Riding the Current by Finding the Right Crew

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In Riding the Current: How to deal with the daily deluge of data, Madelyn Blair provides an excellent manual for knowledge workers, managers, and executives. The advice and insight in this book is the closest that I have seen that aligns with my PKM Seek > Sense > Share framework. There is a lot in the book, which is filled with anecdotes, concepts, frameworks, and exercises. It covers both knowledge seeking from a formal and an informal perspective, and I would recommend it for any organization.

Madelyn, who sent me the book after we had a few of conversations over the past couple of months, uses a journey metaphor of Setting Out; Selecting the Vessel; Finding the Right Crew; Stocking Supplies; Equipping for the Dive; Deciding to Dive Deep; and Taking Charge. In Finding the Right Crew, there are three key roles:

Accompanier: Facilitates accomplishment of the task by providing information and/or contacts.

Practice Partner: Creates a learning environment of conversation, listening, and questioning, all with an appreciative attitude.

Fellow Seeker: Is a seeker just like the primary seeker, willing to engage in conversation and think critically and appreciatively.

Finding people to fill these roles can greatly assist our own sense-making. We should find Accompaniers who are more knowledgeable or experienced than we are in our journey. They are like mavens. A practice partner can connect us to the work to be done and help keep us focused. They understand our work or life context. Fellow seekers are the most open to our sharing and are often not judgemental as they are trying to make sense themselves.

PKM Finding the Right CrewHere is what Madelyn has found that others have said about finding the right crew:

  • Seek out those who are expert in your areas of need or simply practice in them
  • Seek out and join new communities of practice
  • Create a community of practice
  • Attend conferences and listen carefully
  • Keep looking for ideas, not just perfecting skills
  • Call in peers to assist you in the next challenge
  • Make it a habit to regularly ask the question, “What am I assuming about this?”
  • Find a ‘thinking partner’ and learn together how to be each other’s thinking partner – Nancy Kline: Time to Think

I would highly recommend this book if you are in any way interested in personal knowledge management.

PKM Roles

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I like to frame personal knowledge management as a combination of seeking knowledge, making sense of it, and sharing it with others. This simple model has worked well in explaining the main concepts of PKM and helping others to individually construct a set of processes to make sense of the world and work more effectively. Two key factors are sense-making and sharing, which I have shown on the image below.

PKM quadrantsWhile the upper right quadrant is where we might think we should put our efforts, it stands to reason that not all of us can work there for all the facets of our lives. Sometimes we are merely seeking something very quickly, at other times we may share without much thought, and there are times we want to keep our sense-making private, as we mull over new ideas. We are also limited to the amount of time we have to put a lot of thought into everything we do. Sometimes it is best to leave that to others.

Over 10 years ago Patrick Lambe wrote a very good guide on the various roles one can have in PKM.

Most people treat PKM as if it’s a full suite of skills that everybody now needs to have: skills like identifying sources of knowledge, searching, navigating, analyzing, organizing, linking, mapping, converting back and forth between tacit (head) knowledge and explicit (written down) knowledge, relationship building skills, communication, presentation, knowledge packaging, and so on. But in fact, like most things, different people have different personality types, and different personality profiles in relation to their personal knowledge affinities and capabilities. – PKM: A DIY Guide to Knowledge Management

Lambe identified six roles: Consumers, Communicators, Collectors, Connectors, Critics, and Creators. I have taken these and placed them on the same sharing & sense-making quadrant I used above. If you read the DIY guide, there are a series of questions to help identify your own tendencies in PKM. This is a good guide for work groups to find out how knowledge is co-created and shared. An effective team would have people engaged in all roles and provide some load-sharing for creation and criticism, both of which take significant effort. You could look at PKM by area of specialization as well, having a few people responsible as Creators, while others are nominated Critics. Those not as knowledgeable in a field can still play a role as a Connector, Collector, or Communicator.

PKM 6CAnother way to look at these roles is as an individual. When researching a field of practice, you could identify not just the Creators but also the good Critics. Critics can provide balance, something that TED Talks could learn from. The role of critic can even be formalized in an organization, as the US Army has done at its “Red Team University”.

