Internet Time Alliance Insights

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We can learn a lot from open conversations with trusted colleagues who want to improve their professional expertise. My colleagues have these conversations regularly and I have learned a lot over the past two years that we’ve been together.

A professional is anyone who does work that cannot be standardized easily and who continuously welcomes challenges at the cutting edge of his or her expertise. ~ David Williamson Shaffer

When we updated the Internet Time Alliance website last month, a major component that Paul designed was the integration of our best articles into a single database, called Insights. Every page now dynamically generates recommended readings and we keep adding articles, so that we now have over one hundred.

We have also just curated a number of our thoughts into a single presentation that shows our perspectives on workplace transformation. It’s like an extended business card from all of us.

ITA Insights 2012

Do you need to be managed?

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These days it’s more productive to think of organizations as organisms. Managers become stewards of the living. Their role is to energize people, empower teams, foster continuous improvement, develop competence, leverage collective knowledge, coach workers, encourage collaboration, remove barriers to progress, and get rid of obsolete practices.

Living systems thrive on values that go far beyond the machine era’s dogged pursuit of efficiency through control. Living systems are networks. Optimal networks run on such values as respect for people, trust, continuous learning, transparency, openness, engagement, integrity, and meaning. ~ Jay Cross

Do we really need managers? Is management as we currently practise it out of date for the networked era?

thoughts on public education

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Everything I know, I did not learn in kindergarten. I didn’t go to kindergarten. Perhaps that was good, as that was the year that my father died, and I still did not speak much English anyway. It could have made for a stressful year. No kindergarten meant I could start school a bit later and I think I was really ready when I entered that one-room schoolhouse which was probably the best learning environment I ever had.

There were only three of us in Grade One, so I was also able to listen to what was going on in the Second Grade, in the same row, just ahead of me. Recess and lunch were usually fun, with all ages playing games together. There were not enough students in any one grade to form a dominant group. I was later home-schooled by my mother who never had any formal education in English. This was my introduction to public education.

I went to university straight out of high school and did a standard four-year degree. I got a gentleman’s pass from the Royal Military College and then put my books away. What remains of my undergraduate education is not so much my knowledge of History as my fluency in French. It wasn’t the classes that helped me master the language, but the girl I met in Québec between first and second year. That was real informal learning, watching morning TV cartoons with her young niece, whose French wasn’t too much more advanced than mine. I was one of only a few of my classmates who achieved fluency from no ability at all on entry. Motivation was the critical part of my learning.

Thirteen years later I went to graduate school part-time, with a full-time job and a young family. I could not have done it without the support of my wife. I received a graduate degree in Education but my real education has been in the 14 years since. I have been learning mostly online, first by accessing all of the information available on the web that interested me and more recently by connecting to a worldwide network of people, most of whom I have not met face-to-face. This network now numbers in the thousands.

I have learned that it was a shotgun wedding between robber baron capitalists and progressives, who at the turn of the last century helped to create our public education system, with age-based cohorts, classrooms, bells, and a standardized curriculum. The capitalists needed workers who could read instructions, while progressives, like Moses Coady, founder of the Antigonish movement, felt it their mission to help society.

I have noticed with our boys now finishing up at school, that for the most part, the current system does not help them learn. If anything, it stops them from learning. One-size fits nobody, I call it. We were lucky, in that one or both of us parents could be at home during the day. Our boys could stay at home from time to time, such as the year one was frequently bullied — by the teacher. They knew they always had an option not to go to school. If I had to do it over again, I would pull our kids out of the system during middle school and let them become self-directed learners, later having them rejoin their friends in high school. Middle school was a needlessly stressful time for our family.

When I went to school, if a book was not available in the library system, in reality, it did not exist. Now my children can find and read most of what they need. The shift from scarcity to abundance of information is one of the many reasons we need educational reform. There can be no standard curriculum when everything is miscellaneous, as Cluetrain.com co-author Dave Weinberger says. Courses are artifacts of a time when information was scarce and connections were few. With ubiquitous computing, that time is over. Our children know that.
school train
I watch how our kids learn to play computer games. There is no rule book. The fun of the game is in figuring it out. This is always done collaboratively. Collaboration seems natural to this generation. While studying, Facebook is usually open and classmates send messages back and forth as they share in their learning. The whole notion of cheating may be gone in a generation.

I think this generation will be one of the last in the current system. I hope the next public education system is not another shotgun wedding, or a reaction to change, like charter schools can be. Actually, I hope that it’s not a system at all. It should be a network, like the Internet — open, with no centre, using only basic protocols and allowing for innovation at the edges. If we let our children design it, that is most likely what it would be like. It might look like Stockholm’s school without classrooms or something even more radical.

