Work is learning. Learning is the work.
The Globe & Mail: The diplomacy of knowledge
“Learning together is an important part of living together. While many of our greatest challenges arise through the interplay of complex problems, so, too, do our greatest advances often occur at the intersections between disciplines. Who knows what a greater understanding of quantum physics will be able to tell us about genetics, or what a better grasp of ecology can teach us about global networks?” ~ David Johnston, Governor-General of Canada.
Here are some of the insights and observations that were shared via Twitter this past week.
“If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us. The free mind is not a barking dog, to be tethered on a ten-foot chain. ~ Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.” – via Nick Milton
Horses for Sources: Why Oracle’s acquisition of Taleo shifts the innovation onus onto the service providers:
Companies buy software because they want standard process that can be automated with as little human intervention as possible. For process flows such as recruitment, if Taleo can provide you with the steps you need to automate an end-to-end recruitment process effectively, then the only way to find more value (or dare I say “innovation”) from recruitment is in those areas that cannot be automated – such as assessing the cultural fit of a candidate, or making a judgement call that the candidate has potential which his or her former employers had previously failed to unleash.
Sarah Lacy – Why Oracle May Really Be Doomed This Time – via @rstephens
But to win, Oracle will have to change its strategy as dramatically as it did in 2006 when Ellison famously announced that software innovation was dead and just started to buy everything. Buying once-hot companies like Taleo and RightNow isn’t going to cut it this time when there are better products in the market like Workday and Salesforce.
The Speculist – In the Future, Everything Will Be A Coffee Shop – via @jhagel
Universities Will Become Coffee Shops
Book Stores Will Shrink to Coffee Shops
The Coffee Shop Will Displace Most Retail Shops
Offices Become Coffee Shops … Again
@MartijnLinssen – Why it pays to keep rats on starvation diets
I merely showed them the stats. And they’d go on, and stay at the company for many years to come. And I’d think of my wife’s quote “The company’s goal is to keep their employees just not dissatisfied enough”.
@euan – “social business is just the web becoming part of our work life”
I came across this most thought-proving post by Seb Paquet on Google Plus, that looks at how new ideas and especially new business models can be understood. Seb notes that:
Phil Jones adds this insight in the comments:
- Inner circle : comrades (or arch enemies)
- 2nd circle : potential collaborators (dependent on deals you can make) (or potential competitors)
- 3rd circle : supporters (or opponents)
- outer rim: passive obstacles
What could this mean for a startup or new business?
Accept that most people do not understand why you are doing this in the first place and some of those who do will be working at cross purposes to subvert you. Try to turn potential competitors into collaborators. Be active in professional networks with your supporters and be co-operative in spirit, for these people may help to convert your opponents. Finally, ignore the passive obstacles and find ways to route around them.
Seb is already working on version .2 of this, so stay tuned on G+.
Over the past year I have been working on change initiatives to improve collaboration and knowledge-sharing with two large companies, one of them a multinational. In each case, implementation has boiled down to two components: individual skills & organizational support. Effective organizational collaboration comes about when workers regularly narrate their work within a structure that encourages transparency and shares power & decision-making. I have also learned that changing work routines can be a messy process that requires significant time, much of it dedicated to modelling behaviours.
My Internet Time Alliance colleague, Jane Hart, notes, ” … as for the new social and collaboration skills that workers require, well you simply can’t train people to be social! What was required was getting down and dirty and helping people understand what it actually meant to work collaboratively in the new social workplace, and the value that this would bring to them.”
Jane refers to the collaboration pyramid by Oscar Berg, an excellent model to show what needs to be addressed to become a social business.
The low visibility activities link directly to personal knowledge mastery (PKM) skills, based on the process of Seeking information & knowledge; making Sense of it; and Sharing higher value information with others. These individual activities are not a single skill-set that can be trained in a classroom. They have to be internalized and perceived as valuable to each person in order to achieve the discipline to use them regularly. Every person’s PKM processes will differ. As Jane notes, one size doesn’t fit all.
It is a difficult path to get acceptance that each worker is responsible for his or her own learning and additionally must be a contributing member of a network. PKM is individuals retaking control of learning, and making it transparent. It takes time, but it also requires a receptive environment.
Creating a supportive social environment is management’s responsibility. These activities are shown on the upper part of the pyramid, above the water line. Some specific examples of activities I have been involved in over the past year include:
My experience is that changing to more collaborative, networked ways of work requires coordinated change activities from both the top and the bottom. It has to be a two-pronged approach and it will take some time and effort.
