Work is learning. Learning is the work.
I have only had to commute by vehicle for four years in my life. The rest of the time I have been able to walk or cycle to work. It’s been nine years since I last had to commute. Every Monday morning I am very thankful.
Photo via US Library of Congress
As you soon as you try to address a problem, it gets more complicated, because that’s what conventional management does; I wrote last week in Managing collaboration, and Paul Chepolis commented:
I couldn’t agree more. How many times has this occurred with leadership teams and organizational leaders. Take a simple problem, lose total perspective, and give it a life that is absolutely unnecessary. We kill ourselves!
As Umair Haque posted on Twitter back in November; “Name a “working” institution. Just one. Better yet, define a “working” institution. See the problem? Management is the problem:
We falsely believe we can manage the future, based on the past. Researchers have shown experts do worse than laypeople in predicting the stock market and that these experts do even worse than just flipping a coin. Managing for the future is a conceit of those in power and our institutions are based on the notion of being able to manage complex systems using mechanistic models.
For any change initiative, there is often an assumption of going from the current state to a desired state, as if there is some kind of linear progression. This can be the false presumption of many a performance analysis. Thinking in terms of networks moves us beyond linear thinking. Dave Gray says we even need to change the way we think about change:
If change is a constant, then the only real sustainable competitive advantage is to be able to grow and evolve continually, to stay ahead of the competitive pack.
You can’t do this with the traditional business structure that we’ve inherited from the industrial revolution. This isn’t like redecorating a room in your house or moving the furniture around. This is a major rehab project that might affect the foundations, the plumbing and everything else. It requires some pretty fundamental rethinking of the way your company is structured, how you execute your strategy, and how you’re going to evolve.
What the world requires today is organizations that are capable of continuous creativity and innovation, that can adapt and evolve on a continual basis; organizations that can generate new businesses, that can sprout and branch into new categories and new industries; that can recover quickly from failures and move on.
I have not seen organizations move toward a more social business model without changing management. That may mean reducing the number of managers; empowering people who are customer-facing; or significantly opening up the workflow and making it more transparent. Management is the problem but management is also the solution, if you change it.
A world without bosses may seem like science fiction but then so did a world without secretaries, typing pools, or switchboard operators not that long ago. To be successful in changing to a networked enterprise, the management structure must be up for negotiation. This may be the critical question to ask at the beginning of any change (social business, enterprise 2.0, social learning) initiative. Is management on the table? If not, why even start?
Image: William Jay Gaynor: NYC under new management (1913)
“If problems are one focal point for collaboration, tools can be another. An example: systems needed to deal with the gigantic data sets generated in finance, astronomy and oceanography. Such tools naturally bring together computer scientists and the statisticians, economists and scientists who might use the data. Goldin points to “crowdsourcing” as a second example of a cross-disciplinary tool, complexity science as a third and (optimistically, I feel) practical ethics as a fourth.” ~ Tim Harford
[emphasis added]
Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.
@milouness – “As technology & knowledge allow people to handle more complexity, old categories of simplification become less useful.” – via @sandymaxey
“In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards. ~ Mark Twain” via Roger Schank
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. ~ Clay Shirky” – via @surreallyno @flowchainsensei
Aljazeera – “Please remember: Humans are ‘naturally nice’ ~ @Ohra_aho”
Biological research is increasingly debunking the view of humanity as competitive, aggressive and brutish.
“Humans have a lot of pro-social tendencies,” Frans de Waal, a biologist at Emory University in Atlanta, told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Monday.
@EskoKilpi – knowledge is socially constructed. Knowledge is not stuff accumulated and stored by individuals:
Whether the social process is called leadership, management, networking, or communication, knowing is an ongoing process of relating. Social media best produce connectedness and interdependence as processes that construct collective authority and responsibility. Social media are most meaningful when giving voice to multiple perspectives, making it possible to seek out, recognize and respect differences as different but equal. Accordingly, reality in science is no longer viewed as a singular fact of nature but as multiple and socially constructed as David Weinberger writes in his newest book: “Too Big to Know”.