Walled Gardens

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

Quotable Moments:

“The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change. ~ Carl Rogers” – via @timbuckteeth

“The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud. ~ Coco Chanel” – via @transarchitect

@flowchainsensei – “Projects” are no way to run a railway – or any other kind of business, for that matter.”

Audience question about IBM Connect during Lotusphere 2012 “Did you evaluate enterprise LMS [learning management systems] before you built this?” A, “No, we began with how people learn.” – via @marciamarcia

Maps only get you so far:

@upriver_ca – If you were going to be thrown into a fast-moving river, would you rather have a map or a canoe?

Much of the world of management is built around drawing maps. And maps are wonderful things if the things that the map represents are manageable. All too often we confuse the map with the terrain, though, and we imagine that while many leaders would like the map, many of those in the water would prefer the canoe.

Walled Gardens:

@MarkFederman – “re: Apple/iTunes becoming de facto textbook gatekeeper. Given their walled garden/control mentality, this is very concerning.”

Jaron Lanier: The False Ideals of the Web – via @jhagel

The obvious strategy in the fight for a piece of the advertising pie is to close off substantial parts of the Internet so Google doesn’t see it all anymore. That’s how Facebook hopes to make money, by sealing off a huge amount of user-generated information into a separate, non-Google world. Networks lock in their users, whether it is Facebook’s members or Google’s advertisers.

Wired – Dirty Little Secrets: The Trouble With Social Search

Still, this potentially marks a real transformation to the way we have looked for information on the web, one with real winners and losers. It also signals a real danger to the balance of power between users and megacompanies. We are increasingly moving from a bottom-up web, where users vote with their links, keyboards and their clicks to show what’s relevant to them, to a top-down web where that’s doubly or triply mediated by browsers, search engines and social networks.

Oopsie! The Audacious iBooks Author EULA – via @nwinton

Apple, in this EULA [end user license agreement], is claiming a right not just to its software, but to its software’s output. It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty. As far as I know, in the consumer software industry, this practice is unprecedented. I’m sure it’s commonplace with enterprise software, but the difference is that those contracts are negotiated by corporate legal departments and signed the old-fashioned way, with pen and ink and penalties and termination clauses. A by-using-you-agree-to license that oh by the way asserts rights over a file format? Unheard of, in my experience.

 

Modelling, not shaping

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In social networks we can learn from each other; modelling behaviours, telling stories, and sharing what we know. This may not be highly efficient, but it it can be very effective. You will know you’re in a real community of practice if it changes your practices.

Education and training are shaping technologies. They reward successive approximations of the desired behaviour. Modelling, on the other hand, is the foundation of social learning:

Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory posits that people learn from one another, via observation, imitation, and modeling. The theory has often been called a bridge between behaviorist and cognitive learning theories because it encompasses attention, memory, and motivation.

If we look at how organizational training & development has functioned, it has been separate from the work being done and focused on shaping behaviours. There is strong evidence that we need to integrate learning into our work in order to deal with the increasing complexity of knowledge work. The valued work in the enterprise is increasing in variety and decreasing in standardization. I have suggested that communities of practice are the bridge between work teams and open social networks, with narration of work an enabler of knowledge-sharing, and of course, modelling behaviour.

The way that Triple Creek [I have no relationship with this company] positions its Open Mentoring platform is a current example of a tool that could enhance social learning (modelling) in the bridging area that communities of practice can offer.

As long as this type of tool is not tied to any team, project or supervisor, it could help connect members of a community of practice. The challenge would be in finding a balance between intrinsic and extrinsic goals. Too much shaping and not enough modelling could turn this into one more thing that has to be done (like annual performance reviews).

Communities are more like dance halls than factories. Platforms that have too much control will not be adopted on a community level. As a consultant, I would like to be able to recommend a variety of these platforms, that can inter-operate on some level, so that enterprise communities can choose the most suitable ones for their stage of development. All communities of practice are unique and will grow, mature and often die over time. No single platform will meet all community needs, but if it supports one of these principles for working smarter – Transparency, Narration of Work or Distribution of Power – it would be worth checking out.

There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in

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This site was offline from sunrise to sunset today [yes, I missed you, too], in support of the anti-SOPA/PIPA protests. One factor that influenced my decision was this article (and several others) by Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet Law:

Some of the Internet’s leading websites, including Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla, WordPress, and BoingBoing, will go dark today to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). The U.S. bills have generated massive public protest over proposed provisions that could cause enormous harm to the Internet and freedom of speech. My blog will join the protest by going dark tomorrow. While there is little that Canadians can do to influence U.S. legislation, there are many reasons why I think it is important for Canadians to participate.

Here is the Wikipedia article on SOPA/PIPA, the only page available on that site today:

What are SOPA and PIPA?