Note: Oscar Berg has made a higher resolution image available on Flickr with a CC-BY license: The Collaboration Pyramid
Image via US Library of Congress
You are engaging with social media for marketing and customer support. You have also put in place a social intranet, with activity streams for sharing information, collaboration tools for work teams and document management systems that include social tags and easy sharing. Now the hard work begins. However, this usually occurs just after the software vendors have provided the initial training and you are now on your own as an organization. You’re ready to be a social business; everyone is connected but few know what to do.
Social media can have a strong influence on the individual, very much in a McLuhanesque tetrad of media effects way. Those who come to social media for the first time are like adults learning a new language. They cannot start with the same advanced mental models and metaphors they may have in a primary language. Furthermore, once they get to an advanced level in this new language, its idioms, metaphors and culture may have changed how they think in that language. This is the real change process enabled by social business; people will start thinking differently.
Social media change the way we communicate. Write a blog for a year or more and your writing will change. Use Twitter for some time and get a sense of being connected to many people and understanding them on a different level. Patterns emerge over time. Even the ubiquitous Facebook changes how we react to being apart from friends. Social media change the way we think.
Each time we adopt a new social medium we start at the bottom, or at the single node level. We have to make connections with what will become our network, either by connecting to existing relationships or doing something that helps to create new relationships, like creating content for sharing. Starting over, in each medium, can be daunting, especially for someone in a position of authority who is concerned about image or influence.
But we need to actually use social media to understand what it’s like to be a node in a social network. There is little in the industrial workplace or public school system to prepare us for this. Therefore we won’t even know what we’re talking about until we learn the new language of social media and online networks, and the only way to learn a new language is through practice.
While people may say it’s not about the technology, that’s where a large share of the budget goes in any major change initiative. The bigger change to manage is getting people to work transparently. Transparency is a necessity for cooperation and collaboration in networks. A major benefit of using social media is increasing speed of access to knowledge. However, if the information is not shared by people, it will not be found.
In this newly transparent workplace, there is no place to hide, or as Mark Britz wrote, “Social Media spreads your culture quickly … for better or worse.” This change alone can be enough to cause massive organizational upheaval. It must be addressed by modelling good network era behaviours. Working smarter is not just about using technologies but changing our routines and procedures. With greater transparency, information now flows horizontally as well as vertically. New patterns and dynamics emerge from interconnected people and interlinked information flows, and these will bypass established structures and services.
With the democratization of information, user-generated content is ubiquitous. Search engines give each worker more information and knowledge than any CEO had 10 years ago. Pervasive connectivity changes organizational power structures, though the full effects of this take time to be visible. From this transparent environment new leaders and experts will emerge. It will take different leadership, or leadership for networks, to support collaboration and social learning in the workplace.
Agile organizations need people who can work in concert on solving problems. People need to change how they work and all the knowledge and courses won’t help. Management must ask – “How can we help you work in this new transparent environment?” – and take action, not once, but continuously.
In social networks we often learn from each other; modelling behaviours, telling stories, and sharing what we know. While not highly efficient, this can be very effective learning. There is a need to model the new behaviours of being transparent and narrating one’s work. There is also a need to share power, for how long will workers collaborate and share if they cannot take action with this new knowledge? Modelling the new behaviours will take time and trust.
Since all these social technologies cannot model the new work behaviours themselves, who will? The organization will, by fostering communities of practice. These can be bridges between work teams and open social networks, with narration of work an enabler of knowledge-sharing. One determinant of effective professional communities is whether they actually change practices. Only then will we know if the social business initiative has been successful.
Organizations adopting social business need to find people who can model the behaviours, not just talk about them. They should identify people who already narrate their work, share transparently and create user-generated content. Organizations should get advice from people who share power and do most of their work in networks. If there is nobody to model network era behaviours in the organization, how will people learn? From Facebook?
Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.
@SebPaquet – “If the computer is a tool for thinking, then the internet is a tool for thinking together.”
@britz – “Culture, the most powerful presence in your organization, is only learned socially & informally. Social Media spreads your culture quickly … for better or worse”
@nilofer – “When fear rules in the work culture, ideas are weak, stillborn or absent.” via @LucGaloppin
@josemurilo – “‘It’s not the sharing that’s bad, it’s the technological design of giving it all to someone in the middle’ ~ Eben Moglen on Facebook”
Boosting productivity with Workforce Collaboration – A common reaction to a lack of transparency & openness is we tend to work primarily with the people we already know – by @OscarBerg
The harsh reality is that companies that continue to only help a small fraction of the workforce to become well connected, such as managers, sales people and formally appointed experts, will be outperformed by companies that are able to connect all their people regardless of position, budget or whatever.
