What training can learn from advocacy

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On the Net, everyone is competing for attention, but two things seem to increase your signal strength – 1) make the media appealing 2) talk to people on their terms.

Here’s an excellent resource that shows how to get your message across – Visualizing Information for Advocacy:

Advocacy organizations tend to collect a lot of information.

They often package this information into detailed written reports. While these reports support policy recommendations and are valuable reference tools, they may not be the most effective way to make an impact within a campaign.

We live in an information-rich environment and in our daily lives constantly receive messages conveyed through design. Many of these messages seek to influence as well as inform, serving a variety of commercial and non-commercial interests. How do you make your message heard?

It’s packed with good examples of information design, as shown by the cover which has visuals from a campaign that developed an analogy between federal land grants and use of the airwaves (read the booklet for more information):

info for advocacy

The message here is that all the information in the world won’t help if it’s not received, which is what the marketing and advertising industry has known for a long time. For those in non-profits, or in training, this is something that should be considered in all of our work. It’s especially important when people have the option of paying attention. As the authors say:

You’ve got data, now what to do with it?

How do you tell your story more effectively?

How can you move your audience?

Another example of getting your message across is a recent video by Canada’s Sons of Maxwell: United Breaks Guitars. It shows how a message can go viral on YouTube, much to the chagrin of United Airlines, whose employees broke the band’s guitar and the company would not pay compensation. This video got the attention of over 2.5 million people in less than a week. Though well-produced, it was the timing and the grassroots appeal that really spread this video. This is almost impossible to plan for and I wouldn’t trust anyone who “guaranteed” that my message would go viral.

Face it, even if your organizational marketing or instructional video is informative and professionally done, it probably won’t attract 2.5 million visits or ever go viral. That reinforces the need to also talk to people on their terms. This is especially pertinent if your audience is online and can click away at any time (Captive audiences are a different situation).

Communicating with people on the Internet means engaging in meaningful conversations, one at a time. As the Cluetrain Manifesto informed us 10 years ago:

  1. Markets are conversations.
  2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
  3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
  4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
  5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.
  6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
  7. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
  8. In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.
  9. These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.

So gather all that useful data, tell a compelling story using good design and understand your audience well enough to speak on their terms.

Here’s another fine example: the credit crisis visualized.

Time to get your licence

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In the last half of the 20th century in North America it was assumed that as an adult you had a driver’s licence and that you most likely owned or had access to a car. I know, I didn’t get my licence until I was 26 and that made me a very rare specimen indeed. The optimal way to get around our cities and especially our rural areas is by motor vehicle. Malls are being built that do not have any designated pedestrian or bicycle lanes. We still design as if everyone moves around by automobile.

drivers licence

Well it’s now the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the Web is over 15 years old and e-mail is much older than that. However, many in my generation (the baby boomers) are living as if the Internet is an interesting thing to have around or “surf” but not really essential, like a car is. I’ve noticed this especially with boomers working inside organizations. But things are changing and we see that most younger people own a mobile device and manage several networks on the Web – Facebook, YouTube, StumbleUpon, Digg, etc. For them, a car may be optional, but a mobile Web device is essential.

Understanding the Web today is like driving a car 25 years ago. You need it to get around, work and be social. It’s as important for individuals as it is for organizations. Think back a decade or two and imagine a business without a parking lot; today that’s getting a lot easier to imagine. The Web changes everything and Internet strategy can no longer be left to a few specialists to “do that Web thing”. We all need to get involved and learn by doing. You can’t become a driver without practice and the same goes for the Web. I would suggest that anyone who doesn’t have a learner’s Web permit had better get one soon. That’s especially true for my fellow baby boomers, many of whom are making the decisions at work.

Image by ndanger

Learning about healthy workplaces

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The Project did not last very long but I learned a few things along the way.

First, I saw how England and Scotland are using social media to address the stigma around mental health issues, with Shift and SeeMe. Advocacy and non-profit groups could take some lessons from these organizations, especially Shift’s high quality videos.

A clear answer to my main question eluded me during what should have been the first half of the project, “How can we engage senior leadership in organizations to take mental health seriously and adapt their workplaces appropriately?” Engaging business leaders on what is considered a non-essential area requires much time and networking. It’s a long-term campaign and social media are only one part of that.

I came across Beth Kanter’s excellent resource on Non-profits, health care and social media which included a comprehensive slide presentation. It seems that 59% of Americans (and one can assume Canadians as well) get their health information online. If you’re in the health information business, then you had better be online. Also, connecting people and communities is necessary, as “People tend to trust ‘a person like me’ more than authority figures from business, government or the media.” Here’s another reason why non-profits and advocacy groups should use online social networking – it’s cheap and connects people who share some values.

I learned a lot about mental health in the workplace, such as the fact that 2008 was the worst year for disability claims in the Canadian public service and that over 44% of these are mental health conditions, as reported in The Ottawa Citizen . From some of the facts, I created a slideshare presentation, using CC Flickr photos:

Do You Care?

View more documents from Harold Jarche.

