Feedforward

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One of the consultant’s dilemmas is that you have to stay ahead of the curve to remain relevant. Yesterday’s problem doesn’t need to be solved – there’s probably an app for that already. This is why “perpetual Beta” informs all of my work.

I used to work as a training designer but there’s really not much to differentiate one course from another. Training content development has become a commodity and many companies are forced to compete on price. Even performance consulting, a good part of my consulting business for the first five years, is becoming more commonplace (and that’s a good thing). I’m now focused on working smarter, helping organizations integrate learning into the workflow, especially using social media.

More and more people in the workforce are now facing the same challenges as consultants. How can they re-skill and provide services for today’s and tomorrow’s problems, not yesterday’s? Schools don’t help much, with curriculum that is developed looking back at best practices and only reviewed every few years. Off-the-shelf training programs sure aren’t of much use, having been reduced to the lowest, and simplest, common denominator.

As I work with our PKM Workshop, now in progress, I realize that I have to keep things up to date and reflective of the participants’ needs. Before I release an assignment or resource, I have to review it in light of the current context. Sometimes I add in new discoveries just hours before publishing. This is professional development in perpetual Beta. I think more and more professional programming will go this way in time. MOOC’s are another example of this non-fixed curriculum perspective.

There is no normal. We need to think like artists, less concerned with feedback and more focused on feedforward.

Thus, the artist’s job is to dislocate the old media through their art to reveal the ground effects of the new media. McLuhan’s observations are as relevant now as they were forty years ago: The artist is the person in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. S/he is the person of integral awareness. ~ Mark Federman

Models, flows and exposure

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

“@wwjimd: Resilience = Not having all of your eggs in one basket. Abundance = having enough eggs.” – via @SebPaquet

@Kurt_Vonnegut – “Future generations will look back on TV as the lead in the water pipes that slowly drove the Romans mad.”

Young people tire of old economic models – via @steveszed

The dominant narrative says that environmental restraint must be limited and gradual, while social spending must be contained, otherwise the economy will not grow and we will all suffer. This kind of thinking is pervasive, dangerous, and outdated. Infinite growth in a finite world is impossible, growth based on speculative finance is unstable, and since the 1960’s, GDP growth and self-reported well-being have been completely uncorrelated phenomena. In this sense holistic, deep-reaching change of both thought, education and practice is needed. Indeed, we were brought together by an increasing realization that our global economic troubles aren’t just a few bad apples; the problem is indeed the apple tree.

WaPo Note to Class of 2012: More than half of young college graduates now jobless or underemployed – via @TWgy

While there’s strong demand in science, education and health fields, arts and humanities flounder. Median wages for those with bachelor’s degrees are down from 2000, hit by technological changes that are eliminating midlevel jobs such as bank tellers. Most future job openings are projected to be in lower-skilled positions such as home health aides, who can provide personalized attention as the U.S. population ages.

The evolution of design to amplify flow – by @jhagel

If we are not enhancing flow, we will be marginalized, both in our personal and professional life. If we want to remain successful and reap the enormous rewards that can be generated from flows, we must continually seek to refine the designs of the systems that we spend time in to ensure that they are ever more effective in sustaining and amplifying flows.

On the value of exposure, which many of us are frequently offered:

Variety and diversity

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Esko Kilpi made a series of tweets today that I wanted to collect in a single post:

Unlike mechanical systems, human systems thrive on variety and diversity.
An exact replication of behavior in nature would be disastrous and seen as neurotic in social life.
The Internet changes the patterns of connectivity.
The Internet transforms our understanding what “local” is, makes possible wide participation and new enriching variety in interaction.
All human systems are connected and connected systems cannot be understood in terms of isolated parts
The unit of analysis is now communication and emergence, not entities.
The perspective of network science views knowledge as socially created and socially re-created.
Management literature typically emphasizes individuals and locates explanatory power in their personal properties.
The potential of social media cannot be realized without a very different epistemological grounding, a relational perspective.
Independently existing people and things then become viewed as co-constructed in coordinated networked action.

variety diversity

To learn, we must do

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As I was preparing to start our online PKM workshop last night, I came across one of the best articles that I have read in a long while that reflects the value of what the PKM framework supports. Anne Adrian, in My own serendipitous opportunities, talks about her experiences in online sense-making.

“In 2007 I started blogging with the intention of learning and trying to determine if blogging and other online tools could be useful for my organization.

I did not ask my organization, I just did it.  At that time it could have ended badly for me because I was blind of what was possible. Blogging and connecting led to Google Analytics, Delicious, Flickr, Slideshare, Twitter, and now Google Plus. There are many applications that have been useful for a short while and then either their usefulness to me (not to all) died or they died (Google Wave, Buzz, Friendfeed).  I quickly learned the value of open sharing which led me to Creative Commons, open source, open education, and open science.”

