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.

Thoughtful filtering

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Here are some of the ideas and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week, just to show that what happens in Vegas, gets posted to the Web ;)

Steve Rosenbaum: We need thoughtful filters with humans replacing algorithms so it becomes more about ideas than data – via @Smartinx

“if learning happens all around us, and we strive to create “learning organisations” how can we justify the LMS as a content management tool?” – by @mollybob

Brenda Sugrue: “When a client asks you to consider Learning Styles or Bloom’s Taxonomy it should be a BIG instructional design red flag” #DevLearn – via @rec54

Innovation is Not ‘Best Practice’ – via @hyponastic

  • Innovations start out as best practices, but best practices all become uninnovative.
  • Best practices can blind us to more things than we might realize at first.
  • Innovation is not about agreeing on things.
  • Best practices are too complicated.
  • Everything works some of the time, nothing works all of the time.

Anything that does not contribute to learning is waste – by @eskokilpi via @davidgurteen

Management theory needs to leave behind the industrial, mechanistic model of reality and the belief in the linear, if – then, causality. The sciences of complexity, non-linear dynamics, uncertainty and creative learning are the foundations of modern, human-centric management.

The task of managers is not reduction of uncertainty but to develop capacity to operate creatively within it. Ilya Prigogine wrote in his book “The End of Certainty” that the future is not given, but under perpetual construction:

“Life is about unpredictable novelty where the possible is always richer than the real.”

It’s the network …

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I presented on Managing in a Networked World at DevLearn 2011 today in Las Vegas.

How do you manage a workforce that is both nomadic and collaborative? In a 24/7 always-on- and-interconnected world, do we need to rethink the industrial-workplace social contract that’s based on hours worked and being on-the-job ? Join Harold Jarche to discuss how these and other trends mean a shift to perpetual Beta, where learning is the work.

A total of four people attended, as compared to about 50 for a session this morning on some new learning technology tool. Many of my conversations with training/learning professionals have shown a general lack of interest in management, leadership or business issues. Too many learning folks are interested in the tools of THEIR trade and not the businesses they are supposed to serve.

Thinking like a node in a network and not as a position in a hierarchy is the first mental shift that’s required to move to a collaborative enterprise. Nurturing Creativity is now a management responsibility. The old traits of the industrial/information worker were Intellect, Diligence, and Obedience. The new traits of the collaborative worker are Passion, Creativity, and Initiative. These cannot be commoditized. People cannot be creative on demand. The collaborative enterprise requires looser hierarchies and stronger networks. What does that mean for learning & development?

The learning delivery model is being obsolesced by ubiquitous connectivity and diverse social networks. If learning professionals do not participate in the emergent leadership of the networked enterprise, they will be outsourced and sooner than later, automated. There is no room for those who just do their job within their job description (these were industrial-age constructs). The automation of physicians and lawyers was discussed during this morning’s keynote. What makes instructional designers et al, think they are any different? The 21st century workplace is all about understanding networks, modelling networked learning, supporting and strengthening networks.

Third Industrial Revolution – Review

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The future should be networked, writes Jeremy Rifkin in The Third Industrial Revolution. He sees the next industrial age, one bridging industrialism to continental collaboration as the most feasible post-carbon future. This era of networked energy will be based on 5 pillars, all essential for a successful transition:

  1. shift to renewable energy
  2. shift buildings to become local power plants
  3. deploy energy stores locally, especially hydrogen
  4. use the Internet to create a smart energy-sharing grid
  5. shift transportation to plug-in & fuel cell power

Europe is leading the way and Rifkin spends a good part of the book setting up a narrative and understanding for an American audience. There’s lots here on how power is created, controlled and regulated. I was most interested in the way Rifkin connects so many perspectives together. The first part talks about energy but the book continues with sections on economics, politics and education. There is a good review of how many of our current institutions were forged at the beginning of the second industrial revolution, around 1890 – e.g. corporations, schools, utilities.

He discusses how bureaucracies are an outdated form of control. This resonated with me after my presentation on social media to federal assistant deputy ministers only a few weeks ago:

Still, systemic thinking is a difficult task in a bureaucratic environment where there is a strong drive to hold on to turf and protect domains. This is what leads to what I call the DG (director general) abyss – the process by which big-picture ideas, agreed to at the ministerial level and even higher at the head-of-state level, lose their heft and become increasingly smaller and more narrow in vision and scope as they descend down into the departments and agencies, finally ending up as a shadow of their former selves, languishing in the minutia of countless reports, studies and evaluations, whose purposes become increasingly obtuse, even to those tasked with managing them.

The institutions we created to mirror the dominant energy producer of the 20th century, big oil, are a large part of the problem:

The oil age from its onset has been characterized by gigantism and centralization. That’s because harnessing oil and other elite fossil fuels requires large amounts of capital and favors vertical economies of scale, which necessitates a top-down command and control structure. The oil business is one of the largest industries in the world. It’s also the most costly enterprise for collecting, processing and distributing energy ever conceived by humankind.

