The new work

by

All work today can be reduced to just four basic types of jobs, according to Lou Adler. His company identified four prototypical jobs after developing thousands of job descriptions over the years.

Everything starts with an idea. This is the first of the four jobs – the Thinkers. Builders convert these ideas into reality. This the second job. Improvers make this reality better. This is the third job. Producers do the work over and over again, delivering quality goods and services to the company’s customers in a repeatable manner. This is the fourth job. And then the process begins again with new ideas and new ways of doing business being developed as the old ones become stale.

While I am not a fan of job competencies, I think this article can tell us something about the future of work in general. For instance, Gary Hamel identified obedience, diligence, and intellect as industrial/information economy competencies. Today, initiative, creativity, and passion are essential skills for what Hamel describes as the Creative Economy. I view this new creative economy as a property of the Network Era which is bringing about the rise of knowledge artisans. So I began to map Hamel’s essential work competencies against Adler’s job types.

Another factor in the changing nature of work is the changing perception of value. In the creative economy, more value is coming from intangible assets than tangible ones. For example, the S&P stock index in 2009 was 81% intangible assets, up from 17% in 1975. I recently discussed intangibles and organizational dynamics with Jay Deragon, as part of the Smarter Companies initiative. As the Smarter Companies website explains:

Despite its enormous importance today, most businesspeople lack the basic knowledge and tools needed to optimize intangible capital. This leads to blocked learning, suboptimal performance, stifled innovation and stagnant growth.

Learning to better deal with intangibles is the next challenge for today’s organizations and workers. I developed the following graphic to describe the four job types in relation to 1) work competencies and 2) economic value. It appears that an economy that creates more intangible value will require a greater percentage of Thinkers and Builders.

jobs value competenciesAs we move into a post-job economy, the difference between labour and talent will become more distinct. Producers and Improvers will continue to get automated, at the speed of Moore’s law. Those lacking enough ‘Talent’ competencies may get marginalized. I think there will be increasing pressure to become ‘Thinkers + Builders’, similar to what  Cory Doctorow describes as Makers in his fictional book about the near future.

What is relatively certain is that ‘Labour’ competencies, which most education and training still focuses on, will have diminishing value. How individuals can improve their Thinking and Building competence should be the focus of anyone’s professional development plan. How organizations can support Thinking and Building should be the focus of Organizational Development and Human Resources departments. While Producing and Improving will not go away, they are not where most economic value will be generated in the Network Era.

As with all models, this one simplifies reality, but it may be useful for thinking about the future of work.

Innovators, imitators and idiots

by

Friday’s Finds:

friday2

“first come the innovators, then the imitators, then the idiots … you can set your watch to it.” – @littleidea

“Sad. So many education questions now start with, “Do you know any apps for … ?” and nearly none with, ‘What outdoor games do you know … ?'” – @surreallyno

“Ninety percent of what we call ‘management’ consists of making it difficult for people to get things done.” – Peter Drucker – via @davidgurteen

serendipity: let’s talk numbers – via @jhagel

For example, my research found that, on average, people made up one third of the participants (the nodes illustrated by person thumbnails in the networks illustrated above) of a serendipity story, where the remaining participants were deemed to be either information or physical objects. This is practical information of potential value to a designer of a serendipity system: if, say, ten participants are somehow simulated, engineered or factored into a system, then it might be a useful starting point, although by no means any guarantee for serendipity—remember that control is too simplistic a concept—to allow or arrange for around three of these participants to be people.

Social enterprise tools: an industry in denial? via @sheynkman

Teens have problems like pregnancy, truancy, drug use, low grades. They also use Facebook. If I were to suggest that I can solve these problems by creating a Facebook page, I’d be rightfully laughed at.

Yet this is often the sales tactics in my industry: five bucks a month per employee and all or most of those pesky problems with productivity and barriers to collaboration magically go away. It may increase sales, but this strategy all but guarantees a blowback in the future.

From “unemployed” to unworking – via @tiacarr

“Jobs” are a product of industrial society, those typified by economic growth. However, as economic growth becomes untenable and businesses continually streamline their processes through automation, society is left with deep structural unemployment and wealth inequality. More people find themselves with less disposable income and so they consume less and have lower social mobility.

“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.

