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 The New York Times reported in March of 2011 that armies of expensive lawyers, who once did “discovery” work have been replaced by software programs that do the work at a fraction of the cost.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.

 

 

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)