Do not underestimate the power of audio

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I once wrote a paper on educational radio programming on the CBC during the 1930’s and 1940’s. The achievements of early radio have similarities with web-based social learning. Two of the more popular programmes on early CBC radio were the Citizens’ Forum and the Farm Radio Forum.

“Farm Radio Forum, 1941-65, was a national rural listening-discussion group project sponsored by the Canadian Association for Adult Education, the Canadian Federation of Agriculture and CBC. Up to 27 000 persons met in neighbourhood groups Monday nights, November through March, using half-hour radio broadcasts, printed background material and pretested questions as aids to discussion of social and economic problems.

Farm Forum innovations included a regional report-back system, whereby group conclusions were collected centrally and broadcast regularly across Canada, occasionally being sent to appropriate governments. In addition, discussion – leading to self-help – resulted in diverse community “action projects” such as co-operatives, new forums and folk schools. Farm and community leaders claimed that the give-and-take of these discussions provided useful training for later public life. In 1952, UNESCO commissioned research into Farm Forum techniques. Its report was published in 1954, and consequently India, Ghana and France began using Canadian Farm Forum models in their programs.”

Radio is a one-way medium but innovations such as programme guides by mail one week in advance, local discussion groups and national feedback on individual responses, kept people actively involved. Imagine a group of farmers gathering at a neighbour’s house, bringing food for a communal supper, and then discussing issues of great social relevance,  like the possibility of medicare. This was real public radio, not just commercial-free airwaves. Today, the CBC produces programmes such as Cross-Country Checkup and the Radio Noon Phone-Ins for similar purposes.

Donald Clark has looked at the medium as well, in Radio Education: huge and hugely underestimated and provides a view of the further potential of this medium in the Internet era.

Radio and new media
Podcasting is the true heir to radio. To timeshift an audio experience and put it in the hands of the learner, gives them is convenience and control. Internet radio has given many access to distant radio stations and led to growth in stations with a very specific focus. Far from being a dead or dying medium it is finding new purposes and new channels.

Conclusion
Radio is scalable, in the broadcasting sense. It’s low cost and reach have seen widespread use, not only in the developing world but in developed countries like the UK, where radio has long been respected as a source of high quality educational content. Video is very far from killing the radio star.

Sometimes it’s good to go back and revisit what we have collectively learned. We should not underestimate the power of audio, whether it be as podcasts or live radio.

our crude knowledge capture tools

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Earlier this week I commented that while of course, you cannot capture knowledge in the literal sense, people in organizations need to share their knowledge-making experiences. The aim of knowledge-sharing in an organization is to help make tacit knowledge more explicit, not some type of fictional Vulcan mind meld. I have quoted Dave Jonassen on knowledge transfer several times here, “Every amateur epistemologist knows that knowledge cannot be managed. Education has always assumed that knowledge can be transferred and that we can carefully control the process through education. That is a grand illusion.” I also noted in networked sharing that it is very important to understand that organizations and cultures that do not share what they know, are doomed.

It is important to keep in mind that what we loosely call knowledge, when using terms like knowledge-sharing or knowledge capture,  is just our approximation of it so we can share it with others. As Dave Snowden says, we are not very good at articulating our knowledge.

We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down. This is probably the most important. The process of taking things from our heads, to our mouths (speaking it) to our hands (writing it down) involves loss of content and context. It is always less than it could have been as it is increasingly codified.

When we use our knowledge to describe some data, such as what we remember from an experience or our summary of a book, we convey our knowledge by creating information, and as Dave notes, writing it down is not very effective.

But that does not mean that we shouldn’t even try. The cumulative pieces of information, or knowledge artifacts, that we create and share can help us have better conversations and gain some shared understanding. Our individual sense-making can be shared and from it can emerge better organizational knowledge. It’s not a linear process, as in from data we get information, which when aggregated becomes knowledge, and over time becomes wisdom (DIKW).

I think of wisdom as something that can only be partially shared over time. Hence the reason why masters can only have a limited number of apprentices. But when writing, and later books, came along, we had a new technology that could more widely distribute information created by the wise, and the not so wise. Neither the wisdom nor the knowledge actually get transferred, but the information can be helpful to those who wish to learn.

