Friday’s Finds #25

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Here’s what grabbed my attention on Twitter this past week.

Networked Life means less command & control; but more self-control Euan Semple

via @jclarey Confessions of a Learning Consultant: I have designed and delivered programs with no more than minimal impact on my client’s business.

via @moehlert “Students who spend 8 yrs in grad school are being seriously over-trained for the jobs that are available.” Harvard Magazine [good debate in the comments]

via @cammybean is a 2002 study at Sara Lee by Atos KPMG (link to translation from original Dutch) that 80% of learning occurred spontaneously during work [paraphrased]:

What surprised the participants at the workshop was that a large proportion of learning was self-directed by workers. Nearly 80% of their learning fell within the categories of “spontaneous learning at work”, “networking with colleagues” and “consulting manuals and instructional materials”. Based on these definitions, learning at Sara Lee is about 80% informal and 20% formal learning.

Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences & scientific stupidity: Donald Clark

via @kwheeler Why Silicon Valley beat Route 128 in Boston. Good article. TechCrunch

via @Socialearning The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education – Curtis Bonk

via @mathemagenic A personal view on knowledge work: Mathemagenic

via @dstojanovic Using twitter in academic setting? Here is how to cite. RT @GersteinLibrary: How to cite Twitter and Tweets

via @SoulSoup “The Complete Guide to Google Wave“, a free book you can download & share.

Internet Time Alliance Podcast

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My colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance and I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Dawn Poulos for Xyleme Voices (a podcast library on the evolution of training). It was quite enjoyable and the technology worked very well. Dawn is a real professional and I would recommend getting involved in this series, which includes podcasts from Janet Clarey, Lars Hyland, Clive Shepherd and others.

Harold Jarche, Charles Jennings, Clark Quinn & Jay Cross on Challenges and Misconceptions of Collaborative and Social Learning in the Workplace:

Part 1 managing collaboration

Part 2 CLO’s and the needs of business

Part 3 collaborative learning in a corporate setting

Part 4 social media in corporations

Part 5 integrating learning in the enterprise

The value of social media for learning

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The LCB Big Question this month is, “How do I communicate the value of social media as a learning tool to my organization?”

Here’s my answer, bringing together several threads I’ve been thinking about.

1. We live in a networked society. More of our work is being done within and between networks. In networks, there are no standard communication routes or protocols. Things get done in a much messier and uncontrolled fashion. You can’t impose a hierarchy and try to control all of the interactions and communications in a network. The network regards hierarchy as a failure, and routes around it.

2. When it comes to the kind of work that we get paid to do, the simple work is being automated and the merely complicated work is being outsourced to where labour is cheapest. This leaves us with the complex work, or the type of problems that require creativity, inductive reasoning and often require help or inspiration from others.

3. Complex work and work in complex environments require faster feedback loops. We need to get data, information and knowledge quickly, and cannot wait for it to be bounced up and down a chain of command. Social networks, which are comprised of people that we trust in some way, can enable us to connect to someone who may be able to help. However, to do this, we have to already have that connection. Social media allow us to initiate and nurture relationships with many people in many different ways. The quality of our networks becomes critical in enabling us to do complex work. Social learning is the enabler.

4. Social media, such as blogs, Twitter, and social networks help people find and connect with each other, based on some shared interests. With complex work, our challenges are now highly contextual and written best practices just don’t cut it anymore. We need someone who understands the nature of our problem who can use human reasoning to help us. We have to be connected to that person though. That’s why we need to engage in social networks, but these are not created overnight. We develop them one conversation and one interaction at a time.

networks-n-nodes

5. What are the value of social media as learning tools? Simply put, they help create networks of multi-way trust to share ideas, advice and feelings between people who care. Social networks have been shown to be the principal way that learning spreads in organizations:

Individual learning in organizations is irrelevant because work is almost never done by one person. All value is created by teams and networks. Furthermore, learning may be generated in teams but this type of knowledge comes and goes. Learning really spreads through social networks. Therefore, social networks are the conduit for effective organizational performance. Blocking, or circumventing, social networks slows learning, reduces effectiveness and may in the end kill the organization.

Économie du savoir

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Je participerai comme conférencier au forum sur l’économie du savoir à Edmundston, N-B, ce mardi le 3 novembre.

Pendant une journée, les entrepreneurs, les gestionnaires ainsi que les intervenants de la région du Nord-Ouest, auront la chance de découvrir les différentes facettes du savoir. Les participants acquerront des outils et des connaissances en plus d’établir de nouveaux contacts d’affaires pendant cette journée. Ils auront la chance de rencontrer différents intervenants et entrepreneurs de la région qui offrent un service relié au savoir ainsi que de connaître plusieurs histoires à succès des entrepreneurs de la région. De cette façon, les participants seront en mesure d’ajuster ou d’implanter une stratégie au sein de leur entreprise afin de mieux performer. Le tout dans le but de contribuer au développement économique de la région du nord-ouest du Nouveau-Brunswick.