“Chance favours the connected mind”, says Steven Johnson. Being connected creates enhanced serendipity. As Anne concludes:

“Putting myself into places (online and physical places) where serendipitous discoveries can happen is not efficient, and of course, cannot be planned. Serendipity helped me discover people, concepts,  and ideas that I would have never known before. Relationships–online, physical, mixed, new and old–and time and space are not easily planned. Serendipity does not map to set goals or plans. Instead serendipity has surprised me with energy, thoughts, knowledge, ideas, concepts, realizations, experiences, and relationships.”

All of this makes no sense unless, as individuals, we engage in our networks and contribute what we have learned or are learning along the way. As Jane Hart mentioned to me in a Skype conversation today, the individual’s role in social learning is as important as the technology or getting people to collaborate. PKM is as much a life skill as a work skill. It is necessary for all knowledge work. It is a framework that can help to develop critical thinking, something often touted by educators, but seldom taught. To learn, we must do.

Probing the frontier

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

Quote via @karlpro

“@charlesjennings: Keynote at #AITD2012 classic quote of the day: “The toothpaste is out of the tube” re: social media in the workplace.” by @AnneBB

Why Sharing Makes Sense to Pleistocene Hunters and Digital Economies – via @eprenen

Bowles proposes that the Internet has created all sorts of digital resources that are as fugitive and difficult to own as wild game on the hoof. No one can really make a software program all by themselves (it takes a lot of people to make one), and it is difficult to own software privately (because it is so easily copied and therefore very expensive to “fence in” as private property).

Roger Schank: How to teach wisdom: induce colossal failure repeatedly

To put this another way, wisdom can be learned and so it can indeed be taught, but only if we are willing to re-conceptualize education.
We simply have to get over the idea of teaching wisdom as the transmission of information and we have to emphasize repeated tries and failure followed by reflection.

The path to productivity is not a new assistant or PM software. It’s these 4 shared characteristics. – via @sardire

1. They have a life.
2. They take breaks.
3. They’ve often worked in several different industries.
4. They have great outside collaborators.

@TimKastelle – 3 critical lessons on innovation in a changing business environment

It’s hard to fit new innovations into old business models
You have to break connections to make room for your new ideas
Optimising when your environment is changing is very dangerous

@MITSMR – 54% of 4,000+ senior managers favor new business models over new products & services for future competitive advantage.

THE LEADING QUESTION
What do executives need to know about business model innovation?
FINDINGS
Business model innovation can consist of adding new activities, linking activities in novel ways or changing which party performs an activity.
Novelty, lock-in, complementarities and efficiency are four major business model value drivers.
Within organizations, business model choices often go unchallenged for a long time.

Using social media for onboarding

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Last year, I looked at new hire practices and found some interesting methods:

Ensuring new hires understand the shadow or informal part of the organization through the use of tools such as network maps (Jon Katzenbach, Senior Partner of Booz & Company, author of The Wisdom of Teams).

Pairing with another worker or even tripling with two experienced workers and getting to work immediately, in order to reduce formal training (Menlo Innovations)

Two actions that can begin even before a formal offer is made:

  1. Providing access to an online knowledge base.
  2. Connecting to an internal social network to connect online & ask questions.

Embedding collaboration from the start by co-developing an individualized new hire program.

Giving time for new hires to just look around and talk to people (Semco SA; New Seasons Market).

Good practices can be summed up with three key lessons, I later wrote in new hire emergent practices:

  1. Connect People
  2. Connect with Social Media (less hierarchical than other forms of communication).
  3. Start the process as early as possible

I collected several online resources and bookmarked “onboarding” on Diigo & Delicious.

Yesterday, Jane Hart had Mark Britz in conversation on the uses of social media for onboarding at Aspen Dental. The conversation was recorded and will be available at the Social Learning Centre shortly. Here are some of the highlights of what Mark had to say, via the Twitter stream that accompanied yesterday’s conversation:

  • Getting new hires to narrate their work, through blogs and other social media, is a good practice.
  • Allow Community to be the cornerstone of the onboarding process.
  • Use the tools you have already for social learning. Focus on building community for onboarding.
  • As new hires come across work “exceptions”, they will need to leverage a community of peers to deal with these types of problems for which training does not prepare them.
  • Mark used a wiki to capture 85 questions Senior Recruiters were being asked by Dentists in an FAQ for new-hire managers & recruiters. Any initial mistakes were corrected and now these FAQ are on a Yammer page for easy access.
  • You should get new hires to share their learning and narrate their work via blogs (one blog, multi-user) by just making it a part of the work process.
  • When the organization didn’t support networking after training, the employees created their own Facebook group.
  • Social media can be used as tools for 1) collaboration, 2) community, 3) sharing – about equal use for each was observed.
  • Using social media (Yammer) for peer to peer learning, completely eliminated the need for any formal training of the remote recruitment team [though the organization is not opposed to formal training].