As the Internet economy has shifted to a distributed and collaborative model, so too must the energy economy. It will be a battle between centralized and distributed energy and how easy it will be for localities to participate and profit. Rifkin provides great detail on how this can be done by 2050 and his model has already been adopted by the European Union while the US and Canada lag behind. The younger generation already understand this model, as the President of Spain noted, “For a younger generation growing up on the Internet and comfortable interacting in social media, the hierarchically organized flow of authority and power from the top down is old school.”

Rifkin includes a good analysis of the education system and its issues, with a section entitled, The Biosphere becomes the Learning Environment. Though I found the first part a bit slow going I really enjoyed the second half and the synthesis it provides on much of my professional work. Near the end, Rifkin summarizes the fundamental communications shifts we’ve experienced, echoing Marshall McLuhan:

All forager-hunter societies were oral cultures, steeped in mythological consciousness. The great hydraulic agricultural civilizations were organized around writing and gave rise to theological consciousness. Print technology became the communication medium to organize the myriad activities of the coal- and steam-powered first Industrial Revolution, 200 years ago. Print communication also led to a transformation from theological to ideological consciousness during the Enlightenment. In the 20th century, electronic communications became the command and control mechanism to manage a second industrial revolution, based on the oil economy and the automobile. Electronic communication spawned a new psychological consciousness.

Today we are on the verge of another seismic shift. Distributed information and communication technologies are converging with distributed renewable energies, creating the infrastructure for a third industrial revolution. In the 21st century, hundreds of millions of people will transform their buildings into power plants to harvest renewable energies on-site, store those energies in the form of hydrogen, and share electricity with one other across continental grids that act much like the Internet. The open-source sharing of energy will give rise to collaborative energy spaces, not unlike the collaborative social spaces on the Internet.

The third industrial revolution paves the way for biosphere consciousness.

Plans, structures and illusions

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

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face ~ Mike Tyson – via @DickBeveridge

Working Wikily: “It is ultimately to everyone’s benefit when we see ourselves as a node within a network …”

Say goodbye to the organisational hierarchies please – by @sig

This focus on efficiency over effectiveness should remind us of what Peter Drucker once said: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” And today, thanks to modern IT we do things very efficiently, especially the 60% that which need not to be done at all.

@DavePollard – The Metamovement: Moving Beyond Marches and People in the Street

THE CHALLENGE OF BALANCING GROUP AUTHORITY AND INDIVIDUAL AUTONOMY

From what I have seen, the major challenge the Occupy groups are dealing with is about who is authorized to do what on behalf of, or binding upon, participants, without infringing on individual participants’ autonomy. For example, if someone wants to organize a march, does it need to be put forward as a proposal and agreed to by consensus of the whole? Since it only needs to be agreed to by consensus if it is put forward as a proposal at a General Assembly, does this encourage people to circumvent the collective decision-making process by just saying “I’m going to do this — who’s with me?” instead of putting forward a proposal to the group?

@JeffMerrell – WSJ: Peter Cappelli on why companies aren’t getting employees they need. “The problem is an illusion”

Some of the complaints about skill shortages boil down to the fact that employers can’t get candidates to accept jobs at the wages offered. That’s an affordability problem, not a skill shortage. A real shortage means not being able to find appropriate candidates at market-clearing wages. We wouldn’t say there is a shortage of diamonds when they are incredibly expensive; we can buy all we want at the prevailing prices.

The real problem, then, is more appropriately an inflexibility problem. Finding candidates to fit jobs is not like finding pistons to fit engines, where the requirements are precise and can’t be varied. Jobs can be organized in many different ways so that candidates who have very different credentials can do them successfully.

like a horse and carriage – by @snowded

“Economists and workplace consultants regard it as almost unquestioned dogma that people are motivated by rewards, so they don’t feel the need to test this. It has the status more of religious truth than scientific hypothesis.”

“The facts are absolutely clear.
There is no question that in virtually all circumstances in which people are doing things in order to get rewards, extrinsic tangible rewards undermine intrinsic motivation” (New Scientist, 9 April 2011)

Here again is why I do Friday’s Finds. It’s part of my sense-making process:

I added a sense-making activity about two years ago when I realized I was losing track of what I was finding on Twitter. I could have saved interesting tweets to my social bookmarks but instead I decided to do a weekly review of what I had found. This requires little effort during the week, other than clicking the “favorite” star. At the end of the week, I re-read these tweets and their links and then decide which ones are still of interest. The activity of reading, writing and perhaps commenting helps to internalize some of the knowledge. The result is Friday’s Finds and a byproduct is that some other people find them interesting and useful as well.

Connect, exchange, contribute

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Highlights from Skills for Learning & Development Professionals (an article I wrote for T&D Magazine in 2008).

My experiences over the past three years have shown that these skills are still necessary in the workplace.

