Managing engagement

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Ewen Le Borgne has an entertaining post on Communication, KM, monitoring, learning – The happy families of engagement. This humourous look at the various parties that try to support engagement in the organization is well worth the read. He discusses the three main branches of the family: Communication, Knowledge Management, and Monitoring & Evaluation. There’s even good old PKM:

The little brother PKM (personal knowledge management) was not taken seriously for a long time but he is really a whiz kid and has given a lot of people confidence that perhaps his branch of the family is better off betting on him, at least partly. He says that everyone of us can do much to improve the way we keep our expertise sharp and connect with akin spirits. To persuade his peeps, PKM often calls upon on his friends from social media and social networks (though these fellas are in demand by most family members mentioned above).

What all of these family members (disciplines) have in common is they are focused on some aspect of communicating, connecting and collaborating and they all think they have a unique perspective. But they share another commonality. They are all blind, as in the story of the blind men and the elephant.

“In various versions of the tale, a group of blind men (or men in the dark) touch an elephant to learn what it is like. Each one feels a different part, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then compare notes and learn that they are in complete disagreement.”

You see, the [real] elephant in the room is the Network. We are all examining how best to get work done in a networked economy, because the Internet has changed everything. This is most evident today in publishing and increasingly so in how we manage work without geographical boundaries. We are all learning how to work anew.

In a lot of cases, knowledge workers now own what these specialties used to provide. Individuals are becoming their own information curators and sharing widely, self-managed communities constantly spring up, and social media are breaking marketing channels. Perhaps the age of specialization is over in the Network Era.  As I’ve said before: Knowledge workers of the world, Collaborate, You have nothing to lose but your Managers! With efficient networks and powerful cognitive support tools, the Engagement Family may have to rethink its structure and hierarchy. You cannot manage engagement if no one needs to be managed.

Finally going mobile

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I don’t travel a lot. This year I was away for 47 days, or 13% of the year. The other 87% of the time I was in Sackville, in my home office or down at the café with wifi and lots of people I know. That’s probably why, in 2011, I have finally purchased my first smart phone, an iPhone 4s. My old phone was coming up for renewal and since I’ve been with the same vendor for over 20 years, I figured I’d probably stick with them, not that service is great, but it’s okay.

I decided to go with Apple’s latest offering for several reasons. The 8MP camera meant I would no longer need a separate camera (so my son is happy with his new hand-me-down Canon). The iPhone is good enough for me, a very amateur photographer. I was also intrigued with Siri and wanted to understand it and see what it might mean for workplace learning. Also, it looks like I’ll be travelling more in 2012, so buying equipment before year end just made business sense.

Basically, I’m a newbie with smart phones. This is a good thing, as I’ll have a better understanding of what challenges are presented to other workers as they have to adopt these technologies. I’ll try to narrate my learning as I figure out this mobile stuff, which my colleague Clark is so adept at.

I realize that mobile is a critical part of the future of workplace learning. I intend to do some serious learning this year. I also bought my son an iPhone 3GS and it’s amazing to see how quickly he has added it into his life. It’s time for me to keep up.

Embracing change from both sides

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One of the great difficulties in shifting an organization from a hierarchical, command and control structure to a more networked wirearchical one is that you have to work both ends at once. Strategic guidance and high level models are rather abundant; for instance we generally know that organizations should be flatter, information should be democratized and risk & failure should be made more acceptable. Examining a business and looking at how it can be more social, innovative and agile is not really that difficult. From both inside and outside the organizations, most gaps are easy to identify. But the main challenge is what to do about them. Consultants, and even key internal staff, can often identify the problem (at the time) but then they move on to the next problem before much change has happened.

Complexity theory tells us that complex problems need to be probed through action before any sense can be made of them. Changing to a social business is complex. Dave Snowden has operationalized this with the Cynefin framework (Probe-Sense-Respond in complex environments).

But, as Dave has reminded me, over half of our probes will fail. That means we cannot create a plan for the organizational shift and then implement it. It has to be designed as a work in progress, or really a series of works in progress.

My experience, especially this past year, is that social business is just a different organizational culture. But you cannot directly change it or implement it. Culture is an emergent property of the many practices that happen every day. Change the practices and a new culture will emerge.

Communities of practice are often where work practices get developed. Even without formal approval, communities of practice exist and have a great influence on the organization. They can be a bunch of workers in the lunchroom or the CEO’s inner circle. They learn from each other by modelling behaviour. We may not even realize we’re modelling (and adopting) behaviours, but it happens all the time; like keeping your mouth shut when an executive says something really stupid.

So how would you re-focus an existing organization? First you need the frameworks and new ways of talking about business in place. These are based on the concepts Steve Denning, Gary Hamel, John Hagel and others talk about (radical management, management innovation, edge perspectives). Then you need to identify Probes, or what Dave Snowden calls safe-fail experiments. These are designed to be not so large that failure would seriously damage the company.

