The changing nature of work

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In 2013, I was able to spend some time looking at the changing nature of work. I continued to read from many sources, and I observed what and where I could. I used this blog to help make sense and engage with my professional learning networks. Here is a single-paragraph summary of what I see as the major issues affecting the management of work.

First of all, it is becoming obvious that the fundamental nature of work is changing as we transition into a post-job economy. The major driver of this change is the automation of procedural work, especially through software, but increasingly with robots. The drivers behind the post-job economy are also changing our work structures. Organizations will need to become more networked, not just with information technology, but how knowledge workers create, use, and share knowledge. This new workplace also will require different leadership that emerges from the network and temporarily assumes control, until new leadership is required. Giving up control will be a major challenge for anyone used to the old ways of work. An important part of leadership will be to ensure that knowledge is shared. But moving to a knowledge-sharing organizational structure will be difficult, because of the knowledge sharing paradox; which is that the more control is exerted, the less knowledge is shared. All of these challenges need to be addressed, and rather quickly, as software continues to eat jobs, and income disparities get wider.

nature of work is changingReferences:

the-post-job-economy

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connected-leadership-is-not-the-status-quo

organizational-knowledge-sharing-framework

the-knowledge-sharing-paradox

Engaged for work

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There is a real change in how work is getting done today. It’s not just factory workers but many professionals whose work will be automated by software and robots.

Procedural work will keep getting outsourced to the lowest cost of labour. The industrial world deskilled work to its component parts, and today these parts continue to get automated or crowd-sourced. Traditional jobs will not come back.

So how will anyone be able to make a living? Get creative. Creative work cannot be automated. “Focus on the human factor,” says futurist Gerd Leonhard, “If our work – and our output – is robotic we will soon be surpassed by intelligent software agents and machines.” Human creative work is not just art, design, and the like, but includes making valuable things for a specific context, need, or market. The internet makes finding these markets much easier.

So how can anyone learn and prepare for this world of work? We know that training works well to learn a defined skill, such as how to drive a car. You can also train for a field, such as carpentry. But training does little for creativity.

First of all, learn real skills, not just how to make it in an organization. Artists first learn the skills of their field. Learn how to code, bake, or some other defined skill. Master it, and then start breaking the rules. This is the Picasso approach. “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” [attributed].

At the same time, learn how to cooperate in networks. Start right now in engaging in diverse professional learning networks. Put yourself out there, for in this new world of work, you are only as good as your network.

Cleric-Knight-Workman
Image: Cleric — Knight — Workman

Think of yourself as a freelancer for life and always nurture your networks, no matter what. Avoid getting lulled into a false sense of security. To stay engaged, take control of your professional development. The alternative is rather feudal.

PKM and MOOC

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Workplace training and education too often resemble modern playgrounds:

“safe, repeatable, easily constructed from component parts, requiring that the child bring little of their own to the experience” – Johnnie Moore

When adults design for children they have a tendency to dumb things down. Perhaps the notion that there is no such thing as writing for children should be extended to workplace training and education design. In the workplace, thinking of co-workers as “learners” actually may be a barrier to learning.

The real value of the MOOC (massively open online course/content) could be its potential to remove the barrier between learners, designers, and instructors. Its workplace learning potential may be greater than its academic value. But if one thinks of the MOOC as a course, designed by one party for another party, then it really is nothing new.

“Indeed, I was struck by a recent comment from someone with 15 years of experience in designing face-to-face, blended and online credit programs: I am trying to understand what MOOCs can offer that my understanding of educational design, learning design and online and distance education does not include. I’m afraid that the answer continues to be: ‘Nothing’, at least for the moment.” – Tony Bates

But the MOOC can foster emergent learning, which makes it an optimal form for understanding complex issues. This is something that a curriculum-based, graded, course is not well suited to support. With the MOOC, especially one focused on being massive and open, there is a greater possibility for serendipitous connections, such as what happened with participants becoming instructors in the early MOOC we conducted in 2008.

If we think of the MOOC as a vehicle for shared understanding, and not content delivery, it becomes the collective equivalent to personal knowledge mastery. It is group learning, with some structured content, and good facilitation; but most importantly, space for sense-making. In the complex domain, combining PKM with more structure for social learning, using the MOOC format, can be an important addition to how workplace learning is supported.