learning is not something to get

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“When times were tough, training departments slashed budgets by replacing face-to-face instruction with online reading. They failed to follow through with the discussions, practice, social processing, and reinforcement that makes lessons stick. It didn’t work. Most eLearning is ineffective drudgery.” —Jay Cross

In too many cases we view learning as something that is done to people. It’s almost as if we are goin’ to get some learnin’! We think we can ‘get’ an education or ‘get people trained’. This is absurd.

university class bologna 1350s
University Class, Bologna, 1350s

A wonderful example is provided from a possible near-future in one of Margaret Atwood’s absorbingly dystopic novels.

“I was going to Martha Graham [College] partly to get away from Lucerne, but also I had to do something so I might as well get an education. That’s how they talked about it, as if an education was a thing you got, like a dress.” —The Year of the Flood

We need to look at work and learning together. A workscape perspective can help us see how learning and working are interrelated in a business environment that is a complex, interconnected ecosystem today. But this causes problems for our current management and organizational models.

“Workscape: A metaphorical construct where learning is embedded in the work and emerges in ‘pull’ mode. It is a fluid, holistic, process. Learning emerges as a result of working smarter. In this environment learning is natural, social, spontaneous, informal, unbounded, adaptive, and fun. It involves conversation as the main ingredient.” —Jay Cross

If learning is everywhere, then who is in charge of it?

If learning is the work, why do we need a separate department responsible for managing it?

If workers are responsible for learning, why can’t they take control of it?

Our networked reality is changing how we view workplace learning. The questioning is already happening.  The basics of our economy are in question. Copyright is no longer the bastion of our knowledge economy. Complexity informs every aspect of our lives. So why should learning be controlled by some external, and usually not that important, department?

Individuals need to take control of their learning in a world where they are simultaneously connected, mobile, and global; while conversely contractual, part-time, and local. Organizations must also move learning away from training and HR, as some external band-aid solution that gets called in from time to time, to an essential part of doing business in the network age. Learning has to be owned by the workers and learning support has to be a business function. Then we can get on with net work.

PKM Workshop: learning out loud

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Sometimes it helps to learn out loud: LOL. That’s why we commit to formalized activities. They can help us try something new.

The Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop provides a loose framework to try out some new ways of learning for yourself, but with a small group of people to help and support you. It’s nine weeks long and you can do everything at your own pace.

This online workshop on adapting to the networked world of work includes tools, tips & techniques from two facilitators who have been connecting, communicating and collaborating online for over fifteen years. The workshop is for anyone looking to  understand the digital reality of the connected economy. Whether you are a freelancer, work  in an organisation, or want to connect beyond the corporate walls, this is designed to give you a head start in developing a personal sense-making framework.

Here are some comments from our previous workshop:

“There is a saying that “when the student is ready the master (teacher) shows up” and that is how I see this course.”

“Without any coherent strategy I often was not persistent in my undertakings. This course gave me an excellent opportunity to evaluate my position and to work out an appropriate approach.”

“I used a time tracking tool to get a feeling for how much time I spend on seeking, sensing and sharing … So reducing my seeking and spending more time sensing (converting things into high quality content) is my most important goal for the next few months.”

It’s all about conversations

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Markets are conversations —Cluetrain Manifesto

… and so are organizations.

The network design principles successful organizations follow are: ( 1 ) shortening the distance between two randomly picked files/nodes/people. ( 2 ) getting more people who you personally know to know each other. —Esko Kilpi

Conversations.

How do we have these at work? I mean real conversations, about work that matters.

We narrate our work.

This was very natural when people worked together.

Italian fishermen mending nets on wharf at foot of Union Street in San Francisco

 

Fishermen repairing their nets on the wharf at the foot of Union Street in San Francisco — Source: Wikimedia

Jane Hart, in a very preliminary survey, shows the top three ways that people prefer to learn at work:

  1. Collaborative working within your team
  2. Personal & professional networks & communities
  3. General conversations and meetings with people

It’s all about conversations.

But in too many organizations, the major obstacle is that teams are distributed, either geographically or in time; or people are too busy to have meaningful conversations. This is why narration of work is so important. It’s the only way that others will have the slightest clue about what you are doing. If they don’t, why would they want to continue working with you?

So let’s talk about work, in meaningful ways. If work is not worth discussing, why bother doing it?

