Making sense of our world

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I define Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) as a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world, work more effectively and contribute to society. It’s sense making + getting things done.

George Siemens has made this rather succinct statement about knowledge:

When I externalize something, it’s information.
When someone connects it in some manner, it becomes knowledge.
Knowledge is essentially relatedness/connectedness.

PKM is about making connections, with ideas and with people.

As I keep developing my own processes and work with clients to promote a networked learning culture I look for clearer ways of describing what this PKM stuff is all about.

The image below is an attempt to state the Seek-Sense-Share framework as simply as possible.

To be effective networked learners, we need to seek information; pulling, instead of having it pushed to us by others. We can use human (e.g. Twitter) and mechanical (e.g. Google) filters to help us do this.

We connect to this information by making sense of it in a variety ways, such as validating it with our own experiences and observations (e.g. blogging). We have to  be more than just information filters. Our experiences inform us and our environment gives us feedback. Making sense of the present prepares us for the future.

Sharing information about what we have learned by narrating our work (e.g. activity streams) and making it transparent (e.g. Intranets & Web) can create serendipitous network effects through social learning. As Hugh Macleod says, “The network is more powerful than the node”.

Lead, follow or get out of the way

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A while back, it was only those nasty dictatorships that shut down communications, but now “enlightened” democracies like the USA and the UK are doing the same. However, it’s not really about social media, as they’re just the current manifestation of the Internet. The Cluetrain made it clear in 1999, “Hyperlinks subvert Hierarchy”. We are living in a complex, hyperlinked society and this interconnectivity is changing how we work and live.

Nine Shift likens it to 100 years ago when we left the agrarian age and moved into the industrial age: we are at a turning point in society (2008-2012) and the old way gives way to the new way (2010-2020). Mark Federman sees this point in time as just past mid-way in a 300-year transition of our dominant communication medium, from the print age to the electric age, starting with the telegraph and currently manifested with Web 2.0 [see Why Johnnie & Janey Can’t Read and Why Mr & Mrs Smith Can’t Teach PDF].

Social media for marketing was the tip of the iceberg. This didn’t shake much up, as there was no significant power shift. Corporations stayed in charge. But the real power of social media is for getting things done. Social media facilitate learning and working; which are now joined at the hip in the creative, complex workplace that’s 24/7 in multiple time zones. They give communication power to each person. Social media enable ridiculously easy group-forming, for both furthering democracy and enabling hooligans.

Institutions are just beginning to realize how profound these changes are and they are fighting back. The role of bureaucracy is to maintain the status quo. For the last one hundred years, our positions in the hierarchy have given us our purpose. In North America, people still ask, “What do you do for a living?”. It places us in the pecking order. This was very noticeable when I worked for the federal government in Ottawa 20 years ago. Each job title had a number of digits. The more digits you had, the lower you were, and therefore of less importance. Traditional, stable hierarchies will be blown apart by the interconnected, always-on electric age.

My observations show these are some of the required qualities for what is currently called the social enterprise, a better way of working together:

Work is open & transparent
There is a constant need to share and work is narrated
Continuous learning is a must
Conversation is valued
There is time for reflection
A culture of Perpetual Beta
Metrics are understood and measured by the workers

These are at cross-purposes with most of our existing organizational structures, whether it be the non-democratic enterprise with the CEO as anointed ruler or the bureaucracies where process trumps purpose. There is little doubt that the powers-that-be will continue to fight against the new medium because it is already destroying many of the old forms of power. This has happened with each communication revolution.

Therefore it’s no surprise that we will continue to hear about the Web being censored or government controlling our communications. If we want open and transparent work, education and governance then we will have to fight for it. The good thing is that the next generation is already onboard. We only have to look to them for inspiration. It’s up to us to step up and provide some leadership.

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“Lead, follow or get out of the way”

~ Thomas Paine

Exposing that which lies below the surface

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Ken Carroll calls for leaders to be the miners:

You have to dig if you want to find the greatest possibilities within yourself and others. They are not – repeat, not – obvious.

But even simple discoveries can be transformative. They can change individuals and organizations. Seeing your own worst habits can do it. Knowing why you act as you do can do it. Sometimes self-awareness alone makes it obvious where you need to change or even transform.

I’ve often said that 21st century leaders really need to connect & communicate in order to support social learning and collaborative work.

Perhaps a better metaphor is leaders as miners, exposing that which lies beneath the surface.

Some notes on Bureaucracy

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In 2005, I wrote – Seth Godin’s quotable Bureaucracy = Death raises a number of issues on why preventive actions are seldom taken by bureaucratic organisations. Seth talks about the effects of bureaucracy on marketing, but it also results in inertia in healthcare, education, et al. I doubt that his idea of a Chief No Officer would be embraced by many companies or institutions.

