Social learning for collaborative work

by

The authors at Human Capital Lab say that social learning makes little sense and we should really be focused on collaborative learning:

In its simplest form, collaborative learning is a model based on the idea that knowledge can be created through the interaction and collaboration of individuals. It is not driven by a specific tool, or learning plan, but is driven by the need for information and the accountability that those engaged have to one another. Where we decided to move from the verbiage “social learning” comes from the attempt to really define the term and realized that the focus continually goes back to “social” (and often social media tools) rather than to “learning.” It’s not about the tool, it’s about the learning and collaborative method by which it is accomplished.

I disagree.

Social learning is based on the understanding that we are social animals, as described by Albert Bandura in the 1970’s:

The social learning theory of Bandura emphasizes the importance of observing and modeling the behaviors, attitudes, and emotional reactions of others. Bandura (1977) states: “Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.” (p22). Social learning theory explains human behavior in terms of continuous reciprocal interaction between cognitive, behavioral, an environmental influences.

Our social networks have a significant influence on our behaviour, as clearly shown in research by Nicholas Christakis and others.

Image: Smoking in a Face to Face Network (2000) by Nicholas Christakis

Calling social learning, collaborative learning misses out on the fact that all learning happens in a social context.

We collaborate because we have a reason to do so (such as in the workplace).

We learn socially because we are wired to do so.

In a workplace context, social learning is how we share tacit knowledge so that we can work collaboratively. They go hand-in-glove but are not the same. It’s leadership’s responsibility to create structures that encourage social learning in order to do collaborative work.

We need to encourage social learning because things are changing too fast and it’s the only way we can keep up, by learning socially and working collaboratively.

Image: by Ross Dawson: Corporate Directors Understand Change (n = 500)

Network Learning PKM Workshop Notes

by

The Network Learning workshop will be held in Toronto on 27 May 2011. It is focused on mastering social media for networked learning, and is based on my work with PKM (personal knowledge management) since 2005.

I use Seek-Sense-Share as an initial framework to explain how to set up a personalized PKM  process:

1. Finding things out on the Web (SEEK)

2. Keeping up to date with new Web content (SEEK)

3. Building a trusted network of colleagues (SEEK & SHARE)

4. Communicating with your colleagues (SHARE)

5. Sharing resources, ideas and experiences with your colleagues (SHARE)

6. Collaborating with your colleagues (SHARE & USE)

7. Improving your personal productivity (SENSE & USE)

—

To begin, I would recommend reading Network Learning: Working Smarter, an article I wrote for the Special Libraries Association last year.

Here are some more detailed posts for anyone keen to get started early:

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)

For those who want to dig even deeper, they can explore the PKM categorized posts here or my social bookmarks tagged PKM.

The workshop itself will be as participatory as possible, with an emphasis on skill development and enabling everyone to develop a roadmap of what they want to do next. It will also be an introduction to several communities of practice for further learning.

For workshop participants, feel free to ask any questions in the comment field or send me an email.

 

Jobs? We ain't got no jobs

by

If contract work seems like the only option, then start networking with co-workers and competitors. Band together as a guild or association and help each other out. Think of it as a freelancers union and look into group health care, joint marketing and shared administration. You can’t do this working 40 hours a week for The Man. The deck is stacked with laws supporting either employers and employees but the future of knowledge work is free-agency. The powers that be, corporations and unions, won’t change to help out freelancers, we have to help ourselves.

That was my conclusion two years ago in Freelancers Unite. In many ways, it’s easier to be a freelancer than it was when I started 8 years ago. Here’s my marketing advice for free-agents.

There seems to be a growing acceptance of freelancing as a career option, as explained in this recent GigaOm article:

Attitudes toward freelancing have shifted over the past few years, with many more people now prepared to consider it as a long-term career choice. It’s a shift that has certainly been helped by online freelance marketplaces such as Elance and Odesk, which have made it much easier for freelancers to find work worldwide. While some people may have initially tried freelancing out of necessity due to the economic downturn, many people now choose to freelance because it gives them the flexibility to pursue their lifestyle of choice.

In the USA, this shift is being called the 1099 [contract worker] Economy. William Fulton says this shift requires a different way of looking at economic development.

