A Working Smarter Conversation

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Join the five of us for an online conversation

Ask a question; win a book. Then register to join us online on 30 March 2011

We will discuss whatever interests you in the realm of Working Smarter.

Do you have burning questions about social learning, web 2.0, or working smarter? Want to find out how other organizations are grappling with the culture, politics, and governance of implementing informal learning?

Ask us a question or suggest a topic. The more controversial the better.

We will give free copies of the Working Smarter Fieldbook to six people who leave a comment below.

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Four very interesting folks to follow, in my opinion ;)

 

 

"Tyranny was the solution to what was essentially a communications problem"

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

QUOTE: “How to squelch human potential – Step 1) Create assembly-line schools, 2) Distract w/ pop culture, 3) Build corporate cube-farms. Mix well” by @Richard_Florida

Dyer: Why the Arabs can handle democracy via @ewellburn

A mass society, thousands, then millions strong, confers immense advantages on its members. Within a few thousand years, the little hunting-and-gathering groups were pushed out of the good lands everywhere. By the time the first anthropologists appeared to study them, they were on their last legs, and none now survive in their original form. But we know why the societies that replaced them were all tyrannies.

The mass societies had many more decisions to make, and no way of making them in the old, egalitarian way. Their huge numbers made any attempt at discussing the question as equals impossible, so the only ones that survived and flourished were the ones that became brutal hierarchies. Tyranny was the solution to what was essentially a communications problem.

Fast forward ten thousand years, and give these societies mass communications. You don’t have to wait for Facebook; just invent the printing press. Wait a couple of hundred years while literacy spreads, and presto! We can all talk to one another again, after a fashion, and the democratic revolutions begin. We didn’t invent the principle of equality among human beings; we just reclaimed it.

Modern democracy first appeared in the West only because the West was the first part of the world to develop mass communications. It was a technological advantage, not a cultural one – and as literacy and the technology of mass communications have spread around the world, all the other mass societies have begun to reclaim their heritage too.

The Arabs need no instruction in democracy from anybody else. They own it, too.

RWW How Recent Changes to Twitter’s Terms of Service Might Hurt Academic Research via @jonhusband

Twitter’s recent announcement that it was no longer granting whitelisting requests and that it would no longer allow redistribution of content will have huge consequences on scholars’ ability to conduct their research, as they will no longer have the ability to collect or export datasets for analysis.

We all know that our bosses legally spy on us. But what do they do with the info? by @jessebrown [read through to the conclusion]

“Almost everybody monitors—close to 100 per cent,” says Avner Levin, a business law professor at Ryerson University and director of the school’s Privacy and Cyber Crime Institute. “It’s become a fact of corporate life. There’s hardly a discussion about it anymore.” While British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec have legislation guaranteeing some level of employee privacy, Ontario offers none. Many companies ask you to sign away every possible claim on your own data. You may have agreed to be spied on when you signed your employment contract.

Why the weak students end up as educators CS Monitor via @pgsimoes

We also need to develop our future teachers’ own minds, by holding them to the same intellectual standards as other college students. Their so-called methods courses would be much richer if we asked them to read and write about the key dilemmas in their fields. And they should also take more classes outside of the ed-school, where intellectual requirements are already higher.

Would that make them “better” teachers? I’d like to say yes. Surely, though, it would make them more complex, curious, and contemplative human beings. There is nothing in the world more inherently fascinating than education. But ed schools have made it boring, by stripping it of its intellectual edge – and by letting our students slide along.

The students know it, too. That’s why weaker ones flock to the subject – and the more able ones stay away. In each of the past four decades, as my colleague Sean Corcoran has shown, a declining fraction of America’s top college students have chosen to become educators. If we want to reverse that trend, we’ll have to make teacher-preparation programs challenging enough to lure these students back in.

