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.

 

Taylor’s Ghost

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

QUOTES

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

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

*****

via @lpgauthier The Management Myth: Most of management theory is inane  (The Atlantic 2006)

Between them, Taylor and Mayo carved up the world of management theory. According to my scientific sampling, you can save yourself from reading about 99 percent of all the management literature once you master this dialectic between rationalists and humanists. The Taylorite rationalist says: Be efficient! The Mayo-ist humanist replies: Hey, these are people we’re talking about! And the debate goes on. Ultimately, it’s just another installment in the ongoing saga of reason and passion, of the individual and the group.

via @sahana2802 Not So Fast: Scientific management started as a way to work. How did it become a way of life?  (The New Yorker)

Whether he was also a shameless fraud is a matter of some debate, but not, it must be said, much: it’s difficult to stage a debate when the preponderance of evidence falls to one side. In “The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong” (Norton; $27.95), Matthew Stewart points out what Taylor’s enemies and even some of his colleagues pointed out, nearly a century ago: Taylor fudged his data, lied to his clients, and inflated the record of his success.

via @charlesjennings Why Our Jobs are Getting Worse’ — interesting article by Aditya Chakrabortty touching on ‘Digital Taylorism’

As I described last week, the last two decades have seen more British workers get higher levels of skills than ever before. And yet over that time they have come to exercise ever less control over their jobs. Official skills surveys show a plunging proportion of workers who report that they have much influence over how to do their daily tasks – from 57% in 1992 to 43% by 2006. If you’re an NHS worker or teacher you have targets or central curricula to meet; if you’re employed by an outsourcing company you’ll have two sets of bosses breathing down your neck – those in your office, and the client company too.

The labour-market academic Phil Brown has a phrase for this trend: Digital Taylorism [PDF].

via @C4LPT Job 2.0 – The End of Profession (TheNextWeb)

The Job 2.0 era gives us all an opportunity to have more than one profession at a time. Plumbers don’t just do plumbing anymore. They have to be in marketing and PR as well and offer more related services than just plumbing to satisfy market demand. Architects aren’t just designing buildings anymore. They also design cities, furniture, books and gadgets.

Lectures, bloody lectures

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Yesterday I attended Lectures: Dead and Alive, The 2010 Tucker Talk, delivered by Dr. Bruce Robertson, Professor of Classics, who asked, “In an age of instant online videos, why do people still travel thousands of miles to hear a public presentation? Why are lectures so improbably still ‘alive’?”

Bruce is an energetic speaker and he gave an excellent presentation, without slides, that kept the audience’s attention, in spite of the extreme heat and humidity in the auditorium. Bruce said that the lecture is a grand and living thing and noted how the rapt attention of others focused on a single presenter can induce a higher degree of focus. We’ve all heard of or perhaps witnessed people who can electrify a room. Bruce explained how lectures can help us to experience the sublime, enabling the contemplation of otherwise hidden natural order, and this is what teaching should offer. He admitted that the lecture as mere knowledge dissemination, in this age of wikipedia, is dead. Good lectures excite and inspire. His lecture reminded me of the article Love on Campus [dead link].

One of the comments after the talk was that the university continues to value the lecture.

This morning I attended six presentations on research activities. Presentation styles varied widely and included poor slide design with multiple bullet points, counterbalanced by unbounded enthusiasm for the research area. No presentation had the elegance of Bruce’s lecture and I would wager that there is one major reason why not – PRACTICE. Good lectures require practice, something few of us have, or make time for, unless it’s a prestigious speech. I know that my father-in-law, with 30 years of university teaching experience, still rehearsed each of his lectures, including those to first year students. I think he was an anomaly.

Today, several of the presentations went over the allotted time. I would again attribute this to the lack of practice. The question that I now ask is: if you are going to lecture, is it worth doing if it isn’t done well? Given that most lectures range from 45 minutes to an hour and a half, it might be better to create some good notes and have a Q&A session instead. If people run out of questions before the allotted time, just stop. A lecture poorly done offers few escape options: one must plod on to the end.

The TED Talks have shown how powerful a good lecture (presentation) can be. This is what I strive for but have yet to achieve. However, TED has some pretty strict rules, which should be considered before choosing the lecture as teaching mode.

The TED Commandments

These 10 tips are given to all TED Conference speakers as they prepare their TEDTalks.

1. Dream big. Strive to create the best talk you have ever given. Reveal something never seen before. Do something the audience will remember forever. Share an idea that could change the world.

2. Show us the real you. Share your passions, your dreams … and also your fears. Be vulnerable. Speak of failure as well as success.

3. Make the complex plain. Don’t try to dazzle intellectually. Don’t speak in abstractions. Explain! Give examples. Tell stories. Be specific.

