Work is learning. Learning is the work.
“The feral creative mind, in panic to find a truth, jumps back and forth, turning over stones, sniffing the air, all at once, up and down, a niggling doubt removed, another rising, something far away related, something not, a howl in the night, until, through all the crumpled paper in a cluttered mind a light is struck that’s soon so bright a problem fades, and a feral creative mind can live another day.” ~ The Curmudgeon
In The Learning Workplace [dead link], Anne Marie McEwan describes “four profiles of learning workplaces according to structure, global reach, knowledge type, workstyle and social complexity”: Traditional, Emergent, Networked & Hyper-networked.
Many, if not most, companies today face the challenge of moving from a Traditional profile to what I would call “more networked” or somewhere between profiles 2, 3 & 4. This “shift to the right” includes:
These shifts are corroborated by much of the current literature on social business. The big question is: how do we get there? While an even more pressing question may be: how do we get started?
Look at what is common across all these factors – control.
I was chatting today with a friend of mine who works for a large multinational corporation. His main frustration is the level of control throughout the company. Many days he spends most of his time dealing with one support department or another, which has control across the company. Each time an exception occurs, the control measures are inadequate to deal with it and the central authority lacks any local contextual knowledge. My friend gets frustrated, as this is often at the expense of the client. He also says that these exceptions are steadily becoming the norm.
First Step: An initial audit of control measures that no longer make sense would be a good place to start the voyage from a traditional to a networked workplace. Just ask those who do the work where less control would help get the job done.
Second Step: Now take that information and start doing something about it.
In a workscape perspective I described how new frameworks help management, HR and L&D professionals get away from the trees to see the forest of workforce development.
Earlier, in Bridging the Gap; Working Smarter, I explained how loose external networks are necessary to have access to diverse opinions, while work teams need to share complex knowledge and therefore have to build strong, collaborative relationships.
Communities of practice are the bridges between the work being done and diverse social networks, fostering cooperation without hierarchical structure.
Basically, collaboration is necessary to do complicated, but manageable, project tasks; while a looser form of cooperation helps to understand more complex and not yet manageable problems. Cooperation is moving from a soft skill to a required hard skill.
From this perspective, the best way to develop internal workforce support structures (what used to be called learning & development) is from the outside in.
Start with what is being constantly learned in professional social networks and harvest it for insights.
Discuss these ideas cooperatively in communities of practice and then test out ways to enhance collaboration (Probe-Sense-Respond).
Through collaborative work, get feedback on where performance support may be required and if training is needed.
In this way, the externally focused social business, and everyone in it, drives the development tools and methods to support the work being done.
Everyone is involved in what used to be the instructional design process, but now there is a focus on collaboration first, performance support when needed, and training as the last choice.
There are few best practices for the network era workplace, but definitely many next practices to be developed. A good place to start is with an integrative performance framework that puts formal training and education where they belong: focused on the appropriate 5%.
Jay Cross calls the new performance environment a workscape:
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.
Workscapes are not new structures but rather holistic ways of looking at and reformulating existing business infrastructure. They use the same networks and social media as the business itself, but technology is never the most important part. Foremost are people, their motivations, emotions, attitudes, roles, their enthusiasm or lack thereof, and their innate desire to excel. Technology connects people.
Workscapes go far beyond traditional training and instructional services. Jane Hart has developed a comprehensive framework for the support of workplace learning and performance. Note in the centre that “learning needs to be embedded in the workflow“. This is the premise from which all organizational support must flow.
Another perspective, from Charles Jennings, uses the 70-20-10 framework to prioritize performance support. “If you keep people in the workflow, and provide them with facilities and support for learning, the learning is more effective, faster and efficient.”
A workscape perspective can help management, HR and L&D professionals get away from the trees to see the forest, because business is a complex, interconnected ecosystem today.
@MarietjeD66 [Member of European Parliament (D66/ALDE Group)] RT @carlbildt [Foreign Minister of Sweden since 2006] Tried to sort out 21st century statecraft at
#bf7 [Brussels Forum]. Hierarchies losing and networks gaining in a world of hyperconnectivity.
Here are some of the insights and observations that were shared via Twitter this past week.
Image: Mimi and Eunice
@ValaAfshar – “Stop chasing best practices, instead chase the best people.”
