It’s the Network

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Over the past decade I’ve come to the conclusion that networks are changing everything in our lives. Dealing with networks is the big challenge for leaders, managers and knowledge workers of all types. Because we are all inter-networked, work is learning and learning is the work. We can no longer separate learning and working, and all attempts to do so are fraught with problems. Instructional content developed earlier is quickly out of date. Those who should be attending formal training are too busy working, so they slowly lose their skills and currency and become out of date. This is usually realized just after being downsized and forced to look for new work.

Acceptance of life in perpetual Beta is a necessary attitude to survive and thrive in our networked society. As Jay Cross wrote here several years ago,

No human life goes beyond beta; life is a perpetual experiment and reshaping. Speaking for myself, I recognize that I still have a lot of bugs.

What’s beta and what’s not is a state of mind. Many people try to go into release prematurely: they put defective product on the market. (By productizing people, I mean locking in on attitudes, structure, opinions, etc.: becoming rigid.)

Life as beta is uplifting. You have the opportunity to streamline things, to resond to feedback, to become a killer app.

Lots of alphas are claiming beta status now. They debut on life’s big stage long before they’re prepared to play the part.

As Jay says, Beta is not Alpha. You actually have to do something concrete but you also have to be ready to let it go.

I am seeing a great need for senior managers to get some control over their work in an increasingly complex business environment. Paradoxically, they can gain control by giving up control:

Acceptance of life in perpetual Beta is the first step.

Developing personal strategies for sense-making, such as PKM, is the next step.

Sharing knowledge and participating in professional networks then becomes a necessity for work.

Being willing to create and test emergent practices is next.

Finally, we need to build new structures, like wirearchy, for how we work and learn together.

In the spirit of communication

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

QUOTES:

@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.”

*****

@JDeragon People are now the engine of change and the fuel is communications. 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.

Knowledge Management = Story Management. Anecdote

How do you organise your stories?

I didn’t realise it at the time but when we started this blog back in 2004 we were creating a type of story bank where we could go back and retrieve great stories to tell.

Variations on a theme of PKM

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If you don’t make sense of the world for yourself, then you’re stuck with someone else’s world view. Personal knowledge management is not so much about creating knowledge but rather the development of conscious regular activities from which can emerge new knowledge. The knowledge artifacts created along the way are only as good as the use to which they are put. My idea of Seeking > Sense-making > Sharing is similar to many other descriptive processes about learning and working.

I’ve mentioned on this blog:

Fluctuating Support Networks: Finding & Likening > Igniting Passions > Mutual Engagement

The Evolving Social Organization: Listen > Create/Converse > Co-create/Formalize

Critical Thinking: Observe/Study > Tentative Opinions > Participate/Evaluate/Challenge

These are all different ways of looking at learning to learn and learning to work; as individuals, with groups and in networks.

CI and KM

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Jack Vinson asks: “Can anyone point me (and my friend) to some better resources around doing ‘competitive intelligence’ by asking people within the company to work together to develop the intel?  I’ve pointed him to the Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals.”

I was introduced to CI by Conor Vibert about 10 years ago and I discussed on this blog how I did some small scale intelligence collection, collation and dissemination, five years ago. In Conor’s competitive intelligence class at Acadia University, he has students giving presentations on a business, while others are going online to question their claims, and other students are using chat to discuss the points without interrupting the speakers. It’s exciting to watch Conor’s classes in action. Last year, I suggested to a client, a small technology company, how they could set up a CI process. [The company is no longer in business, so I don’t consider this confidential information any more]

Conor wrote a book on CI — A framework for web-based analysis and decision making.

Recommendations:

Developing an internal Competitive Intelligence process:

1. Start by asking questions internally and seeing what kind of answers you get. Use your existing social media tools to do this. A blog or a wiki would work.

2. As a distributed team, each person can be responsible for a specific information source that is monitored regularly.

3. Ask a weekly question and see who can get some information that may be able to answer part or all of it.

4. In the feedback to these questions people may ask you to re-frame the questions. Continue to learn and refine this process for your unique context. Better questions will make for better CI.

5. You may not need to hire anyone else to collate the data, but if you do, keep your team (who have industry knowledge) involved.

6. Don’t just hand CI over to a junior staff member. CI should be part of the conversational flow in the company. Marketing, sales, developers and management should be actively involved.

7. The process of asking questions, seeing if there are answers and in turn asking questions about the questions can hone the team’s ability to gather competitive intelligence.

8. If you decide to purchase access to information sources, such as Hoover’s, only buy one at a time. Use that source as much as you can (squeeze it dry) and until you realize you should eliminate it or augment it with another purchased source.