PEG: Knowledge Workers in the British Raj – by @pevansgreenwood [excellent series]

The future of our business – post Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business Design – is not in applying a new human-resources paradigm to our existing workforce. Much like the British Raj in provincial India, our businesses need to adapt to an environment where we don’t have the time or resources to micromanage every task. The workforce which staffed our bureaucracy in the past is not the same workforce we need in the future. The future of our business is with a smaller, more dynamic workforce of self-starters, built around flat organizational structures and more general skills which devolve responsibility for operational problems to the front line and empower them to work together and solve these problems under their own direction, while freeing the executive team to focus on steering the organization through the challenging environment we operate in today.

 

Frictionless learning

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Gary Wise, in Close to the Edge: The Radicalization of Training,  suggests that workers need an environment with:

seamless, frictionless and ubiquitous access to/from the right learning assets – at their moment(s) of learning need – in work context-friendly amounts – in compelling, readily-consumable formats – to/from the right devices.

This is definitely part of the solution and goes a long way in addressing the training department’s predominantly event-based, fire & forget, mindset. However, it’s also content-centric and appears to assume that if you have the right content, learning will happen.

But more of our work is in exception-handling or is increasingly complex and requires the sharing of highly contextual tacit knowledge. That means we also need to be connected to the right people at the right time. Professional social networks enable these connections. I would add to Gary’s description, “seamless, frictionless and ubiquitous access to/from the right learning assets as well as a dynamic network of colleagues/co-workers …”. Once again, this sounds like wirearchy:

a dynamic [multi-way]  flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology

Emergent Value

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A certain amount of hierarchy is necessary to get work done. Networks route around hierarchy. Networks enable work to be done collaboratively, especially when that work is complex and there are no simple answers, best practices or case studies to fall back on. This is where real business value lies – complex work.

The above image, by Verna Allee, shows the relationship between hierarchies and networks in various domains. While most organizations need to deal with all of these domains, each takes different control methods and communications platforms. Complex work requires looser hierarchies and stronger networks, something many organizations need to improve.

As simple work gets automated, it still needs to be controlled. Complicated work is outsourced but needs to be coordinated. The high value work, as I’ve contended before on this blog, is complex (and creative) and requires collaboration to get things done. This has to be enabled by communications platforms that do more than the traditional Intranet. Enterprise collaboration tools – Socialcast; Jive; Brainpark – are the platforms for complex, collaborative work. In addition, knowledge workers need to regularly poke their heads out of these private networks and get involved in public, social networks – Twitter; LinkedIn; Facebook – which are rather chaotic. This is where they may find new ideas and create emergent value for their organizations.

All levels are needed in any large organization, and they shouldn’t be confused. Enabling the outer rings is critical for long-term success and that’s what business leaders, IT departments, HR and Legal have to enable; very soon.

Follow-up post: Embrace Chaos

Finding the time for networked learning

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A survey of small and medium sized businesses (SMB) showed workers spend about half their day on unproductive tasks:

Knowledge Workers are among the largest staff component in a typical SMB

SMB Knowledge Workers spend an estimated 36 percent of their time trying to

Contact customers, partners or colleagues

Find information

Schedule a meeting

Approximately 14 percent of SMB Knowledge Workers’ time is spent:

Duplicating information (e.g. forwarding e-mails or phone calls to confirm if fax/e-mail/text message was received

Managing unwanted communications (e.g. spam e-mails or unsolicited time-wasting phone calls)

Note: I registered for access to the complete report but it does not go into survey methodology or indicate the sample size, so I would not consider this scientific, but it’s an interesting data point.

These activities are important but obviously they take too much time. Finding the right information faster can be addressed individually through frameworks like networked learning (personal knowledge mastery). Finding information, plus the remaining four activities can be made more effective and efficient through social networks. For example, the largest stated benefit of organizations using social media is increasing speed of access to knowledge (McKinsey 2010). Simple tools like Doodle can make scheduling a breeze. Social networks like Twitter or LinkedIn let you find the right people faster.

The ROI for social media in business is pretty obvious: reducing wasted time.

In addition, there is a huge performance benefit. Not only is there less wasted time but that time can go into learning.