Update: several possibilities for corporate MOOC’s from Donald Clark.

PKM is making sense of complexity

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This is what you find on the first page of most searches for PKM:

Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a collection of processes that a person uses to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve, and share knowledge in his or her daily activities – Wikipedia

It is interesting to note that this definition comes from a study on manufacturing and artificial intelligence.

The paper tries to bridge gap between knowledge management and artificial intelligence approaches proposing agent-based framework for modelling organization and personal knowledge. The perspective of knowledge management is chosen to develop two conceptual models—one describes the intelligent enterprise memory, another models an intelligent organization’s knowledge management system. The concept of an agent-based environment of the knowledge worker for personal and organizational knowledge management support is introduced. – Agent based approach for organization and personal knowledge modelling: knowledge management perspective (2007)

In my practice of PKM, and the Seek > Sense > Share framework, there is nothing artificial at all, and looking for automation only detracts from the real power of PKM.  In the same Wikipedia article, reference is made to Dave Snowden’s issues with the concept.

Dave Snowden has asserted that most individuals cannot manage their knowledge in the traditional sense of “managing” and has advocated thinking in terms of sensemaking rather than PKM.

I agree. Dave has published a recent article on the Cynefin framework, which I think shows clearly where PKM can play a critical role. It is in making sense of complexity.

Cynefin is not intended as a crude categorisation model, although it has been used as such with some utility.  It is as much about dynamic movements.  So in the model shown here the prime dynamic is shown in red.  The idea is that ideas emerge in the complex domain and are then constrained to shift them into complicated. As you start to impose constraint you see if it creates repeatability, if not pull back.  If it works then you shift from exploration to exploitation.  Periodically you relax the constraints again to allow new possibilities to emerge.  From time to time the dynamic may have ossified in which case a reset is need; the blue line known as a shallow dive into chaos.   Only when change is no longer plausible is it shifted to Obvious [green] – Great is the power of steady misrepresentation

Cynefin_Dec_13_DaveSnowdenCynefin image by Dave Snowden

“Ideas emerge in the complex domain …” which is where creative knowledge workers in a network economy need to be active, probing, and playing. We also need to do shallow dives into the Chaotic domain. Neither of these activities will be helped through automation. If anything, automation will make us lazy, or unaware.

The process of seeking out people and information sources, making sense of them by taking some action, and then sharing with others to confirm or accelerate our knowledge, are those activities from which we can build our knowledge. Managing and sharing information, especially through conversations, are fundamental processes for sense-making in the complex domain. Sense-making is acting on one’s knowledge.

A key principle of PKM is that no one has the right answer, but together we can create better ways of understanding complex systems. We each need to find others who are sharing their knowledge flow and in turn contribute our own. It’s not about being a better digital librarian, it’s about becoming a participating member of a networked organization, economy and society.

Sense-making consists of both asking and telling. It’s a continuing series of conversations. We know that conversation is the main way that tacit knowledge gets shared. So we should continuously seek out ideas. We can then have conversations around these ideas to make sense of them. Sharing closes the circle, because being a personal knowledge manager is every professional’s part of the social learning contract. Without effective sense-making at the individual level, social learning at the organizational level is mere noise amplification.

So ask what value you can add ->

adding value

The future of management is talent development

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What is the major difference between the scientific management framework that informed so many of our work practices, and the new management requirements for the connected enterprise in the network age?

Frederick Winslow Taylor started with a basic assumption about the difference between labour and management. Labour was stupid and management was intelligent.

Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type. The man who is mentally alert and intelligent is for this very reason entirely unsuited to what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work of this character. Therefore the workman who is best suited to handling pig iron is unable to understand the real science of doing this class of work.-  F.W. Taylor in Principles of Scientific Management (1911)

This attitude still permeates our organizations, whether we realize it or not.

Taylorism-derived job analysis, evaluation and measurement are the tools (along with their underlying assumptions) that are used to create the skeletal architecture of hierarchical organizations, the pyramid we all know. – Jon Husband in Knowledge, power, and an historic shift in work and organizational design

The assumption of an organizational hierarchy is that the further up the organization chart you go, then the more educated and intelligent you are. But what happens when the work at the bottom of the pyramid gets automated or outsourced? Taylor assumed that only management could see the whole system. In the connected enterprise, everyone has to see the whole system, all the time. This makes many of our assumptions about how work should be organized completely irrelevant, and perhaps even dangerous for any organization where its outputs are important to society, investors, management, or workers.