As a result, savvy economic developers who want to tap into the 1099 economy must recognize that they must focus on a different version of the basics. Visiting existing large businesses in the community remains important because your largest businesses are probably where your future entrepreneurs currently work. But you also have to know the subtle ebbs and flows of your local economy, especially where the clusters of small business activity are located. You have to stay in touch with your educational community, especially your community colleges, to understand what skills your labor force has and needs. And, of course, you have to read all those Craigslist ads that my daughter is reading.

In my short stint as a contract employee last year, I noted that JOB is a four-letter word.

I wrote in 2004, early in my life as a freelancer, that knowledge work requires new structures, including the concept of the job:

Perhaps the actual structure of work, especially the Corporation itself, is an obstacle to knowledge work. Instead of tweaking the mechanisms of the corporation, through job redesign or cultural initiatives, we should be re-examining the basic structure of the corporation. It is an industrial age creation, designed to maximize physical capital and may not be optimal for maximizing “knowledge capital”.

The network, with its dynamic conversations, is where a lot of knowledge work gets done, and we should be looking at new laws to recognise networks in a similar way that we recognise corporations as legal entities. Is anything like this happening?

At the end of a jobless recovery, are we now ready to make some of these changes?

Managing in a networked world

by

In 2009, Anthony Poncier wrote a good post (in French) that covered the eight challenges of management in the virtual era; loosely translated as:

  1. Being concurrently nomadic and collaborative.
  2. Renewing the workplace social contract.
  3. Creating new modes of leadership.
  4. Creating value, not just revenue.
  5. The production of collective knowledge.
  6. Managing with both IQ and EQ (emotional quotient).
  7. A diverse community rather than a disciplined unity.
  8. Learning about the reality of the virtual.

1. Being concurrently nomadic and collaborative is becoming the norm in both large corporations and in small start-ups. The Internet Time Alliance is spread across eight time zones and we understand these challenges. One key to ensuring collaboration is through the narration of work. This fosters transparency and is something to be modelled by management.

2. Transparency becomes a catalyst in renewing the workplace social contract. Empowered workers have more responsibilities and power must be shared. This of course is a major challenge but many companies are already dealing with it, as the WorldBlu list of most democratic workplaces shows.

3. New and radical leadership models are coming forward as alternatives to more traditional, military-style command and control frameworks.

4. Creating long-term value is becoming more obvious in the business world. Dave Pollard’s Finding the Sweet Spot offers a simple guide to responsible, sustainable, joyful work:

  1. Find the sweet spot: Identify your Gift, passion, and purpose
  2. Find the right partners
  3. Research unmet needs
  4. Imagine and innovate solutions
  5. Continuously improvise
  6. Act responsibly on principle

5. I’ve said before that personal knowledge management (PKM) is our part of the social learning contract. Collective knowledge only becomes a reality when individuals engage in meaningful conversations to share their tacit knowledge. Collective knowledge is much more than databases of information.

6. The social, human side of business relationships is finally getting the attention it deserves. Once again, look at Rachel Happe’s vision for the social organization, with some of these attributes:

  • Employment as a mix of commitment/free-agency
  • Managers focused on developing people or managing projects, not on pieces of turf
  • Workers manage their own schedules
  • Each worker has a unique “competency model”
  • Customers participate in projects

7. The challenge of balancing diversity & unity is complex and requires new perspectives. Monika Hardy made this comment on my post, Emergent Value:

all levels are needed in any large organization…
isn’t that what we can do now.. seamlessly. gyrating from the vertical to the horizontal at whim, sophisticated zooming in and out, we’re in the system, we’re out of the system, we’re large, we’re small.
and without us even thinking it’s work, or that we’re doing it, or forcing it.
it’s like our reward for listening to what tech wants is that we can just be. and the freedom from just being, the extra time/money/energy from letting tech work the chaos, is allowing us to notice things we’ve been blinded to – for all the order we thought we craved. we were missing mindfulness.
emergent value and life in perpetual beta.. how lucky are we?

8. Virtual relationships are real and have significant impact on organizations. A song on the Net can drop stock values and a dispersed group of individual activists with networked computers can embarrass nation states and corporations. Virtual relationships can create significant business value (to which I can attest on many occasions). Separating relationships by medium is rather fruitless, so managers need to understand the virtual very well.