Since +90% of our learning is not supported by formal instruction, the opportunities for using social media at work are evident — more time for personal learning as well as a medium for networked learning.

 

Network Learning Workshop Toronto May 2011

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I’m running a one-day workshop with University of Toronto’s iSchool Institute on 27 May 2011. If you know of anyone in the Toronto area who might be interested in attending, please pass on the information. In the past several months many people have approached me asking for tips and techniques on managing digital overload. This is the course for them.

Follow the link for registration details:

Network Learning: Working Smarter

Are you tired of dealing with information overload in your work? Perhaps you’re looking at it from the wrong perspective. Clay Shirky, professor and author, says, “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.”

This course gives you the processes and tools to create your own information filters.

“In the period ahead of us, more important than advances in computer design will be the advances we can make in our understanding of human information processing – of thinking, problem solving, and decision making…” Herbert Simon, Economics Nobel-prize winner (1968)

Network Learning (also called Personal Knowledge Management or personal learning networks) is an individual, disciplined process by which we make sense of information, observations and ideas. In the past it may have been keeping a journal, writing letters or having conversations. These are still valid, but with digital media we can add context by categorizing, commenting or even remixing it. We can also store digital media for easy retrieval.

The Web has given us more ways to connect with others in our learning but many people only see the information overload aspect of our digital society. Engaging others can actually make it easier to learn and not become overwhelmed. Effective networked learning is the difference between surfing the waves or being drowned by them. It also helps us to work smarter.

Weekly mind-stretching

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

“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” ~ O. W. Holmes Jr – via @zecool

Forget About Being a Fast Follower – via @TimKastelle

Experimentation is very intertwined with innovation. Both require a hypothesis – if we do X, then we will get benefit Y. Both require a lot of work for uncertain outcomes. Both require rigor and careful planning. And both are consistently avoided by turning to “experts” who provide an answer, which takes less time and exposes the executive to less risk. After all, if the idea fails and the expert supported it, it can’t be the executive’s fault!

ADAPT: leverage complexity; develop ‘wise’ IT; encourage cross-mentoring; tap networks; strategic community-building – by @Quinnovator

The reflection was that the mechanisms we were suggesting then, to make companies more resilient, were actually strategies making companies more flexible and adaptive.  It’s been a number of years, so it’s interesting to me to see what we were recommending back then and it’s even more relevant now:

  • leverage human complexity: encourage diversity and use it to drive richer solutions
  • develop ‘wise’ information technology: use technology more strategically to complement our capabilities
  • encourage always-on cross-mentoring: have mentoring networks to provide support across tough times and develop people in multiple dimensions
  • tapping social and value networks: reach out across organizational boundaries to partners and customers and eliminate blockages
  • strategic community-building: facilitating information flows

@mbauwens “Most of the economic growth during the Internet era has been largely unmonetized”

As for the great stagnation in real wages in particular, the biggest reason is probably the extraordinarily rapid pace at which the BRICs and developing world has become educated and accessible to the developed world since the Cold War. In other words, outsourcing has in a temporary post-Cold-War spree outraced the ability of most of us in the developed world to retrain to the more advanced industries. The most unappreciated reason, and the biggest reason retraining for newer industries has been so difficult, is that unmonetized value provides no paying jobs, but may destroy such jobs when it causes the decline of some traditionally monetized industries. On the Internet the developed world is providing vast value to the BRICs and developing world, but that value is largely unmonetized and thus produces relatively few jobs in the developed world. The focus of the developed world on largely unmonetized, though extremely valuable, activities has been a significant cause of wage stagnation in the developed world and of skill and thus wage increases in the developing world. Whereas before they were buying our movies, music, books, and news services, increasingly they are just getting our free stuff on the Internet. The most important new industry of the last twenty years has been mostly unmonetized and thus hasn’t provided very many jobs to retrain for, relative to the value it has produced.