@counternotions “notion of a 3-5 yr technology road map is untenable & unrealistic outside of mainframes, ERP, retirement tracking & nuclear containment”
Thabo Mophiring, @Thabo99 posted this to me: @hjarche I just blogged for the first time and now finally understand your comment on blogging in the old days and social curation. [in response to my earlier comment that when blogs were one of the few available social media, the curation included much more commentary and required more work]
Why Britannica failed on paper by @dweinberger
Paper doesn’t scale.
Paper-based knowledge can’t scale.
The Net scales.
The Net scales knowledge.
IM vs KM by @JBordeaux
The difference between IM [information management] and KM [knowledge management] is the difference between a recipe and a chef, a map of London and a London cabbie, a book and its author. Information is in technology domain, and I include books (themselves a technology) in that description. Digitizing, subjecting to semantic analysis, etc., are things we do to information. It is folly to ever call it knowledge, because that is the domain of the brain. And knowledge is an emergent property of a decision maker – experiential, emotional framing of our mental patterns applied to circumstance and events. It propels us through decision and action, and is utterly individual, intimate and impossible to decompose because of the nature of cognitive processing. Of course, I speak here of individual knowledge.
Knowledge Inventories via @IsabelDeClercq
Unfortunately, every few years, the ‘knowledge inventory’ baloney pops up again. It is always proffered by arrogant and unfortunate Western rationalists. They think they can apply analytic reductionism to complex phenomena like knowledge, networks and value. They ALWAYS fail and eventually go away.
…
In summary, business productivity and knowledge inhabits complex networks. It CANNOT be broken down and reassembled. Rather, praxis and phronesis achieve social comprehension, knowledge cohesion, leadership maturity, new capabilities, productivity, growth, business prosperity and optimal outcomes overall.
@ibridazioni – Orangutans shed light on a key insight about Social Knowledge Management
The question was: why all the members of the first group were capable to share knowledge independently from the difference in ages, hierarchy or sex in the group members for generations, while in the second group new discoveries were owned by small groups of orangutans and then disappearing with them? What allowed the widespread of a knowledge inside the whole group and why new ideas did not disappear after inventor’s death but continue for generations?
How could the new knowledge become a group’s assets?In this exceptional natural scenario van Schaik discovered that this fact has a cultural cause!
The cultural difference in the group characterized by a shared culture was a physical and emotional code of proximity that allowed members of the group to approach and interact between them easily. We are in the knowledge’s economy and the cultural proximity code is the first secret to transform knowledge in a evolutive boost.
Cristina Milos recently tweeted that; “Curating is different from aggregating information. That is why I am not a fan of Paperli or Scoopit.” The curation craze has been assisted by an increasing number of web platforms that enable easy sharing (with emphasis on the word easy). But what value do they really provide, aside from another platform to sell user data or advertising?
During my online conversation (recording on YouTube) with Jane Hart yesterday, we discussed personal knowledge mastery (PKM) and one very important aspect, in my opinion, is the need for active sense-making. Merely seeking and sharing information does little other than create more noise online. The sense-making part takes effort. It’s why so few people keep at blogging for years, because it takes work.
But sense-making, or placing information into context, is where the real personal value of PKM lies. The knowledge gained from PKM is an emergent property of all its activities. Merely tagging an article does not create knowledge. The process of seeking out information sources, making sense of them through some actions, and then sharing with others to confirm or accelerate our knowledge are interlinked activities from which knowledge (often slowly) emerges.
One strength of PKM is the “manual” nature of sense-making activities. The act of writing a blog post, a tweet, or an annotation on a social bookmark all force you to think a bit more than clicking once and filing it to an automated system. Other sense-making routines, like a weekly review of Twitter favourites and creating Friday’s Finds, encourages reflection and reinforces learning. Automating sense-making is antithetical to the rationale behind PKM.
It’s not PKM if there is no value created, and I’m not sure if it’s curation either.
I’ve been putting together a series of thoughts on slides to share my perspectives on work and learning in the network era. I’ve called these presentations visual calling cards. The words on these slides come from the posts I’ve written here over several years.
While discussing my latest slide series with my colleague Jane Hart, we wondered which format would be preferable: a slideshow controlled by the viewer, or slides set to music in a streaming video. Does the music and flow enhance or detract from the presentation?
