Automated and Outsourced

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As a result of economic changes, some workers are getting left behind, reports the New York Times:

For the last two years, the weak economy has provided an opportunity for employers to do what they would have done anyway: dismiss millions of people — like file clerks, ticket agents and autoworkers — who were displaced by technological advances and international trade.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I don’t believe that it’s any longer a question of whether standardized work will be outsourced or automated, but when. How much time do we have to prepare people for the new revolution? Any scenario that I consider – peak oil, global warming; globalization; Asian dominance – still requires that the developed world’s workforce deals with more complexity and even chaos. We need to skill-up for emergent and novel practices and that means a completely different mindset toward work.

But our schooling and training systems are backward-looking systems, based on what has worked in the past, and don’t help to develop the new skills necessary for the networked workplace.

We cannot leave these people behind. As the need for creativity in the workplace increases, organizations must give  serious thought to what work needs to get done and how we can prepare people for it. As Gary Hamel described at the Spigit Customer Summit, traditional (industrial) employee traits of Intellect, Diligence & Obedience are becoming commodities (going to the lowest bidder). The networked, creative economy requires independent and interdependent workers (more like theatre productions) with the following traits that cannot be commoditized:

  • Initiative
  • Creativity
  • Passion

This brings into question the rationale for practices such as:

  • Mass training with standard performance objectives for everyone.
  • Predominantly full-time, salaried employment (few options for part-time work at the control of the worker).
  • Standard HR policies.
  • Banning access to online social networks at work.

 

“collaboration is extremely important”

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Some of the things I learned on Twitter this past week.

Always worth repeating: “Management is an overhead” by @EskoKilpi

The Internet is an extinction-level event for the traditional firm
If the (transaction) costs of exchanging value in the society at large go down drastically, the form and logic of economic and organizational entities also change! Accordingly, a very different kind of management is needed.

Business Today: processes are global, distributed, invisible & intangible by @drmcewan

(3) We are now in a new phase of disruptive management innovation …
(6) Continuous improvement in the previous wave of disruptive innovation is now the collaborative intelligence of the second.
(7) In the first wave, management innovations were concerned with accommodating process innovation and control. Only then processes were largely contained, constrained, tangible and visible.
(8) This new wave is also about process innovation and control / coordination. Only now processes are global, distributed, invisible and intangible.

Encouraging online collaboration & discouraging unnecessary travel = prepared for disruption by @suw

From meetings to conferences to team-building events, unreliable air travel changes how we think about long-distance travel. It should also change how we think about working over long distances, and, thence, how we work with the people who sit right next to us.

@johnniemoore : Lovely post from @euan on how “grown up” work environments foster childishness, while “childish” forum demand maturity.

I find it increasingly paradoxical that the “grown up” world of suits and offices and job titles is the one that encourages you to remain childish. You are not really encouraged to say what you think, you pass responsibility up to the grown ups above you and you are rarely able to be held accountable for your decisions.

The 5th Social Media (finally) and the updated presentation by @panklam

So I’m defining this SM [Emergent] as the networked, community, purposeful use of social media to generate relatedness among crowds and emergent networks in support of ideas, causes, and events. It’s still a little mushy, but I just can’t go on adding categories forever and I need to acknowledge the ways that people are using social media to create networks.

Big Question: how do you foster communities to which each and every worker can attach? by @gminks

I would not have learned much without some community to help me learn, to keep me grounded, to challenge the questions I had about different topics. Since I was a distance student, the University just didn’t know how to make and foster that community. Thank goodness there was #lrnchat.

@Padmasree (CTO of Cisco Systems, on demand for collaboration): ComputerWorld

I met 15 customers in Washington recently, and every single one was looking for collaboration and security. Small and large companies in the last five years have had distributed resources with sales and engineering teams all over, so it’s a question of how to bring that expertise together. That’s the reason collaboration is extremely important.

Quote of the Week:

@mrch0mpers : “Easy to rank on the LMS in hindsight. Is the disdain of eLearning the fault of LMS? Evolution of pervasively tech-aware learners? Or is the common disdain for eLearning perhaps … PERHAPS … the result of years of compounded decisions to design to the mediocre? Or did the solutions that emerged to make eLearning easy for masses separate design decisions from the abilities to wield them effectively? There’s an abundance of waxing hyperbolic lately on the LMS. A system didn’t make crappy courseware. People did it under people constraints.”

