Embracing complexity at work

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After our session at Online Educa this morning (well, it was early morning for me anyway) I thought some more about one of the models I used. The Cynefin framework is a good way to explain different types of work and how training can only help in some cases: when work is simple (cause & effect are obvious) or complicated (cause & effect can be determined through analysis). Training is of little use in developing the necessary emergent practices for dealing with complex problems in our work environment.

cynefin and training
Source: Wikipedia

My basic guideline for the workplace is that:

  • Simple work will be automated
  • Complicated work will go to the lowest bidder, as processes & procedures become more defined and job aids more powerful (e.g. mortgage applications)
  • Complex work requires creativity and is where the value of the post-industrial (network era) organization lies
  • Dealing with Chaos sometimes has to be confronted and this requires creativity as well as a sense of adventure to try novel approaches

Reading between the lines of many comments from Online Educa, one thematic question would be: This stuff may be interesting from a conceptual perspective, but what can organizations do right now to address increasing complexity? Initially, I would say there are two laws at work over which you will have little control:

  1. The bottom of the complexity pyramid (simple work) will continue to be automated.
  2. All work that is merely complicated will be done as cheaply as possible (outsourced, partially automated, done as cheap piece work)

Here is a possible strategy to consider:

Work that is merely complicated does not require all of a worker’s cognitive capabilities (really). Use this cognitive surplus and couple it with a time surplus, like Google’s 20% for engineers to work on pet projects. Have incentives for workers to find the complexities in their work and try out creative ways to address them. This will encourage people to move up the creative ladder, into more complex work. Remember, almost all of this complexity is man-made. We decided to network the planet and increase the speed of human communications. We will continue to create more complex work to do.

As for people whose work already requires creativity in dealing with complexity there are a few things they can do. First, they can become mentors and guides for those doing merely complicated work. This is one way to address Richard Florida’s concern that we need to make the service industries more creative. Who we work with makes a significant difference in how creative we are. Everyone can be creative – just watch this video involving the highest and lowest paid staff in a hospital creating a powerful message together.

Those dealing with complex work situations can also be further encouraged to take on Chaotic situations. It’s one thing to be creative and quite another to jump into the unknown by taking action without any idea of what will happen. Here’s a good video on systemic, organizational change explaining some aspects of simple, complicated, complex and chaotic work environments.

The bottom line is to make organizations more flexible, able to deal with change and even create change. Complexity should be embraced as the future of work and the key to an engaged workforce. Few are bored with complex challenges.  The more people who are engaged creatively, the more effective the organization will be and no, there isn’t a course you can take to address this.

The Curmudgeon’s Manifesto

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I believe that Luis Suarez has started something in Curmudgeons Unite!:

I guess I could sum it up in one single sentence: “The more heavily involved I’m with the various social networking sites available out there, the more I heart my own personal business blogs“. As you may have guessed, this crankiness phase I’m going through hasn’t got anything to do with the world of social computing in general, but more with a good number of social networking sites. And, funny enough, they all happen to be some of the most popular ones.

It all has got to do with something as important as protecting your identity, your brand (And that one of the company that may be employing you), your personal image, your own self in various social software spaces that more and more we seem to keep losing control over, and with no remedy.

It’s not just about owning your data online, though I think this is important, but also the fact that social media come and go and even change the rules. One way to keep information accessible is to use an open, accessible, personal blog as the centre of your web presence.

blog central

As I thought about Luis’ post, I realized that there are a lot of social media applications that aren’t worth using because they lock you in or just make things more complicated for your content in the long run. Luis cites Facebook and LinkedIn: “Do you realise that by making heavy use of either of them you pretty much lose all of your rights to the content that you generate and therefore should own by default?”

In addition, Luis criticizes Slideshare but counters with Twitter as a good example of an open platfrom. My own list includes URL shorteners like Ow.ly that send you to their site or append lengthy additions to the original URL. It makes it very difficult to make citations to the original work, a major pain for anyone who blogs regularly, as Stephen Downes noted about Feedburner’s Link Pollution.