Thanks again to Anthony for eight good points, still pertinent today.

"I'd just love to pick your pocket"

by

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

QUOTE: @JeffElder: “I’d just love to pick your brain.” Saying that to a consultant is really saying: “I’d just love to pick your pocket.” – via @techherding

Mimi & Eunice: Precious Sacred Idea

—

Kelly Craft (@acLuser) reflects my own feelings about Follow Fridays on Twitter, and why I decided two years ago to start Friday’s Finds instead:

I’ll also bust the ‘secret’ vault wide-open and admit I’m not a fan of #followfriday in many respects.

  • Truth be told, I really don’t want a bunch of random new followers who I might not share any common interest with.

Internal culture shows you to everyone. – What happens on the inside gets seen by the outside – via @igotan

We live in a world where it’s very difficult to keep secrets anymore.  We communicate very freely, and this causes the walls to turn into veils, and the veils to be more and more translucent.  Imagine the shower in the photo above — it’s symbolic of a new reality, so go to the gym.

Melissa Pierce (@melissapierce) creator of the film Life in perpetual Beta, discussing social media on Chicago Live

“Leaderless groups” are a myth if taken literally” ~ Rosabeth Kanter – via @minutrition

“Leaderless groups,” a phrase I heard stated with pride at Cisco in the early days of councils and boards, are a myth if taken literally. No group is actually leaderless, although it might be highly collaborative. The group might distribute and rotate leadership roles and responsibilities. There might be open discussion of decisions, even if there is a person who declares when it’s time to decided and breaks ties — in short, has the authority. But when everyone is responsible, no one is responsible.

The future's so bright: Workers gotta wear shades

by

What is the future of the corporate model in a knowledge society?

Networked workplaces are on the rise and are challenging the large corporation model. For instance, many big web companies have comparatively few staff. They leverage their networks.

But the corporation is not going to become suddenly extinct, as most of our laws and business practises favour the corporation over the individual. Witness who legally owns the intellectual property (IP) produced by the employee [answer: the corporation]. It’s only in some universities that the knowledge worker maintains these rights.

While salaried workers may not own their IP, they own more and more of the “know-how”. This intangible know-how is the real value of knowledge – being able to do something with it. We are seeing the rise of  knowledge artisans who bring their tools; and leave with them. This is change from the bottom of the organizational pyramid.

Intellectual Property itself has minimal value and much IP isn’t worth the effort to protect it. Consider that companies like Facebook and Twitter have not built their businesses on patent applications. They’re too busy refining their business models, which are in perpetual Beta. Much business value is not in the idea or even the artifact that represents it, but in the speed and vigour of implementation.

The command and control corporate model may be forced to change when shareholders really understand that the valuation of their average corporation is getting to be more than 85% intangible assets. These intangibles are worthless without the know-how of knowledge workers. Therefore the actual value of the average corporation, without its people, is getting close to zero. So where would you put your money? In the corporation or in the people? For now, you have limited options, but who knows if this may change.

Look at Rachel Happe’s vision for the social organization, with some of these attributes:

  • Employment as a mix of commitment/free-agency
  • Managers focused on developing people or managing projects, not on pieces of turf
  • Workers manage their own schedules
  • Each worker has a unique “competency model” [farewell HR]
  • Customers participate in projects

This sounds like a wirearchy or what I would describe as a structure that fosters multi-way flows of power based on trusted relationships facilitated by networked transparency. It reflects what chaordic structures have tried to do – balance chaos and order. Between chaos and order lies complexity, and that’s what simpler, but more nimble, organizational structures can better address.

In a networked world, the future of the corporation will be different, just as the future of many countries today looks suddenly different.

Thanks to Timbuk3 for the title inspiration.

Virtual Trust

by

Virtual work can significantly reduce useless meetings, eliminate commuting time and free up time for knowledge workers to focus on what is important: being creative and dealing with complex problems.

Virtual work also changes the organizational dynamic. Because you can’t watch each person and micro-manage the work, the organization must come up with real performance measurements (instead of obsolete measures such as pay for time), and that in itself might increase productivity.