Compliance of an industry

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1. compliance — acting according to established and accepted standards.

Mandated training is a standard response by industry regulators when dealing with human performance issues. This is ‘compliance training’. The training industry (internal or external) then develops the training and as more compliance training gets loaded onto organizations, we have an excellent excuse to buy some technology systems to manage it.

The owners of compliance, whether authorities like government and regulatory bodies, professional bodies, or  internal legal  counsel, are stuck in a mindset that in order to get compliance you must have training.  They see it as the only way. To them it’s simply a way of keeping the chairman and CEO out of prison if something goes wrong.  If something REALLY goes wrong, the fact that someone had been through a training program and has obtained a tick in an LMS box just means the difference between a few years in jail.

That mindset also permeates the training industry. Too many people in the training department make the leap from a performance issue (lack of skills, abilities, knowledge; lack of access to appropriate data and resources; etc) directly to training as the only solution. This is the wrong approach and the most costly. Management plays into this, with statements like “We have a training problem” and no one challenges that statement. There is no such thing as a training problem.

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Here are some ‘training problems’ that are not solved through training:

  • Poor communications
  • Unclear expectations (such as policies & guidelines)
  • Inadequate resources
  • Unclear performance measures
  • Rewards and consequences are not directly linked to the desired performance

These barriers can be addressed without training. Only when there is a genuine lack of skills and knowledge, is training required [repeat as necessary]. Training should only be done in cases where the other barriers to performance have been addressed. A trained worker, without the right resources and with unclear expectations, will still not perform up to the desired standard. Would training have helped avoid BP’s problems on its oil rig? Not likely.

Examining existing compliance training to see if it could be replaced with performance support would be a start. Performance support is quite appropriate:

  • When performance is infrequent
  • When the situation is complex
  • When the consequence of errors is intolerable
  • When performance depends on a large body of information
  • When performance is dependent on knowledge or information that changes frequently
  • When performance can be improved through self-assessment
  • When there is a high turnover rate
  • When there is little time or money for training

2. compliance — the act of submitting; usually surrendering power to another.

So why doesn’t the industry raise a fuss over wasteful and ineffective training? Is the training industry exhibiting compliance à la définition #2? When regulators demand compliance training, where are the protests from ATD, CSTD or other professional associations? Would the training department be slashed without all that compliance stuff? Would you be able to justify the six figure price-tag of that learning management system without the sword of compliance over the CEO’s head?

If physicians were told they had to give treatments without a diagnosis would they remain compliant? Where are the learning professionals lobbying for change? Some folks, like Will Thalheimer are trying to push us to base our work on research, but for the most part the training industry is a bunch of sugar pill pushers. Don’t say we have no choice. We’re supposed to be the professionals. As workers and organizations become more connected, perhaps they’ll recognize the training scam for what it is. Until then, the industry will keep selling training; for all that ails you.

The consultant’s dilemma

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The major downside of consulting is that when you are working you aren’t finding new work, and vice versa. As a consultant, you are only making money when you’re working. That means that all your vacations are unpaid. You may also have difficulty getting extended health benefits or a pension plan, but there are more options available today. Keeping a balance of potential work and contracted projects takes some time to master. It also helps if you have some cash in the bank when you start, as there will likely be slow times. Keep your costs low and don’t overestimate how much you will make. Also remember that many clients pay 30 days or more after being billed. Make sure you get some money up front. Freelance consulting does have its advantages: You set your own schedule, you can take advantage of opportunities as they arise, and you personally reap the profit of your work.

That was the conclusion to my 2007 article: So you want to be an e-learning consultant?

I recently wrote about 5 considerations on becoming an independent consultant:

  1. Have a clearly defined product or service that is simple to explain.
  2. Sincerely love doing that work.
  3. Be willing to give your all for your work and promoting it [it’s not a hobby].
  4. Have clear long-term objectives and align your daily work to them.
  5. Enjoy doing sales and business development [because you will be doing a lot of it].

