Working Smarter Cracker Barrel

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Next week, at our Working Smarter event hosted by Tulser in Maastricht, NL, we will have a series of short sessions on selected topics. Each Principal of the Internet Time Alliance has three topics of 20 minutes to be discussed in small groups. My topics are listed below and include links to relevant posts as well as a short description of the core ideas behind each topic.

Complexity, perpetual Beta & the need for emergent practices

Networks & Complexity:

It is generally accepted that we live and work in an increasingly ‘wired’ world. There are emerging patterns and dynamics related to interconnected people and interlinked information flows, which are bypassing established traditional structures and services.

The cynefin framework shows that emergent practices are needed in order to manage in complex environments and novel practices are necessary for chaotic ones. Most of what we consider standard work today is being outsourced and automated. We are facing more complexity and chaos in our work because of our interconnectedness.

Network Learning (aka PKM)

Network Learning: Working Smarter

One way (not the only way) to look at network learning is as a continuous process of seeking, sensing and sharing.

Seeking is finding things out and keeping up to date. Building a network of colleagues is helpful in this regard—it not only allows us to “pull” information, but also have it “pushed” to us by trusted sources.

Sensing is how we personalize information and use it. Sense-making includes reflection and putting into practice what we have learned. Often it requires experimentation, as we learn best by doing.

Sharing includes exchanging resources, ideas and experiences with our networks and collaborating with our colleagues.

The 21st Century Training Department

Information is no longer scarce and our connections are now many. The role of the training department must shift from content delivery to enabling people to connect more easily and communicate more effectively. Connecting & Communicating are central roles for organizational leaders whose workplaces are becoming more complex, either in terms of evolving practices, changing markets or advances in technology. Enabling the integration of collaborative learning with work is a more flexible model than designing courses that are outdated as soon as they’re published.

Here are some guidelines for what informal learning development could look like:

  1. Spend less time on design and more on ongoing evaluation to allow emergent practices to be developed.
  2. Build learning resources so that they can be easily changed or modified by anyone (allow for a hacker mentality)
  3. Allow everything to be connected, so that the work environment is the learning environment (but look for safe places to fail)
  4. There is no clearly defined start or finish so enable connections from multiple access points.

Getting to Working Smarter

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I started my military career as an infantry officer and then I worked as a health care administrator and finally as a training specialist. The move to the training field coincided with the creation of  the Web. I was also responsible for some fairly technical training as well as flight simulation. My immersion in technology had begun.

However, almost all of my focus was on individual training, or getting people to an operational level to either fly or fix an aircraft. As I’ve explained before, “individual training” is seen as a separate field from “collective training”. The graduates of our formal training programs would go on to do informal, collective training. The military has learned over time that a bunch of even highly-trained individuals do not make a cohesive unit. Each unit has to learn how to work together, hence the emphasis on collective training and especially pre-deployment training. Collective training is a good way to add all the context to formal training that has been stripped away by the school [yes, we called them schools].

The Training Development branch was also keen on performance improvement and much of our own professional development reflected the practices of human performance technology. HPT is a good framework, and is an excellent addition to instructional systems design (ISD), but over time I have found it to be inadequate to deal with a more complex workplace and address the social aspects of work. Collective and collaborative learning seems to be missing from HPT. For example, even the Army understands the value of story-telling.

My new focus, which is not a directional change but a progression based on experience, is Working Smarter. This takes the best from ISD, HPT and social learning and also incorporates knowledge management, organizational development, network and management theory to look at how we can develop the next practices that will inform networked organizations. As we say at the Internet Time Alliance, work and learning have become one and the same. Networks rule. Nothing is certain. Simply doing things better no longer guarantees prosperity or even survival.

Here is a slide presentation explaining how I came to focus on working smarter. It is a theme I will be discussing in several venues and countries over the next few months. This is my personal learning journey, and it’s not over yet.

Getting to working smarter

Managing the unmentionable

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

@JayCross : “You can’t manage things that you can’t mention.”

“A person grows as a person in connection with another person, and in no other way” — Teilhard de Chardin; via @technoshaman

“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.” — Hannah Arendt; via @jennifersertl

@hypergogue : “The future of workplace learning (or, saying goodbye to all that rhizome nonsense)”

As an example, if you speak to informed Training & Development strategy people they will all say that we’re seeing a trend towards ‘performance support’ and away from learning. Actually, though, trainers have always worked in ‘performance support’. Trainers have always known they’re there to ‘help people learn’. But many of them failed to spot the hidden end of that sentence – trainers help people to learn how to use performance support systems. ‘Teachers’, by the way, are no different in this respect.

