Free-agents and enlightened despots

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A recent NYT article on The Auteur vs. The Committee compares Apple and Google, describing Steve Jobs as an “auteur”:

Two years ago, the technology blogger John Gruber presented a talk, “The Auteur Theory of Design,” at the Macworld Expo. Mr. Gruber suggested how filmmaking could be a helpful model in guiding creative collaboration in other realms, like software.

The auteur, a film director who both has a distinctive vision for a work and exercises creative control, works with many other creative people. “What the director is doing, nonstop, from the beginning of signing on until the movie is done, is making decisions,” Mr. Gruber said. “And just simply making decisions, one after another, can be a form of art.”

As I wrote in 2004 – I’ve heard and discussed the film crew metaphor many times over the past five or so years. It makes sense that in order to address the constantly changing market needs that a more flexible work organization is necessary. The film production crew model seems viable, but the dark side, according to Gautam, is that the producer gets the lion’s share of the profits, and the superstars command the enormous fees, while the average worker just survives. I think that a more cooperative model, like the independent productions, where more of the workers share in the risk and the profit, is more sustainable. This is becoming evident as the barriers to production are coming down – such as lower-priced digital editing suites.

I agree that innovation needs diversity and the film-making model enables this by re-forming the team for each production while keeping the singular vision with one producer/director. I see the future of “net work” is in rapidly forming new teams who work under the vision of a Director. The model is kept dynamic by enabling these teams to quickly disperse and be re-created in new forms. An automatic exit strategy is baked into the business model, ensuring constant destruction of the old model and enabling evolution in successive group-forming.

The more free-thinkers and independent learners that an organization has, the more resilient it will be in times of change. Add this to a constantly evolving organizational model and it might let us keep up with life in perpetual Beta. The key for a successful work organization will be balancing diversity with singular focus. Countries that have a social safety net may be more successful with this, as free-agents will have more control in selecting what “enlightened despot” they wish to work with next and not be pressured to just take any gig. Shifting to a new work model will require systemic changes in education, employment laws, social security and many other areas, but I have little doubt that the older model of indentured servitude has outlived its usefulness.

The community dance hall

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In Diversity, Complexity & Chaos I highlighted several articles by others that discussed these themes and I finished with this graphic:

Karen Jeannette (@kjeannette) noted that her challenge is to “foster movement between the bubbles” and I responded that my own experience and with my clients has been that negotiating these boundaries is an art form and is highly contextual and quite fluid. To which Karen responded, “which is why I’m glad I had dance lessons when I was young …. always dancing, negotiating the next step”. This is an important metaphor. Supporting communities of practice is a lot like dancing, there’s constant give and take.

Another useful metaphor is to think of social media as languages. Learning to use one is like learning a new language, and as anyone who works with adults learning new languages has observed, most grown-ups do not want to look stupid, so they are inhibited in embracing the new language and making mistakes as they go along. Younger children don’t have this aversion.

So here we are, speaking new languages, where some people are fluent and others less so and then put on the dance floor learning new routines, while in fleeting but pervasive contact with partners of varying skills, abilities and mannerisms.

Instead of trying to find the perfect recipe for supporting communities of practice in the organization, think more like a social convener of a community dance hall. Many people have come, some will dance well, some poorly with gusto, and others will watch. Your aim is not to make it perfect for everyone but to make sure that people come to the next dance. That means changing the tempo of the music or perhaps introducing new dance partners or maybe taking a break. It takes keen observation, pattern recognition and a suite of subtle tools (a gentle hand) to help guide the flow.

The community hall is where those who work together can be more social while meeting some new folks from out of town. It’s a constantly negotiated space, dependent on who shows up, who plays, and who dances.  It depends on getting introduced to interesting people; some to dance with and others to talk to.

Simultaneity and Openness

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

@DaveGray – “trainers must know the thing they are training. Most knowledge today flows too fast to learn, then teach. Simultaneity is faster”

Queensland Police on Facebook: “There was no master plan” by @RossDawson

One of the key lessons was that it was critical to have built their social media presence before it was needed. They understood its role and how to use it before the disaster hit and it became the best possible way to communicate with the public.

Hopefully other organizations can learn the lesson of engaging before you need it, particularly in being able to respond effectively to online conversations.

There was no master plan. They were just using the tools they had to address the issues of the moment. Policies, as required, were created on the fly. If they got something wrong, they simply apologized and people generally accepted that.

Are you prepared for the Internet of Things? – by @michelemmartin

The Internet of Things is going to automate a ton of jobs that have never been automated before, reducing the numbers of workers needed for many occupations or eliminating jobs altogether. At the the same time it will create new jobs in areas we can’t even predict.  It will also change the nature of many jobs–the skills and knowledge, the processes, etc–in ways we can only imagine.

