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

—

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

Informal learning, the 95% solution

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Informal learning is not better than formal training; there is just a whole lot more of it. It’s 95% of workplace learning, according to the research behind this graphic, by Gary Wise.

 Since the latter half of the 20th century, we have gone through a period where training departments have been directed to control organizational learning. It was part of the Taylorist, industrial model that also compartmentalized work and ensured that only managers were allowed to make decisions. In this context, only training professionals were allowed to talk about learning. But formal training, usually in the guise of courses, is like a hammer that sees all problems as nails. Unfortunately, these nails only account for 5% of organizational learning.

A significant percentage of workplace learning professionals are solidly grounded in that 5% of workplace learning that is formal training. They know the systems approach to training (SAT), instructional systems design (ISD) and the ADDIE model (analysis, design, development, implementation, evaluation), among some less useful things like learning styles and Bloom’s taxonomy. There are plenty of hammer-wielders in corporate training departments, supported by an entire industry, including institutions and professional associations, all addressing that 5 percent.

Supporting informal learning at work is not as clear-cut as something like ISD. It requires tools, processes and methodologies from a variety of disciplines. There are methods from knowledge management, organizational development and human performance technology, for example, that are quite useful in supporting informal learning. The modern workplace is a complex adaptive system. There is no single approach that can be used all the time.

We  should not constrain our approach with a single methodological lens when looking at organizational performance. While all models are flawed, some may be useful, and any analysis requires an understanding of the situational context and then the selection of the most useful models. Today there is no agreed-upon informal learning design methodology. I doubt that a single one would be useful anyway.

An industrial age mindset would require a unified approach for informal learning, but the network age demands an acceptance of perpetual Beta. We have many methods and frameworks that can better inform us how to design work systems. When learning is the work, the support systems have to enable both. Integrating the best of what we know from multiple disciplines, in an evidence-based fashion, is the way to proceed and support complex, creative, collaborative work. Several of these next practices have been discussed here or amongst my colleagues.

To create real learning organizations, there is a choice. We can keep bolting on bits of informal learning to the formal training structure, or we can take a systemic approach and figure out how learning can be integrated into the workflow – 95% of the time.

Network walking

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In Network Thinking I said that as we learn in digital networks, stock (content) loses significance, while flow (conversation) becomes more important — the challenge becomes how to continuously weave the many bits of information and knowledge that pass by us each day. Conversations help us make sense. But we need diversity in our conversations or we become insular. We cannot predict what will emerge from continuous learning, co-creating & sharing at the individual, organizational and market level but we do know it will make for more resilient organizations.

Gina Minks thinks that “This isn’t going to happen till there is a way to measure it, or a way to convince people that we’ve not ever measured anything in a meaningful way. And I’m not just saying that to make Harold freak out.”

I’d like to follow up on this as Gina raises a good point. There is an existing managerial culture that says we need to measure things in order to control them. But what happens when most of our work is intangible and the business objective is something not easily measurable, like trust or reputation?

Dr. W. Edwards Deming, champion of continual improvement in manufacturing, way back in 1984 talked about the five deadly diseases of management which unfortunately still ring true today. The fifth deadly disease is a reliance on ‘visible figures’ only. There is  no consideration of the unknown and unknowable. For example, Deming asks what are the multiplying effects of a happy or unhappy customer. Even in the 1980’s Deming accused the business schools of merely teaching creative accounting by overly relying on visible figures.

I use an example from my military career when I talk about measurement. Every commander knows how important morale is, even though there is no definitive way one can measure it. We can get indicators and data points, but we have to rely on our understanding of the organization and its environment to have a sense of the current state of morale.

walking man
Image by Stefan Eggert

To get more and better information, managers need to be more involved in the actual business. Deming said that managers need to have roots in the company. Another term, coming from the army before it was coined at HP, is the concept of leadership by walking around, AKA MBWA. I learned this concept during leadership training in the mid 1970’s. It works because it ensures that information is not filtered by the bureaucracy.

As Tim Harford wrote in, Adapt: Why success always starts with failure:

“There is a limit to how much honest feedback most leaders really want to hear; and because we know this, most of us sugar-coat our opinions whenever we speak to a powerful person. In a deep hierarchy, that process is repeated many times, until the truth is utterly concealed inside a thick layer of sweet-talk.”