Ma présentation sera, “ABC Learning” [anything but courses] voyant que les entrepreneurs d’aujourd’hui ont beaucoup moins de temps pour assister à la formation et ont un besoin plus grand au niveau de l’apprentissage. Voici la première partie de ma présentation:

Repenser la formation dans l Entreprise Collaborative

View more documents from Frédéric DOMON.

D’autres ressources sont disponible a ce signet social : economie_savoir

Friday’s Finds #24

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Here’s what caught my attention on Twitter this past week and some stuff left over from the week before:

Quote of the Week: Ingmar Bergman likened aging to hiking up a mountain, “The longer one walks the more winded one becomes, but the view!” via @marciamarcia

Food

Sustainable Food Lab: accelerate the shift of sustainable food from niche to mainstream

Lasagna gardening = my kind of gardening

Food for Thought

via @tonykarrer is an article on The Future of Knowledge Workers, or the aggregated insights of senior business professionals. I’m not sure how good any of us are at forecasting events, but I noted that collaboration ranked high on their list:

The survey asked what types of knowledge work are likely to become the most highly valued in the organization over the next 10-12 years. Collaborative work (project design team, global consultancy, etc.) received the highest ranking by the survey respondents. This is consistent with the high interest expressed throughout the survey in increasing collaborative support capabilities. Expert judgment work (research scientist, legal specialist, etc.) ranked a distant second, followed by process-oriented work (financial reporting, quality assurance, etc.) and transaction work (tech support center, billing inquiry, etc.).

“Emergent behaviors are unintended consequences that make you happy” FastForward Blog by @jmcgee

Rebecca Saxe: How we read each other’s minds | Video on TED.com seeing from another’s viewpoint via @BillBell

How to organise a children’s party (video) by @snowded “we manage the emergence of beneficial coherence within attractors, within boundaries”

Learnstreaming and PKM

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Dennis Callahan has a most interesting Posterous site, called LearnStreaming. His latest post shows this graphic, which I find reflects many of the concepts of personal knowledge management, but with some additional aspects that may make it easier to understand and do:

learnstreaming_denniscallahan

Dennis has a clear and simple definition for Learnstreaming – publishing your learning activities online for the benefit of you and others. This is the basis of many blogs in our field and learnstreaming continues to expand with all the new applications such as micro-blogging, social bookmarks, and “life-streaming” platforms like Posterous.

Using  a related concept from Jay Cross, I would say that learnstreams are the water that allows learnscapes to grow.

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Learning through social networks

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Last year I put down some working definitions in the field of performance and learning:

My own working definitions of these terms [these are not robust, dictionary definitions, but just my own way of putting each term], which I often discuss here and with clients are:

Performance – something measurable and observable to achieve an agreed-upon objective.

Performance Support – tools and processes that support the worker in the desired performance, including, but not limited to, job aids.

Training – an external intervention, designed only to address a lack of skills and/or knowledge.

Education – a process with its main aims of socialization, a search for truth and/or the realisation of individual potential.

Learning – an individual activity, though often within a social context, of making sense of our experiences.

I’d like to add in Peter Senge’s important clarifications on terms we often use:

Knowledge: the capacity for effective action. “Know how” is the  only aspect of knowledge that really matters in life.

Practitioner: someone who is accountable for producing results.

I had said that learning remains an individual activity, with all of the variables of the human experience and much less clearly defined or controlled than education or training. I also recommended that organizations should get out of the learning business and focus on performance. Organizations can direct performance but they should only support learning. Individuals should be directing their own learning.

Senge’s presentation last week gave me cause to reflect on this. He said that individual learning in organizations is irrelevant because work is almost never done by one person. All value is created by teams and networks. Furthermore, learning may be generated in teams but this type of knowledge comes and goes. Learning really spreads through social networks. Therefore, social networks are the conduit for effective organizational performance. Blocking, or circumventing, social networks slows learning, reduces effectiveness and may in the end kill the organization (my conclusion).

To reduce these thoughts to their essence, I would say:

Organizations should focus on enabling practitioners to produce results by supporting learning through social networks. The rest is just window dressing.

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed – [Charles Darwin]

Social Learning – Highlights

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We released our first white paper, on Social Learning, at the Collaborative Enterprise last week.

For me, the essence of social learning is that as our work becomes more complex, we need faster feedback loops to stay on top of it. Courses, with their long development cycle, are inadequate to meet the learning and performance needs of those dealing with complexity. The course is an artifact of a time when information was scarce and connections were few. Social learning can give us more and better feedback if we engage  our networks in order to develop emergent work practices. This requires not only a re-thinking of training but also our organizational structures.

Highlights from the white paper:

Frédéric Cavazza: Social Learning may be defined as follows: “Practices and tools to take advantage of collaborative knowledge sharing and growth”.

Julien Pouget: Social learning can be considered a way of learning that is based on collaborative practices and internet technologies associated with them (wikis, bookmarking, blogs, etc.). Constantly evolving with technology, this way of learning is naturally “nimble”. It enables both individuals and organizations to learn more efficiently in quickly changing contexts.