Paying attention to how technology and other trends may be shaping the new world of work is incredibly important. It allows us to see where old careers may be dead or dying and where new opportunities may await us. It can show us how our current jobs may change and what we need to do to take advantage of change, rather than letting it happen to us.

Rupert Murdoch’s ‘cognitive disconnect’ by @CharlesHGreen

The problem is that the press wields enormous power, even in allegedly educated and refined countries.  So do the police.  And when Scotland Yard’s leadership, and even Downing Street appear compromised by an evil corporate culture like News Corp.’s, there are serious implications for society’s ability to trust anyone.

Open Work: Using Social Software To Make Our Work Visible Again – Too few social business Enterprise 2.0, social media efforts know of  open work – by @dhinchcliffe

Open work, like open source, open standards, or even the more prosaic scholastic open house for that matter, has at its core the ethic that hiding the work process in shadows is generally counterproductive. Collaboration and teamwork work best when there is abundant communication, transparency, and therefore most important of all, trust in the process. Open work is the most likely and most direct route to enabling this.

 

Leadership, Connectivity, Execution, Organization

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Powerful metaphors guide our collective thoughts. It took a long time to understand heliocentrism and then modern science even blasts that model apart somewhat. In spite of all our scientific knowledge, many people still believe in the geocentric model.

Metaphors that provide the common mental frameworks for our organizations are also powerful tools. For example, the company as a well-oiled machine conjures up a certain image. Today, more people are viewing the organization as a biological system, bringing new metaphors that can change the way we think, and act. The Socialcast blog has an infographic that shows what ants can teach the enterprise about teamwork starting with four challenges of distributed teams:

  1. Too much Focus on Technology and Process.
  2. Focus is on Doing, not Goals.
  3. Weak team Cohesion.
  4. Trouble adopting Technology.

One answer is the concept of bioteams, with four key zones that should be supported by the organization.

“We are all leaders. We must keep one another informed in real time. We trust living systems to self-organize”; writes Jay Cross on bioteams. A self-organizing, living system versus a well-oiled machine: pick the company you would rather work for.

My experience with distributed teams confirms these four essential components. I would also add an essential ingredient that strengthens the bonds between these four components and that is trust. However, even with new frameworks and models, the hard work is in changing practice, as those persevering geocentrists show.

Training departments will shrink

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The Epic social learning debate for Summer 2011 states:

“This house believes that as social learning grows, so the requirement for traditional training departments shrinks.”

Let’s examine why they grew in the first place. Training on a massive scale was a requirement for preparing citizen soldiers for war and initial methods were tested during the second world war (1939-45). A systems approach did not become standardized until after the war, led by applied research done by Robert Gagné, as noted by Donald Clark:

One of the interesting system development projects discussed in Gagne’s book is building a revised course of instruction for armor crewman training at Fort Knox, Kentucky. The project was code named SHOCKACTION and undertaken during the late 1950s. The course trained tank crewmen to act as a tank commander, driver, gunner, or loader of the Army’s main battle tank. The course was considered important and worthy of considerable investment of research and development funds. It was noted by officers that the present course was not training armor crewmen to a level of proficiency.

The famous ADDIE model did not get adopted until 1975, just as the baby boomers were entering university and the business world. There was a need to train lots of people in North America and later elsewhere as economies grew. Training departments rose to the challenge.

For thousands of years people have developed work skills through apprenticeship. This worked for small numbers and developed into the highly structured guild system in Europe. Industrialization marked the fall of the guild system. The nation state and the industrial economy adopted a new competency development framework, from which we have modern training departments, professional associations, job competency models, etc. But the industrial economy no longer drives the developed world. Even the information economy  is giving way to the creative economy.

 

In Social learning, complexity & the enterprise, I go over many of the factors that are forcing us to change how we think about learning and work, which is what training departments are supposed to focus on. The most significant change is in how we relate to, and deal with, information and knowledge. We no longer have to go to the library to get a book and we have access to a growing network of expertise from people (like bloggers) who are willing to share their knowledge for free. Instructional content is no longer a scarcity. Neither are “instructors”. Expertise is becoming ubiquitous though the likes of Wikipedia and social networks.

The draining of the hierarchical pyramid will change not only training, but also intellectual property and the social contract with workers. In a shifting networked world, every artificial  structure will be affected, so why should the training department be impervious to these effects? Even money will change, as this article about  The Bitcoin Epoch being akin to the Printing Press Revolution shows.

We are in a management revolution, testing out new models such as the social enterprise, democracy in the workplace, chaordic organizations and networked free-agents. Will the rise of social learning be the “cause” of the shrinking training department? Probably not. But it will be one of the effects.

Becoming personal knowledge managers

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Nick Milton highlights an overview of knowledge management (KM) from Susan Camarena, CKO at the Federal Transit Authority, which includes:

How do we implement KM?