Here’s my personal experience after 7 years in the business

My services are definitely not easy to explain to the average business person, though I’ve done several re-writes of my  consulting services. The sweet spot is to offer services that few others do but for which there is still a demand or need. In my case, I’m one of the few Canadian independent, web-focused workplace learning specialists around. Still, that doesn’t mean I’m worked off my feet.

I love what I do, especially constantly pushing the edge of my professional expertise. I firmly believe that we need better models, systems and practices to integrate learning into our daily work, hence my focus on PKM and social learning in the enterprise.

I usually work seven days a week, either writing, researching or doing project work. I take time off for exercise and other personal activities but my work is not a hobby, it’s a vocation.

My long term objective is to be recognized as an expert in the field of collaborative work & networked learning and become less dependent on project work, with more long-term retainer type engagements as a trusted advisor. I am a very long way away from that objective at this time. Freelancing is a slow-growth strategy.

I like business development and getting to know new clients. However, I am not good at direct sales. This post is as close as it gets. That is my major weakness and is one thing that I would make sure anybody considers before embarking in the profession. Sales drive everything.

After +1,500 posts and +4,500 comments on this blog since early 2004, I know that there are people who like what I write. I would ask my readers and past clients  for recommendations on any of these 5 points and also ask that if you think I’m providing a good service, please pass it on. We independents don’t have large marketing budgets. Our network is our sales & marketing channel.

Thanks;

HJ

A unified performer-facing environment

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Clark Quinn describes the need:

What seems to me to be the need is to have a unified performer-facing environment.  It should provide access to courses when those are relevant, resources/job aids, and eCommunity tools too.  That’s what a full technology support environment should contain.  And it should be performer- and performance-centric, so I come in and find my tools ‘to hand’.  And I ‘get’ the need for compliance, and the role of courses.

Jane Hart shows a model that could work:

Collaboration model

Here it is the social and collaboration aspects that are the focus for the learning – not the content – the content is co-created by the learners [workers] – so that the learner [worker] fully participates and is active in the learning.

This model is used where a problem-based or inquiry-based learning approach is used, and here the tutor [co-worker] is an equal member of the learning group “the guide on the side” rather than the “sage on the stage”.

Time to Get on the Cluetrain

As much as we may think it’s all about learning, it’s not. In the 21st century workplace, getting things done, solving problems and being creative & innovative are the orders of the day.

Thesis #8: In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.

Training professionals had it easy for the past century. Run the course and send them off to work. Now that we are all connected by networks, much of our work is becoming more transparent.

Thesis #12: There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.

There’s no hiding in the global village. That means you can longer head off to a classroom removed from the work and do something disconnected from the realities and needs of workers. They’ll flame you on the back-channel and the whole world will find out pretty quickly. Just accelerate this tendency each year with new arrivals in the workforce and watch what happens.

Thesis #13: What’s happening to markets is also happening among employees. A metaphysical construct called “The Company” is the only thing standing between the two.

If training departments don’t get integrated with the work, they will become irrelevant.

Thesis #20: Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.

The networked enterprise and learning support

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Would you rather go to a doctor who is in the band-aid business or the healing business? Prescribing training for all organizational learning is like handing out band-aids without a diagnosis. Training is often a solution in search of a problem.

This becomes evident when ~80% of learning on the job is informal and less than 10% of the knowledge needed for work is in our heads. But how much organizational effort is put into training, above all else? If it’s more than 20% of the learning support budget then it’s probably being misspent. For instance, Peter Senge’s comprehensive research showed that the average life expectancy of large companies is about 30 years, but some are over 200 years old. What is the reason for this? Organizational learning. Basically, individual learning in organizations is irrelevant. Work is almost never done by one person alone. Almost all value is created by teams and networks of people.

Enterprise training and its ADDIE framework are designed to develop individual skills, where the objective is always, “the learner will be able to …” not, “the organization will be able to …”. The basic premise is that any trained human cog will be able to fit into the organizational machine. But knowledge-intensive and creative enterprises don’t work that way. Every node in the networked enterprise is unique but the network itself is even more important. Social learning is how we get things done in networks. This is how nature and complex adaptive systems work – social learning is the best strategy.

We need to understand, encourage and support social learning in the enterprise.

Recently, Jane Hart & Jay Cross created this graphic that shows the five stages of workplace learning.

