Transparency isn't a choice

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

@skap5 – “Be afraid institutions, be very afraid. Self organized networks are getting better at the purposeful part.”

FastCoExist: Watch Alex Bogusky Talk About The Future Of Responsible Companies

Now Bogsuky is working on models for companies to be better citizens, and part of that involves a different take on advertising so that the new information you get about a company isn’t a gimmick, but hard facts about its performance. “Brand is going to change radically from what’s been a fictional story that’s stood between you and the company to real-time, up-to-the-minute truth about your company,” he says. “Can you–through that–convince me to buy?”

As Bogusky says: “Transparency isn’t a choice. The only choice is does it happen to you or do you participate in it.”

Banks are being Disrupted by the Process of the Innovator’s Dilemma – Part 1 – by @robpatrob

What this implies is, that at some point, Money itself will be questioned. For today money is created by bank lending. With a Fractional reserve system, each dollar that a bank lends to you only requires a reserve of 10 cents. The other 90 cents is magic.

What Killed Michael Porter’s Monitor Group? The One Force That Really Matters – by @stevedenning

Monitor wasn’t killed by any of the five forces of competitive rivalry. Ultimately what killed Monitor was the fact that its customers were no longer willing to buy what Monitor was selling. Monitor was crushed by the single dominant force in today’s marketplace: the customer.

@KJatMARS – “My 16 yr old daughter just told me she was the next version of my operating system that comes with all the bugs fixed!”

“Great example of the power of self-directed, experiential learning and innovation.” via @CharlesJennings

A theoretical model for PKM

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My focus on PKM developed after an initial personal need and then increased when I saw how personal knowledge management could help others. Cheong, KF 2011, ‘The roles and values of personal knowledge management‘, DBA thesis, Southern Cross University, Lismore, NSW – now adds some solid research to the field. K.F. (Ricky) Cheong asked the following research questions:

RQ1: What are the roles of PKM in the Knowledge Management Process?

RQ2: What are the values of PKM for individuals and organisations?

RQ3: Is there any correlation between the roles of PKM in Knowledge Management Processes and the values of PKM for individuals and organisations?

RQ4: Is there any correlation between the values of PKM for individuals and the values of PKM for organisations?

Cheong provides this overview of a general definition:

Irrespective of how PKM is defined by different scholars, the key purpose of PKM is to provide a framework for individuals to manage new information, integrate it and enrich each individual knowledge database in an effective manner. Doing this successfully will empower each individual to easily apply their own personal knowledge to deal with new and old problems, to learn from new experience and to create new knowledge. It is a continuous and interactive process which is not independent of other knowledge management processes. (p. 42)

He based the research model and questions on a framework of skills for undergraduates, developed by Susan Avery, Personal Knowledge Management: Framework for Integration and Partnerships, presented in 2001.

The literature review in chapter 2 stated that Avery et al. (2001) defined PKM as an overall structured process for intentionally managing information and turning it into useful knowledge. There were seven PKM skills in the proposed PKM framework, namely (1) Retrieving information; (2) Evaluating information; (3) Organising information; (4) Collaborating around information; (5) Analysing information; (6) Presenting information; and (7) Securing information. (p. 233)

Cheong concluded, as I have, that PKM is beneficial on both a personal and organizational level. I am quoted in the thesis, but it is my earlier work, and not the more developed Seek > Sense > Share framework I now use, that shows how important knowledge – sharing is for individuals, organizations, and networks.

In summary, the research findings concluded that PKM has important roles in KM processes (section 5.2.1). The values of PKM were found to have significant contribution (section 5.2.2) in both individual competences and organisational competences. Positive correlations were found between the roles of PKM and their values in contributing to individual competences and organisation competences (section 5.2.3), and also between the values of PKM for individual competences and the values of PKM for organisation competences (section 5.2.4). (p. 259)

Cheong suggests that organizations incorporate PKM into knowledge management, and I  generally agree, though I have concerns with (3) as it might make PKM less personal and therefore not habitually used by knowledge workers.

The following is a general framework to guide an organisation in its task of implementing their organisational PKM strategy. (p. 264)

(1) Treat PKM Skills as an asset for organisation.
(2) Develop a PKM Skills inventory as part of Human Capital Management.
(3) PKM Skills are part of the performance measurement and reward system.
(4) Develop an individual learning plan to acquire and improve PKM skills.
(5) Leverage on IT based PKM tools to embed individual learning processes into the organisational learning process.

For most PKM practitioners, this is likely too much information, but Cheong does a good job of a fairly extensive literature review and corroborates what many practitioners already know. This work could be useful in getting PKM accepted as a more standard organizational practice, and for that, I thank Ricky K.F. Cheong.

