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.

 

 

Vendor-neutral

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Yes, I have called software vendors snake oil sellers. Last year I wrote, “Now social learning is being picked up by software vendors and marketers as the next solution-in-a-box, when it’s more of an approach and a cultural mind-set.” In 2005, social learning online was a fringe activity that we had to test using open source platforms like Drupal. Now everything is “social”. I remember when we ran our informal learning unworkshops in 2006 while the major enterprise software vendors ignored us or privately told us there was no market for this stuff. Now they use our words to sell their products.

Usually I represent the buyers of enterprise software, not the sellers. I have advised vendors on how to improve their products but my aim is not to make an easy market for their sales. I want to help organizations democratize while simultaneously improving their overall performance. As an independent consultant, I maintain a perspective of vendor neutrality. I do not represent any other companies.

While some people have inferred that I may be vendor hostile, let me tell you what I learned today about a software company – Socialcast. They are not my client and I do not have any stake in the company.

During a web presentation today, I saw that Socialcast gets a critical part of workplace performance right. They understand that collaboration has to be embedded in the workflow. Their “secret sauce” is the ability to integrate with a wide variety of other enterprise software applications. These are tools that workers use every day. Socialcast enables conversations around and between these systems. There is no requirement to leave the workflow to collaborate.

I’ve used Socialcast for several months and must say the learning  curve is negligible. It’s simple and effective. You are up and using it very quickly. This is a company that understands online collaboration and reduces silos instead of creating a new one.

So there you have it. If you want the endorsement of a vendor-neutral consultant, just do a good job and you’ll get noticed.

New Hire Practices

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I know that there are no “best practices” in new hire development, also known as onboarding, as each organization is unique and often rather complex. However, there are some practices that could make onboarding better in certain contexts. I’ve looked at several examples and am very interested in unique practices (outliers) beyond the corporate norm.

I’d appreciate any unique examples if you can share them.

Unemployed Girl by Kazimir Malevich (1904)

Reference: Onboarding bookmarks on Diigo

Here are some of the key themes that I found about onboarding programs across many organizations.

Personal, dedicated coaching for each new hire (Capital One, Nokia).

Connecting each new hire to to key contacts in the organization (Capital One, Nokia). Note that Nokia will even pay for new hires to travel to other locations to meet their key contacts and co-workers.

Ensuring new hires understand the shadow or informal part of the organization through the use of tools such as network maps (Jon Katzenbach, Senior Partner of Booz & Company, author of The Wisdom of Teams).

Pairing with another worker or even tripling with two experienced workers and getting to work immediately, in order to reduce formal training (Menlo Innovations)

Two actions that can begin even before a formal offer is made:

  1. Providing access to an online knowledge base.
  2. Connecting to an internal social network to connect online & ask questions.

Embedding collaboration from the start by co-developing an individualized new hire program.

Giving time for new hires to just look around and talk to people (Semco SA; New Seasons Market)

Having weekly/monthly new hire welcome breakfasts, lunches & Happy Hours which all managers attend.

Other common qualities of good programs are that they are – informal; extend over time (up to 2 years in some cases); and involve active participation by supervisors/managers

Some companies, like Zappos, will pay people ($2,000) to leave after onboarding, so that only motivated workers stay.

The Networked Workplace

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The networked workplace is the new reality. It’s always on and globally connected. This is where all organizations are going, at different speeds and in a variety of ways. Some won’t make it.

First you connect people inside the workplace, then you connect organizations, and then you connect the world. That’s where we are today.

Look at how work gets done. First, simple work keeps getting automated. Many years ago the typing pool was made redundant. Today lawyers are on the block, tomorrow it may be you.

Then complicated work gets outsourced. Complicated work is that which can be analyzed and broken down into its component parts. It’s ripe for outsourcing. That used to mean overseas, but today, overseas is getting closer to home. These shifts will continue.

What’s left is complex work, but this requires passion, creativity and initiative. These cannot be commoditized. This is where the main value of the networked workplace will be made. It’s a constantly moving sweet spot. Today’s complex work is tomorrow’s merely complicated work.

At the edge of the organization, where there are few rules; everything is a blur. It’s chaotic. But opportunities are found in chaos. Value emerges from forays into the chaos. In such a changing environment, failure has to be tolerated. Nothing is guaranteed other than the fact that not playing here puts any organization at a significant disadvantage.

