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.”

—

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.

Outliers, success and chance

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Summer seems to be for reading and I just finished Gladwell’s Outliers: the story of success, in two days. Like his other books, it’s an easy read with lots of anecdotes. At the end, I thought to myself, what I can take away from this, other than some interesting stories?

The culture of our community strongly influences our health. This culture is more than what we see and can be affected by norms that are hundreds of years old and no longer visible.

When and where we were born have a significant impact on our chances for success. Just being intelligent or creative is not enough. We need chance to favour us; such as reducing competition during periods of low birth rates, or to be born early in the year so that we physically develop ahead of our peers and are perceived as “better”.

It takes a long time to develop deep skill in an area, about 10,000 hours, says Gladwell. The advantage is to those who develop these skills just before they come into great demand, like computer programming before the 1980’s or tailoring prior to an explosion of the garment industry. Like being born at the right moment, timing is everything.

Culture can also help or hinder a society as it changes. For example, Korean culture initially hindered effective communications in airplane cockpits but its culture and language have positioned it well in mathematics, science and education in general.

Echoing Dan Pink’s Drive (Autonomy, Mastery, Sense of Purpose), Gladwell concludes that meaningful work has three defining attributes:

Those three things – autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward – are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five.

I was born in a year with heavy competition, 1959, the bulge of the baby boom. I have had lots of peer competition. Luckily, I got on the Web early, part of my second career, because my first career was good, but not a huge success (I was not on a promotion track when I left the military). I’ve developed skill with social media, especially blogging, amounting to close to 10,000 hours by now. There are about ~2,000 posts on this blog, I’ve made +17,000 Tweets and I’ve spent a lot of time in countless social network systems.

I got a head start because I saw the potential of the Web before my peers did. This was based on a series of serendipitous chances like transferring to the military Training branch and then getting posted to a project that required knowledge about flight simulation and computer based training, which few of us had, so I had to learn as I went along. This pushed me to go back to school and get a Master’s degree which then helped me get a job at a university where I got deeper into learning technologies.

My Canadian culture seems to make me less entrepreneurial than my American counterparts but I think I’m better at understanding other cultures. Good for supporting a business, but probably not leading one. Consulting seems to be a good fit, but I may not have gone into freelancing had I not been laid-off (twice in two years).

For someone 20 years younger than me, I think Outliers would be a good read and might help make some of life’s decisions a bit easier.

Friday's knowledge constructions

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Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week [I wonder if I’ll have to add Google+ to this process some day soon?].

@denniscallahan – “Knowledge is constructed, not transferred ~Peter Senge”

“knowledge transfer” is a handy fiction we have created – by @downes

My answer, and it’s a perfectly reasonable and well-research answer, is that nothing is transferred. That the whole idea of “knowledge transfer” is a handy fiction that we have created over the years, as simple folk, to function as shorthand for what we know is a much more complex process.

Probably the best intermediate position a person can attempt here is something like “knowledge replication“. That’s what’s actually happening in a lot of people’s theories. We know that the sending of a message from one person to another involves a state change. The signal (another handy fiction; let me have it for now) crosses through several media en route from sender to receiver. Thus questions of signal integrity arise, the problem of distinguishing signal from noise, and all the rest of it.

[Gee, I used to have the job title of Knowledge Transfer Officer ;)]

@PhilMcCreight – “Productivity is for robots. Humans should be inefficient” – @kevin2kelly via @jhagel

@heathervescent – “Paquet’s Corollary: Paradigm shift rests on the shoulders of people who disregard current success metrics and replace them with new value lenses.” HT @sebpaquet

Gamification & work – by @johnt  via @petervan @timkastelle

Not all people at work are engaged as they don’t have the “wanting” and “liking”… for some people it’s just a job. Whereas gamers choose to play games as a recreational activity, and they are fulfilled from doing so. Most of us have to work, and some don’t really like our jobs … sure organisational design can make it a more enjoyable atmosphere if it is recognised that people spend more time at work than with their families, but this won’t guarantee total engagement … it’s only part of the solution.

@DavidGurteen – “Theory is knowledge that doesn’t work. Practice is when everything works and you don’t know why. ~ Hermann Hesse”

and finally:

@lirons – “When the great lord passes the wise peasant bows deeply and silently farts. ~ Ethiopian Proverb”

The adaptive organisation

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Continuing from the post: Adapting …

The adaptive organisation is the second-last chapter of Adapt: Why success always starts with failure, followed by Adapting and you. In the final chapters, Tim Harford examines how groups and individuals can strive to adapt, and here are some highlights.

“So let’s first acknowledge a crucial difference: individuals, unlike populations, can succeed without adapting.” This statement explains a lot about what happens in organizations ;)

Case study of Timpson:

The first thing Timpson does when it buys another business is to rip out the electronic point-of-sale machines (there are always EPOS machines) and replace them with old-fashioned cash registers. ‘EPOS lets people at head office run the business’, explains John Timpson. ‘I don’t want them to run the business.’ EPOS machines empower head offices but they make it harder to be flexible and give customers what they need.

… how senior executives must feel when their cutting-edge, market-leading business finds itself being disrupted by a foolish-looking new technology:

A sufficiently disruptive innovation bypasses almost everybody who matters at a company: the Rolodex full of key customers becomes useless; the old skills are no longer called for; decades of industry experience count for nothing. In short, everyone who counts in a company will lose status if the disruptive innovation catches on inside that company — and whether consciously or unconsciously, they will often make sure that it doesn’t.

These, then, are the three obstacles to heeding that old advice, ‘learn from your mistakes’:

  1. denial, because we cannot separate our error from sense of self-worth;
  2. self-destructive behaviour, because … we compound our losses by trying to compensate for them;
  3. rose-tinted processes … whereby we remember past mistakes as though they were triumphs, or mash together our failures with our successes.

How to overcome these obstacles:

“Honest advice from others is better.”

Perhaps there is one reason why researchers find that self-employed people tend to be happier than the employed: they receive implicit approval of what they do every time somebody pays their invoice, whereas people with regular jobs tend to receive feedback that is both less frequent and less meaningful.

“So it’s worth remembering once again why it is worth experimenting, even though many experiments will, indeed, end in failure. It’s because the process of correcting the mistakes can be more liberating than the mistakes themselves are crushing, even though at the time we so often feel that the reverse is true.”

The book covers and cites several key points from The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Future of Management, which may make it a bit tedious for those who’ve read many management books, but overall I would recommend it as a fresh perspective on some key organizational and structural issues.

 

Adapting

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I’ve just started reading Tim Harford’s book, Adapt: Why success always starts with failure.

Here are my highlights/notes from Chapter One, Adapting:

Planning vs Adapting

“Ormerod’s discovery strongly implies that effective planning is rare in the modern economy.”

“The Soviet failure revealed itself much more gradually: it was a pathological inability to experiment.”

Design Principles

Palchinsky principles’:

first, seek out new ideas and try new things;

second, when trying something new, do it on a scale where failure is survivable;

third, seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes as you go along.

[note that Palchinsky worked in the Soviet Union]

Hierarchies

“There is a limit to how much honest feedback most leaders really want to hear; and because we know this, most of us sugar-coat our opinions whenever we speak to a powerful person. In a deep hierarchy, that process is repeated many times, until the truth is utterly concealed inside a thick layer of sweet-talk.”

Next: the adaptive organization