The school is the hub of an effort to train professional military “devil’s advocates” — field operatives who bring critical thinking to the battlefield and help commanding officers avoid the perils of overconfidence, strategic brittleness, and groupthink. The goal is to respectfully help leaders in complex situations unearth untested assumptions, consider alternative interpretations and “think like the other” without sapping unit cohesion or morale, and while retaining their values.

More than 300 of these professional skeptics have since graduated from the program, and have fanned out through the Army’s ranks. Their effects have been transformational — not only shaping a broad array of decisions and tactics, but also spreading a form of cultural change appropriate for both the institution and the complex times in which it now both fights and keeps the peace.
– Andrew Zolli: HBR 26 Sept 2012

Connectors are also quite helpful. You may want to differentiate them from the mere Communicators, who do not add much value to what they share. However, finding Collectors can also be useful, as they may have information few others do. Of course, they’re harder to find because they don’t share.

PKM creator criticThe roles of Creator and Critic are the most important in sense-making, but there is valuable work for others in disseminating information. So what roles do you engage in? Do you know how to find knowledgeable people in a field? If you are working with others, what role can you play in your group or network? Is everyone conscious of the sense-making and knowledge-sharing activities and practices in the network? If not, how can you identify any gaps in the knowledge flows? Perhaps these frameworks can help.

A few points of view

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Friday’s Finds:

friday2“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.” – Marshall McLuhan – via @gcouros

“Information is shared within the murder so that group decisions can be made” Crow Brains Reveal Secrets of Their Intelligence

“political equality that is required by democracy is always under threat from economic inequality” Cardiff de Alejo Garcia – via @toughloveforx

If democracy becomes plutocracy, those who are not rich are effectively disenfranchised. Justice Louis Brandeis famously argued that the United States could have either democracy or wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but not both. The political equality that is required by democracy is always under threat from economic inequality, and the more extreme the economic inequality, the greater the threat to democracy. – Angus Deaton

@euan – Why blogging still matters in business – and always will.

It’s not about marketing, or SEO, or “going viral”. It is not about internal “enterprise social” or external “social media” It is not even about the platforms or tools on which you choose to write. It is much simpler and much more powerful. It is about developing our awareness, our communication skills, and our collective intelligence. It is about thinking harder and writing better. Blogging is a means by which to rediscover your voice, to learn to share your thoughts with others, and by doing so to help us all get smarter faster.

PEW: Social era challenges: trust, focus, coordination, loyalty, managing complexity; institutional memory.

The new social operating system is affecting the world of work as well. It’s not about being in one small bounded group in a hierarchy. Many people are now doing simultaneous work on multiple projects,  in multiple, distributed teams and with multiple “bosses” and heavily reliant on technology for communication and coordination. Rainie characterized this as moving from a traditional ‘fishbowl’ of shopfloor or cubicle cities to a networked switchboard model – where the individual is the orchestrator of things.

The Leadership Paradox – Leadership is … an activity or behavior that can arise anywhere in a human system.

The overall conclusion of this research was that the leaders of successful organisations did play a key role in radical transformations of those organisations, but not by specifying it or directing it but by creating the conditions which allowed for the emergence of such change.

Understanding complexity

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As I have suggested, it was the most-regulated in the financial system that were in fact the most disaster-prone: big banks on both sides of the Atlantic, not hedge funds. It is more than a little convenient for America’s political class to have the crisis blamed on deregulation and the resulting excesses of bankers. Not only does that neatly pass the buck it also creates a justification for more regulation. But the old Latin question is apposite here: quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who regulates the regulators? – Niall Ferguson: The Great Degeneration

Thinking of complex adaptive systems as merely complicated entities that can be regulated like machines can lead to disaster, as Niall Ferguson shows in his recent book. He cites the USA’s Dodd-Frank Act which is aimed at promoting stability in the financial sector but “requires that regulators create 243 rules, conduct 67 studies and issue 22 periodic reports“. Simple principles, such as transparency, would work much better in the complex, and emotion-driven, world of finance. After all, money is a common human fiction that requires us to believe in it. Human systems are complex.

