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.

Interdependence: a sense of purpose

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As we do more of our work in networks, workplace learning becomes an interdependent activity. Social and collaborative learning support the development of emergent practices needed for more complex work.

Esko Kilpi looks at different work tasks with the same framework as the above figure: independent, dependent or interdependent.

The Internet-based firm sees work as networked communication. Any node in the network can communicate with any other node on the basis of contextual interdependence and creative participative engagement. Work takes place in a transparent, wide-area, digital environment.

The focus is thus not on independent tasks, or predetermined processes, but on participative, self-organizing responsiveness that creates patterns of continuity and creativity.

Work and learning, as they merge, become increasingly interdependent activities. People haven’t changed over the years but with the Internet we have an opportunity to create work structures that may actually meet our core needs. Dan Pink discusses in Drive how various studies have shown that three basic things motivate people to do work (see video). These are:

  • Autonomy
  • Mastery
  • A sense of purpose

This applies to all but the most menial of tasks. We need to be in control, work at bettering ourselves and do this with the sense of some greater mission. We are social beings. As independent self-employed workers we were limited for centuries in developing our skills without support, adequate tools or feedback from others. We needed to study from masters and become part of a community of practice. Even with guilds and unions, there was limited access and individuals lacked autonomy. This same lack of autonomy and sense of purpose was magnified in the factory and is still evident in the modern workplace. Today, up to 84% of workers want to leave their jobs, in spite of the current economic climate.

It is only by working (and learning) interdependently, retaining our autonomy, co-developing our mastery and feeling a shared sense of purpose that we will be truly motivated. The opportunity the Internet has given individuals is the chance to work cooperatively toward a shared purpose (Seb Paquet calls this “ridiculously easy group-forming). The Internet also affords organizations the opportunity to loosen the dependence of workers through participative engagement (as The Cluetrain Manifesto explained a decade ago). The new organization must be some mix of free-agent autonomy, support mechanisms for mastery, and a wide enough span for each person to develop a personal sense of purpose.

Perhaps there is a new middle ground between lone wolves and corporate sheep:

2011: Integration

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I was asked to make some predictions for 2011 but missed the deadline. Instead of predictions, I think there are some trends that may cross the chasm this year. This follows on a post I wrote a year ago that included this table:

(2009) Innovators Early Adopters Crossing the Chasm
Technology Simulations Micro-blogs Blogs

Role-playing Social Networks Wikis

Waves Mobile Social Bookmarks
Ideas Emergent Learning PKM – PLN – PLE
 Performance Support

Subject Matter Networks
 Complexity
 Informal Learning

Group-centric Learning
 Flow
 Online Collaboration

I would say the PLE/PLN is across the chasm, while I now call PKM network learning and Beth Kanter describes a similar framework of networked professional learning. Micro-blogging, or Twitter, is definitely across.

As for ideas, more of my clients have accepted the need to support workplace informal learning. Performance support (EPSS) is now seen as a viable alternative to formal training (finally).

Adding to the growth of mobile, already across the chasm in much of the world, is the rise of video. Video for organizational sharing, video for instruction and video instead of manuals.

The big idea that is catching on and may take shape in 2011 is the integration of organizational support. Enough people are realizing that our compartmentalized approach to supporting work doesn’t help in a highly networked world. Why should HR, IT, Finance, Training, KM, OD, Marketing etc. be separate functions? It’s time to rid our organizations of Taylor’s ghost and I’m detecting a small groundswell of similar sentiments like radically different management.

Clark Quinn calls it a unified performer-facing environment and I have said for a while that we need to break down the intra-organizational walls. I hear the same discussions in HR, OD, KM, Training and IT. They see their traditional roles and control eroding. They are trying to remain relevant.

However, they think they have the solution, based on their existing mental models.

They don’t.

Perhaps in 2011 these departments will wake up and start talking to other.

I think the timing is right.

Makers – Review

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I don’t read much fiction but I must say I truly enjoyed Cory Doctorow’s Makers, set in the near distant future. It is neither techno-utopian nor dystopian. Doctorow has matured as a writer since Eastern Standard Tribe, an interesting novel but lacking the depth of characters and story line of Makers. I think it’s also better than the more recent Little Brother, which is oriented more to young adults but is still a good read.

