I come not to bury training, only to put it in its place

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I’ve taught ABCD objectives (audience, behavior, condition, and degree) on many continents, and in universities, companies, and government agencies. I promise you that students of instructional design appreciate ABCD. They rely on the mnemonic to help them produce and screen their efforts. Admittedly trickier is demonstrating where objectives come from, establishing that valuable link between the tasking, analysis, goals, and objectives. That is a story for another time. —Allison Rossett

Methods like ABCD 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.
cynefin education training
In complex environments, a Probe-Sense-Respond approach is required, and this is something that training and education programmes, designed in advance and directed by management, cannot address. While people still need to be trained and educated, that alone will not prepare them for a networked workplace that demands the integration of learning and working.
probe sense respond
The increasing complexity of our workplaces means we have to accept the limitations of training and education as we have practiced them. There is a growing need to help people be more creative and to solve complex problems, on a daily basis and in concert with others. Even the best training programmes cannot help here. Organizations (HR, L&D, OD, KM, etc) need to add significantly more thought and resources to enable people to learn socially, share cooperatively, and work collaboratively.  Work is changing, and so must learning support. Making better carriages will not help.

Communities of practice enable the integration of work and learning

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COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE

  • Our world is getting more complex as everything gets connected.
  • Complex problems require more implicit knowledge, which cannot be codified.
  • Implicit knowledge can only be shared through conversations & observation.
  • Collaborative and distributed work is becoming the norm.
  • Knowledge-sharing and narration of work make implicit knowledge more visible, especially in distributed work teams.
  • Transparent work processes foster innovation.
  • New ideas come from diverse networks, often outside the organization.
  • Learning is part of work, not separate from it.
  • Communities of practice enable the integration of work & learning.

So what is a community of practice? Maybe we should start with what it is not:

  • It is not a help desk filled with subject matter experts.
  • It is not a work group, or even task focused.
  • One is not appointed by management to join a community of practice.

Some characteristics of communities of practice:

  • People want to join them.
  • They usually have a higher purpose, that one person alone cannot achieve.
  • People feel affinity for their communities of practice.
  • There are both strong and weak social ties.
  • You know you are in a community of practice when it changes your practice.

community-of-practice-change

Friday the 13th Finds

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

@RalphMercer – “Consensus, the general agreement to fail together.”

Eide Neurolearning: Remembering inhibits learning

In an interesting study, researchers from Duke University found that learning and remembering compete when both are made to occur at the same time.

@sjgill – How to create a learning culture in organizations

That is, organizational learning is not about training. Rather, it’s about a community of workers sharing in a process of constantly seeking improvement through new knowledge, new skills, and new applications of knowledge and skills to achieving the goals of the organization. They examine what they do, compare that to what needs to be done, reflect on what they have learned, and make the needed change in the organization.

Forbes: The End of Middle Managers (And Why They’ll Never Be Missed) – via @bdupperin

The captains don’t “manage” every day. They have just one meeting as captains per week. That meeting determines the deployment of strategy. We hand off to the captains—then they hand off to the teams, who hand off to the individuals who deploy day to day, and then they get out of the way (as they resume their own production roles, side by side with their teams.)

At this point, our entire company is flat.  With no hierarchy, everyone leads within their areas of stewardship and responsibility.  Many will have excess capacity and offer to help another teammate or even go to another department to ask how they can help. (Yes, this really happens—in some cases, it happens every day.)

@changethinking – The Dirty Little Secret Behind the 70% Failure Rate of Change Projects – via @LucGaloppin

The inconvenient truth is that after many years of applying our craft, with plenty of opportunities to have an impact and more than enough practitioners to make a difference, there is no hard evidence that we have made even a dent in the appalling prognosis for executing change. The latest research continues to show what the original findings revealed—7 out of 10 projects still fail to reach their stated intentions.

Adam Scislowicz – Brokerage Rules & Trust:

 @brianinroma – Want to end email hegemony? Follow these simple tips.

PKM as pre-curation

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The most important part of personal knowledge mastery (PKM), in my opinion, is the need for active sense-making. Merely seeking and sharing information does little other than create more noise online. Sense-making takes time, discipline, and effort.

One strength of PKM is the “manual” nature of sense-making activities. The act of writing a blog post, a tweet, or an annotation on a social bookmark all force you to think a bit more than clicking once and filing it to an automated system. Other sense-making routines, like my weekly review of Twitter favourites and creating Friday’s Finds, can encourage reflection and reinforce learning.

Sense-making, or placing information into context, is where the real personal value of PKM lies. The knowledge gained from PKM is an emergent property of all its activities. Merely tagging an article does not create knowledge. The process of seeking out information sources, making sense of them through some actions, and then sharing with others to confirm or accelerate our knowledge are interlinked activities from which  knowledge (often slowly) emerges.

Robin Good has a similar perspective on curation, as shown on this mindmap on curation for training & education.

Content curation is NOT the same as social sharing, reposting/retweeting, liking or favoring a specific content item.

