organizational relevance

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Peter Evans-Greenwood has had some good articles lately. This is from his latest, is your organisation irrelevant?

“However, the environment we operate in today is a lot more fluid than the environment of the past, the environment where the vast bulk of our current organisational theory was formulated. Information flows much more rapidly than it used to while the world seems to change every year rather than every generation. The traditional static view of the organisation – one where it has a well defined and stable structure (someone leads, others follow, even if you’re leading from the bottom) – is starting to look a bit long in the tooth.”

hyperlinks-subvert-hierarchy
Peter concludes:

“Leadership is no longer part of a job description: something anointed on the chosen few. Leadership is a role to be adopted when needed, and then passed on when the need has gone. It’s a dynamic thing, moving around the organisation, reshaping the organisation as it passes from individual to individual, team to team.”

leadership-pyramid

Leadership is an emergent property of a network in balance. In this post-information era, organizations need to really understand networks, manage for complexity, and work on building trust. But almost all workplace systems, in organizations of any size, are at cross purposes to this. Networks, for the most part, are seen as something relating only to the IT department. The constant demand for more controlled processes (compliance training, for example) fails to build resilience into the organization. Every time the organization deals with an exception using a standard method, and fails to account for the unique situation of the employee or customer, it erodes trust.

The answers are so simple they are ignored by minds numbed by +100 page reports that tell us nothing. Give people a job worth doing, the tools to do it, and recognition of a job well done. In a transparent, diverse & open organization, management can then get the hell out of the way. This is how organizations can remain relevant.

hyper-connected pattern seeking

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Here is more confirmation that work is learning, and learning is the work. From a recent post by the BBC:

Crucial in surviving all of these unpredictable variables is the use of network design tools – software suites that can simulate what happens at the point of disaster.

“This helps when decisions need to be made in the next couple of days – maybe even the next couple of hours,” explains Tim Payne, research director for Gartner analysts.

“The processing speed at which they can run through a plan or simulation can take seconds — rather than having to run it over night.”

It means companies can take a highly-educated guess at how their decisions will immediately impact their supply chains – and their ability to meet their customer’s demands.

As feedback loops get faster with increased connectivity, the ability to learn and ‘spin on a dime’ becomes paramount. The BBC article discusses the use of technology to analyze data and spot potential risks and trends. But what about people? Technology is only a small part of creating more nimble companies. Workers have to be able to recognize patterns in complexity and chaos and be empowered to do something with their observations and insights.

The Principles of Networked Unmanagement provide an initial framework.

It is only through innovative and contextual methods, the self-selection of the most appropriate tools and work conditions, and willing cooperation that more productive work can be assured. The duty of being transparent in our work and sharing our knowledge rests with all workers.

Innovative and contextual methods mean that standard processes do not work for exception-handling or identifying new patterns. Self-selection of tools puts workers in control of what they use, like knowledge artisans whose distinguishing characteristic is seeking and sharing information to complete tasks. Equipped with, and augmented by, technology, they cooperate through their networks to solve complex problems and test new ideas. This only works in transparent environments.

If learning, and unlearning, are not integrated with the daily work flow then opportunities, such as the Duchess’s dress cited in the BBC article, will be missed. Organizations and their ecosystems that can learn and adapt quickly will be able to capitalize on the myriad opportunities that are constantly presented in a hyper-connected economy. This is nothing new, but it is becoming much more crucial for business survival.

 

networked unlearning

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Our nature – our bias towards an inward focus based on tradition and the past, or an external focus on what we’re seeing around us – cuts across age. Those of us who are willing to question our assumptions will find that we can unlearn (and relearn) at any age. Those who put more weight on what they already know will struggle to change at any age. Today’s digital native will be tomorrow’s digital dinosaur if they are unable to unlearn. That bleeding edge agile practitioner who dogmatically insists that they won’t work with unless you follow these four (in their view) essential agile practices has more in common with their older colleagues still clinging to waterfall methodologies than they are comfortable admitting. —Peter Evans-Greenwood

How can we avoid becoming dogmatic? I think social media can help a lot. Today, we can easily connect to networks that offer diverse views. Inge de Waard uses the example of research tribes: “When joining forces with people that have a common language – but different viewing angles – everyone learns as there is some kind of zone of proximal development there, or it can be created based on mutual conversation and dialogue.” Social media are tools that can help us develop emergent practices. They enable conversations between people separated by distance or time. Social media can facilitate the sharing of tacit knowledge through conversations to inform the collaborative development of emergent work practices. Conversations that push our limits enable critical thinking, which boils down to questioning assumptions, including our own.

