I don't do NDA's

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

“I don’t do NDA’s” Implied Suspicion Versus Implied Trust – via @petervan

Overheard: “School is where young people go to watch old people work.” via @simfin @ScottElias @zecool

When I Grow Up (Video) – We Never Intended to Work This Way by @kevindjones

When I grow up, I want to stay until 5, even when I have nothing to do.

I want to suppress common sense for company policy.

Strive for mediocrity.

Learn not to take chances.

Not state the obvious because I fear retribution …. (cont)

State of Washington to Offer Online Materials, Instead of Textbooks, for 2-Year Colleges – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education via @cgreen

Mr. Green, of the state community-college board, says the Open Course Library is very much a work in progress, and may always be. Indeed, its success depends upon the academic community to continually review, revise, and improve the courses, and then post them back online for others. (The idea of freely sharing information, he concedes, might just be the more challenging cultural shift.)

But “getting there” is not in question, says Mr. Green. He says he’s been blunt with textbook publishers and has encouraged them to get on board if they can.

“You saw what happened with Craigslist and newspapers,” he says, referring to the free classified advertising that has helped force some newspapers out of business and required others to reinvent themselves. “We are going to get there with or without you.

Stephen Downes: ‘Connectivism’ and Connective Knowledge by @downes

Let me explain why we take this approach and what connectivism is. At its heart, connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks. Knowledge, therefore, is not acquired, as though it were a thing. It is not transmitted, as though it were some type of communication.

What we learn, what we know — these are literally the connections we form between neurons as a result of experience. The brain is composed of 100 billion neurons, and these form some 100 trillion connections and it is these connections that constitute everything we know, everything we believe, everything we imagine. And while it is convenient to talk as though knowledge and beliefs are composed of sentences and concepts that we somehow acquire and store, it is more accurate — and pedagogically more useful — to treat learning as the formation of connections.

EFF Celebrates 20th Anniversary With New Animation by Nina Paley

Onerous user agreements.
Tracking and surveillance online.
“Three Strikes” and copyright cops.

Organizational Development and social media

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This post is the beginning of what we hope will be an ongoing conversation (Organizational Development Talks: OrgDevTalk) between Michael Cook and myself. Mike contacted me after having read my posts through the Human Capital League, which cross-posts many of my articles.

Michael:

“Thanks again for both the time and the conversation we’ve started on social media and uses in the workplace. As a starting point for our dialogue I’d like to begin with a broad question…I am an OD consultant by profession with a passion for improving the overall return on investment that a company makes in human capital and a co-equal commitment to improve the overall experience of being at work in any environment for each individual. Honestly, I want to see less suffering in the working experience.

Given these two commitments why, in your view, it is consistent with what I am already working on to give myself over to gaining a better understanding of some of the newest developments in the social technologies. I mean to say here that I am first and foremost a people guy. Won’t getting involved with these technologies simply be a distraction, a boost more for my ego than necessarily moving my commitments forward?”

Hi Mike:

Let me restate the question. Why should I, as an OD professional, concerned with the human aspects of organizations, have to understand web technologies? As Andrew McAfee says, “it’s not not about the technology”. McAfee addresses much of this question in his post, so I won’t repeat what he says.

All organizations use information and communication technologies to some extent, whether it be email, data management systems or more recently, social media. The one technology that is changing how we work, learn and relate is the Internet, especially the web. Many information technologies are just exploiting Internet connectivity in some way. Saying we don’t need to understand the Internet is like saying we didn’t need to understand speaking, reading or writing to do our jobs before. In my experience, most organizational issues boil down to one factor: communication. The Internet is where we communicate; from voice to data to social networking.

With this ubiquitous connectivity, more of our work is at a distance, either in space or time. Telework and distributed teams are becoming the norm. If we are going to support people doing this kind of work, we need to understand it. However, working online takes practice to be proficient. It is difficult to understand theoretically. For example, even though I have worked online for over a decade, I did not really understand Twitter until I used it.

But can’t we understand these communications media theoretically, or get advice from our IT department? For example, a doctor does not have to have suffered a disease before discussing how to treat it. Many academics in business school have never started a company, yet they can talk about the fundamentals of business.

Why is the Web, and especially social media, so different?

I think that one fundamental difference about social media is they have a strong influence on the user, very much in a McLuhanesque medium/message/massage way. Those who come to web media for the first time are like adults learning a new language. You cannot start with the same advanced mental models and metaphors that you have in your primary language. Furthermore, if you do get to an advanced level in your new language, its idioms, metaphors and culture may have had a strong influence on how you think in that language.