Have you mapped your network? Here’s some methods and tools – by @kanter

network mapping by beth kanter

The subject of education

by

I mostly focus on workplace learning here, but I want to put together some of my previous thoughts on public education. My opinions are based on watching our two boys go through a public education system, now complete, plus a fair bit of reading, in addition to many conversations with educators over the years. If we change how we think about public education, we may also be able to improve how we support workplace learning.

school_country__abiclipa_01.jpgWe do not live our lives based on academic subjects, and no workplace is subject-based, but almost all of our curricula are stuffed into subject silos. Education systems should focus on facilitating learning and critical thinking. When students are ready to enter the workforce they will then have the learning skills to blast through whatever job training interests them. Getting the education system out of the job training business will likely make for happier learners, teachers and and maybe even parents.

What would a curriculum look like if you eliminated any specific content and any reference to particular technologies and instead focused on universal cognitive processes? Many varieties of this “curriculum” could be created, using various content areas or communication technologies. I imagine a curriculum that is open to teachers’ expertise and students’ needs, based on processes like those suggested by Marina Gorbis in The Nature of the Future:

  • Sensemaking
  • Social and emotional intelligence
  • Novel and adaptive thinking
  • Moral and ethical reasoning

What would be different about this more basic curriculum is that students would be able to choose how they would learn these process skills and how they would show mastery. Self-expression could be shown through writing, blogging, art, drama, mechanics, etc. This approach would also free up a whole bunch of teachers in administrative curriculum development positions. Without a subject-centric curriculum, teachers could choose the appropriate subject matter for their particular class and the school system could concentrate on ensuing that students have mastered the important processes.

All fields of knowledge are expanding and artificial boundaries between disciplines are disintegrating. Our education systems need to drop the whole notion of subjects and content mastery and move to process-oriented learning. The subject matter should be something of interest to the learner or something a teacher, with passion, is motivated to teach. The subject does not matter, it’s just grist for the cognitive mill.

Discussing what subjects we should teach is the 21st Century equivalent of determining how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The answer is infinite. The real debate in education is whether we need subject-based curriculum at all.

Connected leadership

by

How is leadership in a hyper-connected workplace different? It’s been an ongoing conversation here, as this comment by Stephen Downes, on leadership as an emergent property, provides a counterpoint to certain popular leadership literature, especially “great man” theories.

‘Leadership’ is the trait people who have been successful ascribe as the reason for their success.
It is one of those properties that appears to be empirically unverifiable and is probably fictional.

In preparing for our connected worker program, I reviewed my previous posts on leadership and created a short synthesis of the key points. With life in perpetual Beta as a guiding perspective, networked organizations have to learn how to deal with ambiguity and complexity. Those in leadership and management positions must find ways to nurture creativity and critical thinking. Too often there are organizational barriers that prevent this. The 21st century workplace is all about understanding networks, modelling network learning, and strengthening networks. Anyone can show leadership in these areas.

Another guiding principle for modern organizational design is for loose hierarchies and strong networks. This is succinctly explained in the definition of 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”. As networked, distributed work becomes the norm, trust will emerge from environments that are open, transparent, and diverse. Supporting social networks ensures that knowledge is shared and contributes to organizational longevity. Organizations need to learn as fast as their environments.

As a result of improved trust in the workplace, leadership will be seen for what it is – an emergent property of a network in balance and not some special property available to only the select few. This requires leadership from everyone – an aggressively intelligent and engaged workforce, learning with each other. In today’s workplace, it is a significant disadvantage to not actively participate in social learning networks.

Leadership in networks does not come from above, as there is no top. To know the culture of the workplace, one must be the culture. Marinate in it and understand it. This cannot be done while trying to control the culture. Organizational resilience is strengthened when those in leadership roles let go of control.

Related posts:

The Connected Leader

From Hierarchies to Wirearchies

The Nature of the Future – Review

by

Nature of the FutureWhat will the future look like? Here are some glimpses.

  • Genomera: Crowdsourcing clinical trials.
  • BioCurious: Hackerspace for biotech.
  • Lending Club: “We replace the high cost and complexity of bank lending.”
  • ScholarMatch: Connect under-resourced students with resources, schools, and donors to make college possible.
  • Foresight Engine: How would you reinvent the process of medical discovery?
  • Open PCR Machine: Do it yourself thermocycler for controlling Polymerase Chain Reactions for DNA detection and sequencing.