I’ve decided to start the Curmudgeon’s Manifesto, which may serve as a call to arms to start dumping platforms that don’t understand how to play nice on the Internet. It’s our playground, and through our actions we get to set the rules of conduct.

Here’s my start (additions welcome):

  1. I will not use web services that hijack my data or that of my network.
  2. I will share openly on the Web and not constrain those with whom I share.
  3. I will not lead others into the temptation of using web services that do not respect privacy, re-use, open formats or exportable data.

Update:

A suggestion from Doug Belshaw:

Change the name of the Curmudgeon’s Manifesto to the Open Educators’ Manifesto (or similar). Back OpenID and OpenSocial. People like to sign up to positive-sounding things that cite big players or existing traction.

Success depends on who we work with

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Here’s a description from Connected: The surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives, in which sociologist, Brian Uzzi, describes how creative teams (musical productions) function:

Uzzi found that teams made up of individuals who had never before worked together fared poorly, greatly increasing the chance of a flop. These networks were not well connected and contained mostly weak ties. At the other extreme, groups made up of individuals who had all worked together previously also tended to create musicals that were unsuccessful. Because these groups lacked creative input from the outside, they tended to rehash the same ideas that they used the first time they worked together. In between, however, Uzzi once again found a sweet spot that combines the diversity of new team members with the stability of previously formed relationship. The networks that best exhibited the small-world property were those that had the greatest success.

Production company networks with a mix of weak and strong ties allowed easy communication but also fostered greater creativity because of the ideas of new members of the group and the synergies they created. Thus, the structure of the network appears to have a strong effect on both financial and critical success.

As the need for creativity in the workplace increases, organizations should give some serious thought to the structure of work groups and networks. 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 Creative Economy requires more independent workers (like musical productions?) with the following traits that can not be commoditized:

  • Initiative
  • Creativity
  • Passion

It seems that successful creative work groups need to be just cohesive enough with some additional “friction” from new members in order to keep the passion and creativity flowing. 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

With working life in perpetual beta, it’s time to re-think not just how we work, but with whom we work.

eCollab Blog Carnival

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The first eCollab Blog Carnival (follow link for details) is set for 12 December 2009 (that’s a Saturday).

If you wish to contribute:

Before:
–    On your blog, via email, twitter or through other means, announce the new carnival ( you create a short post with links, visual, hashtags and short descriptions of Ecollab),
–    feel free to invite others as well.
–    Let us know by registering via the contact form or by sending a tweet to @hjarche with the hashtag #ECOLLAB

The topic to launch our carnival is the future of the training department, and submissions can be made in English or French, in keeping with the bi-cultural focus of Entreprise Collaborative.

ecollab carnival

During LearnTrends 2009 I noticed several back-channel discussions about the usefulness of the ADDIE model for instructional systems design, with some completely opposed and others thinking it just needs tweaking. With training so closely linked to ADDIE, do we need to reconsider training’s role in the workplace?

  • Has ADDIE outlived its usefulness?
  • Can training address complex work?
  • Has training become a solution looking for a problem?
  • Does the training department have a future?

—

In addition, if you’re at Online Educa this week, be sure to take in The Great Training Robbery, presented by the Internet Time Alliance.

Friday’s Finds #28

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What I found of interest on Twitter this past week:

There is no point collecting common knowledge if it isn’t shared. There is no point sharing knowledge if it isn’t used. Jack Vinson

When you make the complicated simple you make it better. When you make the complex simple you make it wrong. Dave Gray

Does open source software drive open and transparent management? S+B makes the case. via @CharlesHGreen

The hierarchy-innovation trade-off via @nickcharney (he’s looking for discussion & debate on this).

One company at DevLearn 2009 reported an estimated savings of $3-5 million per year in linking global repair operations by using Yammer (private version of Twitter) via @lrnchat

Twittering the student experience via @jalam1001:

The academic departments involved in the study were so impressed with the affordances of Twitter that they have continued to use it in their pedagogic academic practices and plan to work with other bodies in the University such as the Students’ Union to promote the use of Twitter as a lightweight communication channel in the coming academic year.