My belief is that it is the basic nature of managerial organisations that is the prime contributor to a reactive versus a preventive mindset. Why were the levees around New Orleans not maintained? Why is there no funding for programmes such as Canada’s Participaction, but we continue to add more expensive acute care machinery to our hospitals? Why is early childhood education ignored when it is a prime contributor to healthy, contributing citizens? And finally, what can we do to change this?

My belief that bureaucracies are a key contributor to many of our societal and economic problems has not changed in six years, and I’ve picked up a few more references confirming this.

Bureaucracies can amplify psychopathic behaviour, writes David Schwartz, a psychotherapist:

Since psychopaths are usually very smart, they can be quite competent at impersonating regular human beings in positions of power. Since they don’t care how their actions affect people, they can rise to great height in enterprises dealing with power and money. They can manufacture bombs or run hospitals. Whatever the undertaking, it is all the same to them. It’s just business.

Daniel Lemire looks at bureaucracies from a computer programmer’s perspective:

Bureaucracies are subject to the halting problem. That is, when facing a new problem, it is impossible to know whether the bureaucracy will ever find a solution. Have you ever wondered when the meeting would end? It may never end.

Bureaucracies are the enemy of innovation, as they favour self-preservation over change. They are self-serving. They are preventing organizational growth and we don’t need them any longer.

Bureaucracies are (finally) outliving their usefulness, as the economy changes. Valdis Krebs wrote on Adapting Old Structures to New Challenges:

When change was slow, and the future was pretty much like the present, hierarchical organizations were perfect structures for business and government. The world is no longer predictable, nor are solutions obvious. Old structures are no longer sufficient for new complex challenges.

And bureaucracies may be in danger from social media, says Peter Evans Greenwood:

Social media – as with many of the technologies preceding it – streamlines previously manual tasks by capturing knowledge in a form where it is easily reusable, shareable and transferable. What is different this time is that social media is focused on the communication between individuals, rather than the tasks these individuals work on. By simplifying the process of staying in touch and collaborating with a large number of people it enables us to flatten our organizations even further, putting the C-suite directly in contact with the front line.

This is having the obvious effect on companies, eliminating the need for many of the bureaucrats in our organizations; people whose main role is to manage communication (or communication, command and control, C3, in military parlance).

However, some bureaucracies, like the Canadian military,  just keep plugging along, as Mark Federman notes:

On resistance to this report [LGen Leslie’s Report on Transformation].

“[At] a large meeting in December 2010 involving the generals, admirals and senior DND civil servants … it became apparent the tendency was to argue for the preservation of the status quo. … Though grimly amusing, these interactions proved that consensus has not and probably never will be achieved on any significant change.”

We need to reinvent management so that it does not include bureaucracy. Steve Denning suggests dynamic linking as a better alternative to bureaucracy:

Even the best intentions to delight clients or empower staff will be systematically subverted if the work is coordinated through hierarchical bureaucracy. Meshing the efforts of autonomous teams and a client focus while also achieving disciplined execution requires a set of measures that might be called “dynamic linking,” The method began in automotive design in Japan[1] and has been developed most fully in software development with methods known as “Agile” or “Scrum,”[2]

“Dynamic linking” means that (a) the work is done in short cycles; (b) the management sets priorities in terms of the goals of work in the cycle, based on what is known about what might delight the client; (c) decisions about how the work is to be carried out to achieve those goals are largely the responsibility of those doing the work; (d) progress is measured (to the extent possible) by direct client feedback at the end of each cycle.[3]

 

Sharing in need of some creativity

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

“It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It’s that they can’t see the problem.” – G. K. Chesterton – via @albybisy

@umairh – “Being airlifted into a triathlon is probably a pretty bad way to check if your leg’s broken. And similar is true for social contracts.”

Economist – “The Internet has been a great unifier of people, companies & online networks. Powerful forces now threaten it.” – via @dhinchcliffe

Yet it is another kind of commercial attempt to carve up the internet that is causing more concern. Devotees of a unified cyberspace are worried that the online world will soon start looking as it did before the internet took over: a collection of more or less connected proprietary islands reminiscent of AOL and CompuServe. One of them could even become as dominant as Microsoft in PC software. “We’re heading into a war for control of the web,” Tim O’Reilly, an internet savant who heads O’Reilly Media, a publishing house, wrote late last year. “And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform.”

IBM poll of CEOs (2010) found they deemed creativity to be “the NUMBER ONE leadership competency of the successful enterprise of the future” – via @charlesjennings

Image by ibmphoto24

 

 

Communities across the chasm

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How do you get ideas to spread, especially in organizational communities of practice (often behind the firewall) to encourage innovation?

In Connecting Ideas with Communities, I figured that if you want to foster large-scale change in an organization or even a network, then you would:

  1. Connect the right Mavens with the potential Innovators,
  2. target the Early Adopters via the Connectors, and then
  3. find the Salespeople who will influence the Early Majority.

