Working online is different

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With volcanic ash grounding most flights in northern Europe, I’ve been thinking about web conferencing and distributed work. I work predominantly at a distance, using networked communications (what we used to call computer supported collaborative work), and have been doing so for over a decade. I have never met several of my clients in person and the same goes with some of my business partners. I can go many months without stepping foot in an airport. Flight cancellations don’t have much direct influence on my work, though I do understand the economic ramifications of the current situation.

Over the years I’ve used a lot of different technologies, from video conferencing to collaborative work spaces. Currently, my favourites are Zorap, Skype, and Google Documents. I give more presentations online than I do in-person and I must say that online presenting has some real advantages — backchannels, ability to send links, engaged participants who can help others, etc.

But it’s not about the technology. The real issue is getting people used to working at a distance. For instance, everything has to be transparent for collaborative work to be effective online. Using wikis or Google Documents means that everyone can see what the others have contributed. There is no place to hide. For example, I once developed a Request for Proposals with a large group distributed across several time zones. Everyone could provide input for a specified period of time and then that issue was closed. Later, some people complained that their requirements were not being addressed. I was able to look at the revision history of the wiki and show that they had not even contributed on those issues. This stopped the complaints and we were able to move on.

I now take for granted my online personal knowledge mastery processes, such as social bookmarking, blogging, and tweeting, but these habits make online collaboration much, much easier. However, these habits and practices have taken several years to develop and may not come easily to many workers.  If  economic conditions and events that disrupt air traffic drive organizations to use more online social tools, many people may be in for a shock. Work, as they know it, will change.

Emergent Social Media

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Four major types of social media (SM), according to Patti Anklam are:

  • Media SM – news, commentary & opinions
  • Customer SM – listening to customers, responding to market needs
  • Enterprise SM – provide the conditions for enabling knowledge & action to emerge
  • Personal SM – learning, creating, co-creating, sharing, weaving

Patti also asks, what’s the fifth SM? — “the networked, community, purposeful use of social media to bind networks, causes, and events.” Ideas include: Cause; Crowd & Community SM. My suggestion would be Emergent SM, because it is not separate but a result of activities in the other four.

Learning is described as an essential part of Personal SM but really it is part of all four. In networks, learning cannot be pulled out as a separate activity. We have to stop thinking of learning as a separate thing/area/silo. As I have said before, when you learn with and from your customers, learning and marketing are the same. Perhaps getting rid of the L word is a start. It’s all learning.

Here’s my perspective:

Personal SM facilitates cooperation in networks. It is self-directed.

Enterprise SM enables collaboration inside the organization and focuses on shared objectives.

Media & Customer SM are specialized areas for certain organizational objectives and are market focused.

Emergent SM develops as continuous learning, co-creating & sharing become the norm, at the individual, organizational and market level. As Esko Kilpi states:

Complex organizations are neither products of random experimentation, nor can they be perfectly designed beforehand  and managed efficiently top down. The Internet could not have been designed top down, nor can any living organism be planned from outside.

What is going on in these cases is called emergence. Interaction itself has the capacity to create emergent structure, coherence, consistency and change.

Emergent SM is the combination of self-directed learners and learning organizations who connect as a network that learns: Networking = Learning

Complexity and Collaboration

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

@jonathanfields: “The day you say “that SOB stole my idea” is the day you need to face your own inability to execute.” via @moehlert

@barbarosa1: “There are an increasing number of world problems that can’t be solved by hierarchy. Collaboration is the only chance for a solution.” via @sifowler

@timkastelle Nice post from @EskoKilpi: Complexity. The new world between chance and choice

The Internet changes the patterns of connectivity and makes possible new enriching variety in interaction. The changed dynamics we experience every day through social media have the very characteristics of the edge of chaos.

The sciences of complexity change our perspective and thinking. Perhaps, as a result we should, especially in management, focus more attention on what we are doing than what we should be doing. Following the thinking presented by the most advanced scientific researchers, the important question to answer is not what should happen in the future, but what is happening now?

Our focus should be on the communicative interaction creating the continuously developing pattern that is our life.