Robin says that, “Curation is about making sense of a topic/issue/event /person/product etc. for a specific audience.”

The difference between PKM and Curation is that the former is personal, while the latter is for an intended audience. I practice PKM for myself and my blog’s primary audience is me. Sharing online  makes it social so that I can learn with and from others. Sense-making (as described by Ross Dawson)  is the most important aspect in both cases:

Filtering (separating signal from noise, based on some criteria)

Validation (ensuring that information is reliable, current or supported by research)

Synthesis (describing patterns, trends or flows in large amounts of information)

Presentation (making information understandable through visualization or logical presentation)

Customization (describing information in context)

The connection, in practice, between PKM and curation seems quite obvious to me. I can practice PKM and over time develop a wide variety of knowledge artifacts. For example, I have 2,182 blog posts and 2,858 social bookmarks. These have all been curated by me and for me. However, if I want to curate these artifacts for an intended audience, I can quickly search these artifacts and find suitable resources. I frequently do this for my clients, where I may compile a list of a few blog posts related to some aspect of our project.

I think that people who have a professional PKM framework have some of the skills and knowledge needed to be good curators. Their sense-making processes are already developed. I would consider PKM as a form of pre-curation.

Training, Performance, Social Workshop Notes

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We launched a new online workshop today called, From Training, to Performance, to Social. It’s a Beta version, at a reduced price, but we have had a good number of participants sign up. I came up with the idea while conducting one of the PKM workshops and noticed that many people either mixed up training with performance improvement, or thought of social learning as merely a bolt-on to a formal course.

The first assignment has started with a bang this week, with many long and thoughtful posts about training and instruction. We will move to performance improvement tomorrow and then focus on social learning all of next week. There is one assignment for Training, two for Performance Improvement, and three for Social; reflecting, in my opinion, their relative importance in any organization. It roughly aligns with the 70:20:10 framework.

We have participants from AUS, NZ, UK & Europe, and North America, from many types of organizations and backgrounds. The workshops are designed to give just enough structure, without constraining personal and social learning. We curate what we think are the essential resources on a topic and also provide additional links and resources for those who are interested. We encourage all discussions to be done in the group area, so that people can learn from each other. Also, participants get my attention for two weeks. I try to find ways to help each person as I see what issues arise in the conversations. Without these conversations, I would not be able to help in an informed way. For those attending the workshops, the more they give, the more they get.

This is my fourth online workshop this year and it seems to be a model that works for me as well as participants. Feedback has been almost universally positive and I find the workload manageable. We will be offering more topics, and suggestions are always welcome. Custom workshops for organizations can also be developed.

courses artifacts

Innovating our way out of the industrial era

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I have frequently said that simple and complicated work is getting automated and outsourced and that the real value in the networked enterprise is in complex (creative) work. Standardized work, that can be done by many, is low value in the network era. See my posts on Job Automation or Exception Handling for further reading.

 Bob Cringely clearly shows how this works in information technology.

Toward the top end of IT the value of individual contributors becomes extreme. There are many IT organizations where certain critical functions are dependent on a single worker. These are complex or arcane tasks being done by unique individuals. You know the type. Every organization needs more of them and it is easy to justify looking wherever — even overseas — to find more.  It’s at this level where the commodity argument breaks down.

The bad news is that routine, standardized work has increasingly lower value. The good news is that almost every person has the capacity to do more complex and creative work. We have been designed as learning organisms. Our main constraints are our artificial structures, especially our schooling systems. Much as we no longer need the majority of the population to grow crops, we no longer need a large workforce of widget makers or data processers. However, we have an infinite demand for creative products and services.

As Cringely concludes:

So we have a standoff. Corporate America has, for the most part, chosen a poor path when it comes to IT labor issues, but CEOs aren’t into soul-searching and nobody can turn back the clock. Labor, in turn, longs for a fantasy of their own — the good old days.

The only answer that makes any sense is innovation — a word that neither side uses properly, ever.

The only way out of this mess is to innovate ourselves into a better future.

Between organizations, innovation can start by increasing connections, as it is obvious there are few connections between labour leaders and CEO’s.  Inside organizations, innovation can be facilitated through narration, transparency and power-sharing. That’s how we can start to get ourselves out of this wicked problem of work in the 21st century.

I came, I saw, I learnt

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What better article to read this past week than 11 lessons about digital communities from Rome by Courtney Hunt.

  1. Capitalize on proven, older designs.
  2. Build the new upon the old.
  3. Sometimes you have to destroy the old to make way for the new.
  4. The past can teach about process (people don’t change).
  5. Rules are only guides.
  6. Sometimes not enforcing rules allows the system to find its own pragmatic balance.
  7. Intimacy and humanity can overcome many design and resource flaws.
  8. Technology does not have to be alienating.
  9. Taking the time to make things beautiful reaps long term benefits.
  10. Manage signal to noise.
  11. People are ingenious.
Sunset at St Peter’s

I was confused on my arrival in Rome, easily getting lost in the labyrinth of streets and alleys in the old city. Hans de Zwart showed me how to let go and learn to flow with the traffic and street patterns. It became much easier, and on the last night I strolled the several kilometers, without a map, back to my hotel. I think many people feel confused at first in online communities. It’s up to the community to help them feel the flow.

