reading energy and responding to it. It’s always been human energy and mojo that have powered everything good that’s ever happened in business or institutional life. We delude ourselves when we pretend that the yardstick and the milestone matter … More measurement won’t do anything except clog the pipelines through which your company’s mojo flows.
If you can’t write the action points and learnings down on a postcard then you have too many. The key point is lessons have to be acted upon; otherwise why bother capturing them!
@SeriousPony — “Curse of Expertise is not that experts forgot how they learned; it’s that they don’t really KNOW what they know & use.”
Do you think you will still be working, in some capacity, in 10 years? What will you have learned during that decade? Will you remember much of it? Will you have access to reminders and artifacts that could jog your memory? Perhaps you need an outboard brain.
Everyone talks about change today, and how people will have many careers and vocations through their working lives. Company lifespans are decreasing and losing your job is becoming a rather common, but unfortunate, occurrence. Having a blog, a public presence to share ideas, enables you to grow a professional network beyond your organization’s walls. It can provide useful insights while you have a job, and connect you to people who can help you if you need to look for new work. Given the usefulness of blogs, it’s amazing that many professionals still cannot be bothered with them.
My business would not exist without my blog. Period.
Note that I live in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada; population 5,000. I am 1,000 km away from the closest internationally recognized city (Boston or Montreal). Even our timezone is unknown to many people. Without my blog, nobody would ever have heard of me. My speaking engagements are an indication of the reach my blog has provided. Finally, thanks to Automattic for making WordPress, which I adopted in 2006, and it made my online life much simpler.
Change Agents Worldwide has just released its first ebook featuring 21 views on the future of work. I have captured some of the highlights and set them in a flow to tell a part of the story, but you will want to read them all. Most formats are free of charge, and don’t forget to check out the last page.
We believe change is coming fast to the enterprise. We believe in the principles that drive the evolving Web: chief among these are transparency, sharing/collaboration, authenticity, and trust. —@chagww
The World of Work
The typical situation in which many businesses are stuck – taming emergent bottom-up behaviors external to organizations, while trying to give rise internally to similar emergence through top-down programs. —Thierry de Baillon
As I walk the halls of too many businesses, I see zombies. They were once new employees, alive, full of excitement and vitality; they were one part optimism, one part tenacity with at least a sprinkle of ingeniousness. Now those characteristics have all but vanished. Reluctantly, they have become cogs in the machine. —Kevin Jones
The last decade has been all about the social business buzz with organizations introducing new technologies with old-world thinking. —Ayelet Baron
How to Ensure the Failure of Your Change Initiative: Engage with your legal team and allow them to make the policies for use of the new capability as restrictive as possible. —Bruce Galinsky
Generation Y: So when I make the realization that I am a shiny new cog in an old, rusty machine, you, my manager, must act quickly to help keep me engaged, productive, and happy. —Carrie Basham Young
Re-thinking Work
The possibilities for what your organization can become when you no longer think of employees as cogs in a wheel are extraordinary. —Rob Caldera
In a knowledge economy, it’s the talent and knowledge of people, and the results of their productive interactions that create value — solving complex problems, inventing new solutions, engaging with customers. —Catherine Shinners
The collapse of workplace certainty requires us to – forge new partnerships; subvert hierarchies; connect & reconnect; add our special value. —Jonathan Anthony.
Rethinking how we pay people for an era defined by networked collaboration represents an important element in the quest for ongoing improvements in performance. —Jon Husband
Sharing complex knowledge in trusted networks requires a combination of actively engaged knowledge workers, using optimal communications tools, all within a supportive organizational structure. —Harold Jarche
The best outcomes come from creating an environment where individuals can think and learn together. —Clark Quinn
In your job, whenever you have to design a project or achieve a task that supports the classical Top-Down frame, think about doing it a different way. —Céline Schillinger
An important consideration is not always focusing on “What’s in it for me right now?” but on shifting our thinking to “What will best balance satisfying immediate needs, yet still nourish future opportunity in the process?” —Bryce Williams
Setting out to “change the world of work” is an ambitious goal. It takes a raw courage to challenge the status quo, to tear down the psychological walls that have built our understanding of “work” as we know it in the 21st century. —Susan Scrupski
Changing the World of Work
The world needs each of us to hear the call in the distance and move. The people making a difference are leaping one step at a time. —Marcia Conner
Deciding to trust your own choices of talented people is the first step to the future of work. —Simon Terry
If you believe change is needed but don’t know where to start, consider a very simple approach: revisit the annual objectives. Make 50 percent of the bonus count for engagement and exploration of better ways of working. —Danny DeGrave
A good Change Agent will use his network to reach out way beyond his company — and even his industry — to find the most forward- thinking people, study their way of working, and then apply that new knowledge to his own enterprise. —Jim Worth
Forget about job titles and job descriptions. They are constraints. Tear your eyes away from the rear-view mirror and have a good long look through the windshield. —Richard Martin
Storytelling is more powerful than official, crafted messages. “Look what they did” means more than “Our strategy is to do this.” —Jane McConnell
Be ready to start a journey. Nobody will guarantee you that this journey will be successful. But to quote philosopher Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: “I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.” —Rainer Gimbel
Postscript
We don’t know exactly how it happened. Our chroniclers believe it started around 2020, when networks became an invisible fabric of society. Everyone and everything was connected to everyone and everything else. —Joachim Stroh
Flip teaching (or flipped classroom) is a form of blended learning in which students learn new content online by watching video lectures, usually at home, and what used to be homework (assigned problems) is now done in class with teachers offering more personalized guidance and interaction with students, instead of lecturing. —Wikipedia
Flipped teaching appears to be a good approach that engages teachers with their students, instead of just delivering content, which technology can do fairly well now.
