Collaboration is a means not an end

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Collaboration Isn’t Working: What We Have Here is a Chasm writes Deb Lavoy in CMS Wire.

Why do teams fail to act the way we think they will? Are we oversimplifying the notion of team? What about organizations? Where is the deeper insight on the relationship between teams and organizations? Why isn’t a sophisticated vocabulary breaking out? Why do we not yet have 100 words for different kinds of collaboration and teams, as expert in it as we think Eskimos are about snow? What is the difference between an intranet, a community and a team?

My immediate response was to say to myself, why of course it isn’t working, based on my own observations and client experiences. Collaboration is only part of the solution to building social or open businesses. I have looked at the two types of behaviours necessary in a social enterprise: collaboration and cooperation. Cooperation differs from collaboration in that it is sharing freely without any expectation of reciprocation or reward. Try to get people to openly cooperate in most businesses and they will be reprimanded for not being focused on their jobs, the bottom line, or shareholder value. However, cooperation contributes to the REAL bottom line: the entire business ecosystem.

One other necessary change in becoming a real social business is much more difficult. Both Don Tapscott (via Ross Dawson) and I see certain principles necessary for open networked business.  Transparency, Collaboration, Sharing, and Narration are all relatively easy. Empowerment, or distributed power, is rarely, if ever, discussed when it comes to social business. It’s the big gorilla in the room that can scare owners, executives, and managers senseless. But we have the technology to move away from command & control, because, as Gwynne Dyer clearly shows, “Tyranny was the solution to what was essentially a communications problem.” We no longer have that communications problem in business.

Social business lacks overarching principles. Social business is a means to an end, not an end in itself. For me the objective is clearly the democratization of the workplace. Many business leaders shirk away from such thoughts. Wirearchy, as Deb notes, is an excellent example of such a principle [notice the bit about “power & authority”]. It sounds more like a democracy than a well-oiled industrial business machine.

“Wirearchy: a dynamic flow of power and authority based on trust, knowledge, credibility and a focus on results enabled by interconnected people and technology.”

wirearchy

Vendors of collaboration platforms are selling tools that can enable a more democratic workplace, but most clients don’t want that, so vendors don’t mention it. Business just wants more efficient and effective work. Networks, by their very nature, subvert hierarchies, whether those in charge like it or not. But hyper-connected work environments require different operating principles. That’s the big shift that has happened over the past two decades. It’s becoming much more obvious now because people outside the business structures are seeing the value of cooperation in a networked world; Wikipedia being the best-known example. Many in business still need to wake up to the notion of cooperating with your environment, your customers, your suppliers, and especially your workers.

Until workplaces becomes more cooperative, enterprise collaboration software will amount to very little. Social business is just a hollow shell without democracy (I wrote that a year ago and little has changed). Businesses can harness the powers of knowledge networks by promoting cooperative behaviours, within an overarching organizing principle like Wirearchy. While it’s not about the technology, the technology has changed everything. I cannot see any other way that businesses will remain relevant in a networked world other than by becoming more open, and democratic.

Create conversation spaces

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Curation is more than integration, writes Rick Segal in Forbes [via Robin Good]. Segal discusses how marketing is about curating all the conversations around a subject.

In truth, curation has more to do with the multi-participant communications flowing in the stream of social media conversation …

Now, marketing communications must be framed by the conversation, and not just by the marketer, but by all the parties to the conversation …

A conversation is not like an exhibit hall. It’s physical boundaries are potentially limitless, though most can and will exhaust in time. The membership of a conversation is certainly not always well-controlled. A new meme or raconteur can abscond with it, if we’re not careful. Not everything that shows up belongs. But the great curator, like the great raconteur, is always two or three stories or anecdotes ahead of the rest of the table.

Now think of this from a workplace performance perspective. Solving complex problems also requires “multi-participant communications”. In the network age, learning is conversation. But aren’t training courses more like “exhibit halls”? They are prepared in advance, checked for quality control, and delivered with the best look & feel. Conversations are messier with ill-defined boundaries; just like work and just like life.

Informal Learning Conversations

Personal knowledge management is akin to pre-curation. If we look at workplace performance support as curation, then creating spaces for conversation would be an obvious component. Getting all the necessary parties involved in workplace conversations can enhance knowledge-sharing and contribute to greater diversity of ideas, a necessity for innovation. I think training & organizational development can learn a lot from marketing, but of course I’ve said that before.

