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

A world without bosses

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Can your organization work without bosses? In the documentary, Ban the Boss (one hour BBC video) Paul Thomas shows that most organizations can run just fine without bosses, or at least without traditional, hierarchical bosses who tell workers what to do.

Gwynn Dyer explained that historically, hierarchies were the result of a communications problem, in Why the Arabs can handle democracy.

A mass society, thousands, then millions strong, confers immense advantages on its members. Within a few thousand years, the little hunting-and-gathering groups were pushed out of the good lands everywhere. By the time the first anthropologists appeared to study them, they were on their last legs, and none now survive in their original form. But we know why the societies that replaced them were all tyrannies.

The mass societies had many more decisions to make, and no way of making them in the old, egalitarian way. Their huge numbers made any attempt at discussing the question as equals impossible, so the only ones that survived and flourished were the ones that became brutal hierarchies. Tyranny was the solution to what was essentially a communications problem.

We have been able to communicate with each other better and better for the past half century, and now with mobile communications we need even fewer intermediaries to get work done. Many bosses don’t have a clue what is actually happening at the front-end, as is clear in the BBC documentary, and as I wrote in network walking.

Bob Marshall alerted me, via Twitter, to this documentary that shows just how difficult it can be to change attitudes and beliefs about work. In this case, the obvious place to start a boss-purge was at the vehicle service bay, with nine skilled mechanics “supported by” eight managers. The workers wound up keeping one manager, but on their terms. Other departments were more difficult.

Could you imagine if workers were allowed to vote their bosses in and out? Well they can now in Blaenau Gwent, Wales; as they have been able to do at Semco SA for decades. Listen to Ricardo Semler explain how Semco organizes work and “staff determine when they need a leader, and then choose their own bosses in a process akin to courtship”.

Yes, there is a different, and better, way to get work done, with fewer managers. If all you have are general management and supervision skills, your work days may be numbered.

Learning in NB

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The government [update: actually it is an unelected group, NB2026, consisting of a variety of people, including several serving and past politicians] is asking how New Brunswick can be the learning province of Canada. Similar questions have been asked before, so I’m just going to amalgamate some of my responses.

Learning at School

Public Education: The problem is not that we don’t teach enough math or science or English. The problem is the structure itself. Until the structure is addressed, I don’t imagine that any fine-tuning of our current system will address the systemic problem that our schools promote childishness and discourage learning. Curriculum is the confinement of the human experience. It is a blunt tool that winds up bullying someone.

There is no shortage of good information on how we can improve public education.

Education’s three conflicting pillars – this shows the fundamental weakness of the system.

Learning in the Workplace

The major shift needs to be toward network thinking and supporting informal learning in the workplace. Each worker needs to take control of his or her own learning (e.g. personal knowledge mastery) and be given the opportunities and support to do so. My response to CCL’s question:

The overwhelming majority of the learning needs of Canadian adults are not addressed by formal training and education. In this post-industrial era, adults today require self-directed learning skills to thrive in the unstructured work environments outside of school. Efforts should be focused on the development of practical tools and strategies for adults to learn in a networked information society.

Learning in the Community

We need to encourage a Read/Write society. We also must encourage an aggressively intelligent citizenry that is empowered with access to its own ideas, not blocked by corporate interests.

Understanding social media

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I have offered to give a course on understanding social media at the Tantramar Seniors College, consisting of four two-hour weekly sessions. This will not be a traditional course where I decide what curriculum is important and then deliver it to participants. Instead, I am providing opportunities to connect information, knowledge and people. This afternoon is the sign up session and instead of providing an outline, I will solicit needs – “What do you want to do?”

Here are some potential topic areas:

Social bookmarks – here are mine on social media.

Blogging

Introduction to social networking (see also social media in plain English video)

Using social media for personal learning.

Social media in business and privacy issues.

My intention is to spend class time showing how I use social media and how my network lets me learn faster. I will connect with my online networks to find answers to any questions that arise. I would also like to engage the class in co-developing resources, guidelines and other materials that will help them after the classes are over.

I will narrate on this blog what transpires over the next month, as the main reason I volunteered to give this course was to learn.

Mistakes & Security

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

“1 tip for managing creative people: don’t.” @flowchainsensei

“The amount of failure that can be tolerated is directly proportional to the amount of innovation needed.”~ Tim Campos” – via Kevin Jones

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“Security is mostly a superstition. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. ~ Helen Keller” – via @simpletonbill & @johnsonwhitney

“With enough ‘security,’ corporate or national, you can utterly kill freedom, production capacity, and morale.” @PatrickWelsh

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Being an Outsider – by @euan

In business it is easy to get locked into things being the way they are. To be too much in the flow. To become too mainstream and feel stuck. It is easy to think that things are inevitable and that change is too difficult to even consider.

Blogging inside a business has the potential to alter this.

Forbes: Learning from Brilliant Mistakes – via @CharlesJennings

  • Mistakes should be planned
  • Mistakes must be mined
  • Mistake-making must be promoted

“We need to start thinking about the social context of knowledge development as much as, if not more than, individual competence.” – by @snowded

The same applies for an organisation as for an individual. Its not enough to run experimental programmes, the key word in deliberative practice is deliberative. There are some key additional requirements:

  • Experiments need to be constructed to run in parallel
  • All experiments must be designed as safe-to-fail
  • Amplification and dampening strategies need to be in place before the experiments are run
  • Managers need to be targeted on the basis that at least half of their experiments should fail
  • Research and monitoring needs to provide real time feedback