Fluctuating support networks

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I had the recent pleasure of meeting Judith Holton, a colleague at Mount Allison University. Judith passed on a couple of papers which I found most interesting, as she has looked deeply into the theory behind the need for what I would describe as social learning networks. Judith uses the term, “fluctuating support networks”. In Exploring the informal organization in knowledge work: A grounded theory of  fluctuating support networks (2008), Judith concludes [my emphasis]:

The study contributes to management praxis by raising awareness and offering insights into the practical value of fluctuating support networks and their power to rehumanize the knowledge workplace. As an informal response to the formal organization, fluctuating support networks deviate from the conventions of the formal organization and provide network members with a venue for fulfilling unmet social and psychological work-related needs. Knowledge and understanding of such networks may enable managers to understand their functionality in resolving knowledge workers’ concerns and needs in response to persistent and unpredictable change and may offer managers an additional resource for achieving strategic organizational goals, especially those goals that require cross-functional integration and non-conventional perspectives to address increasingly complex organizational problems. Adopting the basic social process of rehumanizing as a conceptual framework may assist managers and human resource professionals in developing organizational strategies that support a broader humanistic paradigm. Such perspective also highlights the value of the informal organization, and fluctuating support networks in particular, as important psychological infrastructure for the knowledge workplace.

Rehumanising Knowledge Work through Fluctuating Support Networks [PDF] (2005) describes the three stages of rehumanising (Finding & Likening; Igniting Passions; Mutual Engagement). I was most surprised when I noticed that each of these steps parallels the three parts of personal knowledge management, namely: Seeking; Sense-making & Sharing. I’ve added some of my previous statements on working smarter, after the colon:

Finding & Likening, which is serendipitous or intentional: PKM prepares the mind to be open to new ideas (enhanced serendipity)

Igniting Passions, which amplifies causal looping process:  Aids in observing, thinking and using information & knowledge (I Sense)

Mutual Engagement, which facilitates creative problem solving: “You know you’re in a community of practice when your practice changes” (We Use)

Judith Holton’s research confirms my observations and readings over the past decade. Knowledge workers cannot work effectively within the confines of hierarchical structures that are beset by change from within and without. Social networks, facilitated by social media, provide the fluctuating support networks that are necessary. The problem is clear:

Knowledge workers identify this increasing sense of dehumanisation in their work and work environments as a particular concern. The loss of the human dimension in workplace interactions is characterized by a work environment that is compressed, fearful, isolating, bureaucratic and legalistic; by interactions that are atomised and inauthentic; and, by work assignments that erode autonomy and identity. (Holton, 2008)

Once again, I see that social learning in informal networks is key to getting things done in today’s knowledge-intensive workplace.

Networks and complexity

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[Dilbert cartoon removed]

Jane Hart alerted me to this cartoon, which is already being spread throughout the Net.

My first thoughts on reading this, after I laughed, are that social media are not about the latest web technologies and that they are of importance to more than just the marketing department. A cultural change is required in the way we organize our work because of two related factors: Networks & Complexity.

Wirearchy may be a neologism, but I’ve found it to be a most descriptive term for discussing what happens when you connect everyone via electronic networks. To paraphrase Jon Husband:

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 model 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.

Living and working in non-hierarchical networks is our challenge this century. The effective use of social media, to learn from and with others, is essential for individuals and organizations to be productive in this networked age. That is why social learning is of great interest to me as a workplace learning professional and I’ve come to the realization that work is learning and learning is the work.  Social learning is getting things done in networks.

There is little doubt that industrial management and all that it has created (chain of command, human resources, line & staff, production, etc.) are the wrong models for the emerging, networked workplace. This is a workplace with increasing numbers of free-agents and permanent employees who don’t have a job for life, especially as the average lifespan of corporations decreases while those of workers increases. Many workers, including white collar ones, can’t afford to retire. Existing management models and support functions were developed to keep things stable and ensure that people conformed to corporate culture. There is much less time to do that as workplace culture evolves with society, markets and technology.

Mark Federman called this world, ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate, and that was five years ago.

Results-only

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

“Education is a self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon” Sugata Mitra’s TED Talk via @Willrich45

@openworld “When peer learning meets “results-only work environments” (#ROWE), a breakaway era will begin”

What Girl Scouts have to say about going ROWE. via @caliandjody

In the year and a half since my organization migrated to a Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), I have talked about our experience extensively. My enthusiastic descriptions of ROWE excite most people, and although I believe that it is an inherently exciting concept, there are people who respond to it with a strong sense of indifference. I have connected this sense of indifference to three potential foundational thoughts: ROWE is too different (shifting to ROWE is so radical that fear supersedes excitement); ROWE is not different at all (been there, done that); or ROWE appears to be not applicable (hint: ROWE is applicable to everyone).

