Friday's Finds: teaching ourselves

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

QUOTES

@barrydahl “Forget about giving the guy a fish, or teaching him how to fish, either. Teach him how to teach himself.”

@euan “People can’t have authentic conversations with customers if work requires them to leave their real selves at the door”

“When someone is searching,” said Siddhartha, “then it might easily happen that the only thing his eyes see is that what he searches for…”  – via @WDYWFT

@skap5 “Project selection is key. Accepting non-strategic projects or jobs for the cash will haunt you in more ways than you can predict.”

@Ambercadabera “Social Media is now a job, but one day it will be a skill. You dont have a “Director of Phone”” – via Soclogical

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Antony Mayfield: “We don’t grasp how magnificently, terrifyingly complex networks are ...” – via @JohnnieMoore

We don’t grasp how magnificently, terrifyingly complex networks are. We like to draw pictures of them and then think we’ve captured their meaning, when they are more like the weather – always changing, hyper-complex. Predictable if you are smart and have a huge amount of data and training, but only to a point and only some of the time. (There’s mileage in that weather forecasting analogy – I’d like to come up with it.

WSJ: How to get a real education by Scott Adams

Fail Forward. If you’re taking risks, and you probably should, you can find yourself failing 90% of the time. The trick is to get paid while you’re doing the failing and to use the experience to gain skills that will be useful later. I failed at my first career in banking. I failed at my second career with the phone company. But you’d be surprised at how many of the skills I learned in those careers can be applied to almost any field, including cartooning. Students should be taught that failure is a process, not an obstacle.

Maker’s schedule, Manager’s schedule by Paul Graham

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

@tdebaillon Emotional Surplus – via @TimKastelle

Interactions are a human-to-human matter, they involve people, not brands. Whether it be a customer service rep, a sales person, a community manager, another customer, a relative, conversations and engagement are always about exchanging knowledge between different human beings. Period. Nobody, unless irremediably harebrained, has ever conversed with a brand. In that context, talking about brand engagement or online presence is pure nonsense.

Technologies for collaboration and cooperation

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Whether we’re working or learning, how we communicate is a key part of everything we do. Some web tools hinder communication while others may enable it. Last year, in communication and working together, I looked at a communities & networks model by Lilia Efimova:

One of the things I came up when playing with different ideas was to position teams, communities and networks in respect to the most prevalent forms of communication in each case (in all cases the other forms of communication are there as well, but are not at the core of it).

I find the model useful to look at what kinds of social tools are most suitable for the type of collaboration or cooperation we’re trying to foster. For instance, there is a big difference between Sharepoint and Facebook, though both enable some kind of collaboration. Structured, goal-oriented collaboration is typical of what happens inside the firewall in a controlled access environment. Informal, opportunity-drive (serendipitous) collaboration is more like the free-for-all of an event like #lrnchat. Communities of practice are a mix of both.

My experience is that there is no platform that covers the entire spectrum. Open networking environments lack the tools needed for project work while enterprise collaboration systems lack openness and flexibility. There is an opportunity for platforms like Yammer & Socialcast or Brainpark to bridge the structured with the informal. Three smaller pieces loosely joined seems to be a better approach for collaborative work/learning at this time rather than a unified platform. That may change as collaboration technologies mature but for now any large organization should be looking at all three.

Organizational architecture

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Why do people do bad things? Is it because they have to? Here is Gary Stager discussing a re-enactment of the famous Milgram Experiment:

One of the subjects in the television program was a 7th grade teacher who explained that she didn’t stop shocking the learner because as a teacher she had learned when a student’s complaints were phony. I thought to myself, “Has she electrocuted many students?”

The teacher asked the researcher, “There isn’t going to be any lawsuit from this medical facility, right?” When told that the teacher was not liable, she replied, “That’s what I needed to know.” It is however worth noting that this was after she induced the maximum shock and the learner demanded that the experiment be terminated.