Image: PKM Roles & Values by K.F. Cheong

Social business for organizational survival

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The potential of social business is organizational survival, because enterprises must be able to share knowledge quicker than before.  Why? As everyone and everything gets connected to the Net, feedback loops, both positive and negative, accelerate. A video can go viral and generate fame and revenue almost overnight. A racist act can be recorded and distributed around the world in minutes, even years after the event, forcing the perpetrators to leave politics. Customers can quickly force companies to change their policies, taking advantage of social media’s capability for “ridiculously easy group-forming” [Seb Paquet].  Self-publishing makes everyone a broadcaster.

Social business requires a major shift in how we do work, moving from hierarchies to networks. What does this really mean? It is understanding that business is not something separate from being human, and that humans are social creatures. Business is personal and has always been. We just thought we could mechanize everything by applying the principles of scientific management and other industrial age crap that have only got us into a bigger mess than when we started a century ago. As Jay Cross explains:

“People are emotional beings. We take everything personally.

Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, business has tried to cover this up. Management by spreadsheet is easier if workers are interchangeable parts. No messy emotions to get in the way.”

We are beginning to realize that the highest value work today is the more complex stuff, or the type of work that cannot be automated or outsourced. It’s work that requires creativity and passion. Doing complex work in networks means that information, knowledge and power no longer flow up and down but in all directions. Social business is giving up centralized control and harnessing the power of networks.

Knowledge networks are based on openness, transparency and diversity, from which trust emerges. Effective enterprise networks ensure that when knowledge is gained, some of it can be captured and then easily shared. Trust is essential for sharing implicit knowledge. This is the core of social learning – sharing implicit knowledge through conversations, observations and modelled behaviour.  Social learning is how organizational knowledge gets distributed. A social business learns quicker through social learning. Social media are merely enablers, if used adeptly.

A business that is more connected to its people, its customers, and its partners will be more resilient than one that is reliant on rules, regulations, and mechanistic frameworks. Many people talk about the need for resilience in facing climate change, population growth and environmental degradation.

Resilience is also an “… ineffable quality that allows some people to be knocked down by life and come back stronger than ever …” Social businesses are more resilient because they rely on people, not processes. The latter are developed only to handle the work that is not complex or creative, freeing workers to deal more with exception handling. Social business is how an organization can survive by using a more resilient, organic framework. Isn’t it time to exorcise Frederick Winslow Taylor’s ghost from our organizations?

Become your own upstart

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Upstarts & Incumbents

In Clayton Christensen’s book, Seeing What’s Next the authors discuss how new business entrants (upstarts) can target non-core customers of industry incumbents. These come in three categories (overshot, undershot and non-customers) and by targeting these customers, entrants can avoid direct confrontation, while developing skills and expertise in areas outside the core business of the incumbents. Once the entrants have grown “under the radar”, they can grow to directly confront the incumbents. They can develop “asymmetrical skills” based on “asymmetrical motivations”. Basically, they are motivated to do new things that do not have the revenue streams of the existing products and services of incumbents.

According to this model, new entrants to a market should identify potential customers based upon the markets of established incumbent(s):

  1. Undershot – willing to pay more for more functions/services
  2. Overshot – find current offering more than adequate
  3. Non-consumers – lack ability or the wealth for current service / products

For a new entrant, the best market is the non-consumer (also the least demanding) who is under the radar of the incumbents. The second best target group is the Overshot Customer (specialist displacement for mainstream) who is willing to accept a more specialized product/service than the broader offering of the incumbent, or one who is looking for something cheaper and “good enough” (low end).

In business, there are always upstarts with different motivations and new skills looking for new opportunities and disruptive innovations. Some of the key questions to ask when looking for signals of change in any industry or market are:

  • What jobs are customers trying to get done?
  • Are customers not served, undershot or overshot by current offerings?
  • Where are new business models emerging?
  • What role do regulatory agencies play?
  • Has a recent technology changed how work gets done?

Internal Upstarts

You could look at your current organization as an incumbent and yourself as an upstart and ask similar questions to those above. What is the organization focused on and who are the overshot and undershot customers? Who are the non-consumers? You can do this individually, as a team, or even a department. Perhaps you realize that your organization is not dealing well with networked customers and has poor knowledge-sharing and collaboration skills. With asymmetrical motivation, you can start learning and developing these yourself. Over time this will give you asymmetrical skills, like online community management or mastery of social media tools. None of this would be at odds with the organization or your current work.

