Blog – Page 206 – Harold Jarche

The collapse of complicated business models

2010-04-08 by Harold Jarche

Clay Shirky, in the collapse of complex business models, notes:

Bureaucracies temporarily reverse the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.

The premise of his article is that successful organizations and industries become more complex over time and are unable to embrace new ways of doing things, which at the onset are much simpler. He discusses the complex television industry and how it cannot produce simple, and low cost, fare for the web.

I’m not sure if complexity is the issue. I see it more as complication. Companies and industries start out as relatively simple operations and then become more complicated. Complicated systems can be analyzed, and we can tell how things work. Modern organizations are not complex, they are merely complicated. A complex organization could not be managed.

The real problem is on the outside, not the inside, of the typical complicated organization. The outside environment has become complex and the complicated organization lacks the ability to deal with it. Systems like the Neilson ratings don’t give us the kind of information we need to make decisions on programming. The media landscape is too fragmented to completely analyze.

The Cynefin framework describes the complicated & complex domains as:

Complicated, in which the relationship between cause and effect requires analysis or some other form of investigation and/or the application of expert knowledge, the approach is to Sense – Analyze – Respond and we can apply good practice.

Complex, in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe – Sense – Respond and we can sense emergent practice.

The typical large modern organization tends to thoroughly assess a situation before acting, assuming it can be analyzed. This does not work in complex environments where we need to first do something and then see what happens. We see this with Beta releases of web services, which adapt as they are used by more people. many web companies understand this.

I don’t see simplicity as the solution to dealing with complex environments. A new organizational structure is required that is 1) based on simple units but is 2) connected as a network that is much more complex than any hierarchical organization could ever be. This type of organization will be too complex to manage directly. It will self-manage and adapt. The best work structures to deal with complexity will be complex networks, and likely some mix of wirearchical, chaordic, democratic, etc.

Knowledge work revisited

2010-04-07 by Harold Jarche

In knowledge work (2004) I commented on how Lilia Efimova described the main uses of blogs for knowledge work: personal knowledge repositories, learning journals, or networking instruments.

Another point in Lilia’s paper is that knowledge work is “discretionary behavior”, in that knowledge workers have to be motivated to do knowledge work. Many companies are tryng to find ways to motivate their knowledge workers. This makes me wonder about Peter Drucker’s comment that the corporation as we know it won’t be around in the next 25 years (Managing in the Next Society, 2002). Perhaps the actual structure of work, especially the Corporation itself, is an obstacle to knowledge work. Instead of tweaking the mechanisms of the corporation, through job redesign or cultural initiatives, we should be re-examining the basic structure of the corporation. It is an industrial age creation, designed to maximize physical capital and may not be optimal for maximizing “knowledge capital”.

Yesterday, Jack Vinson asked, Is the term Knowledge Worker no longer useful?:

When Drucker coined the term and others borrowed it, I don’t think the idea was differentiation so much as identification. Traditional “work” was the physical labor variety. As management ideas grew into the information age, they wanted ways to categorize (and measure) other workers within the organization. Knowledge work seemed a good way to describe what a larger and larger portion of the working population were doing.

The challenge for our society, our economy and all organizations will be to ensure that most, if not all, workers are knowledge workers. If not, we may not have a functioning society because simple, mechanical work will continue to be automated and merely complicated work will be outsourced to the cheapest labour market. The only work of value that is left in the developed world is complex work that requires passion, creativity and initiative.

As long as there remains a difference between workers and knowledge workers, the latter term is useful in reminding us how far we have yet to go.

All models are flawed but some are useful

2010-04-05 by Harold Jarche

Silvia Andreoli has added to my last post on PKM and created this graphic to show the individual as well as the social aspects of personal knowledge management. I like its simplicity and the way it shows the flows. My only minor issue is that I would replace “knowledge” with “personalized information”. Knowledge is an emergent property of the entire system, in my opinion.

Silvia’s graphic has some similarities with one of my earlier representations, which included four internal processes and three external ones:

I found over time that even this representation was too complicated to get the idea across quickly and people did not remember it, so I developed the more simplistic Seek-Sense-Share graphic. For people steeped in knowledge management or learning models, a more complicated representation is likely better, but as an introduction, I will keep to the simpler representations. Silvia’s graphic makes an excellent addition to these models.

Beta, data and more

2010-04-02 by Harold Jarche

Here’s what I learned on Twitter this past week:

@literacyadviser “The only truly effective web filter is an educated mind.” via @ jonhusband

@dweinberger “The only way I know to solve big problems anymore is to do it in public.”

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“Training for future use of a skill is pretty much pointless.” by @JaneBozarth

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Why you need to understand political policy by @cognitivepolicy via@drmcewan

In other words, we are more like defense lawyers than philosophers. We are compelled by our judgments to feel a moral view is appropriate and correct, then defend it if pressed to do so. We don’t start with a set of assumptions and reason our way to conclusions. And this process occurs largely outside conscious awareness so it takes practice to recognize when it is happening.