Social media change the way we communicate. Write a blog for a year or more and your writing (and thinking) will change. Use Twitter for some time and you will get a sense of being connected to many people and understanding them on a different level. Patterns emerge over time. Even the ubiquitous Facebook changes how you react to being apart from friends. Social media can change the way you think.

When you adopt a new web social medium you are also starting on the bottom, or at the single node level. You have to make connections with what will become your network, either by connecting to existing relationships or doing something that helps to create new relationships, like writing a blog post. Starting over, in each medium, can be daunting, especially for someone in a position of authority who is concerned about image or influence.

Yes, you need to use the tools in order to understand what it’s like to be a node in a social network. There is almost nothing like it in the industrial workplace or school system to prepare you for this. Therefore you won’t know what you’re talking about until you learn the new language of online networks. The only way to learn a new language is through practice.

Social media are new languages.

Lessons from Cirque du Soleil

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How do you capitalize on widely divergent and constantly changing skills? Lyn Heward, Director of Creation at Cirque du Soleil says that the core skill for each of their  artists is the ability to learn quickly. She used the framework of the seven doors to anchor her presentation at Mount Allison University this evening. An enthusiastic and compelling speaker, Lyn Heward showed how le Cirque maintains creative tension and has managed to grow to over 20 ongoing productions around the world.

For me, these were points worth considering further:

Constraints (budgets, consumers, differences) can become creative catalysts.

Risk-taking. Complacency is the biggest risk any person or organization has.

The most difficult culture to prepare their international troupes for is the USA, which has the highest number of social norms that must be learned before working there.

The clown as teacher, makes it easier for the “student” to drop his guard, become engaged, and learn …

Literacy and numeracy for complexity

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The need for competency in developing emergent practices is not a new theme here. Neither is the democratization of the workplace. It’s all about dealing with increasing complexity.

In addition to new work practices, it seems there might also be a need for different types of literacy and numeracy, as described by Daniel Lemire. Increasing complexity blurs traditional fields of understanding:

We teach kids arithmetic and calculus, but systematically fail to teach them about probabilities. We are training them to distinguish truth from falsehoods, when most things are neither true nor false.

Most of our organizations and institutions seem to be stuck in a medium-complexity mindset. That’s not good enough in a highly complex world but there are forces that want to drag us back to a low-complexity world; one that does not exist. Standardized testing and “back to basics” movements are manifestations of this simplistic mindset. Unfortunately, it’s going to be difficult to upgrade skills for higher complexity work when we lack the necessary basic numeracy (understanding of probabilities) or literacy (seeking truth on our own).

Perhaps this is the underlying challenge in getting people to think about and be comfortable in developing emergent practices. Maybe they lack the required literacy and numeracy.

* More from Daniel on Demarchy and probabilistic algorithms

Exchanging knowledge in Ottawa & Montreal

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I have two scheduled engagements with The Conference Board of Canada in February.

On 3/4 Feb I will be presenting a framework for social learning in the enterprise in Ottawa with the Canadian Council for Learning and Development as well as the Knowledge Strategy Exchange Networks.

Later in the month on 16/17 Feb I will be presenting in Montréal to the Councils of Human Resource Executives where the topic is the future of work. My presentation will discuss:

Social media, distributed work and unlimited information are changing our relationships in the workplace. We can connect to anyone, anywhere and find out almost anything. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchies, making many industrial work practices redundant. Yet we cling to the traditional ways of measuring and valuing work. Job competencies were based on stable, measurable work. Courses are an artifact of a time when information was scarce and connections were few. The future of work is in the integration of learning and working. It is in working smarter.

If any friends and colleagues in these cities want to get together, let me know. I haven’t made my travel bookings yet and I will be in Ottawa for a few extra days for some other client work. If you know of an organization that is looking for speakers or workshops please pass the word. It’s a small world.

Other workshops topics include:

  • How to foster informal learning with Web tools
  • How to develop an effective personal knowledge management strategy
  • Web social media for business
  • How to use social Web tools for training and education
  • Developing a social architecture for online communities

I’ve conducted day-long “Informal Learning Workshops” as well as Informl Learning Unworkshops. Recent workshop titles include:

Notes from 2004

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I was listening to an interview with Steven Johnson on CBC Spark and he suggested that it’s a good practice to take regular notes (like my blog) but also important to review them regularly. I’ve gone through my 2004 posts, which was my first year of full-time blogging on this site, and here is what still remains interesting. Note that in 2004, blogging was not mainstream yet.

In 2004, I posted for the first time — Learning is business, and business is learning — finally.

