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.

Quotes from 2010

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I found many quotes this past year, especially via Twitter. Here are most of them, all together (this way I’ll be able to find them all when I want to use them). #NetworkLearning

Life

via @VasilyKomarov RT @nickthinker: Those who can lead an inexpensive (low cost) life and appreciate the simple and free things are actually the “new rich”!

@KareAnderson “Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

@bduperrin “The more social you are you [the] more opportunities you get, the more busy you are, the less social you become.”

via @CharlesHGreen “When you dig yourself into a hole, first, stop digging.” up by your bootstraps

@EskoKilpi “The everyday live interactions we experience do not exist in a meaningful way in any documents.”

@EskoKilpi “Control means being able to predict (if A then B); if we can’t predict, we can’t control.”

via @4KM Complexity is necessary … confusion & unnecessary complication should be eliminated. (Don Norman)

@GeorgeKao “There’s no such thing as ‘keeping up.’ There’s only checking in at high leverage times.”

@JohnDCook “He who marries the spirit of the age will soon be a widow.”

“Silence is golden but duct tape is silver!” @JaneBozarth

“Uncertainty is the certainty that the parameters will change.” @downes

“No matter how many pairs of reading glasses I buy & strategically place around the house they are never nearby when I need them.” @skap5

History

Abraham Lincoln: The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise — with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. (Annual Message to Congress: 1862)

Organizations & Management

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”- Howard Aiken; via @RudolfChristian

via @minutrition RT @umairh: in the age of strategy, what counted was knowing the terrain. in the age of wisdom, what counts is knowing the soil.

@jonhusband “Unfortunately, HR is the home base for the management practices based on old mental models about work & motivation .. not synched with networked work”

@tdebaillon “Most companies aren’t designed for collaboration.” My Little Enterprise 2.0 Diffusion Framework

@umairh “The problem isn’t that we need new jobs. It’s that we need a better economy, composed of new kinds of companies, built for a higher purpose.”

Henry Mintzberg: “In a word, corporate America is sick.” – “A viable economy needs to be led by explorers, not exploiters.” – “The Problem Is Enterprise, Not Economics” via @jonhusband

@faboolous “Knowledge work thus requires that each party offer something with no guarantee that they will get anything specific in return”.

via @planetrussell- “Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while giving the appearance of stability.” —Nassim Nicholas Taleb, PhD.

“when hiring, we don’t care about formal education” says @JasonFried of37Signals – the new workplace, the new normal

“Walmart exec (I’m not making this up) told me email was so time-consuming cause she had to approve everyone’s email in advance.” @jaycross

“I think “human capital” is an oxymoron. “Social capital” too. Test question: would you consider your spouse, children or friends “capital?” @dsearls

“If I am an effective leader then I have set up a system that is not dependent on me.” @gcouros

“The fact is that organisation and management sciences are not sciences at all but scientific emperors with no clothing.” Complexity & Management Centre

“Organizations not engaged in real-time sensemaking are going to find themselves getting Dumb and Dumber” by Jeff Jonas (& others). via @jonhusband

“Don’t pity the blind man, for he has never seen PowerPoint.” @MeetingBoy

Networks

@reactorcontrol “Tim Berners-Lee describes social networks as “vertical silos”, because they are not interoperable. #dzf4?

@charlesjennings “ROI on social learning? ‘social networks are necessarily loose-edged and impossible to make fully explicit’ (David Weinberger)”

@VMaryAbraham “These guys are some of the smartest in the microsharing room, but I haven’t yet heard the 140-nugget that makes the case.”

Education & Training

Catherine Lombardozzi – “One of my favorite quotes is from Kent Seibert: ‘Reject the myth that we learn from experience and accept the reality that we learn by reflecting on experience.’

“Most of what we know we learn from other people. We pay tuition to a few of these teachers … but most of it we get for free, and often in ways that are mutual – without a distinction between student and teacher … We know this kind of external effect is common to all the arts and sciences – the ‘creative professions.’ All of intellectual history is the history of such effects.” Does Milwaukee have enough college graduates to thrive?

“Anything you think is either unoriginal, wrong or both”

@courosa Look at a single Twitter page. Think about prior knowledge / literacies needed to decode that page. RTs. links. voice. events. #MediaLiteracy

@Dave_Ferguson My comment to @rnantel : fixing most performance problems with training is like fixing a leaky faucet by painting the kitchen.