Next comes the trickier part. These probes have to be supported. How do you take a team that has never narrated its work and tell it to “be more transparent” or “share knowledge with customers”. New ways of doing things have to be practised, modelled and developed in a non-confrontational environment. It takes time. Not an inordinate amount of time with good support, but it doesn’t happen in a matter of weeks; more usually months.

For example, we’ve worked with distributed groups who are focused on improving collaboration. Everyone is onboard at the onset. But after an initial week or two we notice that nobody is sharing information. They say there’s no time to do it, but this is not a lack of motivation, it’s a lack of skills. However, developing these types of social skills require much more practice than theory.

During one of these probes, there can be lengthy periods of time coaching, cajoling and modelling, but at some point, things click with someone. This person sees how these new ways of working are really helping get work done. Someone else gets positive feedback from people outside the team. After a period of time there is no more need for outside help and the team becomes a model for the new business behaviours such as taking initiative in delighting customers. Ideas are supported, not shot down. People build on others’ ideas. One other thing; the end result of a probe is never what we thought it would be.

Like learning a new language, getting access to the right knowledge is only a small part of the solution. The best curriculum and best designed courses will have no effect if people do not practice. Formal instruction, or lecturing, is minimal in any of these probes. People need to do in order to understand. It’s social. Individuals practising on their own will not get the entire organization functioning in the new language either. It has to happen cooperatively. Getting feedback from experienced people, while engaging in peer learning, will help develop next practices in social business. But it requires time, effort and patience.

I’ve been told that you know you’re in a real community of practice when it changes your practice. It’s a good measuring stick.

There is no doubt in my mind that you need to work both ends at once: develop a flexible, contextual strategy but also practice new behaviours through a continuing series of probes. Supporting these probes and learning by doing are essential. Engaging in probes where failure is an option can be an extremely valuable learning process. It can even be transformational. Developing a strategy and then following the plan is just another 20th century “change management” process. It is backward looking, based on a plan that is outdated the moment it is published. In the 21st century, the aim is not to manage change, but understand and embrace change. It’s shifting to an acceptance of life in perpetual Beta.

Sharing whatever you've got

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

@mpesce on the Occupy Movement “#Occupy is a mirror. What you think of it says more about you than it does about Occupy.”

Bill Moyers –  “News is what people want to keep hidden; everything else is publicity.”

@ebase: “Think about your best communities and do something to keep them together.” – Why so sentimental?

The co-op business model: share whatever you’ve got, by @sivers via @willkriski

None of these things looked like a business venture.

All of them were just sharing something I already had.

People often ask me if I have any suggestions for what kind of business they should get into.

I tell them the only thing I know how to recommend: “Start by sharing whatever you’ve got.”

The competitive Edge of Social Business – by @EskoKilpi

For knowledge workers and customers the task of gaining needed inputs for these situations is creating an entirely new environment. Creative learning becomes the fundamental activity. It is not about consuming pre-determined content, passing tests or something with beginnings and ends. Learning is continuous transformation. It is the foundation for creative action. Ability to better meet the needs of a situation can only partially take place prior to the live moment. You can never be fully prepared in advance, success depends on how you are present and how you communicate.

Fifth annual Mckquarterly report on social business benefits is out:  Benefits hold steady for 3 years. via @dhinchcliffe [#1 = Increasing speed of access to knowledge]

Startups Key to Job Growth: Video with Robert Litan “virtually all net new jobs were created by firms less than 5 years old” [not small business, but startups]

Sense-making through conversation

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One of our clients referred me to a post by Nick Milton on another great Boston square that pulls “apart the KM world on dimensions of Knowledge Push and Knowledge Pull (which you might call “Sharing” and “seeking”), and the dimensions of Explicit and Tacit. We get 4 quadrants, which we could call Ask, Tell, Search, Share.”

The similarity to PKM with its seek/sense/share processes had me look back on that for any additional insights from Nick’s Boston square (my additions in red).

Sense-making consists of both asking and telling. It’s a continuing series of conversations. We know that conversation is the main way that tacit knowledge gets shared. So we continuously seek out explicit knowledge, in the form of written work or other knowledge artifacts left by others. We then have conversations around these artifacts to make sense of them. Finally, we share new, explicit knowledge artifacts which then grow our bodies of knowledge. Sharing closes the circle, because being a personal knowledge manager is every professional’s part of the social learning contract.

This square is a good model to look at our own processes. Is the (limited) time we spend on PKM well balanced between the four activities? Missing one of them completely would destroy most of the value in any PKM process. Seeking and sharing information without any conversation around it would only serve to create additional noise with no signal. It’s the individual context, gained through conversations, that provides the real value. This is why narrating our work and making it transparent (shareable) is so important in the creative, networked workplace. It’s how the organization makes sense, from multiple conversations.

Bridging the gap: working smarter

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Nigel Paine recently produced a very good ten-minute video on The Learning Explosion. Nigel used one of my diagrams in his presentation and this motivated me to explain it in a bit more detail.