As organizations get larger, their original simplicity gets harder to maintain. Organizations reach their maximum cohesiveness above 150 people, based on anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s research. Beyond this size, knowing everybody in person becomes impossible. Intermediate layers of power and delegation begin to develop with more than 150 people and companies then enter the realm of complication.

Most of today’s larger organizations have a complicated structure. To enable growth and efficiencies, more processes are put in place, just like the financial regulators have done. This is what management schools have been teaching for over half a century. New layers of control and supervision appear, silos are created, and knowledge acquisition is formalized in an attempt to gain efficiency through specialization. To compensate for all of these rules, organizations put significant effort into compliance training. But this too is a myth, as some of the best trained people have been involved in disasters like the BP oil spill and the Enron collapse.

Today’s large, complicated organizations are now facing complex business environments that require agility in simultaneously learning and working. Typical strategies of optimizing existing business processes or cost reductions only marginally improve the organization’s effectiveness. Faster evolving markets challenge the organization’s ability to react to customer demand. Decision-making becomes paralyzed by process-based operations and chains of command and control; thereby decreasing agility. Training, as “the” solution to workplace learning needs, fails to deliver and then gets marginalized, often being the first department to have its budget cut.

Organizations, public and private, need to understand complexity, instead of simply increasing complication through rules, regulations, and control processes. This lack of understanding is the major barrier to success in the network era. As the image below by Yaneer Bar-Yam shows, a networked civilization requires 1) more laterally connected organizations, 2) fewer hierarchies, and 3) more diversity.

historical progressionA schematic history of human civilization reflects a growing complexity of the collective behavior of human organizations. The internal structure of organizations changed from the large branching ratio hierarchies of ancient civilizations, through decreasing branching ratios of massive hierarchical bureaucracies, to hybrid systems where lateral connections appear to be more important than the hierarchy. As the importance of lateral interactions increases, the boundaries between subsystems become porous. The increasing collective complexity also is manifest in the increasing specialization and diversity of professions. Among the possible future organizational structures are fully networked systems where hierarchical structures are unimportant. – Y. Bar-Yam, Complexity rising: From human beings to human civilization, a complexity profile, EOLSS UNESCO 2002

Dave Pollard has a very clear post on how to address complexity from an organizational perspective. He also elaborates on 16 attributes of effective ways to address complex problems. It’s a list worth keeping handy.

As we come to understand complex predicaments better, we’re learning that the best approaches to them are very different from what works best for simple or complicated problems. Because all the variables cannot be known, and because cause-and-effect relationships cannot be established in complex situations, analytical approaches (like systems flowcharts) used in complicated problem-solving simply won’t work.

The best approaches in complex situations are, well, complex. They entail the use of many different techniques, some of which we are not very good at, and some of which are quite sophisticated, novel, or nuanced. – Dave Pollard, Complexity: It’s not that simple

Once we understand that we are dealing with complexity, and that many of our analytical approaches and control processes are not optimal, then we will be able to build structures for the network era. Over-engineering for complex social work environments is counterproductive. Here is an example from our past, that could work in our future.

In the Six Nations culture, power was distributed but the roles were clear. There were specific roles for each of the member tribes, namely Wolves (Pathfinders); Turtles (Problem Formulators); Bears (Problem Solvers). According to the book Systems Thinking: Managing Complexity and Chaos, solving problems and making governance decisions went like this:

  1. Wolves – Set direction, and identified relevant issues
  2. Turtles – Defined the problems
  3. Bears – Generated alternatives and recommended solutions
  4. Turtles – Checked on the potency of the recommended solutions
  5. Wolves – Integrated the solutions, kept the records, communicated the decisions

What is interesting is that there were clear checks and balances to the dominant wolves, as only the turtles could define the problem, and it was up to the bears to recommend solutions. The wolves could only take action on those problems, with a finite set of solutions. It was simple, but it ensured 1) increased lateral connections, 2) limited hierarchies, and 3) increased diversity of ideas.

Connected leadership is helping the network make better decisions

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Organizations face more complexity in the type of work they do, the problems they face, and the markets they interact with. This is due to increasing connections between everyone and everything. To deal with this complexity, organizations must structure around loose hierarchies and strong networks. This challenges command and control management as well as the concept that those in leadership positions are special. It makes the concept of High Potential [HiPo] employees seem rather old-fashioned. Leadership in networks is an emergent property.