Two major changes are needed for the networked organization to capitalize on simultaneously working in simple, complicated, complex and chaotic environments.

First, power must be distributed. It’s a move toward democracy without losing the entrepreneurial zeal. Some companies are already there. There are no answers or cookie cutter approaches here, so don’t try to copy anyone.

Distributed power enables faster reaction time so those closest to the situation can take action. This is often the case in complex and chaotic environments where there is no time to write a detailed assessment of the situation. Those best able to address the situation have marinated in it for some time. They couldn’t sufficiently explain it to someone removed from the problem if they wanted. Shared power is enabled by trust.

Second, transparency must become the norm. Transparency ensures there is an understanding of what everyone is doing. It means narrating work and taking ownership of mistakes. Transparency helps the organization learn from mistakes. Of course this is very difficult for any command and control organization, with its published organization chart and sacrosanct job titles, to embrace.

Power-sharing and transparency enable work to move out to the edges and away from the comfortable, complicated work that has been the corporate mainstay for decades.  There’s nothing left in the safe inner rings. It’s being automated and outsourced. But the outer rings are scary and workers can’t be controlled out there or they’ll be ineffective. Aye, there’s the rub. Deal with it, or others will.

Jobs, networks and economics

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

QUOTES:

@sandymaxey – “Hierarchical networks appear incestuous, perpetuate mindless incrementalism, reinforce stagnant thinking. Need inclusivity for disruption.”

Carl Sagan: “It is suicidal to create a society dependent on science and technology in which hardly anybody knows anything about science and technology.” via @MarionChapsal

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via @loyalelectron – Wow. 72% of Indians, 81% of Chinese now say economic opportunities are superior in their native countries than in US. – Wall Street Journal:

A new study by researchers at U.C. Berkeley, Duke and Harvard has found that, for the first time, a majority of American-trained entrepreneurs who have returned to India and China believe they are doing better at “home” than they would be doing in the U.S.

The new China? BMW, Daimler, VW, Siemens & IKEA go to Southern US because labour’s cheap & workers have no rights – via @CWNH

But slumming in America is fast becoming a business model for some of Europe’s leading companies, and they often do things here they would never think of doing at home. These companies – not banks, primarily, but such gold-plated European manufacturers as BMW, Daimler, Volkswagen and Siemens, and retailers such as IKEA – increasingly come to America (the South particularly) because labor is cheap and workers have no rights. In their eyes, we’re becoming the new China. Our labor costs may be a little higher, but we offer stronger intellectual property protections and far fewer strikes than our unruly Chinese comrades.

@SteveDenning: “The real jobs crisis is that most jobs suck” via @SebPaquet

This is not just a matter of keeping the workers happy. In today’s knowledge economy, the motivation of workers is a key determinant of productivity. The lack of passion in today’s workforce is a fundamental cause of the continuing sharp decline in the performance of the Fortune 500.

@nineshift: “We say teleworkers are 25% more productive than office workers”

Industry Canada reports productivity gains of up to 50% by Teleworkers. (Trade-Marks Branch)

IBM Canada had Teleworker productivity improvements of up to 50% per teleworker. (IBM, Canada)

Boeing finds that Telework helps to increase their employee’s productivity an average of 15-30% and, “The quality of the work done has improved even more!” (Boeing Case Study provided by Telecommute Connecticut)

@lemire: conventional peer review system (filter-then-publish) has disastrous consequences:

In the conventional peer review system, you seek to please the reviewers who in turn try to please the editor who in turn is trying to guess what the readers want. It should not be a surprise that the papers are optimized for peer review, not for the reader. While you will eventually get your work published, you may have to drastically alter it to make it pass peer review. A common theme is that you will need to make it look more complicated.

@etiennewenger: New paper on assessing value creation for communities and networks: A Conceptual Framework (PDF) – via @NancyWhite

We will use the term “community” as a shortcut for community of practice, which we define as a learning partnership among people who find it useful to learn from and with each other about a particular domain. They use each other’s experience of practice as a learning resource. And they join forces in making sense of and addressing challenges they face individually or collectively.

We use the term network as a shortcut for social network. The term refers to a set of connections among people, whether or not these connections are mediated by technological networks. They use their connections and relationships as a resource in order to quickly solve problems, share knowledge, and make further connections.

We see communities and networks as two aspects of the social fabric of learning rather than separate structures.