I was keen on The Cluetrain Manifesto, only five years old at the time, and noted a few lines I really liked:

“Fact is, we don’t care about business — per se, per diem, au gratin. Given half a chance, we’d burn the whole constellation of obsolete business concepts to the waterline. Cost of sales and bottom lines and profit margins — if you’re a company, that’s your problem. But if you think of yourself as a company, you’ve got much bigger worries. We strongly suggest you repeat the following mantra as often as possible until you feel better: “I am not a company. I am a human being.”

I also wrote —

Social networks, communities of practice, expertise locators, etc. have more potential and utility in this medium [the web] than centralized systems such as LCMS (learning content management systems)” [The year before I had been working for a company selling an LCMS].

as well as:

I find that there is still a lot of snake oil being sold as e-learning. If you can help people find what they need, when they need it, in the right context to be useful, then you will have effective content management and/or performance support. The rest is what a friend of mine calls ‘shovel ware’.

More thoughts & comments from 2004

Many companies are trying to find ways to motivate their knowledge workers. This makes me wonder about Peter Drucker’s comment that the corporation as we know it won’t be around in the next 25 years (Managing in the Next Society, 2002). Perhaps the actual structure of work, especially the Corporation itself, is an obstacle to knowledge work. Instead of tweaking the mechanisms of the corporation, through job redesign or cultural initiatives, we should be re-examining the basic structure of the corporation. It is an industrial age creation, designed to maximize physical capital and may not be optimal for maximizing “knowledge capital”.

The network, with its dynamic conversations, is where a lot of knowledge work gets done, and we should be looking at new laws to recognise networks in a similar way that we recognise corporations as legal entities. Is anything like this happening?

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Business models that allow leadership to prosper will be essential. These potential leaders, from an “aggressively intelligent citizenry”, need to be free from corporate non-disclosures or government gag orders, and the most effective business model could be the free agent working within a peer network. As tenure was essential for academic freedom, so an unfettered business model may be necessary for future leaders. If all individuals had the rights of today’s corporations, what kind of societal benefits would ensue?

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My conclusion for a while has been that knowledge cannot be managed, and neither can knowledge workers. It will take a new social contract between workers and organisations in order to create an optimally functioning enterprise. Adding management and technology won’t help either. This is the crux of everything in the new “right-sized, lean, innovative, creative” economy – getting the right balance between the organisational structure and the knowledge workers.

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This piece of advice is worth a revisit:

Each of us is given five balls. One is rubber and four are glass. The rubber ball is work. If you drop it, it will always bounce back. The other four glass balls are family, friends, health and integrity. If you drop them, they are shattered. They won’t bounce back.

Networked learning in a changing world

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

I modified my use of Twitter favourites for my Friday’s Finds selection this week. I switched my social bookmarking service from Delicious to Diigo and noticed that Diigo offered a method to save my favourites automatically. Instead of reviewing my favourites in Twitter, I went through the bookmarks on Diigo, deleting ones I no longer wanted to keep and updating and annotating those that I found more interesting. This redundancy will provide me with two ways to retrieve information, either from my blog or my bookmarks. It’s not much more effort and I think it will make my bookmarks more useful.

A Baker’s Dozen: Principles of Value Networks | ValueNetworks.com by @vernaallee

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 in designated roles to take action or produce an outcome. Only through the power of value networks can we address our complex issues – together – and create a more hopeful future.

Five surprising changes in 2010 by @lemire

We are replacing physical objects and processes by bits and software faster than I would have predicted at the beginning of the year. We are also becoming a civilization of autodidacts. Scholarship is being fundamentally reshaped under our noses without anyone noticing. I think that much of the establishment is greatly underestimating the amplitude and significance of these changes. The proof is how badly prepared the American government was with respect to Wikileaks.

Mark Federman: What is the (Next) Message?: Death of the Liberal Class

My own position (at the 4 minute point in the video) is simple to state: the constructs that gave us corporatism, capitalism, the liberal class, and modernity itself are now obsolesced, and we need a new framework in which to observe, theorize, understand, and undo the dysfunctions that we have clearly visited upon ourselves, and the wider world …

What is not acceptable in a contemporary context is the penchant of the fogey generation – men like Reihan Salam and Tony Keller – to continue to apply 19th and 20th century principles to the analysis of our 21st century reality.

My Three Words for 2011: Seek, Sense, and Share | Beth’s Blog by @kanter

Jarche defines networked learning as  “an individual, disciplined process by which we make sense of information, observations and ideas.”    He further suggests that networked learning is the solution (in part) to information overload (not the cause!).   For networked learning to be beneficial, it requires an open attitude toward learning and finding new things.   In addition, each person needs to develop individualized processes of filing, classifying and annotating digital information for later retrieval.  His conceptual model include the three words:  seek, sense, and share.