Skype learning – 7 great benefits; by @donaldclark

You can always spot a fabulous technology when it can be used as a verb, like email, text, tweet. I’ll ‘Skype’ you, is one of those wonderful verbs. Over the last two years I’ve been doing voluntary Maths and Science tuition for kids that find these subjects difficult. It’s been a mix of face-to-face and Skype. So what follows is a short comparison between these two techniques.

From facts to data to commons; by @dweinberger

In a world too big to know™, our basic strategy has been to filter, reduce, and fragment knowledge. This was true all the way through the Information Age. Our fear of information overload now seems antiquated. Not only is there “no such thing as information overload, only filter failure” Clay Shirky, natch, in the digital age, the nature of filters change. On the Net, we do not filter out. We filter forward. That is, on the Net, a filter merely shortens the number of clicks it takes to get to an object; all the other objects remain accessible.

“analogy making is at the core of all cognition” Eide Neurolearning

Hofstadter believes that analogy making is at the core of all cognition, and what is especially interesting is how frequently analogies seem to occur in everyday experiences and how complex the parallels can be when suddenly we have a flash of insight, “That’s just like…(something else)”.

Henry Mintzberg on coaching ourselves & learning at HR 2010 World Congress; via @jonhusband

Highlights from these excellent videos:

  • “The Inflated Sense of the CEO” – hero worship is horrible for organizations
  • All MBA grads [without previous experience] should be stamped on the forehead with a skull & crossbones warning: “Not Prepared to Manage”
  • The role of Human Resources (HR) is to be a fifth column in the organization
  • The first thing HR can do is to get rid of the “R” [people are not resources]

Talking about Working Smarter

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Working Smarter: What is it? Why do we need to do it?

Working Smarter means integrating learning and working.

We’re networking our society, our economy and our workplaces. This increases complexity because there are more connections between people, places and things. In complex systems, the link between cause and effect cannot be determined. Instead, we need to look for constantly-changing patterns (think weather systems). More work of value is in the complex domain. Industrial-style work is being outsourced and automated.


In complex environments, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Reducing our work using mechanistic models is ineffective. People are not interchangeable parts in these systems. We are not “human resources”. Separating functions like HR, OD, KM, IT, Marketing & Training creates silos of knowledge and encourages tribal-style loyalties.

Working Smarter happens at multiple levels. Individuals need to take responsibility for their own learning and think critically. This threatens traditional command and control organizations. Cooperation via digital networks is changing how people learn and work outside the organization. Seb Paquet calls it, “ridiculously easy group forming”. We need to rethink how we collaborate to get work done. In organizing group work we have to consider each individual as well as the multiple networks that connect us.

Collaborative work, while constantly learning and connecting in networks, must be the foundation of any new organizational model. We still need to work out the details of the next workplace. We can do this by working smarter.

From learning to working technologies

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Here is a graphic of Moore’s technology adoption curve. Inspired by Jane Hart, this is my view of the current state of the learning technologies industry:

The Late Majority and Laggards are focused on meeting their compliance needs. Many of these are in traditional industries. They are purchasing one of their first learning management systems (LMS) and are focused on features & functions, which is usually a large shopping list provided by a variety of constituents.

The Early Majority are focused on learning and particularly course delivery. They are comprised in large part of education and training (E&T) intensive organizations, including schools. Most have existing contracts that bind them to a vendor. Some are considering open source (OS) as an option to their costly systems.

The Innovators & Early Adopters have shifted to a work focus. Many are in newer industries, with little legacy software. Others are in more traditional industries who have seen the urgent need for change. They are focused on supporting social and informal learning and integrating it into the work flow. These companies are retiring their LMS and are outsourcing formal course development that accounts for only 10% of their performance needs.

As an organization, are you waiting for Workscapes to cross the chasm or are you content to use technologies that have jumped the shark?

Learning socially

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

“We spend a billion dollars globally on training …. and what we get is worth shit.” From training to learning in the new economy (c. 1996)

In a fundamental way, all work is about learning: it is about learning to fit in and to collaborate, about learning to take initiative when appropriate, it is about really understanding customers, about acquiring intimate knowledge of the products and services the company sells and how they can fit into customers’ lives. Acknowledged as such or not, learning has to be an integral part of work. But, somehow, integrated [work+learning] activities have become split into the separate spheres of [work] and  [training] which have come to be dominated by quite different interests.