One way to build a cognitive web toolbox would be to start with each of the four critical thinking categories shown in the image above. Each sub-category is just an example, and includes many different tools. One can start unlearning by finding and mastering tools that allow you to critically observe and study your field, participate in conversations that  push your understanding, challenge your assumptions, evaluate others’ arguments, and make tentative opinions that in turn will be challenged.

Unlearning takes practice. Living in a state of perpetual Beta can also be uncomfortable. The key is to be engaged in your learning. It requires strong opinions, loosely held. That means going out on a limb knowing you may be criticized. It also means putting forth half-baked ideas, which over time and exposure may develop into something more solid.

But finding and weaving our knowledge networks is getting easier with over two billion of us connected by the Internet. This scale and diversity is an advantage, not something to be concerned about. There is no such thing as information overload. I have yet to see someone completely filled with information. The real challenge is finding the right information. The more I learn, the more I realize I have to learn even more.

As Peter says in the article quoted above, “… it’s not learning that is the challenge, it’s our ability to unlearn that’s holding many of us back.” But we don’t need to unlearn alone. Our networks can help us unlearn; if they are are open, transparent, and most importantly, diverse. A more descriptive term for Personal Knowledge Mastery might just be Networked Unlearning or connected critical thinking.

Friday's Dutch Treat

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Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past week.

During a client workshop in the Netherlands this week, I explained how I use Twitter favourites to collect items of interest during the week and then review these before posting my regular Friday’s Finds post on this blog. I will often tweet an article and then add it to favourites so that I pick it up during my weekly review. The key to PKM is to find a routine that works for you. KM has to be personal to work in the long run.

For example, earlier this week @MHHoekstra had written a blog post that was pertinent to the workshop. I quickly looked at Maarten’s post, a conscious learning process, when it was tweeted by @C4LPT and then added it to my favourites to review later. Two days later, I have read the post and refer to one of the graphics below:

Also, via @nilofer I came across an article in The Atlantic that has me confirming many of my thoughts on work being automated and outsourced. Higher-value manufacturing work, requiring greater task variety and hence more tacit knowledge and informal learning, is actually coming back. But standardized work, with high task standardization, is not. The piece is entitled: The Insourcing Boom.

What’s happening in factories across the U.S. is not simply a reversal of decades of outsourcing. If there was once a rush to push factories of nearly every kind offshore, their return is more careful; many things are never coming back. Levi Strauss used to have more than 60 domestic blue-jeans plants; today it contracts out work to 16 and owns none, and it’s hard to imagine mass-market clothing factories ever coming back in significant numbers—the work is too basic.
Appliance Park once used its thousands of workers to make almost every part of every appliance; today, every component GE decides to make in Louisville returns home only after a careful calculation that balances quality, cost, skills, and speed. Appliance Park wants to make its own dishwasher racks, because it can, and because the rack is an important part of the dishwasher experience for customers. But Appliance Park will likely never again make its own compressors or motors, nor is it going to build a microchip-etching facility.

Finally, here is a photo from my last day in Amsterdam. For more information on the Latin inscription, see this short description from File Magazine.

 

Future Perfect

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What is a “peer progressive”? Steven Johnson, in Future Perfect, describes a person who is neither right-wing nor left-wing, ignoring the labels of 20th century politics, and one who embraces the power of networks for the betterment of society.

To be a peer progressive, then, is to believe that the key to continued progress lies in building peer networks in as many regions of modern life as possible: in education, health care, city neighborhoods, private corporations, and government agencies. When a need arises in society that goes unmet, our first impulse should be to build a peer network to solve that problem. Some of these networks will rely heavily on technology, as Kickstarter does; while others will be built using older tools of community and communication, including that timeless platform of humans gathering in the same room and talking to one another.