My sense is that becoming a master at networked learning helps you improve what you are doing in world that is changing so fast and is so complex.

A snapshot of life in perpetual Beta

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I had the pleasure of meeting Eileen Clegg at the Internet Time Alliance Party in November. Eileen wanted to know what ITA does and I agreed to explain my personal perspectives on work and learning.

We moved into the Internet Time Lab, in Jay’s basement, and Eileen drew while I talked.

The result shows some of the main concepts and ideas that drive my work.

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Life in Perpetual Beta is a primary theme.

Understanding complexity is central to my work.

Other themes include giving up control and letting people manage themselves.

Concepts such as ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate (Mark Federman) and wirearchy (Jon Husband) inform my work.

The idea that “humans don’t scale” is based on research such as the work of Robin Dunbar.

Probe-Sense-Respond comes from the Cynefin framework.

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So that’s a snapshot of some of the ideas that I find important for my work … for now. Be sure to check out some of the great visuals Eileen has done with a wide variety of clients.

Transparency: embrace it

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How do you make work more effective? Make it transparent, as Sigurd Rinde did with his client. He redesigned an advertising agency’s workflow, identifying the main choke points, four “big meetings” where one of the “owners” had to be present, and then made the workflow visible so anybody could see what was happening.

With an average seven weeks from start to end for their projects, where I assumed half a week average delay from instant for each meeting due to “sorry, I’m busy on Thursday”s (that I would argue was very optimistic), we could cut the time from seven to five weeks per project, on average, without losing anything but thumb twiddling. With a 20% profit margin today it would translate to a tripling of their profits.

Of course the clients would think this was a great idea.

Did they go for this no-brainer? Nope, the two owners would not hear of it, their controlling habits and methods where not to be touched, and bah humbug to tripling of profits. Ah well, their prerogative, they did not have outside investors. Maybe I should have had a chat with their spouses over lunch at Harrods?

Oh, I guess they didn’t.

Transparent work is the one of biggest opportunities we have in creating more effective organizations but it seems to be a major barrier in any hierarchy. The owners didn’t want a transparent workflow to show they were the cause of the problem. Too often, the leadership IS the problem. Whether they like it or not, these types of owners/managers had better adapt. More and more, workers know where the problems are because they have access to the data. They  can see alternatives and find solutions blindingly fast on the web. The hard reality for business leaders is that in an inter-connected world, we need less management, not more.

In a transparent workplace, the role of management is to give workers a job worth doing, the tools to do it, recognition of a job well done and then let them manage themselves. Working smarter means using social media tools, which are inherently designed for transparency, and doing something worthwhile.  Social media are the equivalent of an industrial factory for each worker. Today, every worker has the ability to get a message out to the world in the blink of an eye. Workers can also connect to massive amounts of information. As anthropologist Michael Wesch states, “when media change, then human relationships change“. The Internet has changed everything. The social contract that we call employment has been changing for a while. Unions are shrinking, the self-employed are growing and low wage service jobs are becoming our largest growth sector. What can unite us is our ability to easily connect with each other, without traditional intermediaries.

For me, an essential part of working smarter is showing people they have access to the most powerful communications medium in history and that individuals have to grab hold of it, understand it and use it for the good of society, because we are society. Working smarter is not about doing your job better. It’s understanding what it means to work, to create and to be responsible, while being visible to everyone else. This can be a bit scary, but I firmly believe that transparency is the foundation for a much better workplace.

Will's Learning Landscape Model

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Will Thalheimer has developed the Learning Landscape Model and created this 13 minute video to explain it.

Overall I find the model useful, though I would replace “Learning” (at 2:15) with “Instruction”, because that’s really what training departments provide in order to promote on-job-performance.

It is also good to see on-job-learning as part of the model. The various measurement points, beyond Kirkpatrick’s four levels of evaluation, (at 9:50) are really worth noting. There are over a dozen measurements noted that are often ignored in organizations.

If you’re in the learning & development (L&D) field I would highly recommend this video and further perusal of Will’s work.

As the video concludes (from 10:39) Will shows the divided responsibilities of Learning versus Business professionals. This division of responsibility highlights a problem with our current work support structures.

Handing-off from learning to working is a vestige of the industrial mindset and reminds me of Waterfall software development models. We need to integrate learning and working, using something more akin to an Agile model, as Sahana Chattopadhyay recently described. My challenge to L&D professionals would be to integrate and support the entire model, not just the parts in pink. This is what the 21st century training department needs to do.

The Learning Landscape Model is based on solid research, as is all of Will’s work, and provides an excellent framework for L&D departments to practice their craft. While I don’t think it’s enough, it’s a good place to start the journey of developing the necessary emergent work practices for the next century.