The 21st century workplace: moving to the edge

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The evidence of simple and (merely) complicated work getting automated and outsourced is widespread. Meanwhile, the business imperative is to be innovative, creative and agile.  The current Canada Post strike is evidence of this shift, with workers reacting against a major automation initiative. The postal automation process currently has significant flaws, but who thinks these cannot be solved in some future iteration? What is the future of complicated work, such as mail sorting and delivery? Rather bleak, I would think. However, solving a customer’s unique problem of getting pieces of art to several remote locations can be complex. There will always be complex problems that cannot be solved through automation.

I’ve used this concentric model to describe the networked workplace in recent posts:

emergent workplace

Basically, valued work in the 21st century workplace is moving to the outer rings to deal with growing complexity and chaos. The high-value work is in facing complexity, not in addressing problems that have already been solved and for which a formulaic or standardized response has been developed.

Dave Jonassen has said that as adults, most people are paid to do only one thing – solve problems. When dealing with work problems we can categorize the response as either known or new. Known problems require access to the right information to solve them. This information can be mapped, and frameworks such as knowledge management (KM) help us to map it. We can also create tools, especially electronic performance support systems (EPSS) to do work and not have to learn all the background knowledge in order to accomplish the task. This is how simple and complicated knowledge gets automated.

new known

Complex, new problems need tacit knowledge to solve them. Exception-handling is becoming more important in the networked workplace. The system handles the routine stuff and people, usually working together, deal with the exceptions. As these exceptions get addressed, some or all of the solution can get automated, and so the process evolves.

The 21st century workplace, with its growing complexity due to our inter-connectivity, requires that we focus on new problems and exception-handing. This increases the need for collaboration (working together on a problem) and cooperation (sharing without any specific objective).

One challenge for organizations is getting people to realize that what they know has little value. How to solve problems together is becoming the real business imperative. Sharing and using knowledge is where business value lies. With computer systems that can handle more and more of our known knowledge, the 21st century worker has to move to the complex and chaotic edge to get the real (valued & paid) work done. In 50 years, this may not be an issue, but right now there are many people who need help with this challenge. This is the important work of leaders everywhere: enabling the current workforce to enter the 21st century.

Get outside the disciplinary box

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A most interesting post by Nick Milton at Knoco got me thinking again about complexity. I like the 2 X 2 diagram showing how increasing complexity makes us dependent on creative individuals and increasing collectivity makes us dependent on more processes. The former case is reflected in my own observations that complex work requires creativity and is where the value of the post-industrial organization lies. The latter case is where we are – with industrial processes and procedures for everything, but none able to deal with increasing complexity and hence the need to change our focus to things like barely repeatable processes.

According to the diagram, in a highly complex and collective environment, like most organizations in our interconnected world, we should be focused on knowledge management. If this means some form of KM 2.0, then I might agree. If it means enterprise KM and perhaps even the semantic web, with all its undelivered promises, then I doubt that it will be adequate to simultaneously support creative individuals and develop flexible procedures and processes.

Venkatesh Rao has a good critique of KM, from a generational perspective, and how it is so different in approach from social media. I think we need some form of “social KM”; a way to facilitate social learning, improve knowledge-sharing and overall enable collaboration and innovation. I don’t think that exists yet, though many are experimenting with frameworks like Social Business or Enterprise 2.0.

Much has been learned in the KM field and there is much to learn from emergent social media practices as well. However, real innovative approaches will be found at the edges. Frans Johansson showed with several cases in The Medici Effect how exponential innovations can occur when examining one field through the lens of another field. That is the opportunity: change lenses.

Nick concludes:

We need to be innovative, we need to be agile, we need to learn very fast, and we need to pool and build on what knowledge we have. That’s why Knowledge management is a crucial tool for survival in a Level 3, Collective world; whether you are in the Nuclear industry, the sales and marketing business, government, or any other sector. Knowledge is in short supply, so we need to make the most of what little knowledge we have, and be prepared to think and learn and innovate on our feet, collectively.

I agree, though knowledge management is too narrow a perspective. We need to think bigger and get outside our disciplinary boxes.

Update: This video on the tension between expertise and creativity gives more food for thought on the balance we need to foster in the complex, collective workplace.