This book talks a lot about governance models and how people can organize to make better organizations: political, business, and non-profit. For example, Johnson discusses the work of Scott E. Page who states that “Diversity trumps ability“, an interesting concept for decision-making.

Take two groups of individuals and assign to each one some kind of problem to solve. One group has a higher average IQ than the other, and is more homogenous in its composition. One group, say, is all doctors with IQs above 130; the second group doesn’t perform as well on IQ tests, but includes a wide range of professions. What Page found, paradoxically, was that the diverse group was ultimately smarter than the smart group. The individuals in the high-IQ group might have scored better individually on intelligence tests, but when it came to solving problems as a group, diversity matters more than individual brainpower.

Steven Johnson argues that it is time to change our guiding economic framework: corporate capitalism.

Capitalism helped us see the value of decentralized networks through the price signalling of markets. The next phase is for capitalism to apply those lessons to the social architecture of corporations themselves.

Some people might call this social business.

The modern regime of big corporations and big governments has existed for the past few centuries in an artificial state that neglected alternative channels through which information could flow and decisions could be made.

Johnson shows in the book that we need to shift our thinking from centralized power to the power of distributed networks, which are more robust, especially in facing complex problems.

Image: Paul Baran (1964) RAND

Future Perfect: The case for progress in a networked age, is a recommended read.

Quotes to learn from

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Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past week.

J. Paul Getty: “In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy.” via @kanta_sharma

@BetaLeadership – “Most CEOs of the world at some point long ago delegated disciplined practice and learning – and thus became relatively dumb.”

@BetaLeadership – “In the long run, every company has EXACTLY the people it deserves. Period.”

Ivan Illich: “Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting.” via @IvanIllich2

Paulo Freire: “To teach is not to transfer knowledge but to create the possibilities for the production or construction of knowledge.” via @timbuckteeth

Buckminster Fuller: “Wealth is the ability to regenerate life. How many people can you take care of for how many days?” via @finnern

William James: “The deepest human need is the need to be appreciated.” via@dscofield

Joachim Stroh on Google Plus:

The chessboard picture points to another side effect of transparency: things are becoming more visible to anyone in the organization, and consequently, the level of understanding throughout the organization needs to rise as well. It’s one thing to see the individual pieces on the chessboard, and it’s another thing to understand the moves on the board.

Working in the dark

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I discuss transparency a lot on this blog. I see it as one of the three principles for net work. Transparency is a key enabler of shared power and making our organizations more democratic. Alex Bogusky says that, “Transparency isn’t a choice. The only choice is does it happen to you or do you participate in it.” As the external world becomes more transparent, for better or worse, then so must the internal workplace move toward transparency.

However, a dysfunctional company culture does not improve with transparency, it just gets exposed. This is the major obstacle in improving workplace transparency – fear of exposure. As Marshall McLuhan noted several decades ago, we now live in a global village. Our workplaces need to adapt to this reality.

Nick Charney has a good post on the value of openness, an enabler of transparency, in the federal public service. Tools like internal wikis can facilitate this, if they are used.

But first I wanted to set up the discussion by arguing that GCPEDIA (the Government of Canada’s official internal wiki) has the potential to be the single most transformative technology adopted by the Government of Canada since the first computers were issued to civil servants twenty years ago. It is the only technological environment (possibly with the exception of the lesser known GCConnex and GCForums) that allows public servants to share information across the entire enterprise. It has the potential to level geography, silos, and hierarchy and in so doing allows the civil service to tap into its cognitive surplus like no other technology to date has.

 Jessica Stillman describes two of the biggest fears about working transparently:

  • Fear #1: Your company will be a ship without a rudder
  • Fear #2: No carrot, no stick, more slacking

Sigurd Rinde understands the value of transparency in getting work done. He redesigned an advertising agency’s workflow, identifying the main choke points – four “big meetings” where one of the “owners” had to be present – and then made the workflow visible so anybody could see what was happening.

