Idiots, Networks and Patterns

by

Here are some interesting things that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@SebPaquet ~ “Make something idiot-proof and somebody will make a better idiot.”

@CharlesJennings ~ “we deliver milk. we facilitate learning. we transfer funds. we help build knowledge.” [on ‘learning transfer’]

@StevenBJohnson ~”you can’t have an epiphany with only three neurons” – Where Good Ideas Come From [innovation is about networks]

Marc Benioff [CEO Salesforce.com]: We learned that the key to success with social collaboration is integrating social into workflow. Collaboration is not an island. – via @JayCross

The Physics of Finance: The more chaotic our environment & less control we have, the more we see non-existent simple patterns, or as Valdis Krebs pointed out, seeing fictitious patterns in random data is called “apophenia”

This is interesting in this limited context of discrimination and how the orderliness of physical environments might influence it, but the effect described seems in fact to be far more general — it reflects a human longing for order and simplicity whenever faced with too much uncertainty.

People Are Close to Revolt (James Fallows, The Atlantic) via @SteveBrant

All of the people I know who are capable of rational thought also understand that the combination of (we’re rural so pretty much everyone gets climate change) climate change and energy issues, lack of jobs, and the refusal of government to provide us with basic services means that a new revolutionary social movement is needed. Food prices are soaring, gas prices are making it hard for people to get to low paying jobs, and the amount of suffering because of lack of access to medical care is dire. [US Midwest University Librarian]

Situated Technologies: interesting future-oriented reads HT @JonHusband

The Internet of People for a Post-Oil World [available as free PDF]
Spring 2011 – Christian Nold and Rob van Kranenburg

The authors articulate the foundations of a future manifesto for an Internet of Things in the public interest. Nold and Kranenburg propose tangible design interventions that challenge an internet dominated by commercial tools and systems, emphasizing that people from all walks of life have to be at the table when we talk about alternate possibilities for ubiquitous computing. Through horizontally scaling grass roots efforts along with establishing social standards for governments and companies to allow cooperation, Nold and Kranenberg argue for transforming the Internet of Things into an Internet of People.

Will you soon be able to make Amazon’s Kindle at Home? by @SteveDenning [reminds me of Cory Doctorow’s book, Makers]

Igoe and Mota point out that digital manufacturing is beginning to do to manufacturing what the Internet has done to information-based goods and services. Just as video went from a handful of broadcast networks to millions of producers on YouTube within a decade, a massive transition from centralized production to a “maker culture” of dispersed manufacturing innovation is under way today.

 

Informal learning is a business imperative

by

In Part 2 of Social Learning doesn’t mean what you think it does, my colleague Jane Hart  uses a very helpful diagram created by a previous colleague of mine, Tom Gram:

Tom Gram’s diagram [reproduced below] shows that “most work requires a combination of knowledge work and routine work. These characteristics of jobs and work environments call for different approaches to training and development.” [see  Mapping informal and formal learning strategies to real work], so the work of the L&D department will be very different in different organisations, depending on the type of workers and work done.

I connected this to the whole notion of simpler work getting automated and outsourced usingTom’s framework.

I then created my own graphic and looked at what happens to work if this is true.

Supporting informal learning and helping connect tacit knowledge in the enterprise are now business imperatives, not just something extra. The valued work in the enterprise is increasing in variety and decreasing in standardization. It is moving to the edge. Organizations that do not optimize informal learning may themselves get automated and outsourced.

Social networks drive Innovation

by

I’m always looking for simple ways to explain how networks change business and how social media help to increase openness, driving transparency and increasing innovation.

Does this graphic stand on its own, or is there more explanation required?

Updated:

With significant feedback via Google+, here is the next, but not last, version.

Version 3 (thanks to Dan Pontefract & Simon Fowler and many others on Google Plus)

Learning and economies

by

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

@SteveDenning “If you’re not hearing laughter, it’s a sign you’re still in the land of traditional management.” via @JurgenAppelo

@HildyGottlieb ” When we plant seeds of moral outrage, we eliminate the possibility for action on what we have in common.”

Learning Organizations Then and Now – by @Driessen

The learning organization sees companies as communities (organisms). A very interesting statement is made towards the end of the book [The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook]:

The lifeblood of the organization as community is dialogue, not only within teams but in the whole organization. If intellectual capital is the most important production factor than the capacity to have deep discussions about important topics is essential for breakthrough thinking and innovation.

