Cooperative finds

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

“The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation ~ Bertrand Russell” – via @JenniferSertl

@MickSainsbury – PKM feeds the intellectual capital of an organisation

Organisations should be facilitating a culture of PKM and promoting its value to its people as a significant strategy for capacity building, continuous improvement, innovation, renewal, reconstruction and engagement.

PKM feeds the intellectual capital of an organisation.

@TomSpiglanin – Social Net Work and the Workplace Professional

This is the concept of net work: individual nodes who connect work teams to vast social networks through communities of practice, making the work teams significantly more productive and effective. If there is power in a single connected node, imagine the increased power of multiple nodes connecting the workplace to individually cultivated communities of practice. The net work product has the potential to grow exponentially better.

@JayCross – Learn Informal Learning Informally. Experiential

This workshop is not a course. It’s more like Outward Bound meets Oxford. You learn by doing.

 You work surrounded by the knowledge of others, Why on earth would you not use it?

Objection 4. “Our people are too busy for this. It will take too much time”
Too busy to learn, but not too busy to reinvent wheels, rework solutions, and revisit old problems? You need to explain that KM is a time-saver, that it cut project times by up to 16%, that it’s the lazy person’s way to work. As one of my colleagues said “You work surrounded by the knowledge of others, Why on earth would you not use it? It will save money and time, it will make your life easier, and you will do a better job”. Basically, if people are so busy, there is not argument NOT to introduce KM.

@JohnnieMoore – Strip out the strategising and you may create the conditions for swift trust

Of course in big organisations, talking strategy can be a high status activity – those who are seen to be good at it get the big bucks. That presents a pretty serious impediment to more agile processes happening inside the hierarchy. But it’s not going to stop them happening outside.

PKM Book Update 1

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I have been very pleasantly surprised at how well my request to fund the PKM Book Project has been taken up by the community at large. So far, 30 people have sponsored at the basic $10 level. This is where I hoped to have the most support, as it is not a lot of money but shows that people are willing to pay a bit to get a book published that will then be made available for free to anyone who wants it.

I have been even more surprised that some people have purchased more than one basic sponsorship (thanks Dave Ferguson & Leah Good) and that I also have two Bronze level sponsors ($100) – Steve Dale & Mark Brewer – and one Gold Sponsor ($500) – Tantramar Interactive. There are two more Gold sponsors pending. This is much bigger than I anticipated.

I will take some time this Summer (now that I can afford it) to write the outline and pull several new threads together. The PKM Workshops have provided me with great feedback on how personal knowledge management is understood and used by others. Thanks to everyone for a great start and for giving me the incentive to get going on a project I have thought about doing for several years!

Beyond collaboration

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In A Wicked Problem, I said that all levels of complexity exist in our world but more and more of our work deals with real complex problems (in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect), whether they be social, technological, or economic. Complex environments and problems are best addressed when we organize as networks, work to continuously develop emergent practices; and cooperate to advance our aspirations.

Jay Rosen talks about covering wicked problems and describes how journalists could address this “beat”. I think that these approaches align quite well with my Collaboration/Cooperation – Work/Learning framework, based on the working smarter  graphic here.

Rosen says that the beat must be global and networked. This is why we must cooperatively engage in external social networks to understand the complexity of wicked problems. He also talks about the need for narrative, pattern-based understanding of multiple disciplines, and becoming a learning machine. This is the role that communities of practice can play. They are more constrained spaces, yet  still open to diversity of opinion. Work teams, filled with experts, remain good at solving Tame Problems, or those that can be constrained.

Rosen’s is one more perspective on the need to reframe our work structures to incorporate intentional connections beyond traditional business. The answers lie outside, not inside, the organization. As Rosen concludes:

The wicked problems beat is not a View from Nowhere thing. It starts from the limits of professional expertise. It is a reflection on unmanageable complexity. It preaches humility to the authorized knowers. It mocks the one best answer and single issue people. It seeks to deliver us from denial.

Organizations need to extend the notion of work beyond collaboration, beyond teams, and beyond the corporate fire wall. They need to make social networks, communities of practice, and narrative part of the work. It’s a big leap but we need to change the business conversation away from confident military terms (target market, strategic plan, marketing campaign) and instead talk in terms of complexity, wicked problems and cooperation. As Rosen writes, “Cliché is the vernacular in its spent state. Savage clarity is the vernacular coming alive again.” Let’s bring some savage clarity to the modern enterprise.