With an average seven weeks from start to end for their projects, where I assumed half a week average delay from instant for each meeting due to “sorry, I’m busy on Thursday”s (that I would argue was very optimistic), we could cut the time from seven to five weeks per project, on average, without losing anything but thumb twiddling. With a 20% profit margin today it would translate to a tripling of their profits.

Of course the clients would think this was a great idea.

Did they go for this no-brainer? Nope, the two owners would not hear of it, their controlling habits and methods where not to be touched, and bah humbug to tripling of profits. Ah well, their prerogative, they did not have outside investors. Maybe I should have had a chat with their spouses over lunch at Harrods?

The clients did not go for this, even with the data staring them in the face they continued in their old ways. This confirms what I noted in my last post. Just having the right information will not get us to change how we work.

Medecins sans frontières [MSF] has embraced transparency as an essential part of its international aid work in the world’s most dangerous areas. MSF knows that learning through constant discussions is critical for all members of the organization. MSF has a culture of debate and exposing the truth and this lets the organization move forward. Transparency can mean life or death for members of MSF, as any organization dealing with complexity and chaos has to understand.

What may be considered a knowledge management problem, finding the right information at the right time, is really a transparency one. If I want to find general information, I search the Web, and quite often find what I need. For more contextual knowledge, I ask my network via text message, Twitter, blog or forum. The reason I can do this is that either the knowledge or the knowledgeable person is visible on the web. Without transparency being practiced on the web, it would be a useless resource for finding information. Transparency gives the web its power.

A common occurrence inside large organizations is not being able to find information. Finding information can take up to 36% of workers’ time. Transparency is the principle that everything that can be shared, should be. It is achieved by embracing simple standards, like the web uses. It assumes that we never know how information may be used in the future, so we make it easy to find. As natural pattern seekers, if enough of us can see the data and information we all create, then there may be a chance that we can make some sense of it. If not, we will continue to work in the dark.

The right information is not enough

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There is quite a bit of research on the significant value of making the right information available to the right person at the right time – and quite a bit of research shows clearly that Enterprise Search has a direct impact on the success of organizations. So enterprise search platforms must include social capabilities to tap into powerful ways to find the information that employees need more quickly and accurately. This calls for integration into a single platform that continuously evolves as the workplace changes.

This is the conclusion made by Julie Hunt in a comprehensive post on enterprise search. I would like to contrast this with a statement made by Dave Snowden that I noted in negotiating between chaos and project management.

Fallacy: If you give the right information, to the right people, at the right time, they will act accordingly. As “pattern-seekers” we may not even “see” the data when it is presented.

This is a problem with technology-centric solutions to business problems. Business is about people and how they interact. No single technology has ever addressed an entire area of business. No technology will resolve our search issues because we don’t have search issues. Our business issues are more like understanding disparate data; finding information to support or refute what we think we know; and getting information that helps us take appropriate action. There is a danger that a single social search platform could be seen as replacing the need for personal reflection and providing time for individual sense-making and sharing it. It has happened before with knowledge management and learning management systems.

I am a strong proponent of manual, not automatic, sense-making frameworks. Each person is the indivisible unit of knowledge work. If the aim is to improve organizational knowledge, then people have to take time to make sense of it. If not, it remains merely information, whether in a unified search tool or elsewhere.

While Julie Hunt provides a good overview of how social re-connects enterprise search, we should not let search tools, or any other tools, override the social (human) aspects of business. As Jay Cross says, business is VERY personal. Sense-making, or learning while we work, is too important to be managed by a single technology platform.

Coherence in complexity

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Many of our older business models are not working any more. Anecdote reports that John Kotter, leadership guru, is accepting that methods like his 8-step process for leading change may not be effective in the face of complexity.

“The majority of the [HBR Paywall] article is focussed on a ‘new’ concept Kotter calls ‘Strategic Accelerators’. In effect, he is talking about using Communities of Practice/collaborative networks to tap into the power and agility of the informal capabilities of an organisation. The network of strategic accelerators complements the formal systems; it does not replace them. Collaborative networks are not a new concept, but Kotter’s application of them to the arena of strategy is very insightful.”

