Mirroring society

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

“Her life is like a Twitter stream – awash with the fleeting and the trivial. —@gapingvoid”

“The Internet mirrors society. If you don’t like what you see in the mirror, don’t break the mirror. —Vint Cerf” via @quinnnorton

“We would like an app which costs us nothing, never has intrusive ads, and never sells to a large company. And is free. —@ianbetteridge”

Meet the New Medical Specialist: The Networkologist – via @BrianSMcGowan

“Understanding disease is a bit like getting to know New York, Albert-Lázlo Barabási argued in a talk today at the TEDMED conference in Washington, DC. Barabási is a physicist by training who got into studying disease by first examining networks. He believes that the way we currently practice medicine — identifying a diseased part of the body, then working with a specialist to treat the illness that ails the organ in question — is too specific. It doesn’t account for the complex relationships between parts of the body that make up a larger system. Right now, we’re focusing too much on individual buildings and neighborhoods, rather than examining the links between things.”

“The [issue] is that we’re not solving single problems any more. We’re [addressing] what some people have called ‘messes’.” —Rod Collins” — via @flowchainsensei

Photo taken while walking through McGill University in Montreal this week.

Loose Hierarchies, Strong Networks

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When I wrote that the only knowledge that can be managed is our own, I wanted to highlight that command & control methods do not work well in this network era that is replacing the industrial/information era. In our increasingly complex work environments, we should take the advice of Snowden & Kurtz and the Cynefin framework, described as “loose hierarchies & strong networks” by Verna Allee.
cynefin networks verna allee

While a certain amount of hierarchy may be necessary to get work done, networks naturally route around hierarchy. Networks enable work to be done cooperatively, especially when that work is complex and there are no simple answers, best practices, or case studies to fall back on. Real business value today is in complex and creative work.

Just imagine if the idea that the only knowledge we can manage is our own informed our organizations and our approach to learning and development?

What would education look like? Perhaps like this school in Bat-Yam where children direct their own learning and involve the entire community to help them achieve their personal learning goals (YouTube video). Loose hierarchies, strong networks.

What would training look like? Perhaps workers would be asked how they learn best and then be supported by the organization to get their work done. Maybe one-hour of compliance training on the LMS would disappear. Loose hierarchies, strong networks.

What would knowledge management look like? Perhaps every worker would be encouraged and supported to develop a personal knowledge mastery system not tied to enterprise software. Each person would have knowledge artefacts that could be connected to the enterprise but not uniquely owned by it. The organization would support the development of PKM skills. Loose hierarchies, strong networks.

What would your organization look like with looser hierarchies and stronger networks? Probably a lot more human.

CSTD Montreal Symposium

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I will speaking this week in Montréal at CSTD’s Symposium. Please note there are two Harolds as keynote presenters! My topic is The Future of the Training Department.

Here’s the set up.

Most training activity for the past century assumed that you could prepare people for the future by training them in what had worked in the past. Yesterday’s best practices were the appropriate prescription for today’s problems. That worked when the world was stable and things remained the same over time.

At this point in the 21st century, the game is changing. Complexity and our interconnectivity have rendered the world unpredictable. The orientation of learning is shifting from the past (efficiency, best practices) to the future (creative responses, innovation). Workplace learning is morphing from blocks of training followed by doing the work, to a merging of work and learning. Change is continuous, so learning must be continuous.

To justify its continuing existence, the training department must shift direction in three areas:

  • Embrace complexity and be open to uncertainty
  • Move from a Push to a Pull orientation
  • Adopt new frameworks to support learning in the workflow

I’ll be discussing a potential framework for the future training department this Friday.

One final thought. In the future, it will not likely be called the training department and may not even be a department.

Preparing for the future of work with PKM

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Hugh Macleod, one of my favourite cartoonists and someone who really understands the networked economy, recently asked; How Do You Best Prepare For The Creative Age?

Image: Gapingvoid.com

Chris Jablonski at ZDNet identifies five trends driving the future of work as we get virtual, online and global [I think he misses “local” though, especially as energy prices continue to increase]. Trend 4: Adaptive lifelong learning the norm -“Ten years from now, relevant work skills will be shaped by the continued rise in global connectivity, smart technology and new media, among several other drivers.” This is linked to the Institute for the Future‘s graphic of Future Work Skills 2020 identifying six disruptive shifts as well as the skills necessary to deal with them:

  1. Sense-making
  2. New media literacy
  3. Virtual collaboration
  4. Cognitive load management
  5. Novel and adaptive thinking
  6. Social intelligence
  7. Trans-disciplinarity
  8. Computational thinking
  9. Cross Cultural competency
  10. Design mindset

The first four of these skills are ones that the personal knowledge management framework  has been based on. For the past two years I have offered full-day workshops on PKM  at the University of Toronto’s iSchool Institute, with the final one scheduled for 1 June 2012 (Network Learning: Working Smarter). Feedback indicates that most people would prefer to do this online, so I experimented with a workshop that just finished last week. Here are some comments:

“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.”