In a recent conversation with my Internet Time Alliancecolleagues, we were talking about how much time is wasted in commuting to work, which none of us do. Charles Jennings told us about his days of leaving for work at 06:30 every morning and usually returning around 20:30. A grinding routine, which I am sure many readers share. We also agreed that an open office workplace is often a place with too much noise to get any work done. It was noted that in some offices, employees booked meeting rooms for themselves in order to work in peace. Perhaps it’s time to flip the office, I suggested.
The shift from consuming broadcast media to creating interactive media may be engaging a new generation in a new way. Just think of all the hours that used to be spent watching TV can now be used to generate ideas – some good and many bad – but they are being generated on an enormous scale. Just look at YouTube. This is what Clay Shirky calls the cognitive surplus.
Now take this idea one step further and think of all the time wasted in the typical workplace just consuming – listening at meetings; reading directives, waiting for someone to make a decision; commuting; etc. Imagine what could happen if an entire organization decides to tap into its collective cognitive surplus. Very soon, the organization may have no choice.
Domino’s Pizza, a global quick-service restaurant company, understands that workers must be active and engaged in their own learning and development. As described in Introducing PKM to a Corporate Audience, Domino’s learned that “PKM makes learning a real-time activity within the flow of work” but also that “the company needs to clarify what people are allowed and expected to do in terms of learning during the workday.” In addition, information services, and IT security need to be consulted. The job of L&D is to familiarize busy professionals with new tools and realistic examples of how to use PKM at work.
Domino’s focused on helping people in leadership roles to develop PKM practices. This is a good approach as it improves the chances of spreading these habits throughout the enterprise. While the Seek > Sense > Share framework may be simple, it takes time and practice to become a habit. A pragmatic approach for some companies would be to support workers who are already practicing some aspect of PKM. Two identifiable groups are Connectors and Experts.
Connectors are people with many relationships who find it easy to talk to people. The challenge for the organization is to use these skills to improve knowledge-sharing. Connectors can be identified through observation, interviews, or social network analysis. To become knowledge catalysts, connectors need to have good curation skills. They have to know how to add value to knowledge and discern when, where, and with whom to share.
Experts have deep knowledge on a subject but many lack the skills to synthesize what they know in order to share it with a broader audience. It is critical that experts share their knowledge so the organization can make better decisions. This is a leadership responsibility that companies like Domino’s understand. Expertise in a closed room is of little use in a connected enterprise. Experts need to develop skills in working out loud and other sense-making practices. Connectors can help them but first there has to be something to share. Getting experts to share in a meaningful way can take time but first it requires a supportive environment and some basic skills.
If an organization wants to get meaningful results by adopting PKM practices, but does not see how this can be implemented throughout the organization, then an initial pilot should identify two groups: Connectors and Experts. Help these people improve their PKM skills. Get Connectors to add value and be more discerning. Get Experts to simplify in order to share. It will take time and practice but the benefits will be an organization that can use more of its knowledge to make better decisions. More Catalysts in the enterprise may also significantly improve innovation because innovation is inextricably linked to both networks and learning.
Ed Morrison, Advisor for the Purdue Center for Regional Development, says that many of the familiar approaches to management no longer apply, and goes on to provide 7 keys to guiding an open network. I have added my images that support this excellent set of rules.
Click on each image for a link to the supporting article.
Rule 1: Form a core team with distributed leadership roles
Rule 2: To accelerate, go slowly at first [AKA: Probe-Sense-Respond]
Rule 3: Find opportunities by linking and leveraging assets
Rule 4: Create coherence with visualizations and outcomes with success metrics
Rule 5: Adopt simple rules to design and implement strategy
Rule 6: Promote transparency, mutual accountability and success metrics
Last week I spent several hours each day, for four consecutive days, trying to share complex knowledge. I had my understanding of communities of practice, personal knowledge management, leadership, and innovation that I wanted to share. My friend and colleague Christian Renard had his knowledge about marketing, business, and digital power to share. From the time I was picked up at the Gare du Nord we began to share our knowledge through many conversations. But it was not easy, simple, or direct.