If you think that your organization may not survive the next onslaught from an external upstart, then perhaps it’s time to realize that with the right motivation, you and your colleagues could develop the skills needed to take the upstarts on when the time comes. So start doing something the organization does not want to do and few have the skills to do. If you think that successful organizations in the near future will practice networked unmanagement, then you can start developing asymmetrical skills for the networked workplace now by:

Organizational, institutional, technological, and market changes are certainly coming as the network era gets into full swing. Watch for the signals of change as existing industries fall to the upstarts and be ready yourself.

Friday's Smorgasbord

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Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past week [as I prepare for a long flight home, with too many stops on the way].

@RalphMercer – “pilot projects are designed to delay good ideas until they are out of date”

Manuel Castells on the rise of alternative economic cultures – via @jonhusband

“We live in a culture of not virtual reality, but real virtuality because our virtuality – meaning the internet networks – are a fundamental part of our reality.

“All the studies on the internet show that people who are more social on the internet are also more social face-to-face.”

@HansdeZwart – Brewster Kahle on “Universal Access to All Knowledge”

They are convinced that it is feasible to store all the world’s knowledge. Texts are being digitized (i.e. scanned) for representation on the screen (see Open Library for examples) and are openly available. The Internet Archive have made their own scanners pushing the costs per scanned page (mostly labour) down to about 10 cents per page. Their scanning centers now have 3,000,000 free ebooks available online (incl. 500,000 for the blind/dyslexic and 250,000 modern books available for lending) and they have about 8 million more to go. They have made a book mobile that can download and print a book for about one dollar.

@Ignatia – European Environment Agency Keynote [my presentation summarized by Inge de Waard]

Moving from local to global
We live in a less barriered world: self-publication, group forming across the world, unlimited information. In the past we linked up with people with similar interests locally, due to simply physical realities… now we can link up with people from around the world. So from a learning perspective our learning group grows (personal addition: this also means that the group that lives inside the personal zone of proximal development grows, as more people can potentially be in this). Groupforming is now becoming networks. This has an effect on mentorship: per mentor you can only have so many learners, but with the growing group more mentors can stand up and the learners themselves can become mentors.

I saw more bicycles in Copenhagen in 2 days than I see at home in 2 months. They are everywhere. Here are some in front of the central department store, Magasin du Nord.

The training world is changing

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From the Citrix GoTo Blog:

Open online courses, talent management, social collaboration: The training world is changing. Traditional training structures, based on institutions, programs, courses and classes, are under pressure. One of the biggest changes we are seeing in online training is that the content-delivery model is being replaced by social and collaborative frameworks.

Here are just some of things happening now that trainers should be prepared to tackle in the new year:

Increasing Complexity

Helping people be more creative and solve complex problems is now a priority. While workers still need to be trained and educated, that alone will not prepare them for a networked workplace that requires continuous learning on the job. Training departments need to add more thought and resources to enable people to learn socially, share cooperatively and work collaboratively …

An Expanded Role for Training and Development

Training professionals will need to help create and support social learning networks, moving out of the classroom to where the work is being done. They will also need to promote continuous knowledge sharing by modeling how it is done and setting the example. Trainers will have to become expert learners …

Learning as a Business Imperative

As work becomes more networked and complex, the social aspects of knowledge sharing and collaboration are becoming more important. Learning amongst ourselves is getting to be the real work in many organizations. Training development professionals should be part of that change.

For a more in-depth list of near-term trends that should be taken into consideration during the next year, download [read] the white paper: https://www.slideshare.net/GoToTraining/whats-working-and-whats-not-in-online-training

EEA Learning Day

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I will travelling and speaking for most of this week but will share what I have learned when I get back. This will be my first time addressing the European Environment Agency in Copenhagen and I look forward to meeting many new people. Here is what I will be talking about:

Keynote: Working Smarter in the Learning Organisation

As complexity increases in the networked economy, we need to integrate learning into the workflow. Communities of practice bridge the gap between getting work done and serendipitously connecting to looser social networks. Learning and development in the networked workplace must move from content delivery to community enablement. Harold Jarche will present a new framework for working smarter which includes the narration of work, transparency and knowledge-sharing to increase innovation.

I will also be running a workshop for managers:

Workshop: Coaching in the Learning Organisation

Harold Jarche will discuss some new approaches to support informal and social learning in the workplace. If problems and environments are becoming more complex, and are changing so quickly that our level of information will always be inadequate, there are some new qualities that learning coaches will need: 

1.       Openness to learning, not only from our peers, but from our employees and their contacts.

2.       Flexibility in our learning approaches; helping people understand how they learn best.

3.       The ability to be a generalist, moving in and out of learning situations as required.

4.       The skill to develop large-scale social networks in order to access help in solving  employee problems.

5.       An understanding of how networks operate in the exchange and development of knowledge.

"If you don’t build your dream, someone will hire you to build theirs"

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

@MichaelYardney – “If you don’t build your dream, someone will hire you to build theirs.”