Future PKM workshops will be either custom designed for organizations who want these onsite, or conducted online at the Social Learning Centre, hosted by my colleague Jane Hart. Here are the details on online PKM workshops.

Notes from a Paretian world

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

Why Thinking About Averages Can Be Disastrous – by @timkastelle

If you are operating in a Paretian world but you assume that it’s Guassian, you’re heading for trouble. That’s why thinking about averages can be disastrous. Think about outliers instead.

Polymaths, bumblebees & the expert myth – by @jerrymichalski @aprilrinne

We need a new kind of expert — one whose expertise is hard-won through direct experience and whose point of view is both flexible and principled. We need people who have a deep sense of the world’s inner workings and interdependencies and who are comfortable in multiple settings and speak multiple national and disciplinary languages. These should be people who can absorb new material very quickly, and then improve it as they share it with others. We need to rely on people who are more than just an “expert” on any one topic, but across topics

We don’t need to do away with experts entirely. Instead, let’s update and refine what it means to be an expert in the 21st century.

WSJ: Better Leadership Through Social Media – by @awsamuel

“Join a new online network? I’d love to!”

In 15 years of helping business, government and nonprofit leaders make strategic choices about digital technology, I’ve yet to hear an executive utter those words.

Network Tensions – by @panklam

This tension I noted, is one of the primary ones I exposed in Net Work: “Outcome v s. Discovery.” Tensions, I wrote, “are present all the time; both leaders and members of a network should be aware of how these tensions impact the health of a network. All networks will shift along these lines of tension as they respond to changes in the environment, changes in the demographics of their members, and changes in purpose, structure, and style.”

The only knowledge that can be managed is our own

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“Every amateur epistemologist knows that knowledge cannot be managed. Education has always assumed that knowledge can be transferred and that we can carefully control the process through education. That is a grand illusion.” – Dave Jonassen

The only knowledge that can be managed is our own. In my opinion, knowledge management should be about supporting personal knowledge mastery in networks, with a distributed, not centralized, approach. Net Work Literacy entails self-organized learning while cooperating in diverse networks. Each of us is responsible for our own learning and in this network era we are now obliged to share that learning. If no one shared what they have learned there would be no Wikipedia or other free learning resources on the web.

Shifting to Net Work

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Our first Net Work Literacy session ends this week. There were several reasons why Jane Hart and I decided to offer this two-week online programe. The idea first came to me as I realized how many of my clients and colleagues were not as connected as they could be, too often wasting their time on routine things and not building networks that could help them get work done.

I’ve also noticed that people in their mid to late job careers are woefully unprepared to adapt to a post-job world, where work is simultaneously connected, contractual, part-time, global and local. Once the job is gone, many also lose their professional networks. The Net Work Literacy programme aims at getting people to think in terms of networks, with a focus on taking control of their professional development.

Our programme is global in scope, with participants from four continents so far. However, a key to long term success in learning and working in a post-industrial society is connecting these global learning networks with one’s local community. As energy costs increase, more of our resources will have to be local. Using network skills at the local level, connected to a global support network, is one way to develop a sustainable way of life.

As we continue with the Net Work Literacy programme, I intend on getting more stories about what is happening in various localities and learn how people are dealing with what my friend Bill Draves calls a Nine Shift.

There are 24 hours in a day. We have no real discretion with roughly 12 of those hours. We need to eat, sleep, and do a few other necessary chores in order to maintain our existence. That hasn’t changed much through the centuries, so far.

That leaves approximately 12 hours a day where we, as individuals, do have some discretion. That includes work time, play time, and family time.

Of those 12 hours, about 75%, or 9 hours, will be spent totally differently a few years from now than they were spent just a few years ago. Not everything will change, but 75% of life is in the process of changing right now.

Awareness

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Part of Personal Knowledge Management is seeking sources of knowledge (Seek-Sense-Share).

To be able to seek, first you have to be aware. Wolfgang Reinhardt has looked at knowledge workers, researchers in particular, and examined how they can be aware in their fields of expertise. Wolfgang graciously sent me a copy of his PhD thesis (Awareness: Support for knowledge workers in research networks) which he will be defending on 5 April at the Open Universiteit Nederland in Heerlen.

Wolfgang describes 10 knowledge worker roles that I think are helpful in understanding how all collaborative workers can share their knowledge.

  1. Controller
  2. Helper
  3. Learner
  4. Linker
  5. Networker
  6. Organizer
  7. Retriever
  8. Sharer
  9. Solver
  10. Tracker

Think of these roles, and who will do them, as you start or support a community of practice. There are also 13 different knowledge actions conducted by these researchers, to varying degrees, that Wolfgang has found in his research.