SOPA and PIPA represent two bills in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate respectively. SOPA is short for the “Stop Online Piracy Act,” and PIPA is an acronym for the “Protect IP Act.” (“IP” stands for “intellectual property.”) In short, these bills are efforts to stop copyright infringement committed by foreign web sites, but, in our opinion, they do so in a way that actually infringes free expression while harming the Internet. Detailed information about these bills can be found in the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act articles on Wikipedia, which are available during the blackout. GovTrack lets you follow both bills through the legislative process : SOPA on this page, and PIPA on this one. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to advocating for the public interest in the digital realm, has summarized why these bills are simply unacceptable in a world that values an open, secure, and free Internet.

Narration of Work

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I see three major principles for working smarter in networked organizations:

  1. Transparency
  2. Narration of Work
  3. Distribution of Power

I spoke about the distribution of power in my last post on the democratization of the workplace. The narration of one’s work is an essential practice that enables this. Hans de Zwart discusses a narrating-your-work experiment that had a 17 member team use Yammer to share daily experiences with colleagues. He talks about the barriers to narration as well as the perceived benefits of this two-month experiment.

His conclusions and recommendations:

  • Don’t formalize narrating your work and don’t make it mandatory. Many people commented that this is one aspect that they didn’t like about the experiment.
  • Focus on helping each other to turn narrating your work into a habit. I think it is important to set behavioural expectations about the amount of narrating that somebody does. I imagine a future in which it is considered out of the norm if you don’t share what you are up to. The formal documentation and stream of private emails that is the current output of most knowledge workers in virtual teams is not going to cut it going forward. We need to think about how we can move towards that culture.
  • We should have both a private group for the intimate team (in which we can be ourselves as much as possible) as well as have a set of open topic based groups that we can share our work in. So if I want to post about an interesting meeting I had with some learning technology provider with a new product I should post that in a group about “Learning Innovation”. If have worked on a further rationalization of our learning portfolio I should post this in a group about the “Learning Application Portfolio” and so on.

The recommendation of both private and public narration components aligns with the need to support both strong and weak social ties. Covering the public/private spectrum can promote social learning, increase collaboration, and nurture an environment for cross-disciplinary innovation – and bridge the gap to working smarter.

democratization of the workplace

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There was a most interesting thread on Twitter today. Bert van Lamoen (@transarchitect) in a series of tweets, said [paraphrasing several]: “Senge’s five disciplines provided instant utility for learning to organizations in 1990, yet learning organizations remain rare to this day. Hierarchy kills all learning. Our social systems are not designed to cope with complexity. Organizational learning is fundamental change. Today’s organization is not fit for organizational learning. Therefore, we need total redesign. Social and transformational architecture encompasses complexity and emergent change.”

In wither the learning organization, I linked to a paper on Why aren’t we all working for Learning Organisations? The authors, John Seddon and Brendan O’Donovan, open with a reference to W. Edwards Deming’s commentary on Peter Senge’s book, The Fifth Discipline (1990).

“Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers – a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars – and on up through the university.

On the job people, teams, and divisions are ranked, rewarded for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by Objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable.”

After explaining how double-loop learning gets managers to focus on the system and away from controlling people, the authors conclude:

Our argument is that Deming’s statements in his 1990 review of Senge’s work continue to hold true: it is the dominance of the command and control management thinking which, 20 years on, still prevails and prevents the development of more generative learning. It is only by studying an organisation as a system and creating double-loop learning that we might finally see Senge’s ‘learning organizations’ stop being the exceptional and instead become the norm.

Double-loop learning requires an understanding, and a constant questioning, of the governing variables and of course this is where learning abruptly comes up against command & control. Flattening the organization is one way to open communications and delegate responsibility, but asking employees to engage in real critical thinking [double-loop learning], and accepting the resulting actions, will not work unless there is a multi-way flow of power and authority. Critical thinking is not just thinking more deeply but also asking difficult and discomfiting questions. Without power and authority, these become meaningless.

The BetaCodex Network advocates first reducing hierarchy, and then making work independent of the formal structure, in order to increase the value creation structure. This makes sense, but who other than an enlightened CEO is going to make these changes? People like Semler are still outliers in the business world — “On his first day as CEO, Ricardo Semler fired sixty percent of all top managers.”
coping strategies
According to Charles Green this is how large-scale change happens:

Ideas lead technology. Technology leads organizations. Organizations lead institutions. Then ideology brings up the rear, lagging all the rest—that’s when things really get set in concrete.

We have the ideas (and some examples) on the great work that needs to be done at the beginning of this century – create new organizational models that reflect (and actually capitalize on) our humanity. We also have technologies that enable and support collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and connecting on a human level. The major obstacles seem to be that there are not enough good examples and that these organizations are not influential enough to change the dominant business ideologies.