In networks, everyone is a contributor within a transparent environment. Effective networks are also diverse and open. Anyone can lead in a network, if there are willing followers. Those who have consensus to lead have to actively listen and make sense of what is happening. They are in service to the network, to help keep it resilient through transparency, diversity of ideas, and openness. Servant leaders help to set the context around them and build consensus around emergent practices.

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preempting automation

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There is a lot of talk in the mainstream media about the increasing automation of work and jobs. I have discussed automation and outsourcing here for several years and it’s fairly obvious that standardized work will keep getting automated, by software or robots. Addressing this technology-driven shift should be a high priority for everyone, from unions, to governments, and human resource professionals. As we move into a post-job economy, society needs to restructure how work gets done and how it is compensated. While this is a macro issue, there are some things that can be done within the enterprise right now. Companies that implement these changes could be in a much better position as the creative economy rises to dominate agricultural, manufacturing, and information economies.

I have written that the future of management is talent development, but what does this mean on a day to day basis? One small change, that could have a major impact, would be to look at everyone’s work from the perspective of standardized versus customized work. Every person in the company, with the help of some data and peer feedback, should be able to determine what percentage of their time is spent on standardized work. If the percentage is over a certain threshold, say 50%, then it becomes a management task to change that person’s job and add more customized work. The company should be constantly looking at ways to automate any standardized work, in order to stay ahead of technology, the market, and the competition. Automation is pretty well inevitable but it does not have to decimate the workforce.

Looking at the overall company balance between standardized and customized work should be an indicator of its potential to succeed. By visualizing the Labour/Talent split, people in the company can take action and make plans before the inevitable shift. This of course means that jobs and roles have to become more flexible and open to change. But this is a post-job economy we are moving toward. We cannot stay tied to the concept of the job as the primary way to work.

Building ways to constantly change roles will be one way to get rid of the standardized job, which has no place in a creative economy. This one small change could have a major impact on any organization. It just requires a slightly new way of looking at work, collecting good data, engaging workers in the process, and being transparent about it all. Most of all, it requires companies and managers who really care about talent development.

The reality that treating workers like Talent, not replaceable and low cost Labour, can actually increase revenue is starting to make an impact, even where it is not quite so obvious – the retail sector. Getting staff to focus on customized work, or dealing with each unique customer need, pays dividends in the long term.

“A better-paid, better-trained worker, she argues, will be more eager to help customers; they’ll also be more eager to help their store sell to them. The success of Costco, Trader Joe’s, QuikTrip and Mercadona, Spain’s biggest supermarket chain, indicate, she argues, that well-paid, knowledgeable workers are not an indulgence often found in luxury boutiques with their high markups. At each of the aforementioned companies, workers are paid more than at their competitors; they are also amply staffed per shift. More employees can ask customers questions about what they want to see more of and what they don’t like, and then they are empowered to change displays or order different stock to appeal to local tastes.” —NYT: Thinking Outside the (Big) Box

Working Socially

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Why should I, as an OD/HR/L&D professional, concerned with the human aspects of organizations, have to understand social media and enterprise social networks?

Saying we don’t need to understand social media is like saying we didn’t need to understand speaking, reading or writing to do our jobs before. With ubiquitous connectivity, more of our work is at a distance, either in space or time. Distributed work is becoming the norm. If we are going to support people doing this kind of work, we need to understand it. However, working in online social networks takes practice to be proficient. It is difficult to understand theoretically. For example, even though I had worked online for over a decade, I did not really understand Twitter until I started using it regularly in 2008.

One fundamental difference about social media is they have a strong influence on the user, very much in a McLuhanesque medium/message/massage way. Those who come to social media for the first time are like adults learning a new language. They cannot start with the same advanced mental models and metaphors that they have in their primary language. The image below shows the effects of enterprise social networks, from a McLuhan tetradic perspective.

tetrad ESNSocial media change the way we communicate and social media can change the way we think. We need to use the tools in order to understand what it’s like to be a node in a social network. There is almost nothing like it in the industrial workplace or school system to prepare us for this. Therefore we won’t know what we’re talking about until we learn the new language of online networks. The only way to learn a new language is through practice.