“Within five years, textbooks will be the biggest market for e-book devices” Forrester Research via @charlesjennings

Australian guide to social e-learning in an academic context via @fdomon

Here’s a new social networking site dedicated to theatre: MITI Show Space This is one more Community in a Box that we’ll see more of as the internet becomes the medium for work, learning and co-operation.

Google Wave Cheat Sheet via @jsuzcampos

Social Media Marketing – Review

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My own interest in social media is from the perspective of learning and workplace performance but the lines are getting fuzzy between marketing, communications, learning and training, so Social Media Marketing may be suitable for a wider audience than just marketing. This is one of the latest books in the for Dummies series produced by Wiley.

social media marketing

In Part 1, Shiv Singh covers the overall lay of the Internet landscape comprehensively and without any hype. In reading this section, I thought that this is the kind of information I would give my own clients. It covers broader aspects, such as general trends in social media use, as well as specifics like setting up Twitter alerts.

Part 2 is the hands-on section of the book and deals with developing an online voice, reaching your audience and most importantly, dealing with criticism. Part 3 could be called “SEO in a box”, and while it’s not of particular interest to me, this is what most companies (for profit & non-profit) are looking for – how do I actually market with social media? This section includes a chapter on the fast-growing mobile media marketplace. There are lessons here that translate for the learning function as well, such as sending mobile text alerts for changing content.

The headings in Chapter 12, “Energizing Employees within Your Company for Social Influence” could just as easily be incorporated by HR/Training as Marketing:

  • Encouraging your employees to collaborate
  • Picking social software for social influence
  • Don’t try to control too much
  • Surfacing the connections
  • Taking search social, too
  • Allowing alternate access
  • Making the goal to de-structure and de-organize
  • Giving employees other choices

The final section is on best practices and common mistakes and, given the complexity and changing nature of the field, these may change. Here are my picks of those provided:

Best practice: Conduct many small tests frequently and build on each one

Common Mistake: Not being patient

Overall this is a comprehensive book for someone new to the field and is a good reference for those with experience. It’s the kind of book I would recommend or give to clients to provide us with a common point of reference.

Wirearchy in practice

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So far, wirearchy as a managing framework for networked business and organizatons is the only one that makes sense to me, which is why it has a category of its own here.

“A dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology”

A while back, Jon Husband parsed wirearchy to see if it still made sense, and it does. In looking at the parts of the framework; they are, for the most part, embraced by progressive organizations:

  • knowledge – check
  • trust – check
  • credibility – check
  • results – check
  • interconnected people – check
  • interconnected technology – check

However, there are not too many places where you actually see “a two-way flow of power and authority”. Actually, the only place I’ve seen this two-way flow is in cooperatives or loose networks, like our group, the Internet Time Alliance. I’ve recommended before that the training department inverse the hierarchical pyramid, but can corporate management do this? Can there be a real two-way flow of authority? We have a two-way flow of authority in democracies, but this usually flows up the the pyramid only every four years or so.

Corporations were created to give limited liability to organizations that were taking on large, capital-intensive projects. Today, many corporations are based on intangible goods and services, like software or processes. Do we still need a corporation to enable wealth for post-industrial businesses? Open source has shown that software can be developed faster and cheaper (and many would say better) without a corporate structure. There are alternatives.

We should be looking at alternatives to the corporate model because networks are not markets and networks require structures that are more flexible and can respond faster to change than hierarchies. I’ve said before that work in complex environments require faster feedback loops. Social networks, which are comprised of people that we trust in some way, can speed up feedback loops in our problem solving at work. However, to do this, we have to already have that connection. The organization has to incorporate social networks as part of its structure and perhaps that is the first step in developing a wirearchy: giving explicit permission to engage in social networks and bypassing, or even obsolescing, the formal communications structures.  If the work still gets done, you don’t need the formal structure any more, and you’re on the road to becoming a wirearchy.