In this interview with Guy Kawasaki, Dr. Philip Zimardo discusses the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, where students played their roles as guards or prisoners and abuses started within 24 hours:

But on the second morning, the prisoners rebelled; the guards crushed the rebellion and then instituted stern measures against these now “dangerous prisoners”. From then on, abuse, aggression, and eventually sadistic pleasure in degrading the prisoners became the daily norm. Within thirty-six hours the first prisoner had an emotional breakdown and had to be released, followed in kind by similar prisoner breakdowns on each of the next four days.

German researchers have recently released horrendous stories of what went on with regular soldiers during the Second World War. As der Spiegel notes: “Newly published conversations between German prisoners of war, secretly recorded by the Allies, reveal horrifying details of violence against civilians, rape and genocide”.

In this report from Science News we learn that moral talk is cheap:

When faced with a thorny moral dilemma, what people say they would do and what people actually do are two very different things, a new study finds. In a hypothetical scenario, most people said they would never subject another person to a painful electric shock, just to make a little bit of money. But for people given a real-world choice, the sparks flew.

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But when there was cold, hard money involved, the data changed. A lot. A whopping 96 percent of people in the scanner chose to administer shocks for cash.

It seems it’s not just authority, but money (from which we can derive a form of authority) that may drive us to do immoral things.

Part of the answer lies in the concluding paragraph of the der Spiegel article:

The morality that shapes the actions of people is not rooted in the people themselves, but in the structures that surround them. If they change, everything is basically possible — even absolute evil.

I have often quoted Winston Churchill, and it’s most appropriate here – “First we shape our structures and then our structures shape us”.

Adding new programs, such as diversity training, will not address structural issues. Organizational architecture, which should be a blend of the best from our management disciplines and neuro-sciences, is what’s really needed. My observations over several decades show that most people work within structures without really thinking about them. For our future, and our humanity, we need to change this. What kind of foundation is your organization built upon?

Are we awake?

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Social business offers businesses a major opportunity for redefining the nature of work and the structure of companies, freeing knowledge workers from organizational-only pressure and defining a new social contract between customers, workers, firms and their ecosystem. On a dark side, it also gives companies novel ways to enforce business-as-usual and to further exploit the outdated legacy of our industrial era. People-centric or IT-centric, the use of social technologies for enterprise is at a crossroad, and it might be time to face it without self-indulgence.

This is how my colleague, Thierry deBaillon, concludes his article on the two faces of social business. It’s not just social business, but the entire model of the Net that we need to critically examine. As Jaron Lanier wrote in You Are Not a Gadget:

The people who are perhaps the most screwed by open culture are the middle classes of intellectual and cultural creation.  The freelance studio musician, the stringer selling reports to newspapers from warzones are both crucial contributors to culture. Each pays dues and devotes years to honing a craft. They used to live off the trickle down effects of the old system, and like the middle class at large, they are precious. They get nothing from the new system.

If you’re not one of the recognized leaders in your field, can you make a living online or are you just part of the long tail, valuable only to aggregators and their advertising revenues? As a content creator are you providing the fodder that lets Google, Facebook and YouTube earn huge market valuations?

Will there be a middle class in the networked economy? Is there a middle class in the social business?

Doc Searls says that the social web is nothing more than the commercial web:

I want liberation from the commercial Web’s two-decade old design flaws. I don’t care how much a company uses first person possessive pronouns on my behalf. They are not me, they do now know me, and I do not want them pretending to be me, or shoving their tentacles into my pockets, or what their robots think is my brain. Enough, already.

We’re definitely reaching a crossroad with net neutrality, open data, and personal social networks on one side and usage-based billing, controlled access, and gated communities on the other. As I’ve written elsewhere, 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.

However, I see the darkness creeping in, ever so quietly. It was only one hundred years ago that we had widespread child labour in North America.

Child labour and other inhuman practices haven’t been eradicated but we have made huge strides. Are we letting society and our workplaces slip backwards? Any technology cuts both ways. The Net has the potential for much good.  There is still an opportunity for a workplace reformation, but we have to seize it.

