Mass, decentralized and social

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How did the word get out for Tunisians to initiate large-scale protests? Social networks; though not necessarily all technology-mediated. The same happened in Egypt. If social media were not a threat, it is unlikely the government would have shut down almost all web access. Jeremy Littau says the Egyptian uprising “movement is mass, decentralized, and social. Sound like anything we know?” It’s also very human.

China is blocking searches on Twitter related to Egypt, as it too fears the power of social networks. Social networks, and the learning that happens as a result, are a threat to all hierarchical structures. Social networks accelerate the spread of new ideas and lay bare systemic injustices. This is powerful stuff and it scares people. Anyone in a position of power and authority is losing some of that due to the growing power of social networks – doctors, teachers, managers, politicians, etc. Seb Paquet calls it “ridiculously easy group-forming”. Hugh Macleod says that the network is more powerful than the node.

Social networks speed access to knowledge and accelerate learning. An Egyptian blogger, Ma3t, learned via social media this week:

They hit us bad. They shot tear gas at us, I saw ppl running and screaming, and all i can remember is the tweeted instructions ” Do not rub ur eyes” I tried, I really tried, but my eyes were on fire, I didn’t rub them though but ended up walking blindly into a wall.

It’s all social as we become more connected and observe the emerging network effects. The year 2011 will be interesting and 2012 will be even more interesting. Hang on.

No best practices, but some strong indicators

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It’s been a busy week, mostly on-site with a new and exciting client project. I’m still trying to get a flight home (hopefully this evening) but at least I’m able to get out my weekly Friday’s Finds. Here’s what I learned via Twitter this week.

QUOTES

@jackvinson “I did blogging in my KM class a few years ago. “forced blogging” = flogging :-)”

@zenmoments “Freedom is not worth having if it does not involve the freedom to make mistakes. ~ Gandhi”

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Performance Measurement “a Complete Waste of Time” – via @julienllanas

So, why do companies spend so much time and money on trying to come up with new rating systems and fancy pay for performance plans? Actually, I have no idea. I’m hoping someone out there can help me on that one. But, this week is a milestone week in my career – I’ve officially decided to do something about it – I’ve propsed to my executive team that we eliminate our performance rating system and ditch this whole pay for performance idea.

@stevedenning: Coordination: From hierarchical bureaucracy to dynamic linking via @RessHum

2. The team reports to the client, not the manager: The shift in the organization’s goal from producing goods and services to delighting clients means that the team effectively reports to the client, rather than the manager. The manager’s role is to give the team a clear line of sight to the client. Work is presented to the client or customer proxy at the end of the process of iterations, so that the team doing the work can experience the reaction. Progress is measured not by whether the boss is satisfied but rather whether value is delivered to clients. Instead of reliance on progress reports, progress is measured by only in terms of finished work—work that actually delivers value to clients at the end of a work cycle.

Un-Manage Your Employees by @DHH  Getting rid of distractions and co-managing so workers can get things done. – via @dhinchcliffe

When you hire people who do nothing but manage, you implicitly say to the rest of your employees, “Don’t worry about the coordination or structure of your work—all these concerns now belong to the manager.” When people don’t have to think about the totality of their work environment, because that’s now the manager’s job, they’re less engaged, less motivated and less efficient.

The Net Work of Leadership: Create the Space by @panklam

What he [Rangaswami] says is (and I agree) is that it makes no sense to give smart people tasks, but to “expose them to problem domains and then giving them the resources and tools to solve these problems.”  When a problem domain is large, it takes a network, more than just a team, and the vision of a leader who can create the spaces within which people will make the right choices about what tasks they must select to work toward the solution of the problem.

Going Social – Chief Learning Officer, Solutions for Enterprise Productivity via @fdomon

You may be saying to yourself: “Echols, this tale of hats and cattle is all well and good, but what’s the bottom line? I need best practices to convince my management.” Well, right now there are no best practices to emulate, but there are lots of experiments going on to define solutions. I repeat, these are experiments, and to succeed, your organization needs to have a culture of experimentation. Experiments produce failures most of the time. Acceptance of failure and disciplined learning from those failures is key because the winners in this arena will be the organizations that learn the fastest, and you can’t learn if you don’t try.