One limitation of this representation is that the first four stages look bigger than the fifth stage and could be perceived as being more important. Here’s a different perspective on the same theme.

My recent post on the value of the LMS stems from the perspective that the networked enterprise is a new organizational form that needs different support mechanisms.  Siloed support functions are becoming redundant, as are siloed technologies. Unless a platform like an LMS is actually used to get work done, it will become redundant as well. When learning is the work then it has to be integrated with working. That means stand-alone L&D departments (and the stand-alone LMS) are peripheral to 90% of the learning that is happening. The new focus of the training department in the networked enterprise must be on communicating, connecting and collaborating, and that means integrating with the work being done, not using parallel processes and technologies.

Learning at the edge of chaos

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Some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week.

Breakthroughs Happen At The Edge of Chaos via @VenessaMiemis [which links to an image showing that between stability & chaos is where we find creativity and the closer we are to chaos, the more potential there is for breakthroughs]

To which I responded, “For individuals, that would be the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky)”

Speaking of Vygotsky:

Graham Attwell: Personal Learning Environments & Vygotsky. via @fdomon

Within this perspective a Personal Learning Environment could be seen as allowing the representation of knowledge, skills and prior learning and a set of tools for interaction with peers to accomplish further tasks. The PLE would be dynamic in that it would allow reflection on those task and further assist in the representation of prior knowledge, skills and experiences. In this context experiences are seen as representing performance or practice. Through access to external symbol systems (Clark, 1997) such as metadata, ontologies and taxonomies the internal learning can be transformed into externalised knowledge and become part of the scaffolding for others as a representation of a MKO within a Zone of Proximal Development. Such an approach to the design of a Personal Learning Environment can bring together the everyday evolving uses of social networks and social media with pedagogic theories to learning.

Note: This post also had Jay Cross (@jaycross) asking me if there is any difference between PLE and PKM (personal knowledge management), aside from their DNA; to which I responded that I didn’t see a major difference in the tools & practices, though PKM assumes a worker while PLE typically assumes a student/learner. The terms are pretty well interchangeable if you remove the formal student/teacher/institutional relationships. I’m not sure what came first, PKM or PLE, but it doesn’t really matter. Whatever you call it, at the edge of chaos, we need to take control of our learning.

Speaking of breakthroughs at the edge of chaos, Euan Semple asks if we need a new religion (@euan):

The church and its myths predominated for centuries until Darwin, Freud and the carnage of the first world war trenches knocked a big whole in those assumptions. People weren’t ready for the vacuum left by the undermining of those stories though so the totalitarian regimes of Fascism and Communism filled the gap. When those myths too fell apart we were left with the myth of capitalism and the market and isn’t this beginning to look decidedly suspect since the collapse of the banking industry? Even watching the farce of the old them and us story of the right and left politics running out of steam in the UK general election is like watching another big story die.

The old, stable ways don’t work any more, says Ed Morrison (@edmorrison) in Re-engagement networks and the NASA Shuttle shutdown:

You can see the challenges, as I do, in the streets of Kokomo, or any Midwest auto community.
To address these challenges, we began to think about what a new system of economic adjustment — economic re-engagement — would look like. We designed re-engagement networks and set our challenge in a different light: In communities facing major transformations, we need to design and strengthen different types of re-engagement networks. This kind of thinking heads us in a different direction — away from the transactional, social service model that provides the foundation for our current systems.

Identifying a collaboration platform

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This is a follow-up from yesterday’s post that the LMS is no longer the centre of the universe and Jane Hart’s post today on A Transition Path to the Future. According to Jane, Step One in this transition is:

There are, of course, a number of steps on the transition path to a post-LMS future, and one of the first inevitably involves taking a good hard look at how your LMS is performing.  It may be that you want to retain it in some cut-down form, or it may be that it is providing no real value at all, and it is a barrier to “learning” .  I’m not suggesting that in every case, you should junk your LMS completely – in fact that would probably involve throwing the baby out with the bathwater! – but you certainly need to take an honest look at whether it is delivering what you need in the workplace today.

Step Two, or a concurrent step, would be to look at how to enhance collaboration.