Network management assumes human creative potential can be realized in supportive and challenging environments by engaging everyone.

We need creativity at the company level to respond effectively to increasing competition and uncertainty. We also need creativity at the worker level to define jobs that will be augmented, rather than replaced, by machines … The reason for the firm to exist now? Talent development. Firms will exist so that workers can learn and grow much faster than they could on their own. – John Hagel in Wired: Here’s How to Keep the Robots From Stealing Our Jobs

A focus on Talent development means growing and supporting customized work and letting the robots do the Labour. It requires some fundamental organizational redesign, from compensation, to competencies, and even redefining management. Network management focuses on Talent development. Everything else is superfluous.

future management

 

Lessons from an early MOOC

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In September 2008, Michele Martin, Tony Karrer and I hosted a 6-week open professional development program on social media. We did this for the eLearning Guild as a run-up to the annual DevLearn conference. It was an asynchronous (no time-scheduled activities) program. We developed all activities for three levels of participation: Spectator; Joiner; and Creator, with different requirements for each. The majority fell into the first category, but the Creators were able to take on the role of facilitating, which became important as we grew.

Here was the program we created:

  1. Introduction to Social Networks
  2. Social Bookmarks
  3. Blogs
  4. Aggregators
  5. Wikis
  6. Implications / Summary

We had to be flexible because we originally expected about 50 participants. We actually had over 900 people in what today could be viewed as a professional development MOOC, where the C did not stand for course, but rather content. Developing the content was a major effort shared between Michele and myself. I learned a lot, including the insight not to do another one of these for free. It took a lot of work to develop the program and even more to facilitate and keep as many people as possible engaged for six weeks. There was a lot of reading, reflection, and writing.

One experience of the program still stands out for me. Paul Lowe, course leader of the MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication, spontaneously gave a live web presentation on his use of blogs with his master’s students and shared what he had learned so far.

  • blogs act as the glue between synchronous events
  • blogs are ways of mapping the learning journey
  • every blog is unique and gives a whole-person view, which you don’t get with assignments
  • blogs encourage dialogue and show how to relate to an audience, which is good for photographers in training
  • there is peer group feedback
  • blogs allow for rich media – images, video, sound, links to other resources; all of which can be mashed up, tagged, recomposed, mixed – by all participants
  • blogs can also be emotional and playful

I also noted that Paul’s student blogs were not used as assessment vehicles. To ensure that blogs and comments were read, the course assigned small groups of  “blog buddies” to read and comment on each others’ blogs. Graduates could also keep their blogs, as they were not hosted by the university and this helped to give a sense of ownership to the students. This course was an excellent example of some pragmatic uses of social media and is still pertinent today.

Here are some other things I learned during those six weeks.

  • A loose-knit online learning community can scale to many participants and remain effective.
  • Only a small percentage ~10% of members will be active.
  • If facilitators can seed good questions and provide feedback, then conversations can flourish.
  • Use a very gentle hand in controlling the learners and some will become highly participative (insight shared by Paul Lowe)
  • Create the role of “synthesizer”. I found it quite helpful when Tony and Michele summarized (curated) the previous week’s activities.
  • Keep the structure loose enough so that it can grow or change according to the needs of the community.

Michele Martin also shared her thoughts in Deconstructing the Work Literacy Learning Event.

What I do think we managed to do was create and foster a community of practice that, for a period of time, brought together a large group of people who wanted to work together on learning about using Web 2.0 tools for learning. Through this network of connections and discussion, we also created an excellent resource that will be available to other people who may want to explore these tools on their own, at their leisure. [note that the platform we used, Ning, began charging for service in 2010, so the resource is no longer available]

As Ning was shutting down its free service, I tried to capture some of the resources we had created, like the Introduction to Social Networking. In 2013 the technology available has changed and MOOC’s are now all the rage (or is that already over?). The Internet has made social and cooperative learning much easier. It still takes focus, guidance and flexibility to make it work though. I am glad we did this five years ago and learned these lessons for ourselves.