Epistemic #Games Are the Future of #Learning, Letting Students Role-Play Professions – via @aptara_learning
Epistemology is the study of knowledge and, according to Shaffer, every age has its own epistemology, i.e., what it means to know something. Computers — which are increasingly becoming ubiquitous in work and school — provide the means to think in new ways, which will fundamentally reconfigure our thinking and theories of knowledge. Computers in general, and epistemic games in particular, are structuring new epistemologies for our digital age.
“The epistemology of School,” in Shaffer’s words, “is the epistemology of the Industrial Revolution — of creating wealth through mass production of standardized goods. School is a game about thinking like a factory worker. It is a game with an epistemology of right and wrong answers in which Students are supposed to follow instructions, whether they make sense in the moment or not.”
While this kind of epistemology may have been appropriate and even innovative for the Industrial Revolution, it is outdated for our informational economy and digital age. Being literate in the digital age uses reading and writing as a foundation to build upon, but they are no longer solely sufficient. Students must learn to produce various kinds of media and learn how to solve problems using simulations.
What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (Paul Gee’s 36 principles) – via @EmmanuelleEN
33. Distributed Principle: Meaning/knowledge is distributed across the learner, objects, tools, symbols, technologies, and the environment.
34. Dispersed Principle: Meaning/knowledge is dispersed in the sense that the learner shares it with others outside the domain/game, some of whom the learner may rarely or never see face to face.
35. Affinity Group Principle: Learners constitute an “affinity group,” that is, a group that is bonded primarily through shared endeavors, goals and practices and not shared race, gender, nation, ethnicity, or culture.
36. Insider Principle: The learner is an “insider,” “teacher,” and “producer” (not just a “consumer”) able to customize the learning experience and domain/genre from the beginning and throughout the experience.
The Social Learning Revolution – by @C4LPT
The new role of the Workplace Learning Professional
He or she will need a new mindset: This means understanding it will no longer be just about using traditional “command and control” approaches (that are employed in most training solutions to try and force people to learn), but will be much more about encouraging people to engage in new collaborative activities to support one another as they (learn) to do their jobs – in many cases helping them to “connect and collaborate”. This, of course will be a key feature of building and supporting the collaborative culture of a social business.
The dangers of hydraulic fracturing (comprehensive visual) via @kimlengle
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Image via : Game Junkie
A guiding goal in much of my work is the democratization of the workplace. Democracy is our best structure for political governance and I believe it should be the basis of our workplaces as well. As work and learning become integrated in a networked society, I see great opportunities to create better employment models.
So is it possible to have Enterprise 2.0 or a Social Business without a democratic foundation? Is the employer/employee relationship the only way we can get work done? In describing Enterprise 2.0, Andy McAfee, who originated the term, says that our work structures will not change:
“If you pit a good performer against a bad system, the system will win almost every time.”
This quote from Rummler & Brache in Improving Performance, sums up many of the symptoms of hierarchical systems, whether they be schools, businesses, or even prisons.
The great work to be done at the beginning of this century is the democratization of the workplace. Efficiency and effectiveness are not enough, and too often become mechanistic. It’s time to discard industrial management models that emphasize command and control and ensure that individuals at all levels have opportunities to engage in and question the system.
Without questioning, things can quickly go awry.
Gary Stager discussed the well-known Milgram Experiments, conducted in the 1960’s to see how far people would go in administering electric shocks to learners [some of the methods are now in question]. These experiments were replicated by ABC News and Stager picked up the direct link to public education [please read the whole article]:
‘One of the subjects in the television program was a 7th grade teacher who explained that she didn’t stop shocking the learner because as a teacher she had learned when a student’s complaints were phoney. I thought to myself, “Has she electrocuted many students?”
The teacher asked the researcher, “There isn’t going to be any lawsuit from this medical facility, right?” When told that the teacher was not liable, she replied, “That’s what I needed to know.” It is however worth noting that this was after she induced the maximum shock and the learner demanded that the experiment be terminated.’
This is why we need to change the entire education system – constraining curriculum; compulsory testing; useless homework; irrelevant subjects; classrooms cut off from the world; systemic bullying; etc. More or better teachers won’t help; we need to change the system.