Today we have the added benefit of technologies that can bypass that thick layer of sweet-talk and (re)enable leadership by walking around — social media:

“As a CEO, that’s what I most appreciate about enterprise social software: The way it bridges the gap between what’s personal and what’s business. For example, my company, like virtually all others, has offices all over the world, and visiting them is one of the most important things I do. In the old days, a visit to branch office or an overseas development lab was a blur of new faces and unfamiliar names. But with enterprise social software, everything is different.” —Tom Kelly CEO of Moxie Software

Being actively involved in the way work is done and understanding the real issues is what’s necessary to be of service as a manager or even as a workplace performance professional. I  remember working with the head of nursing who was also responsible for performance and training for all nursing staff in a large hospital. I asked to do an on-site performance analysis over several days. As a visitor I had to be accompanied by a member of the hospital staff.

The senior clinician took me around to all floors and let me interview a number of staff. What was surprising to me was that after two years on the job, it was the clinician’s first time on the wards. Just connecting the clinician with the staff saw some immediate results in changing outdated and redundant procedures. I had achieved some organizational performance improvement before I had even completed my analysis!

Getting  managers out of their offices is a low-tech method that can reap major business benefits. Incorporating this mindset into the use of social media then becomes a business accelerator, increasing speed of access to knowledge and empowering people to get things done.

One way to convince managers of the importance of network thinking is to force them to connect with their networks by getting out of their offices, physically and virtually. It’s not a question of what keeps managers awake at night, it’s what can we do to make sure they are awake to their networks during the day. Go for a walk.

Notes from 2006

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2006

What good are notes if you don’t review them from time to time? I reviewed my notes from 2004 as well as notes from 2005 last January, so now it’s time to review my half-baked ideas from 2006.

Non scholae sed vitae discimus (We learn, not for school, but for life – Seneca, Epistulae)

Curriculum is a solution to a problem we created, wrote Brian Alger, a quote that still sticks with me.

I started thinking about life in perpetual Beta – Perpetual beta is my attitude toward learning – I’ll never get to the final release and my learning will never stabilise. I’ve also realised that clients with a similar attitude are much easier to work with than those who believe that we will reach some future point where everything stabilises and we don’t need to learn or do anything else. I believe that this point is called death.

On the “learning profession”: As a learning professional, it’s time to take a stance. Enabling learning is no longer about disseminating good content. Enabling learning is about being a learner yourself, sharing your knowledge and enthusiasm and then taking a back seat. In a flattened learning system there are no more experts, only fellow learners on paths that may cross.

Foreshadowing my business future in 2011, I wrote that perhaps individual expertise is gradually being replaced by collaborative expertise.

I was asked for one or two sentences on where the field of adult e-learning is going. My response was that 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.

I riffed on Jay Rosen’s theme and wrote about the people formerly known as students:

The people formerly known as students do not believe this problem ”too many individual learners” is our problem. Now for anyone in your circle still wondering who we are, a formal definition might go like this:

The people formerly known as students are those who were on the receiving end of an oligopolist educational system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and few options, and accredited institutions competing to speak their truths while the rest of the population learned in isolation from one another – and who today are not in a situation like that at all.

My thoughts on a networked world were that in warfare, work and learning we are witnessing a major change in command and control and we will have to shift with it or suffer the fate of defeated armies.

Effective work and learning networks are composed of unique individuals working on common challenges, together for a discrete period of time before the network begins to shift its focus again. This is like small groups of guerrillas joining for a raid, conducting it, and then going their separate ways to reform as a different set for a new mission. If armies and businesses organisations are changing to networked models, then the best learning support has to be informal, loose and networked as well. We are shifting from a “one size fits all” attitude on work and learning to an “everyone is unique” perspective. If everyone is unique then there are no generic work processes and no standard curricula.

Near the end of 2006, I concluded that  in our networked world, modelling how to learn is a better strategy than shaping on a pre-defined curriculum.