We already are doing it!

Everyone has their own KM program! Like:

  • Saving numbers of the “right” person to call on an old, wrinkled and well used piece of paper.
  • Reusing a memo that was approved as your template for the next memo to ensure it gets through.”
  • Getting a movie recommendation – you trust their opinion and ensure you don’t waste your time!

However, an ad-hoc approach is not efficient

You don’t learn from what I (and others) know!!!

This is the root of personal knowledge management (PKM). With digital information overload, an ad hoc method is definitely not efficient but neither is a standardized method for everyone in the organization. I’ve described my own framework as well as those of others. Setting filters is a good first step, as Five Forms of Filtering by Tim Kastelle explains.

Some of us are naive in our filtering, just going with what we think is best. Others rely on experts but that is more and more inadequate in our increasingly complex world of expertise. We need to develop networks of expertise and regularly check them for diversity and signal vs noise. Relying on a single set of algorithms can be dangerous so we need to establish heuristics that foster more critical thinking. The way we become better knowledge managers ourselves is through practice because information is not enough, we need to learn from experience. PKM is a process to capture  some of those experiences and learn through more structured sense-making and sharing.

The only knowledge that can be managed is our own.

"Sharing put me on the map"

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Here are some of the things I found via Twitter this past week.

QUOTES

@stangarfield – “Influence knowledge sharing behavior by modeling it – lead by example, practice what you preach, show how it is done: get followers”

@nilofer – “Being genuinely creative means not knowing where you are going. Accept uncertainty.”

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The Bitcoin Epoch: It is Akin to the Printing Press Revolution – via @petervan

Hang on, you may think, how can a currency be created out of thin air? The answer is central banks do this all the time. Remember most money in existence is not in a physical form. Central banks create ‘base money‘ to keep their currencies flowing. Its a bit of an esoteric process as if they create too much then deflation follows yet too little and the liquidity of the economy suffers. Bitcoin uses the ‘mining’ of its peers to create the ‘base money’, so the balance of getting its level of generation right is created not by top-down be-suited men in offices, but by the natural ebb and flow dictated by the number of peers in the system.

The dark side of being human – via @JoanVinallCox [related post on organizational architecture]

What happened in the basement of the psych building 40 years ago shocked the world. How do the guards, prisoners and researchers in the Stanford Prison Experiment feel about it now?

Kai Nagata: Why I quit my job – via @JoanVinallCox

So I didn’t quit my job because I felt frustrated or that my career was peaking. I quit my job because the idea burrowed into my mind that, on the long list of things I could be doing, television news is not the best use of my short life. The ends no longer justified the means.

Sharing For Art and Profit: Creative Commons Celebrates ‘The Power of Open’

Creative Commons not only empowers creators and remixers, it can also be a driver of viral success. When Nina Paley, director of the animated feature “Sita Sings the Blues”, was unable to release her film due to music licensing issues, she decided to release it for free online with a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. The film was acclaimed by critics such as Roger Ebert, and after an outpouring of donations and revenue from related merchandise, Paley was able to secure distribution. In the book, she explains, “When an artist is broke, you start thinking that it has to do with the value of their work, which it doesn’t. I have also seen artists who refused to create unless they got paid … I’ve never had more money coming at me than when I started using Creative Commons BY-SA. I have a higher profile. I don’t spend anything on promotion. My fans are doing it for me and buying merchandise. Sharing put me on the map.”

The job bubble

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Formal education exploded as we moved into the industrial age one hundred years ago, with larger organisations demanding Taylorist job functions. As the industrial age gives way to a networked age, there is less need for well-defined, cookie-cutter jobs. With fewer standardized jobs, why do we need standardized education, or even standardized training? [I know that there are exceptions to this statement, but they are becoming fewer].

This was my concluding paragraph on a 2006 blog post, Informal economy; informal learning.

Thomas Friedman wrote this week in the New York Times that a job may be a thing of the past, which I have thought for a long time now:

Look at the news these days from the most dynamic sector of the U.S. economy — Silicon Valley. Facebook is now valued near $100 billion, Twitter at $8 billion, Groupon at $30 billion, Zynga at $20 billion and LinkedIn at $8 billion. These are the fastest-growing Internet/social networking companies in the world, and here’s what’s scary: You could easily fit all their employees together into the 20,000 seats in Madison Square Garden, and still have room for grandma. They just don’t employ a lot of people, relative to their valuations, and while they’re all hiring today, they are largely looking for talented engineers.

The job bubble may be over. It didn’t last long; about 100 years. Now we have to figure out better ways of getting work done and ensuring fair recompense. It doesn’t mean getting rid of social safety nets either, but our policy-makers had better catch on quickly. In Canada there’s some discussion about employment insurance for the self-employed. It doesn’t really work so far, but at least there is public discussion.