The connected leader

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HBR: How Poor Leaders Become Good Leaders

  • They improved their communication effectiveness.
  • They made an effort to share their knowledge and expertise more widely. 
  • They developed a broader perspective.
  • They began to encourage cooperation rather than competition.

These four skills, of the nine identified by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, are some of the core skills for connected leaders. Leadership, like culture, is an emergent property of people working together. For example, trust only emerges if knowledge is shared and diverse points of view are accepted. As networked, distributed workplaces become the norm, trust will emerge from environments that are open, transparent and diverse. As a result of improved trust, 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 is connected leadership, or leadership that understands networks.

trust emerges from effective networks

In complex environments, weak hierarchies and strong networks are the best organizing principle. While many organizations have strong networks, they are too often coupled with strong central control. Letting go of control is what connected leadership is all about.

Here is how a connected workplace should function. It flips the traditional management pyramid.

leadership in connected workplace

Networked contributors (whether they are full-time, part-time, or contractors) do the bulk of the knowledge work at the edges of the organization. The narration of work  and PKM are becoming critical skills, as work teams ebb and flow according to need, but the network must remain connected and resilient. A key function of connected leaders is to listen to and analyze what is happening. From this bird’s-eye view, those in leadership roles can help set the work context according to the changing conditions and  work on building consensus.

The connected workplace requires collaboration as well as cooperation. Both collaborative behaviours (working together for a common goal) and cooperative behaviours (sharing freely without any quid pro quo) are needed, but most organizations focus their efforts on shorter term collaboration. However, networks really thrive on cooperation, where people share without any direct benefit. Practising and promoting cooperation is another important leadership skill in the connected workplace.

Connected leaders know that people naturally like to be helpful and get recognition for their work. But humans need more than extrinsic compensation, as our behaviour on Wikipedia and online social networks proves. For the most part, people like to help others. Cooperation makes for more resilient knowledge networks. Better networks are better for business.

Solving problems is what most knowledge workers are hired to do. But complex problems usually cannot be solved alone. They require the sharing of tacit knowledge, which is knowledge that cannot easily be put into a manual or procedural guide. Research shows that tacit knowledge flows best in trusted networks. Trust promotes individual autonomy and this becomes a foundation for more open social learning. Without trust, few are willing to share their knowledge. An effective knowledge network also cultivates the diversity and autonomy of each worker. Connected leaders know how to foster deeper connections which can be developed through meaningful conversations. They understand the importance of tacit knowledge in solving complex problems.

The power of social networks, like electricity, will inevitably change almost every business model. Those who emerge as leaders need to understand the new connected workplace. Working smarter in this workplace starts by organizing to embrace networks, manage complexity, and build trust.

The Connected WorkerYou cannot train people to be social; you can only show them what it’s like to be social.

 

Competitive knowledge

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Knowledge itself is not a great business advantage, and if it were, academic institutions would be running circles around the Fortune 100. It’s what gets done with the knowledge that matters. But there still needs to be a good flow of information and ideas that get tested out in the specific context of the organization, such as its markets and the technology available. Nick Milton describes four types of organizational knowledge: Core, Non-core, New, & Competitive. Moving competitive knowledge into core knowledge is a key part of this flow.

Competitive knowledge. These are areas of new evolving knowledge that the company knows a lot about. This knowledge may well give them a competitive advantage – the first learner advantage. In areas of evolving knowledge, the company that learns the best and learns the fastest, has the potential to outperform its rivals.  The KM focus for competitive knowledge is on the development of best practice. As this knowledge is being applied around the business, there needs to be a continuous capture of knowledge from practice, comparing of knowledge through communities of practice, and development of best practice. Ownership of competitive competence probably lies with the communities and networks.

I have mapped Nick’s Boston Square to the coherent organization to show how communities of practice provide the link between social networks and enterprise work teams to filter new knowledge and find competitive knowledge.

competitive knowledge

One challenge of finding new knowledge is that social networks are comprised mostly of non-core knowledge. There is often more noise than signal. However, given their diversity, social networks are where we can find innovative ideas. This is why curation and PKM skills are so important for organizations today. Testing new knowledge is where communities of practice can be handy. Gaining competitive knowledge is the obvious ROI for fostering internal and external communities of practice.

So here is a clear value proposition. Communities of practice act as filters of new knowledge in order to find competitive knowledge for your organization. People who understand the context of the work teams must participate in communities of practice, as only they can identify what new knowledge could be competitive. That means that those doing the work need time and support to get away from their teams and see the bigger picture. Does your organization provide this time, or is everyone too busy focused on managing core knowledge? The implications of myopic work practices are quite obvious.