Outsourcing Journalism: [More evidence that simple work is automated & merely complicated work is outsourced. Be creative or lose your job.] by @RossDawson

Seed.com is considering outsourcing fact-checking and copy-editing – given finding the right talent and quality control systems this should be feasible

When was the last time you worked entirely with people in the same building? Collaboration Is More Important Than Ever by @elsua

I mean, when was the last time you were working with your colleagues in your same building and on the very same project (Just that ONE project!)? Or even in the same country? I bet that was a long while ago! In my own case, the last time I had all of my colleagues in the same building and working on the same project was in 2000. Yes, that far back! From there onwards, people have become a whole lot more distributed, and virtual, to the point where my current team expands globally nowadays across various geographies. And we are all working on a bunch of various different projects / initiatives as well. To us all, like I said, collaboration is not a nice thing to have, but a critical success factor of not only what we do, but who we are as knowledge workers doing Web work day in day out.

If you’re interested in games and social networking (super useful for eLearning and learning) then Games for Social Networks: Notes On The Design and Business of Networked Play is ace from @aquito.  via @BFchirpy

You are not replaceable *because* you share know-how, in fact it gets you places. The fallacy of know-how recipes and hoarding. by @johnt

Chefs share their recipes in books, but will reading one make me a chef. Even when they do demo’s where you can pickup contexual, peripheral and nuances like: what goes with what, acidic’s, timing, seasonal food, temperatures, etc…it still doesn’t mean I can do it, or that I’m a chef. As I said in my recent post, knowledge is not an accumulation of facts, it’s a way of being…Libraries vs Apprenticeship/Storytelling.

HPT and ISD

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Clark Quinn discussed the Great ADDIE Debate and summarized the alternatives to exclusively using ADDIE (analysis, design, development, implementation, evaluation):

The obvious question came up about what would be used in place of ADDIE.  I believe that ADDIE as a checklist would be a nice accompaniment to both a more encompassing  and a more learning-centric approach.  For the former, I showed the HPT model as a representation of a design approach considering courses as part of a larger picture.  For the latter, I suggested that a focus on learning experience design would be appropriate.

Using an HPT-like approach first, to ensure that a course is the right solution, is necessary.  Then, I’d focus on working backwards from the needed change (Michael Allen talked about using sketches as lightweight prototypes at the conference, and first drawing the last activity the user engaged in) thinking about creating a learning experience that develops the learner’s capability.  Finally, I’d be inclined to use ADDIE as a checklist to ensure all the important components are considered, once I’d drafted an initial design (or several).  ADDIE certainly may be useful in taking that design forward, through development, implementation and evaluation.

I think of HPT (human performance technology) as an enabler to get to first base in instructional systems design (ISD). Without the proper analysis of the organizational needs, constraints and performance factors, a “learning” project may be doomed from the onset, because too often, training is a solution looking for a problem.

Here are some images from past presentations that support Clark’s post and may be helpful.

Hpt and isd

Bigger is not better

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Common business wisdom used to be that nobody gets fired for buying IBM. Implicit in this statement is that it’s best not to rock the boat if you want to keep your job. The same culture permeates most large organizations. There is a belief that large companies have to buy products and services from other large companies. Bigger is better.

I have worked on both sides of the RFP/Proposal & purchasing/selling continuum. In the military, we developed our technical specifications and then some ‘professional’ from Public Works & Government Services would wrap those specs into a Request for Proposals. The additional caveats ensured that only a few bidders could ever meet the mandatory criteria. Often, it excluded the product or services that we, the operational users, really wanted. In the end, everybody’s job was protected, a large company got the contract, and the taxpayer was fleeced.

As an officer, I hired a consulting firm, through the proper channels, and they spent several months taking my own analysis and then selling it back to the military in fancy packaging. Money changed hands but the only value exchange was the consulting company learning something about the client.