I have been discussing the potential of communities of practice in fostering innovation for some time here. In my last post I wrote that in an increasingly complex workplace, many of the old models are no longer useful, referring more specifically to workplace learning. The same is happening to our models for management and ‘change management’, as if we could manage change in the first place. Complexity, driven by global networked communications, is the main factor.

High value work today is in addressing complexity, whether it be in the market, society, or the environment. This requires learning, sharing, innovating and engaging. Organizations that promote awareness, transparency and openness through appropriate ways to coordinate, collaborate and cooperate have a better chance of understanding complexity. Joachim Stroh describes this in his fractal image below.
fractal

The coherent organization is our way of creating a framework to look at organizational performance. It is based on the fact that governance, work, and learning models are moving from centralized control to network-centric foundations. For instance, coalition governments are increasing in frequency, businesses are organizing in value networks, and collaborative & connected learning is becoming widespread. A coherent organization framework ensures that collaboration (working for a common objective) and cooperation (sharing freely) flow both ways. Systems, such as enterprise social network tools, can assist ‘net work’ practices like the narration of work and personal knowledge mastery.
communities of practice

So while change cannot be managed, per se, organizations can be structured in ways to be more resilient to change. Kotter suggests a second operating system:

“The existing structures and processes that together form an organization’s operating system need an additional element to address the challenges produced by mounting complexity and rapid change. The solution is a second operating system, devoted to the design and implementation of strategy, that uses an agile, networklike structure and a very different set of processes. The new operating system continually assesses the business, the industry, and the organization, and reacts with greater agility, speed, and creativity than the existing one. It complements rather than overburdens the traditional hierarchy, thus freeing the latter to do what it’s optimized to do. It actually makes enterprises easier to run and accelerates strategic change. This is not an “either or” idea. It’s “both and.” I’m proposing two systems that operate in concert.”

I would strongly suggest instead that organizations need to get the first operating system correct so that they do not need a second one. A coherent organization is structured to take advantage of the complexity and noisiness of social networks, allowing information to flow as freely as possible, and affording workers the space to make sense of it and share their experiences and knowledge. The underlying concept of a coherent organization is that organizations and their people are members of many different types of networks, for example, communities of practice, the company social network, and close-knit collaborative work teams. A coherent organization requires a single unifying framework, not two operating systems.

Ask not for whom the Reaper comes

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My colleagues and I often get cast as informal learning zealots in pieces written to placate the training industry and maintain the status quo, especially the lucrative compliance training market. Actually, given the tone of some articles and presentations, I am certain many people think of us in even less friendly terms.

So…now you get back to Training and they’re sitting around the fire at the mouth of the Training cave hugging their storyboards to their chests like flotation devices in a water landing. They’re in a trance and chanting ADDIE over and over…rocking back and forth and hugging those storyboard for dear life. And here you come, dragging your new stakeholder relationship and your sparkling new EPSS behind you, or your cheap-as-heck Web services portal, or your SharePoint, or your WordPress site. Your silhouette looks to many of your peers like that of the grim reaper. Several are updating resumes. Others whimper softly, “Please don’t make me change.” – Gary Wise

The Grim Reaper seems an appropriate image. My colleague Charles Jennings looks at workplace learning from the perspective of Experience, Exposure & Education; with the latter accounting for about ten percent of time and effort. The Reaper looks for those who spend 100% of their efforts only supporting the ten percent. The Reaper knows that work is learning and learning is the work. Workplace learning means much more than courses and management systems. I have said many times that courses are artifacts of a time when information was scarce and connections were few. That time has passed. The Reaper is looking for those who insist on living in the past.

While the course purveyors look to “leverage” informal and social learning for their schooling tools, they should note that levers are designed to move things, and it will be the courses that move – into a darker corner. As my colleague Jane Hart shows in this image, there is a lot of room to expand as a learning and performance consultant.

In an increasingly complex workplace, many of the old models are no longer useful. Schooling, the basis of much of corporate training, is one of these. Connections to almost unlimited information show how much more powerful Pull learning is to Push, like self-taught African teens and hole-in-the-wall learning. A generation of self-taught learners outside the western schooling model is becoming the next global workforce, and more importantly, your competition.

Ask not for whom the Reaper comes – he comes for you.