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

Diversity, complexity, chaos and working smarter

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

@jhagel on an expansive view on the power of the narrative – via @jseelybrown @quinnovator

But here’s the catch.  Narratives cannot be crafted by PR departments.  They emerge out of, and are sustained by, daily practice. They require taking a long-term view of trajectories that extend well beyond the individual institution. They also need to penetrate beneath the surface events that occupy our daily newspaper headlines to tap into the deep forces that are shaping these surface events. Our existing institutional leaders are generally poorly equipped to take on this opportunity.

Complexity, chaos and enterprise-architecture ~ by @tetradian – via @DavidGurteen [explores the under-represented Chaotic domain of Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework]

But what’s not there in Dave’s model is any consistent framework to tackle the Chaotic domain – instead, we’re just told to run away back to the safety of one of the other domains. And yet, following that same logic above, we can see straight away what its base would be: the aspirational dimension, the explicit choice of meaning and purpose – otherwise known in the enterprise-architecture as vision, values and principles.

“The only metric that matters is engaging passion” ~ @jhagel via @panklam

In his elegantly constructed Tuesday morning keynote, the always inspiring John Hagel nimbly set  the tone for a business-focused conference. Starting with last year’s big E2.0 question “How do we get adoption for social software?” he linked adoption to passion and performance (“If you are interested in performance you have to be interested in passion”). People who are engaged in activities they are passionate about will connect with other people — and if you’ve got the platform available, and right, then they will use it in conjunction with passion. The only metric that matters is engaging passion.

Resiliency & the Working Smarter Framework: Building on Strengths ~ by @brentmack

As you can see, the role of Management in this model is to tap into or mine the emergent (next) practices stemming from staff collaborations and transform these practices into new tools and processes.

In this type of workspace, the new tools and processes are put into service much faster. It is accepted that rapid change and the complexity of overlapping issues is the norm. Organizations are positioned more on the outer boundaries where change is happening. Management at the bottom of the pyramid supports a work culture where staff use a variety of social media tools that enables effective social learning activities which fuels collaboration and innovation.

[Brent then creates a diagram unifying working smarter & resiliency, with this graphic summary of the working smarter framework]

@Spigit – New post! Getting Innovation Results from Our Cognitive Surplus – “super post by the @spigit boys” via @petervan

Let’s return to the three elements of this underutilized asset, employees’ cognitive surplus: knowledge, perspectives, heuristics.

All need interaction to be surfaced and applied in context.The knowledge to address a new challenge isn’t likely to be recorded anywhere. It’s the tacit knowledge you want to get at. Perspectives are vital, but can only be applied in the context of the issue. They don’t really have a life outside of a specific need. There is no recording of perspectives to apply to a problem – it’s all about interacting. And heuristics are similar. Methodologies to apply to a problem can be recorded, but we’re all coded differently. Someone has to actually apply those problem-solving methodologies.

Given these requirements, what are the keys to getting innovation results from our cognitive surplus?

1. Seek out diversity in innovation efforts

2. Focus the innovation effort

3. Use social graph for communication, not collaboration

[this post motivated me to make a small addition to a previous graphic]

 

Tribes and networks coexist

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So the social networking utopia is not coming, writes Mashable’s Chris Taylor on CNN. He cites one Dunbar number (now all the rage) and concludes:

Turns out we’re hardwired to get along best in tight groups of no more than 150, and have been since we were living on the African savannah. Armies take advantage of this hardwiring, as do the smartest corporations, not to mention wedding planners.

Dunbar’s research looked at relationships among primates and didn’t take into account loose ties or electronically mediated & enhanced communications. It is not a fair comparison. But Taylor’s words on Tribalism triggered an old connection for me:

A study released this month shows that digital tribalism is alive and well in the social network era. The tribes I’m talking about aren’t nations, corporations or sports teams, though clearly these brands all matter as much as they ever did.

I’m talking literally about tribes — as in the kind of village-sized small groups most of us lived among for nearly all of human history, right up until the 20th century. Small groups that we now seem to be organizing ourselves into again — virtually.

A few years ago I came across a framework of our four primary historical modes of organizing – Tribal; Institutional; Markets; Networks. The TIMN framework shows how we have evolved as a society. It has not been a clean progression from one mode to the next but rather the new form built-upon and changed the previous mode.

A key point of this framework is that Tribes exist within Institutions, Markets AND Networks. We never lose our affinity for community groups or family, but each mode brings new factors that influence our previous modes. So yes, tribalism is alive and well in online social networks. It’s just not the same tribalism of several hundred years ago.