How do you start the discussion about social networks with senior managers who think of technology as just different products and platforms?

Work today has few time or geographical boundaries. As our water coolers become virtual, social relations online will be the glue that connects us in our increasingly distributed work. Every little tweet, blog post, comment or “like” online shares our individuality and humanity. These actions help us be known to others in the digital surround. They help us build trust to get things done, be productive and innovate. However, we cannot benefit from professional social networks unless we engage in them. This requires more than merely mastering the technology. It means being social in our work. Not using social media to connect, contribute and collaborate is like sitting in a closed office all day.

To stay engaged with interconnected markets, business has to get more social. Social learning, a major activity on social media, is how we get things done in networks.  Most organizational value is created by teams and networks, not individuals working alone. Organizational learning spreads through social networks. Therefore, social networks are the conduit for effective organizational performance.

Blocking, or circumventing, social networks slows learning, reduces effectiveness and may in the end kill the organization. Senior managers need to understand social media in order to support learning in social networks which will enable practitioners to produce results.

Does being social at work mean being highly connected?

Does social mean highly connective? It’s much more than that. Social means human. It is an understanding that relationships and networks are complex. Our industrial management models are based on a belief that our structures are merely complicated, but more of our work is dealing with complex problems, for which there is no standardized approach.

Social bonds keep us together. Much of it is about trust. If I trust you, I might ask you for advice, so trust is essential for collaboration. We lose it if we try to micro-manage knowledge work. The argument that ‘business is business and social is social’ makes little sense today. Business is social because it involves people. Business must be more social the more complex the work and the greater the need for collaboration and cooperation. We foster innovation through social interactions. The idea that a lone person working in a lab can come up with a brilliant idea is largely unfounded. Connections between people drive innovation.

“Connecting ideas is the core of innovation, but without connecting ideas to people, there is no innovation at all. – Tim Kastelle

What kind of changes are needed in the way we organize work?

We need to understand complex adaptive systems and develop work structures that let us focus our efforts on learning as we work in order to continuously develop next practices. The role of leadership becomes supportive rather than directive in this new knowledge-intensive and creative workplace. Artificial boundaries that limit collaboration and communication only serve to drag companies down and create opportunities for more agile competitors.

Most managers would agree that an increasing amount of work and effort is in exception-handling. Social networks are an excellent framework to deal with these, as they enable people to crowd-source problem solving and speed the flow of knowledge.

What does exception handling mean for companies and employees? A practical definition is the time that employees – both management and front line workers – spend managing the non-routine tasks that must be addressed even though they occur outside the realm of standard daily business operations. It’s the things that just come up and disrupt someone’s workflow, requiring special time and attention. – Tim Young: Socialcast blog

To understand social networks, it is best to be able to see them. Visualization, like value network analysis, enables people to see the workplace with new eyes. This in turn can lead to diverse ideas and innovative approaches. Visualizing network relationships can give the initial leverage of getting complex new ideas accepted into general management thinking. Visualization is the fulcrum to widespread understanding of social connections in business.

Finally, it’s rather obvious that many HR policies imply that people cannot be trusted. Almost all IT policies say that. But it’s an interconnected world. Everything is transparent, whether we want it to be or not. Once management realizes that their company is a glass house, they will have to start working differently.

Note: This post is a synthesis and update of several conversations I posted as Organizational Development Talk, in 2011.

The network era transition

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I concluded in my last post that organizations will need to adapt to the network era. Another possibility is that hierarchical organizations, like most companies, will not be able to adapt to the network era. As with the assembly line, the view of the company as an organization chart may become a relic of the past. org chart

In the very near future it is quite possible that most of us will be working in knowledge networks, whether we are farmers or software engineers. A knowledge network in balance is founded on openness which enables transparency. This in turn fosters a diversity of ideas, and can promotes innovation. The emergent property of all of these exchanges is trust.

The network era may revert the role of the organization to merely a supporting one. We might even see corporations bidding for the privilege of supporting knowledge networks. I see evidence of this new approach to work at Change Agents Worldwide, which is firmly based on transparency and trust amongst its current 33 members.