@Bulldozer0 – “The best way to overcome cynicism and skepticism is with openness and transparency.”

The Myth of Hiring Passionate Employees via @OscarBerg

What really facilitates the benefits of having a passionate employee is rolling out the red CARPET:

Challenges — an employee can use his/her skills to the fullest, such that (s)he must do her best every day
Autonomy — an employee has the freedom to act in accordance with his/her passion
Resources — an employee has the wherewithal to go the extra mile
Professional development — an employee has opportunities to learn and grow in/with the company
Enthusiasm — an employee can share his/her enthusiasm with others and have it reciprocated
Tangible impact — an employee can tell that what (s)he is doing is meaningful and valuable

A suggested plan to confront Death by Administration via @AdrianCheok

One, no meeting is ever convened other than to take decisions.

Two, nobody is required to go to a meeting unless its decisions affect them.

Three, university managers must begin meetings with discussion of a recent scholarly article or book on any topic — apart from management.

The last one should really reduce meeting time.

Toby Miller is professor of cultural industries at City University London.

What is learning’s role?

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My colleague, Clark Quinn, in Building a Performance Ecosystem states that the benefits of maximum information for people to get work done, combined with minimum barriers to achieve their work goals, are good for the entire organization. “When they [workers] can get the resources they need and the right people to assist when necessary, the performance benefits are obvious.” Alignment is necessary.

Some of that alignment is missing between departmental silos though. While Clark says that “learning leaders” should step up to the challenge, there is also a strong need to get aligned with IT, marketing, and operations, to name a few. As Clark concludes:

“By aligning the use of technology with business needs in this way, learning leaders are demonstrating the strategic contribution to the organization that the executive suite wants to see. Failing to grasp the opportunity at this inflection point in business operations has a grim prospect. Folks know they can learn on their own and together. If learning leaders don’t get in and facilitate the full learning spectrum, it will happen without them. Then, just what is learning’s role?”

What is learning’s role? First of all, in the network era, a coherent organization is one in which learning is no longer a specialty. Much as writing was no longer a specialty when the majority of workers became literate, learning today is more than putting an X in a checkbox. Work is learning and learning is the work. I may have said this many times before but it is the essential change in how we must view knowledge-intensive and creative work in a networked environment.

Learning is not something done to us, it is what we do together. Learning delivery in a constantly changing work environment is an outdated notion. For example, training courses are artifacts of a time when information was scarce and connections were few. It is glaringly obvious in this time of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity that we can get pretty well any information we need whenever we want it. To make sense of this, we need network era literacies, and with these new literacies we no longer need the equivalent of learning scribes. Pulling informal learning, instead of having formal instruction pushed to workers, has to become the workplace norm. By norm, I do not mean something bolted on to a course or some function of an LMS. I mean integrated into the daily work flow.

Learning together is part of collaborating to get things done while also cooperating in order to participate in knowledge networks. “Strictly business” is less frequently the case in our lives, as our work/life boundaries get fuzzier. Meanwhile the work/learning boundaries also get fuzzier. We no longer limit our learning to classrooms, training centres, workstations, or our official company mobile devices. In this environment, we cannot leave the direction of our learning to a “learning professional”. If today’s learning professionals want to remain relevant in the coherent organization, then they need to participate in collaborative and cooperative work/learning flows. This will be a sea change for the training & development profession, but I am certain it will happen with our without their participation.

CoherentOrgExpanded

Enterprise social network dimensions

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Many organizations are using social media and social networks, but how do they know if they are using them appropriately or adequately? Do they have all the aspects of collaboration and cooperation supported in order to succeed as a social business? I started looking at how we can begin to make sense of enterprise social networks from an organizational performance perspective and found a few good sources and have woven these together for what I hope is a useful performance support tool, or at least a conversation starter.

Ian McCarthy’s honeycomb of social media was an initial inspiration, showing how one could quickly and graphically portray differences between social media platforms. The Altimeter Group’s recent report on making the business case for enterprise social networks provided more detail on what happens inside organizations. Finally, Oscar Berg’s digital workplace concretized gave a good picture of what people-centric, service-oriented businesses should look like.

I put these concepts together within the framework of a coherent enterprise that supports both collaborative and cooperative behaviours. I hope it provides some clarity and would appreciate any feedback or further building upon these ideas. Thanks to all those who have shared so that I could play with these ideas, and hopefully create something useful.

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