The oft-quoted 90-9-1 rule, would infer that you only need 1% Creators (Mavens):

User participation in an online community more or less follows the following 90-9-1 ratios:

  • 90% of users are Lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
  • 9% of users are Commenters. They edit or rate content but don’t create content of their own.
  • 1% of users create content and are Creators.

This article goes on to disprove 90-9-1, as do others, indicating that as more people get used to sharing online, the figure rises to 10% or more Creators in active communities. This is further reinforced by research that shows that a 10% level of commitment is necessary to spread ideas:

An important aspect of the finding is that the percent of committed opinion holders required to shift majority opinion does not change significantly regardless of the type of network in which the opinion holders are working. In other words, the percentage of committed opinion holders required to influence a society remains at approximately 10 percent, regardless of how or where that opinion starts and spreads in the society.

One percent just doesn’t give you the necessary critical mass. Going back to my original premise from two years ago, I would think that a good rule of thumb would be to nurture communities of practice from a kernel of Mavens & Innovators plus Early Adopters & Connectors, aiming to engage enough to compose 10% of what will be the actual community. Inside organizations, this is relatively easy to calculate. Let’s say you have 100 nuclear scientists in R&D. These professionals already feel an affinity to their field but they are spread across the world. Some of them get together once a year while others may seldom travel. Knowledge is often kept in silos or sits on a hard drive or in some lost shared-drive folder. How would a newly-minted community manager help this community of 100 share its knowledge?

Ignoring technology selection (which is usually the easiest aspect), I would start to identify the Mavens; those who are respected by their peers for their knowledge and experience. Then I would find the Innovators. Now comes the hard part, getting these two groups to dance. This requires a lot of listening and preparation in order to see and seize opportunities for collaboration. Once something innovative is identified that interests the Mavens, such as sharing conference notes and views on the Intranet with the greater community, then it’s time to get the Connectors to help spread the word, but not to everyone, just the Early Adopters who don’t take all that much convincing. Once this group becomes about 10% of the desired size it’s ready for an open launch. Given the gentle hand of the community manager, a bit of publicity and easy ways for Lurkers to drop in, you may have the roots of a community of practice.

A major difference with this approach is that you don’t try to convince the Majority from the onset. You cross the chasm once you have a bridge, not before.

 

"Hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust"

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Here are some interesting things that were shared via Twitter these past two weeks.

I was called a Bandwidth enhancer by @WallyBock – I like that term!

“Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.” ~Peter Ustinov – via @CBurell

“if managers really managed, they wouldn’t need performance consulting. Performance is the managers job.” – @BillCush

(organizational / institutional) “Hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust” … Warren Bennis .. an original leadership guru – via @JonHusband

BPM, overpromised & under-delivered: Programming is the automation of the known. Business processes … are the management & anticipation of the unknown – by @pevansgreenwood

Since Frederick Taylor’s time we’ve considered business – our businesses – vast machines to be improved. Define the perfect set of tasks and then fit the men to the task. Taylor timed workers, measuring their efforts to determine the optimal (in his opinion) amount of work he could expect from a worker in a single day. The idea is that by driving our workers to follow optimal business processes we can ensure that we minimise costs while improving quality. LEAN and Six Sigma are the most visible of Taylor’s grandchildren, representing generations of effort to incrementally chip away at the inefficiencies and problems we kept finding in our organisations.

Social & Workplace Learning through the 70:20:10 Lens – by @CharlesJennings

The shift in focus to workplace and social learning by HR and Learning professionals over the past few years is a significant one. And it’s not just a passing phase or fad. It is reflecting a fundamental change that is happening all around us – the move from a ‘push’ world to a ‘pull’ world, and the move from structure and known processes to a world that is much more fluid and where speed to performance and quality of results are paramount.

The Progress Principle: “One of the best business books I’ve read in many years.” … @DanielPink

[Teresa Amabile] Our survey showed that most leaders don’t understand the power of progress. When we asked nearly 700 managers from companies around the world to rank five employee motivators (incentives, recognition, clear goals, interpersonal support, and support for making progress in the work), progress came in at the very bottom. In fact, only 5% of these leaders ranked progress first – a much lower percent than if they had been choosing randomly! Don’t get me wrong; those other four motivators do drive people. But we found that they aren’t nearly as potent as making meaningful progress.

“And no, there was no need for a training department”; comment by @UFrei on Training Departments will Shrink

And why did these experts spend so much of their valuable time coaching us newbies? … And no, there was no need for a training department (our branch had been too small anyway). But there was an attitude to passing on the expertise from the best SMEs to the ‘apprentices’ and this attitude had been sponsored by senior management.

My conclusion: We need Sponsors facilitating learning (something former ‘Training Departments’ could probably do) and motivated Coaches among the experts with the allowance to spend part of their time to develop new expertise.

