The performance appraisal treadmill

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In The Paradox of Performance Pay, Allan Hawke shows how it has clearly led to decreases in organizational performance.

Peter Scholtes, who has researched and written extensively about performance, appraisal and pay, argues that such a performance ”management” regime is inherently the wrong thing to do because three faults are common to all variations on the theme:

  • It doesn’t work.
  • It’s wrong to focus only on individuals or groups, because most opportunities for improvement involve systems, processes and technology.
  • Performance ”management” is judgment, not feedback; it’s a hierarchical dynamic.

W. Edwards Deming called annual performance appraisals one of the five deadly diseases of management. Performance ratings are nothing more than a lottery, Deming said in 1984. This pertains to all levels in the organization.

ANNUAL RATING OF PERFORMANCE

  • Arbitrary and unjust system
  • Demoralizing to employees
  • Nourishes short-term performance
  • Annihilates team work, encourages fear.

Perhaps the performance appraisal treadmill is keeping organizations from testing out and adopting better management models for the networked economy. How could anyone possibly show progress in 365 days? It also makes one wonder about the effectiveness of publicly-traded companies that get a ‘performance appraisal’ from the market every quarter.

JFK Report Card 1930

Performance appraisals are like academic grades and keep the focus on the individual. In the collaborative, social enterprise this is counter-productive. There is no place for this practice in doing net work. In today’s enterprise, work is learning and learning is the work, and it has to be done cooperatively.

The Web changes business

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So you think the Web won’t change the business you’re in? Do you believe that education, training, and instructional design organizations will carry on with business-as-usual, as people keep paying for traditional courses? Look at how these business models, which were all created since the birth of the Web, have managed to change entire industries.

  • Google – Advertising
  • Craigslist – Classified Ads
  • Wikipedia – Encyclopedias (print & electronic)
  • Amazon – Books
  • LinkedIn – Recruiting
  • Elance – Freelancing
  • GMail – Email (web-based & almost unlimited storage)
  • WordPress – Custom Web Design, Hosting & CMS
  • Moo – Business Cards
  • Etsy – Local Artists & Artisans go global in minutes
  • iTunes – Music on demand

Given that 65% of todays’ students will end up in jobs that don’t exist today, we know work will change significantly in the next decade. The network economy is changing everyone’s business, and will significantly affect education and training as well.

The college in transition

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I really enjoyed my visit to Algonquin College in Ottawa today. I met many motivated educational change agents who are looking at how they can improve their learning environment, with and without technology. The campus is home to a wide range of students, though I was surprised that most are under 24 years of age. I had expected more mid-career students

I must admit that on arrival this morning (using the highly efficient Ottawa transit system), I found the new construction trades building to be quite stunning.

As the opening keynote speaker, my job was talk about some of the bigger issues facing Canadian colleges today. One of the topics was the appearance of new open, online offerings from US universities like Stanford, Harvard, Princeton and MIT. If these folks are offering free courses, why would you want to take the bus to a community college, one might ask? Here’s an interesting perspective on what EdX might mean.

Perhaps these new(ish) models, like MOOC’s, will address some of the issues facing higher education, as I heard a few stories of students being completely tuned-out of the formal education process.

Like most organizations adapting to the networked society, the college is trying to balance its existing hierarchies (there are many) with the impact of ubiquitous connectivity & pervasive proximity.

It will be interesting to see how the shift to a mobile campus develops and what external forces will influence the direction of this college. I think colleges, with their work-oriented programmes, are in a much more resilient postion than their brethren at four year universities. But on the other hand, I’m not a futurist. I just tried to show how communication revolutions lead to fundamental shifts in how we organize work, and how this changes our relationship with knowledge, and society’s view of education.

It’s perpetual Beta.

The college in perpetual Beta

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I will be speaking at Algonquin College in Ottawa tomorrow and one of the main themes I will be discussing is how networks are changing our communications, work and education systems. It’s called The College in perpetual Beta:

One of the biggest hurdles facing organizations, and people working in them, is to stop thinking of hierarchies and start thinking of networks. In this “network era”, work is learning and learning is the work, but what does that mean for traditional education and our continuing professional development? How can we prepare students, staff and faculty for a world where we are simultaneously connected, mobile, and global; while conversely contractual, part-time, and local?

Algonquin College is the largest community college in Ontario with over 18,000 full-time and 35,000 part-time students.

Manual, not automatic, for sense-making

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I started Friday’s Finds three years ago, in an attempt to make my finds on Twitter more explicit. I had been using Twitter actively for over a year at this time and realized that I was not making much sense of it. Now I make a weekly summary of my favourites: reviewed, filtered, and reassessed. The actual tools I use for personal knowledge mastery are quite limited. Google Reader is my aggregator — I link my Delicious & Diigo social bookmark accounts together but mostly use Diigo, I write my half-baked ideas regularly on my blog, and I engage in many conversations on Twitter which I curate here. That’s about it.

I prefer simpler tools that force me to think and connect by myself. If it was automatic I wouldn’t think about it much, but that’s what I want to do; think more, not less. As I mentioned in Personal Information management for Sense-making, George Siemens’s complaint that, “Too many aspects of my sense-making system are manual”, is what I see as a strength of PKM. By keeping sense-making activities ‘manual’, we are forced to do something.