George Siemens: There is a growing demand for the ability to connect to others. It is with each other that we can make sense, and this is social. Organizations, in order to function, need to encourage social exchanges and social learning due to faster rates of business and technological changes. Social experience is adaptive by nature and a social learning mindset enables better feedback on environmental changes back to the organization.

Bertrand Duperrin: Since much knowledge work focuses on narrow and contextualized issues, the only way to get the appropriate answer is through an unmediated and contextualized from the source. Peer to peer learning is efficient because it comes when needed, and only then, and because it involves someone who has already found a solution and used it.

Clark Quinn: When you learn with others, you co-create your understanding, and this has implications for formal and informal learning, as well as organizational and societal effectiveness. The effect of the internet, the flattened world, is that we can learn socially in new ways with new people, creating new understandings, new „inspirations?.

Cédric Deniaud: Knowing how to collaborate, share one’s knowledge and promote it, are part of the true skills that are required today.

Charles Jennings: We are living in a world where access trumps knowledge every time. Those who know how to search, find and make the connections will succeed. Those who rely on static knowledge and skills alone will fail.

Florence Meichel: To be efficient, learning processes must integrate two complementary dimensions. We learn by doing and talking to others and at the same time, we learn how to learn. From these two approaches, we have double-loop learning processes, (individual and collective), which enable organizations to develop permanent and relevant adaptive skills.

Anthony Poncier: All this informal knowledge can be capitalized for and by the community of learners and enriched by all who participate. Indeed, each person generally organizes his or her own learning. We must give the means and the desire to share or “socialize” this personal work, to all learners (that is the role of the trainer).

Jay Cross: People have always learned to do their jobs socially. Workers talk with one another, mimic the behavior of successful performers, ask questions, converse, gossip, and collaborate. The fact that it’s fun encourages us to continue with the practice.

Christophe Deschamps: Less formalistic than knowledge bases, these tools [blogs, wikis, company social networks] which convey conversation within organizations enable us to understand formal knowledge and also the informal context that drives them, and give them all their meaning.

Lilian Mahoukou: The word “social” means more people-generated content, less control and less hierarchy; which is fundamentally different from current training modalities.
It’s a huge challenge for trainers who need to first understand the stakes and start listening to the conversations around social learning.

Friday’s Finds #23

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Peter Senge on Organizational Learning

I was offline for much of the week but I did manage to live-tweet Peter Senge’s presentation at the CSTD conference. Instead of my standard mix of Friday’s Finds, here is a special summation of a fascinating presentation. With no notes, no PowerPoint and one transparency on an overhead projector, Peter Senge held everyone’s attention.

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.

In Silicon Valley it was observed that the more turbulent the employment situation, the more stable were the professional social networks of workers, whether employed or not.

Knowledge is the capacity for effective action (know how) and it is the  only aspect of knowledge that really matters in life. While learning may be generated in teams, this type of knowledge comes and goes. Learning really spreads through social networks.

The field of knowledge management was co-opted by information technology vendors, and became useless for organizational learning.

A practitioner (definition) is someone who is accountable for producing results.

The main factors contributing to organizational longevity are: a shared sense of identity, a tolerance for experiments (planting next year’s seeds), being fiscally conservative, and sensitivity to the environment. The last one is very important. Companies and industries must understand and support their environment (no fish, no fish sticks to sell).

We have had falling commodity (food) prices over time due to globalization. This equates directly to falling farmers’ revenue. A systems thinking approach would realize that this is not sustainable. Our global food system is the greatest generator of poverty in the world. We need to create global food chains that don’t drive farmers off their lands. Look at the Sustainable Food Lab whose goal is to accelerate the shift of sustainable food from niche to mainstream.

Did you know that it takes 250 litres of water to make 1 litre of Coca Cola? The company is now addressing this, but we all need to understand the entirety of the environments we live and work in. The first step is to see and understand the system. Then we need to take some time and reflect. In this way we can change the mental models we use to describe our world. All businesses are managed based on existing mental models. If you change the models, you can change the world.

A new business model, started in Europe, is that if you produce it, you are responsible for it forever (e.g. take back your car at the end of its life). This is a positive change  and social justice proponents, as well as environmentalists, have to stop being negative. We must see the extraordinary opportunities for change.

As training and development professionals, we were asked what is all this learning for. There were many responses, such as to improve the bottom line or to make a better world. Peter Senge showed us that the objective of all of our endeavours should be learning how to live together.

Collaborative Enterprise launches

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Networked people and technology are showing that markets really are conversations while collaboration in the workplace is becoming critical for business success. Today, Frédéric Domon and I launched Entreprise Collaborative, a cross-cultural idea laboratory to exchange perspectives with experts and practitioners. Here we will connect social learning and the networked enterprise to develop more resilient organizations.

Our first White Paper on Social Learning has contributors from both sides of the Atlantic and is available in French and English, linking two linguistic communities.

Please join in the conversation!

(PDF) Collaborative Enterprise – Social Learning Introduction