Another quotable Friday

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

There were lots of quotable folks on Twitter this week, so that’s what I’m highlighting:

@charlesjennings “My credo: real learning is all about experience, practice, conversations and reflections – no more, no less.”

@hwakelam “Complex systems create fast space (simulation) improving engagement with physical space and helping adults play ~ John Smart”

@oscarberg “Collaboration is in a more sorry state in most (even leading) large organisations than they dare to confess.” – “I have yet to experience an organisation where their collaboration practices are as good as they say.”

@JenniferSertl “As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being ~ Carl Jung”

@SebPaquet “Money has no smell, but reputation does.”

“the Knowledge makes us the most qualified cabbys in the world, twitter makes us the most informed” via @Jackcabnory & @KARLcabbyJAMES

@techherding “Starting a new business based on Apple “cloud” model. You pay me to buy a Ferrari, but I keep it for you.”

@susancain “In modern organizational life, the most important things are the ones you can’t measure ~ Roger Martin, at World Innovation Forum”

@ImaginaryTime “Organizations need to start regarding knowledge as an emergent property of social interaction as opposed to a material object.”

PKM Updated

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Here are four main processes that can be used in developing critical thinking skills using web tools (click image to enlarge).

Using a Seek-Sense-Share framework (à la personal knowledge management), pick one or more web platforms on which to practise critical thinking.

PKM Critical Thinking Process Web Tools & Strategies
1) SEEK Observe & Study Use an aggregator (feed reader) to keep track of online conversations Follow interesting people on Twitter  

Use Social Bookmarks (set them free)

Find a Twitter App to suit your needs

Create online (reusable) mind maps,  graphics and text files of your thoughts

With more information in online databases, use Search, instead of file folders.

Set up automated searches

Review your bookmarks, Twitter favourites, etc
2) SENSE Challenge & Evaluate  

Form Tentative Opinions

 Tweet your thoughts, not just those of others  

Write a reasoned response to an article/post that inspires/provokes you

Write an original Blog post

Present your images/mindmaps with explanations

Write book/video reviews

Aggregate your learning from various sources and post a regular “what I learned” article – text, podcast, video, image
3) SHARE Participate Connect via Twitter 

Share social bookmarks through groups & networks

Join Social Networks

Join in Tweet Chats

Comment on or about other blogs

Continue and extend conversations from news sources, other tweets or blog posts

In my opinion, the core of PKM is 2) sensing, though 1) active observation is necessary to feed sense-making processes and 3) sharing with others creates better feedback loops. The diversity of both what one seeks and who one shares with have a significant impact on the quality of sense-making processes.

Update:

At the suggestion of a reader of Wally Bock’s Three Star Leadership blog, here are some personal knowledge management (PKM) references:

Networked Learning: Working Smarter – longer article as an overview of PKM.

All posts on this site tagged PKM.

Latest list of PKM – Networked Learning Resources (2011)

 

Riding the roller coaster

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roller-coaster

It’s been a roller coaster of a ride for the past eight years but I’m still here, freelancing, blogging and trying to figure out life in perpetual Beta. So on my eighth anniversary as a free agent, I would like to thank all the wonderful people in my communities (virtual and physical) and networks (professional and personal) for their help, support, understanding, insight and humour. I’d also like to thank all the people who have taken time to comment on my writing and extend my own thinking.

Last year at this time, I wrote about what I had learned as a free agent. Those lessons still stand. In retrospect, I think that the seven year mark may have been The Dip that Seth Godin refers to in his book, and I’m glad I decided to stick it through.

I’ve been travelling a lot more this year, with three speaking engagements already for The Conference Board of Canada, in addition to my teaching at University of Toronto’s iSchool Institute. I have an upcoming engagement at MODSIM [now cancelled] in Ottawa plus several scheduled speaking events in the Fall, such as CSTD and SIBOS. All of these mean meeting new people, connecting with old friends and having an opportunity to learn more.