For me, the act of writing a blog post, a tweet, or an annotation on a social bookmark, all force me to think a bit more than clicking once and having it served up from an automated system. The routine of reviewing my Twitter favourites and creating Friday’s Finds is another manual routine that I find helps to reinforce my learning and (hopefully) add to my knowledge.

I’m describing this in more detail here as some of these issues came up during our PKM Workshop this week.

So without further ado, here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

“Integral to the training of an athlete is difficulty, obstacles, and defeat. The same is true of entrepreneurs. —@AronSolomon”

“Lack of trust leads to increase in command & control, which leads to decrease in trust. —@jitterted” —via @flowchainsensei

“Big-city wages, small-town prices” is a damn fine business model. —@gapingvoid

The six human skills that will matter long term [a dissenting opinion] – via @dhinchcliffe

But six will survive, say Messrs Brynjolfsson and McAfee, no matter how fast and smart computers become. Those skills are: statistical insight; managing group dynamics; good writing; framing and solving open-ended problems; persuasion; and human nurturing. These will define the jobs they think will exist at the end of the universe.

… Indeed, when we view the two researchers’ six skills from the perspective of the boardroom, what appears strikingly absent is any reference to taking decisions.

Collaboration Will Drive the Next Wave of Productivity Gains – via @brianinroma

Today, a new wave of technologies — collaborative or social technologies, most of which appeared only within the last decade — is entering the workplace. But as with the technology of the 1980s and 1990s, the ability of these technologies to drive real productivity growth will depend on whether or not they are accompanied by thoughtful changes in the way work is done.

These new technologies hold out the promise of many business benefits. They greatly amplify our abilities to interact simultaneously with large numbers of people. As they make their way from use in our personal lives into the workplace, they offer the promise of significant improvements in generating, capturing, and sharing knowledge, finding helpful colleagues and information, tapping into new sources of innovation and expertise, and harnessing the “wisdom of crowds.” Collaborative technologies have the potential to shift the way we interact with people on our teams, find external expertise when it’s needed, and share ideas and observations more broadly.

“free courses are not free degrees and courses never really worked that well in the first place —Roger Schank”

I am writing this diatribe for a simple reason. We now have a large amount for money available to start building masters degrees. I am seeking universities who want to work with us, but these universities need to abandon their old models in the new on line space. I would be happy to hear from people who think their university could do that. MIT and Harvard will continue to pretend they are doing something important but free courses are not free degrees and courses never really worked that well in the first place. Students don’t typically attend college because of all the great courses. Universities may like to think that but while a Harvard degree may well be worth a lot, Harvard courses are just a form of entertainment.

Boundaries are for learning

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Opportunity lies at the edge of systems. Real value creation happens at the edge of organizations. That’s also where we find learning opportunities. Understanding the role of boundaries in human systems can also give us ways to take advantage of them for learning, as Kathia Laszlo writes in Reflecting on Boundaries: Who is teaching and who is learning?

“The boundaries of a system are part of its structure. There are structures that are enabling and others that are limiting. There is a delicate balance between openness and safe space. Diversity is healthy, but with certain limits. As systems thinkers, observing and reflecting on the role of the boundaries is an important practice. We need to remember that social systems are human creations. We must recover our power as social systems designers in order to reconfigure those boundaries and enable new and more life-affirming interactions.”

For example communities of practice can be bridges between our work teams and our loose social networks. Perhaps the boundaries between each of these systems — teams, communities, networks —  can be used for learning opportunities as well.

Think of opportunities to open doors between the work space and the looser dialogue in communities of practice. Bringing in specific examples from the work space to the community is another opportunity for learning. Finding new metaphors and models in our social networks and discussing these within the context of our community of practice can foster innovation. Perhaps there are roles in communities of practice that can be used in your work teams. Maybe looser social network protocols will revitalize a community of practice. Think about where the boundaries are and their influence on learning.

None of this is profound, but I think it’s helpful for community managers and facilitators: guide people to the boundaries to get new ideas to flow in and out. As Kathia writes:

“How can I facilitate the evolution of this organization or community?” is a question I frequently ask myself. And often I find that the answer to this question relies on my ability to expand the boundaries of the system so that we can move from either/or to both/and. If in the old system there where those who teach and those who learn, how can we create a culture in which everybody teaches and everybody learns? How can we move beyond acquiring knowledge to creating meaning? How can we collaborate rather than work against each other?

PKM live with Euan Semple

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Seb Paquet describes the social web as enabling “ridiculously easy group-forming”, and that’s what we did. During our PKM Workshop this week, we discussed the books we would recommend to others. Euan Semple’s “Organizations Don’t Tweet” came up and I mentioned that I had reviewed it. I also suggested that Euan might be available to discuss the book. He graciously agreed to talk with us, even though his work schedule is quite hectic. This evening we set-up a Google+ hangout and Euan talked about several ideas in the book as well as some of his experiences as a change agent in large organizations.