These are all discussed in the book, The Nature of the Future, by Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future.

We are quickly finding out that when we go from a centralized communications infrastructure to a distributed one, when we connect everything and everyone, the result is not just to make things faster, better, and bigger. The social system itself acquires a fundamentally different quality: it becomes more diversified, more emergent, and often unpredictable.

This book provides probably the best background, and foreground, reading for most of the ideas discussed on this blog: complexity; the changing nature of work; the need to integrate learning into our work; and the primacy of cooperation in networks. Dedicated chapters cover money, education, science, governance, and health, with interesting future scenarios supported by current examples. While automation and robotics may be taking many jobs away, Gorbis identifies unique human skills which will continue to be important. These should be the core of any public education program.

  • Sensemaking
  • Social and emotional intelligence
  • Novel and adaptive thinking
  • Moral and ethical reasoning

As Gorbis writes, and I wholeheartedly agree, “Learning is social”.

We need to learn how to work better with machines, letting machines do what they are good at. Gorbis shows how machines and average people can outperform experts at playing chess. “Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.”

On the future of health care, Gorbis sees a new role for doctors. “In a socialstructed health care system, the doctor is not an omniscient God but a great conversationalist, astute observer, and insightful partner, that is, she is less a robot and more a real human being.” Doctors will be more like nurses, and with increasingly advanced technology, nurses will be more like doctors. I wonder if in the future, their roles will merge?

Gorbis identifies a major disconnect in our economy.

  1. Our technology tools and platforms are highly participatory and social.
  2. Our business models, by contrast, are based on market, i.e., monetary rewards.
  3. conflicts [between these two priorities] are likely to grow simply because the number of such endeavors [Twitter, Facebook, etc] is growing exponentially.

Gorbis concludes that “much new value and innovation will move from commodity-or-market-based production to socialstructed creation.” This reminds me of the T+I+M+N framework. A networked economy is not a mere modification of a market economy, but a form in itself that can address issues beyond the capabilities of markets.

Would I recommend this book? Yes. There are few people who would not benefit from this synthesis of the forces of technological, economic, and societal change coming at us. I will close with some practical advice, applicable to all, but especially for anyone entering the workforce.

In a world where people’s jobs will not be given to them, each individual will need to look deeply and understand what she or he is good at, how she or he can contribute to multiple efforts and navigate multiple roles and identities as a part of different communities.

Cooperation in the networked workplace

by

* This post is sponsored by Microsoft Office 365 *

This is my second post on productivity tools for the networked workplace. First, I want to elaborate a bit on collaboration and cooperation. Two types of behaviours are necessary in the networked workplace: collaboration and cooperation. Cooperation differs from collaboration in that it is sharing freely without any expectation of reciprocation or reward. Collaboration is just getting things done. Cooperation is what drives the extended enterprise — customers, suppliers, partners and anyone else touched by the business.

In my previous post I discussed how Microsoft tools differed in supporting either collaborative or cooperative behaviours, or both. These facets align with the digital competencies required in the networked workplace.

collab-coop competenciesCooperative competencies of 1) sharing openly; 2) communicating effectively in communities & networks; and 3) contributing to knowledge networks; are often given less attention by management than the more job-focused collaborative competencies. But yesterday’s soft skills are today’s critical skills. New tools for cooperation, like activity stream platforms can support open sharing. Yammer is one such platform, and Jared Spataro, at the Microsoft Office Division, has this to say about Yammer’s place in their business model:

What should I do?  In my customer meetings over the last few months, people have often asked, “What should I use for social?  Yammer or the SharePoint newsfeed?”  My answer has been clear: Go Yammer!  Yammer is our big bet for enterprise social, and we’re committed to making it the underlying social layer for all of our products.  It will power the social experiences in SharePoint, Office 365, Dynamics, and more.   Yammer’s unique adoption model appeals directly to end users and makes it easy to start enjoying the benefits of social immediately.  And because it’s an online service, Yammer gives us the ability to innovate rapidly-updating the service quickly as the market evolves.  So whether you’re an Office 365 customer or running SharePoint on-premises, Yammer will provide the latest innovations and best user experience.

yammer for cooperationThe above image is a continuation of a review of Office 365 I posted to Slideshare. In Yammer’s case, it is clearly a platform focused on cooperation. Like other activity stream, or micro-blogging, platforms, Yammer enables serendipitous connections by making work more transparent. As Ross Dawson says, Yes you can ‘engineer’ serendipity. Yammer would be one tool to help with that engineering.