I’m also very grateful for my colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance. With Charles, Clark, Jane and Jay along for the ride, the roller coaster is a lot more fun.

a little understanding

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

QUOTES:

Indian PM “Knowledge combined with creativity and productivity has the potential to impact the social economic nature of a nation” – via @stevedineen

“Getting out of the way is a much underrated organizational skill.” – Craig Newmark – via @Mickipedia

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Claiming Ephemeral Media – why it’s important to own your data – by @downes

If people want to converse in an environment that basically owns all their data, I can’t stop them, but I’ve been through this before – remember HotWired Threads, anyone? – and don’t feel like going through the grief again.

I think that’s the most difficult part of reclaiming ephemeral media. The silos [Facebook; Twitter; etc.] have made people feel as though they have to be there, and the people there are complicit in making those who don’t play in the sandbox feel like outcasts. Are you ready to have people act as though you’ve dropped off the grid?

 

Excellent PKM & networked learning reference list by @hreingold – An Introduction to Mind Amplifiers

a five week course using asynchronous forums, blogs, wikis, mindmaps, social bookmarks, synchronous audio, video, chat, and Twitter

@aronsolomon – Transparency + Clarity = Understanding – via @rdeis

The problem is that we tend to make things way too complicated. We say too much when few words will suffice. We over-elaborate upon things which are reasonably easy to understand.

“We train, hire, and pay doctors to be cowboys. But it’s pit crews people need” Atul Gawande @ Harvard Medical Graduation – via @hastingscenter

In his book “The Youngest Science,” the great physician-writer Lewis Thomas described his internship at Boston City Hospital in pre-penicillin 1937. Hospital work, he observed, was mainly custodial. “If being in a hospital bed made a difference,” he said, “it was mostly the difference produced by warmth, shelter, and food, and attentive, friendly care, and the matchless skill of the nurses in providing these things. Whether you survived or not depended on the natural history of the disease itself. Medicine made little or no difference.”

Connecting with Communities of Practice

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This month, The Learning Circuits blog asks how do we break down organizational walls when it comes to learning?

One way to look at this problem is to see what kind of work needs to get done in the organization. For example, if you are trying to balance the need to support complex work with innovation, as many knowledge-intensive companies are, then there are different needs to be simultaneously addressed. Complex work requires strong ties and high levels of trust to enable work teams to function. This often has to be done behind the firewall to protect competitive secrets. On the other hand, innovation needs loose ties and a wide network to get diverse points of view. This means working outside the firewall on the wide open Web.

Communities of Practice, supported by skilled community managers and appropriate knowledge-sharing tools can bridge these two areas. They can provide a lightly structured forum to bring outside ideas inside the organization, to multiple teams, while not detracting from the work being done in individual projects.

 

Job automation

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I’ve said it so often now that you may be bored with the notion, but many people do not understand it at all. Simple work is getting automated and complicated work is getting outsourced — Automated & Outsourced.

On top of that, what was complicated yesterday is merely simple today and hence will be automated. Daniel Lemire has an interesting take on what automation will do to not just business but also politics:

In fact, most jobs require little general intelligence:

  • Jobs are highly specialized. You can sum up 80% of what most people do with 4 or 5 different specific tasks. In most organizations, it is a major faux pas to ask the wrong person: there is a one-to-one matching between people and tasks.
  • Jobs don’t require that you to understand much of what is going on. You only need to fake some understanding of the context the same way a spam filter fakes an understanding of your emails. Do you think that the salesman at the appliance store knows why some dishwashers have a shredder and some don’t, and why it matters? Do you think that the professors know what the job market is like for their graduates?

A key part of the problem is the job. Politicians want “job creation” and people want jobs to be able to feed their families and pay the bills. But the job is nothing more than a social construct. I think it’s outlived its usefulness, as I found out last year. The construct of the job, with its defined skills, effort, responsibilities and working conditions, is a key limiting organizational factor for the conceptual economy. We need to get beyond it.

In order to realize the creative potential of individuals we have to cast off old notions of how work gets done. There is no such thing as a generic  job description into which we just drop some “qualified” candidate. Job competencies are a myth. People are individuals. The role of an effective HR department would be to know each person individually. The fact is that everyone can be creative, including the janitor.

Understanding and incorporating humanity back into our work will liberate us from the industrial, scientific management models that inform too much of our work. It will also help us deal with all those complex problems that are really keeping us up at night.