To spread these ideas may require more than just mavens, connectors and salespeople to reach a tipping point. We may also need to identify the ‘Doers’ inside more organizations and find ways to help them become double-loop learners. We should engage the trustworthy, those people with strong intimacy skills who get things done.

Perhaps we have been focused at the wrong level. I know that my most successful consulting engagements have not been at the very top, but with people who are doing the work. If we can create a mid-level groundswell, without giving up on finding enlightened executives, we may get somewhere.

Unless the dominant command & control management ideology is replaced, then most organizational change initiatives will just be tinkering at the edges. I can see why some people could become jaded over time with every successive new management system that still does not produce real change. The democratization of the workplace has been my guiding mission for the past decade. Democracy is the foundation upon which the likes of  Enterprise 2.0 or the Social Business need to build, in order to foster double-loop learning organizations that can thrive in complexity.

Learning is the main driver for productivity

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

@EskoKilpi – “Learning is the main driver for productivity. Productivity of learning determines the speed of productivity improvement.”

Teaching: “The master taught by example to the apprentice, by coaching to the journeyman.” by @snowded

It matters who you teach. The more you know about the subject, the less able you are to [teach] beginners classes. I am sure there are some people who can manage this but i haven’t found one yet. In effect to teach (which again is different from speaking) you have to be separate but close in your knowledge base. Academic audiences are good for my work as they challenge and test in a way that a conference audience rarely does. Not only that, you can use words and reference concepts without explanation which means you move faster to more interesting grounds.

@flowchainsensei – “In a world of complexity and change, is consensus unrealistic, and does (ongoing) diversity of viewpoints offer more?”

No more business as usual: “As all business becomes social business, L&D professionals face a momentous choice.” by @JayCross

Our evolving view is that successful future organizations will become learning networks of individuals creating value. They will become stewards of the living. This is a major break from the past — and an opportunity for L&D professionals to become essential contributors to their organizations.

“… old ideas, no matter how thoroughly discredited, die a slow death as, one by one, their advocates pass away. ~ Stiglitz” – via @DemingSOS

Do we need patents? by @lemire

Granting monopolies, even temporary ones, is expensive. We need to be sure that the gains out-weight the costs. In this case, the rationalization offered by the industry does not stand up to scrutiny:

  • The U.S. and the U.K. have always had strong patent laws protecting chemicals and drugs. Meanwhile, continental Europe had much weaker patent protection. Until recently, you could not patent a drug or a chemical in Germany (1967), Switzerland (1977) and Italy (1978). Where did the pharmaceutical industry thrive before the 1960s? In Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Though Italy was the fifth produce of drugs in the 1970s, its industry is now practically disappearing.

Real organizational transformation is structural

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In The 3 Structures of an Organization, the BetaCodex Network covers the weaknesses of our existing management and organizational models and shows a better way to design more network-centic businesses. For example, the authors state that the average modern organization expends about 20% of its energy on value creation, while the best may spend 50%. This still accounts for a significant amount of wasted energy. Organizations should dedicate 70% of their energies toward value creation.

These value creation structures have to be externally (market/customer) focused and are the most important parts of the business. Modern work is increasingly dealing with exceptions, which is complex and cannot afford the rigidity of centralized control systems. Informal networks have to be recognized as they provide the glue that keeps the organization together. Formal structures are the least important and only serve to support value creation, the opposite of centralized, top-down hierarchies.

Formal Structure, as can solely serve the trivial purpose of external compliance, should be subdued to or coherent with [the] Value Creation Structure, in which the work is done and where [the] organizational periphery is in charge, not bosses.

This is the kind of world without bosses I referred to in my last post.

The guiding principles make a lot of sense, and reflect what I have seen in organizations. Real change does not begin until you change the formal structure.

Eliminate Formal Structure, as much as possible, by fully aligning it with value creation and by allowing it only for external compliance. Make the work independent of formal structure.

Focus all organizational energy (e.g. with regards to learning and mastery) on the first two structures – not on formal structure, which is trivial. Approach Informal and Value Creation Structures with a systemic mind-set.

Support the positive effects of Informal Structure through high levels of transparency, investment in self-awareness of teams, radical decentralization of decision-making towards the periphery, and also through bonding rituals, and strong, shared values and principles.

This presentation is part of an ongoing discussion at BetaCodex. If you are interested in how these principles might apply to learning and development, here is an excerpt from a draft white paper (in development):

Never, ever, attempt to manage individual performance, though, as individual performance does not exist.

You cannot and need not develop people. People can do that on their own. An organization, however, can create conditions for self-development, getting out of the way by not trying to control or contain it.

Individual mastery is the only viable problem-solving mechanism in complexity … We usually tend to over-rate talent, and under-rate systematic, disciplined learning.

No training budgets, but on-demand learning resources.

I wholeheartedly agree with these recommendations!

Other BetaCodex papers can be accessed from: www.betacodex.org/papers