The humanity of Rome was also quite surprising, especially after reading all the tourist warnings for the city. Even though there are places filled with vendors of cheap crap trying to take advantage of tourists, for the most part it’s like being in a bunch of connected neighbourhoods. Almost everyone I met was friendly and all merchants were courteous, polite and honest to a fault. One fellow tourist, an older gentleman from Australia, told me that he stopped a pick-pocket who was trying to lift his wallet, on the train. He cried out and grabbed the thief’s hand. As the train came to a stop, the locals on the train created a wall and forced the thief out, while at the same time calling for the police. They then apologized on behalf of their city. Rome is a community that keeps on trying, in spite of its challenges, because its people believe in the city.

Rome: public water fountain

Too often we focus on the technology and not the human relationships in online communities. Rome, and many other physical communities, can give us some insights on where to put our priorities. David Griffiths offers some good questions that anyone supporting online professional communities should ask.

“Community or Network?   Organic or stagnant?  Are you focused on solving the problem, or what lies behind the problem?  Reactive or Proactive? Ask yourself, what is the purpose for CoP and how do you know if they are working?”

An online community should be much more than a place for economic man to get things done  (collaborate). A community needs the attracting power of a greater sense of purpose so that people will regularly try to do the right thing for the long term benefit of all (cooperate). We can learn something from a city that is 2,765 years old.

All connections lead to Rome

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Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter, and also heard in passing at ICALT 2012 this past week in Rome.

@rosariocacao – “@adriancheok at ICALT: you don’t have time to make explicit your tacit knowledge”

@britz – PKM = People, Simplicity, Discipline

@AdrianCheok – “How to cope with email overload” – [nice succinct summary]

@cufa – “Serious case of info overload/illegible pics on too many slides at #icalt2012 – are we not meant to be learning and teaching experts?”

@RichardTheGeek – The Lord of the Phones – 3 phones to bind them [at ICALT 2012]

ICALT 2012

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I leave for Rome today and will be presenting a keynote at IEEE’s ICALT 2012 (International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies). Here is what I will talking about.

Integrating Learning into the Workflow

The challenge for 21st century businesses is not saving 20th century jobs that will be automated and outsourced anyway, but focusing on creating more opportunities for creative work. For institutions, employers, educators and workers, that means giving up control and co-creating a new social contract for the creative, networked economy. For all businesses this means integrating learning into the workflow. There are practical models and frameworks that all businesses can use to connect work and learning. Harold Jarche will challenge some traditional ideas about workplace learning.

Our current models for managing people, training and knowledge-sharing are insufficient for a workplace that demands emergent practices just to keep up. Formal training has only ever addressed 20% of workplace learning and this was acceptable when the work environment was relatively stable. Knowledge workers today need to connect with others to co-solve problems. Sharing tacit knowledge through conversations is an essential component of knowledge work. The effective use of social media enable adaptation, and the development of emergent practices, through conversations.

As our work environments become more complex due to the speed of information transmission via ubiquitous networks, we need to adopt more flexible and less mechanistic processes to get work done. Workers have many more connections, to information and people, than ever before. But the ability to deal with complexity lies in our minds, not our artificial organizational structures. In order to free our minds for complex work, we need to simplify our company learning structures.

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I am really looking forward to making some connections with people I know online (some for many years) but our physical paths have never crossed. Many roads lead to Rome this week, it seems.

Hans de Zwart
Sebastian Fiedler
Robin Good
Allessio Jacona

Aligned principles for an open, networked society

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Via Ross Dawson, here are Don Tapscott’s four principles for the open world:

Collaboration. The boundaries of organizations are becoming more fluid and open, with the best ideas often coming from outside.

Transparency. Open communication to stakeholders is no longer optional, as organizations become naked.

Sharing. Giving up intellectual property, including putting ideas into the commons, is a massive source of value creation.

Empowerment. Knowledge and intelligence is power, so as they are distributed, we gain freedom.

And, here are my three principles for Net Work, or getting stuff done in this open world:

Narration, Transparency and Power-sharing

Narration is making one’s tacit knowledge (what one feels) more explicit (what one is doing with that knowledge). Narrating work is a powerful behaviour changer, as long-term bloggers can attest.

Transparency is an easy concept to understand but much more difficult to implement in an enterprise. It means switching the default mode to sharing. This can be enabled by social media, but social media also make the company culture transparent. A dysfunctional company culture does not improve with transparency, it just gets exposed.

Distributed power enables faster reaction times so those closest to the situation can take action. In complex situations there is no time to write a detailed assessment. Those best able to address the situation have marinated in it for some time. They couldn’t sufficiently explain it to someone removed from the problem if they wanted to anyway. This shared power is enabled by trust. Power in knowledge-based organizations must be distributed in order to nurture trust.