Mass communication has not been without its detractors, perhaps Socrates being the first.  He is reported to have said that the advent of written language, and books, would result in men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, who will be a burden to their fellows (Plato’s Phaedrus). How times change.

The lesson I take from this is that we cannot become complacent with knowledge. It must be shared amongst people who know that they are only seeing a fragment of others’ knowledge. Because it is so difficult to represent our knowledge to others, we have to make every effort to keep sharing it. For example, narrating one’s work does not get knowledge transferred, but it provides a better medium to gain more understanding. Knowledge shared in flows over time enables us to create better mental pictures than a single piece of knowledge stock.

One way of capturing knowledge is to create knowledge collections, as described by Steve Denning, in Can knowledge be collected?

Why has the promise of knowledge collections not been realized? Evidence-based medicine suggests that the answer may lie in distinguishing between precision knowledge, intuitive knowledge, and behavior-change knowledge.

[snip] In assessing the potential value of knowledge collections in economics, management or development, it’s important to recognize that most of the relevant knowledge is not precision knowledge. It’s not like “when you have a strep throat, take an antibiotic.” It’s more like the treatment of cancer or hypertension. It needs trained professionals to solve problems through intuitive experimentation and pattern recognition, and then behavioral change knowledge to provide support and involvement in continued monitoring and experimentation.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, capturing knowledge (as crudely as we do) is only the first step. We also need to enable sharing, take action, and empower people. But I cannot see how we can do this if we don’t try to capture some of what we know in order to get a level of common understanding. Exactly what I have been trying to do on this blog, over many years.

Do you know when it’s time to let go?

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According to my colleague Jay Cross, Morgan McCall, Robert Eichinger and Michael Lombardo originated the 70:20:10 framework at the Center for Creative Leadership in North Carolina. Their 1996 book, The Career Architect, stated that lessons learned by successful managers came roughly:

  • 70% from real life and on-the-job experiences, tasks, and problem solving
  • 20% from feedback, and working with and observing role models
  • 10% from courses and reading

Research also shows that most workplace learning is informal. But when do you move from formal instruction to informal learning? An interesting article on management coaching  uses the metaphor of riding a bike. When is it time for the parent to let go of the bicycle and let the child ride alone?

Jesse Lyn Stoner says:

How do you recognize that moment – that it is time to let go? I consider these four questions:

Do they have the skills and knowledge they need?
Have they demonstrated their ability to do this in other settings or similar ways?
Do they want to do it?
Do they have the resources they need to do the job?

These are the types of questions that training departments and HR professionals should be asking. When is it time to let go? Are they looking for indicators, or are they just wed to their preferred methods of control. I think it’s a great question to ask: When do you let your employees ride on their own? If there is no clear answer, perhaps most workers are still encumbered with training wheels.

If the organization has no methods in place to mark the time that employees can ride on their own, then they may be treating their workforce like children. At what point can someone make decisions to spend a few hundred, or even a few thousand, dollars to address an issue that is important to get work done? With metaphorical training wheels, nobody falls, but the riders never achieve full speed either. Are these the kinds of employees you want? Give them a chance to really ride.

[This post was written after a great 70 KM bike ride on a fall day in the middle of the week]

It starts with capturing knowledge

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In the Altimeter Group’s Report on Enterprise Social Networks, four areas of business value were identified:

  1. Encourage Sharing
  2. Capture Knowledge
  3. Enable Action
  4. Empower People

I would suggest an order of difficulty and business value for these four components.

Capturing knowledge is the foundation, and drives value up the chain, enabling sharing of  knowledge and the ability to take action on that knowledge. All three can then drive empowered people (if the organizational structure allows this, and if it doesn’t, consider the resulting frustration).

As Dave Gray wrote in The Connected Company, capturing tacit knowledge is tough:

“The learning challenge for the company comes from the dynamic relationship between the two forms of knowledge. Tacit knowledge is where the action is, and in most cases, it’s the people with the tacit knowledge that deliver the results. But the only way tacit knowledge can be broadly shared is by translating it into explicit knowledge — a very difficult task that very few companies have mastered.”