“You can not have a superior democracy with an inferior system of education.” @ginab

My Favourites

Steven Johnson – Chance favours the connected mind. via @timkastelle

@ralphmercer – “committees are places to lure great ideas to be killed while absolving everyone of the blame”

“Hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust” … Warren Bennis” via @jonhusband

via @HealthCareerPro “I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.” ~ Winston Churchill.

What is working smarter?

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I’m in the business of helping organizations work smarter. What does that mean?

Our industrial and information age is nearing an end as we transition into an era where creativity becomes the most important element in our economy. We are also living in a more complex time as traditional disciplines blur and as information explodes. For the developed world, that means the future does not lie in doing manual or simple work because much of it will be automated. Merely complicated work, which is most of the work done in traditional industrial or office jobs, is being outsourced to the cheapest source of labour. That leaves complex work, requiring initiative, creativity and passion.

How does this affect our daily lives?

First of all, look at the restructuring that is happening in our economy. Jobs are being shed that will never be replaced. Can your work be done remotely by someone who doesn’t cost as much? Then at some point in the near future, it will. Companies are finally realizing that they need to work smarter. That means automating and outsourcing where necessary (if they don’t, their competition will) and then figuring out how to get things done in complexity.

The core of working smarter in complexity is the integration of learning and working. It sounds easy, but it’s not. There are two major parts to this. At the individual level it requires people to think critically and embed sense-making processes into their work and their lives. This takes skill and practice. It also takes a work environment that supports and encourages individual learning, sharing, and collaboration.

Hierarchy is the enemy of creativity but we still need some structure to get things done. As Vera John-Steiner writes in Creative Collaboration; “…the achievement of productive collaboration requires sustained time and effort. It requires the shaping of a shared language, the pleasures and risks of honest dialogue, and the search for a common ground.” The risks of honest dialogue will be a major barrier for many organizations to transition to more creative work.

Successful organizations will need to:

1. support creative collaboration (not merely team work)

2. support each person in developing critical thinking skills

3. put this together in order to get things done

There is no specific recipe to do this. Every organization and business will have to find its own path. However, that path will not include:

– standard job competencies; job descriptions & JOBS;

– one-size-fits-all instruction;

– equating time to value;

– and many other vestiges of the industrial era.

Social performance support

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

Business is nothing but “Social Networks” by @sig

Adding “social” as a layer onto a rigid structure created pre-IT will never do it. E 2.0 or it’s new name, “social business”, is commendable but a blind alley, you have to focus on bettering the core mechanism instead. The core mechanism that allows and executes “a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end by working with someone to produce or create something”. (That was the definition of Process and Collaboration baked into one sentence.)

Social doesn’t just mean friends — it means society; by @umairh

Think of the “social” in social media the way economists use the word: to represent society. The right function of “social” tools is to give yesterday’s creaking, rusting institutions social — as in societal — significance. Social doesn’t just mean friends — it means society.”

@rdeis “RT @OPENForum Why I Was Wrong About Twitter – Very Good summary of what Twitter does really well.”

Back then, when Ashton Kutcher was trying to get a million followers and the news was all atwitter about Twitter, like many others, I thought Twitter was nothing more than a gossipy, truncated, silly platform for, as I put it, learning about what someone was doing “at 3:47 tomorrow afternoon.”

Let’s invest more in developing people skills, tacit knowledge, the humanities, meta-learning, and decision-making.

How the app phenomenon is changing economics; by @rbgayle

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.

Leadersheep:

Leadersheep are a species in the Homo genus of bipedal primates in Hominidae, the great ape family. They are most likely descended from the wild mouflon. Leadersheep are raised by some B-schools and a culture of impatience/short-termism for good looks, fast wins, fleece and milk. Leadersheep can be manipulative and self-absorbed, but are usually not dangerous and often mean well. If you are one or see one, teach it to become less important.

@charlesjennings “Transport for London ‘lorry blind spots’ film – why cyclists get crushed (daughter did research for this)” – None of the cyclists along the side of the lorry in this video can be seen from the driver’s seat inside the lorry cab.

Also: augmented reality version

@charlesjennings “@edavidove just pointed out that this is the ideal male performance support ‘tool’ (@hjarche photo at Schiphol)”

Resonance

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Over the past year, I’ve posted 225 articles here, some popular, some a bit controversial and some ignored (but still useful for my own learning).

Here are some posts that resonated with readers.

