Learning and economies

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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

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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.

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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

From jobs to meaningful work

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The Company Men is a movie that “centers on a year in the life of three men trying to survive a round of corporate downsizing at a major company — and how that affects them, their families, and their communities.”  The movie is entertaining but I am most interested in how it showed the real work shift that is happening, not the effects of recession but the new nature of work.

[Spoiler Alert]

Movie synopsis on Wikipedia

Two factors appear to be at the root of the demise of this shipping company. Work is getting outsourced, as is obvious from the rusting shipyards, as well as automated, requiring fewer blue-collar workers. The worship of shareholder value is covered in detail, with the executives doing everything they can to drive up share prices, increasing the value of their stock options while delivering another round of layoffs.

Most of the movie centres on how a few managers/executives deal with losing their jobs. During this time they learn a couple of lessons.

  • Meaningful work is in creating something of value that delights customers.
  • A job is not the same as meaningful work.

When they finally embark on rebuilding a ship-building company, it is quite different from the original industrial era company.

  • All support functions, including sales and HR, are working collaboratively in the same room.
  • Everyone is committed and seems to have a sense of skin-in-the-game.
  • Management and employees are working together.
  • There is real communication among people who understand and respect each other, many having shared some tough experiences together.

The new company seems to have inverted the hierarchical pyramid, putting customers first, then creating an environment to support the front-line workers, understanding that they’re in a much more complex environment than before. This will be a smaller scale manufacturing enterprise, relying more on brains than brawn. Even though this had a bit of a Hollywood ending, it shows that the future of work in North America will be different.
titanic
In order to remain flexible, 21st century companies will be smaller. Workers will have to be more agile and will likely have to change companies more often, requiring more of a freelancer’s attitude. Everyone will have to be focused on the customer. Status hierarchies will crumble as everyone can ask, “What have you done for my company lately?”. The workplace will be less comfortable with less job security, but much more work will be meaningful. It’s obviously not that meaningful here and now at the end of the current industrial/information era, with 84% of workers wanting to change their jobs. It’s time for all of us — politicians, workers, managers — to stop thinking about jobs and create meaningful work. It will help us get on with the work of the century.

Social learning: the freedom to act and cooperate with others

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“Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy“ – Article #7 of The Cluetrain Manifesto, 1999.

The Net, especially working and learning in networks, subverts many of the hierarchies we have developed over hundreds of years. Formal education is one example, as shown in this excellent article by Cathy Davidson:

Grading, in a curious way, exemplifies our deepest convictions about excellence and authority, and specifically about the right of those with authority to define what constitutes excellence. If we crowdsource grading, we are suggesting that young people without credentials are fit to judge quality and value. Welcome to the Internet, where everyone’s a critic and anyone can express a view about the new iPhone, restaurant, or quarterback. That democratizing of who can pass judgment is digital thinking. As I found out, it is quite unsettling to people stuck in top-down models of formal education and authority.

Thanks to Johnnie Moore for pointing out this article, but then that’s how much of my learning happens today. It’s social and comes via my online networks, in this case, Twitter.

Five years ago I wrote that a shift of focus (and development effort) away from the management aspects of learning and more on the social aspects of learning can only be positive for the learner. We need to better understand the social, network aspects of work and learning and build structures that support these. As we become more networked, status hierarchies are being replaced by task hierarchies [thanks to Esko Kilpi for these terms]. In both work and learning, our status in our networks is constantly changing and being renegotiated. We focus on tasks, and in doing these, our status changes. It’s no longer about who we are, but what we do. Isn’t this how our social networks function as well? Social learning, a key part of any community, is a dance with changing partners, each interpreting the music in their own way but influenced by every partner.

Social learning is the lubricant of networked, collaborative work. Therefore we need to redesign work structures that foster self-organized (social) groups for learning and working. If work is learning, and learning is the work, then shouldn’t the workplace be structured as a learning environment? And shouldn’t educational institutions foster this kind of integrated, collaborative, social learning? This is revolutionary. Peter Isackson describes the subversive nature of social learning in the Hole-in-the-Wall (HiW) learning experiments:

It seems to me that the fundamental key to the success of HiW is the notion of “self-organized groups” who learn on their own. If education is to become truly non-invasive, as Jay suggests, it must refrain from defining both the goals and the means to reach them, entrusting the groups with this task. If educational gurus (authorities) notice that a group is neglecting what is considered “essential” in the curriculum (for whatever reason, whether it’s basic security, survival or inculcating an existing set of values), the group could be challenged to account for why they may be neglecting a certain topic or reminded of the interest in pursuing it. Respecting the self-organizing group and its decision-making capacity is the sine qua non of success. It also happens to be the absolute opposite of the organizational principles of traditional education and training.