Attitude:

Accepting that we will never know everything, but that others may be able to help, is the first step in becoming a learning professional. This is an acceptance of a world in flux and that knowledge is neither constant nor fixed.

Instead of trying to know everything in our field, we can concentrate on knowing who to connect with. The network becomes all-important. That means an attitude of openness and collaboration – joining others on a journey of understanding. Giving up control would be a first step on this journey.

Even reading on the web is quite different from print. Digitally, we have opportunities to engage the writers and make our thoughts known, whether through comments or linking to the original article from our blog.

Having a blog, a permanent presence on the Web, becomes the jumping off point for deeper professional discussions. Producing a blog also opens a person up to criticism, so once again, an open attitude to learning is essential.

Learning:

Learning professionals can no longer rest on their past accomplishments while the field changes and grows. They should be testing Web 2.0 tools so that they can develop optimal processes to support their organizations. If learning professionals are not setting the example of learning online, who is?

The example of putting your own learning process out in public or on your intranet shows that you are willing to learn from others. As new tools are introduced, learning professionals should be early adopters, leading the way in testing them out. We are in an age of “walking the talk”.

Collaboration:

Through sharing and exposing their work on the Web, learning professionals can connect to communities of practice and get informal peer review. There is no way to stay current with the technology, the neuroscience or the pedagogy all by ourselves.

With blogs and other collaboration methods, each of us can become a participatory node in various communities of practice. The whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts, and knowing who to call becomes more important than having the right answer. But we are all humans and we relate on a human level. That means that we first have to get to know others and develop a level of trust before real sharing can happen. Collaboration is a two-way street and a blog can get you moving.

Flow [from original transcript and not published in T&D article]

Imagine walking into a cocktail party that has been going on for a few hours and jumping into the conversation. Blogs and activity streams (e.g. Twitter) are like that. They flow along and different people join in the conversation from time to time. One can monitor dozens of blogs and hundreds of streams, not necessarily reading each post. You can then have a general idea of what’s flowing by, so that it’s easy to join the conversation when something interesting pops up.

To use blogs and streams for learning effectively, you have to jump in and go with the flow for a while. Understanding what is behind the writing, as well as the conversations around each post, provides the necessary context. Learning with online media isn’t just about finding a useful fact here or there, but requires an engagement with multiple stories that flow by, sometimes mixing and other times diverging. Following these flows is an acquired skill. It’s a meta- learning skill for the Internet age that is worth developing. Jumping in is the first step.

Critical Thinking

A part of critical thinking is the questioning of underlying assumptions, including our own. There are several Web 2.0 tools that can help develop critical thinking in the four areas of:

1. observing and studying our fields;
2. participating in professional communities;
3. building tentative opinions; and
4. challenging and evaluating ideas.

Connect, exchange, contribute

In many workplaces today, anyone can connect with almost everyone. Each of us can be a contributor to the network. Who you know becomes as important as what you know. Conversations help people make meaning, and the quality of our conversations is affected by the quality of our networks.

If we limit our conversations to only those in the same office, we’re missing out. People with larger and more diverse networks have an advantage as learning professionals and in dealing with change. This constant flow of sense-making through conversations in our workplace networks makes the idea of learning as a fixed event in a specific place look obsolete.

Knowledge filters

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filters
This graphic is part of the Seek > Sense > Share PKM model and is based on Five forms of filtering by Tim Kastelle. Here’s a review of the five forms.

  1. Naive filtering is what too often happens in our knowledge searching. It’s like prairie-dogging, or standing up in your cubicle and asking those close to you for advice. It’s rather hit and miss and dependent on who works nearby and happens to be listening.
  2. Expert filtering worked when knowledge was more stable but in an interconnected, interdependent, digital world we have to ask, who are the experts? Still, good experts are valuable and I use platforms like Twitter to connect to them, like Michael Geist on Canadian copyright law or Valdis Krebs on networks.
  3. Networked expertise can be sought through group-sourced information resources, like the curated Working Smarter Daily or in self-created expertise lists like Google+ to create circles of expertise. You can also link to existing communities of expertise/interest such as Dave Gurteen on knowledge management.
  4. Algorithmic filters can be simple, like typing in a basic search string, or more refined using techniques like Google’s advanced operators. However, they are all based on someone else’s ideas of what is important, programmed in from the start. These filters are beginning to look very dangerous unless you know the underlying logic.
  5. A good perspective on Heuristic filters is Howard Rheingold’s Crap Detection Skills:

“Unless a great many people learn the basics of online crap detection and begin applying their critical faculties en masse and very soon, I fear for the future of the Internet as a useful source of credible news, medical advice, financial information, educational resources, scholarly and scientific research. Some critics argue that a tsunami of hogwash has already rendered the Web useless. I disagree. We are indeed inundated by online noise pollution, but the problem is soluble. The good stuff is out there if you know how to find and verify it. Basic information literacy, widely distributed, is the best protection for the knowledge commons: A sufficient portion of critical consumers among the online population can become a strong defense against the noise-death of the Internet.”