Four years ago I wrote that free-agents offer better value, especially in consulting:

Many free-agents are also natural enterprises, not encumbered by the need for constant growth. I’ve worked as a sub-contractor on bids from large corporations who need my skills for a specific project. It’s usually good work for me, but in many cases I could have put together a team of free agents for a much lower cost and a more effective (in my opinion) project. However, most large corporations and government agencies write their requests for proposals (RFP) in such a way as to exclude small operators, thinking that they are mitigating their risks.

Three years ago I saw the big consulting companies were jumping on bandwagon 2.0  — It looks like social media (wikis, blogs & social networking) are going the way of e-learning and knowledge management (KM). That means big companies charging big fees for cookie-cutter solutions.

Clients may think they are hiring an expert team with much experience, but in many cases they are getting a bunch of recently graduated MBA’s. This story [now offline] about a high-priced consultant with the Boston Consulting Group motivated me to write this post:

Despite having no work or research experience outside of MIT, I was regularly advertised to clients as an expert with seemingly years of topical experience relevant to the case. We were so good at rephrasing our credentials that even I was surprised to find in each of my cases, even my very first case, that I was the most senior consultant on the team.

The culture of ‘nobody gets fired for buying …’ was obvious here:

I got the feeling that our clients were simply trying to mimic successful businesses, and that as consultants, our earnings came from having the luck of being included in an elaborate cargo-cult ritual. In any case it fell to us to decide for ourselves what question we had been hired to answer, and as a matter of convenience, we elected to answer questions that we had already answered in the course of previous cases — no sense in doing new work when old work will do.

When marketing is disconnected from sales and neither are integrated with client services you get cases like BCG above. Too often, sales & marketing are putting lipstick on a pig.

There’s more than one type of consultant and some of these folks are giving us a bad name. One key advantage of hiring independents or small companies is that those who write the proposals actually do the work. Marketing, sales, and consulting are one integrated unit, a real advantage for clients.

To make the relationship with clients as clear as possible, I’ve used these guidelines since I launched my practice seven years ago:

  1. Base recommendations and actions on an objective needs assessment conducted in partnership with the client.
  2. Define and achieve useful results that can be aligned with both the client organization’s mission, objectives and positive contributions to society.
  3. Focus on results and consequences of the results. Measure performance based on results, not on procedures performed for the client.
  4. Set clear expectations about the process to be followed and about the expected outcomes.
  5. Serve the client organization with integrity, competence, and objectivity.
  6. Respect and contribute to the legitimate and ethical objectives of the client organization.
  7. Prevent problems from occurring rather than solve problems that could have been predicted and avoided.

Sense-making glossary

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PARC offers a glossary of quite useful sense-making terms. Sense-making is what the second part of the Seek-Sense-Share PKM model is about.

Sense-making – The process by which individuals (or organizations) create an understanding so that they can act in a principled and informed manner …

Source-linked sensemaking – In conventional media, a document about a topic may cite a list of references. In source-linked sense-making, the report is an active document with active links for retrieving the sources used …

Examples of sensemaking operations are abstracting, annotating, assumption linking, classifying, clustering, comparing elements or schemas, concept splitting, making a cross product, detailing, document mining, emitting, extracting, format stripping, foraging,  fusing,  goal shifting, instantiating schemas, linking, matching,  negotiating meaning, perceiving order, re-encoding, refining, retrieving, segmenting, shifting representations, source linking, summarizing, stemming, structuring, transforming, and zoning.

Resumable sensemaking is the sensemaking analog of life-long learning, that is, it embodies the idea that (at least potentially) the process of making sense is never done.

Many of the definitions are framed around report writing but these can easily be expanded into the broader areas of personal knowledge management or personal learning environments.

“Shape Patterns, Not Programs”

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Excellent lessons and a wealth of references are included in this paper, Changing Homeland Security: Shape Patterns, Not Programs which is applicable to a wide and sundry audience.

Advice from Socrates to a man who over-planned his son’s birthday party – “ask the women”, with the following results:

We held the party at Panathinaikon Stadium. We set up places to eat, a site for crafts, a tent for shelter and rest, a station for music, and a space for art. Singers wandered and told stories. There was a field for wrestling and running and flying kites. We encouraged the children to try what they pleased. We helped if they asked, then we stepped back and watched. When there was hitting or crying or harsh words – and there was – we immediately spoke sternly or separated the offenders. Then we redirected them toward an established activity.