Ensuring knowledge flow through narration

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Can the training department, or learning & development, directly contribute to innovation, or are they merely bystanders? Enabling the narration of work is one area where they can help. When it comes down to it, much of learning is conversation. Organizational learning is no longer about courses, which are artifacts of a time when information was scarce and connections were few, because that era is over. Work narration already happens outside the organization, and it’s time to bring it inside.

As with knowledge artisans, many learners now own their knowledge-sharing networks. Today, content capture and creation tools let people tell their own stories and weave these together to share in their networks. Narrating one’s work has been done by coders and programmers for decades, as they “learn out loud.” What started as forums and wikis quickly evolved into more robust networks and communities. Programmers who share their work process and solutions in public are building a resource for other programmers looking to do the same type of work. This makes the whole programming environment smarter. Organizations can do the same.

The public narration of what we do, attempt, and learn on a daily basis not only helps us help others, but also puts us in a position to get help from peers. When your co-workers know what you’re working on and what problems you’ve run into, they can offer their experience. Since few people work in the same room as all their co-workers, they rely on online networks to offer them a common space to find and offer work narration.

Narration helps everyone get smarter. John Stepper says that everyone should work and learn out loud. If you’re confused about what to write, John suggests posting about what you’re working on every day, who you’re meeting with, the research you’re doing, the articles you find relevant, lessons you learned and mistakes you made. These insights are valuable to people trying to train or help co-workers. He also recommends creating short posts that are easy-to-skim; as they make this kind of narration practical for both the author and the audience.

Narration is turning one’s tacit knowledge — what you know — into explicit knowledge — what you can share. Developing good narration skills takes time and practice. Just adding finished reports to a knowledge base does not help others understand how that report was developed. This is where online activity streams and micro-blogging have helped organizational learning. People can see the flow of work in small bits of conversation that, over time, become patterns. Narration of work is the first step in integrating learning into the workflow.

Organizational sense-making can be looked at as either stock or flow. Stock is organized for reference and does not change frequently. Courses are stock. Flow is timely and engaging. Narration of work in social networks is flow. With access to more knowledge flow, via social technologies, highly networked workers can have broader, deeper and richer learning experiences than any instructional designer could ever create in advance.

A worker today can ask questions to a worldwide support network on a platform like Twitter and get an answer in minutes. Deeper questions can be addressed on a service like Quora, where responses get voted on by the community. Many experts worldwide are now narrating their work and making it freely available on the Internet. A new form of distributed cognitive apprenticeship is available, and knowledge workers are taking advantage of this.

In knowledge networks, openness enables transparency, which fosters a diversity of ideas, which in turn reinforces the need for openness. This can be implemented through the use of social networks which can improve knowledge-sharing which fosters innovation, the bottom line for any organization in the network age. The narration of work, is basically knowledge sharing on a regular basis. It’s the raw material of knowledge sharing. It’s not content delivery (stock) that training departments should be focused on but the narration of work (flow).

narration

Training departments should put a major emphasis on learning flow. Stories are an excellent example of learning flow. For millennia, we have learned through stories. This is how gamers and hackers, the digital pioneers, have learned how to learn without curriculum, courses, or instructors:

  • They share their stories.
  • They know there is no user manual.
  • They embrace the flow.

Here is how to ensure knowledge flow through enterprise and external social networks:

  • Capture as much as possible and create digital artifacts.
  • Share as much as possible. Make it the default action by offering entrance into social networks to everyone. [e.g. feed readers, social bookmarks, blogs, photos, videos, social networks, activity streams].
  • Keep everything open and transparent [do not create “walled gardens”]; the key to useful information is being able to find it.
  • Support easy-to-make connections; between people, and with digital resources.

To learn more about narration and other open business practices, join my Learning in Social Business workshop, starting on March 1st.

Jobs and work

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Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past two weeks. [Note: It seems that if you look in enough places, certain patterns begin to emerge.]

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers. -Thomas Pynchon.” via @johnsonwhitney

Bert van Lamoen (@transarchitect) “If the old rules are left in place there are no new behaviors and the new model fails and nothing changes.”

Hugh MacLeod (@gapingvoid) – “The rush hour @starbucks crowd has this nice bourgeois desperation about them …”

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.

Disposable worker syndrome is killing us – by @michelemmartin

In the past, through this blog, I’ve focused on how we as individuals need to keep renewing and recycling ourselves through a process of lifelong learning and adapting to change. I still believe this is true. But I also believe that, through our institutions, we are doing great spiritual and emotional damage to ourselves by consistently communicating to people that they are disposable and that they are on their own in the process of recycling and renewing.

