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)

 

Changing the mechanistic mindset

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The latest question from Michael Cook (Organizational Development Talks: OrgDevTalk) continues from our last conversations:

Harold: I am still not certain about my future as a member of the blogging community but I have revisited our last exchange and rekindled my spirit for that dialogue…

Among the many things you said in your post of February 1st a couple have stuck with me as they pertain particularly to where I put my energies. Here is the first of these:

“Our industrial management models are based on a belief that our structures are merely complicated.”

To me this statement gets right to the heart of where I am stumped about how to support clients. Without fail, in the past five years every new client I have been engaged by has specified one of two things they really wanted to see change in their organizations culture. They said either 1) they wanted more leadership from their mid-level managers or 2) they wanted more ownership from their employees for the outcomes the business required. The phrase they often use is wanting people to “step up.”

In my dialogues with them I do my best to point out that to the best of my knowledge both of these changes are within reach, however, not without them, the client, making the first move. Among the moves that they need to make is to stop imposing a management structure designed to serve the interests of the ownership of the business on employees who are doing their best to fulfill the requirements of customers or clients.

The challenge of having this conversation make a difference lies in speaking this way into a system that believes that their company is really mechanistic in its operation and that they, the owner or senior manager, are really in control. This perspective is supported entirely by the belief that not only is the organization mechanistic, it is merely, as you have said, complicated.

How would you recommend breaking through this mythology? My guess is that a conceptual approach won’t cut it. Without releasing the grip of this perspective the outcomes they desire are virtually impossible to attain.

The second thought that you shared of particular interest was the notion of Wirearchy: a dynamic multi-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology. The truly stunning aspect of this idea is that it may in fact be possible to implement on some level without the use of technology. In my own experience some version of Wirearchies have been around for a long time, especially on complex development projects. What would you recommend as an approach to have a client see that the notion is less something new than something not yet formally recognized or empowered? Then, having accomplished that objective, how best to introduce the possibility of leverage deriving from some sort of investment in technology?

To me both your remarks and the questions they generated for me are interrelated and from an OD standpoint truly stand as the gateway to establishing new management models.

I think this may be a long response, Mike.

I recently gave a presentation to senior HR executives, discussing the need for new work and learning approaches premised specifically on the need to focus on complex (and creative) work.

Rob Paterson sums up complexity and why we need to understand how if differs from the merely complicated:

“It’s a simple message, really. But if you don’t get it, you’re headed for chaos.

Simple = easily knowable.

Complicated = not simple, but still knowable.

Complex = not fully knowable, but reasonably predictable.

Chaotic = neither knowable nor predictable.”

In that presentation to HR Execs I show that simple routine work is constantly being automated (e.g. automated tellers) and complicated work is being outsourced to the cheapest labour market (e.g. call centres). If companies want to be competitive in the global market, they need to focus on non-standardized, complex & creative work.

automation

Work is changing as we get more connected. The old ways of organizing work are becoming obsolete, as 84% of workers in the US plan to change their jobs in 2011. They want out, in spite of a lacklustre economy. We are seeing mass, decentralized and social movements that confront existing hierarchies, politically and in the workplace. The recent examples of uprisings in North Africa are good attention-getters. There is no normal. All our institutions are facing the challenges of always-on connectedness and the need to adapt to Internet Time. Social media are just the current tip of the Internet iceberg, making work relationships much more complex. Workers do have to step up, but they also need the tools and authority. Encouraging workplace practices like personal knowledge mastery is a start.

When I show that our existing professional disciplines are like blind monks examining an elephant, I get some attention. The need for collaborative work and social learning increases as higher-value complex work requires passion, creativity and initiative. These skills are not taught in some training program, but shared socially through modelled behaviour and over many conversations. We need to understand complex adaptive systems and develop work structures that let us  focus our efforts on learning as we work in order to continuously develop next practices. The role of leadership becomes supportive rather than directive in this new knowledge-intensive and creative workplace. Artificial boundaries that limit collaboration and communication only serve to drag companies down and create opportunities for more agile competitors.

The last slide of that presentation shows a type of servant leadership, supporting the real work being done.

connected leadership


I have learned that I need to start a conversation on complexity but it has to be simple enough not to lose my clients’ attention and not to seem like an academic lecture. This latest presentation is one more iteration of that. If you can can reframe the conversation, then you can talk about new ways of working and integrating learning. For example, most managers would agree that more work and effort is required for exception-handling. Social networks are an excellent framework to deal with these. This can start a new business conversation.

Analytical tools like organizational or value network analysis are also good ways to show what is really happening in an organization and its environment. Visualization is a powerful change agent. The most effective technology to start with to see the value of more collaborative, less controlled, work practices is micro-blogging. This could be an open platform like Twitter or a cloud service like Yammer or Chatter or an in-house tool like Status.net.

I agree that it’s not necessarily about the technology, even though technology is everywhere.

Sometimes it’s just giving up control, as the wirearchy framework suggests. Adam Kahane wrote in Solving Tough Problems:

“If we want to help resolve complex situations, we have to get out of the way of situations that are resolving themselves.”

According to the authors of Getting to Maybe, 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 [perpetual Beta]

None of these require technology, but they all require a new mindset. I have worked with clients who accepted the need to deal with complexity and change their work structures. Patience is a virtue.