If capturing knowledge, or making tacit knowledge more explicit, is the core challenge for social businesses, what should we do?

For the organization: Make it easy to share

For teams and groups: Narrate your Work

For individuals: Practice personal knowledge mastery

For learning & development (training) professionals:

  • Be a lurker or a passive participant in relevant work-related communities (could be the lunch room) and LISTEN to what is being said.
  • Communicate what you observe to people around you, solicit their feedback and engage in meaningful conversations.
  • Continuously collect feedback from the workplace, not just after courses.
  • Make it easy to share information by simplifying & synthesizing issues that are important and relevant to fellow workers.

rp_enterprise-knowledge-sharing-520x390.jpg

Talent vs Labour

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Are you talent or labour? The difference may be very important. According to a recent article in the New York Times, talent is getting into a position to be able to push capitalism around, but not labour.

Talent is extracting more of the pie and getting richer. The gulf grows between talent — the high-earning, differentiated workers — and labor, those widget makers who support them.

In the NYT article, Roger Martin, author of “Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes and What Capitalism Can Learn from the NFL“, talks about basic labour getting automated and outsourced, a popular theme on this blog.

Through the 1970s, owners moved jobs to Sun Belt right-to-work states. They automated, outsourced and worked to diminish the power of unions. When Ronald Reagan crushed the air traffic controllers’ union in 1981, it was a clear signal: labor had finally been forced to capitulate entirely.

If you want to be valued (and paid) in the network era, then you need to do work with high task variety, requiring continuous informal learning, and based on mostly implicit (tacit) knowledge that cannot be easily codified or shared. This is how talent gets respect from capital. Talent is not easily replaceable.

We’ve been lulled into the notion that information processing is knowledge work. For instance, we generally assume that all lawyers are knowledge workers (it seems they are not). I like Gary Hamel’s definition of the Creative Economy, where the traditional (industrial) employee traits of Intellect, Diligence & Obedience are becoming commodities (going to the lowest bidder). This Creative Economy requires more independent workers (like musical productions) with traits that cannot be commoditized: Initiative; Creativity; Passion. So “knowledge workers” had best ensure that 1) they have more Task Variety than Standardized Work and 2) they are valued for skills that cannot be turned into commodities.

This may be the post-capitalist era, but it will only be good to those that have talent. Our education systems have to ‘up their game’ to get each person to develop his or her  unique talent. Being able to fill a job is not enough, even if it is an honest day’s labour. The capitalist system is designed to screw labour. But it’s more difficult to screw talent. If we want to help people, we need to help each person become Talent. That means emphasizing creativity, complex problem-solving, and innovation. For those of us in the learning, training, education, or human development business, we are doing a major disservice to society if we are merely preparing labour to be used by capital. OD/HR practices like performance management and competency modelling may just be hindering talent and reinforcing the capital/labour divide.

Update: Joachim Stroh has, once again, created a nice graphic to complement this post.

Update: Soft skills are human skills

PKM Workshops

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The final scheduled personal knowledge management workshop finishes this weekend. With four workshops this year and 110 participants, I have learned as much as anyone else. I have seen examples of seeking, sensing and sharing in a wide variety of workplaces, from the perspectives of freelancers, government workers, corporations, etc. Helen Blunden at Activate Learning Solutions recently offered her views on the last workshop. Stephen Dale also gave his take on PKM. Here is a great explanation from Jack Vinson, who shared his years of KM experience during the workshop:

Personal knowledge management is the idea that individuals have to be responsible for managing to get things done. While organizations around us can help, the essential people and things that I use in my regular work need to work for me. This means that I need to know how to use the resources my organization(s) provide, and I have to bring in additional resources when these are not sufficient for me to succeed.  These resources can be everything from the software and files on my computer to the stuff on the network to the people who will make larger connections for me. Importantly, beyond the simple bits and bytes, PKM is about making connections between these artifacts and the people who create them or influence them. I need access to people in the organization to the people outside the organization who will help me get things done.

PKM is about getting things done.