Cooperation as a strategy

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Martin Nowak, a mathematical biologist, concludes The Evolution of Cooperation with the following winning strategy:

What I find very interesting in these games of conditional reciprocity, direct and indirect reciprocity, we can make the point that winning strategies have the following three properties:  they must be generous, hopeful and forgiving.

Generous in the following sense: if I have a new interaction, now I realize (and this is I think where most people go wrong) that this is not a game where it’s either the other person or me who is winning. Most of our interactions are not like a tennis game in the US Open where one person loses and one person goes to the next round. Most of our interactions are more like let us share the pie and I’m happy to get 49 percent, but the pie is not destroyed. I’m willing to make a deal, and sometimes I accept less than 50 percent. The worst outcome would be to have no deal at all. So in that sense, generous means I never try to get more than the other person.  Tit-for-tat never wins in any single encounter; neither does Generous Tit-for-tat.

Hopeful is that if there is a new person coming, I start with cooperation. My first move has to be cooperation. If a strategy starts with defection, it’s not a winning strategy.

And forgiving, in the sense that if the other person makes a mistake, there must be a mechanism to get over this and to reestablish cooperation.

This strategy aligns with my thoughts on how cooperation differs from collaboration. To be generous, hopeful, and forgiving  will in the long run make for stronger networks and communities. It works in nature, as Nowak shows.

cooperation

What's working in social business

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What’s working in social business in 2012? This is the question that CMSWire asked me to write about. In my opinion, technology sales, marketing campaigns and the speakers circuits are doing well. Implementation and organizational change are lagging far behind.

Like the knowledge management and e-learning hype phases of the 90’s and ’00’s respectively, social business is being led by software vendors. Some are even the same vendors that MIT’s Peter Senge said co-opted the field of knowledge management. I watched as e-learning moved from hope for ubiquitous learning, to the overproduction of self-paced online courses, also known as “shovelware.”

My focus on social business stems from a background in training, knowledge management, performance improvement and social learning. I have learned that the hard work comes after the software has been installed and the initial training sessions are over. Then comes the question, what do we do now?

Transparency

People may say that it’s not about the technology, but that is where a large share of the budget goes in any major change initiative. The bigger change to manage however, is getting people to work transparently. One of the major benefits of using social media is increasing speed of access to knowledge. But if information is not shared, it will never be found, and knowledge will remain hidden. Transparency is a necessity for social business.

While social media enable transparency, they also lay bare a company’s culture. A dysfunctional company culture does not improve with transparency, it just gets exposed. In the transparent social business, there is no place left to hide. This change alone can be enough to cause massive organizational upheaval. Transparency can be scary for anyone who owes their position to the old system.

Social business is not just about using social media but changing routines and procedures. With greater transparency, information now flows horizontally as well as vertically. New patterns and dynamics emerge from interconnected people and interlinked information flows, and these will bypass established structures and services. Work gets more democratic as it becomes visible to all.

With the democratization of information, user-generated content increases. Today, search engines give each worker more information and knowledge than any CEO had even 10 years ago. Pervasive connectivity changes organizational power structures, though the full effects of this take time to become visible. From a transparent environment new leaders and experts may emerge, as it takes different leadership and an understanding of networks to support a social business.

Narration

Agile social businesses need people who can work in concert on solving problems, not waiting for direction from above. Management must ask: how can we help you work in this transparent environment? In social networks we often learn from each other; modelling behaviours, telling stories and sharing what we know.

While not highly efficient, this is very effective for learning. There is a need to model the new behaviours of being transparent and narrating one’s work. Social business also requires power-sharing; for how long will workers collaborate and share if they cannot take action with their new knowledge and connectivity? Changing to more social behaviours takes time, but most of all, it takes trust.

Once social technologies have been installed, modelling new work behaviours becomes the main organizational challenge.

The organization can support this by fostering and supporting communities of practice. These are potential bridges between work teams and the open social networks on the Internet. Narration of work, or learning out loud, is a prime enabler of knowledge-sharing. One indicator that a social business is working is when people at all levels are narrating their work in a transparent environment.

If the daily routine supports social learning, and time is made available for reflection and sharing stories, then an organization is on the right track. One determinant of effective professional communities is whether they actually change practices. Only then will we know if the social business initiative has been successful.