Let me close with a reflective note by one of the participants. Catherine Lombardozzi said that we need to really think about learning.

One of my favorite quotes is from Kent Seibert: ‘Reject the myth that we learn from experience and accept the reality that we learn by reflecting on experience.’ My experiences in this experiment underscored for me how important it is to reflect “out loud” – if not by engaging online, by taking some of what you’re thinking about and talking about it with others. These kinds of tools make it possible to compose and share your thoughts on what you are learning, to ask questions, to get feedback from others (many of whom you have never met). Tools also make it possible to learn from others… following their bookmarks, for example, or using the tools to make contacts, simplify your own research, and more. They expand our learning support system in fabulous ways.

we are the internet

Moving forward with Social Collaboration

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Change Agents Worldwide is a new type of consultancy, which functions as a transparent cooperative. It includes solo change agents (like me) and enterprise change agents who are trying to bring about change in their respective workplaces. This is a network of progressive and passionate professionals, who really want to bring about substantive change in how work gets done.

ctwftw-226x300This is how I would describe what Change Agents Worldwide is trying to achieve:

We know that people have always sought meaning in their work. But people and their workplaces have not always been aligned. In the emerging network era we are finding that successful organizations foster openness, so that value can be created by every node in their network. In a truly connected enterprise, knowledge comes from diverse viewpoints through active seeking, sense-making, and sharing. Trust emerges from the transparency of working out loud. Credibility is achieved from the questioning of all assumptions, while a focus on results distributes authority throughout the network. Everyone can and should work in an organization like this.

Later this week we will describe the disruptive changes facing organizations today, as well as some frameworks to address them. Susan Scrupski (USA), Simon Terry (AUS) and I will talk about the issues and also discuss some real business examples.

Please sign up and join us on Thursday, 12 December for Moving forward with Social Collaboration in partnership with Socialcast by VMware. It’s free.

To get a feel for the ideas and people at Change Agents Worldwide, here are some recent quotes from our blog.

Just as the railroads need a precise sense of time, our new economy demands new precision in ideas like collaboration, work, trust, community and value. – Simon Terry

We’ve demonstrated that being “social” doesn’t necessarily open up new risks, but can in fact be more successful at bringing risk to the forefront earlier and when there is still a chance to remedy the issue … in contrast to when inappropriate behaviors occur out of pure naïveté, in private channels, and aren’t discovered until it is too late to remedy … leaving only damage control to come to the rescue. – Bryce Williams

But, anyone who’s played in both these camps will readily acknowledge that a digital strategist or VP of Consumer Strategy has no idea what social collaboration is inside the enterprise and most likely spends his/her entire day in email, teleconferences, meetings, and ppt. And, someone who’s running an internal enterprise social network has no idea who the top players are in SMMS (or what that acronym even means). – Susan Scrupski

As more and more knowledge work is carried out by people communicating and exchanging information using hyperlinks in social networks (where knowledge lives ) and routing it to where it is needed at any point in time, vertical arrangements of knowledge are disrupted, if not subverted. – Jon Husband

The value of Twitter

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Friday’s Finds:

friday2“From @SteveMartinToGo interview: “Writing is now so essential to our lives online. Sometimes it’s the only thing people see of us.” So true.” – @thinkitcreative

What an anonymous British sheep farmer can teach us about the power of  Twitter: “though it took me a while to realize it, I had the tools to connect to thousands of people around the world” – via @mathewi

“Twitter gives you an amplifier for your voice… It cuts out the middleman (I don’t need you to interpret and translate my life and my work for other people – sorry journalists but I’m a shepherd not an idiot). It lets you find your niche (and that niche can be massive). It lets you sell things … and it lets you connect with weirdly interesting other people.”

The real value of Twitter in 1 image, by @ValaAfshar @tom_peters @sandymaxey

the value of twitterRich people don’t actually create the jobs – via @eprenen

But, ultimately, whether a new company continues growing and creates self-sustaining jobs is a function of the company’s customers’ ability and willingness to pay for the company’s products, not the entrepreneur or the investor capital. Suggesting that “rich entrepreneurs and investors” create the jobs, therefore, Hanauer observes, is like suggesting that squirrels create evolution.