Gare du Nord and Metropolitain Entry, Paris Source: User: ‘Jorgeroyan’, Creative Commons A-SA 3.0, wikimedia.org
What proved helpful in our coming to a common understanding was that we both practice a form of personal knowledge management. Each of us has written articles, and more importantly, created images to describe many concepts. These visual metaphors accelerated our knowledge sharing.
Sharing information and viewing it through our individual filters is the best that we can hope for in terms of knowledge transfer. It is a very inexact process. Christian and I shared many stories over the four days and these too helped us come to some common understanding. Most importantly, we trusted each other and did not judge. We were both on similar journeys of understanding and were not trying to sell our ideas.
I was reminded once again of how much time it takes to share complex (implicit) knowledge. Four days, some long car rides, a few meetings with others, and several wonderful meals later, I think we came to a joint understanding of certain concepts. In the hurried pace of many businesses today, this would have been nearly impossible. If most organizations have a real need to share knowledge, which I believe they do, then they have to make time and space available for deep conversations. This may be one of the greatest challenges for organizational redesign as we enter a creative economy.
The aim of knowledge-sharing in an organization is to help make implicit knowledge more explicit. It’s important to understand that each of us only has an approximation of knowledge in our understanding. Knowledge should be seen as a fluid, not a solid. The cumulative pieces of information, or knowledge artifacts, that we create and share can help us have better conversations and gain some shared understanding. Our individual sense-making can be shared and from it can emerge better organizational knowledge. For organizations to share knowledge, even organizations of just two people, individuals have to have the bits necessary to put together. Knowledge is like electricity, with many small particles that enable flow. PKM helps to create the bits that will enable the conversational flow.
To really share complex knowledge takes a willingness to listen as well as the time and space to do so. Jon Husband’s definition of wirearchy is an excellent framework for organizations to start with:
Wirearchy – “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.”
While speaking at the Learning Technologies conference in London, I went downstairs to see the trade show. The exhibition hall had hundreds of booths and I was told that 12,000 people had signed up. When I arrived, it looked like all 12,000 were there. I quickly got a feeling of sensory overload and tried to filter the signal from the noise, but could not.
Then I came alongside the Reed Learning booth and saw a series of booklets in racks on the exterior posts. They immediately caught my eye and I took one. This is significant, because I try very hard to leave any trade show with nothing physical in my hands. I hate carrying extra paper products that usually get thrown out, but I really liked the look and feel of this one so I put it in my bag and returned to the much quieter conference floor.
The next day I showed the little book of inspiration to Jane Hart, who also thought it was quite attractive. As we thumbed through it, we realized that we each had written articles for the book, but I had completely forgotten about it. The best part of the book, in my opinion, is how each article has its own artwork and typography. Everyone to whom I have shown the book likes it.
It’s always good to remember that old technologies can still serve an important function in our digital world. Paper products can provide a tangible connection to our words that is not available online. By the way, I got 10 copies, in exchange for a copy of The Social Learning Handbook ;)
Engaged for Work – The Little Book of Inspiration – by Reed Learning
Here is the link to the online version of my article: Engaged for Work
The Little Book of Inspiration is available as a PDF from Reed Learning
Simple standards facilitated with a light touch, enables knowledge workers to capture, interpret, and share their knowledge.
Personal knowledge mastery is a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world and work more effectively. But what we loosely call knowledge, using terms like knowledge-sharing or knowledge capture, is just an approximation. We are not very good at articulating our knowledge, says knowledge management expert Dave Snowden: “We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down.”
Becoming knowledgeable can be thought of as bits of knowledge partially shared and experienced over time. It is laborious, hence the reason masters through the ages could only have a limited number of apprentices. But when writing, and later books, came along, we had a new technology that could more widely distribute information created by the wise, and the not so wise. Whether being mentored by a master or reading a book, knowledge does not actually get transferred, but shared observations and information can be helpful to those who have a desire to learn.
Merely being well-read is not enough to be knowledgeable, as possibly first noted by Socrates. Plato wrote in Phaedrus that Socrates felt the written language would result in ‘men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, who will be a burden to their fellows’. Socrates saw a core truth in learning from artefacts like books. We cannot become complacent with knowledge and just store it away. It has a shelf life and needs to be used, tested, and experienced. It should be shared amongst people who understand that they are only seeing a fragment of each others’ knowledge. Because it is so difficult to represent our knowledge to others, we have to make every effort to continuously share it. Once is not enough, as most parents know. Knowledge shared in flows over time can help us create better mental pictures than a single piece of knowledge stock, like a book.
