Things are changing

by

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

@MeriWalker – “Higher education is like a corpse propped up in the corner of a building that’s rotting out from under it.”

@flowchainsensei – “How long will you tolerate domination, coercion and manipulation in the workplace? For as long as they pay you?”

You don’t need a banker – by @robpatrob

This idea was truly “disruptive”. The actual tools were inferior to the opposition. Their context was superior.

THIS is what my new book is all about.

It is a contextual guide that will, I hope, help you see the context and so the mindset issues that can either trap you or empower you.

Exhibit A: Toronto Star: We’re the source material for news

We do 90 per cent of the legwork. For all the budget-slashing, the Star still delivers an enviable package of local, national and international news coverage, plus award-winning investigative reporting, expert analysis and diverse commentary.

Exhibit B: GigaOm: blogs & Twitter picked up journalistic slack

But as Carr points out, it was exactly those Twitter accounts and bloggers who kept the heat on Armstrong and the doping allegations while the mainstream sports press were celebrating his achievements: Twitter users like @TheRaceRadio and @UCI_Overlord, and a relatively little-known blog called NYVelocity — a site run by a commercial photographer and amateur cycle-racer. Since founder Andy Shen didn’t have any connection to cycle-racing, he was free to pursue whatever stories he wanted, and others picked up and redistributed his links and commentary.

L’innovation pédagogique

by

Voici ma présentation hier soir à Moncton pour l’ouverture du colloque de l’ACDEAULF.

Résumé : Les médias sociaux, la dissémination du travail et l’information illimitée modifient nos relations en milieu de travail. Nous sommes désormais capables d’entrer en communication avec n’importe qui et n’importe où, et de trouver pratiquement toute l’information que nous recherchons. Les hyperliens réduisent à néant les hiérarchies, rendant superflues de nombreuses pratiques de l’éducation industriel.

Pourtant, nous nous accrochons aux méthodes traditionnelles d’évaluation du travail. Les compétences professionnelles étaient fondées sur des tâches stables et mesurables. Les cours sont le vestige d’une époque où l’information était peu abondante et les relations limitées. L’avenir du travail réside dans l’intégration de l’apprentissage et des méthodes de travail. L’avenir, c’est apprendre à travailler plus intelligemment.

It’s about value creation

by

There’s always something thought-provoking on Sigurd Rinde’s blog. His latest post, the information age fallacy, looks at the amount of time wasted in managing information flows, instead of creating anything new. The problem with information technology, as Sig describes it, is that IT, “has mostly produced faster ways to do exactly the same we did two thousand years ago.”

“The figures are rather simple – knowledge work stands for about 60% of the world’s value creation while knowledge workers spend on average about 2/3rd of their time on managing the flows. If we could automate that management and spend that time on value creation instead – i.e. change “what” we do – we would look at approximately 120% GNI growth world wide.”

The amount of time at work wasted doing certain non-productive tasks can be up to 50%, according to some studies, and this does not even include time wasted in meetings.

rp_wasted-time.png

Adapting to a networked economy and workplace takes time. This time has been overlooked in our race to get the next shiny piece of technology. Oscar Berg summed it up on Twitter recently and said that the main reason for our technology-centric approach to work is that we are hoping “for a silver bullet that will kill all our problems in one shot.” Obviously, the evidence shows that the next piece of technology will not solve our problems and may actually compound them.

Value is created by workers with creativity, curiosity, and empathy. Value creation in the 21st century is having ideas, connecting people and ideas, and trying new things out based on these ideas. Not only do these activities take time, they are highly social, as success often depends on who we work with. Spending time on merely managing data flows saps our energy and drive for doing creative work.

Maybe we need to look at productivity differently. Instead of asking, what have you done for the company this week, we should be asking what ideas you have had and what have you done to test them out? It might get us away from measuring and doing things that should be automated in the first place. Automation is not a bad thing if you know what to do with the extra time it provides, so let the droids do the boring stuff, and let’s focus on value creation.

