Join Internet Time Alliance for a Day in SFO

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The day following DevLearn, Saturday, November 6th, the five members of the Internet Time Alliance are holding a retreat to share insights and plan for the forthcoming year. We’re meeting at the Internet Time Lab, across the Bay from San Francisco in Berkeley.

We originally intended for this to be a private session for challenging one another’s views on what’s important in social learning, enterprise learning governance, working smarter, the impact of mobile learning, taking advantage of personal knowledge environments, breakthroughs in brain science, revised views of motivation, growing awareness of emergence, the shift from push to pull models, rethinking the role of the LMS, and breaking down barriers to change. We’d swap our views on recent thoughts emanating from Altimeter, IBM, Dan Pink, JSB, and others we listen to.

Then we spotted a potential pitfall: the echo-chamber effect. When it’s just us, there’s an ever-present danger that we’ll fall into griping about how most corporations simply don’t have a clue, leave gobs of money on the table, and look for salvation in all the wrong places. Name-calling isn’t going to help us make progress.

We decided to invite half a dozen outsiders to take part in our one-day retreat. It will keep us honest.

Our ground rules:

No competitors. If Fiat attends, Volkswagen can’t. Our choice.
Small group. This session will be intimate and participatory. No more than six outsiders can attend. Again, our choice.
No consultants. We’re the consultants (ugh). You’re the practitioners.
Big payback. Bring a problem to solve; you’ll receive individualized advice from thought leaders.

Everyone will share in the day’s activities, which will probably include:

Lunch at the Cafe at Chez Panisse
Walk in the redwoods in the Berkeley Hills
Books such as The Working Smarter Fieldbook, Informal Learning, & Engaging Learning
Video records of the proceedings

Fee for the day is $1,200. Two from a single organization, $1,000 each. (Yes, you are essentially funding our plane tickets and picking up the tab for meals.)

Interested?

DevLearn2010

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Join me and my colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance at DevLearn in San Francisco next month. We all plan to be there.

Jane Hart provides a snapshot of the State of Learning in the Workplace Today on at 10:45 am on Wednesday, November 3.

At 4:00 pm on Wednesday, we all will be engaged in a conversation entitled Work Smarter: Learning is the Real Work.

We expect to pop up at a few other places as well. (Surprise!)

Different – Review

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Different, by Youngme Moon, discusses how market competition creates a herd mentality amongst competitors and results in a wide array of very similar products. The more mature a market category, the less deviation there is. I see this in the learning management system (LMS) market. Basically, they’re all the same and currently all are adding “social” to the mix, as they try to keep up with each other.

Tim Kastelle, who writes on innovation, was also struck by what I would describe as the key graphic in the book.  It shows what happens when you benchmark yourself against your competitors. Over time, everybody starts to look the same. A radical, and different, approach would be to emphasize your strengths and ignore, or even celebrate, your weaknesses.

The herd mentality is to keep up with the competition, but as the author writes, ” … if you’re looking for a unique solution, the last thing you should do is ask for a vote”. Youngme Moon describes three major types of idea brands that don’t try to compete: reverse, breakaway and hostile. Descriptions and examples are provided in this book filled with anecdotes from the professor at Harvard Business School.

Just being different is not enough for business success though. The difference has to have meaning, such as Harley Davidson creating a real community of bikers, numbering over a million. Difference has to resonate, not just be superficial.

I like the author’s approach in writing this book, as it reminds me of life in perpetual Beta or the process of blogging, where the final product never really gets out.

This book is very much a working draft, which is another way of saying that I have tried very hard to approach it with the same lack of self-consciousness that I feel if I were simply thinking out loud, on paper. I think I’ve gotten some of it right, but I’m sure I’ve gotten some of it wrong, too. It is a leaky, leaky boat, this book of mine.

This book is an easy read and different from many management books in the sense that it does not offer a specific  formula for success. I would recommend Different for anyone working in marketing or product development. There are also many insights for entrepreneurs and freelancers.

Being social for learning and performance

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Social learning has been a theme here for some time [my first post on the subject in 2005: from e-learning to s-learning]. Recent research by CMU, MIT & Union College shows that being social is also a key to group performance:

That collective intelligence, the researchers believe, stems from how well the group works together. For instance, groups whose members had higher levels of “social sensitivity” were more collectively intelligent. “Social sensitivity has to do with how well group members perceive each other’s emotions,” says Christopher Chabris, a co-author and assistant professor of psychology at Union College in New York.

“Also, in groups where one person dominated, the group was less collectively intelligent than in groups where the conversational turns were more evenly distributed,” adds Woolley. And teams containing more women demonstrated greater social sensitivity and in turn greater collective intelligence compared to teams containing fewer women.

However, many OD, HR and training departments still focus on individual skill development and the perennial favourite, leadership training. How often do people work in total isolation today? Why are skills taught separately from the workplace and co-workers? As for leadership, how can you decontextualize it from the workplace? Easy cookie-cutter solutions, like MBTI for leadership, are mainstream fare, even though MBTI is about as valid as astrology [I’m a reflector, completer finisher, ENTJ, inspirer – what are you?]

