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.

Enabling Innovation Facing Global Dilemmas

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

Quote of the Week:

bhsprincipal Patrick Larkin

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

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I’m currently in Berlin attending a working meeting of the International Monitoring Organisation which is examining four dilemmas facing Germany, the EU and the global community. The group decided to use Twitter for the first time and a few of us jumped in to help get the conversation online. Here are some highlights, in chronological order:

@jaycross #paradoxolutions. Messages from our group going to office of Angela Merkel. Starting point: Innovate or die, Deutschland

@jaycross Squeezed between Dynamics & Complexity. No way back. Growing “Dynaxity” [interesting neologism]

Peter Pawlowsky on high performance teams: need to communicate across disciplines eg pilots & doctors in medical rescue

key message this morning was that innovation must be based on uniqueness at all levels

Jürgen Howaldt shift from an industrial to a knowledge age requires more openness for innovation; both social & technological

Frank Emspak German work-sharing agreement helped avoid recession & maintain skill base for innovation

@jaycross Kompetenz = not just knowing how but also doing it. English equivalent = “working smarter“

Francesco Garibaldo Innovation: we have to invest time with no obvious & immediate results in order to get some key results over the long term.

Fritz Böhle Accelerated change & uncertainty are obstacles to innovation: one solution to this is encouraging and supporting self-directed learning

Points from Stephen Downes, on Uniqueness & Conformity:

Fully realized, a state of total knowledge is indistinguishable from total complexity, or chaos …

In a chaotic environment, knowledge is nothing more than pattern recognition.

@downes the ‘pracademics’ – people who are working in academics and in practice

A framework for the social enterprise

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I have put together two of the major articles on social learning in the enterprise that were posted here this year. A framework for social learning drew on my collaboration with colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance and the evolving social organization was co-authored by Thierry deBaillon.


Please feel free to share this 18 page white paper as I hope it will encourage more conversations on how we can integrate learning and working, a key part of enabling Enterprise 2.0.

Social Enterprise White Paper (PDF)

Open Innovation

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The most interesting presentation at last week’s ACCTCanada Directors Forum was, in my opinion, on open innovation by Angus Livingstone, UILO at UBC. Much of the discussion by other presenters focused on patents and other control mechanisms, while Angus showed the shifting paradigms that we are experiencing in university knowledge transfer. He explained that the main shift over the next five years will be from closed to open innovation, in parallel with shifts from outputs to impacts and from transactions to relationships. Angus highlighted the old paradigm:

  • Patents
  • Licenses
  • Spin-offs
  • Proprietary industry research funding

and showed the new paradigm:

  • Industry engagement
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Knowledge mobilization

Since hearing that presentation and reflecting on the slides that Angus sent me, I came across Ed Morrison’s paper on how regional innovation clusters form. The initial step is to change the conversation.


The shifting conversation then encourages learning networks to develop, from which can emerge a concerted strategy for innovation. Ed calls the underlying activity, strategic doing:

Networks are complex adaptive systems. We can guide these networks, even manage them, if we follow simple rules. And that’s the point. We cannot guide complexity with complexity. Strategy in complex adaptive systems emerges from  following simple disciplines.

Both Angus Livingstone and Ed Morrison show that innovation is dependent on learning in networks. Social learning is about getting things done in networks. It is a constant flow of listening, observing, doing, and sharing. Effective working in networks requires cooperation, meaning there is no fixed plan, structure or direct feedback. Through social learning we can co-develop emergent practices. Social learning is how we move from transactions to relationships and foster knowledge mobilization.

Social learning is not some buzz word from the HR department but is a critical component in fostering innovation and hence prosperity. It’s the ‘how’ of business innovation and is important for decision-makers to not only understand but to embrace by doing. This is why I say that work is learning and learning is the work. Life in perpetual Beta is what every leader and manager needs to understand today.

Goals, strategy & conventional wisdom

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

QUOTES

Chance favours the connected mind. by @timkastelle

*****

If your overall strategy depends on speed to market … patents won’t help much. by @timkastelle

Critically, though, if your overall strategy depends on speed to market or quickness of response to changing environmental conditions, patents won’t help much. They’re too slow.

King Gillette: with patent protection he kept prices high; without protection he lowered prices & increased sales & profits: How conventional wisdom can be wrong by @rbgayle

The ‘sell the razor cheap and make money on the razors’ model is really not true at all but has become a standard narrative. Truth is not as important as the narrative, it seems. we do like our stories.

Observable work – more on knowledge work visibility. by @jimmcgee

  • What can you do to make your own work more readily observable?
  • How might making your work observable be immediately beneficial to you, even if no one else bothered to pay attention?
  • Who else benefits if your work is more observable?
  • How do you benefit from others making their work more observable?
  • What risks and challenges do you need to manage as you make your work more observable?

Enterprise 2.0 is only the next iteration with a fancy new name for research into new ways of working. E2.0 research & the long tail by @drmcewan

The Long Tail does not only apply to books, films and music. There is a long tail in academic research … I also said in my comment that I get frustrated by much of the Enterprise 2.0 conversation, in that it seems as though there is too much focus on novelty and re-invention. That is unfair, though. So much academic research is not easily accessible and written in turgid language. No wonder it is so seldom referenced. It needs to be discovered, translated and made usable.

“The iPad can trap us in the idea that learning is about content delivery” by @CharlesJennings

What is learning about in your opinion?
John Seely Brown, who was the Head of the Xerox Park research center for many years, together with a colleague of his, John Hagel, recently published a book called “The Power of Pull”. It is based around the fact that we live in a world which is information-rich, but generally interaction-poor. In a learning context, it is a world where learning content is ‘pushed’ to people rather than learners ‘pulling’ just the content they need for their learning to take place.  Seeley Brown and Hagel map out changes that are taking place as this information economy of push is shifting to a more interactive, ubiquitous and on-demand two-way communication – a world of pull. My colleague in the Internet Time Alliance, Jon Husband, calls this new world “Wirearchy”.

Some qualities of a knowledge worker by @jackvinson

So, what is it that knowledge workers need in order to do their jobs?  Merlin talks about three key elements to be great as a knowledge worker in the last two minutes of the talk.

  1. Tolerance to handle ambiguity, the unknown, and the incomplete;
  2. know that you have enough information to do the work at hand;
  3. Courage to work within the uncertainty and the lack of information and still do the job.