"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 …

 

Leave the cookie-cutters at the bakery

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It seems that everybody wants an easy solution. They want best practices and case studies they can copy. They don’t want to do the hard work of learning for themselves. They want a cookie-cutter solution.

Well there aren’t any.

Case studies abound in business and many sell for a significant amount. Other than for general education, they’re rather useless. Each organization’s situation is not only different, it’s changing. Case studies and best practices in business are like the arbitrary subjects in our schools. They’re easy to package but don’t transfer well into real life.

Few managers ask the tough questions, like what are the underlying assumptions of how we do business and do they make sense? Are any of our practices self-defeating?

Complex problems require require different thinking. Once again, I’d like to refer to the book,  Getting to Maybe. The authors say that in complex environments:

  • Rigid protocols are counter-productive
  • There is an uncertainty of outcomes in much of our work
  • We cannot separate parts from the whole
  • Success is not a fixed address [what I call perpetual Beta]

Rigid protocols are prescriptive and tell you what to do. For dealing with complex systems, we need to make sense of the data and THEN figure out what to do, as Dave Snowden explains in this video.

“We conduct safe-fail experiments. We don’t do fail-safe design. If an experiment succeeds, we amplify it. If an experiment fails, we dampen it.”

The problem with best practices is they presume simplicity and this can cause the organization to fall off the cliff into chaos. Beware the cookie-cutter salesman!

The next time you pick up a report on best practices, ask yourself:

  • Has anything changed since this report was written?
  • How is my organization different from these?
  • Who stands to gain from the report?

Many best practices are self-evident. They’ve worked for years and address relatively simple systems. But the business issues that consume us are most likely complex. Instead of looking for best practices, take that time and money and invest in an experiment (a probe).

Perpetual Beta is an attitude toward learning and working. It is accepting that we’ll never get to the final release and our learning will never stabilize. Perpetual Beta is affirming to principles and actually committing to do something, while remaining open to change. But most of all, it’s actually doing something.

Life in Perpetual Beta – Director's Cut

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You read this blog, why not see the movie by the same name? [I have no affiliation with the film, though I like the title and enjoyed it]

Life in perpetual Beta – Director’s Cut is now available for purchase. Produced by Melissa Pierce @melissapierce and released this month, the documentary covers the effects of social media and the always-on Web on many facets of our lives. It includes interviews with Seth Godin, Biz Stone, Gary Vaynerchuk, Jason Fried, Liz Strauss and many others.

Life in Perpetual Beta is a documentary film about the ways in which technology has/is/will change the ways in which we think about ourselves as individuals and a society. It is exploring the cultural shift that technology creates as it enables people to live more passionate, less planned lives. Life in Perpetual Beta was made by the same principles it explores, all aspects of the film were crowdsourced on social networks, from who to interview, what to ask, camera crews and how to pay for production. Life in Perpetual Beta will inspire you to believe that with a little faith in humanity and help from the internet, anything is possible.

Check out the movie’s website.

There are a lot of interesting stories and perspectives in this video. No answers, but many lenses to see our mixed-up world and how perpetual Beta is becoming the norm.

“There’s no map” – “You have to be open” – “Authenticity is obvious” – “Everybody is in the design business” – “You can change your mind” – “You have to know where you are now and plan forward from that”

Note: The video is only available for purchase in the USA, though you can watch it in the screening room.

Managing information and knowledge

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

QUOTES

“Your brain is most intelligent when you don’t instruct it on what to do” ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb – via @KareAnderson

@adriarichards: “You do a disservice to entire STEM [science, technology, engineering, mathematics] community when you don’t think about bridging the gap between your knowledge and a layperson’s experience.”

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Can there really be Too Much Information? via @jrobes

Information rules all of our lives. In fact, DNA, the building block of our bodies, is “the quintessential information molecule,” writes journalist James Gleick in his new book, The Information: A Theory, a History, a Flood. Yet all this information can be overwhelming and difficult to use effectively. In advance of Gleick’s appearance at Zócalo on March 15, we asked [five] experts whether more information is always a good thing.

Information overload and innovation by @rhillard

Business and government innovation is best measured by the new connections it adds to society and the organisations that support it rather than by the quantity of transient data that becomes persistent or even the amount of truly new data. Adding something new adds the greatest value to the people that it serves when it increases the number of connections.

A little more on not doing KM – via @DavidGurteen

The potential of KM [knowledge management] is enormous but many KM projects have failed to live up to expectations. Why?