Simplexity – review

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In Simplexity Jeffrey Kluger writes an easy-reading book on “why simple things become complex and how complex things can be made simple”.

simplexityFirst of all, this is not a book for anyone looking for a deep examination of complexity theory. Kluger is a writer for Time, not an academic or researcher. This makes Simplexity a very easy read and rather enjoyable. It’s the kind of book you want to take on a business trip, as it will give you some interesting ideas and perhaps help you look at things a little differently.

The book is organized into chapters that read like short stories. Topics range from “Why is the stock market hard to predict?” to “Why do people, mice, and worlds die when they do?”. My favourite chapter was, “Why is a baby the best linguist in the world?”. I learned that the first 9 months of life are essential to language learning and that a baby’s brain can do some amazing things in language acquisition. It had me questioning some of the common practices in language education.

For business professionals, the chapter on “Why do the jobs that require the greatest skills often pay the least?” is informative. The story of Beth Bechky, a workplace ethnographer, tells how she discovered that engineers in a firm would spend hundreds of hours developing blueprints to pass on to the assemblers, with the instructions, “Build to the print”.

The assemblers, in turn, accept the blueprints, shoo the engineers away – and often as not simply put the drawings aside. Never mind building to the print, many of them barely look at it. The source they turn to instead is one another. The more experienced assemblers figure out how the job should be done and tell the less experienced ones what to do. When a question arises, all of them simply consult one another.

The back cover compares Simplexity to Freakonomics and I would say that it’s a fair comparison. It’s a fun read and will make for interesting dinner conversations and may provide some insights, but it is only a shallow dive into complexity theory.

Friday’s Finds #27

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As part of my – sense-making, moving from tacit to explicit, sharing with others – PKM system, here’s what caught my attention via Twitter during the past week. This week, I’m going to focus more on what others found interesting, as there was a lot of traffic as a result of the LearnTrends conference. LearnTrends once again emphasized my perspective that Work is Learning and Learning is the Work.

#learntrends

Janet Clarey (@JClarey): “We need to help people get around in their network and learn from it, instead of building Communities of Practice.” via @rlohuis

Chris Hardy: “new technology plus old organization = costly old organization; need new biz models and plan DAU [defense acquisition university].” via @littleasklab

Deb Schultz: “Organizational learning will be about connecting the dots for content instead of creating the content.” via @rdeis

Jerry Michalski (@jerrymichalski): “Kids are naturally curious, traditional education suppresses it; ‘unschooling’ of adults brings curiosity back.” via @SuzNet

Gary Woodill (@gwoodill): “We only started to really use classrooms a lot in corporate training after the founding of ASTD in 1947.”

Danny McCraine (@dmccraine) “If we know the public school system is broken, why do we emulate it in a corporate environment?”

Comments from George Siemens’ (@gsiemens) Session:

“opens the whiteboard up to let participants create the agenda…whoa! crazy fun! ” @chambo_online
“Very intrigued to have 130 people writing on a whiteboard all at once at #learntrends … and amazingly, it didn’t suck” @cynan_sez
“130+ people writing on same Elluminate whiteboard and GWave also being completed. Online learning has arrived” @GillianP

Jay Cross (@jaycross): “Hallmark of Future Work. Past: Subject Matter Experts. Future: Subject Matter Networks” via @Melissa_Venable @rdeis

JimFolk (@JimFolk) “Agile networks > now agile learning #learntrends see concept of Edgility that I use.”

ScottSkibell (@ScottSkibell) “Wow, I never thought of training as a form of media. Many similarities to other industries. Some aren’t good.”

Jane Hart (@c4lpt): “Ask the [social networking group] how they will determine whether the community has been successful.” via @dmccraine

@mdkemmler “Interesting comment someone made – ‘Sharepoint is a creativity powervac'”

via @gwoodill Study on mobile phones/PDAs for informal learning – PDF

George Siemens (@gsiemens) “‘networks as cognitive agent’ – a useful professional phrase when explaining to the unconverted” via @GillianP

Let me sum up #learntrends: “context; agile; social; augmented; mobile; meta; networks; culture; CoP; 3d; virtual; systems” via @jadekaz

The Cost of Not Paying Attention to Culture & Social Learning

The CLO article on France Telecom’s toxic culture and how training was thought to be an effective way initiate culture change, raised many comments on its sheer folly [Training is a solution in search of a problem]:

Sometimes it takes a series of events so unfathomable for reality to truly hit home.