You can’t motivate students, but you can kill what motivation they have. via @bhsprincipal

Motivation – at least intrinsic motivation — is something to be supported, or if necessary revived.  It’s not something we can instill in students by acting on them in a certain way.  You can tap their motivation, in other words, but you can’t “motivate them.”  And if you think this distinction is merely semantic, then I’m afraid we disagree.

On the other hand, what teachers clearly have the ability to do with respect to students’ motivation is kill it. That’s not just a theoretical possibility; it’s taking place right this minute in too many classrooms to count.

@KevinDJones – Baby Boomers vs. Digital Natives – Let the Debate … End

This goes back to my study a few years ago when this notion of the generational divide was starting.  I did some ethnographic research on Enterprise 2.0 adoption for a class I was taking and I was surprised to find that adoption didn’t work by age (which is what I was told).  And now we are finding this more and more.

neuro-science provides new metaphor for organizational reform via @bduperrin

One easily sees benefits of being able to put the PFC [prefrontal cortex] to work: adapt to any situation without chains or barriers, benefit from our total intelligence in any circumstance. Human beings who can do this are very few – as mentioned above, our brains have not yet reached this development level. One can train and improve though, this is some of what we learn to facilitate in neuro-psychology.

JND: Taming complexity through design: modularization, mapping, conceptual models. via @captic

We are faced with an apparent paradox, but don’t worry: good design will see us through. People want the extra power that increased features bring to a product, but they intensely dislike the complexity that results. Is this a paradox? Not necessarily. Complexity can be managed.

Once we recognize that the real issue is to devise things that are understandable, we are halfway toward the solution. Good design can rescue us. How do we manage complexity? We use a number of simple design rules. For example, consider how three simple principles can transform an unruly cluster of confusing features into a structured, understandable experience: modularization, mapping, conceptual models. There are numerous other important design principles, but these will make the point.

Whither the learning organization?

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Why aren’t we all working for a learning organisation? ask John Seddon and Brendan O’Donovan,  authors of this same-titled 2010 AMED Network paper ( PDF ). This article is well worth the read for anyone interested in learning organizations, an often-described but seldom-observed phenomenon in my experience. The Deming quotes show that this is not new conceptual territory:

“Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers – a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars – and on up through the university.

On the job people, teams, and divisions are ranked, reward for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by Objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable.” (Deming in Senge 2006)

Deming understood that systemic factors account for more organizational problems, and therefore more potential for change, than any individual’s performance. The role of managers should be to manage the system, not the individual functions. The authors target the real culprit: command & control management. This is why the learning organization has never taken hold in business.

For many years I have been fairly certain that the model we use for our structures is the problem, not the people doing the work.  This article, and the works it cites, help to confirm this.

I have only perused Deming slightly and I read Senge’s work 15 years ago, while completing my Master’s thesis. It’s time to revisit these important works, as also suggested to me by Bertrand Duperrin. I like that this article clearly articulates the work to be done in organizational design and new management theory, based on the research of Senge, Deming, Argyris and many others. It is an excellent synthesis of the work that has been done in the field as well as a call for the work to be done in our organizations.

“The basic precepts of command and control have remained unquestioned whilst the underlying paradigm has outlived its usefulness. The problem is not a general problem of culture, but more specifically is one of management thinking. In order to change this mindset, managers must learn to study their organisation as a system, and to understand the true nature of the problems facing them.”

Organizations don’t need heroes

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In the HBR article IT in the Age of the Empowered Employee, the author explains the concept of a “new contract to empower employees to solve the problems of empowered customers”, by identifying innovators:

In our new book, Empowered, we call these covert innovators HEROes — highly empowered and resourceful operatives. HEROes are those employees who feel empowered to solve customer problems and act resourcefully by using whatever technology they need to use. HEROes comprise 20% of the U.S. information workforce, but your industry may have many more or many fewer highly empowered and resourceful operatives.

The picture they use to explain this organization framework is a pyramid.

I don’t doubt their findings that about 20% of information workers act resourcefully and take the initiative in dealing with customers. I do take issue with the acceptance of the status quo and even supporting it with something like the HEROes model. That’s just not good enough, in my opinion, and shouldn’t be acceptable for any business leader.