 

Friday's Finds for 2011

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Every Friday I review what I’ve noted on Twitter and post a wrap-up of what caught my eye. I do this as a reflective thinking process and also in order to take some of what I’ve learned and put it on a platform I can control, my blog. I call it Friday’s Finds and here are some of the more notable finds during 2011.

Blogging

Blogging for knowledge workers: incubating ideas; by @mathemagenic

Blogging is primarily known as an instrument for personal publishing, reaching a broad and often unknown audience without pushing content on them. While blogging is personal, most of its advantages are the result being part of an ecosystem, where weblogs are connected not only by links, but also by relations between bloggers. Those relations do not appear automatically: it takes time and effort before one can enjoy social effects of blogging. To sustain blogging before those effects appear it is important to find a personally meaningful way to use a weblog.

@euan: Information Fertiliser: untidy information, like blogs, makes better knowledge fertiliser:

Finding the good stuff is one of the functions of bloggers. Information rag and bone men who curate the weak signal and the long tail. Seeing patterns in the small, the marginal, the messy. This is where those with nerdy curiosity and a good eye can find real value in what others have discarded or not noticed …

Learning

Johnnie Moore: Learning is not a parcel – via @DavidGurteen

Learning is not a FedEx package that you sign for at the door. Learning happens on its own schedule. We often realise the significance of events long after their original impact, and may actually continue to revise what we think the lesson is as our lives unfold.

The Power of Conversations by @charlesjennings

We rarely, if ever, work and learn alone. We reach our goals and contribute to our organisations’ objectives in a social context. In the maelstrom of our digital communications age the need to think ‘socially’ is more important than ever.

@marksylvester – ‘”I can explain it to you, I can’t understand it for you” – via an extremely smart woman we met on Friday.’

Failure is only useful if we learn from it – by @TimKastelle

  • Failure is only useful if we learn from it: we often talk about the need to fail in innovation, however, there is only value in failure if it helps us learn.
  • Try to fail as cheaply as possible: the main problem with the Edsel isn’t that it failed – it’s that it failed so expensively. There is a hierarchy of failure, and we need to figure out how to fail as early in the process as possible. One way of doing this is through prototyping.

Networks

Value Networks and the true nature of collaboration by @vernaallee (Digital Edition)

The true shape and nature of collaboration is not the social network – it is the value network. Value networks are purposeful groups of people who come together to take action. Value network modeling and analytics reflect the true nature of collaboration with a systemic human-network approach to managing business operations. It shows how work really happens through human interactions, and provides powerful new practices and metrics for managing collaborative work. It provides a way to a) better support non-hierarchical organizations such as cross-boundary teams, and task forces, and b) quickly and effectively model emergent work and complex activities that have multiple variables and frequent exceptions.

Antony Mayfield: “We don’t grasp how magnificently, terrifyingly complex networks are ...” – via @JohnnieMoore

We don’t grasp how magnificently, terrifyingly complex networks are. We like to draw pictures of them and then think we’ve captured their meaning, when they are more like the weather – always changing, hyper-complex. Predictable if you are smart and have a huge amount of data and training, but only to a point and only some of the time. (There’s mileage in that weather forecasting analogy – I’d like to come up with it.

Knowledge

Knowledge Management = experience-sharing NOT information-sharing – Knoco Stories

In most of the training courses I run, I ask the question “where does knowledge come from?”
Always, every time, I get the answer “Experience – Knowledge comes from Experience”. Never does anyone answer “Knowledge comes from Information”.
Never
If you don’t believe me, try it yourself. Ask people “where does knowledge come from”? and see what they say.

“knowledge transfer” is a handy fiction we have created – by @downes

My answer, and it’s a perfectly reasonable and well-research answer, is that nothing is transferred. That the whole idea of “knowledge transfer” is a handy fiction that we have created over the years, as simple folk, to function as shorthand for what we know is a much more complex process.

Probably the best intermediate position a person can attempt here is something like “knowledge replication“. That’s what’s actually happening in a lot of people’s theories. We know that the sending of a message from one person to another involves a state change. The signal (another handy fiction; let me have it for now) crosses through several media en route from sender to receiver. Thus questions of signal integrity arise, the problem of distinguishing signal from noise, and all the rest of it.