In sum, our strategy was to control only that which could be ordered. For those activities in the realm of that which is, and must be, unordered, we watched and we shaped – gently, but with insistence. Because I have learned to know the difference between the states of order and unorder, I am now seen by all Athens as the wisest of men. Second to you of course.

On planning for the future

We need to learn how to become a partner with an uncontrollable future.

Consider how one rears children. They are not little machines waiting to be directed by higher headquarters. They are people learning how to be free and responsible citizens. Their future emerges; it is not designed. So too with homeland security – it is only five years old.

There is much good advice here for all organizations dealing with complex issues.

Agility and Autonomy

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for social learning to be successfully implemented in an organisation it is not just about adding in the new tools or platforms but also about acquiring a new mindset and new skillset for both learning professionals and individuals.

Jane Hart  shows in this Table; Social Learning = New Toolset + New Mindset + New Skillset

New Mindset: Agility

A key part of the New Mindset is agility. This is one of the limitations of instructional design as it too often practiced. For instance, at one time, software engineers assumed they could design a program and then build it based on the initial  specifications. Today, that is not often the case and much software development has adopted more agile methods. Assuming you know everything at the start of a complex development project is rather arrogant. This article on the future of software development had me asking if instructional design is also arrogant:

The problem was that the Waterfall Model was arrogant. The arrogance came from the fact that we believed that we could always engineer the perfect system on the first try. The second problem with it was that in nature, dynamic systems are not engineered, they evolve. It is the evolutionary idea that led to the development of agile methods.

Instead of factory-style production teams, agile programming uses far fewer, but better, programmers. The principles of communicating, focusing on simplicity, releasing often and testing often are all applicable to developing good instructional programs.

A culture of perpetual Beta is critical. Perpetual Beta means we never get to the final release and that our learning will never stop. Agile organizations realize they will never reach some future point where everything stabilizes and they don’t need to learn or do anything new.

New Skillset: Autonomy

I have observed over the years that a significant portion of the workforce has not been able to develop the skills to learn for themselves. What many lack are tools, methods and practices to learn and to take action. Autonomous learners face many barriers on the job, particularly the pervasive attitude that you must look busy or you’re not working.

We are trained early in life to look to authority for direction in learning and work. The idea that there is a right answer or an expert with the right answer begins in our schools. John Taylor Gatto describes this in the seven-lesson schoolteacher.

The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. The expert makes all the important choices; only I, the teacher, can determine what you must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions which I then enforce. If I’m told that evolution is a fact instead of a theory, I transmit that as ordered, punishing deviants who resist what I have been told to tell them to think. This power to control what children will think lets me separate successful students from failures very easily.

The message from many workplaces continues to be that good employees wait for their supervisor to tell them what to do.

However, when we move away from a “design it first, then build it” mindset, we need to engage everyone in critical and systems thinking. Workers in agile workplaces must be passionate, adaptive, innovative, and collaborative. The way to begin is to become autonomous.

Developing practical methods, like PKM, is a start on the path to autonomy. A major premise of PKM is that it is Personal and there are many ways to practice it.  We need to think about and talk about work differently. For example, dropping the notion of being paid for time is one way to start this change.  An hourly wage implies that people are interchangeable, but no two minds are the same. Many of our human resource practices should be questioned and dropped.

Social Learning

Social learning is how things get done in networks. For example, Sue Schnorr recently asked if Networking = Learning?. It seems that way to me. Learner autonomy is a foundation for effective social learning within and without the enterprise and social learning is the lubricant for an agile organization. Agility is a necessity because we are dealing with increasing complexity.

Esko Kilpi puts it very succinctly. Let me paraphrase his words:

In order to develop the necessary emergent practices to deal with complexity you need to first cultivate diversity [autonomy of each learner] .

You also need rich and deep connections, but these are not enough if you don’t also have meaningful conversations [social learning].