Just ask France Telecom. Since the beginning of 2008, 24 employees at the company have committed suicide and an additional 13 have attempted suicide. Many of these victims left suicide notes implying the company’s working environment was a key factor in their decisions — one even explicitly cited “overwork, stress, absence of training and the total disorganization in the company.” Some of the attempts occurred on France Telecom premises.

In September, the telecom giant announced the launch of a training program that will teach its 22,000 managers to recognize signs of depression. However, this reactive measure is akin to handing out first-aid kits. It addresses the symptom rather than the root problem: The organization’s culture is quite literally toxic, slowly suffocating its employees.

Group-centric work and training

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Individual Training

In the +20 years I spent in the military, much of it was as a student on course. In the military there is a whole system that governs individual training, in our case it was CFITES.

CFITES

CFITES comprises several volumes of instructions, including all of the ADDIE steps. A lot of resources are put into preparing individuals for duty and the system is designed for large numbers. Much time and effort goes into training a soldier and in peacetime there’s not much other than training to do anyway. If in doubt – train. Military Instructional Systems Design (ISD) has greatly informed and inspired civilian training. Frameworks such as the Systems Approach to Training, developed by the military, have over the years been adopted and adapted by corporations and government agencies.

Collective Training

Groups of soldiers who will work together usually participate in “collective training” and this typically follows some kind of cycle of preparing for operations, performing missions and coming back from missions. During the preparation phase, units work through the types of operations they think they might have to do. These are scenario-based rehearsals of varying intensity. For instance, one group exercise may solely focus on communications systems and processes.

What is interesting is that the collective training system is much less formal. There are guidelines, but not several volumes of guidance. For the most part, the training specialists are only advisors on collective training. The combat operations folks run the show here.

However, the military has a distinct advantage over business when it comes to collective training. The military is not always on operations. Due to the tempo of operational duty, soldiers need to come back and recuperate and this is when training can be conducted. Business, on the other hand, cannot afford to take staff away from their work for long. Business may be lower tempo than combat operations, but it’s always on.

The Military/Industrial Legacy

In corporations and large organizations, the training focus is predominantly on individual skills, usually based on some variant of ISD. However, as Jay Cross and I explained in the future of the training department, training is inadequate in developing the emergent practices necessary to operate in complex networked environments. The military is able to get around this weakness through collective training prior to operations, or pulling troops out of the operational theatre for special training. Also, new operating procedures are constantly updated with information from the Lessons Learned Centre.

Civilian organizations have taken one part of the military training model – Individual Training – and applied it to almost all training. This is part of the problem which could be partially addressed by focusing less on formal individual training and supporting informal learning. But the big challenge for businesses is to conduct collective training while working (being operational) at the same time.

Not Group Think, but Think Groups

The reality of working in networks is that the individual is only one node within multiple relationships of varying strengths and value. How the group works together and to whom it connects becomes very important. How then can networked workers do the equivalent of military collective training while still working effectively?

groups

Something like the Lessons Learned Centre could be a good model for a more operationally-focused training department, communicating the emergent patterns that are observed in day to day work. The official objective of the training department could also shift from supporting individuals to supporting groups. This would be a major shift and we might then see a number of changes:

  1. Training would have to move to the group because you could no longer pull individuals out of the workplace for courses.
  2. Each group has its own work context so it becomes critical to involve each group in the design of tools and interventions.
  3. There would be many groups to serve, so better feedback loops would be needed to ensure a two-way flow of communications.
  4. The training department would be busier serving many masters and may be forced to emphasize do-it-yourself solutions for groups (a good thing).
  5. The training department would learn more about the work being done (a real good thing).
  6. Courses would become an option of last resort.

The new training department would have to be focused on “Connecting & Communicating”, such as lessons learned, and I would bet that the first set of tools they would grab would be some kind of social media to enable better communications and networking.

invert pyramid