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.

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.