Enterprises adopting social business need to find and support people who can model knowledge-sharing behaviours, not just talk about them. Managers should identify people who already narrate their work, create user-generated content and share transparently. Companies should get advice from people who share power and do most of their work in networks already. Just think, if there is nobody to model social business behaviours in the organization, how will people learn? From their friends on Facebook?

In a social business, work is learning and learning is the work. Social learning needs to be integrated into the daily workflow. Workers need more than technology; they need ongoing, real-time, constantly-changing, collaborative support. Management’s primary responsibility in a social business is supporting organizational learning.

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Originally posted on CMS Wire

Learning and Marketing

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I had a great conversation with the Marketing Tech Blog folks on Blog Talk Radio yesterday.

Listen to internet radio with Marketing Technology on Blog Talk Radio

Douglas Karr and Marty Thompson of DK New Media were gracious hosts. One of the main reasons I accepted their invitation is that I think marketing and learning professionals have a lot to learn from each other. We have to stop thinking of learning as a separate thing from work. When you learn with and from your customers, marketing and learning are the same. Perhaps getting rid of the L word is a start. It’s all learning. Learning-oriented marketing, both internal and external, is both getting the message across and understanding the needs of others.

I’ve been watching marketing & training moving closer, just as work & learning get integrated in the networked workplace. I think many training departments in the future may become part of marketing. A great example of this is at  Intuit, where training is part of the marketing department and involves the customer directly. At Intuit, customers are paid to develop content, and as one person wrote in a chat comment, “The e-Learning has kept my CPA husband loyal to Intuit versus Peachtree, etc.”

Perhaps marketing and learning can work together and figure out how best to deal with complex issues and problems without a “how-to” guide. Think of the future of learning as a business, not just a supporting department. It also keeps the learning function customer-focused and not merely process-dependent.

Emergent learnings

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

@JamieNotter – “Key lesson: for people to give energy to these new things, they need to stop doing other things.”

@AnnaFMackenzie – “I agree. Writing is writing – it takes practice and discipline to write well. I find blogging helps thesis writing.”

@dominicad – “A richer organization has more options for slack time.”

«Il n’y a pas d’éducateurs, «mais seulement des gens qui montrent aux autres comment ils s’y prennent pour s’éduquer eux-même. ~ J. Guitton »  – via @PascalVenier

Team Wikispeed, where learning really is the work – via @jhagel

You can certainly gain knowledge by reading a textbook, but acquiring “tacit knowledge,” education that comes from first-hand experience, is a much more powerful and effective way to learn. Talent development in firms today typically comes in the form of stale training courses and presentations rather than a focus on tacit knowledge development. At WIKISPEED, however, the team learns almost entirely through hands-on experience. Volunteers work in pairings of inexperienced and experienced individuals who take on small projects. Not only does this help novice volunteers learn faster, it also reduces the time and cost of documenting every process because knowledge is exchanged between peers rather than consolidated in formal training programs.

90% of companies with >1,000 employees recently changed their organization structure. <50% were successful! – via @JostleMe

“an alarming statistic, and one with perilous implications. Apart from the high costs and squandered opportunity, a failed reorganization can leave an enterprise even worse off than it was before, with lost productivity, a weakened market position, and a disengaged workforce, among other impacts.”

 culture is an emergent property of all the little things you do – via @JDeragon

We are accustomed to thinking that the intangibles of life exist separately from tangible things; material things separated from spiritual, personal things distinct from commercial. This is not so. The knowledge economy has taught us how intangibles like intellectual property and design can be converted into money. Consider how much of the cost of a computer covers its tangible components versus how much you are paying for its technology and software. Tangibles and intangibles are often interchangeable. Material wealth can buy intangibles like lifestyle, time, rich human experiences, and education. In the same way, intangibles like knowledge, wisdom, culture, and caring can generate tangible wealth, too.

@TomSpiglanin – Why would I need to manage my own knowledge in the first place? 

At the end of the day, we are individually responsible for our own professional development, not our employer. After all, the only knowledge we can truly manage is our own.

