I have been reviewing a number of resources I have collected on social media, social learning and return on investment. The bottom line seems very clear to me. Social technologies remove artificial organizational boundaries and let knowledge be shared more easily. I create slide presentations so that I have something ready in case I need to quickly review a subject, such as an impromptu client brief. I put this one together as an aid that might be helpful in presenting a few aspects of the positive impact of social technologies in the workplace.
The challenge of moving from a hierarchical to a network structure is a complete shift in how we have thought about organizations. The BetaCodex model is based on solid systems and organizational theory from the likes of Stafford Beer, Charles Handy, Henry Mintzberg and Thomas Malone. From these, and others, Betacodex have developed two main design concepts: 12 laws, and the double helix transformation framework.
The most valuable part of this paper are the two case studies, that show how companies can create a new outside-in structure and better address external complexities. One is a German technology firm and the other a Brazilian packaging producer. This paper carries on from the last and includes enough practical information to make real structural change in organizations.
The BetaCodex framework supports the concept of loose hierarchies & strong networks, and provides a concrete structure to address the fact, highlighted in the Cluetrain Manifesto, that hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. I would suggest this as a sub-title for the paper: how organizations can thrive in the network era. A BetaCodex structure could lead us to a world without bosses and would help to ensure that the sociopaths do not take over. It would be a real thrill to work with an organization that is committed to such a change.
After the event, however, the system automatically prompts the chosen peer group to reassess those same behaviours at intervals of say one, three and six months. At the end of this period a ‘change score’ is calculated: an average value representing the amount of observed behavioural change that has taken place. Knowing that they are living up to the expectations of their peers, people make an effort to change. By coupling a meaningful challenge to the event, learners will endeavour to practise what they have learned – and we can skip directly to robust ‘level 3’ results.
Which is based on an old military approach, Training Validation, as exemplified by the Canadian Army:
On-job Performance
On-job performance is an evaluation measure that aims to determine if the trainee has been able to transfer the knowledge, skills or attitude learned in the training environment to the real world of the job. Within the ASAT, on-job performance is an element of validation conducted after at least three months following the training event. There are many different approaches to conducting this form of evaluation. Trainees, superiors and peers can be queried both through written questionnaires and personal interviews, and the results can lead to measurement of the effectiveness of the course/training activity. The validation of individual training is the responsibility of Commander LFDTS.
Training Efficiency
Examination of trainee reaction, the learning process and the transfer of learning to the job against the anticipated results and resources expended is the final method of determining efficiency. This analysis is a strategic responsibility, and the results are used to modify the conduct of future courses/training.
These are good systems if training was the correct solution in the first place, but note that formal instruction only accounts for 5% of workplace learning. As I wrote in a previous post, these types of methods work very well when you know what you are trying to achieve and understand the systems you are operating in. They work well when you have established best or good practices to base the training on. But what happens in complex environments, when ”the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance”? This is the situation many workers find themselves in today.
Feedback and validation have to be part of our daily work, not just for training events. This is where PKM practices can help on a personal level, work narration for teams, and communities of practice for disciplines. Once again, work is learning and learning is the work.
Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter (and other places) this past week.
“It should be possible to build a city where you can go your whole life without owning a car and not feel deprived.” —Toronto planner Paul Bedford – via @grescoe
“Creativity is not an escape from disciplined thinking. It is an escape with disciplined thinking.” – Jerry Hirschberg – via @BarbaraOrmsby
The worst illiterate is the political illiterate. He hears nothing, sees nothing, takes no part in political life. He doesn’t seem to know that the cost of living, the price of beans, of flour, of rent, of medicines, all depend on political decisions. He even prides himself on his political ignorance, sticks out his chest and says he hates politics. He doesn’t know, the imbecile, that from his political non- participation comes the prostitute, the abandoned child, the robber and, worst of all, corrupt officials, the lackeys of exploitative multinational corporations. — Bertolt Brecht
But here’s where the challenge arises for the education and university system: it was designed to support income inequality and designed to favour the wealthy …
Examine the structure of the traditional university system, especially as instantiated in the United States, but also to a certain degree in Canada and many other nations. Admission is regulated by tuition, and in the most elite institutions, the tuition is the highest. The recent British experiment in voluntary moderation was a failure. Admission in private universities is also enabled by legacy, the result of favours granted by and to alumni of the university. There is in addition a bias in elite universities toward graduates of a small number of preparatory school.
