Friday’s Finds #19

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Weekly summary of interesting items I’ve found on Twitter:

Half an Hour: An Operating System for the Mind (a must read) “facts learned by rote & at a younger age bypass a person’s critical & reflective capacities”

The BioTeaming Manifesto via @jonhusband some similarities with wirearchy

Killing off Mickey Mouse: Open Knowledge, Open Innovation via @josiefraser

Masters of Illusion: The Great Management Consultancy Swindle via @umairh

“‘Buy American’ Hurts Canada Connection“: Canada buys more from the US “than the UK, Japan, Germany and China combined” via @pwmartin

Teens don’t look beyond the first 6 search results (& other interesting data points) No More Teachers, No More Books: The Social Student Comes of Age via @gfbertini

Enterprise 2.0: instead of workflow, think flowing work

Twitter_HQ

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Where it all connects, Twitter HQ by takuma104

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Recombining Organizational DNA

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The survey results from the Chief Learning Officer survey show that 77% of respondents feel that people in their organization are not growing fast enough to keep up with the business. Is this anyone’s fault or just a sign of the times?

Human performance in most organization is an afterthought, if thought of at all. Various deparments handle certain components of it, as if you could actually separate workers’ skills from their knowledge and then separate again their attitudes. Here are some possible culprits:

IT: for locking down computers and treating all employees like children, closing off a wealth of information, knowledge and connections outside the artificial firewall.

Communications: for forcing employees to use approved messages that do not even sound human.

Training: for separating learning from work.

HR: for forcing people into standardized  jobs and competency models that do not reflect the person.

Individual growth is not promoted when communication, learning, and even curiosity are blocked. If 77% of senior learning professionals feel that people are not growing fast enough, then either these professionals are not doing their job or they have the wrong job. I think it’s the latter. Separating the responsibility for ‘people’ among an assortment of departments makes no sense from the individual worker’s perspective, it’s just administrative efficiency. With better communication tools available today, these divisions are no longer necessary.

There is an opportunity to identify overlapping areas and redundancies in organizational human performance support. It’s doubtful that departmental incumbents will address the issue because of tribal loyalties, but an anonymous employee survey would be a good start.  A unified support function, focused on really serving workers and helping them grow, could significantly reduce this 77%.

We were discussing this amongst the InternetTime Alliance team and Jon Husband asked why all human processes in an organization are in silos. Jay Cross said it was because of different DNA. Training, HR, OD, KM use different models, speak different languages, and go to separate conferences. However, they’re all in the business of connecting and communicating. They just don’t do it with each other. Given the imperatives for continuous growth today, organizations need to give serious consideration to recombining their organizational DNA.

Networked community management

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As more of our social and work life moves online there is a growing demand for community managers. Betrand Duperrin discusses the differences between community managers and organizational managers (in English & in French), stating that “Sometimes you need a community manager. Sometimes a manager is enough…”

I’ve discussed The Community Manager before and others have shared their experiences in the role of community manager. From our collective experience to date, it is obvious that online community management is much more art than science. It’s like herding cats. Bertrand makes the specific  differentiation between communities and work groups or teams. Communities need a soft guiding hand and more of a master of ceremonies than a directive manager.

Online communities are networks. Any group “work” is co-operative and non-directive. Keeping it going requires a facilitative community manager, or what Bertrand calls an animator (a very accurate term in French). Communities exemplify complexity, with fuzzy boundaries, shifting cultures and autonomous members.

Online work team environments do not and cannot have this level of complexity or work would not get done in the manner that those paying for it would like. The work may be complicated but there are rules, boundaries and processes. Work groups need managers who can direct activities in order to achieve goals. This type of work is collaborative.

group work revised

Community management is not organizational management. Co-operation is not collaboration. Co-operation requires free will on the part of all participants. It’s messy and complex.

This raises some questions:

What happens if the dominant model of how we organize work moves toward a network model and away from a market model?

What would that mean for how we structure our workplaces?

If most of our jobs are directive or reactive in nature, will our work skills help us in co-operative networked environments?

New challenges of management

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Anthony Poncier (in French) covers the eight challenges of management in the virtual era, which I’ve loosely translated:

  1. Being concurrently nomadic and collaborative.
  2. Renewing the workplace social contract.
  3. Creating new modes of leadership.
  4. Creating value, not just revenue.
  5. The production of collective knowledge.
  6. Managing with both IQ and EQ (emotional quotient).
  7. A diverse community rather than a disciplined unity.
  8. Learning about the reality of the virtual.

This list brings out the challenges of managing in a networked environment and highlights some of the different facets that managers will need to focus on. The trend is also that there will be fewer managers, making the job much more multi-faceted or as they say in French, polyvalente. It might make for a good checklist for executive recruiters and Boards of Directors. This ain’t your daddy’s management, folks.

Updated 2011: Managing in a Networked World

Work Smarter – informal learning in the cloud

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Just picked up my copy of Jay Cross’ latest book, Work Smarter, which sells through Lulu for a reasonable $19.99. As Jay says, this is not a traditional book. It’s an unbook and not meant to be read linearly, though you can if you want. It covers a wide variety of topics, as you can see in the preview, and features all of our colleagues at InternetTime Alliance as well as other friends of Jay.

Work SmarterThe book is also updated from time to time, so it’s always current.

This is the kind of book to keep at your desk and peruse as you need, refreshing something you know or a quick read on a new concept. The sub-title tells it all, “informal learning in the cloud”. This is a great book to hand out to clients and others who want to get up to speed on working and learning in networks.

Thanks for all the hard work in putting this together, Jay.