When cooperating, people perform together (co-operate) while working on selfish yet not-conflicting goals. by @StoweBoyd

As swift trust and ad hoc project teams become the dominant form factor for working over the next few years, we will see the transformation of large businesses away from monolithic power and belief systems, to something much more of a mosiac. In  this not-too-distant future businesses may principally be organized around helping every employee find and achieve their personal meaning for work, instead of trying to indoctrinate workers to a corporate agenda.

In networks, cooperation trumps collaboration

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In networks, cooperation trumps collaboration. Collaboration happens around some kind of plan or structure, while cooperation presumes the freedom of individuals to join and participate. Cooperation is a driver of creativity. Stephen Downes commented here on the differences:

collaboration means ‘working together’. That’s why you see it in market economies. markets are based on quantity and mass.

cooperation means ’sharing’. That’s why you see it in networks. In networks, the nature of the connection is important; it is not simply about quantity and mass …

You and I are in a network – but we do not collaborate (we do not align ourselves to the same goal, subscribe to the same vision statement, etc), we *cooperate*

We are only beginning to realize how we can use networks as our primary form of living and working. David Ronfeldt has developed the TIMN framework to explain this shift – Tribal; Institutional; Markets; Networks. The TIMN framework shows how we have evolved as a civilization. Ronfeldt sees the network form not as a mere modifier of previous forms, but a form in itself that can address issues that the three other forms could not. This point is very important when it comes to implementing social business (a network mode) within corporations (institutional + market modes). Real network models are new modes, not modifications of the old ones, and cooperation is how work gets done. Some examples:

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Work is learning and learning is the work

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We have come to a point where organizations can no longer leave learning to their HR or training departments. Being able to understand emerging situations, see patterns, and co-solve problems are essential business skills. Learning is the work.

I had mentioned that I was talking to a financial advisor at a bank the other day and I asked her what kind of professional development she did. The bank has a central online learning portal where employees can take ‘courses’, particularly compliance training. The financial advisor told me she just went to the end of each course and did the test. She found it rather useless.

I talked about some of the communities that we have supported for sharing professional development, like my workshops, and she said it would be great to have access to something like this, but it most likely would be blocked. It is a major business mistake when learning is not connected to working.

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Charming finds on Twitter

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

“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. ~ Oscar Wilde” – via @PeterWinick

Cheating” is (finally) recognized as a 21st century learning skill – via @rbgayle

The IEEE’s Computer and Reliability Societies recently published “Embracing the Kobayashi Maru,” by James Caroland (US Navy/US Cybercommand) and Greg Conti (West Point) describing an exercise in which they assigned students to cheat on an exam — either jointly or individually. The goal was to get students thinking about how to secure systems from adversaries who are willing to “cheat” to win. The article describes how the students all completed the exam (they all cheated successfully), which required them to provide the first 100 digits of pi, with only 24h to prepare. The students used many ingenious techniques as cribs, but my heart was warmed to learn that once student printed a false back-cover for my novel Little Brother with pi 1-100 on it (Little Brother is one of the course readings, so many copies of it were already lying around the classroom).

[I really enjoyed the book Little Brother, and so did my sons]

@RosabethKanter – “If can’t have certainty about outcomes, try fast achievable projects & certainty of process.”

Clouds eventually give way to clarity. What separates the best from the rest is whether leaders communicate, improve, engage, invest in relationships, and remain true to principles. This can make the difference in getting stuck or emerging triumphant.

@TheEconomist – “There is a remarkable tendency to trust experts, even when there is little evidence of their forecasting powers”

There may be another, psychological, reason why investors want to pay for advice: the avoidance of regret. If you choose to put all your money into technology stocks on the back of your own research, and such stocks collapse, you only have yourself to blame. But if you have listened to the advice of an expert, then the decision is not your fault.

@edCetraT – “couldn’t make it to #IEL12 ?No worries @LnDDave curated the shared resources for you”

Note: I talked about the future of the training department at IEL12 but no one picked it up, so here is a picture, which should be worth 1,000 words ;)

 

@sjgill – “A learning organization needs tools that people can use to discover information”

So the question becomes, “How do we make work and learning part of the same process?” One way is to help people develop new knowledge in the course of their work when faced with a new task or a new challenge, whether that is operating a new tool or becoming an effective leader. This is done by making information accessible and by making the tools to create knowledge from that information accessible, too.

@gwynnek – “Remember when people only lurked? Now 76% of Twitter users post status updates. Up from 47% in 2010. ht @mbjorn”