@hypergogue : “Piracy creates demand” – Wabi-sabi

Japanese lawyers seem to understand that some things are too complex to control or, at least, that attempts to control and simplify may destroy the beauty (ahem, the ‘value’, cough) of the things they’re trying to defend. They show an understanding of obliquity. Wabi-sabi is the opposite of the Pyrrhic Victory – it’s a triumphant surrender? This seems, somehow, too neat an idea, too symmetrical.

@amcunningham : If you are wondering what social learning might look like for health professionals, have a look at TILT (Today I Learnt That)

All Social is Learning ,by @JBordeaux [If all learning is social and work is learning, we need to focus on the social aspects of business]

This weekend, I was struck by a logic stick.  If all learning is social, is all social learning?  We know this is not automatically so, learned that in the intro to Logic, Sets and Numbers (an actual college course I took in the 70’s).  But when we engage in a social setting, online or offline, are we ever not learning?  Let’s add in a third statement: we are constantly learning.  Even while asleep, some research indicates, the brain assembles and makes sense of what it experienced that day.  There isn’t a time when our brains aren’t rewiring themselves based on input from our environment.

Technological Change must always precede economic growth, by @ingenesist

Technological Change must always precede economic growth – economic growth cannot sustainably precede technological change. If you throw money at a problem, you are not guaranteed technological change.  If you throw technological change at a problem, you are guaranteed money.

Harold’s Note: I agree that institutions follow :

We’re now at the stage where we have some new ideas for work (wirearchy, natural enterprises, workplace democracy) and some new technologies (social media, nano-bio-techno-cogno). The next step in this evolution is the new organization. Remember that business schools only followed after the mass production model had been proven. Therefore we cannot expect leadership from our institutions until we have proven a new organizational model. It’s time to get to work.

Learning in public

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In a succinct post on the nature of knowledge management in a knowledge-intensive field, Jasmin Fodil looks at how rocket scientists learn. She shows how workers at the NASA Goddard Space Fight Center reapply their knowledge:

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Goddard is doing a pretty good job of knowledge sharing:

The Knowledge Management life-cycle at Goddard seems solid to me; the focus is on the individual’s learning processes, structures, and needs, rather than content management systems, which is already leaps and bounds ahead of the curve, and there are many practices and resources to facilitate the process. Because of that, the system is unique in that is dovetails nicely with a socialized knowledge management system. People are already used to residing within a learning organization, and social software will enhance the on-the-ground process that are already so robust.

Notice that, “How Can I Learn It?” does not include sharing through information flows, such as blogs, wikis or micro-blogs (social media). As Fodil asks at the end of her article, I also wonder how much more effective the organization would be if most learning was in public, or was a “socialized knowledge management system”. Of course, Goddard may already be doing this. If not, there can be a lot of knowledge loss between discrete events such as the development of case studies or the collection of lessons learned. Workshops and case-based events may not be frequent enough. All of these are knowledge “stock” and I think there is much potential, in most organizations, to improve knowledge flow to connect these events.

PKM is my suggested framework to enhance knowledge flows in the organization by first focusing on the needs and desires of the individual and then making each person’s flow public (Seek-Sense-Share). Network learning requires sense-making in public. But, as Fodil concludes:

Sometimes learning in public is a difficult process, but the feedback, support, and resultant improvements are worth it.

Transparency is the first, and perhaps largest, hurdle in creating new management frameworks for a networked world. Learning in public makes our work transparent and can help us develop critical next practices in our increasingly complex workplaces. We all have to start thinking and working like rocket scientists.

Transparent work

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People are now the engine of change and the fuel is communications, says Jay Deragon in Systemic Impact of Social Technology

System outcomes can be influenced by numerous factors such as:

  1. Competitor innovation that attracts the market away from your business
  2. Cost of goods increases and margins shrink. You cut expenses to survive.
  3. Employee turnover which fuels inconsistency and waste.
  4. Customer leave due to dis-satisfaction
  5. Market shifts that you are unaware of and don’t understand

The #1 influence that is threaded through all five examples above is communications.

I’ve attended various meetings over the past six months; meetings with groups that I haven’t had dealings with before. These were professional associations, networks of researchers and administrators, and others. I would say that all the problems discussed at these meetings were, at root, communications issues.