In the spirit of learning by doing, I’ll let you decide. Feedback is always appreciated.
An artisan is a skilled manual worker in a particular craft, using specialized processes, tools and machinery. Artisans were the dominant producers of goods before the Industrial Revolution. Knowledge artisans of the post-industrial era are retrieving old world care and attention to detail, but using the latest tools and processes in an interconnected economy.
Artisans did not watch the clock and neither do knowledge artisans.
Next generation knowledge artisans are amplified versions of their pre-industrial counterparts. Equipped with and augmented by technology, they rely on their human capital and skill to solve complex problems and develop new ideas, products and services. Small groups of highly productive knowledge artisans are capable of producing goods and services that used to take substantially larger teams and resources. In addition to redefining how work is done, knowledge artisans are creating new organizational structures and business models. Knowledge artisans are retrieving the older artisanal model and re-integrating previously separate skills.
Knowledge Artisans not only design the work but can also do the work. It is not passed down an assembly line. Many integrate marketing, sales and customer service with their creations. To ensure that they stay current, they become members of various “Guilds”, known today as communities of practice or knowledge networks. One of the earliest knowledge guilds was the open source community which developed many of the communication tools and processes used by knowledge artisans today: distributed work; results-only work environments (your code speaks for you); RSS, blogs & wikis for sharing; agile programming; flattened hierarchies, etc.
It is hard to be a knowledge artisan in a hierarchical organization that tells you what to do and which tools to use. Today, we are seeing the more experienced and adventurous knowledge artisans leaving, while younger skilled artisans are not joining command & control organizations.
Are knowledge artisans the mainstay of the network era economy? If so, what does that mean for your organization or business?
A study of international alliances found that two-thirds of the alliances between equally matched partners were successful but where there was a significant imbalance of power almost 60% of alliances failed. Consequently in the case of a formal joint venture equal ownership is the most successful structure, 50-50 ownership being twice as likely to succeed as other ownership structures. ~ Managing Collaboration
When we created the Internet Time Alliance we were five independent consultants, all with many years working alone. We wanted to do something together but did not want to become a typical professional services company, with principals, junior staff and administrative support, all driven by sales & marketing.
Now the six of us continue to work as individuals but we are increasingly realizing the power of our alliance, which is driven by our almost daily narration of our professional work. Internally, we are completely transparent and it’s often quite amazing how quickly we can put something together, as we draw on our specific strengths and connections. More and more we are working together, sometimes in pairs, or even as a group.
People often ask, what does Internet Time Alliance really mean? Well first of all, we are all free-agents, with our individual professional practices, but we are also co-owners of our UK-based company. That means we have business presences in four countries. Jay calls internet time, the accelerated timeframe of the new economy brought on by eBusiness and the Internet. A year of Internet time may equal 7 years of calendar time. We think wikipedia’s definition of alliance aligns with our practice, “An agreement or friendship between two or more parties, made in order to advance common goals and to secure common interests“.
One of our common goals is the democratization of work and learning, as Jay discussed recently during his trip to India and I talked about in relation to social business.
Our interlaced networks are dominated by innovators and early adopters. Most of us are early adopters in that we put into practice much of what we recommend. For example, we were early to blogging and Twitter. When our clients are ready to cross the technology adoption chasm, we can be the pathfinders. We learn from our mistakes by talking about them. We’ve learned that solving problems together is becoming the real business imperative. Sharing and using knowledge is where emerging business value lies.
Image via Wikipedia
Because our work is often on the complex and chaotic edge, our business will not grow like a traditional company. There is no formula to bottle and sell. An alliance is a business model suited for a networked world and we think it’s a good one to try out. While there is no template to follow, a good starting point is to develop a network culture.
Build trust over time by doing things together. Nurture the good things that emerge and bypass the negative things. There is no need to dwell on your weaknesses. Focus on your strengths. No contract, mission statement or charter is going to create a working alliance. We had the advantage that many of us had worked together or had known each other for a long time prior to creating the alliance.
Our own business model stays in perpetual Beta and we are often trying new “probes” to see what happens. Everything is filtered through our online conversations, often in our private activity stream, but sometimes in public, like this post. If you want to create an alliance, start with openness, transparency and diversity; but trust is what will keep you together.