"I'd just love to pick your pocket"

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Friends, trust and firewalls

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

@jayshep -“Timesheets are an admission that your clients don’t trust you, and that you don’t trust your clients.” – via @jeffrey_brandt

Friends To Count On: Prof Robin Dunbar on why “Bill” Gore kept his factories small & why group & brain size are linked – via @CharlesJennings

The psychological demands of living in large groups mean that, in primates, species-typical group size correlates rather closely with the species’ brain size. On the primate model, our oversized brain would predict a group size of around 150, the number now known as Dunbar’s Number. We find it in the typical community size of hunter-gatherer societies, in the average village size in county after county in the Domesday book, as well as in 18th-century England; it is the average parish size among the Hutterites and the Amish (fundamentalist Christians who live a communal life in the Dakotas and Pennsylvania, respectively). It is also the average personal network size – the number of people with whom you have a personalised relationship, one that is reciprocal (I’d be willing to help you out, and I know that you’d help me) as well as having a history (we both know how we came to know each other).

Tear down the firewalls: article on freedom of information and expression by @birgittaj at artsforum Canada

I have seen new stories and new myths emerge out of the language of the internet, where people speak together through Google and translate new languages; and I have seen the library of Alexandria materialize with free knowledge and torrents of information wash upon shores otherwise impossible to reach.  I have seen the alchemy of stories take on real shape in a collective online effort; and the truth seeped into the real world.  As the untouchables try to hide their secrets for the chosen few, those secrets keep spilling out in a whirlwind of letters in every digital corner of the world.  They sweep through the streets of Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Tunisia, Greece, Iceland, Hungary, Libya, and the United States — confirming that the rumors are true: “corpocracy” is the new global empire, and it thrives in local corruption.

Email 21Years Into the Game. Who uses it, how, time wasted, techniques. Cool stats, even cooler how-tos, how-not-tos. – via CharlesHGreen

In fact, shockingly, 63% of respondents said they spend more than 30% of their available work time writing, reading, and responding to email, while the majority (71%) of respondents said that it only “somewhat enhances,” “is neutral to,” or even “hinders,” their effectiveness. 40% of respondents said it decreases their balance between work and life outside of work.

 

The democratization of the enterprise

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My About section used to include this paragraph, written a while back and still reflective of my professional perspective:

A guiding goal in much of my work is the democratization of the enterprise. Democracy is our best structure for political governance and I believe it should be the basis of our workplaces as well. As work and learning become integrated in a networked society, I see great opportunities to create better employment models. I know that we can do better than cubicle farms, cookie-cutter job descriptions, generic work competencies and boring, dead-end jobs. I especially enjoy working with any organization that is open to change.

I share this vision with Mark Dowds, whom I’ve only met once but we’ve stayed in touch through the magic of social media. Here’s a great presentation by Mark, founder of Brainpark, on 8 reasons to democratize the workplace.

The entire presentation is well worth watching to understand why these are important, but for the attention deficient, here are the eight reasons:

  1. Reduced costs
  2. Reduced workforce
  3. Increased productivity
  4. Getting closer to customers
  5. Fewer layers of bureaucracy
  6. Shorter time to market
  7. Increased employee motivation
  8. Increased recognition of employee contributions

Mark (@MarkDowds) has a great sense of humour and I’m sure you’ll find his presentation enjoyable.

Good Friday's Finds #100

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I started Friday’s Finds almost two years ago, “In an attempt to make my finds on Twitter more explicit, this may be the start of regular posts on some of the things I learned this past week (weekly seems better than monthly).”

This weekly activity forces me to review and reflect, good things to practice in my opinion.

@funnymonkey – “Every time I read content on Linked In I get another look at the evolving face of spam. I feel dirty afterwards.”

Why high performance organizations will thrive on uncertainty & lack of control – by @RossDawson

When you look at what has really changed in the best performing organizations of today compared to say those of a couple of decades ago, this is at the heart of the matter. Executives used to be in control, know what was happening, and to direct the company’s activities in detail to achieve success. That doesn’t work any more.

As I told the audience, we all know CEOs who like being fully in control of the situation. Unless they can quickly change who they are, they are not well suited to the world of today and tomorrow, and will almost inevitably fail. Their successors will be completely comfortable with uncertainty, lack of control, and guiding a path to success from that base.

Embracing Chaos with a Little Help from My Friends – by @raesmaa

  1. Firstly, business development people at that time were stuck at the process automation hype, in the name of cost and time savings. Both good targets, however people and innovation (other than process innovation) were neglected. The same applies to organizational learning. These were not in the core focus for most organizations.
  2. Secondly (ok, this is obvious); the speed by which the level complexity has grown is huge. Change and complexity are becoming a norm. As Harold Jarche says: “Any work where complexity is not the norm will be of diminishing value.” In my model, I see it all too simplified.
  3. Thirdly, I was on the right track but missing some adjectives – especially the social. And I was stuck to the processes too much; the physical process (distribution of goods) and the related information processes.

Graphic: The Cost of Fragmented Communication in the Enterprise – by @socialcast

Kathryn Schulz: On being wrong [reminds me of Life in perpetual Beta]