“Knowledge is constructed, not transferred ~Peter Senge” – via @denniscallahan

Work

@SteveDenning: “The real jobs crisis is that most jobs suck” via @SebPaquet

This is not just a matter of keeping the workers happy. In today’s knowledge economy, the motivation of workers is a key determinant of productivity. The lack of passion in today’s workforce is a fundamental cause of the continuing sharp decline in the performance of the Fortune 500.

“Some psychologists have a theory that many of the world’s ills can be blamed on psychopaths in high places.” via @SebPaquet [reminds me of The Gervais Principle]

“Robert Hare, the eminent Canadian psychologist who invented the psychopath checklist, … recently announced that you’re four times more likely to find a psychopath at the top of the corporate ladder than you are walking around in the janitor’s office,” journalist Jon Ronson tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered.

The Job is dying – by @robpatrob [a comprehensive must-read]

But if all you know is the job, how do you get prepared to do well in the new networked world as a freelancer or as a very small business person?

The challenge is mindset. If you have been looked after in a job, what do you know of making your life on your own? Like riding a bike, no book can help you really.

Our advice is to join a co-working space. There you will have access to both the social aspects of a network and you will have the advice and support that you need to do well as a new immigrant to this New World of the Networked Economy.

Resiliency & the Working Smarter Framework: Building on Strengths ~ by @brentmack

As you can see, the role of Management in this model is to tap into or mine the emergent (next) practices stemming from staff collaborations and transform these practices into new tools and processes.

In this type of workspace, the new tools and processes are put into service much faster. It is accepted that rapid change and the complexity of overlapping issues is the norm. Organizations are positioned more on the outer boundaries where change is happening. Management at the bottom of the pyramid supports a work culture where staff use a variety of social media tools that enables effective social learning activities which fuels collaboration and innovation.

 

Create, Collaborate

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This cartoon, by Hugh Macleod of GapingVoid, pretty well sums up my last few years.

The Internet has allowed me to self-publish at will and get connected to a growing network of people, several of whom I have had opportunities to collaborate with. There are no more hierarchies between creation and collaboration.

We live in a most interesting time in history. Never before has it been so easy to collaborate. Thanks, Vint Cerf, Sir Tim and everyone else who helped make the network era possible.

Collective sense-making

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More of my online sense-making is in connecting to people, not accessing information sources. For instance, I read a few journals but I have dropped several, knowing that other people in my network will find the interesting articles and let me know. I used to read many of the technology blogs, like TechCrunch and Read/Write Web but have dropped them from my feed reader and instead read posts that have been referred via Twitter, Google Plus or blog posts.

The big shift for me in the past decade has been in weaving a network that brings me diversity of opinions and depth of knowledge. I am constantly following/unfollowing on Twitter in an attempt at optimal filtering, which is an impossible but worthwhile goal. I look for experts who share their knowledge or act as human-powered content aggregators, selecting quality information and discarding the crap. I look for people who have mastered Crap Detection 101.

Aron Solomon [dead link] has noted that:

2012 will be a year where the value of information finally seeps into the public consciousness. The conversation will become about not only what we know but how we know that what we know is meaningful. We will shift from an orientation of quantity to one of quality. It’s not that we won’t use the Internet, it’s not that Google will disappear – of course not.

Knowledge in a networked society is different from what many of us grew up with in the pre-Internet days. While books and journal articles are useful in codifying what we have learnt, knowledge is becoming a negotiated  agreement between connected people. It’s also better shared than kept to ourselves, where it may wither and die. Like electricity, knowledge is both particles and current, or stock and flow.

streamThe increasing importance of fluid knowledge requires a different perspective on how we think of it and use it. If change is constant, then the half-life of codified knowledge (stock) decreases. We see this with the increasingly combative debates on intellectual property (IP) expressed as copyright. Both vestiges of an economy dominated by knowledge as stock. The digital world is harshly bumping against the analog world and we are caught in-between.

I think the only way to navigate this change is collaboratively. No one has the right answer, but together we can explore new models of sense-making and knowledge-sharing. We each need to find others who are sharing their knowledge flow and in turn contribute our own. This is the foundation of personal knowledge mastery. It’s not about being a better digital librarian, it’s about becoming a participating member of a networked society.