Has the recession created a freelance utopia or a freelance underclass? via @MsRasberryInc

The country’s freelance nation has always been a diverse lot, some of whom were pushed out of full-time jobs and others who actively pursued this pathway with entrepreneurial zeal. But the recession has forced a growing number of people to grudgingly pursue this path. Do some of them end up “loving it”? Of course. Will some devote their extra free time to creative pursuits, perhaps to become indie rock darlings? Sure. But those who want to pursue the freelance life to support themselves full time are having a far harder time doing so.

Douglas Rushkoff: What we lack is not employment, but a way of fairly distributing the bounty we have generated through our technologies

The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with “career” be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?

China adds $6.50 of value per iPhone. iPod supported 14000+ jobs in the US – by @TimHarford

A similar story seems to hold for jobs. Greg Linden, Jason Dedrick and Kenneth Kramer of the University of California, Irvine, look at the jobs created by the old faithful iPod. Their study reckons that the iPod accounted for almost 41,000 jobs worldwide in 2006, and only 30 of those were in manufacturing in the US. But the iPod supported more than 6,000 engineering or other professional jobs in the US – as well as almost 8,000 lower-paid jobs in the likes of retail and distribution. Linden and his colleagues reckon that US workers earned more than two-thirds of all the wages paid to workers in the iPod value chain.

Guardian: Ecology is the new economy. via @JenniferSertl

The basis for this thinking is that the linear way in which the world economy currently operates fuels a culture of consumption and creates more waste than is sustainable in the long term. In contrast, the living world operates in a circular cycle where the waste of one species provides the food for another and resources flow.

Adapting to a networked world

by

Simon Bostock referred me to this speech that Ben Hammersly gave to the UK’s Information Assurance Advisory Council. The main theme is how the ruling generation (Baby Boomers) are failing to understand how the Internet has changed EVERYTHING.

You’re all the same age, and upbringing, as the people that the digital generations are so upset with. Don’t take it personally, but your peers are the sorts of baby-boomers that have been entrusted with the future, while they are obviously so deeply confused by the present.

For example:

[Moores Law] This is all obvious for us, yes, but Truth Number One, is that anything that is dismissed on the grounds of the technology-not-being-good-enough-yet is going to happen. We have to tell people this.

—

Fundamental Truth Number two is that the internet is the dominant platform for life in the 21st century.

—

Indeed, a small part of the trigger for the London riots can be understood as the gap between the respect given to peoples’s opinions by the internet, and the complete disrespect given by the government and the ruling elites.

—

The government, and the security industry, in this country and elsewhere, have spent the past ten years really blowing it. Time and time again there has been a demonstration of security theatre, or overreaction, or overstatement of the risks in hand. From liquids in airports to invading Iraq, no one believes this stuff any more.

Hammersly likens his role as “translator” between the ruling generation and the younger generations, and given his record, he seems to be doing this with a vengeance. I’m sure it will still take some time to get the message through.

Earlier this year I spoke to HR Executives and Chief Privacy Officers about social media, the most visible part of the world connected by the Internet. After one presentation it was clear that the group (all over 40) knew that things were changing but few understood what they could do within the context of their own organization. Or perhaps they had no real incentive to do so.

While people like Hammersly are needed as translators, we also need pathfinders to show concrete measures that can be taken by the pioneers. Using the  tipping point metaphor, Mavens deeply understand the situation, Connectors are needed to get the word out and Salespeople have to convince those in control to take action. That means there’s work for many while we get to the critical mass where a networked way of working (e.g. wirearchy) living (e.g. Shareable) and learning (e.g. MOOC)  become natural.

Two simple backchannel options

by

I’ve been looking at some simple ways to add a backchannel for a conference, with a few major constraints. It has to be free or very low cost. It should not be open to the general public (thus eliminating Twitter). It should be as simple as possible.

The simplest tool I found was Today’s Meet, which lets you set up a backchannel in seconds, requires no account set-up, allows pseudonyms, is web-only, provides a full transcript and will delete all contents after a set time. Pretty good for a free service. One main issue could be that the site is not password protected. There is a unique URL generated and if kept confidential, is acceptable for low risk conversations. The site can be set up minutes before the conference and transcripts downloaded minutes after the conference is over and then deleted. Overall, a rather stealth technology.

A more complicated, but also more robust platform is WordPress. It requires each user to create a WordPress account. Using the P2 theme, available with a free wordpress.com account, you can set up a private community activity stream that looks much like Yammer. Benefits include customization, the addition of explanatory pages and several widgets, including Twitter feeds. With the worldwide WordPress community, you also know the technology will be around and supported for a long time.