To torture my metaphor, we are treating people like garbage–throwing them into landfills and just letting them waste away there. We are doing nothing to provide them with the structures and resources and emotional supports that would help them go through that renewal process.

NYT: The Rise of the Permanent Temp Economy – via @jerrymichalski

The temp industry’s continued growth even in a boom economy was a testament to its success in helping to forge a new cultural consensus about work and workers. Its model of expendable labor became so entrenched, in fact, that it became “common sense,” leaching into nearly every sector of the economy and allowing the newly renamed “staffing industry” to become sought-after experts on employment and work force development. Outsourcing, insourcing, offshoring and many other hallmarks of the global economy (including the use of “adjuncts” in academia, my own corner of the world) owe no small debt to the ideas developed by the temp industry in the last half-century.

Being paid for a task decreases intrinsic motivation (PDF) – Edward Deci’s original experiment from 1971 – via @dougald

It appears that money – perhaps because of its connotation and use in our culture – may act as a stimulus which leads the subject to a cognitive reevaluation of the activity from one which is intrinsically motivated to one which is motivated primarily by the expectation of financial rewards. In short, money may work to “buy off” one’s intrinsic motivation for an activity. And this decreased motivation appears (from the results of the field experiment) to be more than just a temporary phenomenon.

The Guardian: Payment by Results – via @JohnQShift

Payment by results is a simple idea: people and organisations should only get paid for what they deliver. Who could argue with that? If your job is to get people back to work, then find them a job dammit … and they make people lie …

… This lying takes all sorts of different forms. Some of them are subtle forms of deception: teachers who teach to the test or who only enter pupils for exams they know they are going to pass; employment support that helps only those likely to get a job and ignores those most in need; or hospitals that reclassify trolleys as beds, and keep people waiting in ambulances on the hospital doorstep until they know they can be seen within a target time. In the literature, this is known as gaming the system.

The new artisans of the network era

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Are knowledge workers the new artisans of the network era? If so, can you call yourself a knowledge worker if you are not allowed to choose your own tools? How about managing your own learning?

toolsAn artisan is a skilled worker in a particular craft, using specialized processes, tools, and machinery. Artisans were the dominant producers of goods before the industrial era. Today, knowledge artisans of the network era are using the latest information and social tools in an interconnected economy. Look at a web start-up company and you will see it is filled with knowledge artisans, using their own tools and connecting to outside social networks to get work done. They can be programmers, designers, writers, or any other field requiring complex skills and creativity. One of their distinguishing characteristics is the ability to seek and share information with their networks in order to get work done. Knowledge artisans are connected workers.

Knowledge artisans are amplified versions of their pre-industrial counterparts. Augmented by technology, they rely on their networks and skills to solve complex problems and test new ideas. Small groups of highly productive knowledge artisans are capable of producing goods and services that used to take much larger teams and resources. In addition to redefining how work is done, knowledge artisans are creating new organizational structures and business models, such as virtual companies, crowd-sourced product development, and alternative currencies.

Knowledge artisans not only design the work, they can also do the work. It is not passed down an assembly line. They tolerate few, if any, silos between the product, the work, and the customer. Many integrate marketing, sales, and customer service with their creations. To ensure that they stay current, they become members of various ‘guilds’, known today as ‘communities of practice’ or ‘knowledge networks’. One of the earliest knowledge guilds was the open source community, which developed many of the communication tools and processes used by knowledge artisans today — distributed work, results-only work environments, blogs & wikis for sharing, agile programming, flattened hierarchies, working out loud, and much more.

Companies like Netflix understand that they are best served by people who take control of their own careers. Netflix is constantly looking for the best knowledge artisans in the industry. People who work hard, but produce just good enough results, will get let go. A master artisan strives for perfection. The 2009 presentation on Netflix culture makes their demand for the best workers abundantly clear. It’s the only way to deal with complexity.

netflix economic security

As more organizations engage with connected workers who have seen the new workplace structures, they will need to change some habits, like letting workers choose their own tools. Knowledge artisans are often more contractual, more independent and shorter-term than previous information age employees. Because of their more nomadic nature, artisanal workers will bring their own learning networks. Companies will need to accept this in order to get work done. Also, training departments must be ready to adapt to knowledge artisans by allowing them to  collaborate and connect with their external online networks. When the future of learning is the future of work, then learning support has to adapt to the new reality of an artisanal workforce. But it’s also worth noting that to be a successful knowledge artisan will take a lot more than just being a good employee.