The pyramid needs to flipped and organizations should develop ways to encourage innovation amongst 80% or more of the workforce, not the minority already performing in covert ways. I’ve suggested this before, in workers, management and work support.

It is time to invert the organizational pyramid mental model and integrate learning, both self-directed and social, into all that we do. As the systems that we work in become more complex and even chaotic, we have to develop sharing-based accountability practices.

However, most of our HR and work practices are still premised on the assumption of stable systems. This is no longer the case. Some of the project-based work that I do uses learning-based accountability, where we are all responsible to help the rest of the team learn. For those who work on the Web, this becomes a natural way to do things. The same can be said for sharing-based accountability, especially amongst bloggers and others who share online. We have learned that the more you give, the more you get back in the form of feedback and more learning opportunities.

Inverting the organizational pyramid requires serious work from management by optimizing connections between people and enabling better communication. Innovation, in the form of emergent practices, come from the dynamic interface between workers and those outside the organization. It’s management’s job to facilitate the creation of new tools and processes to support the work being done. Focusing on a minority of workers will not create a system that can improve the entire organization.

JOB is a four-letter word

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A while back I wrote on the age of dissonance and how our way of structuring work, particularly the job, was inadequate for the networked, creative economy:

New design principles, from instructional development to job descriptions, are needed for our inter-networked society. I’ve started looking at a new design for the training department but redesign is needed everywhere. I think that more people are looking for new designs and are willing to try them out, if they can. The economic crisis may actually help bring about some needed change. So here’s a new job description to insert into all those talent management systems: work redesigner.

I’ve been thinking about jobs a bit more recently as I’ve taken a term position at a university and my job is knowledge transfer or more specifically, the commercialization of research. I’m responsible for certain projects: communications on research issues, partnership opportunities with industry, commercialization of research, patents, intellectual property protection, and technology disclosures.

But, like most people, I am more than my job description. As most readers know, I am fairly well-versed in organizational development, knowledge management, and educational technologies, which should be areas of interest in a university. However, I can’t get involved in activities related to these areas because that’s not my job.

Here’s the organizational common wisdom: I’m not faculty, therefore I can’t be involved in teaching. I don’t work in computing services therefore I can’t touch IT. I’m not in HR so I can’t help with organizational development. Stick to your knitting, is the implied message of departmental responsibilities and hierarchies. If I see an opportunity outside my job description there are few things I can do about it. I can initiate some collegial conversations, if I have the opportunity, but I’m not invited to the table.

This is not a ‘woe is me’ story. I accepted this contract already knowing the organization and what I would be able to do. I have learned something of course.

My ongoing recommendations on how the workplace must change, as written on this blog, have just been augmented by another, more personal, question: What happens to a person’s entrepreneurial and creative spirit after they repeatedly see that they can’t do anything with it? If you’re told often enough that it’s not your job, you will start saying, sorry, but that’s not my job.

I think that the construct of the job, with its defined skills, effort, responsibilities, and working conditions, is a key limiting organizational factor for the creative economy, including Enterprise 2.0. Jon Husband has written extensively on work redesign and how the Taylorist assumptions of division of labour and packaging of tasks are just plain wrong:

Just as important is the underlying assumption of these methods about the fundamental nature of knowledge. It assumes knowledge and its acquisition, development and use proceeds slowly and carefully and is based on the official taxonomy of knowledge, a vertical arrangement of information and skills that are derived from the official institutions of our society (Jane Jacobs has a fair bit to say about this in Chapter 3 titled Credentialing vs. Educating in her last book Dark Age Ahead, as do others like John Taylor Gatto and Alfie Kohn, and as does David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous – the power of digital disorder).

I can relate to Jon’s description of a typical organization here:

“Any of us familiar with medium to large sized organizations can begin to see, I believe, that the fundamental Taylorist assumption that knowledge is structured vertically and put to use in siloed pyramidic structures and cascaded down to the execution level must be straining at the seams in the increasingly highly-connected social networks in which many people work today.”

Our article on the evolving social organization addresses some methods to promote creativity through social learning and my post on organizational change, unpacked gives more details.  However, the corMucha-job-cigarette papers-1898e assumption of the job, that can be ‘filled’ [just like the minds of learners], is what needs to change. This is the constraining concept. It presumes common skills and the mechanistic view that workers can be replaced without disruption.

But who could replace Van Gogh, Picasso, or even Steve Jobs? As complex work requires more creativity, confining our complex individual creativity within the bounds of a mere job description is debilitating. Structured jobs can suck individual creativity and create an organizational framework that discourages entrepreneurial zeal. It’s time for a serious redesign of how we structure work.