It's about networks

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Rob Paterson writes at FastForward Blog on how the UK riots show us that everyone needs to be plugged into the Web to get things done; for good and for bad:

The Police and the community are learning also in real time how to help each other – by also using social media. Citizens are using Twitter and Facebook to help the police have better intelligence and the police are learning this week how best to respond and to monitor.

I noted in a post on Agility & Autonomy that a culture of perpetual Beta is critical. Perpetual Beta means we never get to the final release and that our learning will never stop. Agile organizations realize they will never reach some future point where everything stabilizes and they don’t need to learn or do anything new. Networks are in perpetual Beta too. Unlike hierarchies, they continuously change shape, size and composition. Our thinking needs to continuously change as well.

Euan Semple talks about the power the Web gives us:

This is why I am so passionate about the web and the ability it gives us, to quote David Weinberger, to “write ourselves into existence”, to see the world as made up of connected individuals with the ability to shape their shared future rather than as a mass or ideologically driven herd.

This is also why I feel so motivated to work with the large corporations and institutions that so dominate our modern world. If I can help any of the individuals who make up those organisations to feel a little bit more self aware, a little bit more capable, and a little bit more able to think for themselves and speak for themselves, and to do so as part of networks of others doing the same – then I will have done my job.

I’ve observed that one of the biggest hurdles facing organizations, and people working in them, is to stop thinking of hierarchies and start thinking of networks. Asking, “What do you do for a living?” shows hierarchical thinking, as does “What is your job title?”.  Network-centric questions would be, “What is happening?” or “What are you learning?” or “Who are you learning from?”. No wonder Twitter asks, What’s happening?; Socialcast asks you to share something; Google+ prompts you to share what’s new and Yammer asks, What are you thinking about?

Both Rob and Euan posted their thoughts online today and I have woven them together with my own perspectives. My thinking is a product of my networks. Understanding networks, weaving networks and contributing to networks (the integration of learning & work) are now critical skills in all organizations. Like Euan, I am making progress one person at a time, and there has been progress. I hope it’s fast enough to deal with the increasing complexity and violence.

It’s about networks, stupid, or, as Searls & Weinberger conclude in World of Ends, “We have nothing to lose but our stupidity.

Those hard soft-skills

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Soft skills, especially collaboration and networking, will become more important than traditional hard skills. Smart employers have always focused more on attitude than any specific skill-set because they know they can train for a lack of skills and knowledge. Soft skills require time, mentoring, informal learning and management support. Soft skills for the networked workplace are foundational competencies.

So what are these so-called soft skills?

Participating in a decentralized world/society/economy/business requires trust.

Cooperation – in our work is needed so that we can continuously develop emergent practices demanded by increased complexity. What worked yesterday won’t work today. No one has the definitive answer any more but we can use the intelligence of our networks to make sense together and see how we can influence desired results.

We are moving to an economy that values – emotional intelligence, imagination, and creativity.

Putting yourself out there as a learner first means that you may need to check your attitude before going online.

Acting & Improvisation:

  • Failure is an Option
  • Practice Passionate Followership
  • Don’t Act, React
  • Go with your Gut
  • Don’t be a Blockhead
  • Trust Others
  • Make Others Look Good

Tolerance for ambiguity – is becoming an important leadership trait in increasingly complex, networked environments.

Noticing: the first step to a learning organization

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Five years ago I suggested that those who teach will not test:

  • Anyone who teaches is not allowed to test.
  • Those who design the tests are answerable to those who learn and those who teach.
  • Those who teach are only responsible to those who learn and are subjected to tests.

Keith Lyons points out some more fundamental questions about the efficacy of providing feedback:

“Royce [Sadler] observed that “feedback is about telling … that is the problem”. He discussed this dilemma and noted its roots in the transmission model of education. He proposed an alternative model in which teachers were the bridge in students’ journeys from what they know to incorporating information they did not know to develop their knowledge.”

Directed feedback and assessment keep learners in a dependent situation whereas the real aim should be to get learners to notice their own progress.

“Royce argued that ‘traditional’ assessment practices require the assessor to judge a problem, repair the response and give advice. Yet these are a student’s responsibility.  He argued forcefully that Noticing is a key to student flourishing.”

My observations are that trades or craft schools often get students to notice their own progress but this is lacking in general education and corporate training. There is still a culture of dependence, stemming from early school years and copied by so many training and educational bodies:

“The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency.  Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do.  It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives.  The expert makes all the important choices; only I can determine what you must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions which I enforce.”

Shifting from external to internal assessment reinforces what we already know about social learning from Albert Bandura:

“Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.”

Self-ownership of our learning, taking responsibility for our mistakes, all in a collaborative work environment that helps us learn socially — these are the hallmarks of a real learning organization.