2020 Workplace

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In The 2020 Workplace, Jeanne Meister & Karie Willyerd make 20 predictions at the end of the book. William Gibson said, “the future is already here –  it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Here are my thoughts on where we are with some of these predictions:

Your mobile device will become your office, your classroom, and your concierge. We’re already seeing this with young people. They’d rather go without a car. Mobile computing is the future that is already here.

Web commuters will force corporate offices to reinvent themselves. Yes, working online IS different.

Job requirements for CEOs will include blogging. How else can you communicate with everyone effectively and efficiently? It’s sure not by email and face-to-face is difficult in distributed organizations. I would include podcasts & video in this statement.

Social media literacy will be required for all employees. I give this perhaps 24 months. We no longer offer training on email. Connecting to online social networks for working and learning will be a fact of life much sooner than later.

The lines between marketing, communications and learning will blur. I’ve called this the integration of organizational support. What we at the Internet Time Alliance call working smarter is a culture supported by social learning; collaborative work and a leadership framework. Technology enables this but the three pillars are more important than any technology platform.


Training Evaluation: a mug’s game

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“Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things.” —Peter Drucker

Dan Pontefract is quite clear in Dear Kirkpatrick’s: You still don’t get it:

Let me be clear – training is not an event; learning is a connected, collaborative and continuous process. It can and does occur in formal, informal and social ways every day in and out of your job. In your email, with the statement “what happens after the training event”, you have cemented (again) the root cause of the Kirkpatrick model. The ‘event’ is not solely how learning occurs. Whether in the original model, or the weakly updated model, the single largest flaw with the Kirkpatrick Four Levels model is the fact its basic premise is that learning starts with an event. Once you ultimately get past this stumbling block, the Kirkpatrick Four Levels model will potentially become relevant again, should it be suitably updated again.

Dan is not the first person to show the limitations of the Kirkpatrick model. Eric Davidove and Craig Mindrun wrote in Verifying Virtual Value:

The key to determining the business value of networked learning, however, is a more expansive view of the kinds of outcomes delivered. Traditional training analyses, such as Kirkpatrick’s four levels of evaluation, were designed to assess solutions that are delivered in a linear manner. Since networked or collaborative learning solutions are informal, integrated with the workflow and driven by the learners, these traditional assessments will not work.

Event-based instructional interventions, or the course as learning vehicle, is an outdated and useless way to look at workplace learning. Courses are an artifact of a time when information was scarce and connections were few. The internet is an environment optimized for ABC learning [Anything But Courses].

In “Not Your Father’s ROI”, Jay Cross suggests:

Make a hypothesis of cause and effect. Interview a statistically significant sample of the workforce to see if the hypothesis holds up. Often, results obtained from social science research methods will produce more meaningful feedback than solid counts of the wrong thing.

Changing our training evaluation models shouldn’t be a management focus anyway. That’s looking at the wrong thing. Even if we get 100% efficiency, and some level of effectiveness, we’re missing 90% of the  picture, as shown in this graphic by Charles Jennings.

Training more efficiently is a mug’s game. Managers and workplace performance professionals should focus on Working Smarter, by helping people learn and develop socially.

The cost of codification

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

From KM to complexity – Necessary silos, cognitive truths about knowledge sharing, narrative as mediator, the zone of effective diffusion, and decision-making; by @johnt

At the highest level of abstraction (you have a conversation with yourself) the cost of codification is very low as you have a 100% shared context (hopefully).

[NOTE: the moment you have to transfer (it’s more of a dance rather than a transfer anyway) with another person then you have to be aware of the barriers (their current level of understanding, expert language, world view) which are ultimately overcome with experience and acquiring skill…see curse of knowledge]

On the other hand if you want to share your knowledge with everyone then the cost of codification will approach infinity.