I started the conversation by mentioning the direct connection between PKM and the chapter on Literacy Re-discovered:

Things to remember:

  • Having somewhere to write like a blog or Twitter makes you more aware of what is happening around you.
  • We are communicating more to each other through the medium of writing than we have done for decades.
  • Writing an effective blog post or tweet is a literary skill.
  • Much business writing is badly done and ineffective.
  • The metaphor of the document has become a liability in the era of blogs and Wikipedia.
  • Improving our writing skills and seeing it as part of everyone’s job will improve the effectiveness of our organizations.

A number of other observations were shared, and the group is now gathering its notes together in our discussion forum and continuing to learn together. We practised Seek (find books & authors), Sense (get recommendations for our context), and Share (have a conversation and narrate our learning). It was great to see this in action. It was a real bonus for the workshop, and something we hope to keep doing in future workshops, when the opportunity arises. As Hugh says:

Getting people together across multiple timezones and several countries to have a meaningful conversation is now ridiculously easy. Sometimes we forget just how revolutionary this is.

Take off those rose coloured glasses

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Training is only 5% of organizational learning, but for a long time this small slice has been the primary focus of most Learning & Development (L&D) departments. The other 95% was just taken care of by the informal networks in the organization. On-job-training in some cases, or just observation and modelling in others. Then a funny thing happened. All those informal networks became hyper-connected. First with web-links and later with ubiquitous mobile devices.

Take a look at social media. These manifestions of the current state of the web enable easy knowledge-sharing and, as Seb Paquet calls it, ridiculously easy group-forming. Social media are fantastic tools to support organizational collaboration and informal learning. But if you look around, L&D is almost never the initiator, nor the owner of, social media in the enterprise. The informal part of organizational learning is no longer the private purview of L&D, if it ever was. The new reality is that, at least implicitly, business units are realizing that work is learning and that they need to empower workers to learn and solve problems collaboratively.

Joyce Seitzinger referred me to this post, What will your training role be in the future? The author describes four future roles:

  1. Design & Create Courses
  2. Enable Learning
  3. Support Learning
  4. Be a change agent for development

Only the first is related to what L&D has actually been doing.  The other three are open for the taking in the networked workplace. They can be done by people from sales, marketing, communications or many other areas. It should not be a foregone conclusion that these roles will be filled by trainers. In my experience, trainers have often been let go during a transition to a more performance and social focused L&D function, replaced by people with other skills from varying backgrounds. The future will not be L&D 2.0 but rather a new organizational learning approach, where learning is integrated into the workflow. Many departments outside L&D are already staking this new ground and building their expertise.

The future is bright for organizational learning, but don’t think it will look like the past.

“A Sunset Through Rose Colored Glasses” by Josh Harper

How blogging changed my life for the better

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I guess I could be described as a hardcore blogger, as I’ve been writing here for over eight years. So I’m going to respond to Hugh MacLeod’s question about the importance of blogging to me.

Like I said many times before, for those of us crazy enough to take it seriously, blogging matters, so does freedom, that’s why I wrote the book. And yeah, we have a duty to convince those less fortunate than ourselves to give it some more thought.

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  1. I live in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada; population 5,000. Even our timezone is unknown to many people. Without my blog, nobody would ever have heard of me. This Spring, I have four speaking engagements out of town (Montreal, Ottawa, Washington DC, Rome). Without my blog, I am sure that IEEE and many other organizations would not have invited me to speak.
  2. My blog is a key part of my professional development and essential to my personal knowledge mastery processes. It’s how I make sense of many things. My blog keeps me connected.
  3. I initially met my business partners at the Internet Time Alliance through my blog. That was a very good thing!
  4. My blog has allowed me to connect to people all over the world. This year alone, I have had visitors from 168 countries. It means that I can often travel to a new city and already know someone at my destination.
  5. In addition, my blog gives me (just a little bit of) credibility with the much younger digital generation ;)

It's not about knowledge transfer

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In 2009 I listened to Peter Senge’s keynote address at the CSTD national conference. His research findings showed that the average life expectancy of large companies is about 30 years, but some are over 200 years old, and the key driver for their longevity is organizational learning. Individual learning in organizations is irrelevant, as work is almost never done by one person alone. Knowledge, Senge said, is the capacity for effective action (know how) and it is the only aspect of knowledge that really matters in business and life. Value is created by teams and mostly by networks of people. While learning may be generated in teams, this type of knowledge comes and goes. Learning really spreads through social networks.

Another point that stuck with me, as I had witnessed this, was Senge’s observation that the field of knowledge management had been co-opted by information technology vendors, and had become useless for organizational learning. I was reminded of this while reading, Lost Knowledge: What are you and your organization doing about it? –

Executives have known about “lost knowledge” and retiring Boomers for years, and yet very few companies have taken steps to insure that there is some sort of effective knowledge transfer from Boomers to younger employees.

Knowledge cannot be transferred. This is the big conceit of knowledge management. This “loss of knowledge” when older workers retire is a symptom of a structural problem. It shows that the company never gave any thought to organizational learning.

Successful, and long-lived, organizations do this all the time, not just when a demographic blip hits them.

Retiring baby-boomers are just one more wake-up call to dysfunctional organizations.