One current theme in the workplace and education circles is to “blend” social with the formal and structured. But social learning is not a bolted-on component of our formal educational and training programs. It is a sea change. It will disrupt institutions built upon the technology of  the printing press – all communication enterprises, including education. Yes, we have always learned and worked socially, but we have never had the power of ridiculously easy group-forming or almost zero-cost duplication of our words and images.

The network effect of the Web is explained in detail in Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks. Benkler describes the changes that a networked society can have on our governance, economic and cultural structures [bold added]:

The networked information economy improves the practical capacities of individuals along three dimensions: (1) it improves their capacity to do more for and by themselves; (2) it enhances their capacity to do more in loose commonality with others, without being constrained to organize their relationship through a price system or in traditional hierarchical models of social and economic organization; and (3) it improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate outside the market sphere. This enhanced autonomy is at the core of all the other improvements I describe. Individuals are using their newly expanded practical freedom to act and cooperate with others in ways that improve the practiced experience of democracy, justice and development, a critical culture, and community.

One final note for all those managers, directors and others in status hierarchies: social learning is about giving up control.

Mimi & Eunice cartoons by Nina Paley.

Tumultuous times during the Big Shift

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Here are some interesting finds that were shared on Twitter this past week.

@EskoKilpi – “The big shift: Transformation from status hierarchies to task hierarchies – #networks” [I think this is a critical differentiation between the industrial/information economy and the creative/knowledge economy we are shifting to.]

Mike Wesch “I don’t want to help make students for the world. I want to help make students who make the world over.” – via @JonHusband

@JohnnieMoore – “I see so many promising “breakthrough” methods as if it can be guaranteed, controllable and risk-free.”

@RosabethKanter – “The first rule for change agents is “Stay alive” ”

Survival is more important than heroism. As a wise mentor once said, the first rule for change agents is “Stay alive.” That’s a lot more important than showing off. If you can’t force a major change or get the best possible deal, a lesser deal that keeps doors open for the future means living to fight another day. Baseball analytics show that getting on base is among the most important ways to win the game. If you strike out while trying to hit a home run, the whole side might go down. If you go for a lesser way to get on base, such as taking a walk, you keep the game alive. Sometimes backing down averts a major crisis and keeps the debate alive.

@dhinchcliffe – First Rule of Collaboration: If you can’t link to it, it didn’t happen, HT @maverickwoman No web of links = no social business

What ever tools you use to collaborate with others, make sure there is a way to log the conversations, keeping a history is vital. And beyond that, if you can’t share links to that history, then it may as well not exist.

“Very nice piece by Marc Andreessen in WSJ saying software is eating the world and why that’s good” – @RossDawson

Six decades into the computer revolution, four decades since the invention of the microprocessor, and two decades into the rise of the modern Internet, all of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale.

@SteveDenning  – Why Amazon Can’t Make a Kindle In the USA – Disturbing piece on loss of US manufacturing in high tech:

The U.S. has lost or is on the verge of losing its ability to develop and manufacture a slew of high-tech products. Amazon’s Kindle 2 couldn’t be made in the U.S., even if Amazon wanted to:

  • The flex circuit connectors are made in China because the US supplier base migrated to Asia.
  • The electrophoretic display is made in Taiwan because the expertise developed from producing flat-panel LCDs migrated to Asia with semiconductor manufacturing.
  • The highly polished injection-molded case is made in China because the U.S. supplier base eroded as the manufacture of toys, consumer electronics and computers migrated to China.
  • The wireless card is made in South Korea because that country became a center for making mobile phone components and handsets.
  • The controller board is made in China because U.S. companies long ago transferred manufacture of printed circuit boards to Asia.
  • The Lithium polymer battery is made in China because battery development and manufacturing migrated to China along with the development and manufacture of consumer electronics and notebook computers.

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

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

Note for all managers! Best study ever: Wasting time online boosts worker productivity – @TimKastelle

Surfing the Web is even better for productivity than talking or texting with friends or sending personal emails, the study found.

And smart bosses would stop snooping, researchers said: Excessive Internet monitoring and surveillance only makes employees do it more, they said.

@csmonitor – Video: Taking Advantage of Tumultuous Times [Much better than any Did You Know? video; this one sets the stage for the changes that will engulf us.]