A case for social learning in business

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This is a first draft of putting together the case for social learning and social business. Comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. This was not rehearsed, so I know that the narration can be tightened up. I’m interested in seeing what other points could or should be added and especially if the central theme makes sense.

Happy Monday

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I’m on the road this week. We’re working with an interesting client and I’m doing what I love: designing new ways to work and learn more effectively. Life is good :)

When you work for yourself, it doesn’t feel like work, just an opportunity to do better.

Saving tigers, social business and science

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Here are some of things I learned via Twitter this past week [Friday’s Finds].

We need to save our tigers [follow link for ways to help] by @Sumeet_Moghe

“Do not cut down the  forest with its tigers and do not banish the tigers from the forest; the tiger perishes without the forest and the forest perishes without its tigers”  – Mahabharata, 400 BCE

“C’est avec la logique que nous prouvons mais c’est avec l’intuition que nous trouvons. [Henri Poincaré]” via @MichelleBlanc

@jmcgee “‘diligent laziness’ = DRY – don’t repeat yourself, = take advantage of what others know and share, = take/make time for reflection”

@snowded “Never try to excite a conservative with something novel or interesting (note to self)”

From information to conversation by @EskoKilpi

People often need to act and make decisions in situations in which causality is poorly understood, where there is considerable uncertainty and people hold different beliefs and have personal biases. However, people very reluctantly acknowledge that they face ambiguity at work. Problems in organizations tend to get labeled as lack of information. It feels more professional to try to solve a knowledge management problem that is called lack of information than a problem that is called confusion.

[SEED Magazine] “Critical slowing” as a threshold approaches could be a signal for collapses in complex systems. via @ViRAms

The practice of science has always been grounded in predicting outcomes. The hypothetico-deductive method—the due process of scientific inquiry—can be summed up by four basic steps: review data, make prediction, test, repeat. Now the ways in which we as a society are extracting information from large-scale events and systems, identifying patterns, and making predictions are clear examples of the analytical logic of science—what might be referred to as scientific thinking—transferring to the organizational principles of the public at large. In this way, scientific thinking is a nascent tool for policymaking, governance, and problem solving in general.

Foreign Policy: the “nation that out-educates us today is going to out-compete us tomorrow”. via @ValdisKrebs

The first generations of Indian startups focused on selling IT services, and the Chinese developed copycat web technologies such as Baidu, China’s Google rival, and Sina, its Twitter clone. But they are going beyond that now. They are gaining the knowledge — and developing the confidence — to create innovative products, not only for domestic markets, but also for global ones.

Social Business planning: set up a process of discovery by @robpatrob

When I worked with NPR back in 2005 the question was “How will social media affect us and what should we do?”

The great thing then was that No One could know the answer to that question. And if by chance one of us did, no one else would just accept that answer.

So what we did was to set up a process of discovery where it was agreed at the outset that no one knew.

We then set off, nearly 1,000 people, on a number of test journeys where groups “Played” with creating stories about what the future might be.

Social learning for business

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Here’s an elevator pitch, in 10 sentences, for social learning, which is what really makes social business work.

  1. The increasing complexity of our work is a result of our global interconnectedness.
  2. Today, simple work is being automated (e.g. bank tellers).
  3. Complicated work (e.g. accounting) is getting outsourced.
  4. Complex and creative work is what gives companies unique business advantages.
  5. Complex and creative work is difficult to replicate, constantly changes and requires greater tacit knowledge.
  6. Tacit knowledge is best developed through conversations and social relationships.
  7. Training courses are artifacts of a time when information was scarce and connections were few; that time has passed.
  8. Social learning networks enable better and faster knowledge feedback loops.
  9. Hierarchies constrain social interactions so traditional management models must change.
  10. Learning amongst ourselves is the real work in social businesses and management’s role is to support social learning.