A coherent path to social business

by

Thierry de Baillon and Ralph Ohr, in their post on Business Model Innovation as Wicked Problem, conclude the following:

An ever increasing pace of change leads to a decrease in life time of operating business models. Companies are therefore forced to reinvent themselves more frequently by creating new business models. Entering new businesses through open business model innovation exhibits a wicked problem structure. In order to properly address those problems, companies have to follow emergent strategies and need to put decentralized, self-organizing structures in place. Social business brings an answer to the urgent necessity to successfully tackle corporate reinvention and to enhance strategic adaptability by connecting individual human stakeholders.

What kinds of “emergent strategies and decentralized, self-organizing structures” can be put in place? I think it boils down to three things: Openness, Knowledge-sharing, and Diversity.

1. Openness can be encouraged through the use of social networks and enterprise social platforms. People need to know what others are doing and the default mode has to be sharing. If workers cannot connect with anyone they need to, then the knowledge needed to address a problem may never be revealed to those who need it. Opening communications to everyone is the antithesis of bureaucracy, where lines of control are ever-important.  Bureaucracies are the enemy of innovation, as they favour self-preservation over change. They are self-serving. They are also reinforced by the notion of jobs. Openness means getting rid of jobs, which subvert openness, innovation and emergent practices. Social networks, powered by social media, help to remove bureaucracy and antiquated ways of working.

2. Just because a system is open does not mean that a learning organization will emerge. People need to practice knowledge-sharing through the narration of work and personal knowledge mastery. Both are simple concepts to understand but take time to become daily practices throughout an organization.

3. Finally, any organization needs to have a diversity of opinions in order to remain innovative and deal with the wicked problems described by Thierry and Ralph. “Connections drive innovation“, according to Tim Kastelle. “We need input from people with a diversity of viewpoints to help generate innovative new ideas. If our circle of connections grow too small, or if everyone in it starts thinking the same way, we’ll stop generating new ideas.” This means giving access to social networks, eliminating tribes such as departmental silos, and actively looking for people with different backgrounds and experience.

Putting all of this together, is what we at the Internet Time Alliance call a coherent organization.

The Coherent Organization:
Cooperation & Collaboration flowing between work teams & social networks
via communities of practice

From observation to breakthrough

by

From multiple observations come ideas. From multiple ideas can come new insights. From multiple insights we can create stories. From our stories, we can change beliefs. In a nutshell [my interpretation], this is what Gunther Sonnenfeld discusses in much greater detail in The Great Planning Paradigm. Sonnenfeld’s post is focused on marketing, an area where I have little experience.

I find The Great Planning Paradigm is a good framework to look at innovation (breakthroughs) in general. It also aligns with personal knowledge management (PKM) or those routine behaviours that we can practice and perfect in order to enhance learning and innovation at an organizational level. The PKM framework of Seek-Sense-Share has several similarities. Observations equate to Seeking. Insight equates to Sensing. Telling stories equates to Sharing. It is most interesting to see a connection between PKM and marketing, something I would not have considered. Everything, it seems, is connected.

In PKM and innovation I showed how Seek-Sense-Share aligns with the four skills that most successful innovators exhibit. The framework has similarities with the four innovation skills noted by Scott Anthony, author of The Little Black Book Of Innovation. Seeking includes observation through effective filters and diverse sources of information. Sense-making starts with questioning our observations and includes experimenting, or probing (Probe-Sense-Respond). Sharing through our networks helps to develop better feedback loops. In an organization where everyone is practising PKM, the chances for more connections increases.

Collaboration is working together for a common objective, while cooperation is openly sharing, without any quid pro quo. Both are necessary in order to connect the work being done in organizations with new ideas outside the organizations. Innovation is not so much about having ideas, as making connections.

I recently explained the Seek-Sense-Share framework in my session with En Nu Online in the Netherlands, with quite positive feedback that the image below helped to convey how it worked. We seek new ideas from our social networks and then filter them through more focused conversations with our communities of practice, where we have trusted relationships. We make sense of these embryonic ideas by doing new things, either ourselves, or with our work teams. We later share our creations, first with our teams and perhaps later with our communities or even our networks. We use our understanding of our communities and networks to discern with whom and when to share our knowledge. Sometimes, timing is everything.