 

iSchool Networked Learning PKM Resources

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This is a follow-up from the Networked Learning (PKM) workshop I conducted for the iSchool Institute yesterday. Here are some of the resources I suggested prior to the course:

Network Learning: Working Smarter, an article I wrote for the Special Libraries Association last year.

Sense-making (shows types of sense-making activities)

Talking about PKM (from the professional KM community)

PKM in a Nutshell (includes many links for further exploration)

Critical thinking in the organization (looking at how PKM fits into the workplace)

PKM categorized posts on this blog & my social bookmarks tagged PKM.

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All the slides are now posted on my Slideshare account and can be downloaded. It was interesting that few people had heard about The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999) when I mentioned that Hyperlinks Subvert Hierarchy (#7).

I opened with a recent short video by Teemu Arina entitled Global, Local, Personal (2011)

We discussed Twitter for professional development and I suggested two weekly chats that might be of interest: #lrnchat & #KMers

Jane Hart hosts two communities, Social Learning (on Yammer) as well as Share and Learn (using the open source WPMU platform). More information and how to join these communities at C4LPT.

In the Share & Learn community, Jane is also hosting a thirty days to use social media to work and learn smarter program starting this Monday, 30 May. Join now.

I also showed a TED Talk by Eli Pariser called Beware of Online Filter Bubbles. This was a great introduction to information/source filters and I based part of the discussion on Tim Kastelle’s excellent post on Five Forms of Filtering.

I talked about my blog as home base for PKM and showed several other PKM processes.

One of the participants even set up a Yammer community on the spot and created a Twitter account. The Twitterers in the crowd included: @brentmack – @marcopolis – @elearningguy – @ruralibrarian

Discussions on what tools people use continued through our lunch and breaks. Evernote, a cross-platform tool to “remember everything” is quite popular.

As Marco Campana commented “If any of these tools don’t make your life easier, don’t use them.” – @hjarche Yup. #netlearn

If I’ve missed something or anybody has more questions or needs help, please contact me here, on Twitter, via email, Skype or send the Pony Express to Sackville (New Brunswick, not Nova Scotia).

Psychopaths and others

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

QUOTES

@RalphMercer – “would (LMS) learning management systems exist if we weren’t trying to make someone pay?”

@PembaTrees – “Was asked for an easy way to start a NGO …. Spend 5 years writing proposals, give talks, start a social enterprise & get a line of credit.”

@B4HOttawa – “Wisdom is like a baobab tree; no one individual can embrace it – African Proverb”

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“Some psychologists have a theory that many of the world’s ills can be blamed on psychopaths in high places.” via @SebPaquet [reminds me of The Gervais Principle]

“Robert Hare, the eminent Canadian psychologist who invented the psychopath checklist, … recently announced that you’re four times more likely to find a psychopath at the top of the corporate ladder than you are walking around in the janitor’s office,” journalist Jon Ronson tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered.

Without Workflow, Social Business Is Doomed – via @bduperrin

The only way to avoid the social death spiral is to make sure that any social/enterprise 2.0/collaboration initiatives you implement tie directly to everyday work, and sit squarely in the middle of key workflows.  This can take many forms, ranging from project management to targeted Q&A for specific critical topics.  What matters is that the work is important, and that the collaboration tool delivers a substantial reduction in the amount of effort required to complete that work.  Improved quality alone is not enough–the only non-monetary payoff most of us pay attention to is extra time.

Most interesting comment of the week: Storytelling Sucks by @DonaldClark to @jhagel on The Pull of Narrative

[Donald] It’s received wisdom in learning that storytelling and narrative are unquestionably good. But is it? Plato warned against filling young minds with fixed narratives and I’m coming round to a similar view, but with a twist. I’ve always been a big fan of sports and more recently of reality TV. Add to this computer games, virtual worlds, blogging, wikis, social networks, email, messenger and skype, and I find that most (not all) of what I really love is relatively unscripted, open, fluid, and often with more than a touch of ‘play’.

The top-down, command and control, baby-boomer culture is really starting to annoy me. The more I watch prescribed movies and TV, with their fixed plot structure, and abandon the publishing hyped ‘modern’ novel, the more I enjoy life. There’s an obsession with ‘stories’ that borders on the manic in learning, the arts and media. They really do want us to open our mouths and swallow.