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Social business on the edge of the chasm

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Last year I was asked what I thought about Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0). While it’s a popular subject amongst some management theorists, there aren’t many examples of E2.0 in practice.  Peter Evans-Greenwood has a good analysis of why E2.0 is not ready for mainstream business implementation due to regulatory constraints:

So, I agree with naysayers that the business case for E2.0 etc “transforming business into a more social business” is not there today. I disagree in that I think it will happen, but we need to up-end regulation first.

As I write this, it seems the term “social business” is already replacing E2.0. Social business should be understood by organizational leaders because they will need to be ready for a significant change in their operating models in the near future. Social business is almost ready to cross the chasm.

Social business is about a shift in how we do work, moving from hierarchies to networks. The highest value work today is the more complex stuff, or the type of work that cannot be automated or outsourced. It’s work that requires creativity and passion. Doing complex work in networks means that information, knowledge and power no longer flow up and down. They flow in all directions. As John Seely Brown said, you can only understand complex systems by marinating in them. This requires social learning. Complex work is not linear. Social business is giving up centralized control and harnessing the power of networks. It is as radical as was Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management in 1911.

The potential of social business is organizational survival. Enterprises must be able to share knowledge quicker than before.  This requires a shift toward something like a starfish framework that not only allows for independent action but also distributes knowledge through all the parts. Social learning is how organizational knowledge gets distributed. Social businesses can learn quicker.

The main barriers to social business are cultural. People in charge of most organizations today got there by doing things the traditional way of the MBA mindset. They feel they do not need to change and few are willing to give up power and authority, even if it is for the good of the organization.

Shortly after posting this, I came across an article in CIO: How Social is Taking Over Business [dead link]

Social media for senior managers

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This is the second of my conversations with Michael Cook on Organizational Development.

Michael:

I was thinking about the metaphor you used in responding to my question, that “social media are like new languages”, then after reflecting on that idea for a while I re-read your response and realized that you had actually said “social media are new languages” not like new languages, they are actually new languages. I was jolted into realizing where much of my current challenge is coming from. I keep attempting to learn about social media by comparing them to something I already know about rather than recognizing that while they have aspects that are familiar they are truly new phenomena.

So now I am wondering, email is email and it is ubiquitous. Anyone who has used email for any amount of time has had instances of recognizing its limitations. For one, it does a terrible job of conveying context and tone. Yet, there is no doubt that many of my clients (most of whom are senior managers, 45+ years of age) will do as I have done and think of an ESSP (Emerging Social Software Platform) as a glorified email system, and when I make a suggestion that they consider writing a blog they will give me the “devil eye” and shrink back like I have suggested maybe we hug. Since these are very likely the people in an organization that stand to gain the most by endorsing an investment in some form of social media, where would you suggest I begin a conversation with them about the topic and when is the right time to bring in someone with a technical background to support any signs of interest? It seems to me that starting with a product discussion is probably not where I would want to begin.

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Harold: Once again, let me rephrase the question – “How do you start the discussion about social media with senior managers who think of technology as just more IT products and platforms?”

I like to start any conversation with a client from a business perspective. IBM describes the current situation as such:

The rapid growth of social networking and mobility has enabled people to tap into the experience of others to accomplish anything – ranging from their work to the way they purchase goods and services.

This pretty well sums up what is driving business change. People can connect to anyone, anywhere and at any time. This changes all the control systems that organizations have developed over the past century: pricing, pay, hours of work, product development, jobs, customer service – you name it.

The challenge for business leaders is to manage work with porous organizational boundaries. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. We need to change our mental models and even invert the management pyramid.The typical branching organization chart does not reflect the way that work gets done in networks. Work is really done in the white space within and now outside the organization.

Work today has few time or geographical boundaries. As our water coolers become virtual, social relations online will be the glue that connects us in our increasingly distributed work. Every little tweet, blog post, comment or “like” online shares our individuality and humanity. These actions help us be known to others in the digital surround. They help us build trust to get things done, be productive and innovate. However, we cannot benefit from professional social networks unless we engage in them. This requires more than merely mastering the technology. It means being social in our work. Not using social media to connect, contribute and collaborate is like sitting in a closed office all day.