Draining the week

by

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

@asplake – “Toyota’s change-management secret: make no distinction between day-to-day management and change management”

“The Dynamic Duo: Collaboration and Chance” by @BenZiegler via @bentrem

We live in two worlds – order and chaos.  In the world of order we plan, reflect, and think about what to do next.  In the world of chaos things happen, we get things done, yet unpredictability persists.  In one world we like to think we are in control. In the other we mingle with increasing complexity, conflict, and uncertainty.

With increased collaboration we are better positioned, through our collective strength and diversity, to respond to whatever chaos throws our way.  Sometimes we should court serendipity, says Ben Casnocha. And anyways, success is random Kare Anderson reminds us.

“little attention is placed on preparing people to deal with the trials and dilemmas associated with success” by @shauncoffey

The benefits of success to the leader and the organisation are obvious.  Less readily apparent is the personal “dark side” of success which revolves largely around three psychological issues outlined by Ludwig and Longenecker (1993:270-271).  These are:
Climbing the success ladder exposes leaders to negative attitudes and behaviours.  There may not be apparent, but nonetheless come with the territory of successful leadership.  Negatives that could be reinforced include unbalanced personal lives, a loss of touch with reality and an inflated sense of personal ability.
Leaders may become emotionally expansive – “their appetite for success, thrills, gratification, and control becomes insatiable”.  They can lose the ability to be satisfied.  They can become personally isolated and lack intimacy with family and friends, losing a valuable source of personal balance.  They “literally lose touch with reality”.
Other factors include stress, fear of failure and the “emptiness syndrome” (“Is this all there is to success?”)  An inflated sense of ego can lead to abrasiveness, close-mindedness and disrespect.

Smiling Buddha Cabaret: The usefulness of draining

Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.

Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor’s cup full, and then kept on pouring.

The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. “It is overfull. No more will go in!”

“Like this cup,” Nan-in said, “you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”

It takes time to be social

by

According to research by the Dachis Group, only 10 – 20% of employees in large organizations are actively engaged with their enterprise social collaboration platforms, as reported in this MIT Sloan article:

It may be that for many employees, even in these early adopter firms working to integrate internal social business applications, using these applications do not offer enough value or reason to shift behavior. Employees may be unaware of the potential of their social platform; or perhaps they have not been properly trained and educated. Or of course, it is also possible that while they are aware and have been trained, the value still isn’t there or isn’t high enough.

I think that one of the underlying reason is that these platforms, like KM and elearning platforms before them, are not integrated with the workflow. For example, email, frustrating as it may be, is part of most business workflows. If a collaboration platform requires that you go out of your normal workflow, then it will not be used by anyone except the curious and the early adopters. The problem is too often a case of putting the technology before the people using it.

However, once social technologies have been installed, modelling new work behaviours becomes the next organizational challenge. This part is often overlooked in the hubris of a successful technology implementation project, when really it is just the beginning. Too many companies do not do the time-consuming work of modelling, coaching, mentoring and facilitating social learning (and I do not mean in the classroom). Low adoption rates are not a worker issue, they are a management issue.

Looking back on a project we did last year with a large organization, I note that we spent several months coaching the learning & performance innovation team on working socially. Initially, we had daily conference calls. We cajoled people to narrate their work, and required at least one micro-post per day. We did a lot of explaining and modelled narrating our work. Later we had weekly conference calls, or “virtual coffee” to discuss issues. These were essential, as even a few months into the new work/learning routine there was some confusion, so things were not obvious to everyone. It takes time and a lot of practice to change behaviours. After several months, we were no longer needed; but I doubt that progress would have been made if we had not provided the initial scaffolding.

Just being aware of the potential of a social platform is not enough. Everyone needs their own “aha” moment, and until that happens, adoption is not certain. It will not happen at all if the work being done on a daily basis and the social collaboration platform are not integrated; and if they are, it will still take time.

Innovation is not a repeatable process

by

Can innovation be promoted through better processes? James Gardner [dead link] does not think so any more.