Digging through my old posts on jobs, I came across some interesting links:

If you ever have a choice, never have a job.

Jobs, which can be “filled”, turn people into commodities (human resources): “Being a commodity is inevitably dehumanizing, no matter how much they pay you.”

Our economy, with jobs as an important part of the social contract, is just someone else’s story.

Freelancing is still a difficult option.

In Let’s talk about work, I wrote:

In a networked, knowledge-based economy where initiative, creativity and passion trump intellect, diligence and obedience; being “at” work 8 hours a day makes little sense. The Internet makes “time at work”, an antiquated notion. It also makes many of our traditional management and personnel policies irrelevant. The recession has only amplified this trend.

Finally, this was my last experience in a JOB – I think that the construct of the job, with its defined skills, effort, responsibilities and working conditions, is a key limiting organizational factor for the creative economy.

 

Social, not mediated

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Earlier this year I wrote that social media for marketing is just the tip of the iceberg. The real power of social media is for getting things done. They facilitate learning and working; which are now joined at hip in the creative, complex workplace that’s 24/7 in multiple time zones and always-on.

I think phase one of social media is almost over. It started with the early adopters who were enthused and helpful. It is finishing with the carpet-baggers; all those social media gurus and brands who want to sell you stuff and see this as an easy marketplace. Just as the snake-oil salesmen followed the travelling circuses and chautauquas in the developing American West, so did every vendor and spammer jump on the social media bandwagon. And some of the bigger kids did too.

Now some organizations are realizing how interconnected, networked people can get things done by working smarter. They are seeing the iceberg under the water line and realizing that social is bigger than media. As Umair Haque describes it, we need to move from social media to social strategy:

Yet, most “social media” strategies have one or more of three goals: to “push product,” “build buzz,” or “engage consumers.” None of these lives up to the Internet’s promise of meaning. They’re just slightly cleverer ways to sell more of the same old junk. But the great challenge of the 21st century is making stuff radically better in the first place — stuff that creates what I’ve been calling thicker value.

Organizations don’t need “social media” strategies. They need social strategies: strategies that turn antisocial behavior on its head to maximize meaning. The right end of social tools is to help organizations stop being antisocial. In fact, it’s the key to advantage in the 2010s and beyond.

My observations of Google Plus reinforce why we need to shift away from the tip of the iceberg (media) and focus on its base (social). The current business model for social network platforms is antithetical to what we really need to use them for. We are the product being sold. How can that be a sustainable social contract?

Google Plus wants to sell my data, hence the requirement to use my real name. It’s not about me; it’s about the advertisers. I think the people who are critical of Google Plus (and it could have been any other company) are signs of an initial sea change. Growing resentment of being used and subjected to constantly changing terms of service could result in a desire for common and open social platforms. Governments and NGO’s could step up and get these going but the marketplace may demand it.  If Status.net offered an ad-free & no-selling-of-data platform for $25 per year (same as Flickr Pro), would there be enough people for a viable business model? Would it be possible to give free accounts to those who cannot afford it?

I believe that as social networking becomes more important in our work and leisure activities, we will be willing to pay for it, in return for controlling our data. I hope that time is soon.

One platform to rule them all

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All of the hype around Google+ seems to have put me me into a social networking depression. Until recently I really liked Twitter but I know that it will become more advertising-centric as time goes on. Where Facebook is, Twitter will be. Along comes Google+ and it seems to address many of the issues of those who use several social  platforms; a unified dashboard, coupled with the promise of Google Takeout. Of course the price for Google+ is free, so who’s really the customer? Not me; not you.

For several years, I have seen my blog as my central point on the Web, with peripheral platforms coming and going. I’d like to keep it that way and own my data. What happens if I don’t participate in Google+? Will I miss out on an increasing number of learning and business opportunities?

Stephen Downes has a good criticism of Google+ and what its dominance could mean: a data black hole:

Of course, Google+ is already a great source of connecting with more wonderful people and ideas. Dave Gray posted a detailed analysis of Google+ and how he uses his public and private social networks, with this graphic:

So I am going to lurk for a while and see what is happening. I don’t want to jump on any bandwagon but I have a responsibility to my clients and myself  to understand this stuff. I’d like to just avoid it for a few weeks and see what transpires. Not sure if I’ll be able to do that, especially when I read comments, from people I respect, that Google+ “hangouts” enable people to learn more easily than any other medium. That’s pretty powerful.

For now, I’m going to try to not get rolled-over by the Google juggernaut and keep maintaining my little piece of the open Web. In the meantime, you may be seeing less of me on Twitter as I take more time for reflection on this potential social media inflection point. I also belong to several private networks that still need my attention and I may discuss some of my concerns there. My blog will continue to be where I post my half-baked ideas and air them in public.