There are no workshops scheduled at this time, though there has been some interest expressed to me via email and social media. If there is sufficient interest, I will conduct another workshop before the end of the year. Of course, custom workshops are available for organizations who want something tailored to their unique needs and these can be run on-site or online.

If you are interested, please let me know. You can comment on this post, send me a tweet, email or even call me. My contact information is posted here. I would also like to know if you would prefer a two-week or month-long workshop. One person even suggested a 6-week programme.

 

Dysfunctional work silos

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

I am only highlighting one post I came across this week, as I think it is extremely important as an indicator of how work is changing.

Bersin.com: Performance Management As a Part of Daily Life: Work.com Changes the Game – via @C4LPT

But Work.com is more than a performance management system.  It is an integrated part of the Salesforce platform, and as such is located where many employees actually do their work.  Critically, there is no separate system to access.  There is no need for HR to entice employees to use the performance management system.   This is not “performance management” software – it is “work software” – a tool which Salesforce.com hopes will help people work together better.

My Comments

This should be a wake-up call to work support specialists (L&D, OD, HR) that ‘net work’ has to be integrated. For vendors, the days of stand-alone learning, talent, or performance management systems are numbered. It should also be a clear indication that industrial/information age work structures, and the disciplines they begat, are losing. relevance.

If systems like Work.com are integrated with the lines of business, there may be less need for specialized HR practitioners or at least fewer of them. Managers may begin to ask why they need HR, when they can manage 80% of performance management themselves. And PM is just the start. Why not learning management, when the vast majority of learning happens on the job?

We are moving toward a unified performer-facing work support model, one that does not differentiate between HR, OD or L&D. The only differentiation is between those doing the valued work, and those supporting it. With integrated software systems, we can now see who is doing what and how much value they add. Work is becoming transparent, and highlighting the dysfunction of our work function silos, created in a time when information was scarce and connections were few. That time has come to pass.

work-silos

Enterprise 2.0 transition

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The E20 Meetup in Paris today discussed the role of “Organizational Development” (OD) and “Human Ressource Management” (HR) in the Enterprise 2.0 game play. The discussions focused on how and in what manner OD and HR can support adoption & transformation processes. Bjoern Negelmann was the host.

Jon Husband and I attended via Google Hangout. Others in attendance included some people I know online, such as Thierry deBaillon and Anthony Poncier, as well as many I have yet to meet, like Marc Bramoullé, Gregory Lefort, Claude Super, and Clemence BJ. It was a good series of deep conversations, mostly conducted in French. Here are my thoughts on some of the questions that were discussed.

What are the obstacles in the Enterprise 2.0 transition?

I have not seen organizations move toward a more social business model without changing management. That may mean reducing the number of managers; empowering people who are customer-facing; or significantly opening up the workflow and making it more transparent. Management is the problem and management is also the solution, if you change it.

Enterprise 2.0 will not fulfill its potential unless its foundation is more than just web technologies or connected businesses. We need to integrate democratic organizing principles into our discussions on Enterprise 2.0 as this is really what it is about,  democratizing the workplace, because in the long run, hyperlinks do subvert hierarchy.

Perhaps the largest obstacle for OD/HR at this time is that few in this field understand the nature of networks. They are mentally trapped in the “org chart/job/role/task” trap. I shared this image by Joachim Stroh to show that “matching roles” is a more network-centric perspective than “filling positions”. This got Jon Husband explaining the +50 year history of HR competency models, their inheherent problems, and how they significantly influence all work in large organizations today.

What is the difference between the adoption & transformation process?

Culture is an emergent property of people working together. Designing a new work system is only part of the solution; it merely sets the stage. Marinating in the resulting complex adaptive system is essential. Monitoring all systems by engaging with them is how we can understand the organization as organism. It cannot be done by managers or OD/HR disconnected from the work being done. It cannot be done from behind a desk. To know the culture, people have to become the culture. One cannot engineer human or organizational performance. [I noticed that the gardener metaphor to explain a new  OD/HR role was used more than once during our discussions]

What is the role of OD & HR within the Enterprise 2.0 transition process?

OD/HR need to connect with the work being done. First hand observation means getting out of the office, where a higher level perspective can help with pattern recognition not possible by those involved in the work. OD/HR should help identify gaps in knowledge networks and play the role of network weavers. They need to model network learning behaviours, such as learning out loud, personal knowledge management, and the narration of work.