“I have not been able to find any regular correlation between well adopted innovation processes and actual innovation outcomes, and I’ve been looking pretty hard. And here at Spigit, we’ve got hundreds of data sets to look through.”

After a decade of looking at innovation in organizations, Gardner says that people have to be personally motivated; the old “what’s in it for me?” [WIIFM] question. “In other words, if it personally affects us, we care about it. If it doesn’t, we might care a bit, but we are much less likely to take action to change things.”

This is why I think personal knowledge mastery is so important. PKM promotes unique, individual ways of sense-making, while still sharing among peers and colleagues. In my writing on PKM for the past eight years, I have stayed away from prescriptive methods on purpose. I want every knowledge worker to discover his or her own processes. With our PKM workshops, I have seen examples of many different tools used for PKM. There is no single answer, but once you find something that works, you have a better chance of sticking with it.

I recently wrote about PKM and innovation and concluded that in order to address complex problems, businesses have to rely more on individual tacit knowledge, but this type of knowledge is never easy to convey to others. It takes time and especially trust to keep making attempts at common understanding. Accepting PKM, as a flowing series of half-baked ideas, can encourage innovation and reduce the feeling that our exposed knowledge has to be ‘executive presentation perfect’.

Workplaces that enable the constant narration of work and learning in a trusted space can expose more tacit knowledge. We can foster innovation by accepting that our collective understanding is in a state of perpetual Beta. This is how we create a culture of innovation.

Innovation is like democracy, it needs people to be free within the system in order to work. In my opinion, democracy is an essential foundation for social business. Empowering knowledge artisans to use their own cognitive tools creates an environment of experimentation, instead of adherence to established processes. I discussed knowledge artisans in my recent white paper, and what follows is an excerpt.

An artisan is a skilled manual worker in a particular craft, using specialized processes, tools and machinery. Artisans were the dominant producers of goods before the industrial era. Knowledge artisans of the post-industrial era are beginning to retrieve old world care and attention to detail, but they are using the latest tools and processes 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, marketers, salespeople. Their distinguishing characteristic is seeking and sharing information to complete tasks.

Next generation knowledge artisans are amplified versions of their pre-industrial counterparts. Equipped with and 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, but they can also do the work. It is not passed down an assembly line. 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; and much more.

Allowing and supporting PKM, like BYOD, can empower knowledge artisans. This empowerment creates a more diverse set of skills and perspectives in the workplace. It also helps keep knowledge artisans motivated (autonomy, mastery, sense of purpose). While not directly equating to innovation, these conditions can be much more fertile ground for new ideas and many more connections. It’s rather obvious that strict command and control, or slavish adherence to cult-like methodologies like Sick Stigma, are getting us nowhere.

Understanding behaviour

by

In his book Drive, Dan Pink looked at rewards, consequences and motivation at work and showed that much of what we have taken for granted is just not supported by the research. Extrinsic rewards only work for simple physical tasks and increased monetary rewards can actually be detrimental to performance, especially with knowledge work. The keys to motivation at work are for each person to have a sense of Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose, as shown in this video. With this in mind, there are times when rewards and consequences are not linked to a desired performance, and this can lead to confusion or even worse. Rewards are still an important aspect to consider in workplace performance. Consider the case of medical researchers sharing their professional knowledge and findings amongst peers.

In a research-oriented work environment, it makes sense to share one’s knowledge so the whole team can be more productive. Insights from one person can save another a lot of wasted time. But what happens when this sharing is not recorded, or people are not given credit for their input? Compound this with a system that only rewards final discoveries, so that researchers have their bonus and career directly tied to their published work. Would you help out a colleague knowing that he alone would get credit for the final discovery? Would you be willing to share if the two of you were in competition for a promotion? Would you share if the company was letting go of staff based on merit, as measured in the annual performance reviews?

Klaus Wittkuhn wrote about human performance system imbalances several years ago in the Performance Improvement Journal.

It is not an intelligent strategy to train people to overcome system deficiencies. Instead, we should design the system properly to make sure that the performers can leverage all their capabilities.