As I mentioned in my last post, a tool like Lync can greatly enhance workplace collaboration as well as support internal cooperation. Yammer can extend that cooperation, with the real potential for business innovation resulting from connecting with people outside the department or enterprise.

If you don’t think you need to increase cooperation for your enterprise, then perhaps it fits into one of the two categories of companies that IDG’s Bill Laberis identifies in a short, but pointed, video. Fostering distributed work may not be suitable for 1) financially troubled companies, or 2) companies who don’t trust their own employees. For these companies, no networked productivity tool suite will help.

—

Disclosure: This post was sponsored by Office 365 but I retained editorial control and take full responsibility for what is posted. Contract writing is one of the ways I make my living.

ten years

by

ten of spadesOn 21 April 2003, jarche.com went online. It started as a single web page, later upgraded to a Drupal powered site and then changed over to its current WordPress configuration. About 2,350 posts have been published so far, with over 6,500 comments [+1 million comment spam have been blocked]. Many thanks to Chris at tantramar.ca for keeping this site running for so long.

So what has changed and what have I learned over the past decade?

It is easier and more acceptable to work from home, live in a different time zone, and work with people you may have never met face to face. When I started, the mainstream media were making fun of blogs. Now every media outlet has one, if not many. This blog has helped me connect with people all over the world. Without it, I doubt I would have lasted 10 years as a freelancer.

My early Blogger site is still online. I moved my blogging here in February 2004. In 2003 social media were primarily blogs. While blogs now face a lot of competition, I have noticed that the influence of a single blog post can be much greater today, as it gets re-posted on various other platforms. I would still strongly recommend blogging, especially for freelancers. What I’ve learned about blogging is that you have to do it for yourself. Most of my posts are just thoughts that I want to capture.

One advantage (?) of living in a remote and rural part of the country is that I need to have a wide focus. There are not enough potential clients around here, so there is no local market. Because of this, I saw the world as my market from the onset, and the past 10 years have shown that it’s possible (though sometimes difficult) to do international work and not live in a major metropolitan area. Sackville boasts a population of around 5,000 people and the nearest major cities are Boston (900 KM) and Montréal (1,000 KM).

One of my guiding principles is accepting life in perpetual Beta, meaning that things keep changing and I have to keep learning. In 2003 Twitter did not exist and WordPress was only released in May of that year. Twitter is now the main source of referrals to this blog, surpassing Google, while WordPress is the number one blogging platform in the world. This month I tried two new RSS readers, as the social media landscape keeps changing.

Probably the most significant change in my work came with the formation of the Internet Time Alliance, in 2009, with my partners Jay Cross, Jane Hart, Charles Jennings, and Clark Quinn. Not only has this international think-tank exposed me to new networks, but it’s a wonderful support group, where I can bounce around my half-baked ideas.

Thanks to everyone who has connected here over the past 10 years and especially those who have shared their knowledge and experiences. I look forward to the next decade.

All models are wrong

by

friday2Friday’s Finds:

“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] passed away today – @fhuszar

“The true test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald – via @goonth

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” ~ T.S. Eliot – via @ethnobot

“Managers complain that employees do not think outside the box, but it is the management system…that keeps them firmly inside.” ~M.Addleson – via @janhoglund

Innovation Teams Don’t Work – via @petervan

The companies that are the most successful at maintaining cultures of innovation understand that sometimes – nay, many times – innovations fail. Those companies accept the risk of that failure and have a culture that allows for failures and encourages risk taking.

Public good or playing markets? The real reason for MOOCs – via @ShaunCoffey

In fact, though the MOOCs clearly have a potential to grow immensely, these figures are strikingly similar to what was achieved during the last wave of e-learning euphoria in the early 2000s.

Been here before

During this earlier wave, all of the US investment banks in the late 1990s and early 2000s extended the hype cycle from the adventures of dot.com companies directly into e-learning start-ups.

Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Securities, Hambrecht and Co, Sun Trust, and many others relentlessly spruiked the e-learning industry as destined for fabulous growth trajectories and mouth-watering revenue streams.