This relates to a common psychological phenomenon called “confirmation bias” which refers to the tendency to be overly critical of information that challenges what one believes to be true (or the tendency to uncritically accept information that supports one’s belief). We see this all the time in politics. People are predisposed to consider their values, views and positions as inherently good and right. At the same time, we tend to be suspicious of anyone who holds a view different from our own.

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Industrial vs Networked approaches to work: Fire the indispensable? OR nurture a linchpin culture? via @minutrition

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@courosa “Ning Exposed – Tech Company Scams its Clients” [2008]

Is Ning a scam?
There’s a theory that Ning’s actions are part of a carefully planned scam to make the company the next MySpace or Facebook. Instead of spending millions of dollars advertising and gathering enough members to compete with MySpace or Facebook, why not create a social network platform and rely on the ambition of thousands of other network creators to up build membership. When the time is right, simply take all of those members and combine them into one super-site, Ning.com

[Read the comments on the above link to get a better idea of the issues]

This reminds me how important it is to own your data, and the following show two open source options to Ning’s Software as a Service (SaaS) platform:

@elggdotcom “there is a hosted version of Elgg coming in May”

@romiranck “A hosted version of Drupal, Drupalgardens, is in beta now. Testing it out.”

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You may have noticed that I’ve changed the tagline of this website to life in perpetual Beta. I find it an accurate description of my life and work. It’s been a subject of conversation here since 2006.

I seek, I sense, we share

2021-01-232010-03-31 by Harold Jarche

I’m working on a few presentations and have been updating some graphics, one of which I used in my last post. Anne Marie McEwan told me she really liked the image and instead of waiting until I give the presentations next month, I’ve put up a segment of the slides on Slideshare [no longer available] with all the related graphics on PKM from the perspective of seeking, sensing and sharing. (CC-Attribution-Non-Commercial). Please let me know if you find them useful and feel free to suggest changes. It’s life in perpetual Beta around here.

Critical thinking in the organization

2016-11-122010-03-30 by Harold Jarche

Even the mainstream training field is realizing that reduced layers of bureaucracy mean decision-making gets pushed down the organization chart. This is the message of the AMA in the promotional video – Critical Thinking: Not just a C-suite skill. However, wirearchy takes this one important step further by advocating a two-way flow of power and authority. In both cases, the need for critical thinking is evident. Here is Edward Glaser’s definition:

“Critical thinking calls for a persistent effort to examine any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the evidence that supports it and the further conclusions to which it tends. It also generally requires ability to recognize problems, to find workable means for meeting those problems, to gather and marshal pertinent information, to recognize unstated assumptions and values, to comprehend and use language with accuracy, clarity, and discrimination, to interpret data, to appraise evidence and evaluate arguments, to recognize the existence (or non-existence) of logical relationships between propositions, to draw warranted conclusions and generalizations, to put to test the conclusions and generalizations at which one arrives, to reconstruct one’s patterns of beliefs on the basis of wider experience, and to render accurate judgments about specific things and qualities in everyday life.”

A personal knowledge mastery process can help to develop critical thinking skills, where sense-making includes observing, studying, challenging (especially one’s assumptions), and evaluating. Developing these skills takes practice, appropriate feedback and an environment that supports critical thinking.

Several web tools can be used to develop critical thinking skills; the foundation of PKM:

critical thinking tools

Flattening the organization is one way to open communications and delegate responsibility but asking employees to engage in real critical thinking, and accepting the resulting actions, will not work unless there is a two-way flow of power and authority. Critical thinking is not just thinking more deeply but also asking difficult and discomfiting questions. Without power and authority, these become meaningless.

So yes, critical thinking is not just for the C-suite, but unleashing it requires a new framework for getting work done. Wirearchy as the organizational framework, coupled with active personal knowledge management processes, is a step in that direction.

Elgg: it’s a community effort

2020-06-132010-03-29 by Harold Jarche

This weekend I noticed a tweet from Alec Couros about some issues with the Ning social networking platform. That post is over a year old but from the comments as late as last fall, there seem to be ongoing issues on how Ning treats its customers, users and their data.

This brought me to reflect, once again, how important an open source framework is as we move more of our computing to the cloud. While Ning may be free, it is not open source, and the company can make changes at will, just like Facebook, Google or Twitter may do.

I advise my clients that they should consider how important their data is to them before using software as a service (SaaS). Can the data be easily exported? With social bookmarks, it is easy to export and import OPML files from one platform to another. It is also simple to export from WordPress.com SaaS to your own open source hosted version, which is why I strongly advise clients to use WordPress for blogging. With Ning, Facebook and many others, there is no such export function.

So what is the alternative to Ning? This social networking platform is simple to set-up and use and has been embraced by millions, including LearnTrends (+3,000) and WorkLiteracy (+900), two sites I manage. For large enterprise projects I have used Drupal as a community management platform and it works well, though it requires solid technical support.