First of all, collaborative work tools must be simple to be effective. The real complexity should come out of the emergent work, not the software. A collaboration platform that is over-engineered would be counterproductive. The key aspect of a collaboration platform is that should make work more transparent and rewards sharing. Does your LMS do this? Does it simplify work and make it more transparent for everyone in the network? Does it enhance serendipitous learning?

The options then become:

  • Open the LMS so it can be used in the daily workflow
  • Connect the LMS to a collaborative work platform
  • Migrate learning to a collaboration platform and minimize use of the LMS

Given the nature of many LMS, the last option is the most likely. Once again, it’s about getting work done. If learning is embedded in the work tools, then there is little need to go to a separate place (LMS) to “do some learning”. Here are some examples:

  • Use blogs to replace group e-mails so that information can be updated on a given subject/topic. This makes the work transparent and encourages learning.
  • Use wikis for all documentation. This reinforces the notion of work in perpetual Beta and encourages business improvement.
  • Adopt presence tools (IM, micro-blogging) so you know who is doing what in the organization. Tools like Twitter/Yammer/Laconica also become excellent places to jot down notes in public, which encourages serendipitous learning.

The key challenge is merging work and learning, especially in the minds of workers. I’ve noted before that the main objective of the modern training department should be to enable knowledge to flow in the organization. The primary function of learning professionals within such a collaborative work model is to connect and communicate, based on three core processes:

  1. Facilitate collaborative work and learning amongst workers, especially as peers.
  2. Sense patterns and help develop emergent work and learning practices.
  3. Work with management to fund and develop better tools and processes for workers.

If your LMS is not helping you with these processes then it’s time to find a better platform.  I recently described one such platform – Elgg: it’s a community effort:

Another platform that I have used since its early days is Elgg, an open source social networking platform that attracted me because of its unique underlying model. We started using Elgg for an online medical community of practice in 2004 after going through dozens of platforms. The key differentiator of Elgg is that the individual [worker] is the centre of all the action. A course is just a node that an individual connects to [does not disrupt work flow]. You don’t “enter” a course, you just connect to it, as you would to a colleague or friend. This is real user control. We liked Elgg so much that we paid to develop a calendar function and then gave the code to the community.

In 2005 I described Elgg as a Content/Community/Collaboration Management System that allows you to develop, invent and construct knowledge [knowledge management & social learning]. That sure beats any LMS, in my opinion. Elgg is used for commercial applications like Emerald Publishing as well as the foundation for the Eduspaces community.

The Elgg platform has matured in the past six years and has a strong community and a solid product (v. 1.7). My colleague Jane Hart provides Elgg services for education & business. Soon, Elgg.com will launch with services for those who want a hosted community platform. One major advantage of Elgg will be the ability to take your data and have it hosted elsewhere. Avoiding vendor lock-in is a wise business decision. The Elgg community blog has more information.

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* Here is Jane Hart’s follow-up post on Elgg as a collaboration platform.

LMS is no longer the centre of the universe

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OK, so here’s the deal – if learning is work and work is learning, why is organizational learning controlled by a learning management systems (LMS) that isn’t connected to the work being done in the enterprise? Learning is no longer what you do before you go to work, never having to learn anything else in order to do your job. In the 21st century networked economy, learning and working are becoming one.

As Robert Kelley showed over a 20 year study of knowledge workers, we need to keep learning in order to get our jobs done – “What percentage of the knowledge you need to do your job is stored in your own mind?”

1986 ~ 75%.
1997 ~ 20%
2006 ~ 10%

In a networked economy, social learning is how we get things done. Training, based on solid documentation of processes and procedures, works well at lower levels of complexity and we can develop best practices. As complexity increases, we need more tacit knowledge, which cannot be documented. Conversation is a prime medium for the sharing of tacit knowledge and is the foundation for collaborative work. We need to communicate in order to collaborate. This is why organizations need to manage what matters – collaboration.

The LMS framework is being challenged for its supremacy over organizational learning much as heliocentricity showed European civilization that we were not the centre of the galaxy. Jane Hart says that, “what is needed is an organisational system that SUPPORTS and ENABLES this informal approach to learning.” That system is one where the LMS is nothing more than a node in the network, which means that the LMS has to play nice with others (which most do not). The centre of the universe has shifted for training & development professionals and they can ignore this shift, as the Catholic church did, or they can become part of the Learning Reformation.