Activate your knowledge

by

PKM is much more than processing information. It’s about ideas, conversations and especially relationships. Most of all, PKM is a framework to actually do knowledge work. It is a framework that helps move from an awareness of knowledge to activation of its use in the context of getting work done.

My earliest inspiration on the power of personal knowledge management came from Lilia Efimova and her research on blogging as knowledge work. Lilia’s knowledge framework, as explained in her doctoral dissertation: Passion at Work, shows that knowledge work is done within a context and that awareness of context can be developed through ideas, conversations and relations.

PKM EfimovaActivation of knowledge happens in the context of tasks and so the cycle continues.

The top sector represents the domain of developing ideas, which requires the filtering of vast amounts of information, making sense of it, and connecting different bits and pieces to come up with new ideas.
In this process physical and digital artefacts play an important role (Halverson, 2004; Kidd, 1994; Sellen & Harper, 2001), so knowledge workers are faced with a need for personal information management (Landsdale, 1988) to organise their paper and digital archives, e-mails and bookmark collections.
– The sector of conversations reflects the social nature of knowledge work (Brown & Duguid, 1996; Lave & Wenger, 1991) and incorporates the spectrum from passively followed conversations to collaboration with others focused on performing specific tasks. Conversations contribute to both developing ideas and relations with others.
– The lower sector represents the domain of relations, since effective knowledge development is enabled by trust and shared understanding between the people involved (Cross, Parker, Prusak & Borgatti, 2001). For an individual, this means a need to establish and maintain a personal network (Nardi et al., 2002), to keep track of contacts (Whittaker, Jones & Terveen, 2002), or to make choices about which communities to join and which to ignore. [Passion at Work, page 11]

My interpretation of this over the years resulted in the — Seek (filter) > Sense (discern) > Share — framework, showing PKM as a process of moving ideas and conversations through relationships of people in networks, communities (CoP), and work teams.

PKM at workPKM is completely contextual. That’s why it’s so personal. PKM is rather useless if it is separate from work. PKM is a way to integrate learning and work. PKM is pretty well the antithesis of formal education and training. Knowledge only emerges through the work, it is not predetermined. With PKM, there is no curriculum. Work is learning and learning is the work. This is relatively simple to understand but often difficult to put into practice. I run workshops on PKM but the most important part is putting ideas into practice. We have found through experience that it usually takes at least a month of practice, with reflection and feedback, to become proficient at PKM.

The risky quadrant

by

Donald Taylor asks where your learning & development (training) department resides.

  1. Are you unacknowledged prophets, with a manager or executive who understands that you need to change, but the organization lags behind?
  2. Are you facing comfortable extinction, like the once dominant but now bankrupt Kodak?
  3. Or are you in the training ghetto, disconnected from the business and unable to be part of any change?

training extinctionThe reality today is that risky leadership is needed. As Don notes:

If both the department and the organisation are changing fast, this is a great opportunity. We can invest in new procedures and systems, build our skills and experiment with different ways of working with the business, and the business – because it is also changing fast and open to new ideas – will respond. It’s in this quadrant that we find really progressive L&D teams that are making an impact. While they are undoubtedly leaders, this quadrant is also risky, because that’s the nature of change.

Unacknowledged Prophets: If you are in this quadrant I would advise you to bide your time, build up your skills, create alliances, and wait for opportunities. As Stephen Berlin Johnson says, “Chance favours the connected mind.” Get collaborative, cooperative & connected. Louis Pasteur said that “Chance favours the prepared mind“. Be prepared.

Comfortable Extinction: This is a difficult quadrant because there is no understanding of the need for change. Everything is just fine. If you are the only person in your organization without rose coloured glasses, I would try to become a lone unacknowledged prophet, preparing for the inevitable crisis. If nobody sees it, then it would be best to let the training department drift into obscurity so that others can take the lead in promoting cooperation, collaboration and knowledge sharing. Sometimes it’s best to let natural selection do its thing.

Training Ghetto: Getting out of the basement and becoming relevant may take some time, which departments in this quadrant may not have. I would suggest first moving from training delivery to performance improvement. Get someone (yourself?) skilled at performance consulting. Forget about social learning, for the time being, and focus on performance support tools and job aids. Become useful to the business by bringing practical tools that can be used right away.

So how will you get to the risky quadrant?