Communication in a network is not the same as what we may have considered as traditional business communications. Sending out a clear memo (email) may have worked before, but looking for that email or document six months later on some kind of shared intranet drive is another issue completely. Sharing the emails of a previous worker in a certain position may make sense at first, but becomes totally impractical when 20,000 emails arrive, all in folders that make no sense to the incumbent [I speak from personal experience here]. Adding an enterprise resource system (LMS, TMS, HRIS, etc) doesn’t help much either, because the enforced knowledge structure makes little sense to the individual worker.

What may be considered a knowledge problem is really a transparency one. If I want to find general information, I search the Web, and quite often find what I need. For more contextual knowledge, I ask my network via text message, Twitter, blog or forum. The reason I can do this is that either the knowledge or the knowledgeable person is visible on the web.

Visibility is the key for knowledge work inside the organization as well. Jay Cross described it in Informal Learning, with the case study of CGI using an “Internet Inside” tool approach.

Just compare informal learning on the web with what happens inside the firewall. Online, we all benefit from others who openly share. We read free blog posts, comments, tweets and wikipedia articles. We watch descriptive YouTube videos and check out wiki-how or a host of other self-help sites. We may do all of this without even thinking about the millions of people who share in order to make our lives better. Meanwhile, inside the organization, we’re trying to find that document that got filed away on some shared drive, but nobody remembers the date or the title (about all the metadata available) so it is lost to us.

When I note how easy it is to find the stuff we need on Google, most people understand and agree. Then I explain that it only works if some people are making the information public. Making the information that results from our daily work visible is a huge step in enhancing communications. The simplest and easiest way is to replicate the tools and processes used on the open Internet – blogs, micro-blogs, social networks, social bookmarks, etc. The problem with enterprise systems is that they don’t act as networks. They were not built with network DNA but rather hierarchical frameworks. Therefore, they cannot scale to complexity the way a much simpler protocol can. Simplicity leads to complexity. Complicated systems just get more complicated.

My advice is to keep the tools simple and replicate the web; it works, and the basic protocols are very simple. Use a DIY approach and let the IT department focus on data security not tools.

Effective networked organizations are those with a sharing culture, embracing a new social learning contract.

Learning, in spite of ourselves

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

“We spend a billion dollars globally on training …. and what we get is worth shit.” From Training to Learning in the New Economy c.1996

Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation – Oscar Wilde; via @JenniferSertl

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect – Mark Twain; via @micahariel

“My mom has zero buzz, but when she says something, I listen” ~ CEO Zappos; via @blindgaenger

The internet forces us to deliver value to our customers before our customers pay for anything. ~Bob Pike; via @splove1

Coevolution of brain and hand in development of higher-level cognition: toolmaking a key; via @hreingold

“Making a hand axe appears to require higher-order cognition in a part of the brain commonly known as Broca’s area,” said Emory anthropologist Dietrich Stout, co-author of the study. It’s an area associated with hierarchical planning and language processing, he noted, further suggesting links between tool-making and language evolution.

Learning, when your organization isn’t into it: Why PKM/PLN/PLE (networked learning) is critical in today’s workplace – You’re on your own, folks! by @michelemmartin

I know from experience that while there are many companies and organzations (usually the larger ones) that take learning pretty seriously, reality is that most workers cannot count on their employer as the primary avenue for improving their skills. They may get some training to learn how to use proprietary systems or processes, but the kinds of skill-building that make people effective and marketable are just not going to happen.

formal, informal & social learning: aiding & abetting organizational evolution; by @dpontefract

When technology companies begin talking collaboration, social ‘whatever’ or Enterprise 2.0 … I can’t help but think they’re missing the chips and malt vinegar of the order. C’mon chefs, organizations are changing from a behavioral perspective (as society evolves too) and thus we need those tools and technologies to help drive the new organizational behaviors right across the org. It cannot be simply the technology; we need the organizational evolution and new behavior model in the mix. (aided and abetted by formal, informal and social learning constructs – malt vinegar)

Richard Branson on what they don’t teach you in business school: shift from quarterly sales targets to longer term goals and focus on “creativity, intuition & empathy”; via @raesma

PLENK 2010

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I was not able to attend any of the sessions at PLENK (Personal Learning Environments & Networked Knowledge)  2010, a Massively Open Online Course (MOOC), other than the one I facilitated on personal knowledge management.  PLENK 2010 was conducted by Stephen Downes, George [Clooney] Siemens & Dave Cormier, three fellow Canadians and two who live pretty close by. However, Zaid Ali Alsagoff provides a comprehensive overview of the most awesome course on planet earth, offered via the intergalactic gaga network.