In this interview, Dr. Philip Zimardo discussed the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, where students played their roles as guards or prisoners and abuses started within 24 hours:
“But on the second morning, the prisoners rebelled; the guards crushed the rebellion and then instituted stern measures against these now ‘dangerous prisoners’. From then on, abuse, aggression, and eventually sadistic pleasure in degrading the prisoners became the daily norm. Within thirty-six hours the first prisoner had an emotional breakdown and had to be released, followed in kind by similar prisoner breakdowns on each of the next four days.”
Father John Culkin, in A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan, wrote that, “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” This reminds me of the question about who is the most important person on board a ship. Is it the Captain, the Navigator or the Engineer? Actually, it’s the Architect, because the initial design influences everything else.
Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you cannot change the way things work in an organization. The problem may be the organizational model itself and it may be better to leave and create an alternative model than help keep a flawed one going.
Clay Burell had guest blogger Bill Farren discussing the hidden curriculum of school architectural design. He asked what hidden messages are our schools themselves asking by their inherent design:
There was an article I read many years ago, but never see cited, about designing learning environments. It’s Rodney Fulton’s SPATIAL model (1991) [my emphasis added]:
“While a body of knowledge does exist that documents the relationships between learning and physical environment, there are problems that need to be resolved before the present level of understanding can be systematically advanced. One problem is that common vocabulary does not exist. Thus, in the literature, concepts are often described with similar but not identical terminology. Conversely, the same terms are used for similar but not exactly the same concepts. But this confusion in vocabulary is only a symptom of the fundamental problem: the lack of a conceptual model that explores relationships of physical environment to learning rather than to behavior in general. Architectural models address built environments, emphasizing both interior and exterior features of building design that allow, encourage, prohibit, or inhibit various behaviors. Psychological models discuss environmental attributes that set conditions for or even control human behavior. Sociological models emphasize the importance of environment in terms of how it facilitates human interactions. By emphasizing individual appreciation of the environment, aesthetic models address the relationship of values to human behavior. Workplace training models, including human factors engineering, emphasize the fit between environment and person and seek out optimal conditions for performance.
Each of these perspectives can add to a global understanding of the learning environment; however, a model that addresses learners in learning environments is a needed first step in refining educational research. The model described here — satisfaction-participation-achievement-transcendent/immanent attributes-authority-layout (SPATIAL) — can serve as a fundamental basis for organizing research designed to identify relationships between and among components of the learning environment and attributes of the learner. Further, this model has potential for weaving together findings from architectural, psychological, sociological, aesthetic, and human factors engineering studies.”
Rodney Fulton responded, when I originally wrote this post in 2008:
I found it very interesting that some 17 years after I published the SPATIAL Model in a Jossey-Bass publication there was discussion that included the model. I am not aware of any significant use of the model or of any real impact on the field of Adult Education in the United States. I have long since moved on from the field of Adult Education and am now very involved in Public Education at the Elementary level in the US. But again, it was gratifying to see my model referenced in 2008. If you know of any other people using or interested in the model, I’d be happy to hear from you. Thanks Rodney Fulton
Photo by Atelier Teee
Note: this post is an update of two previous posts from 2008
What if your organization got rid of the Learning & Development function? What would the average manager or department head do? What would workers do?
I’ve been thinking about this for a while. When work is learning, and learning is the work, training that is pushed from outside has less relevance. The L&D department is supposed to ensure that training is appropriate for the job, but with jobs constantly morphing into something else, a major disconnect is developing between the doers and the trainers. How many people take courses that are not relevant to their current work or are provided at the wrong time?
Let me propose some things managers and knowledge workers can do without a Learning & Development department.
Observe how people are learning to do their work already. Find these natural pathways and reinforce them.
Connect any “how-to” learning to the actual task. Show and tell only works if it can be put into practice. The forgetting curve is steep when there is no practice.
Make it everyone’s job to share what they learn. Have you ever noticed how easy it is to find “how-to” videos and explanations on the Web? That’s because someone has taken the time to post them. Everyone in the organization should do this, whether it’s a short text, a photo, a post, an article, a presentation with notes, or a full-blown video.
Make space to talk about things and capture what is passed on. Get these conversations in the open where they can be shared. Provide time and space for reflection and reading. There is more knowledge outside any organization than inside.
Break down barriers. Establish transparency as the default mode, so that anyone can know what others are doing. Unblock communication bottlenecks, like supervisors who control information flow. If supervisors can’t handle an open environment, get rid of them, because they are impeding organizational learning and it’s now mission critical.
If you do have an L&D department, share what you are doing and perhaps they will help you become more self-sufficient for your organizational learning. If they don’t, ignore them, as they will be going away anyway.