Revealed: Air Force ordered software to manage army of fake virtual people | The Raw Story via @tomatlee

Unfortunately, the Air Force’s contract description doesn’t help dispel suspicions. As the text explains, the software would require licenses for 50 users with 10 personas each, for a total of 500. These personas would have to be “replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent.”

It continues, noting the need for secure virtual private networks that randomize the operator’s Internet protocol (IP) address, making it impossible to detect that it’s a single person orchestrating all these posts. Another entry calls for static IP address management for each persona, making it appear as though each fake person was consistently accessing from the same computer each time.

 

 

 

Learning Assessment

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For March the LCBQ is:

How do you assess whether your informal learning, social learning, continuous learning, performance support initiatives have the desired impact or achieve the desired results?


Jay Cross responds:

You need to wait a while before taking the assessment. Smile-sheets and test scores prove nothing because they are administered before the forgetting curve sets in. The reason only 10%-15% of what is learned shows up on the job is that most of what you learn disappears rapidly unless it’s reinforced by reflection and practice. That’s why it’s a good idea to wait three to six months — to see what sticks.

In the Canadian military, it is called Validation, as opposed to Evaluation. The latter is to make sure your training program is using appropriate methods and resources. The former is to ensure that you’re meeting operational needs.

We used rolling validations in the Air Force. First, they were based on training that had clear Performance Objectives (PO’s). We would follow up with a quick survey to course graduates, their immediate supervisors and perhaps other senior operational staff. Six months after each course we sent out a survey. It listed all the PO’s on the course. Graduates were asked if 1) they had learned the skill on the course; 2) if they had to use that skill in the past six months and 3) if they felt competent with that skill [yes, it’s subjective]. Supervisors were asked if that graduate had performed the skill in the past six months and if so, whether the graduate was competent.

This was a very quick pulse-taking that could then be followed up with more in-depth interviews.

Could you do this with informal or social learning? Of course you could. You just need to describe the capability you wish to measure.

For example, after 6 months on the job, with access to micro-sharing, company blogs and the development of a personal knowledge management framework, you could ask similar questions.

Do you have to regularly access information and knowledge to do your job?

Have you learned to access information and knowledge faster than when you started 6 months ago?

Supervisors can be asked if people are effective at getting access to information in a timely fashion.

The Big Question is, what do you expect to achieve? In a complex environment, there is no linear relationship between cause and effect, so we know these measurements are only indicators. Used correctly, and administered as lightly as possible, they can help make informed decisions on priorities, support or resource allocations.

 

 

Glass Houses

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My conversation with Michael Cook continues (Organizational Development Talks: OrgDevTalk), this time with no specific question, but some very good insight and commentary:

Harold: I just read your response to my latest couple of questions. In my view your response is profound. I especially like the reference to the address delivered to people in the HR field.  I am a former HR professional so what I’ll say next is grounded in direct experience.

In my opinion, the HR profession is badly in need of a new identity, one that demonstrates clearly to all members of senior management that HR has a strategic imperative which is to be accountable for shaping the management models and practices for the future of any organization.

As you have pointed out, and no doubt what was recognized by your HR audience, much of what is currently contributed by HR staffs falls in the category of “complicated work” which is increasingly a candidate for outsourcing. Where the largest opportunity lies, in my opinion, is to transform the current conversation around “employee engagement” from being held as a complicated matter to one that is viewed as complex. We have arrived at a point where increasingly an employee’s time in the workplace is merely an intersection in their lives, not necessarily a destination, one where their personal vision, talents and skills come together with a “place” or occasion to meet some but certainly not all of their personal needs.

To the degree that employee engagement, supported by HR practices, continues to be thought of as a “thing” to be tweaked, like the temperature of a room, companies will continue to either lose their best people or fail to attract the talent they truly need. The likelihood in these scenarios is that those same companies and their HR department staffs will be left scratching their heads and speaking in low tones about work ethic and attitudes of entitlement as the root of their problems.