So these are two free options to use at conferences where participants do not want to be on the open web and have some concerns about security or publicity. These are not options where security is a major concern. In that case, stick to your Intranet or VPN.

Learning from the Twitter Sea

by

Here are some of the things that were shared via Twitter this past week.

“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea” ~ Isak Dinesen – via @jhagel

@tom_peters – “Best practices” are to be learned from — not mimicked.

@bankervision – “In a decent democracy the police dance at a street party and don’t lose control of the crowd!”

Think You’re An Auditory Or Visual Learner? Scientists Say It’s Unlikely – via @SharonLFlynn

In fact, an entire industry has sprouted based on learning styles. There are workshops for teachers, products targeted at different learning styles and some schools that even evaluate students based on this theory.

This prompted Doug Rohrer, a psychologist at the University of South Florida, to look more closely at the learning style theory.

When he reviewed studies of learning styles, he found no scientific evidence backing up the idea. “We have not found evidence from a randomized control trial supporting any of these,” he says, “and until such evidence exists, we don’t recommend that they be used.”

@PenelopeTrunk – “Voices of the defenders of grad school. And me crushing them.” – via @lemire

It’s pretty well established that non-science degrees are not necessary for a job. In fact, the degrees cost you too much money, require too long of a commitment, and do not teach you the real-life skills they promise.

Yet, I do tons of radio call-in shows where I say that graduate degrees in the humanities are so useless that they actually set you back in your career in many cases. And then 400 callers dial-in and start screaming at me about how great a graduate degree is.

Here are the six most common arguments they make. And why they are wrong.

“Jaron Lanier on economics, the Internet, advertising — very interesting video:  @SamHarrisOrg”  via @edge

… It can become such a bizarre system. What you have now is a system in which the Internet user becomes the product that is being sold to others, and what the product is, is the ability to be manipulated. It’s an anti-liberty system, and I know that the rhetoric around it is very contrary to that.

Finally; it’s really amazing what gets passed on via Twitter!

 

The Freelance Revolution

by

The notion that work is changing and that free agent knowledge workers will dominate the new economy was something I discussed in my Master’s thesis, published in 1998.  I’ve been talking about free agents as the future of work on this blog almost since I started it. I wrote that free agents are the future of work in 2004 when I noticed that it was getting much easier to be a free agent. In my first year as a freelancer, I learned business lesson #1 : there IS NO BUSINESS until you have a customer.

After three years, I created a list of what being a free agent meant to me:

10. Doing my own tech support

9. Only working seven days a week

8. Paying cash & avoiding monthly payments

7. Time for exercise and reading

6. Lots of short breaks, but no long holidays

5. Getting asked to volunteer more

4. Seeing more of my banker

3. Seeing more of my family

2. Looking forward to Mondays

1. Creating my own opportunities

I likened free agentry to a natural enterprise and noted that salaried work is a mug’s game:

Corporations have had continuous profits while workers have seen none of it. Trickle down economics doesn’t work. One of the few options for individual workers is to establish a new work contract. However, unions are losing influence and collective bargaining hasn’t done much for workers’ wages.

It’s getting easier for individuals to connect with social applications like Facebook and we are also seeing tools like Linked-In for business. The tools for individual workers to connect and collaborate are now available, though we don’t have the culture or mindset to fully embrace them yet.

My brush with full-time employment inspired me to write: you do not own me:

I have often referred to salaried employment as indentured servitude, and practices such as non-compete clauses are examples of this culture. Perhaps with more worker mobility, a growing body of free-agents and less dependence on corporations for work, we may see this culture changing. Let’s hope that the lawyers hear about this soon.

My recommendation two years ago was – freelancers unite:

If contract work seems like the only option, then start networking with co-workers and competitors. Band together as a guild or association and help each other out. Think of it as a freelancers union and look into group health care, joint marketing and shared administration. You can’t do this working 40 hours a week for The Man. The deck is stacked with laws supporting either employers and employees but the future of knowledge work is free-agency. The powers that be, corporations and unions, won’t change to help out freelancers, we have to help ourselves.