In the evolving social organization, we noted how knowledge workers get things done by conversing with peers, customers and partners, as they solve the problems of the day. Learning from these social interactions is a key to business innovation. To participate in their markets, organizations, customers and suppliers need to understand each other and this too, is social. Social learning is how knowledge is created, internalized and shared. It is how knowledge work gets done.

A serious re-focus is needed for organizations to take advantage of social learning in business and professional networks. Everything from team composition, job titles, performance evaluation and training approaches must be examined through the lens of [social] networks. There is solid research in social network analysis, value network analysis and social learning that can inform this shift. But leaders and managers must first put aside their old mental models, and that’s the real challenge.

With my ITA colleagues, we’re trying to start a shift to working smarter in networks, without some fancy, and unnecessary, software platform to enable it. It’s a cultural challenge to change mental models, not a technological one.

Related post: Let’s talk about work

Twitter and the law of the few

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The Law of the Few, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point relates to the spreading of ideas & viruses in populations:

The attainment of the tipping point that transforms a phenomenon into an influential trend usually requires the intervention of a number of influential types of people. In the disease epidemic model Gladwell introduced in Chapter 1, he demonstrated that many outbreaks could be traced back to a small group of infectors. Likewise, on the path toward the tipping point, many trends are ushered into popularity by small groups of individuals that can be classified as Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.

Connectors are individuals who have ties in many different realms and act as conduits between them, helping to engender connections, relationships, and “cross-fertilization” that otherwise might not have ever occurred. Mavens are people who have a strong compulsion to help other consumers by helping them make informed decisions. Salesmen are people whose unusual charisma allows them to be extremely persuasive in inducing others’ buying decisions and behaviors.

Charlene Croft tipped me to the fact that Twitter is an amplifier for Mavens, Connectors & Salespeople:

Twitter is a social networking site predominantly used by individuals who are high-level communicators and organizations/businesses who want to reach those communicators.   Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point is a good lens through which to view Twitter users.  He talks about the Connectors, the Mavens and the Salesmen as being the three types of individuals which start and spread what he calls “social epidemics.”

Let’s look at some specific behaviours on Twitter.

Mavens: If you are already a writer or blogger, twitter amplifies your work to a wider audience. Posting your latest work, or having others tweet it, gets out your ideas. When someone as famous as Tim Berners-Lee signs up on Twitter, he automatically gets many followers and a new channel for communication, just as Margaret Atwood has done.

Twitter is becoming a great place to connect online, extending the reach of many bloggers. I’ve noticed that while my blog comments have decreased in the past year, links from Twitter have significantly increased.

People who tweet original ideas and comments tend to have a larger group of followers. This extends their influence and can lead to more speaking and writing opportunities. With more people following you, serendipitous moments have a greater chance of happening. For instance, I once tweeted that I was looking for new projects.  This was picked up by someone who followed me but I did not know previously. It led to paid work.

Connectors: These valuable people to know can make introductions across disciplines. They often follow many people and post lots of “retweets” [RT]. The more they give, the more influential they become in the network. Connectors are well-suited to be online community managers, a vocation that is in demand today.

Salespeople: Direct selling on Twitter usually doesn’t work, as most people will not follow a pure sales pitch. However, Twitter is an excellent resource for salespeople to find out what people are looking for or if they’re unhappy with a competitor. I think Twitter is one of the best free competitive intelligence tools on the web.

I remember when web pundits thought that some day everybody would have a blog. Today, many people have an online website, Facebook or LinkedIn profile, but relatively few blog regularly. It takes discipline to write year after year, especially if it’s more than a personal journal. Twitter, or micro-blogging in general, may be the current web darling but this too will fade. While Twitter, like blogging, is not for everyone, it can be quite useful for a certain segment of the population. This aspect of Twitter should be seriously examined by leaders and managers who want their organizations to work smarter.

Work is learning; so what?

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“Work is learning, learning work” – that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

(once again, apologies to Keats)

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I rewrote the above lines a while back and they sum up how networks have changed the relationship between learning and working. They’re one and the same thing, as the ubiquitous network merges work and learning.

Why?

Networks – Our workplaces, economies and societies are becoming highly networked. The transmission of ideas can be instantaneous. There is little time to pause, go into the back room for a while and develop something to address our challenges. The problem may have changed by then.

Complexity – The Cynefin framework is one way to examine established practices at work. For example, most simple and complicated work today is being automated and outsourced. Higher paid work often involves solving complex problems where there are no established answers and we need to engage the problem and learn by probing. Complexity is the new norm in the modern workplace.

Life in Perpetual Beta – Not just rapid change, but continual change, requires practices that evolve as they’re developed. In programming, this has meant a move from waterfall to agile methods. Beta releases are the norm for Web applications and as we do more on the Web, other practices are following.

The integration of learning and work is not some ideal, it is a necessity in a complex world.

Current models for managing people, training and knowledge-sharing are insufficient for a workplace that requires emergent practices to keep up with change. Looking back at best practices will only cause us to fall further behind. Formal training has only ever addressed about 20% of workplace learning and this was acceptable when the work environment was relatively stable. Knowledge workers today need to connect with others to learn and solve problems in real time.