Blogging for knowledge workers: incubating ideas; by @mathemagenic

Blogging is primarily known as an instrument for personal publishing, reaching a broad and often unknown audience without pushing content on them. While blogging is personal, most of its advantages are the result being part of an ecosystem, where weblogs are connected not only by links, but also by relations between bloggers. Those relations do not appear automatically: it takes time and effort before one can enjoy social effects of blogging. To sustain blogging before those effects appear it is important to find a personally meaningful way to use a weblog.

The connected company – excellent analysis of social business; by @davegray

It’s time to think about what companies really are, and to design with that in mind. Companies are not so much machines as complex, dynamic, growing systems. As they get larger, acquiring smaller companies, entering into joint ventures and partnerships, and expanding overseas, they become “systems of systems” that rival nation-states in scale and reach.

So what happens if we rethink the modern company, if we stop thinking of it as a machine and start thinking of it as a complex, growing system? What happens if we think of it less like a machine and more like an organism? Or even better, what if we compared the company with other large, complex human systems, like, for example, the city?

You Feel the Earth Move Under Your Feet | “the twin revolutions of information and connectivity are turning society upside down” via @sebpaquet

Egypt is about much more than a popular uprising against a ruler who has stayed in power through what can only be described, charitably, as a corruption of the democratic process. Egypt is the most compelling example to date of how the physics of human society are being rewritten. In much the same way that Quantum Physics turned Classical Physics on its head, the twin revolutions of information and connectivity are turning society upside down or perhaps better put, every which way and loose.

Digital hierarchies

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IBM is holding a social business jam this week and lots of high profile people are attending. Check the special guest list. If you want to be part of the action you can sign up for free. To contribute you have to set up your profile and put yourself in one of the pre-selected categories like “Social Network Junkie” or “Baby Boomer”. That’s where I stopped. There was no “none of the above” to select and I didn’t like any of the choices. I am not a label.

Image: Jam by Sally

My first foray as a lurker to the jam showed that most of the conversations were around marketing. My idea of social business is working smarter through social learning. Marketing is merely the tip of the iceberg.

The more I thought about this jam, the more I felt that Jaron Lanier was right:

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.

Are we all a bunch of TED wannabe’s looking for some exclusive opportunity to be special? The good news is: you are special. The bad news is: so is everyone else.

The open Web, without special sign-ons or walled gardens or exclusive clubs is where we can co-create the knowledge needed for the 21st century. It has to be open, transparent and easily reproduceable & linkable. If not, we’re just building digital versions of the hierarchies and silos of the 20th century.

Update:

Here’s the label where I stopped:

Leadership for Networks

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It takes different leadership to increase collaboration and support social learning in the workplace. Leadership is the key, not technology. Most of our leadership practices come from a command and control military legacy that have been adopted by the business world for the past century. But hierarchies don’t help us manage in networks, whether they be social, value or organizational networks. Steve Denning explains:

Saying that hierarchies are needed is like arguing for smoking cigarettes. Hierarchies are a harmful habit that we need to break. We may be addicted to them, so that breaking the habit is hard, but the way forward is clear.

The reality is that there is another way. One can mesh the efforts of autonomous teams of knowledge workers who have the agility to innovate and meet the shifting needs of clients while also achieving disciplined execution. It requires a set of measures that might be called “dynamic linking”. The method began in automotive design in Japan and has been developed most fully in software development with approaches known as “Agile” or “Scrum”.

Jon Husband has succinctly described an organizational framework for networks. Some variation of wirearchy informs successful organizations (like Semco SA; Google; W.L. Gore, Zappos; etc):

In an increasingly interconnected world, a new organizing principle is emerging …

“Wirearchy is a dynamic two-way [multi-way] flow of power and authority based on:

  • knowledge,
  • trust,
  • credibility,
  • a focus on results

enabled by interconnected people and technology“ (Jon Husband, 1999)