4. Connect with people’s emotions. Make us laugh! Make us cry!

5. Don’t flaunt your ego. Don’t boast. It’s the surest way to switch everyone off.

6. No selling from the stage! Unless we have specifically asked you to, do not talk about your company or organization. And don’t even think about pitching your products or services or asking for funding from stage.

7. Feel free to comment on other speakers’ talks, to praise or to criticize. Controversy energizes! Enthusiastic endorsement is powerful!

8. Don’t read your talk. Notes are fine. But if the choice is between reading or rambling, then read!

9. End your talk on time. Doing otherwise is to steal time from the people that follow you. We won’t allow it.

10. Rehearse your talk in front of a trusted friend … for timing, for clarity, for impact.

If these guidelines cannot be met, then perhaps the lecture is not the best format.

—

BTW, the title comes from this video.

Organizational change, unpacked

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In the evolving social organization, I included a table with several descriptive terms, which Amanda Fenton suggested needs to be “unpacked”.

Simplicity

basic hierarchy

 Complication

bureaucracy

 Complexity

wirearchy
Organizational Theory
 Knowledge-Based View Learning Organization Value Networks
Attractors
 Stakeholders (vision) Shareholders (wealth) Clients (service)
Growth Model
 Internal Mergers & Acquisitions Ecosystem
Knowledge Acquisition
 Formal Training Performance Support Social
Knowledge Capitalization
 Best Practices Good Practices Emergent Practices

I’ve linked the sections to my posts that describe some of these terms in more detail [Feel free to suggest better resources/links for the sections I’ve missed].

Many organizations today are based on complicated models but they should be developing ways of dealing with a more complex, networked business environment. Simplifying to a basic hierarchy won’t help, though there are many simple solutions sold as answers to our complicated organizations. Remember the wildly popular who moved my cheese series? Well, now you can use carrots instead of cheese. Works for vegans I guess, but simple answers for complex issues don’t work.

Real solutions require people to do some hard work.

Let’s look at Knowledge Acquisition. Formal training is easy to task out or outsource and then assume that everything has been taken care of. The training gets done and the organization can account for it. Managers can say, “my people got their training”. Courts can be assured that workers have been trained, so the company has met its responsibilities.

Even performance support tools can be developed centrally, by external consultants or an internal team. The resulting tools are then sent throughout the organization to be used at work. The organization can say, “they have the tools”. For example, all bank officers can use the same mortgage calculator, so risk is managed fairly easily once the system is in place. The system is under control.

However, social knowledge acquisition in the organization is a different case. It requires a very different approach. First of all, centralized control won’t work. Secondly, individuals will become responsible for their learning and their actions. This requires trust. Control systems become counter-productive. There is no easy way to move an organization into this wirearchical space. It requires some serious thinking about how things get done. It means giving up control. It means organizational life in perpetual Beta, and that can be a scary thought. But I’m convinced that it’s worth doing.

Image by Cynthia Kurtz

Digging ourselves out of a hole

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

QUOTES

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

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

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

*****

via @bduperrin Six Fundamental Shifts in the Way We Work – HBR

Despite long-term increases in labor productivity, the average return on assets (ROA) of US companies has steadily fallen to almost one quarter of what it was in 1965. We’re running faster, but still losing ground. There is no sign of this long-term erosion flattening out, much less turning around.

The conclusion is inescapable: our management practices and corporate institutions are fundamentally broken. The good news, if you can call it that, is that this isn’t sustainable for much longer: the trend line on ROA approaches zero in 2020.

The Power of Power Laws by @jhagel “We’re shifting from a Gaussian world to a Paretian world, with profound implications for business.” followed by a reply to Power Laws by @downes “The thing with this discussion is, the two types of worlds are being described as if they are natural phenomena, as though they are patterns that we just fall into.”

@SteveCase – Studies Show Why Students Study is as Important as What: Education Week

The research suggests two parallel motivations drive student achievement: “learning orientation,” the drive to improve your knowledge and competency; and “performance orientation,” the drive to prove that competency to others. Watkins found the highest-achieving students had a healthy dose of both types of motivation, but students who focused too heavily on performance ironically performed less well academically, thought less critically, and had a harder time overcoming failure.

Two guesses which orientation develops under a U.S.-style assessment accountability system, and the first doesn’t count.

The Working Smarter Fieldbook: A Glimpse & Some Thoughts by @sahana2802

The book is a synthesis of years of collective experience, know-how,  knowledge and deep passion for improving and enabling human performance. As an L&D professional, for me the book is a practical guide to the implementation of a more efficacious “workscape” and even tells me what my elevator pitch should be. However, as I read it, I realized it is also much more. It speaks to me at a personal level showing me how I can push myself to become a more effective professional, find my Element by investing in collaborating, learning, and sharing, by building a network and being part of a network of professionals.

@JudithELS Although I’m not a great fan of slide-only stuff, these speak for themselves > Internet Time Alliance View of Change