Virtual learning has similar effects. As much as I enjoy face-to-face group learning sessions, they can be limiting. For instance, there is often no back-channel of text-based IM conversation going on simultaneously, nor can I quickly pop a link or file to everyone while the conversation continues. Face-to-face can also be a bit too  linear (highly dependent on time allotted for the session) and not as productive as some virtual sessions.

A key to learning and working collaboratively is trust. Trust is the glue that holds knowledge organizations together, not rules and regulations.  It’s something to consider when developing a recruitment and retention strategy for knowledge-intensive workplaces.

A few years ago, Charles Green responded to my post about the knowledge economy being a trust economy:

Your title captures an important insight; the knowledge economy allows significant distribution of nodes of knowledge, means of production, etc. To get the value of that, resources have to be distributed. If people can’t figure out how to trust other people, all that value goes unachieved. Or, more likely, it accrues to other organizations or networks who HAVE figured out how to trust each other.

I’ve referred several times to articles at the Trusted Advisor because trust is such an important factor in knowledge work as knowledge and innovation cannot be effectively coerced from workers.

Here’s Charles on Measuring and Managing:

If you can measure it, you can manage it; if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it; if you can’t manage it, it’s because you can’t measure it; and if you managed it, it’s because you measured it.

Every one of those statements is wrong. But business eats it up. And it’s easy to see why …

The ubiquity of measurement inexorably leads people to mistake the measures themselves for the things they were intended to measure.

In the learning & development business there is much focus on compliance training, especially since regulatory compliance accounts for a significant amount of learning content development and learning management technology sales. However, there are few sales pitches that say, go ahead, let your employees decide what’s best for them.

Trust, it seems, doesn’t sell stuff:

  • If you trust workers to manage their learning, you don’t need an LMS.
  • If you trust workers to get things done, you don’t need a tracking system.
  • If you trust workers to learn, you don’t have as much pre-programmed training because they will find what’s best.
  • If you trust workers to be self-directed learners they would have a say in the training budget and I doubt they would vote to buy an LMS.

The large amount of compliance training in the workplace is just one more indicator of the amount of trust that organizations and regulatory agencies have in workers. The default position is don’t trust; regulate. However, this won’t work in virtual, distributed organizations, which are fast becoming the norm.

With increasing virtualization of work, there is little doubt that organizational structures will need to change and that management models will  need to adapt to increasing complexity. The virtual workplace requires a foundation of shared information, knowledge, power and trust.

 

Challenging the status quo

by

Euan Semple’s fantasy:

A business where everyone blogs. Everyone thinks about what they are doing and writes about what they are doing. From the top to the bottom, the edges to the middle. Everyone awake and bouncing off each other intellectually as they get more and more effective at whatever they do.

This sounds like the six of us at the Internet Time Alliance and with all of this free thinking, we have a tendency to question the status quo.

Speaking of status quo, Thierry de Baillon has an interesting perspective on the hidden power of renegade networks:

While one of social software’s goal is to harness freeform communication to facilitate knowledge sharing, this kind of tacit knowledge, mostly learned by doing or exchanged nearly in secret between peers, is quite never shared. In a short exchange with Harold Jarche in the Social Learning Community created by Jane Hart (you should join it if you haven’t yet and are interested in the use of social media for working and learning ), I called it Renegade Knowledge, as it clearly subverts organizational behavior. Paradoxically, it is also the kind of knowledge which makes up for processes and procedures shortcoming and helps things keeping running.

Sumeet Moghe shows how questioning the status quo can be part of organizational culture:

At ThoughtWorks, no question is taboo. A company that started from our founder, Roy Singham’s basement, people seem to feel comfortable questioning just about anything in the company. When I joined the company I was quite surprised to see what I thought was the apparent lack of regard for authority in this organisation. People seemed to have no fear questioning the chairman, the CEO or anyone else in the company. It seemed that no ‘best practice’ escaped the “Why?”question. What I thought of as a sign of disrespect in those days, is really a culture of healthy disruption. A big smell in organisational cultures, is when people follow an individual or a practice blindly. A culture of questioning is a great way to drive conversation and helps establish the relevance of a view or a practice in a specific context. In person, or online, these discussions seem to build up like magic. I must say this starts right from the leadership, who encourage questioning. I’ve rarely seen anyone who feels offended because someone questioned their wisdom.