What are the OD/HR implications for the Enterprise 2.0 transformation process?

The future will not likely be “HR 2.0” but rather a new organizational development approach, where learning is integrated into the workflow, and OD/HR is much less directive. Many departments outside OD/HR are already staking this new ground and building their expertise, with social media as an enabler. It is like the Wild West and there may not be a role for those who do not understand and actively participate in the networked workplace. OD/HR may get left on the sidelines with Enterprise 2.0 if they do not engage now.

Update: Here is a newer version of the graphic by Joachim Stroh

The Connected Company Review

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I received a copy of Dave Gray’s The Connected Company from O’Reilly books and must say that Dave has done a great job. It is a comprehensive read, covering complexity and networks, and how they are changing business. The book also includes a lot of detail (almost 300 pages) on how to shift to becoming a connected company as well as how to lead one. In addition, the book is sprinkled with Dave’s great illustrations, making the complicated much simpler to understand. It is not a light read, but it is well written and easy to follow. There is so much detail and good information that it should be picked up by anyone managing, running, or advising any organization today.

So what is a connected company? A connected company is a complex, adaptive system that functions more like an organism than a machine. To design connected companies, we must think of the company as a complex set of connections and potential connections: a distributed organism with brains, eyes, and ears everywhere, whether they are employees, partners, customers, or suppliers. Design for connection is design for companies that are made out of people. It’s design for complexity, for productivity, and for longevity.

Connected companies are all about learning, writes Dave, and this is music to my ears. I have been saying that Work is Learning & Learning is the Work for so long now that it’s really nice to hear it from others. Seeing the prominence of learning as a business imperative is refreshing.

The learning challenge for the company comes from the dynamic relationship between the two forms of knowledge. Tacit knowledge is where the action is, and in most cases, it’s the people with the tacit knowledge that deliver the results. But the only way tacit knowledge can be broadly shared is by translating it into explicit knowledge — a very difficult task that very few companies have mastered.

As Chapter 8, Connected Companies Learn, concludes:

Most importantly, a connected company must be able to respond dynamically to change—to learn and adapt in an uncertain, ambiguous, and constantly evolving environment. A connected company is a learning company.

At the end of the book are discussion questions for each chapter. For chapter 16: How connected companies learn, the questions are: “How does our company learn and grow over time? How does individual and team learning become company learning? How do we share knowledge across the company? How might we do it better?” These are the questions I have often helped my clients to ask. This is an excellent business book for the network era, and one that I would highly recommend for learning and performance professionals as well.

PKM and innovation

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In the FastCoDesign article, How do you create a culture of innovation? the authors note four skills that most successful innovators exhibit:

  • Questioning: Asking probing questions that impose or remove constraints. Example: What if we were legally prohibited from selling to our current customer?
  • Networking: Interacting with people from different backgrounds who provide access to new ways of thinking.
  • Observing: Watching the world around them for surprising stimuli.
  • Experimenting: Consciously complicating their lives by trying new things or going to new places.

One way to practice these skills would be to promote personal knowledge mastery (PKM) in the workplace. The Seek-Sense-Share framework aligns with these innovation skills. 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. Innovation is not so much about having ideas, as making more and better connections.

Innovation is inextricably linked to both networks and learning. We can’t be innovative unless we integrate learning into our work. It sounds easy, but it’s a major cultural change. Why? Because it questions our basic, Taylorist, assumptions about work; assumptions like:

A JOB can be described as a series of competencies that can be “filled” by the best qualified person.

Somebody in a classroom, separate from the work environment, can “teach” you all you need to know.

The higher you are on the “org chart”, the more you know (one of the underlying premises of job competency models).

PKM is a framework that enables the re-integration of learning and work and can help to increase our potential for innovation. It’s time to design workplaces for individuals, and their Personal KM, instead of getting everyone to conform to a sub-optimal structure that maximizes capital but not labour. Knowledge is the new capital, but it resides in each person’s head.

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 make multiple attempts at clarification. 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.

#itashare