As more people work in distributed networks they may realize how little they have to gain from traditional organizations. Networks that foster autonomy as well as interdependence are a much better vehicle for rewarding work than hierarchical organizations can ever be. Hierarchies, driven by external and formal direction, cannot compete with connected workers working in trusted networks, for they are intrinsically motivated.

In networks, cooperation trumps collaboration. Collaboration happens around some kind of plan or structure, while cooperation presumes the freedom of individuals to join and participate. Cooperation is a driver of creativity. Cooperation is also driven by intrinsic motivation.

No person, no matter where in an organizational hierarchy, has all the knowledge needed to thrive in the network era. Neither does any company. Neither does any government. We are all connected and dependent on each other. Hierarchies divide us.

Managing professional relationships as a network allows each node (person) to be unique. This removes the artificial barrier of the job, which assumes that people are replaceable, and that knowledge flows up and down. Knowledge in a network is about connecting experiences, relationships, and situations.

The latest example of this organizational shift is Zappos, the online shoe company, that is going “holocratic”(R).

“We’re classically trained to think of ‘work’ in the traditional paradigm,” says John Bunch, who, along with Alexis Gonzales-Black, is leading the transition to Holacracy at Zappos. “One of the core principles is people taking personal accountability for their work. It’s not leaderless. There are certainly people who hold a bigger scope of purpose for the organization than others. What it does do is distribute leadership into each role. Everybody is expected to lead and be an entrepreneur in their own roles, and Holacracy empowers them to do so.” – Quartz: Zappos is going Holocratic

“The future has arrived — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”– William Gibson

Talking about the Network Era

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Interesting things happen when hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, as the writers of the Cluetrain Manifesto said in 1999. Wikileaks, Edward Snowden, Arab Spring, and the Occupy Movement are just a few recent examples. Spying on entire populations is another network era phenomenon. In education, the current subversion is the MOOC, which has already itself been subverted by corporate interests. In the labour movement we are seeing things like alt-labour as well as a growing shareable economy. Networked, distributed businesses, like AirBNB, are disrupting existing models, with the inevitable push-back as they become successful.

Networks will transform education, business, the economy, and society even further. In the network era, the creative economy will gain dominance over the information and industrial economies. Professional knowledge distribution will move away from institutionalized business schools into networked communities of practice.

The key to a flourishing society in the network era will be distributed sense-making. Self-instruction, the basis of personal knowledge mastery, will be a requirement in a growing number of peer-to-peer networks. Networked learning will give rise to networked decision making. David Ronfeldt articulates this well, with his TIMN [Tribes-Institutions-Markets-Networks] framework. Anyone raised during the past several decades probably understands tribes and institutions and even market forces. This is a triform society (T+I+M). But what happens as we become a quadriform society (T+I+M+N)?

TIMN has long maintained that, beyond today’s common claims that government or market is the solution, we are entering a new era in which it will be said that the network is the solution (e.g., here and here). Aging contentions that turning to “the government” or “the market” is the way to address particular public-policy issues will eventually give way to innovative ideas that “the network” is the optimal solution.

In the network era we have to understand how to become contributing members of networks, for work and for life. This should be a major focus for all professional training and education.

“Reed’s Law” posits that value in networks increases exponentially as interactions move from a broadcasting model that offers “best content” (in which value is described by n, the number of consumers) to a network of peer-to-peer transactions (where the network’s value is based on “most members” and mathematically described by n2).  But by far the most valuable networks are based on those that facilitate group affiliations, Reed concluded. – David Bollier

Without good sense-making skills, the citizenry cannot understand complex issues that affect us all, such as individual privacy versus national security. These issues require networked, human intelligence, not broadcast sound bites, nor ‘learning objects’.

Sensemaking should drive policy. Policy drives decisions. Decisions, of course, need to be informed. If the People don’t know what makes their world go ‘round, the folks on the Hill sure won’t. Globalized governments can’t. – Gunther Sonnenfeld

As David Bollier concludes, “Legitimate authority is ultimately vested in a community’s ongoing, evolving social life, and not in ritualistic forms of citizenship.” Should not education move beyond ritualistic forms of subjects, classes, and certifications and toward ongoing, evolving social learning? How else will we be able to deal with the complexities of this networked, connected sphere that we inhabit?