The status quo is rooted in the past and can provide much-needed stability, but we need to balance this stability with ways to innovate in changing and complex situations. This is the great organizational challenge for most companies. A culture that promotes transparency through the narration of work (e.g. blogging) is a pragmatic way to deal with this.

Blogging, or any other form of narration, lets you create, contextualize, connect and co-create in many ways. As one moves from content creation to contextualization (through grouping, tagging or rating), the potential network effects increase. This gets greater as people connect to the artifacts (through comments, linking or discussion) and then to co-creation, such as mashups or remixes. The basic idea is that as more people manipulate digital objects and give them meaning and context then these objects gain in value.

Narration drives transparency and with transparency come exponential network effects. It’s simple to explain but rather difficult to achieve in hierarchical structures. With ubiquitous connectivity & pervasive proximity, I’m betting the status quo will change.

 

 

In for a penny, in for a pound

by

It’s been a long week and not much of it has been on Twitter. I considered not writing a Friday’s Finds post, having recently hit the 100 week mark. However, as I sit in our kitchen (with four computers), my son tells me that he writes in his journal every night before going to bed. So, after a 1,100 KM drive today, here are some of the things I’ve learned via Twitter this past week.

“Every company has an underground reward program of bad behaviors not punished. Tolerated values are often stronger than stated values” – by @Globoforce

NATO general says more training will be on unclassified web:

[Lieutenant General Karlheinz Viereck] is convinced of the need for radical change in training to enable NATO to meet the challenge of a new security environment. He recognises that NATO must “think, organise and plan totally differently to the past.” His belief in the urgent need for change and the adoption of new methods of training is based partly on a recognition that the old methods are no longer always appropriate in the new circumstances of today’s security environment and partly on a shrewd understanding of the immense possibilities that developments in information and communications technology offer for achieving significant improvements in learning and training.

“Deference” by @euan [I’ll take creative, empathetic, self-directed & innovative any day]

So what’s been bugging me. I think it centres around a couple of words used by the BBC anchor man for the day. I was out of the room at the time but overheard him commenting on the size and enthusiasm of the crowd and contrasting this with our “cynical society” and “lack of deference”. At this point I yelled “Oh fuck off” from the kitchen much to my wife’s annoyance!

If knowledge is power – then knowledge sharing is empowerment.

Search is now officially DEAD. Google dissolves Search Group Internally, Now Called “Knowledge” – via @4KM

Google has seven major product groups. Advertising, Commerce & Local, Mobile (Android), Social, Chrome, YouTube and Search. Search is, of course, Google’s first and most important product. But that group actually no longer exists internally. As of April, when Larry Pagetook over as CEO of the company, the search group was renamed the “knowledge group” internally.

The Hidden Power of Renegade Knowledge – by @tdebaillon

Most of the tasks we are trying to achieve in our daily job are either complex or complicated. They involve multiple steps, human-to-human or human-to-machine interactions, use of different tools, all of which require following procedures, navigating through -and sometime despite- hierarchical requirements and validations, mobilizing resources whose availability isn’t aligned to your needs, producing some outcome for clients, either internal or external, whose logic isn’t yours, all of that in a reduced time frame. Whether we run a home-based business, are a public sector clerk or a Fortune 100 executive doesn’t make much difference here.

Fix the workplace

by

Higher value, paid work is increasingly complex and requires greater creativity. This is how the world works today.  Competition is global. Everything else is getting automated & outsourced it seems. Even lawyers are not immune to this.

In a workplace requiring creative solutions to complex problems, learning and working must be integrated. We need to actually implement the notion of the often-quoted term “continuous learning” Today, learning really is the work.

This is what separates high value work from the stuff getting automated and outsourced. The ability to figure things out, especially wicked problems, is now a key competency. There is no answer sheet here.

Building better courses or getting a learning management system with more features won’t help either. The solutions will not be found in the training department, but in the workplace.

Learning is a process, not an event. It’s a process that is integral to knowledge work, not separate from it. Creative knowledge workers need time to learn on the job, time to reflect, and time to discuss and get feedback. This is often not possible, given the design of the work environment. Instead, we provide sub-optimal methods of learning that are centred around courses, classrooms and hours or days of training, all separate from the work. No wonder it doesn’t work.

Do you want to fix workplace learning? Fix the workplace.