The Seek, Sense, Share Framework
Capturing knowledge, as crudely as we do, is just a first step. Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM) is a framework for individuals to take control of their professional development through a continuous process of seeking, sensing-making, and sharing.
Seeking is finding things out and keeping up to date. Building a network of colleagues is helpful in this regard. It not only allows us to “pull” information, but also have it “pushed” to us by trusted sources. Good curators are valued members of knowledge networks.
Sensing is how we personalize information and use it. Sensing includes reflection and putting into practice what we have learned. Often it requires experimentation, as we learn best by doing.
Sharing includes exchanging resources, ideas, and experiences with our networks as well as collaborating with our colleagues.
The multiple pieces of information that we capture and share can increase the frequency of serendipitous connections, especially across organizations and disciplines where real innovation happens. As Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From says; “chance favors the connected mind“.
Work is learning and learning is the work
PKM may be an individual activity but it is social as well. It is the process by which we can connect what we learn outside the organization with what need to do inside. Research shows that work teams that need to share complex knowledge need tighter social bonds. Work teams often share a unique language or vocabulary. However, they can become myopic and may lack a diversity of opinions. Social networks, on the other hand, encourage diversity and can sow the seeds of innovation. But it is almost impossible to get work done in social networks due to their lack of structure. PKM is the active process of connecting the innovative ideas that can arise in our social networks with the deadline-driven work inside organizations.
In addition to seeking, sensing and sharing, we need to become adept at filtering information as well as discerning when and with whom to share. Like any skill, these require practice and feedback. Much of this can be provided in communities of practice, a half-way space between work teams and social networks, where trusted relationships can form that enable people to share more openly.
Connecting social networks, communities of practice and work teams, is an important framework for integrating learning and working in the network era. We seek new ideas from our social networks and then filter them through more focused conversations with our communities of practice, where we have trusted relationships. We make sense of these embryonic ideas by doing new things, either ourselves, or with our work teams. We later share our creations, first with our teams and perhaps later with our communities of practice or even our networks. We use our understanding of our communities and networks to discern with whom and when to share our knowledge.
Working Out Loud
Narrating one’s work does not get knowledge transferred, but it provides a better medium to gain more understanding. Working out loud is a concept that is very easy to understand, but not quite so easy to do. Most people are too busy managing in their information age workplaces and have little spare time to try to learn how to work in the network age. The most important step in learning a new skill is the first one. This same step has to be repeated many times before it becomes a habit. I have learned that the first step of starting to work out loud, as part of personal knowledge mastery, has to be as simple as possible.
For example, being able to share is usually not a prime reason why people start using web information capture tools like social bookmarks but it becomes more important over time. Coupled with feed readers (e.g. feedly.com) aggregation makes information flows much easier to deal with. Then you have to connect with people.
So how do you get started micro-blogging on a platform like Twitter? I suggest beginning with an aim in mind, such as professional development or staying current in a specific field. The search function can help find people who post about a specific topics. To start, you should follow between 20 and 30 interesting people. Once set up, beginners should dip into their stream once or twice a day and read through any posts of interest. Over time, as they follow links, they may add or delete feeds. Within a week or two, anyone should be able to sense some patterns and then modify their streams to provide more signal and less noise.
Sometimes we get all caught up in the latest social media tools. Getting started working out loud is not complicated and should not involve a steep learning curve on a complicated system. It is best to start with simple tools and frameworks.
Small pieces, loosely joined
The mainstream application of knowledge management and learning management over the past few decades is mostly wrong; we over-managed information, knowledge and learning because it was easy. Our organizations remain enamoured with the next wave of enterprise software systems. But the ubiquity of information outside the organization is showing the weakness of centralized enterprise systems. As organizations begin to understand the Web, the principle of ‘small pieces loosely joined’ is permeating some thick industrial age walls. More workers have their own sources of information and knowledge, often on mobile devices, but they often lack the means or internal support to connect their knowledge with others to actually get work done. Supporting PKM, especially internal sharing, can help information flow more freely.
A personal knowledge mastery framework helps knowledge workers capture and make sense of their knowledge. Simple standards can facilitate this sharing. Knowledge bases and traditional KM systems should focus on essential information, and what is necessary for inexperienced workers. Experienced workers should not be constrained by too much structure, but be given the flexibility to contribute how and where they think best helps the organization.
We know that formal instruction accounts for less than 10% of workplace learning. The same rule of thumb should apply to knowledge management. Capture and codify the 10% that is essential, especially for new employees. Now use the same principle to get work done. Structure the essential 10% and leave the rest unstructured, but networked, so that workers can group as needed to get work done. Many organizations are too slow and hierarchical to be useful for knowledge-sharing in the network era. Organizations structured around looser hierarchies and stronger networks are much more effective for increasingly complex work.
Working Out Loud