Jon Husband says that we are all in this together.

The interconnected Information Age is beginning to show us that we’re all linked together – and that the whole system matters.

This principle applies to organizations, to networks of customers, suppliers, employees and communities, to our societies and to the planet.

New language for this principle is popping up everywhere – knowledge networks, intranets, communities of practice, systems thinking, swarming, social software, social networks, tipping points.

Awareness is the key.  Maintain an “open focus”.

Being aware of yourself, others and the effects of your actions and ways of being in relation to others is a fundamental requirement in these conditions.

To thrive in the network era we need to understand networks – social networks, value networks, information networks, etc. Therefore we will need network era fluency.

network era fluencyNetwork era fluency could be described as individuals and communities understanding and being part of global networks that influence various aspects of our lives. For individuals, the core skill will be critical thinking, or questioning all assumptions, including one’s own. People will learn though their various communities and in doing so, develop social literacy. Information literacy will be developed by connecting to many networks. Diversity of our knowledge networks can foster innovation and improve our collective ability to adapt.

Mass network era fluency will keep our knowledge networks social, diverse, and reflect many communities. This kind of fluency, by the majority of people, will be necessary to deal with the many complex issues facing humanity. We cannot address complex issues and networked forces unless we can knowledgeably discuss them. To understand the network era, we need first to be able to talk about it.

The network era has already changed politics, created new dominant business models, opened up learning, and is now changing how organizations operate – on the inside. Once we are able to talk about networks, we will see that many of our current work practices are rather obsolete. From how we determine the value of work, to how we calculate pay for work; organizations will need to adapt to the network era.

I think business leaders and HR departments do not understand this shift, or the fact that this shift is accelerating, so that in a year or two 75% of peoples’ value will be based on their network performance, their ability to contribute to and accept from others. – Stowe Boyd

Best of Friday’s Finds 2013

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Every second Friday I review what I’ve noted on various social media platforms and post a wrap-up of what caught my eye. I do this as a reflective thinking process and also in order to take some of what I’ve learned and put it on a platform where I control the data. These are my Friday’s Finds.

Here are some of the best finds I made in 2013, on the topics of creativity, complexity, hierarchy, innovation, leadership, learning, models, networks, organizations, work, and the workplace.

Creativity

@TimKastelle – What is the Best Organisational Structure for Creativity?

So why doesn’t everyone organise their company in this way? [like W.L. Gore & Associates] There are a few reasons. One is that it’s hard. It is a lot easier to put up some inspirational posters on the subject of creativity, and hope that works. But it won’t. Restructuring a company to reflect the fact that everyone there has creative skills takes a lot of work. Gore has been built this way from Day 1.

The second reason is that many people still don’t believe that everyone can be creative. The Breed Myth is powerful, and widespread. If you believe it, then you hire special people and put them in special rooms. If you don’t, you have to figure out how to put everyone in your firm into a position to be creative.

Complexity

How Complex Systems Fail [PDF] Complexity, swiss cheese and failure. The classic 1998 article by Richard Cook – via @commutiny

Complex systems contain changing mixtures of failures latent within them.
Hindsight biases post-accident assessments of human performance.
Human operators have dual roles: as producers & as defenders against failure.
All practitioner actions are gambles.
Human practitioners are the adaptable element of complex systems.
Human expertise in complex systems is constantly changing.

Hierarchy

The genesis of a new way of looking at business: Flow is everything – by @sig

The Organisational Hierarchy is kaput – as single purpose executor of the Business Model it requires reorganisation every time you need to get better, an utterly futile exercise most of the time. Replace it.

Managing is a waste of time. Leadership I need, getting out of bed in the morning I can do myself.

Innovation

Deconstructing Innovation: a complex concept made simple; by @ShaunCoffey

So it is important to understand that there is no one-size-fits-all philosophy in terms of successful innovation. The one constant is that you have to be open to change and new points of view. Innovation is continuous.

Successful innovators and entrepreneurs all embrace change and the risks that they pose. In fact, innovation is the poster child of the mantra that there are no rules. Only by trying out new things, by failing, by discovering what works and what doesn’t, do you gain answers to the innovation question.