  • KM projects are NOT focused on the business
  • KM projects are tough
  • KM project leaders are often inexperienced
  • KM projects poorly conceived
  • Lack of senior management support

“every single organization has an informal network where 70% of the work takes place” by @dustinmattison

Work usually doesn’t get accomplished the way management sees it formally. The problem with formality is the fact that you really cannot foresee every circumstance that takes place in an organization, especially unanticipated circumstances. For example, a mid-level manager is called into his boss and she says that “we need to do a project and my idea is to do it in such as way, now go ahead and put it together and let me know if you have any questions.”

You will typically see that mid-level managers going back to his or her section and calling people together where he needs participation on a project. The first thing they will do is try to figure out exactly what the instructions entail. The thing to keep in mind is that every person has to interpret something in their own way. There is no way that two or more people see something in exactly the same way. The management needs to interpret those instructions and have an interaction with his/her people and try to determine what needs to get done.

The Power of Conversations by @charlesjennings

We rarely, if ever, work and learn alone. We reach our goals and contribute to our organisations’ objectives in a social context. In the maelstrom of our digital communications age the need to think ‘socially’ is more important than ever.

 

Crossing the social media threshold

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My ongoing conversation with Michael Cook continues (Organizational Development Talks: OrgDevTalk), with these thoughts:

Harold: With the delays that seem to be following each of your recent responses to me you may be thinking I have fallen through the web someplace and cannot find my way back. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth, although I have been on a journey thanks to everything you have provided me to think about. From when we started by talking on the phone to where we are now has for me been a very long journey. I am reminded of one of those scenes from the Lord of the Rings films where one or the other of the wizards was looking into either a crystal ball or a boiling pot and could see something going on very far, far away. Maybe that time difference between where you are in New Brunswick and where I am in Washington is actually much greater than the four hours that show on the clock!

Perhaps you saw me after that last exchange wandering lost among the hyperlinks you provided. I wasn’t lost, that’s just the look on my face most of the time, especially when I am considering connectivity. Maybe its just my natural tendency to go inward to address a big question.

After spending a good deal of time with the various references you provided I found my mind wandering back to current client relationships. I have one in particular that years ago began by addressing a problem and providing a service that handles a complicated issue for clients. Over the years they added in a couple more twists to further reduce the complicated issue. Then, maybe 10 years ago they ventured outside the simply complicated and began to address areas of complexity, I say without recognition of the looking glass they had passed through. Since that time they have continued along the path of complexity and had increasing problems with their margins.

How might I begin a conversation with this client’s leadership to have them begin to consider that they have evolved into an entirely different type of animal than they were at the beginning? In the context of our conversation thus far around the use of social media inside business this would seem like a fairly fundamental threshold to cross before a management group might begin to consider the use of these technologies.

How do you tell people that the world is different? This is especially difficult for those in postions of authority who owe their position to the past. Why change what still works?

You could start with a list of events to describe how the world is significantly different, like when a singer from Halifax, Nova Scotia can publish a music video seen by millions of viewers and it affects the stock price of a major corporation: United Breaks Guitars or a group of distributed computer hackers shatter the diplomatic world as they join forces with traditional media outlets: Wikileaks. There are many other examples, such as regional protests coordinated through Facebook or some other social medium.

But you also have to show that the organization itself has changed.

If you have someone coming over for the first time, do you Google them? You can be pretty sure that if they’re under 30, they’ve already checked you out online. If you don’t have a profile on the Web they may even have decided not to show. For many people, if you’re not the Web, you don’t exist. Now that’s a change from a decade ago. Find out if the HR department uses LinkedIn to recruit. Maybe they don’t even know what it is.

Social media for marketing is the tip of the iceberg. The real power of social media is for getting things done. They facilitate learning and working; which are now joined at hip in the creative, complex workplace that’s 24/7 in multiple time zones and always-on.

If the organization doesn’t embrace the values of the external network, it will move at a snail’s pace while the rest of the world spins around it. Does this reflect the inside?

Open & transparent
Need to share
Continuous learning
Conversation is valued
Time for reflection
Perpetual Beta
Business metrics are understood

It’s what’s happening outside.

Finally, you can throw some return on investment figures at them. Simply put, social media give you more time to get things done. There are many other reasons, some of which the folks at Socialcast have neatly put out as an infographic:

Not sure if this addresses your questions, Mike, but we have much more time and all the digital space we need.