Learning is the work …

The business of information

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The internet era has allowed almost anybody to self-publish and we’re doing it in droves, on blogs, wikis, YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter. This has shifted our relationship with information because we can find most information we need for free.

I wrote earlier this year about the changing information business.

I would surmise that ten years ago it was easier to sell a research report than it is now. There was less information available online for free. However, I think there is still a growing market for mass customization. That means a customized research report for me that’s different than one for somebody else. That’s pretty well what I sell: customized strategy & analysis for the specific context of each client. The challenge for Janet (and all of us in the custom information business) is figuring out the 90% that we should give away for free and the 10% that has market value and that we can charge for. The problem is that this sweet spot keeps changing so we need to keep tweaking and reinventing our business models.

With ease of publishing comes increased competition and most content publishers today are looking for new and better business models. Ross Dawson sees an exclusive class of online content creators developing, but at a cost. Dawson sees increasing demands to publish more frequently:

I don’t know how professional bloggers who are parents of young children manage. You’d be torn in both directions. It’s hard to keep the blog posts flowing every day, all the time, while you have other demands.

However it will be an imperative for almost all of us to create content in some form, just to have any visibility at all in an overloaded world.

So those who choose to belong to the exclusive class of content creators are automatically drawn into this spiral of intensity, whether they like it or not.

This seems kind of scary, especially when my own publishing is not for money. I wonder if I’ll feel this increasing pressure in the future.

Blogging is part of my learning (PKM) process and has a side benefit of connecting with potential partners and clients. I don’t spend any money on traditional marketing. Everything on the blog is free because I get intrinsic and extrinsic non-monetary rewards for doing it.

Of course, one concern is that people will take my ideas and sell them as their own. This is a risk of being on the internet and I don’t see this changing. It can be frustrating to see work that was developed over years of practice and reflection get repackaged and sold as a poor imitation. An alternative is not to share, but that would be self-defeating.

I don’t think that charging for general information is a viable online business model. When I look at how to price information, a rule of thumb I’ve adopted is that anything that requires context can be fee-based, while context-free information, like blog posts, can be given away. That rule may change some day but constantly tweaking our business models is just part of life in perpetual beta.

On learning and responsibility

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

Absorbing uncertainty: “much HR practice seems focused on abrogation rather than assumption of responsibility” by @snowded

@tonykarrer social learning tools should have 1) obvious value & 2) be the same tools as your work tools [because work is learning & learning is the work]

Good post on learning to learn by @sumeet_moghe People learn iteratively, over time:

It’s interesting how I learnt to use chopsticks though. At one point I decided that eating with chopsticks was cool, since I’d seen some of my friends do it and it was kind of a distinctive thing to do. So I read up a “how-to” for using chopsticks, which since I had no opportunity to use, I forgot in a few days. So when I actually did get the opportunity to use chopsticks, I fumbled for the first ten minutes and actually messed up my shirt! It took me about an hour to finish my meal, but by the end I had found an inelegant way that worked for me. As time passed and I visited more oriental restaurants, I gradually perfected the art — often I’d get little tips and hints from my friends and that helped me get better. Now, I can eat a complete meal with chopsticks and pretty quickly too!

@charlesjennings 5 Barriers to Effective Learning in Organisations:

The Five Barriers:

Barrier 1: Efficiency
Barrier 2: Inertia
Barrier 3: Convenience
Barrier 4: Training Mindset
Barrier 5: Manager Engagement

via @fdomon great post by @johnt : The myth of knowledge objects – the gap between knowing and acting:

Quoting Patrick Lamb (PDF) “There is a profound and dangerous autism in the way we describe knowledge management and e-learning. At its root is an obsessive fascination with the idea of knowledge as content, as object, and as manipulable artefact. It is accompanied by an almost psychotic blindness to the human experiences of knowing, learning, communicating, formulating, recognising, adapting, miscommunicating, forgetting, noticing, ignoring, choosing, liking, disliking, remembering and misremembering.”

@tonykarrer A few great comments already around Creative Commons – Fail!

Bottom line is that Creative Commons is failing to really help us. If you have to go and contact each license holder to find out, you are basically in the same boat as with copyright.