Three Principles for Net Work

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Work is changing

The nature of work is changing in our increasingly networked economy. What was considered good, dependable work in the 20th century is now getting automated or outsourced. Automated tellers have replaced thousands of bank clerks but even more advanced jobs are getting automated as we connect the world with computers. The New York Times reported in March of 2011 that armies of expensive lawyers, who once did “discovery” work have been replaced by software programs that do the work at a fraction of the cost. The same applies to computer chip designers, loan officers and tax accountants. Furthermore, any work that can be outsourced is going to the place of cheapest labour, wherever in the world that may be.

The main driver behind this shift is the interconnectivity of the Internet. It enables hyper-competition, destroying geographical barriers for anything that can be digitized. This includes all information and visual products, from creative writing, to photography and video, to radiological images.

For knowledge workers, there is diminishing value in standardized work, as it will be either automated or outsourced over time. Standardized work usually falls into simple or complicated knowledge domains. According to the Cynefin knowledge management framework, developed by Dave Snowden, in the simple domain, “the relationship between cause and effect is obvious to all” while in the complicated domain, “the relationship between cause and effect requires analysis”. For each of these domains, jobs can be standardized and training can be designed based on accepted practices.

But longer term value today resides in non-standardized work that requires creativity, imagination and innovation. This type of work falls into Cynefin’s complex domain where, “the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance”.

Consider that neither training nor education can adequately prepare workers for the complex domain because there are no best practices, only emergent practices that have to be developed as the work gets done.

This is why, in the network era, work is learning and learning is the work.

Known Problems and Exceptions

Look at a knowledge worker and how things can get done in an interconnected enterprise. Any situation can first be examined from the perspective of being a known problem or not. If it is known, then the answer can be looked up or the correct person found to deal with it. That answer may have been automated and put into a digital knowledge base or even outsourced to a company overseas.

Known problems require access to the right information to solve them. This information can be mapped, and frameworks such as knowledge management (KM) help us to codify it. We can also create tools, especially electronic performance support systems (EPSS) to do the work and bypass any background knowledge in order to accomplish the task. This is how simple and complicated knowledge continuously gets automated.

If there is a new problem, or an exception, then the knowledge worker has to deal with it in a unique way. Exception-handling is becoming more important in the networked workplace as standardized work provides no competitive advantage in a hyper-connected economy. These complex exceptions need tacit knowledge to solve them, but tacit knowledge cannot be codified in a KM system or EPSS. Tacit and complex knowledge gets shared when people work together and develop trusted ties. Therefore, exception-handling requires more collaborative approaches to work.

In addition, once an exception is dealt with, it is no longer new. It is now known. As each exception get addressed, some or all of the solution will get automated. The exception boundary is a constantly changing edge that knowledge workers have to negotiate.

Yesterday’s exceptions will be tomorrow’s examples. The challenge is to make sense of both today. Today’s complex work is tomorrow’s merely complicated or even simple work.

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.

In an organization, narration can take many forms. It could be a regular blog; sharing day-to-day happenings in activity streams; taking pictures and videos; or just having regular discussions. Developing good narration skills, like adding value to information, takes time and practice. Narrating work also means taking ownership of mistakes.

For example, just adding finished reports to a knowledge base does not help others understand how that report was developed. This is where activity streams and micro-blogging have helped organizational learning. Workers can see the flow of sense-making in small bits that over time become patterns. Humans are very good at pattern recognition. Narration of work is the first step in integrating learning into the workflow.

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.

With complex work, failure has to be tolerated, as there are no best practices for exceptions (this is why they are called exceptions). Transparency helps the organization learn from mistakes, but only if the mistakes are shared. Organizations cannot know what is known unless the entire business ecosystem is transparent. Workers need to be able find information fast, which is what McKinsey & Company has reported in the last two years as the main benefit of using social media in the enterprise: increasing speed of access to knowledge.

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. But the challenge, as John Hagel describes it, is “One of the big challenges for companies is that unlike information or data flows, knowledge does not flow easily – as it relies on long-term trust-based relationships”.

Jon Husband defines “wirearchy” as; “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology.” This is the desired state, but getting there is difficult. Examples of shared-power organizations are growing (e.g. Semco SA; The Morning Star Company; W.L. Gore & Associates) but they are not yet the majority.

Conclusion

These three simple principles of narration, transparency, and shared power should provide enough guidance to motivated leaders in an organization. Implementation depends on the specific context of each organization and the ability to keep things in what I call, “perpetual Beta”.

Power-sharing and transparency enable work to move out to the edges and away from the comfortable, complicated work that has been the corporate mainstay for decades. There is nothing left in the safe inner parts of the company anyway, as it is being automated and outsourced.

The high-value work today is in facing complexity, not in addressing problems that have already been solved and for which a formulaic or standardized response has been developed. One challenge for organizations is getting people to realize that what they already know has increasingly diminishing value. How to learn and solve problems together is becoming the real business advantage.