Innovator inside: there is little remaining competitive advantage in trying to control intellectual property:
… if the point of IT security is to preserve the privacy and security of individual customers and their relationships with a supplier (and each other of course), then, in a Sidestep and Twist world, security becomes one of the most important disciplines there is. You’re hardly going to have the most customers (the basis of a Twist competitive strategy) if you’re not trusted in the first place.
Recent semi-scandals, such as the one Path and others are presently embroiled in (they were uploading people’s address books without permission) would probably not have happened if those organisations had been advised properly by their information security people.
On the other hand, if the intent of IT security is to preserve corporate intellectual property and trade secrets, then investing significantly to keep competitors out is something of a losing strategy.
Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, and networks subvert standardization.
In the industrial era we saw the rise of specialized departments and specialized jobs. Any job could be generically designed and then filled by the most suitable applicant. People became interchangeable pieces for the mechanistic model of work. As jobs are to departments, roles are to networks. Eric Mcluhan states that in the new [network] era; “jobs disappear under electric conditions and they are replaced by roles. Roles mean audiences and participation.”
Roles are based on relationships. Without relationships, there are no roles. In the 21st century workplace, roles are emergent properties of value networks, not pre-defined by HR.
All of the support functions that grew during the late 20th century are like the blind monks examining the elephant in the room – the network. Everyone is struggling to understand the network era, but no one is budging from their observation position. And so they remain blind.
One of the biggest challenges I see on a regular basis is getting people to think in terms of networks, then in terms of relationships. From a learning perspective, this is what connectivism is about: knowledge exists within systems which are accessed through people participating in activities. It is by doing our work that we co-create our roles in our networks. Roles emerge from the activities involved in working with others toward some common purpose. This is social. Social media are merely a conduit for collaboration.
Social learning is an enabler. In the network era, systemic changes are sensed almost immediately so that organizational reaction times and feedback loops have to be faster. One obstacle to this is that we are more inclined to ask for advice only from those we trust, but trust takes time to nurture. By sharing experiences (learning socially), trust emerges. A trusting workplace is a learning workplace and one that can adapt faster to change.
A workplace that encourages social learning can more easily become a social business. Social business emerges from social learning that itself emerges from collaborative work. All of this happens within networks. Existing departments need to become contributing nodes in their respective networks or face obsolescence. As workers become more collaborative and networked, they will bypass non-contributing nodes. If a department is not part of the networked workflow, or tries to block it, it is part of the problem.
The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it – Gilmore’s Law
Those specialized departments of the 20th century need to engage in social learning, by modelling behaviour and continuously developing next practices to adapt to changing conditions. This is the challenge to remain relevant in the 21st century workplace. Learn or die.
This isn’t the Information Age, it’s the Learning Age; and the quicker people get their heads around that, the better – Prof Stephen Heppell
Look at how F.W. Taylor in Principles of Scientific Management (1911), described the role of management for the industrial era:
It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.
In the network era, social learning must be supported, roles emerge from networks, work has more variety and less standardization, and businesses must be social in order to deal with increasing complexity. I have suggested something more like this:
It is only through innovative and contextual methods, the self-selection of the most appropriate tools and work conditions and willing cooperation that more productive work can be assured. The duty of being transparent in our work and sharing our knowledge rests with all workers.
It boils down to the fact that in the network era, value is derived from workforce collaboration, where you are either contributing to the network, or you are no longer required.
“Of course we can live without a bodily identity, but the body confers a particular kind of identity. Aquinas pointed out that the principle of individuation consists in the intersection of matter and spirit. Without the body, then, individual identity is not possible. Discarnate man is mass man; individuality is simply not possible because there is nothing on which to base it, to give it substance. Individualism and private identity are artefacts, side-effects of the phonetic alphabet and its symphony of abstraction. (Laws of Media chapter one.) One of the three themes on which Take Today: The Executive as Dropout is based is that jobs disappear under electric conditions and they are replaced by roles. Roles mean audiences and participation. Private identity depends first and foremost on detachment. Social media like Facebook provide identity from the in-crowd of friends that one can amass: that attention is the identity dynamic. Take it away and the user is nobody—a nobody with no body.