Leadership

“By the excessive promotion of leadership, we demote everyone else.” – Henry Mintzberg – via @flowchainsensei

“Everyone is a born leader … We were all leaders until we were sent to school to be commanded, controlled, and taught to do likewise.” – Dee Hock – via @Jan Höglund

Knowledge Leadership in the Era of Convergence – via @JonHusband

In an environment where speed, access, and tools allow workers to seamlessly collaborate across time zones, store massive amounts of data, and crowdsource the answers to difficult organizational issues, organizations that trend toward openness in the knowledge management arena will be better able to use new technologies and react to cultural and business changes. This makes leaders responsible for developing an open, collaborative culture, and suggests that inspiring these attitudes toward knowledge management will have positive individual and organizational consequences.

Learning

@DonaldClark : Failure led, spaced practice is better than training

Over nine months, 500 people in Booz Allen were initially given three types of training:

1.       Placebo
2.       Page-turning
3.       Interactive

All three groups were then given surprise:
Three simulated phishing emails with remedial help if they failed i.e. spaced practice, learn through failure exercises.
>Based on actual simulated attacks, they discovered no significant difference between training and no training!

Knowledge

@DavidGurteen – “PKM is actually what KM is really all about.”

World Bank: Knowledge Management is not mere dissemination:

KM should be conceived less as a purely technical information-based area and more as a communication and behaviour-change area, because putting knowledge to practical use needs a certain degree of behaviour change on both sides. Knowledge producers need to package the product in a way that can be easily applied, [e.g. PKM & Curating] while the users need to be “persuaded” to conceive knowledge as a practical tool that can be applied in their field. In other words, KM should close the gap between the theoretical and conceptual constructs and the practical applications.

Models

“Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.” – George Box [1919-2013] via @fhuszar

Networks

“Networked minds” require a fundamentally new kind of economics – via @eprenen

Networked minds create a cooperative human species

“This has fundamental implications for the way, economic theories should look like,” underlines Professor Helbing. Most of today’s economic knowledge is for the “homo economicus”, but people wonder whether that theory really applies. A comparable body of work for the “homo socialis” still needs to be written.

“While the “homo economicus” optimizes its utility independently, the “homo socialis” puts himself or herself into the shoes of others to consider their interests as well,” explains Grund, and Helbing adds: “This establishes something like “networked minds”. Everyone’s decisions depend on the preferences of others.” This becomes even more important in our networked world.

Organizations

Peter Kruse: Transforming Organizations into Social Brains | sense-making strategy – via @toughloveforx

Organizations that do not develop connectivity, arousal (or engagement) and collective valuation facility will have a poor chance of survival in the competition with organizations that do.  That includes the organizational approach to strategy, leadership and communication, whose main task will be to enable neural facility (or at the very least not stand in its way!)
Success in the neural world will depend strongly on social empathy and an ability to work with social resonance phenomena, that steer and focus attention and energy through the net (Kruse—part 4).

Work

TechCrunch: America has hit peak jobs – via @sardire

Paul Kedrosky recently wrote a terrific essay about what I call cultural technical debt, i.e. “organizations or technologies that persist, largely for historical reasons, not because they remain the best solution to the problem for which they were created. They are often obstacles to much better solutions.” Well, the notion that ‘jobs are how the rewards of our society are distributed, and every decent human being should have a job’ is becoming cultural technical debt.

If it’s not solved, then in the coming decades you can expect a self-perpetuating privileged elite to accrue more and more of the wealth generated by software and robots, telling themselves that they’re carrying the entire world on their backs, Ayn Rand heroes come to life, while all the lazy jobless “takers” live off the fruits of their labor. Meanwhile, as the unemployed masses grow ever more frustrated and resentful, the Occupy protests will be a mere candle flame next to the conflagrations to come.

Workplace

I found the best ever review of standing desks from Wirecutter, via @robpatrob. As a result of what I learned via social media, I had a standing desk built in March 2013, that I now use as my primary workstation. The desk was made from locally sourced yellow birch, by John Crawford. Desk surface is 36″ x 24″ and stands 42″ high. The monitor stand is a locally made box built from century-old recovered wall laths.

harold jarche standing desk