According to McKinsey, the main reason that businesses today use social media is to increase the speed of access to knowledge. It’s not a question of why we should understand social business but what can we do to survive and thrive in what has become a social business ecosystem. Social media are necessary to keep up.

Here is an indicator of the changing nature of business in a highly networked and social marketplace; the “app” market:

This rapid adaption to what customers want requires a very different organizational structure than at many companies. It must be able to adapt rapidly to new information and it must move that information around rapidly … Staying engaged and being adaptive – the successful companies will have both of these attributes.

To stay engaged with interconnected markets, business must get more social. Social learning, which can involve many of these web social media, is how we get things done in networks.  Most organizational value is created by teams and networks, not individuals working alone. While learning may be generated in teams, this type of knowledge comes and goes. Organizational learning really spreads through social networks. Therefore, social networks are the conduit for effective organizational performance.

Blocking, or circumventing, social networks slows learning, reduces effectiveness and may in the end kill the organization. Senior managers need to understand social media in order to support learning in social networks which will enable practitioners to produce results.

The wisdom of lists

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Finding out how others perceive you can be an interesting professional exercise. Marketing and branding may have their place but understanding how the rest of world sees you reverses that lens.

One function of Twitter that I haven’t used much is the ability to create Lists. I only have two lists, but many people seem to find them useful. For example, I have one that includes my Internet Time Alliance colleagues, so I can stay up to date with their tweets, across 8 time zones, without any additional searching. Lists are just groupings of profiles and can be created by any user. All lists are named and some have a detailed description.

I’m on about 400 lists so I decided to take a look at them and I noticed that I’m categorized in many ways. I then went through all of the titles and descriptions, standardized the language & spelling, and put these words into a text document which I used to create a Wordle cloud.

Here’s what my social mirror reflected back to me.

Notes from 2005

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2005

This is a continuation of my notes from 2004 … I see that 2005 was the year I started digging deeper into PKM/Networked Learning.

David Williamson Shaffer’s paper on Pedagogical Praxis: The professions as models for post-industrial education provides a theoretical model, with three case studies (biomedical negotiators, online journalists and architects using complex mathematics), on how educational institutions can better bridge the gap between learning in formal education and learning in the workplace.

Perhaps the power of new technologies to bring professional practices closer to the purview of middle and high school students provides an opportunity to move beyond disciplines derived from medieval scholarship constituted within schools developed in the industrial revolution. Learning environments such as those described here, based on professional learning practices and deliberately constituted outside the traditional structure of schooling, suggest a way to move beyond current curricula based on the ways of knowing of mathematics, science, history, and language arts.
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From the The Walrus magazine on an uninspiring 2005 McLuhan International Festival of the Future, until the very end:
As the last few intellectual thrusts of “Probing McLuhan” wound down, a figure rose from the crowd and said a few words. The voice was eerily reminiscent of the Master, as was the rhetoric. It was Eric McLuhan. “The new media won’t fit into the classroom”, he told the audience. “It already surrounds it. Perhaps that is the challenge of the counterculture. The problem is to know what questions to ask.”
For the first time that afternoon there was silence, and it spoke volumes.

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One challenge in this business of designing systems is to constantly question our models and assumptions – a very McLuhanesque perspective: “The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.”

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Social media & the McLuhans’ Laws of Media:

In looking at the newer social networking technologies [for learning] we could say that they:

  1. extend the learner’s voice;
  2. obsolesce the course as the unit of education
  3. retrieve the Oxford-Cambridge collegial education model
  4. could reverse into a meaningless “echo-chamber” (Wikepedia definition of “echo chamber: Metaphorically, the term echo chamber can refer to any situation in which information or ideas are amplified by transmission inside an enclosed space.)

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On running a virtual team:

Stick to small groups, and
if you’re the leader, give up control, because
there is no leader, so
have complete trust, and
allow for total transparency, but
provide clear & achievable goals, while also having
an open ended final goal.

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

Gloria Gery: “Training will either be strategic or it will be marginalized.”