Two of the slides from your presentation struck me as particularly poignant, numbers 20 and 29. The first points out that the “cheese” for many people currently working as employees has actually moved. Waaay back in the early 2000’s Ken Thomas provided very grounded insight that could serve as a guiding light for the necessary transformation with the publication of ‘Intrinsic Motivation at Work: What Really Drives Employee Engagement’. Thomas uses a somewhat different vocabulary than yours yet to my ears and eyes it conveys much the same meaning. You say Autonomy, Mastery and Sense of Purpose. He says Meaningfulness, Choice, Competence and Progress. Samo/Samo to me. Then you point out (slide 29) that 90% of the learning that matters today in the workplace is the outcome of an experiential process, either personal or with the assistance of others. Yikes, suddenly it is no longer a question of if social media but which and how soon. Clearly the technology and the times have collided much like the chicken and the egg.

I realize there is not a question here but I have been wrestling with one for some time and it is; how can we break up the mythology around engagement, starting with the recognition that engagement cannot be controlled, it can be offered. Leadership appropriate to the reality now is supportive/offering and inquisitive/asking. HR Leadership can lead this transformation and as Peter Block might say, it is not a matter of how as much as are they willing to say YES!

“We have arrived at a point where increasingly an employee’s time in the workplace is merely an intersection in their lives, not necessarily a destination, one where their personal vision, talents and skills come together with a “place” or occasion to meet some but certainly not all of their personal needs.”

For too long we’ve had simplistic models of what motivates people. This is where the whole “incentivise” BS comes from [no, it’s not a word]. People are complex beings. They have multiple, overlapping valences. Good leaders have always understood that.

I agree with Mike. It’s a question of which social media and how soon. This conversation about social media will be dead in a few years. Nobody discusses email any more, other than how many unread messages they have in their inbox. Social media will be there in less than five years. I give it 24 months. But that’s not the important point.

Control is the killer. It’s the basis of our industrial-rooted work systems. Many HR policies imply that people cannot be trusted. Almost all IT policies say that. But it’s a new world. Everything is transparent, whether you want it to be or not. Just ask Julian or Anonymous.

Image by Dave Makes

Once you realize you live in a glass house, you start thinking differently.

 

 

NetWorkShop Sackville

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“I’ve become convinced that understanding how networks work is an essential 21st century literacy.” ~ Howard Rheingold

Patti Anklam, author of Net Work, will be conducting a workshop at Mount Allison University on Saturday, 19 March (9 AM to 4PM). Sponsored by the university’s Office of Research Services, this workshop is focused on bringing together faculty, researchers and businesses in understanding how networks influence us.

Sign up for the workshop online. Similar workshops cost $399, so take advantage of this free offer .

A NetWorkShop is a customized workshop that combines:

A clear and useful presentation of basic network concepts that demystify the hype;

Practical exercises in basic methods that will help participants learn how to use network concepts to make sense of and manage organizational, project, and personal networks;

In short, the NetWorkShop offers a new perspective – a network lens – that sheds light on how human networks are structured and how technologies can enhance our ability to collaborate and co-create.

Leaders Net Work

Collaboration across boundaries is one of the most significant challenges for leaders in the 21st century. Collaboration is about working to make networks effective. Net Work – being intentional about creating and sustaining networks – is a core capability of successful leaders.

Your personal network is key to your performance. Work performance and success is highly correlated with an individual’s ability to maintain a diverse network of contacts and to understand how to maintain and manage relationships. A simple exercise will reveal the diversity and reach of the participants’ personal networks and provide insight into how personal networks affect performance.

You can’t manage a network. Many traditional “soft” management skills can refocus the role of management toward a model of stewardship. Stewardship results in creation of conditions in which vibrant and focused networks can make a difference for an organization. Using case examples from participants, we’ll work out some ways that the network perspective can leverage the power of emerging networks.

Managing in Complexity. A complex system is one in which the relationships are always changing and in which there is absolutely no way to predict the future. We’ll tie together the network concepts, exercises, and cases by taking a practical view of how to lead effectively in an environment of continuous change.

The NetWorkShop (PDF)