The novel, told from the future, includes human drama as well as several business plans and their unfolding. It’s a business book written as fiction and is better than most business plans I’ve read. I’ve also learned more from this book. Doctorow delves just deep enough into the future of open source, crowd-sourcing, personal video surveillance and other current trends to give some idea of their large scale potential. However, it’s not so deep that it detracts from the story, which includes some interesting and complex characters. Here’s Lester, one of the protagonists and a real “maker”, talking about the constraints of working inside a large corporation:

“Working here. They said that they wanted me to come in and help them turn the place around, help them reinvent themselves. Be nimble. Shake things up. But it’s like wrestling a tar-baby. You push, you get stuck. You argue for something better and they tell you to write a report, then no one reads the report. You try to get an experimental service running and no one will reconfigure the firewall. Turn the place around?” He snorted. “It’s like turning around a battleship by tapping it on the nose with a toothpick.”

I purchased the book, as the form factor was best for a 400 page novel, though you can download it or read it online as well.

Still Confused in 2010

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

“In this day and age, if you’re not confused, you’re not thinking clearly.” ~ Burt Mannis – via @mariogastaldi

“I don’t have to attend every argument I’m invited to. ~Author Unknown” via @denniscallahan

@vernaalle: “Good luck = accident. Good management = control (yeah right!). Good fortune means working with what is emerging in a way you can succeed.”

“Downsizing is a sign of management’s failure … passing it along to people who tried to execute management’s flawed strategy” ~ Geoffrey James – via @ajaypangarkar

A Self-sufficient Organization: We spend a lot of time developing leaders and then we rely on them to run our organizations.

(1) By creating leaders, we sometimes diminish others.

(2) By creating leaders, we create followers. We focus on developing leaders but not as much on developing followers. But followers need to develop as well.

(3) Followers distance themselves from leaders. This removes a certain level of trust, communications, and performance from followers. Dominant voices and group think destroy team work.

(4) Leadership creates the hunger for power and power can corrupt people. Corrupted people often make the wrong decisions.

Connectivism: “Basically, networks underpin life & human existence” – “Knowledge in any moderately complex task or activity is networked” by @gsiemens

@jhagel: “Are we hard-wired for hierarchy? Bad news for the kumbaya crowd . . . ”

When participants experienced an outcome that could increase their status and have them become superior players, activity increased in circuitry at the top front of the brain that controls the intention to do something, suggesting that rising in a hierarchy makes one more action-oriented.

My comment to @jhagel: “Perhaps we need to follow our passions to be happy & reinforce what we’re good at. Could mean less stress in hierarchies” [Would be interesting to compare people who work in hierarchical relationships and those who don’t.]

Wakeup call for employers: 84% of workers want to quit! by @stevedenning

When 84% of workers are unhappy in their work and can’t find any reasonable alternative, while a sizable slice of the workforce is either unemployed, underemployed or on the cusp of losing their job, the potential for social and political unrest is significant.

The message for employers, employees and politicians is clear: we need to revolutionize the workplace.

UN-OAS: “information regarding human rights violations should not be considered secret or classified – via @oscarberg

December 21, 2010 – In light of ongoing developments related to the release of diplomatic cables by the organization Wikileaks, and the publication of information contained in those cables by mainstream news organizations, the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression see fit to recall a number of international legal principles. The rapporteurs call upon States and other relevant actors to keep these principles in mind when responding to the aforementioned developments.

“Gandhi’s conviction on sedition … Priceless !!!!” via @kunalkapoor

The only course open to you, the judge, is either to resign your post, and thus dissociate yourself from evil if you feel that the law you are called upon to administer is an evil and that in reality I am innocent, or to inflict upon me the severest penalty if you believe that the system and the law you are assisting to administer are good for the people of this country and that my activity is therefore injurious to the public weal.

*This is my 85th Friday’s Finds, the last for 2010. See you next year.