Academic subjects are irrelevant to real learning. They are not irrelevant to the education of academics of course. But, how many people really want to become experts in the academic fields?
In practice, one of my beefs with Q and A is that it purports to introduce interactivity to meetings but is often deadly dull. Generally after a speaker has already gone on too long, the more fidgety members of the audience need to do something different, and that may take the form of an overlong question that actually is more annoying to much of the audience than the speaker has been. What would often be much better is a complete break in the pattern. Have you noticed the energy level soar when we break for drinks? I don’t think it’s just the liquids.
Why diversity is essential for innovation, and ultimately survival, is shown in this wide-ranging article on How Culture Drove Human Evolution:
You start out with two genetically well-intermixed peoples. Tasmania’s actually connected to mainland Australia so it’s just a peninsula. Then about 10,000 years ago, the environment changes, it gets warmer and the Bass Strait floods, so this cuts off Tasmania from the rest of Australia, and it’s at that point that they begin to have this technological downturn. You can show that this is the kind of thing you’d expect if societies are like brains in the sense that they store information as a group and that when someone learns, they’re learning from the most successful member, and that information is being passed from different communities, and the larger the population, the more different minds you have working on the problem.
If your number of minds working on the problem gets small enough, you can actually begin to lose information. There’s a steady state level of information that depends on the size of your population and the interconnectedness. It also depends on the innovativeness of your individuals, but that has a relatively small effect compared to the effect of being well interconnected and having a large population.
It’s not about innovative individuals so much as the ability of the network (society, organization, company) to stay connected to its collective knowledge. This is an important factor to consider in knowledge-intensive organizations. How quickly would your lose collective knowledge if people do not share their knowledge? Are your knowledge networks large enough to ensure that collective knowledge does not get lost? Is your organization more like an isolated island or part of a connected and diverse continent?
We will create the future organization by bringing democracy to the workplace, I wrote last week in How we will manage. The essential factors, in my opinion, for an effective networked workplace (Enterprise 2.0, Social Business, etc.) are not what we have seen in many industrial style companies:
In one of the best blog posts I have ever read, Venkat Rao discusses The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office”. The initial premise is Hugh Macleod’s cartoon on the company hierarchy, which often elicits a chuckle when I show it to others [especially since I have it on my business cards]. The entire article is well worth reading.
To summarize, the losers have opted out of the system and just do the work they need to do. They find joy and value outside of work. The clueless have bought into the company bullshit and think that if they work hard for their masters, they will move up the ladder. The clueless keep the machine working. The sociopaths buy and build companies and suck their profits for as long as possible and then cast everyone aside to start something new. The sociopaths don’t give a shit. Often, the CEOs are merely part of clueless layer and are beholding to the VC sociopaths.
I recently listened to a programme on CBC Radio’s Maritime Magazine on work bullies and it only reinforces the premise that sociopaths run too many organizations. “So why do so many bullies rise to a position of power?” asks Jerry West, the radio host. Here is a reference to the answer given:
In 2005, British psychologists Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon at the University of Surrey interviewed and gave personality tests to a number of high-level executives. They then compared their profiles with those of criminal psychiatric patients at Broadmoor, the all-male high-security hospital, home to some of England’s most notorious murderers. The researchers found that three out of eleven personality disorders were actually more common in managers than in the disturbed criminals:
histrionic personality disorder
narcissistic personality disorder
obsessive-compulsive personality disorder
This has led researchers to describe such disturbed executives as “successful psychopaths” and similarly disturbed criminals as “unsuccessful psychopaths”.
And you wonder why I rage against the machine when it comes to hierarchies and institutions? In the CBC programme, a Dalhousie University professor states that in job interviews, no one bothers to look at deviant or counter-productive behaviours. Hiring those who are prone to bullying then leads to a hostile or toxic work environment. As Jerry West says, “It’s not difficult to find hierarchical work environments that are toxic” and organizations that exhibit this behaviour include Canada’s RCMP.