"we are bound to fail"

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

QUOTES:

“We could have saved the earth but we were too damn cheap.” – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. – via @RobertaHill

Remember … the technology that gives You the power to organize, also gives Them the power to watch – by @ValdisKrebs

“It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.” ~ Virginia Woolf – via @MarionChapsal

CFO: What happens if we invest in developing our people & then they leave us? CEO: What happens if we don’t and they stay? via @Be_Why @eranium

“A famously successful entrepreneur once told me, ‘Avoid working with people you don’t like or trust; it’s not worth it.'” – @MurrayBuchanan

Comic Sans walks into a bar & the barman says: “We don’t serve your type here.” via @techherding @TedInJest @CuteGecko @those2girls

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The Prepared Mind by @snowded [my emphasis]

The problem is we build on the assumption that we should not fail, not the assumption that we are bound to fail, but with early detection and fast recovery/exploitation we can turn the situation to our advantage. That means organisational structures that are agile before the crisis, not bureaucratic. It means network connections built and sustained in advance, the ability to delegate power when needed without complex process. I could go on (and will over the next few days).

@dweinberger – Transparency is the new objectivity – via @plevy
Outside of the realm of science, objectivity is discredited these days as anything but an aspiration, and even that aspiration is looking pretty sketchy. The problem with objectivity is that it tries to show what the world looks like from no particular point of view, which is like wondering what something looks like in the dark. Nevertheless, objectivity — even as an unattainable goal — served an important role in how we came to trust information, and in the economics of newspapers in the modern age.

“In a very deep sense, applied science is an oxymoron” – via @rlanzara

It is interesting that the nations and states that could afford to delve into basic research, philosophy and the humanities, that is, into the supposedly least practical of all areas, are the same ones that were especially developed during their eras, even if the causal context is not entirely clear. Perhaps because potentially more is unknown than is known and applied, perhaps because despite this, there is an added value to the deep inquiry that demands people invest many years and resources into the endeavor of research, even today.

University of Alberta surgeon educates over 100,000 through iTunes podcasts aimed at medical students – via @sidneyeve

A University of Alberta professor and surgeon, Dr. Jonathan White, decided to make 10 to 30 minute iTunes podcasts of his lecture material in order to reach his students at a different level.  His medical students feel the free Podcasts are more captivating, and enable them to consume a greater amount of content when they are short on time.

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a suit

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What is so different about working online? Why do social media scare the sh*t out of many organizational decision-makers?

As I wrote last year, working online is different:

But it’s not about the technology. The real issue is getting people used to working at a distance. For instance, everything has to be transparent for collaborative work to be effective online. Using wikis or Google Documents means that everyone can see what the others have contributed. There is no place to hide. For example, I once developed a Request for Proposals with a large group distributed across several time zones. Everyone could provide input for a specified period of time and then that issue was closed. Later, some people complained that their requirements were not being addressed. I was able to look at the revision history of the wiki and show that they had not even contributed on those issues. This stopped the complaints and we were able to move on.

A major aspect of online collaboration is that our symbols of power are stripped bare. No one knows what kind of fancy suit you’re wearing or if you have an expensive watch on your wrist [which only old folks use anyway]. Nobody has seen you drive into your private parking spot with your high price car. You are what you contribute. That’s it.

Computer technology has been a great equalizer in our society. I can buy one of the best computers on the market and the richest person in the world is not able to get one that performs much better. Consumer technology devices are great equalizers. I probably have as much computational power as most CEO’s of major technology firms. Actually, I may have more, because my system has not been crippled by the IT department.

The collaborative, networked enterprise saw its birth in open source software projects. From these widely dispersed groups we got blogs, wikis and micro-sharing as tools to help get things done. But these groups are fairly egalitarian. You’re as good as your code. The suits weren’t invited.

You see, on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a suit … and that’s a major barrier to adoption.

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Image: The New Yorker, 1993

Learning and working effectively

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An effective networked workplace can be viewed as a three-sided framework, with a leadership/management strategy (radical & wirearchical) that supports collaborative work enabled by social learning.