 

@Kasparov63: “21st century democracy needs to adapt to 21st-century technology. The gap between information to public & government response has grown too big.”

Some fundamental changes

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But neither the flat organization nor empowered employees have been fully realized. The reason is that most of us have been working over the years to solve problems by creating new and improved companies, rather than by equipping individuals with their own empowering tools. What we still need are tools that make individuals both independent of companies and better able to engage with companies (or with organizations of any kind). Social tools alone won’t do it — especially ones that are still corporate silos. (And, forgive me, even Quora is an example of that.) – Doc Searls: Answering “Why has the empowered employee predicted in the Cluetrain Manifesto not emerged?” in Quora

You cannot read the rest of Doc’s answer unless you log into Quora, which is a pretty good example that most social media companies are just as control-oriented as any industrial organization was. If you have not read The Cluetrain, you should at least peruse some of its 95 theses. The initial thesis of The Cluetrain Manifesto is that markets are conversations, but I think that theses 10 through 12 describe the big potential change in relationships brought on by the Internet.

#10. As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.

#11. People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.

#12. There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.

As Doc mentions, the big challenge is equipping individuals with their own empowering tools. These tools are hardware, software, and most importantly, skills and attitudes. Taking control of our learning is a challenge for individuals used to working inside hierarchies that demand conformity and compliance. Note that without compliance training there would be almost no e-learning industry. The deck is still stacked against networked individuals.

So if you read the Cluetrain back in 1999, or have since quoted it, then it’s time to think about how to implement it. I have written about hierarchies and connected organizations for the past few weeks here. I have no doubt that major systemic change is necessary to deal with the wicked problems that face society today. Critical components that need to change are how we work and how we learn in organizations. That change has to start with people. Individuals need to build their own interdependent learning networks.

wicked-problems-joachim-strohThis is not a leadership or a management responsibility. This is a people issue. Each one of us should start seeking knowledge, building upon it, and sharing it, all in public. In this way we can develop an aggressively intelligent and engaged citizenry.

For the first time in history we have the means to learn together without any institutional or organizational intermediaries. We don’t need schools, or even corporate MOOC’s. It is not easy, but it is possible to create a global group of co-learners around almost any problem or subject. What’s holding us back? I think we are holding ourselves back.

If participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally, then it’s time to make some fundamental changes. Here is an example of re-thinking market relationships. Doc Searls is working with the Vendor Relationship Management project, which is “based on the belief that free customers are more valuable than captive ones — to themselves, to vendors, and to the larger economy. To be free —”

  1. Customers must enter relationships with vendors as independent actors.
  2. Customers must be the points of integration for their own data.
  3. Customers must have control of data they generate and gather. This means they must be able to share data selectively and voluntarily.
  4. Customers must be able to assert their own terms of engagement.
  5. Customers must be free to express their demands and intentions outside of any one company’s control.

Similar changes can be made in education and employment.

  • Free learners are more valuable than captive ones.
  • Free employees are more valuable than captive ones.

Thanks to Jon Husband for inspiring this little manifesto.

Ask what value you can add

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Remember when someone older than you first got an email account? They probably sent you at least one joke, and it was likely to a long list of recipients. Actually, they probably sent a lot of jokes. There is a similar phenomenon with social media. While it may not be jokes, we are inundated with over-sharing of the same stuff.

First of all, there is a difference between sharing and making something public. Posting a social bookmark to a service like Diigo does not create additional noise for your networked peers in a social network. This is making your work public. But posting your latest collection of webpages in an activity stream is sharing. Doing it poorly adds more noise than signal.

For example, I recently passed on a tagged collection of social bookmarks as a result of a conversation in an online community of practice. I shared this tag when the occasion arose. I did not post every time I created a new bookmark. In my PKM framework of Seek > Sense > Share, this is called discernment, or knowing when, and with whom to share.

As good social learners, sharing is not as important as knowing when to share. This does not preclude us from collecting lots of information (Seek), but it should make us consider appropriate ways to share. We should be ready to share when the time is right.

The most important and difficult part of PKM is sense-making. Little should be shared if there has been no value added. The value I added when sharing my bookmarks was not so much in terms of adding my own insights, which were negligible, but there was value in the timing. The context for sharing was optimal.

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