Being a free agent has been like riding the roller coaster, but after this decade it seems that it is becoming the norm. One of my inspirations when I went on my own was Dan Pink’s Free Agent Nation. Via @DanielPink on Twitter, I just came across this article in The Atlantic – The Freelance Surge is the Industrial Revolution of Our Time:

This transition is nothing less than a revolution. We haven’t seen a shift in the workforce this significant in almost 100 years when we transitioned from an agricultural to an industrial economy. Now, employees are leaving the traditional workplace and opting to piece together a professional life on their own. As of 2005, one-third of our workforce participated in this “freelance economy.” Data show that number has only increased over the past six years. Entrepreneurial activity in 2009 was at its highest level in 14 years, online freelance job postings skyrocketed in 2010, and companies are increasingly outsourcing work. While the economy has unwillingly pushed some people into independent work, many have chosen it because of greater flexibility that lets them skip the dreary office environment and focus on more personally fulfilling projects.

Welcome to the revolution, folks. Let’s keep working together.

Metacognition, our secret weapon

by

Why are organizations victim to “negative, culturally-driven patterns” while cities are not, asks Patrick Lambe at Green Chameleon. In a most interesting paper, Patrick examines why organizations seem to sabotage  themselves; why cities grow, corporations die and life gets faster; how the food price index is linked to political instability; and a long discussion on the role of witchcraft in most societies.

How Collectives Inhibit Insight (PDF) synthesizes much of my own recent thinking, on bureaucracy and the emergent nature of corporate culture.

These patterns of behaviour are emergent and unintended. Collectives do not sit down and decide by consensus to act in these ways. They just happen. But there does seem to be a “grammar” of collective behaviours, where specific kinds of circumstance will produce specific kinds of social response, and which therefore makes them predictable.

There are two ideas here:

(1) social collectives produce unintended (ie never deliberately planned by individuals or groups of individuals) habits of thinking and behaving, and provide those habits to their members – and these habits have predictable, discoverable “grammars” rooted in the circumstances of the social collective and its needs; and

(2) the natural “grammar” of social collectives in response to insight and innovation is to impose friction on the absorption of new ideas.

If we understand the grammar of how social collectives naturally respond to insight, perhaps we can understand how to work with the insight-activation mechanisms of that grammar, and avoid or mitigate the effects of the insight suppression mechanisms.

Social collectives seem to have a life of their own, no matter what any individual does. This can appear hopeless, but Patrick shows that we a powerful weapon, “we have something that social collectives do not have – and that is metacognition, the ability to reflect on our own thinking processes and to question them.” This is a powerful tool in all that we do within organizations and societies. The ability to see outside of our selves. With much discussion in various venues about 21st century competencies, I would put metacognition at the top of the list, as it’s the core of critical thinking.

Corporate culture

by

Next month I’ll be discussing corporate culture at Sibos in Toronto. My view (not original) is that corporate culture is an emergent property. It is a result of the myriad properties of the organization and its environment. Culture happens, and like a child, once born, the parents are not really in control.

We used to think of organizations like machines, inspired by Newtonian physics 300 years ago. The scientific revolution followed the last communication revolution, the age of print.  Now we face a new revolution as we sit in the middle of the electric age, its disembodied words first spread by the telegraph and now the Internet. With increasing connections and speeds of transmission, our work environments have become much more complex.

In complex environments, emergent practices have to be developed by probing, sensing and responding. This is what I call perpetual Beta; constantly probing the environment, sensing what happens and then responding by creating Beta practices; but always ready to discard them should the situation change. Both culture and practice emerge from the organization and its environment. As John Seely Brown noted, in order to understand complex systems you have to marinate in them.

The one complex system that I know best is my body. I remember as a competitive athlete how in tune I was with my body, feeling the smallest changes. People would ask me what I thought about during races. Most of the time I was monitoring my systems, seeing if I could push a bit harder, change my stride or take advantage of some aspect of the environment. I was marinating in it.

For several decades the idea of the organization as organism has spread, popularized by the work of Peter Senge on the learning organization in 1990.  If you think of organizations like organisms and culture as emergent then it becomes obvious that understanding and monitoring systems is critical.  If you also understand the need to develop emergent practices in order to adapt and thrive, then you know you have to engage the entire organism. As a complex adaptive system, it cannot be directed and there is no obvious link between cause and and effect. You don’t push a button at head office and voilà you get a specific result at the field office. Instead, you keep the body healthy, engaged and constantly learning. The body, and all its constituent parts,  then adapts to its environment.

This is how you develop a healthy corporate culture. Nurture the body, which is composed of people and their relationships, using tools, within a framework of processes and procedures. But designing an effective work system is only part of the solution; it merely sets the stage. Marinating in the resulting complex adaptive system is essential. Monitoring all systems by engaging with them is how we can understand the organization as organism. It cannot be done by managers disconnected from the work being done. It cannot be done from behind a desk. To know the culture, be the culture.