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 is the centre of all the action. A course is just a node that an individual connects to. 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. 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.

Supporting communities like Elgg and Drupal means that we can have more control over our use of web technologies. As business and education move to the web and the cloud, open-source platforms will help to ensure that some corporate board doesn’t decide our future for us.

Literacies

2018-06-112010-03-28 by Harold Jarche

What is literacy? We may think we know. Some people even say we need 21st century literacies. But Marshall McLuhan said that, “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” Is this how we view literacy, though the rear-view mirror?

Chris Hedges, in America the Illiterate wrote that the lack of print literacy is creating a society that is not able to reason or understand the complexities of our modern world.

“We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection.”

I find a strong counter-argument to the notion of literacy under attack is Mark Federman’s paper entitled: Why Johnny and Janey Can’t Read, and Why Mr. and Ms. Smith Can’t Teach: The challenge of multiple media literacies in tumultuous times [follow the link to the PDF of entire paper at bottom of Mark’s blog post]. Mark looks at two other periods in history when our notions of literacy changed. Three thousand years ago as the Greeks grappled with written language, Plato decried the demise of wisdom. As the printing press changed Europe and the balance of power shifted from the clergy to secular powers, we witnessed a series of bloody religious wars; followed by the Enlightenment.

So why are we saying that literacy is under attack when orality has been under attack for the past three thousand years? Because nobody remembers anybody who remembers the old ways. According to Mark Federman, societies take about 300 years for memory to fade and for major changes to be adopted. We are now just over half way through the change to electric media. Today, we have traveled over 160 years into the electric communication age, launched by the invention of the telegraph, which separated words from paper.

Mark Federman concludes in his paper:

“Have no fear – Johnny and Janey will, in all probability, learn to read, just as they learned to speak. But orality has not structured society since ancient Greece, and literacy no longer structures society today. The challenge for all the Mr. and Ms. Smiths throughout the academy, and eventually in the secondary and primary classrooms throughout the world, is to recognize that the exclusive focus and predominance given to the pedagogical artefacts of a literate world is inconsistent with the skills necessary to participate in the discovery and production of knowledge in a ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate [UCaPP] world. In a UCaPP world, what is valued as knowledge comprises a vastly greater domain than that in a world structured by literacy.”

Finally, Professor Mike Wesch, in the video of his presentation to The Library of Congress, An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube, gives examples of how videos, and video-making, are creating a different literacy, enabling a new type of worldwide communication. What kinds of literacies do producers of YouTube videos have?

“And we’re looking at this cultural inversion I mentioned earlier where we tend to express individualism, independence and commercialization while desiring community, relationships and authenticity. This is really a tension that, as these lonely individuals, we crave this connection – at the same time, as individuals, we see that connection as constraint. And what we’re seeking then through technologies often is a form of connection without constraint. Some way of connecting very deeply without feeling the deep responsibilities of that deep connection. YouTube offers this possibility and what we see on YouTube are people connecting very, very deeply. [For example] – bnessell1973 – [on losing his son to SIDS] April 17, 2007 : Creating characters gave me an escape. It allowed me to be silly. It allowed me to act how I wanted to feel. It became a form of therapy, a coping mechanism. And after a while it brought fun back to YouTube for me.”

Is video becoming the/a new literacy? Are we returning to our oral past after three thousand years?

Before we say that literacy is under attack, we should ask ourselves what is literacy today and what might it become tomorrow.

Organizing for an uncertain future

2010-03-26 by Harold Jarche

Some interesting things I found on Twitter this past week, on the themes of organizing and uncertainty:

via @SebPaquet – Neat infographic: Major Shifts in History: The Emergence of Techno-Economic Paradigms by the fantastic @robpatrob

Organisational Effectiveness via @sig [is this what your HR department is focused on?]

It’s all about organisational effectiveness. How fast, efficient and correct all information is disseminated, how effective hand-overs in the workflow happens, how visible and easy to understand the process is, how effective the capture and subsequent dissemination of knowledge is and how little time you spend on making the flow happen.

via @SemiraSK – Excellent! Organizing For Uncertainty – a Rich Agile Model for the Organization of Work by @zenext via @timkastelle

In change-resistant approaches, people can spend more time planning and reporting than actually doing the work. Rigid plan models define intelligent resilience as an indicator of failure. Teams need to be expensively managed because they are never continuously clear what they’re actually doing with their costly time and talent. Someone is punished with the costs of change once plans are approved. To protect the organization from change, clients are adversarial negotiation opponents rather than collaborative partners in continuous shared learning. Because innovation is explicitly the creation of surprise, no inflexible planning models can help create it, and actually only prevent it.

Collaboration: the secret sauce via @sourcePOV

I’ve been grappling with collaboration for a couple decades now, usually in the context of IT projects in corporate silos that seems designed to shut down cross-functional collaboration. The hardest part was watching talented people lose motivation in the midst of their best efforts to overcome resistance.