Two posts, A Framework for Social Learning in the Enterprise (February) and The Evolving Social Organization (August), were popular, as was the white paper that combined these articles. This shows that blog posts do not need to be short to get attention. Longer posts will be read if people are interested in the subject.

A bit more controversial was the post; The LMS is no longer the centre of the universe (May). The great LMS Debate was a topic of conversation with my Internet Time Alliance colleagues for a period of time over the year as well. You get more spirited conversations when money is at stake.

Personal Knowledge Management (March) remained a popular subject, and a key focus of my research and practice, though by the end of the year I was calling it network learning (October).

I revived an article that I had written collaboratively with Michele Martin in 2008 as part of our Work Literacy series. The Ning site it was hosted on had changed its terms of service so I posted a copy of an Introduction to Social Networking (June) on this site. It got more attention here than on the Ning site.

Even though it was written in 2009, The Future of the Training Department remained popular. I really appreciated this comment by Donald Clark; “Close the training departments – love it!”

Thanks to everyone who dropped by, made a comment, wrote a blog post in response, or tweeted something they found here. Thanks for extending the conversation.

Teamwork

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Most of us have seen those great teamwork motivational posters and almost every job description includes teamwork as a critical competency. Teamwork is over-rated, in my opinion. It can be a smoke screen for office bullies to coerce fellow workers. The economic stick often hangs over the team — ‘be a team player or lose your job’.

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In the workplace, teamwork seldom takes into consideration the uniqueness of individuals. Usually you have to fit into the existing team like a cog in a machine. Team members can be replaced. In work teams, it’s business first. But we are more complex and multi-faceted than simplistic Homo Economicus. Our lives have psycho-social aspects. We are more than our jobs. Teams promote unity of purpose, not diversity, creativity, and passion.

Think of a football team, a common business metaphor in North America. There is only one coach and everybody has a specific job to do while ‘keeping your eye on the ball’. In today’s workplace, there’s more than one ball and the coach cannot see the entire field. The team, as work vehicle, is outdated.

As much as organizations advertise for ‘team players’, what would be better are workers who can truly collaborate by connecting to each other in a more balanced manner with multiple facets of their lives. There are other ways of organizing work. Orchestras are not teams — neither are jazz ensembles. There may be teamwork on a theatre production but the cast is not a team. It is more like a social network. Teams are what we get when we use the blunt stick of economic consequences as the prime motivator. In a complex world, unity can be counter-productive.

In a complex society

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As you may have noticed, this has been a busy week. I flew to Maastricht, NL last weekend, via London and Brussels; a 24 hour trip. The highlight of getting to the working smarter event with Tulser was a short but enjoyable stop in Brussels with Christian De Neef who met me at the airport and drove me to the train station. We only know each other through Twitter and it was a casual comment on Christian’s photo that initiated our meeting.

Conversations during the working smarter events in Maastricht and London were stimulating and there were a couple of constant threads. One was the fact that there is little difference between many of the information intensive support functions in any organization  – information technology, knowledge management, learning & development, human resources.  Each support function is a blind monk trying to understand an elephant. I’ve discussed this many times and Karyn Romeis, who attended our session in London, suggests that learning has to move to the front of the organization. It’s not just learning that has to become more operational, but all support functions, and all together. As Christian and I were talking, it was obvious we shared many values, but we come from rather different disciplinary backgrounds. In the network era, it’s all merging.

The other thread was that management is the main barrier to fostering creative and innovative organizations. Many questions centred around, “how do I get my manager to understand this?” If we want to be a change agents, we have to point out examples of the old type of thinking not making sense in the organization any more. We need to create cognitive dissonance to get attention. Transforming an organization means shifting our paradigm (mental models) and this is best done through stories. The most effective stories are about plans and expectations gone awry. It took the little boy to be the first to say that the Emperor had no clothes. However, change doesn’t happen until it happens to us. To understand the power of social media for learning and collaboration (not marketing, where all the effort is currently) we have to become the change we want. That means engaging in social media and learning how to learn in a network. After Maastricht and London, we had many people commit to engaging with Twitter, blogs or other social media. They just needed a gentle push ;)

In complexity, we have to think about emergent practices, which means jumping in and immersing ourselves in the environment in order to start making sense of it. An external, analytical approach will tell us little. There is too much to understand and much that cannot be explained without experiencing it first. Networks and complexity are the defining characteristics of our “work” places today.

Photo: Watching breakfast being prepared in a London kebab diner, near Victoria Station.