All three are necessary. If there is any degree of complexity in the work, collaboration needs to be supported by a flexible management framework that encourages social learning. This is especially true for creativity and innovation. These cannot be forced, yet many of our organizational practices still reflect cultures that do not trust individuals.

Just read any HR or IT policy of a large firm. Most do not start with, “we trust you to do the right thing …”

Jay Cross and I have been tossing some ideas at each over the past week [as he wines & dines his way through Europe] and this graphic is a result of that collaboration.

The intent of this image is to show that both directed (by the organization to get work done or to meet compliance needs) and undirected (by individuals and self-forming groups) activities make up our work and learning how to do work. We work collaboratively to get things done. We learn socially because we want to. Both are necessary but not everything can be managed. The parts in red should be self-managed (though they need organizational support).

It’s when we try to create (learning) management systems for the red parts that we get into trouble, because we’re using complicated approaches for complex areas. Read more on Cynefin:

Complicated, in which the relationship between cause and effect requires analysis or some other form of investigation and/or the application of expert knowledge, the approach is to Sense – Analyze – Respond and we can apply good practice.

Complex, in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe – Sense – Respond and we can sense emergent practice.

My advice is to manage above the line and support below it. However, learning is a jagged, messy process, as the line shows, so don’t expect linear results. Stay flexible; it’s life in perpetual Beta.

Social learning is what managers do already

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Here are some more questions from our Working Smarter conversation on 30 March 2011, followed by my comments. Feel free to weigh in.

Q1: Our Legal department discourages social learning because the communication cannot be reviewed by them before being presented. How has this been addressed by others?

Q2: What social media/social learning methods are effective in regulation heavy business where a single mistake can cause business-wide repercussions.  I am actually afraid of peer-to-peer education because often even the most respected peers just don’t get it right.

Q3: How can any of this really be implemented effectively in an organization that is bound by confidentiality and regulatory red-tape such as healthcare?

Q4: Do you need to be concerned with a technical answer being wrong by non-experts in social learning and be responsible for that error.

I wonder if a legal department would also recommend that people don’t talk to each other in passing, use the phone or send email? The real problem may be that the legal department doesn’t understand social media. Social learning is already happening. Any organization that is not social is not human.

One of the posted responses was that when social learning environments are done right, the community becomes self-correcting. When the community is transparent, with no anonymous posting, people tend to behave. Inaccuracies are found and corrected. As developers say, given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

There is an example of the CIA’s Intellipedia wiki in what one could consider a confidential, highly controlled, and regulation-heavy organization:

“During a typical workday, Intellipedia—the Intelligence Community’s version of Wikipedia—receives about 5,000 contributions. The third anniversary of Intellipedia on Friday, April 17, was anything but a typical workday. Intellipedia users broke the record for contributions in one day with 15,046 edits.”

If clear ‘answers’ are necessary for regulatory or safety purposes, then these are not the areas where you let anyone respond and make up answers. However, there are many places where people can learn with and from each other. Much time is wasted in finding information, locating expertise, scheduling meetings and dealing with redundant communications. Social media can help and concurrently free up time for learning and innovation. I have yet to find an organization that has too much innovation going on.

Q5: “social learning reduces waste of time” would be viewed as paradoxicial by our senior leaders who believe people waste time in social tools :)

The posted response said — “I’ve had success in asking senior leadership how often they learn and exchange information using social rather than formal mechanisms. Once they put their own learning experiences into this context, they are often more likely to accept the value of social mechanisms.”

For example, according to a UK white paper on How Managers Learn, respondents reported that their most-used as well as the most effective informal learning method was — informal chats with colleagues. Other top-rated methods include the use of (external) search engines, trial & error, informal on-the-job instruction, and professional reading.