 

Enterprise Social Technology – Review

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Scott Klososky sent me a copy of Enterprise Social Technology with this handwritten note, “If nothing else, it shows what can be done using crowd sourcing.” The story of how this book was written provides an interesting subtext to its main subject. As project manager Corey Travis writes:

For the content, we decided to heavily outline the chapters, then narrow the crowd by picking three potential writers for each chapter. We had them each write the full chapter and submit their version, and we then picked the best. We have no idea whether anyone has used this model before; we just believed it would help us create a stellar book, and we are pleased with how it worked out.

The book’s twelve chapters follow Scott’s recommended implementation strategy for enterprise social technology, from Setting Social Tech Goals and Assembling the Team to Developing Pilot Projects and Security & Regulations. Each chapter concludes with a summary of key points and there is lots of good information that any organization could use, large or small. It’s main focus is on marketing, sales and online reputation management, coupled with explanations of tools and platforms.

The book is not focused on social media for workplace performance improvement, my own area of professional interest. However, the chapter on “Building a River of Information” reflects some of what I have been advocating with networked learning or personal knowledge management (PKM).

People have always built rivers of information for themselves, but in the past it was a laborious process that required determination and discipline … Now, with Web 2.0 and the new information tools that are being developed every day, everything you ever wanted to know is literally at your fingertips. The Internet acts as eyes, ears and mouth of just about every organization in operation today, and it offers users a larger, more accessible river of information that can help their companies reach new heights of success.

The chapter discusses the need for managing rivers of information from multiple perspectives, like executives or sales or engineers, and then shows how to get started. Not just building the river, but pruning irrelevant or under-performing sources is also explained. The sales force is described as the department that could most likely profit from these techniques of harvesting “information  about competitors, and thought leaders, industry news, statistics, and infographics”.

Social technologies are a fact in the workplace and this book provides a comprehensive overview of the issues. The twelve step method provides a clear path to implementation. Since ROI is always a hot topic, take note of the entire chapter dedicated to it. One key piece of advice is don’t outsource measurement until you understand it very well yourself.

I would recommend this book to my clients and also point them to the Enterprise Social Technology companion website that includes many more resources. Like the cover says, this book was “By the Crowd, for the Crowd”.

 

Outsider by choice?

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

“I’m an outsider by choice, but not truly. It’s the unpleasantness of the system that keeps me out. I’d rather be in, in a good system. That’s where my discontent comes from: being forced to choose to stay outside.” George Carlin, Napalm and Silly Putty. via @cburell

“In human affairs, times of advancement are preceded by times of disorder. Success comes to those who can weather the storm.” —The I-Ching – via @ken_homer

The secret life of chaos – BBC video via @complexified

It turns out that chaos theory answers a question that mankind has asked for millennia – how did we get here?
In this documentary, Professor Jim Al-Khalili sets out to uncover one of the great mysteries of science – how does a universe that starts off as dust end up with intelligent life? How does order emerge from disorder?
It’s a mind bending, counter intuitive and for many people a deeply troubling idea. But Professor Al-Khalili reveals the science behind much of beauty and structure in the natural world and discovers that far from it being magic or an act of God, it is in fact an intrinsic part of the laws of physics. Amazingly, it turns out that the mathematics of chaos can explain how and why the universe creates exquisite order and pattern.

“throwing out the web is like breaking a mirror because you don’t like your own reflection” — @stoweboyd — via @sebpaquet

Value Networks and the true nature of collaboration by @vernaallee (Digital Edition)

The true shape and nature of collaboration is not the social network – it is the value network. Value networks are purposeful groups of people who come together to take action. Value network modeling and analytics reflect the true nature of collaboration with a systemic human-network approach to managing business operations. It shows how work really happens through human interactions, and provides powerful new practices and metrics for managing collaborative work. It provides a way to a) better support non-hierarchical organizations such as cross-boundary teams, and task forces, and b) quickly and effectively model emergent work and complex activities that have multiple variables and frequent exceptions.

The HR ‘Wheel’ that adds no value. by Paul Kearns

Paradoxically, while HR is pretending to play a strategic game, there is plenty of evidence that it is actually wasting huge amounts of value every day just doing the reactive, transactional work that is the comfort blanket of the majority of HR practitioners. The disciplinary, grievance and contractual query work they pretend to dislike is actually the only job they know. Worse still, they have a perverse incentive to ensure they have as many problems to deal with as possible (that’s why they make such a meal of trivial issues). This has the dual appeal of not only keeping them in employment (for now) but also, simultaneously, making them ‘too busy’ to do the really difficult, but high value, strategic work.

How Information Overload and the Rate of Change Effect Training. by @charlesjennings

Socialcast and social learning

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We’ve been using Socialcast for a while now and for large organizations that have multiple silos of information in repositories like Sharepoint, it’s a pretty good platform. Socialcast enables streams and micro-sharing and keeps multiple work teams in touch with each other without being burdened with too many rules. The learning curve is not difficult at all.

Socialcast also has a blog and some of the posts and infographics have been exceptionally good. I already wrote about wasted effort at work but this post on exception handling from September just caught my attention:

Social networks in the enterprise create a permanent “home” for these exceptions to live where users can communicate and collaborate around the answers. Exception management through social networks gives management clear insight into the resources needed for handling these exceptions. Viewing or monitoring the interactions and necessary actions taken to resolve these exceptions can lead to better implementation, revisions or training on these systems, and increase productivity throughout the enterprise.

A more recent post on the evolution of knowledge management clearly shows the need to support the sharing of tacit knowledge in a complex and creative economy:

This is a blog worth subscribing to.