Working smarter through social learning

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This past week I had the opportunity to discuss social learning in the workplace with many people. Explaining a concept helps to understand it. It’s part of my active sense-making as a networked learner. I’ve mentioned before how Ross Dawson’s five ways to add value to information have influenced my networked learning framework:

  1. Filtering (separating signal from noise, based on some criteria)
  2. Validation (ensuring that information is reliable, current or supported by research)
  3. Synthesis (describing patterns, trends or flows in large amounts of information)
  4. Presentation (making information understandable through visualization or logical presentation)
  5. Customization (describing information in context)

This blog and the various presentations I do are attempts to add value (and context) to information so that I can later retrieve it and use it. By making this transparent I not only create value-added information for others but I clarify my own thinking.

Networked learning, or PKM, was a main topic of discussion this week, as many people asked how I had the time to do all of this reading, annotating and content creation. For me, it’s part of my work flow and it creates extremely valuable knowledge artifacts that I can re-use.

Here’s my latest version of putting together my thoughts on social learning in the enterprise. The storyline behind these slides goes like this:

Work is changing as we get more networked and people are not happy with the old structures, as 84% of workers in the US plan to change their jobs in 2011. We are seeing mass, decentralized and social movements that confront existing hierarchies, politically and in the workplace. Social media are the flagship of an inter-connected society, but every industrial discipline views them through their own filters, like blind monks examining an elephant. In this hyperlinked economy more of our work demands collaboration and we are seeing that work is learning. The need for social learning increases as higher-valued 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.

Working Smarter though Social Learning  


Instant private micro-sharing

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As we were discussing social learning this week, several people asked, where do I start? Jay Cross was talking to Dan Pontefract this week in San Jose and one of the lessons learnt by Dan was that micro-sharing (e.g. Twitter) is probably the best place to start. I can understand. Blogging takes time and you have to write a coherent train of thought. Staring at a blank screen can be daunting. Wikis only work when you have a group of people with a common purpose and a need to collaborate. Micro-sharing is easy, especially since it’s limited to 140 characters. Who doesn’t have time to tap out 140 characters?

Of course, the big question from anyone in a medium to large organization is the need for privacy. The usual answer is to use Yammer, which limits access to people with the same e-mail address. This works for company stuff but how do you get people from several organizations to collaborate?

Status.net, based on open source software, offers a range of options, some free and some fee. I’ve just set up a private site which is invitation-only. It’s free for 25 members and then costs $1.00 per user per month beyond that. Not bad at all. You can also download the software for free and host it in-house.

I set up a private community site today. It took only a few minutes and I was able to customize it fairly quickly. This is a great way to pilot micro-sharing with very little risk.

Once the site is established, the admin can invite people to the community. It takes only a few minutes to create a profile. The “public timeline” shows everyone’s posts so there’s no need to follow people, particularly with a community of only 25 people. The site-wide notice for the administrator is handy, so that a semi-permanent message can be displayed for everyone.

Status.net – I like it; though I haven’t figured out the automatic URL shortening feature yet.

CCLD KSEN Workshop follow-up

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We discussed social learning in the enterprise today with an interesting case study on social learning (without technology) by PwC. At the end of the day everyone was asked what pressing issue they would like to discuss for tomorrow. The questions were grouped into five areas, and I’ve added some resources for each:

PKM

Article on PKM and working smarter through networked learning

Beth Kanter: My Three Words for 2011: Seek, Sense, and Share

Sumeet Moghe: How I’m approaching PKM

Tools

Jane Hart’s Directory of Learning Tools 2011 (13 categories)

Jane Hart: Examples of the use of social media and learning (By technology and types of learning)

Jane Hart: 100+ Examples of  the Use of Social Media in Learning

Integration of KM and L&D

Social computing in knowledge-intensive workplaces

What would an integrated OD, HR, IT, KM, Marketing/Communications and L&D partnership look like? Partnerships & the Organization