With private identity and detachment also comes another artefact: privacy, now a major concern. As private identity evaporates, privacy becomes a matter of great concern-and so do private ownership and copyright. All of these things are interrelated and make no sense in isolation from each other. It is no secret that private identity is unknown in non-literate societies and equally that they have no use for privacy.” – Eric McLuhan
My colleague Jane Hart asks who should be your Chief Collaboration Officer (CCO)? It’s a good question, given the growing importance of working collaboratively in the 21st century workplace. Collaboration is a key part of creative work. Hugh Macleod pretty well sums up the core of the networked enterprise with this image:
We live in a most interesting time in history. With the Internet, never before has it been so easy to collaborate, yet within many organizations it’s often more difficult. A CCO could be a role that helps with the transition to a more collaborative workplace, but do we really need more managers? Two comments on Jane’s post raise this question as well:
Jay Cross: “Companies have to make a profit but they don’t have Chief Profit Officers. Workers must be motivated but there aren’t any Chief Motivation Officers.”
Tim Hickernell: “Chief Collaborat
It’s that darn hierarchy thing. As you soon as you try to address a problem, it gets more complicated, because that’s what conventional management does. It adds an extra layer of taxation. But information technology has made management [not leadership] redundant, as Sigurd Rinde explains in Let the Managers Go:
Outside the corporate world, in places with fewer habits and assumed truths, IT has shown way more promise: we can communicate and collaborate with people all over the world in a gazillion ways, we have the “cloud”, we have tablets and smartphones, we have all kinds of technological power. But in the corporate world we still run workflows using doughnuts and stern looks. That’s silly. And amazingly ineffective.
Do you need a Chief Collaboration Officer? Yes, if the CCO is focused on putting the position out of business and is seen as a temporary and transitionary role. The CCO can be the person who has a high profile and can model the new collaborative behaviours. This can take some time but, like raising children, should not take forever. So get a CCO, set up a dance hall, throw some parties, mix things up, and see what happens. Keep your CCO in perpetual Beta.
What you should not do is get a CCO with the primary task of implementing some costly enterprise collaboration software system. That is definitely putting the cart before the horse – but there are many who will counsel this approach. Caveat emptor!
Umair Haque’s Betterness: Economics for Humans is a quick read and a very cheap book at $2.69 for a Kindle version. It’s worth much more than that. Haque starts with an invitation:
If you’re delighted with the status quo, splendidly contented with the present, firmly convinced that the way live, work, and play is the best and last way we can, put this volume back on the digital shelf.
He defines the problem …
Today, business is held fast to this paradox: the more “business” we do and the more we think solely in terms of “business,” the more we structure human exchange according to the precepts of yesterday’s paradigm; the less wealth we create, and often, the more wealth we destroy.
… and shows the signs:
Our institutions are failing. They’re failing us, failing the challenge of igniting real, lasting human prosperity. If institutions are just instruments to fulfill social contracts, then ours are shattering because the social contracts at their heart have fractured.
Haque takes on existing organizational structures and especially skewers vision and mission statements, proposing that businesses should be asking “Why are we here?”, much as Simon Sinek does.
Betterness is a wake-up call to our business leadership and perhaps the best thing you can do is buy a copy for your managers, their bosses, and all the way up the industrial ladder.
I believe we are on the cusp of such a turning point – here and now. Consider what Kuhn famously argues: that a paradigm shift happens when we encounter anomalies that can’t be explained by the paradigm responsible for progress thereto. So here’s our anomaly: that industrial-age wealth hasn’t neatly powered lives lived meaningfully well; that near-term profit, gross product, and hyperconsumption haven’t produced a fuller human prosperity; that the frenzied pursuit of opulence hasn’t been sufficient for the attainment of a good life – of eudaimonia.
“In Strategic Doing, metrics play a different role. We use metrics to facilitate learning. Whereas strategic planning is a deductive process of thought and action, Strategic Doing using inductive reasoning. We learn as we do. Metrics provide a convenient tool to accelerate our learning. With them, we figure out what works. Without them, we would be lost. Accountability in Strategic Doing comes through transparency and the mutual interdependence embedded in the relationships of the network. Forget command and control. It does not work in open networks. Mutual trust becomes the fuel for economic transformation. ” —Ed Morrison
