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.

Complexity links

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I use Delicious to keep track of web resources and recently passed on, via Twitter, my social bookmarks tagged with complexity. Here are some of those bookmarks.

James Surowiecki’s three conditions on the use of the Wisdom of Crowds [something often overlooked], via Dave Snowden:

  1. independence of opinion between the individuals
  2. relevant diversity among the individuals
  3. decentralization of the decision-making process

A short explanation of the Cynefin framework (and video by Shawn Callahan), by Ton Zijlstra:

Over the years I’ve seen the number of issues companies and professionals are dealing with shift more and more to the complex realm. Because our internet and mobile communications connected world as a whole has shifted towards this complex domain more by increasing the connections between us and as a result the speed of change, the dynamics around us and the amount of information. A quantitative shift with massive qualitative impact. Complexity is where predictability is absent, and only in hindsight cause and effect are clear. It’s the messy bits, as Shawn says, where human interaction, culture, innovation, trust are at play. And it’s those same messy bits where increasingly organizations are able to distinguish themselves from others, or not.

On transforming to the enterprise of the future, by Art Murray at KM World:

Move from a posture of sense-and-respond to one of “co-creating.”

Stephan Haeckel’s Adaptive Enterprise brought us from make-and-sell to sense-and-respond. In today’s environment, even sense-and-respond may not be enough. Enabled by massive social networks with memberships numbering in the hundreds of millions, the cycle of listening to customers and filling their wants and needs is both rapid and continuous. You need to get into your customer’s mind, and let your customer into yours. The same goes for your suppliers, even your competitors.

Action: Trash the stupid customer surveys, along with the sales presentations. Have an ongoing conversation instead. Ask thought-provoking, open-ended questions and listen intently (the right way to do knowledge capture). Focus on needs and desired results, and find the most efficient and effective way to achieve them.

Added bonus: Do the same internally, from staff meetings to budget planning to performance reviews. Get knowledge flowing in all directions.

Rob Paterson, “ … we refuse to see the complex and work as if complexity was complicated or simple.”

It’s a simple message, really. But if you don’t get it, you’re headed for chaos.

Simple = easily knowable.

Complicated = not simple, but still knowable.

Complex = not fully knowable, but reasonably predictable.

Chaotic = neither knowable nor predictable.

Simple Rules, by Michael Dubakov [check out the simulations]:

Many complex systems are based on simple rules. A set of several simple rules leads to complex, intelligent behavior. While a set of complex rules often leads to a dumb and primitive behavior. There are many examples.

The Cynefin framework and (the complexity of ) classroom instruction, by Andrew Cerniglia:

Classroom instruction is complex but do we treat it as such? Is “sensing” a priority of teacher education? How would an instructor who waits for “patterns to emerge” be viewed by their supervisor? As laid back? Aloof? And does outcome-based education (unintentionally) result in educators treating complex situations as complicated, or worse yet, simple in nature?

The means of production

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Scott Leslie and I agree on many things, so when he posted the following, I wanted to make sure I had not missed something in my own thinking:

With Canada’s GDP at 69% services and stock indexes like the S&P at over 80% intangible valuation, I would say that much of our economy is no longer based on physical capital. The means of production are knowledge, creativity and ingenuity. Also, tacit knowledge accounts for the most-valued work today and it cannot be codified, as explicit knowledge can. Knowledge cannot be separated from the knowledgeable person and even more importantly, knowledge can be increased through collaboration amongst knowledgeable people. Knowledgeable people are the means of production.

Does this mean that ‘we’ own the means of production? No, not yet and maybe not in the future; but perhaps yes. I am not a techno-utopian but I see great opportunities in a networked world where much is transparent and the barriers are low for one person to connect with many. This blog is an example. However, there are reactionary forces that are trying to put the genie back in the bottle, as Jaron Lanier describes at length in You are Not a Gadget:

One effect of the so-called free way of thinking is that it could eventually force anyone who wants to survive on the basis on mental activity (other than cloud tending) to enter into some sort of legal or political fortress – or become a pet of a wealthy patron — in order to be protected from the rapacious hive mind. What free really means is that artists, musicians, writers, and filmmakers will have to cloak themselves within stodgy institutions.

We forget what a wonder, what a breath of fresh air it has been to have creative people make their own way in the world of commerce instead of patronage. Patrons gave us Bach and Michelangelo, but it’s unlikely patrons would have given us Vladimir Nabokov, the Beatles, or Stanley Kubrick.

For example, Facebook and YouTube create nothing themselves except for the platform while members contribute the valuable content for free. Then these corporations reap the profits through advertising and the sale of aggregated data. Will this be the only future for knowledge workers; to contribute to the hive mind for free?

It is possible that this is our future, especially if net neutrality is lost. But I think that interconnected and active citizens will self-organize and counter this movement. For now, the financial systems are controlled by elites and hierarchies but for the first time in history, billions of people have a way around them. We just haven’t figured out how to create better systems — yet. We own the means of production, but we don’t know what to do with it.

Networks and Emergence

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

Some thoughts:

As we learn in digital networks, stock (content) gets smaller, while flow (conversation) gets longer – the challenge becomes how to continously weave the many bits of information and knowledge that pass by us each day.

The challenge for educators and organizations is not how to integrate or adopt web technologies but rather how do we teach, learn and work in networks. Digital networks have changed all hierarchical relationships.

@DavePollard – The Lifecycle of Emergence [if OD, KM, ISD and other siloed disciplines are declining, is there something new emerging?]

Practitioners in a system of influence can even throw ‘lifelines’ or build bridges to invite (or pull) forward those stuck in earlier paradigm thinking, methods and tools — rescuing them from e-mail, for example, by showing them IM, virtual presence and other effective real-time collaboration tools, or showing them new and effective group processes and practices that get them past dissent, disengagement, dysfunctional power dynamics and feelings of helplessness and disempowerment.

Why we need to “kill social media” via @WWWayne

In our view, social media is about the evolution of human communication. Cultural anthropology, sociology, psychology, and linguistics matter in marketing again. Concepts like “social framing,” whereby individuals often perceive issues through the prism of their friends, are starting to help us rethink the way we communicate and the ways people gather, act, and synthesize information. Rethinking social organization through social media is beginning to have a transformative impact on governments and businesses.

Power increases hypocrisy & grace (undeserved merit) decreases it! via @CircleReader

Results: when power (or lack thereof) was legitimate, the powerful also exhibited moral hypocrisy (being less moral themselves but judging others more harshly), while the powerless weren’t – just as before. But when power (or lack thereof) was illegitimate, the powerful didn’t show hypocrisy. In fact, the moral hypocrisy effect not only disappeared but was reversed, with the illegitimate powerful becoming stricter in judging their own behavior and more lenient in judging the others.

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Best humourous tweet of the week:

@shareski: I walked by hotel room 404 and was tempted to hang a post-it saying “Room not Found!”

TLt2010 Presentation on Net Work Learning

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I am presenting at Tlt2010 in Saskatoon this morning. Here’s the overview:

The network era is blurring the lines between working, learning and playing. As we become more connected, our governing models, our business structures, and our ways to support learning are all getting more complex. Social learning is how knowledge is generated in networks – and networks are where many of us will be working. Net work means learning to work anew.

These are the finalized slides, revised this morning. [Re-posted with explanatory notes on 14 May 2010]

Net work learning with notes

I’ve really enjoyed the presentations by my co-presenters, Scott Leslie and David Wiley and of course their insights and comments had me making last-minute changes this morning.

Note: I’m told the video of this presentation will be available in about a week or so. I’ll pass it on via twitter and add the link here.