Learning subverts business entropy

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When Harold Jarche says work is learning and learning is the work, I think he’s suggesting that for a business to thrive, it must place learning at the heart of everything it does. Purposeful learning. Learning that is not “training” as we have visioned it up till now. Any training that is disconnected from the people is not sufficient. Learning that is not about the work is not sufficient. Real 21st century learning must change how we think, behave and interact with each other, as well as what we know. It must be relevant to purpose, activity and relationships. Not just one of those: all three. A business, which is a living system, requires relevant learning in order to subvert that thing which happens to all living systems: entropy. —John Wenger: A Matter of Life and Death

Why do I say that work is learning and learning is the work? Because it’s been obvious to me for a long time that learning is THE critical business skill, whether you work for others or yourself. By learning, I do not mean education, or the ability to get good marks in class. Here is an update of my pitch on why I think learning is so integral to working today.

How work gets done in the network era:

  1. our increasing interconnectedness illuminates the complexity of our work environments
  2. simple work keeps getting automated
  3. complicated work usually gets outsourced
  4. complex work gives unique business advantages, while creative work finds new opportunities
  5. complex work is difficult to copy & creative work constantly changes:
    both require greater tacit knowledge
  6. tacit knowledge is best developed through conversations and social relationships
  7. social learning networks enable better and faster knowledge feedback loops
  8. but hierarchies constrain social interactions … so traditional management models must change
  9. learning amongst ourselves is the real work in business today … so management’s job is to support social learning
  10. social learning is how work gets done in the network era

The future of learning is the future of work

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Where skills and qualifications have been acquired through formal education, many find themselves unable to secure work that makes use of these; where skills are acquired informally, the challenge is to represent these effectively to potential employers. – The Regeneration of Meaning

This image, from a series on the Future of Learning by Gerd Leonhard summarizes how technology is changing our concepts of learning, training, and education.

SoLoMo by Gerd Leonhard

The role that institutions played as gatekeepers is changing, and the support systems that many of us depended upon, like jobs, are disappearing. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, for good and not so good.

hyperlinks hierarchy

The answer, I believe, is to use nearly unlimited information, self-publishing, and ridiculously easy group-forming to our advantage. Thierry de Baillon, co-author of the most popular post on this blog, writes about “a new set of managerial and operational paradigms” in My Social Business Predictions, namely: no boundaries; trusted exchanges; a culture of experimentation; and emergent and adaptive structures.

Returning to the initial quote on this post, the author, Dougald, shows some concrete examples of new operational paradigms: Centers for New Work; Access Space; West Norwood Feast; the rise of house concerts; and unMonasteries. I know of many more examples, and organizations like Shareable are highlighting these new models and experiments.

So it’s important to note that it’s not really the future of learning we should be concerned with, because it is merely a symptom of the future of work. It is becoming obvious that individuals need to take control of their learning in a world where they are simultaneously connected, mobile, and global; while conversely contractual, part-time, and local. Watch how work is changing and you will see how education and training will change.

changing nature of work

Cooperating in the open

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I’ve been thinking about collaboration and cooperation a lot lately. I see PKM as mostly comprising cooperative behaviours, as well as being self-serving (in the good sense). With cooperation, there is often no direct feedback on behaviour. Feedback emerges from the network through time. The image below is based on a previous post on tools & competencies for the social enterprise.

Cooperation is for the long term, while collaboration is usually bound by time, such as one’s career, a job, or a project. This difference is perhaps why I have been avoiding many online community invitations. These communities are often nothing more than a bounded social network. Google Plus communities are an example. If I want to cooperate, then the most porous and least bounded social network is the best for me. This is what my blog (open to anyone) or Twitter (public stream as default) help me do. If I wish to be bounded through membership in a community then I need a reason to do so. A project is a good reason. I belong to several collaborative online project-based communities, as well as few private communities.

This brings me to a simple way to decide if I want to join an online community. If it does not have a stated expiration date, objective, or end point, then I won’t join. I will keep my cooperation open, not within a walled garden. If I want to collaborate to get something done, then a walled garden, with some end in sight, makes sense.

I think one of the problems today is that many online social networks are trying to be communities of practice. But to be a community of practice, there has to be something to practice. One social network, mine, is enough for me. How I manage the connections is also up to me. In some cases I will follow a blogger, in others I will connect via LinkedIn or Twitter, but from my perspective it is one network, with varying types of connections. Jumping into someone else’s bounded social network/community only makes sense if I have an objective. If not, I’ll keep cooperating out in the open.