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.

A new social contract for creative work

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In the TechCrunch article, What if this is no accident?, Jon Evans looks at the current boom in software engineering jobs in comparison to the lack of jobs elsewhere. He wonders if this is how the new economy will look for a while.

It’s beginning to look like we might have entered a two-track economy, in which a small minority reaps most of the benefits of technology that destroys more jobs than it creates. As my friend Simon Law says, “First we automated menial jobs, now we’re automating middle-class jobs. Unfortunately, we still demand that people have a job soon after becoming adults. This trend is going to be a big problem…”

I’ve been saying for a while that simple and merely complicated work will continue to get automated and outsourced (read this post if you don’t believe it or look at this example of legal work getting automated). To keep a job in the creative economy (with core skills of Initiative, Creativity & Passion) one  must become an indispensable linchpin in the organization.

I think more opportunities are being created than destroyed, but our institutions and our cultural mindset still are not ready for this change. Politicians continue to think in terms of jobs. Universities still have job fairs, hinting that such a thing as a career will exist in a hyper-networked world. Parents push their children into undergraduate programs that cost more than graduates can ever repay. Laws are structured so that corporations create wealth in return for indentured servitude, where employees own none of the intellectual property they generate. In such an environment, why would workers try to innovate? The indicators that the underlying nature of work and wealth generation have changed are everywhere.

I’ve questioned the rationale of continuing practices such as:

  • Mass training with standard performance objectives for everyone. What two people really have the same job any more?
  • Limited  options for part-time work at the control of the worker.
  • Standard HR policies that drain the initiative out of people.
  • Banning access to online social networks at work and disconnecting workers from their social safety nets and innovation sources.
So why aren’t we all working for learning organizations, in this day and age? The work that we will be paid for in the foreseeable future is the difficult, innovative, one-of-a-kind, creative stuff. Educational institutions need to help get people ready for this, and standardized tests or common curriculum are of little use in the networked workplace. A core part of this change, in my opinion, is integrating learning and work, because change is continuous, not some special initiative to implement and then get back to normal. I’ve recommended some changes that I now see taking hold in a few places:

  • Abolish the organization chart and replace it with a network diagram (some new tech companies have done this).
  • Move away from counting hours, to a results only work environment (with distributed work, this is becoming more common).
  • Encourage outside work that doesn’t directly interfere with paid work, as it will strengthen the network (such as Google’s 20% time for engineers).
  • Provide options for workers to come and go and give them ways to stay connected when they’re not employed (like Ericsson’s Stay Connected Facebook group). Build an ecosystem, not a monolith.

Our challenge is not saving those jobs that will be automated and outsourced anyway, but focusing on creating more opportunities for creative work. For institutions, employers, educators and workers, that means giving up control and co-creating a new social contract for the creative, networked economy.

I wouldn’t wait if I was in charge of an organization. I would get these changes going as soon as possible. Successfully implemented, this organization would not have a talent acquisition or retention problem for a long time.

Quotes, fraud and wealth destruction

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Here are some insights and observations shared via Twitter this past week.

Name a “working” institution. Just one. Better yet, define a “working” institution. See the problem? –  @umairh

I think collaboration is the next IT investment of the decade. ~ Sheila Jordan (@CiscoSheila) – via @marciamarcia

Don’t tell your execs you want “Social Media” access, tell them employees will work longer hours on their own time for free. – @techherding

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead. ~ Thomas Paine – via @snowded

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.

Real scientists never report fraud – by @DanielLemire

But what is critical is that traditional peer review does not protect against fraud. It is merely a check that the work appears superficially correct and interesting. A reviewer who would go out of his way to check whether a paper reports truthful results should not expect accolades. That is not how the game is played.

It’s not change management [it’s adapting to life in perpetual Beta, IMO] – by @JackVinson

Rather than going down some old familiar paths in a discussion about change and change management, he [Dave Gray] suggests that the whole field needs to rethink what it does. Change management as a means to get you from State A to State B becomes much less important when you are already at State Y and seeing new States coming by every other week.

Dave suggests that rather than one “change” to manage it is an entire portfolio of moves that the organization is trying. And it is that portfolio that should be managed.

The Guardian: The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen – via @CharlesJennings

What has happened over the past 30 years is the capture of the world’s common treasury by a handful of people, assisted by neoliberal policies which were first imposed on rich nations by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. I am now going to bombard you with figures. I’m sorry about that, but these numbers need to be tattooed on our minds. Between 1947 and 1979, productivity in the US rose by 119%, while the income of the bottom fifth of the population rose by 122%. But from 1979 to 2009, productivity rose by 80%, while the income of the bottom fifth fell by 4%. In roughly the same period, the income of the top 1% rose by 270%.

engaging the trustworthy

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In my post on spreading social capitalism I concluded that Mavens (experts) exhibit the greatest intellectual capital, Connectors have the most diverse (creative) networks, and Salespeople get things done (action).

I recently came across a post on The Trusted Advisor that adds another twist to how we connect to each other. On the info-graphic (below) How trustworthy are you? Charles Green shows that Experts (Mavens) are not as trusted, in comparison to several other roles in a network. They lack the intimacy skills of Doers, Connectors and Catalysts (Salespeople).

This makes sense on face value, given that many experts are very deep into their field and less interested in the general public. Consider that people who popularize research — like Malcolm Gladwell who writes in a less academic style — are often much more successful than those whose research their books are based on.

Read more

So you (still) want to be an elearning consultant?

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Last week I commented that many people in the ‘learning’ field are too absorbed in their own interests and not the businesses they are supporting. Working smarter in the 21st century requires the integration of learning into the workflow. This has become a necessity due to the increased complexity facing today’s networked business. Ericsson’s video, On the Brink, provides a good overview of this emerging networked society.

Learning is the work in a constantly changing landscape, and as mentioned in the video, the next 10 years will see more change than the past 15 years, since the creation of the Web.

Prior to the Web, the learning professions were focused on either delivering courses or some specific sub-set of learning. In the late 20th century we saw the rise of personality tests, learning styles, and dubious applications of Bloom’s taxonomy or NLP, among other practices not aligned with the business. With the Web, we went from training to e-learning course delivery, with an emphasis on technology, especially learning management systems (LMS) and rapid authoring. Today, businesses are beginning to realize that LMS are not really helping their organizations and most courses are disconnected from the real work. I have seen companies completely outsource all course design/delivery in order for internal staff to focus on informal and social learning to support collaboration. This makes business sense.

For those in the learning professions (KM, OD, Training, Instruction, Education) there will be a sea change in how they work over the next decade. They will have to become part of the business (or organization, or network) or be completely marginalized. In my article, So you want to be an e-learning consultant? (2007) I showed the different types of work, and associated remuneration, available in the field.

elearning-remuneration

Note how business and technology-oriented work pay much more than pure pedagogical work. This trend has not changed since 2007 and will continue.

I have met many people in learning professions over the years who have the technological savvy but lack business skills. People with expertise in all three areas are few. The L&D folks often do not get a seat at the table because they don’t have a direct impact on the business. My advice to anyone in a learning-oriented field is to get up to speed on networked technologies but also understand the business you are supporting. There’s no more hiding in the shadows, as the network exposes everything and everyone. Narrating work and being transparent are great opportunities in the networked era, but that means there’s no place to hide. It’s a global village and everyone is interconnected. The opportunities are at the intersection.