  1. Acquisition
  2. Analyze
  3. Authoring
  4. Co-authoring
  5. Information search
  6. Dissemination
  7. Expert Search
  8. Feedback
  9. Formal & Informal Learning
  10. Information organization
  11. Monitoring
  12. Networking
  13. Service search

How many of these are done on a regular basis, and with some degree of consistency, in knowledge-intensive organizations? How can this be improved?

Finally, the generic model of awareness describes how “the overall awareness of objects declines the further an object is away from oneself”.

  1. Self-awareness
  2. Awareness of current practice
  3. Awareness of the local research organization
  4. Awareness of the personal research network
  5. Awareness of the research domain

In complex fields, where various researchers are working on similar problems, it becomes rather important to know who has done what. The challenge for distributed research teams is to find ways of understanding what is happening and ensuring it is communicated throughout the network.

Not only does distributed research need collaborative researchers but there must be an understanding of the role that awareness plays amongst knowledge workers. In complex networks, basic management approaches are no longer adequate.

Some final notes from Wolfgang’s defence:

The term “awareness” in Research Networks is a multilayered term that reaches far deeper than just emulating face-to-face situations in distributed collaboration.

Without supporting the awareness of network researchers, innovation, collaboration and knowledge exchange will not reach its potential.

Omitting support for social interactions between stakeholders in scientific events amounts to wasting the opportunity to recommend objects and increase the strength of research networks.

Employees are often laughing

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cluetrain modified

Here’s a modified version of theses 11 to 13 of the Cluetrain Manifesto (1999), for all those corporate personnel support functions (HR, L&D, OD, KM):

People in a networked society have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from the human resources department. So much for L&D rhetoric about adding value to commoditized learning content.

There are no secrets. Networked workers know more than management does about the company’s own products and services. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone. What’s already happened to markets is now happening among employees. A metaphysical construct called “The Company” is the only thing standing between the two.

Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy (Cluetrain #7)

Sharing beyond the classroom and cubicle

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

Brain Rule #2: “There is no greater anti-brain environment than the classroom and cubicle. ~ John Medina” via @chriscognito

“When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course. ~ Peter F. Drucker” via @montberte

@gapingvoid: “Conversations” are fine and dandy, but eventually one actually has to get some work done.”

How creativity works: What Broadway musicals really teach us about collaboration. – via @TimKastelle

[Conclusion]: The global nature of Q—and the difficulty of using global measures to craft local strategies—might be a disappointment for business people who want to use the lessons of Broadway to out-innovate the competition. But it shouldn’t be. The new social science of complex networks is addressing a different kind of problem, a deeper and potentially more important one. This research is concerned less with how to construct teams to maximize their creativity than with the question of what kind of society maximizes everyone’s creativity. And real progress on that front would be something worth singing and dancing about.

[Note on Q]: It’s made up of two parts. The first is the average number of connections you need to join two random people in a network. That number can be surprisingly small, even in a very big network; for example, you can connect two random Facebook users, on average, with a chain that’s less than five friends long. The second part of Q measures the extent to which two people who are connected to the same person are likely to be connected to each other: the “clusteredness” of the network.

Psychology Today: How Da Vinci Got His Ideas – via @marloft

When you make a connection between two unrelated subjects, your imagination will leap to fill the gaps and form a whole in order to make sense of it. Suppose you are watching a mime impersonating a man taking his dog out for a walk. The mime’s arm is outstretched as though holding the dog’s leash. As the mime’s arm is jerked back and forth, you “see” the dog straining at the leash to sniff this or that. The dog and the leash become the most real part of the scene even though there is no dog or leash. In the same way, when you make connections between your subject and something that is totally unrelated, your imagination fills in the gaps to create new ideas. It is this willingness to use your imagination to fill in the gaps that produces the unpredictable idea.

@rushkoff: Whistle-blowers of Goldman-Sachs & Google

In short, the kinds of sustainable, value-creating businesses these corporate escapees are calling for just can’t happen within a corporate model based on borrowing, leverage and expansion. It’s too little and too late for a few corporate whistle-blowers to tell us how the companies they work for are technically incompetent, distracted by revenues or losing the values that once made them great.

On superstition: people believe weird things because of our evolved need to believe nonweird things – via @ValdisKrebs

Through a series of complex formulas that include additional stimuli (wind in the trees) and prior events (past experience with predators and wind), the authors conclude that “the inability of individuals—human or otherwise—to assign causal probabilities to all sets of events that occur around them will often force them to lump causal associations with non-causal ones. From here, the evolutionary rationale for superstition is clear: natural selection will favour strategies that make many incorrect causal associations in order to establish those that are essential for survival and reproduction.”

Learning is the Work – original artwork by @RalphMercer