The slide presentation is designed to be self-explanatory and may help convince management of the need to integrate working and learning. As Nigel says, and I agree, being an effective team player is just one aspect of the 21st century workplace. We must also share our expertise across the organization while encouraging people to develop external networks. That’s what this model tries to explain. Communities of practice are bridges between the work being done and the diversity of social networks.

A key role for any learning and development department today, and for the near future, is to enable and support communities of practice that integrate learning and working.

Open Jobs, Open Net

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

QOTW: “eating your own dogfood: good. believing your own bullshit: bad.” ~ @SebPaquet

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.

Majority of American Workers Not Engaged in Their Jobs  – via @donnyo

Seventy-one percent of American workers are “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” in their work, meaning they are emotionally disconnected from their workplaces and are less likely to be productive. That leaves nearly one-third of American workers who are “engaged,” or involved in and enthusiastic about their work and contributing to their organizations in a positive manner.

… but a majority of those using Yammer are more engaged – again via @donnyo

Employee engagement is a top priority for companies because of its impact on the bottom line. Employees who demonstrate a high level of engagement are more productive and less likely to leave the company. 66 percent of surveyed users say they feel more engaged at their company because of Yammer. By providing direct access to leaders and giving all employees a voice, Yammer strengthens the connection workers feel to their employers.

From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg, scale matters – by @DonaldClark

What do these successful innovations in learning share? Scalability through technology. From Gutenbeg to Zuckerberg, replication, first at low cost, then at no cost, is the key to low cost education and training.

Yochai Benkler on the eG8 – an absolute must view! This is it, folks – understanding the Open Net

Where Good Ideas Come From – Review

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“The premise that innovation prospers when ideas can serendipitously connect and recombine with other ideas, when hunches can stumble across other hunches that successfully fill in their blanks, may seem like an obvious truth, but the strange fact is that a great deal of the past two centuries of legal and folk wisdom about innovation has pursued the exact opposite argument, building walls between ideas, keeping them from the kind of random, serendipitous connections that exist in dreams and in the organic compounds of life.”

This one sentence sums up the core ideas in Steven Johnson’s book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The natural history of innovation. Johnson goes on to explain what organizations can do to foster innovation:

“The secret to organizational inspiration is to build information networks that allow hunches to persist and disperse and recombine. Instead of cloistering your hunches in brainstorm sessions or R&D labs, create an environment where brainstorming is something that is constantly running in the background, throughout the organization, a collective version of the 20-percent-time concept that proved so successful for Google and 3M. One way to do this is to create an open database of hunches, the Web 2.0 version of the traditional suggestion box.”

This is what organizational social learning using social media can do – enable a free flow of hunches and ideas. The chapter on The Fourth Quadrant provides some specific advice for business innovation. The quadrant is the Non-market/Network which “corresponds to open-source or academic environments, where ideas can be built upon and reimagined in large, collaborative networks.” Innovations in this quadrant include: Braille, RNA splicing, Quantum Mechanics, Punch Cards, Germ Theory and many others developed at an increasing pace post-1850, as we became electrified [my observation here].

“Participants in the fourth quadrant don’t have these costs [protecting intellectual assets through barricades of artificial scarcity]: they can concentrate on coming up with new ideas, not building fortresses around the old ones. And because these ideas can freely circulate through the infosphere, they can be refined and expanded by other minds in the network.”

Steven Johnson presented this morning at the CSTD conference , reinforcing these points and making several others. He talked about the concept of getting more parts (or ideas) on the table in order to have more to work with and more potential connections. I liked his view of intellectual property protection as an ‘innovation tax’. He also talked about the emerging role of the organizational translator who can help break down silos and enable better communication and collaboration, similar to the ideas in the post, adapting to a networked world.

Overall it’s a great book with some solid advice for any organization.

Update: Video of SBJ discussing Maple Syrup, Airplane Crashes & the Power of non-Market Innovation (the fourth quadrant).

CSTD 2011

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Here are my notes from the session this afternoon at CSTD 2011 in Toronto. If you need other links or information, just add a comment.

I’m glad we had a chance to field test a variation of the improv icebreak activity of equilateral triangles. It seems to have got things going a bit.

My slide presentation is available for viewing or download here:

Integrating learning and work CSTD 2011

I also showed two videos, the trailer to Networked Society: On the Brink as well as Dave Snowden’s How to Organise a Children’s Party.

Update: some people asked about selling social learning in their organizations, so these posts may be useful:

Social Learning for Business – 10 phrase elevator pitch

Why do we need social business? – many links to other resources & posts

Also: my social bookmarks on social media policies in a wide variety of organizations

 

Principles of creative management

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F.W. Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management, written in 1911, is still the basis of many of our management practices today. Taylor’s ghost is everywhere.

It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.

One hundred years later, we need to get away from these ideas and adopt methods that enable creative work in an interconnected economy. I would suggest something like the following:

It is only through innovative and contextual methods, the self-selection of the most appropriate tools and work conditions and willing cooperation that more productive work can be assured. The duty of being transparent in our work and sharing our knowledge rests with all workers.