Implementation and Case Studies

Jane Hart: Social Learning in the Workplace Examples

Measurement & KPI’s

Eric Davidove: The Business Case for Social Learning

Verifying Virtual Value

Informal learning and performance technology

Soft skills are foundational competencies

Other Resources:

The Shy Connector

The language of social business

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

Wow, your response to my last question was a deep and wide one indeed. I think I may need to put some more definite boundaries around where my concerns lie. First, the line from your last response that captured my interest was this: “To stay engaged with interconnected markets, business must get more social.”  I am thinking about some of my clients and approaching them with the thought that they need to have their businesses become more social. Just to test my own understanding it seems to me that by using the term social, especially in view of the IBM quote you referenced, that you mean to say highly connective, many options for connectivity are now a must for the value proposition of any organization. I imagine you mean more than that but am I in the right ballpark?

What I think I need is some language that creates a new context for the term social because I am afraid my clients will consider the remark naive. ‘Business is business and social is social.’ This would be their natural response, thinking that “social” means not results focused. I know you are using the term in a context that may be transparent to you but I can assure you that my clients do not share the same transparency.

What I need to do is be able to connect your conversation to the critical relationship between companies and customers and show how social media plays an important part in sustaining these relationships into the future. Can you give me a couple of concrete examples where this connection was made using social media that I might be able to share?

Secondly, when I read through your response to my last question I notice that you did not directly address the last part of my question where I asked about the right time to bring a technical expert into a conversation with a client. I suspect it is at the level of strategic value because I know most of my clients would not have an extensive interest in the technology itself but more the outcomes it might leverage. Again, am I on the right track here?

Does social mean highly connective? It’s much more than that. Social means human. It is an understanding that relationships and networks are complex. Our industrial management models are based on a belief that our structures are merely complicated. Here’s an explanation from Noop.nl

The main difference between predictable systems and complex systems is our approach to understanding them. We can understand simple and complicated systems by taking them apart and analyzing the details. However, we cannot understand complex systems by applying the same strategy of reductionism. But we can achieve some understanding by watching and studying how the whole system operates.

What’s important for managers is that this also works the other way around. We create complicated systems by first designing the parts, and then putting them together. This works well for mechanical things, like buildings, watches and Quattro Stagioni pizzas. But it doesn’t work for complex systems, like brains, software development teams, and the local pizzeria. We cannot build a system from scratch and expect it to become complex in the way that we intended. Complex systems defy attempts to be created in an engineering effort.

Social means the bonds that keep us together. Much of it is about trust. If I trust you, I might ask you for advice, so trust is essential for collaboration. We lose it if we try to micro-manage knowledge work. A framework like wirearchy is much better for complex environments than our traditional models of command & control, functional management and enforced adoption of work practices. Wirearchy: a dynamic multi-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology.

The argument that ‘business is business and social is social’ makes little sense today. Business is social because it involves people. Business must be more social the more complex the work and the greater the need for collaboration. We foster innovation through social interactions. The idea that a lone person working in a lab can come up with a brilliant idea is largely unfounded. Connections between people drive innovation, says Tim Kastelle; “Connecting ideas is the core of innovation, but without connecting ideas to people, there is no innovation at all.”

How does social media connect companies and customers? There are many case studies on social media for marketing and customer service available online . However, as my colleague Jane Hart writes:

There are many examples of how enterprises/organisations (profits and non-profits) are using social media for EXTERNAL marketing, customer support, etc, but few real-life case studies of strategic approaches to its use INTERNALLY for social and collaborative learning and/or performance and productivity improvement.

Making organizations more effective is what really interests me.

When working with clients, I would bring in technical expertise as late as possible. Technology is more often a business constraint than an enabler, especially internal IT departments. They will tell you what you can’t do. Determine the business requirements first and make sure they’re clear. Then figure out how to enable them with technology. Don’t let the IT tail wag the business dog. As Steve Woodruff writes, social media is not a business strategy. That also means that a self-proclaimed “social media strategist” should not be developing your business strategy.