We are in a transition from a market to network-dominated society, and according to David Ronfeldt, each transition has its hazards. While tribal societies may result in nepotism, networked societies can lead to deception, as Mashable itself has reported. It’s interesting that tribes of hackers are a potential counter to network deception.

Ronfeldt states that the initial tribal form informs the other modes and can have a profound influence as they evolve.

Balanced combination is apparently imperative: Each form (and its realm) builds on its predecessor(s). In the progression from T through T+I+M+N, the rise of a new form depends on the successes (and failures) achieved through the earlier forms. For a society to progress optimally through the addition of new forms, no single form should be allowed to dominate any other, and none should be suppressed or eliminated. A society’s potential to function well at a given stage, and to evolve to a higher level of complexity, depends on its ability to integrate these inherently contradictory forms into a well-functioning whole. A society can constrain its prospects for evolutionary growth by elevating a single form to primacy — as appears to be a tendency at times in market-mad America.

So tribes are not dead, and neither are institutions and markets, in a networked society. We need to understand all four modes as we make the current transition. Saying that tribes render social networks useless after 150 connections is a bit trite. The real work is in figuring out how best to create organizations, and societies, that balance combinations of all four modes, emphasize their bright sides and remain in perpetual Beta [what Ronfeldt calls incomplete adaptation].

The TIMN framework is very useful for having deeper conversations and increasing our understanding of what we’re going through as a society. It should be required reading for organizational leaders and politicians as well.

Resetting learning and work

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A large portion of the workforce face significant barriers to being autonomous learners on the job. From early on we are told to look to authority and direction in learning and work. The idea that there is a right answer, or an expert with the right answer, begins in our schools. John Taylor Gatto describes this in the seven-lesson schoolteacher.

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, the teacher, can determine what you must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions which I then enforce. If I’m told that evolution is a fact instead of a theory, I transmit that as ordered, punishing deviants who resist what I have been told to tell them to think. This power to control what children will think lets me separate successful students from failures very easily.

Good employees wait for their supervisor to tell them what to do. In much of the industrial/service/information workplace you’re not paid to think, but to do the bidding of someone else. I know this is changing in many places, but a job is still a JOB.

Today, more of our learning is on the job so that formal training is an increasingly smaller percentage of what we need to get things done. Our informal learning needs will continue to grow, as Robert Kelley showed over a 20-year CMU study of knowledge workers. He asked:

“What percentage of the knowledge you need to do your job is stored in your own mind?”

1986 ~ 75%.
1997 ~ 20%
2006 ~ 10%

Workers need to take control of their learning, just at a time when the great majority (especially baby boomers) have been educated by the system that Gatto describes above and have endured countless hours of training measured by hours in a classroom. The crows have been culled from many flocks of turkeys.

Here’s a quote from Peter Drucker’s 2005 article Managing Oneself, in HBR (Slideshare Synopsis of Managing Oneself):

The challenges of managing oneself may seem obvious, if not elementary. And the answers may seem self-evident to the point of appearing naïve. But managing oneself requires new and unprecedented things from the individual, and especially from the knowledge worker. In effect, managing oneself demands that each knowledge worker think and behave like a chief executive officer. Further, the shift from manual workers who do as they are told to knowledge workers who have to manage themselves profoundly challenges social structure. Every existing society, even the most individualistic one, takes two things for granted, if only subconsciously: that organizations outlive workers, and that most people stay put.

Tom Peters called this change in mindset, Brand You and predicted over a decade ago that “90+ percent of White Collar Jobs will be totally reinvented/reconceived in the next decade”. Has yours? I don’t think we’re there yet.

For years, I put forth practical methods, like Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and Skills 2.0 as one part of the equation. The other part is changing organizational structures.

Dan Pink says we’re moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. Like artists, we need to see and learn for ourselves. The great challenge for knowledge workers is to become knowledge managers – managers of their own knowledge. It’s accepting life in perpetual Beta.

However, we don’t have to do this alone. We can become independent while embracing our interdependence. We just need to get over our dependence on others who “provide a job” or “give us an education”. It’s not theirs to give. It’s ours to co-create.

I’ve learned a lot working for myself these past eight years. I’ve had to figure many things out on my own. Freelancing started the day after I was laid-off. PKM was my way of dealing with the fact of no professional development budget. But I learned with the help of others, most recently my colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance.  

Taking control of our learning and our work isn’t really a revolution. It’s more like a reset to the proper default position for the conceptual age.