Emergent practices can be developed collaboratively while solving problems for which there are no definitive answers. For instance, what’s the “best” Internet business model? Where once we could document knowledge and develop guidelines and practices to be followed by most workers, we now need to let workers develop their own practices, according to their particular context, which is constantly in flux. This is a very different approach from the way we designed jobs and training in the past.

So what?

Training, as a separate function from work, will become a luxury. It’s time to re-think your training strategies.

Supporting the development of emergent practices throughout the workforce will become critical to survival. Social media are tools that can help us develop emergent practices. They enable conversations between people separated by distance or time. Social media can facilitate the sharing of tacit knowledge through conversations to inform the collaborative development of emergent work practices. It’s time to master social media for your workplace.

With constant learning and unlearning required to do our work, the idea of a fixed job description and and core competencies becomes antiquated. Those who cannot adapt will be bypassed or ignored by the network. It’s time to rethink your ‘job’.

Friday's quotes

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Some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week or so (just quotes this week):

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

“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

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

“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

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

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

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

Network Learning

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I mentioned in my last post that the term “personal knowledge management” (PKM) does not adequately describe the sense-making process that I attribute to it. It’s rather obvious that knowledge cannot be managed, as Dave Jonassen has said many times:

Every amateur epistemologist knows that knowledge cannot be managed. Education has always assumed that knowledge can be transferred and that we can carefully control the process through education. That is a grand illusion.

I am extremely interested in personal sense-making processes because the Web has had a profound effect on how we communicate. The big change is not the technology per se, but the underlying structure of web technologies: the network. Without the surround of the network in a ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate world, traditional activities of journalling, letter writing and note taking would be unchanged. However, they are quite different in a network.

In a network, connections matter as much, if not more than content.

Sharing knowledge produces network effects.

In a network, nodes gain respect and trust from their activities, not their hierarchical position.

In a network, cooperation is more important than collaboration or teamwork.

As we get interconnected, networking is learning.

This is network learning; it’s an essential part of working smarter.

I plan on gradually shifting the conversation from PKM to network learning because quite often I see that what is holding back organizational change is a failure to understand that networks are quite different from hierarchies. Being a contributing node in a network is not the same as doing your job to the satisfaction of your boss. Trust is multi-way in a network while hyperlinks and social media subvert organizational control mechanisms.

Here is a note I made at a conference this week: All this talk about the digital economy and nobody really understands networks – hierarchical mental model dominates – sad :(

As Stephen Downes wrote, “In a chaotic environment, knowledge is nothing more than pattern recognition.”

Network learning helps with pattern recognition and we need to develop shared mental models of networks to get out of our command & control organizational mindsets. Personally engaging in network learning is the first step.

Using our knowledge

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“Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful.” Margaret J. Wheatley.

All the information and knowledge in the world will not help us unless we take time to reflect upon what we have learned and also do something with it. When I discuss personal knowledge management [a term that really needs to be changed and I welcome suggestions] I emphasize reflection through doing. In my case, this happens most often on my blog. Blogs are powerful tools for reflection.

Blogs act as the glue between our interactions with others, whether they be projects, meetings or conferences
Blogs are ways of mapping our personal learning journey
Every blog is unique and, over time, gives a whole-person view
Blogs encourage dialogue and help us relate to a wider audience and be more professional
Blogs provide peer feedback
Blogs can also be emotional and playful, to show and share our humanity

Reflecting by writing is a start, but then we need to integrate new ways of thinking and doing into our lives. This is the tough part, of course. It’s difficult to change old habits, but I think that by posting our vision on our blogs we raise the stakes. We are telling the world what we stand for. We are setting higher expectations. And this is a good beginning: reflection, followed by making our thoughts explicit and public. As I mentioned in my last post, we’re often too busy to reflect. The discipline of writing is one way to begin our journey to wisdom. Then we need to act on our words.

The conference rut

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I’ve been thinking about knowledge sharing, after attending a couple of conferences in a row and heading off to another. One thing missing in these discrete time-based events is that there is litle time for reflection. Most presenters hold back their knowledge in order to “deliver” it just before the big official presentation. This presentation is followed by some immediate questions & discussions and a coffee break. Then it’s off to see the next presentation. Reflection, if it occurs, comes much later, and usually after the participants have gone home.

Of course, those of us who live in the internet cloud have no difficulties staying in touch, both before and after these events, and often during the event on some backchannel.

Observing inefficient, and I believe ineffective, knowledge sharing due to the lack of opportunities to connect before or after the event is rather frustrating. For instance, a problem is presented in a plenary session and participants are immediately asked to brainstorm & give feedback. Why was the issue not presented weeks ahead of time? What can be achieved in 10 minutes of thinking on demand?What is really achieved with 50 to 100 people in a room, a presenter and then questions from the floor? If we want to innovate in our organizations, we should be innovating how we share information. The tools and techniques are there, but the conference rut is a deep one to get out of.