Even if we trained researchers how to share their knowledge using social media tools combined with good network weaving behaviours, we likely would not get the knowledge-sharing behaviours the enterprise leadership say they want. This of course puts the knowledge management and learning support staff in a very difficult position. They know that the leadership says that collaboration is critical, but they see that the internal system has long-established barriers to real knowledge-sharing.

While a performance analysis can be helpful in determining the barriers to performance, sometimes these are controlled at such a high level that they are beyond the scope of those implementing new systems and initiatives. Perhaps the only thing that can be done is to highlight the issue by making it as clear as possible that all the technology and skills will not overcome systemic barriers. In the case of the researchers described above, not performing is rewarded.

Looking at Dan Pink’s three motivational factors, one can also say that even with a good degree of autonomy, mastery of a complex field of research, and a sense of purpose to create products for the benefit of society; there are still obstacles in creating an effective collaborative workplace. This is why anyone responsible for a collaboration project, such as promoting communities of practice, needs to look at all the factors influencing behaviour at work. There are no easy answers when it comes to changing behaviours in large organizations.

Performance Analysis process based on Mager & Pipe’s book
Analyzing Performance Problems

Taking Charge of your own Development

by

I was interviewed by Rob Paterson (podcast at link) this week and we talked about work, jobs and taking charge of your own professional development. Rob summarized our half-hour together with these points. It is a real pleasure to have someone else encapsulate what you think.

  • The Change in Work – It’s not just factory workers but even Doctors that are going to be automated or outsourced. So how will you make a living? Only truly creative work will pay.
  • So what is Creative Work? – It is not just design etc but will include making valuable things and even growing food – and new sites such as Etsy enable you to find a market
  • The Industrial World Deskilled work – It all became assembly – Anything like this can be automated and will be
  • The jobs cannot come back
  • Training works well when you want to learn how to drive a car – you can train to be a carpenter but making the shift to be creative or to stand for themseleves – you cannot train for that

What is the new?

  • So what helps you be this new person?
  • Apprenticing – complex things cannot be learned except by shared experience
  • The crafts communities have never lost this – learn the rules and then learn how to break them – look at studios – very little teaching – mainly doing
  • Then you have to get connected to your community
  • All sorts of studios will emerge that will help you where clusters of people who know aggregate
  • The Knowledge Artisans have to take charge of themselves

What about advice for you?

  • Learn REAL skills – not just how to make it in an organization
  • Learn how to have a network – in the job world we don’t have them – many of us don’t know anything about this if we have had a job – so start now
  • This must be diverse and be about your interests
  • Put yourself OUT THERE
  • You are as good as your network
  • Think of yourself as a Freelancer for Life – and so always nuture your network  no matter what – avoid getting lulled into a sense of false security

His [my] advice to his [our] kids

  • Find the sweet spot (Dave Pollard) Find out your passion, what you are good at and what people will pay you for
  • You have to have all three

Rob just wrote a book, the first in a series, called You Don’t Need a Job. If you could spend an evening with Rob, I am sure he would share much of what he has written here. But for less than the price of buying him a glass of red wine [his preference I would guess] you can purchase this e-book for only $2.99. Rob provides an interesting way to look at the changing nature of work, and how people are reacting to the fact that the economy and society have fundamentally shifted.

We can see the world now dividing into three camps. There is a camp in Phase I [childhood]. They want simple answers. They want the good old days where women know their place and God rules the natural world. All who are not with them are against them. There is a camp in phase II [teenager]. They want to belong. Status is granted to them by belonging to the system. They want structures that can be predicted. The natural world is only a resource. They want control. And finally there is phase III [adulthood]. Here people need to express themselves. They need to be part of what is going on. They feel connected to all people and to all things.

There is lots of good advice in this first manual for the network era. You may not need a job, but we all need to work together in creating better structures for exchanging value. This book can help. Rob’s next book, You don’t need a Banker, will be out soon. Rob is also an ex investment banker, and has seen the inside of the beast, so I am sure we will learn much from him on this subject.