If learning was free

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Writing If TV Ads were Free, Seth Godin looks at the business and says that the reason there was so much talk about advertising instead of just doing it was because TV ads are expensive. Not all ideas could make it to the broadcast medium. However, with web social media, the cost is minimal with few barriers to entry:

You guessed it: new media is largely free. So why teach it in school as if it were a scary theory? Why encourage people to be afraid? Just do it. Build your own platform. Appear in the places that seem productive or interesting or challenging or fun. Experiment quietly, figure out what works, do it more. No need to be a dilettante, and certainly you shouldn’t spread yourself too thin or quit at the first sign of failure… but… quit waiting for the right answer.

Anybody see a parallel here with instructional systems design or curriculum development? These processes take time and money and once the investment is made, nobody wants to do it again. Web media can be created quickly and, if designed in an open manner, can change according to the needs of learners and facilitators. For instance, we developed the Work Literacy site in about a week and at no cost. It was added to and modified by the participants. Everyone was an unpaid volunteer. Total cost: zero.

Design is a craft and takes practice and so does instructional media design. Now you can practice these for free. With the web, learning is free; “quit waiting for the right answer”.

Friday’s Finds #18

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A weekly compilation of  the interesting things I’ve found on Twitter:

via @1ernesto1 “Dear teachers, we trust you with the children but not the Internet. Yours truly, THE ADMINISTRATION.”

@RalphMercer: “Gen Y is just a tag that describes how much adults have forgotten on what it is like to be a teen … and the fact we must label everything”

Social Contagion — Informal Learning Blog – Social Contagion. via @jaycross

The success of ROWE (results oriented work environment) pilot at Gap: GAP goes ROWE [The hierarchy model is dying.] via @jonhusband

How Not To Pitch A Blogger Redux (And Twitter pitches too) Good advice & congratulations to @kanter!

Tom Gram: Poor Scholar’s Soliloquy 1944

Digital Habitats – book review

via @c4lpt : How to make social media a business tool, not a distraction

Globe & Mail: Information-rich and attention-poor (everybody liked this one) @PhilMcCreight @gminks @kasey428 @jaycross @tonykarrer

Education Spending Versus Achievement Data. @donfred says”I’m a huge fan of education. This makes me wonder” @lemire added “no correlation!”

via @drmcewan : Secret About the Wisdom of Crowds – There is No Crowd

The BioTeaming Manifesto via @jonhusband

“like changing tires on a speeding car”

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“How it Works” is a 5 minute video by IBM Research that describes the changing nature of the way we work. There’s not much “new” but it is well-presented and I think would be useful as an opener or adjunct to many of my workshops and presentations on learning & working on the Web. I’m sure many of my colleagues would find it useful for similar purposes.

It discusses the main challenges in today’s workplace:

  1. embracing change, and
  2. connecting & working with people far away

IBM Research provides a good metaphor for dealing with constant change in the workplace – ” like changing tires on a speeding car”. I particularly agree with the statement that “Employees are ready … it’s the processes that guide their work that haven’t kept up”.

Everyone is facing these challenges and, once again, the crux of the matter is giving up control in order to have a more resilient organization. Resilience, or the ability to learn and adapt, will be the key factor in successful tire changes.

Love the low end

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A while back I wrote about innovation and learning and especially how the recommendation by Scott Anthony to love the low end, makes a lot of sense for business and learning professionals. “The past 10 years have seen an unprecedented rise in the number of contract positions and freelance workers (previous post) ,” with 2.6M self-employed Canadians in 2008 (StatsCan), compared to 1.7M manufacturing production & administration workers in 2007 (StatsCan).

The self-employed are like start-ups in permanent bootstrap mode.  My experience and those of many folks I know is that we keep our costs as low as possible. We don’t go for expensive office space and many of us use open source software or free web applications. We’ll buy something when it makes solid business sense. That is usually a top end computer or mobile device and perhaps a good car if we travel a lot by road. We love the low end and I believe this will be a long-term trend. If you’re offering business products or software as a service, you had better have a low end version that does the basic job. Some folks will go for the premium edition but only if it is absolutely essential.

Sale

As freelancers and contract workers become more of the norm, forget about selling high-end stuff that larger businesses used to buy. Find that sweet spot that the growing, and highly networked, part of the workforce will not only use but will probably do the word-of-mouth marketing for you.

Sowing seeds of destruction

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John Hagel’s Labour Day manifesto calls for institutions to change and embrace the “passionate creativity” of workers.

Twentieth century institutions are not succeeding in the twenty-first century as new infrastructures take hold. They must change or they will slowly shrink into shadows of what they once were and make way for a new generation of institutions more suited to the harnessing the potential of these new infrastructures.

Meanwhile, back in institutional reality c. 2009, Andrew McAfee’s book on Enterprise 2.0 has been delayed for six months by Enterprise 1.0. Will we see institutions voluntarily changing their business models and then getting on with the new order of business? I strongly doubt it and don’t know of many historical examples of this kind of organizational adaptation. IBM managed a significant shift from products to services and Microsoft embraced the Internet before it was too late, with Internet Explorer. But many industry leaders were originally upstarts in their field. Ford didn’t come out of the carriage industry, Google wasn’t built by a telecom, Amazon did not grow out of a book store, and Craigslist wasn’t into newspaper classifieds. These companies changed the game by building a new playing field. New business models require different organizational DNA and this is doubly true for new management models.

How many consultants and experts are selling the idea that a hierarchical industrial-model organization can tweak a few things and then adapt to a two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility? With leadership that is willing to cede control, some organizations will successfully transform, but I think that most will fail. It’s more likely that enterprise 2.0 initiatives will excite some passionate creatives in the organization but when this fails they will leave and either start up or work for a 2.0 competitor. In this way, many organizations will sow the seeds of their own demise, but in the long run that will be a good thing.