That’s in their own words ;)

Friday's Finds #97

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

QUOTES

“Progress is man’s ability to complicate simplicity.” ~Thor-Heyerdahl – via @tedcoine
@rebelbrown

@marciamarcia – “Just overheard at #closym, ‘there is nothing human or resourceful about HR.‘”

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The connected company – by @driessen

What is the social business? What does it look like? Dave Gray shares his view in napkin sketches.

Life expectancy of a S&P 500 company is getting shorter. It’s 15 years now.

Companies are complex systems (shown by complex hierarchies). There are companies that make sense of other companies because they are so complex. Think Microsoft and government.

For every extra employee your profit goes down. For every 3 employees your profit per employee goes down. It is increasing, but by less and less. Or: diminishing returns.

However productivity goes up in city when the population grows. Why?

Content is not King – by @ewanmcintosh

One of the key points I’ve been driving in the past year has been the importance of schools providing places for conversations and exploration to take place, perhaps through a design thinking-based pedagogy and process. Such a process takes the onus off the teacher to be the one preparing resources for children, effectively doing the learning for the youngster. Instead, it forces interaction around content, rather than content to be consumed or ‘learnt’, to take centre stage.

Customers Say Half of all Salespeople Are Unprepared for the Call by @davidabrock [isn’t this an opportunity for social, informal, peer2peer learning?]

 

 

Working Smarter, one day at a time

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ITA 2011Yesterday we hosted a conversation on social learning and working smarter, facilitated by the folks at Citrix and the eLearning Guild. We all enjoyed the hour long session and participants will be sent the link to the recording by Citrix. In Jane’s social learning community a few comments arose about the lack of interaction. I responded that with 500 people in the audience and only one hour, we were limited in what we could do. Citrix provided the platform and support staff for one hour (plus several hours of rehearsal). We had already crowd-sourced the questions and also answered dozens of text questions that came in (however, it seems not all were posted back to the audience). It was great the community participated for 30 days before the event and hopefully will continue for many days after.

Yesterday’s event was only one part of many conversations that started several years ago on our blogs and continues on Twitter and other platforms.

I’ve highlighted some of the questions on performance improvement asked yesterday  and expanded on the responses, including links:

Q: Where does performance support as a process integrate into social tools and learning at the time and place of need? Where do you best recommend that HPT/ISD individuals gain the social/collaboration skills? What tools are you using to create the performance/support and learning communities?

Performance support starts as a complement to social learning, but then we move to having the community co-develop the performance support tools. The best way to develop any skill is to practice & get feedback – I suggest you  jump in and start using these tools in order to understand them and then see how they can be used in the workplace. Check Jane’s tool of the day site, but lots of potential solutions: open source, commercial, already out there (e.g. Yammer & Status.net)

Links:

Whither ISD, ADDIE & HPT? (includes definitions of these acronyms)

HPT and ISD

Getting to Working Smarter

Q: What do you opine regarding HPI/HPT practitioners (ASTD/ISPI) and the need for this type of specialized practitioner as a member of organizations’ HR or as a community resource?

I think HPT skills are a good addition to training development skills but we also need to add business skills and social/collaboration skills. I find that HPT doesn’t get “social” very well. Basically, HPT is only one toolset;  good for some things, but not all.

HPT, like many other workplace disciplines, creates silos. Networks require the integration of organizational support. We’re realizing that compartmentalized approaches to supporting work do not work in a highly networked world. Why should HR, IT, Finance, Training, KM, OD, Marketing etc. be separate functions? It’s time to rid our organizations of Taylor’s ghost and use radically different management. Clark Quinn calls it a unified performer-facing environment and I have said for a while that we need to break down the intra-organizational walls. I hear the same discussions in HR, OD, KM, Training and IT. They see their traditional roles and control eroding. Each field is trying to remain relevant but it’s only by working together that they will.

It’s not just about HPT, or L&D, or HR. Systems thinking is necessary.

Q: Did I miss it, or have you not defined the term “social learning”?

No cookie-cutter answers here ;)

Bandura’s Social Learning Theory

Bandura and Social Cognitive Theory

Working Smarter through Social Learning

Learning Socially

Social Learning Handbook

More to follow …