So what are the options? The programme suggests:
Conduct interviews that might determine bullying behaviours [easy, but not always effective].
Leadership & management must stay vigilant and engaged [not often the norm].
Legislation to protect the bullied in the workplace [will only happen in the long term].
But even these recommendations seem almost futile in many organizations today. While people may be talking about it now, the real challenge is to change our work structures so that it is much more difficult for bullies (sociopaths) to succeed. We need to understand and talk about how our structures shape us.
As Jerry West concludes, “Doing nothing is a choice, too.”
My colleague Jane Hart writes that, “supporting social collaboration is underpinned not only by new technologies but by a new mindset“.
Perpetual Beta is my attitude toward learning and work – I’ll never get to the final release and my learning will never stabilise. I’ve realized that clients and colleagues with a similar attitude are much easier to work with than those who believe that we will reach some future point where everything stabilizes and we don’t need to learn or do anything else. I think this point is called death. Perpetual Beta is pretty well an artist’s perspective, always seeking a new creative endeavour and not just producing the same work over and over. As industrial and even some knowledge work gets automated and outsourced, adapting to an economic life in perpetual Beta may soon become the norm.
With 2 billion people connected by the Internet, we are entering a post-industrial Network Era. Effective knowledge networks are composed of unique individuals working on common challenges, together for a discrete period of time before the network shifts its focus again. We are moving from a “one size fits all” attitude on work and learning to an “everyone is unique” perspective. The network enables infinite combinations between unique nodes. For example, better connections enabled a high school student to create a better cancer diagnostic tool. We will see many more of these connected discoveries in the network era. Also, in a networked world, where everyone is unique, there is little need for generic work processes (jobs, roles, occupations) and no need for standard curricula. Institutions, and mindsets, will collapse.
The real challenge to be productive in this new networked workplace will be an attitude shift. In the near future, organizations may no longer be concerned if you work a full shift or are spending time at your work space. Compensation may become focused not just on results but creative solutions. The core work attitude may be creativity, as in “what have you done that’s different?” Artists think about the impossible, as Hugh Macleod shows:
About one hundred years ago we moved from morality as our core behaviour, to responsibility, as workers left their agrarian communities, where your word was your bond, and became reliable factory workers instead. Are we now shifting from responsibility to creativity? If we are, then most of our organizational tools and measurements about productivity may be obsolete, as well as our mindsets about work and learning. Perhaps, metaphorically speaking, the MFA will become the new MBA.
Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.
@GeorgeMonbiot: “The “self-made man” fallacy is essentially psychopathic: denies the role of and need for other people.”
“Theatre companies don’t talk of their actors as ‘human resources’ – none of them would work for them if they did. ~ Charles Handy.” via @CharlesJennings
A few weeks ago I asked my extended online network: What do you think is the biggest fear/need/barrier when it comes to adopting personal knowledge mastery (PKM) as a practice?
Finding someone to talk to about PKM was a common response, as was the observation that management’s perception is often that not everyone has the same level of ability to do PKM sufficiently well. Management thinks PKM is only for certain, higher-level employees (it’s not). Also listed were fear of technology and fear of complexity, and I see these as two sides of the same coin. Network technologies make things more complex as there are exponentially more connections and possibilities. The complexity of multiple perspectives and solutions can be quite confusing. In PKM, there is no test and no answer sheet, only deeper questions, but an expanding network to help you.
Some people cited a lack of time management skills to make room in the day for changing and learning. Others listed difficulties in being able to build relationships or dealing with too wide of a range of topics. Perhaps the latter is a byproduct of our education systems where we concentrate on only a few subjects at a time, and seldom make connections between them. One person in the PKM Workshop said that sharing what you really think and finding your real voice is a major challenge for those not used to capturing and sharing their learning.
In my opinion, a major barrier to adopting PKM practices is the perception that it will take more time, when in fact, most people waste a lot of time on existing work habits that could be changed. Another reason is the baggage of our education and training systems, which tell us that we cannot learn for ourselves and need an expert or teacher to always guide us. The image below is from a post I wrote 5 years ago, on what is weighing down learning, but is still relevant I think. PKM practices can help people take off those weights. You might call it the PKM Weight Reduction Program for self-directed and peer-supported learning.