In the short period that I looked at mental health in the workplace, I came to see it as the 21st century version of physical safety. In the 20th century concerned people and trade unions fought to create safer workplaces. Our mines, factories and work sites are now much safer in this country than they were 50 years ago. My step-father died several years ago from emphysema which was partially due to time working in the silver mines of BC without any respiratory filters. Most workplaces today have good policies and practices on workplace safety. In many cases, it’s the law.

Moving to a post-industrial economy many, if not most, of our products and services are now intangible. Much of the work  we do is knowledge work, requiring more brain than brawn. Even farmers need knowledge on a wide spectrum of disciplines (weather, markets, genetics, financing) in order to run a successful operation. Our brain is our primary means of making a living, therefore keeping a healthy mental state just makes sense.

The concept of work/life balance is not just a feel good strategy but is essential for any knowledge-intensive workplace. So, do we really need all the numbers to justify a mental health policy for the workplace? The data show the importance of mental health in the workplace, but we don’t pay attention to it and we rarely discuss it.

What’s the future? A recent Canadian study showed that depression and anxiety affect up to 15% of pre-schoolers. Mental health is an important issue that will not go away and informed discussions are necessary at all levels. I’m glad I learned about this over the Summer.

Friday’s Finds #15

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Once again, from the Twitter files this past week:

Work:

“And what I found out is that talent is much overrated. It is motivation and help that makes the difference. They [HR] talk about ´talent´ as if it is a thing that actually exists, apart from effort, motivation and experience.” @MireilleJansma

Dan Pink at TED: “there’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business does”

50 years of applying job evaluation methodologies has created organizational structures that are rigid, non-responsive & slow to change. via @jonhusband

Web:

Open Atrium is an OS (Drupal+) team portal starter package Open Atrium via @jaycross

“Wikipedia’s greatest gift to humanity: proof that there are more pedants than vandals” – via @sebpaquet and found in @lemire’s blog comments. Related: Wikipedia is simply undergoing the process of becoming the system it exists within. via @gsiemens

Twollow.com is locally built Twitter app, and Steve (@comforteagle) clarifies some things about a news report to which Carman Pirie (@pirie) adds more comments

Flashback to 1998: Work the Web video via @elsua and a description of the merger of marketing & KM in law firms – true for any knowledge-intensive org

Learning:

If complex systems researchers don’t get serious about the scientific method, their field is going to fizzle out – Networks are Killing Science via @lemire

I said that we should Kill the Curriculum and @busynessgirl responded, “how about we just hack it?” Which of course I agree with.

Life:

Cars Cause Most Bike-Car Crashes via @folkstone

Saying Yes to donating snipped hair for Oil Spill Hair Mats to rescue oceans. via @yesmagazine @PureAveda

Soaking up carbon with artificial trees & algae-based photobioreactors. via @pathways

Role of an online community manager

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Mark Sylvester hosted a web conference today  on the role of an online community manager. Here are some highlights from my notes:

  • The session used tweetchat.com for the text chat, but this medium was very slow. Alternatives to Twitter should be used if you want online chat. An integrated chat was not available with the Citrix platform. Using Twitter as a chat tool also creates a lot of extra noise for your regular followers on Twitter (via @xpconcept)
  • CM is not a 9-5 job – uses twitter a lot, comments on blogs, uses back-channels for private communications the role changes as the needs of the community change
  • CM is a very time-consuming job and the results are not always tangible and visible.
  • There is also an internal role in explaining the role and activities in online communities to the organization, to answer, “what do you do all day other than play on Twitter?”.
  • Online communities don’t manage themselves.
  • Communities often don’t grow the way they are planned and may be taken over by a sub-group.
  • CM can bridge gap between inside & outside the organization.
  • CM doesn’t fit into any single departmental silo – role is similar to ombudsman
  • CM should not take oneself too seriously
  • “Communities don’t want to be managed” – they want to be nurtured
  • Building community means giving up control.
  • How do you get executive buy-in?
    • find someone with an existing community mindset
    • get executives into a real network experience in order to understand
  • The launch phase requires a small group that is passionate and “transacting” a lot.
  • Building community is not about collecting as many people as possible.
  • Key: crowd-source community management [my experience was this worked on Work Literacy]
  • Dynamic tension in communities: control vs member empowerment (experienced CM’s seem to be at ease with loss of control)

More: The Iceberg Effect of Community Management

Recommended Reading (from the panelists):

Linked: How everything is connected to everything else

The decision to join

Six pixels of separation

The new community rules

Groundswell

Related post of mine: The Community Manager

Mind Map: The Networked Society

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Over the years of writing this blog I’ve reorganized, added tags, categories and the Key Posts & Toolbox pages in order to help make sense of over 1,500 posts. A major theme in my writing has been our shift to a networked society and what that means in how we work and learn. I’m especially interested in the fact that working and learning are merging in many contexts. Learning (often viewed from the limited perspective of training or education) is not a separate activity, removed from work.

This mind map links several concepts and related articles around the theme of the networked society:

Networked Society

Working

Structures

Living

Learning

Relevance in the Network

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In Become a meta L&D Manager (requires free registration), my colleagues Jay Cross & Clark Quinn advise that it’s time to take a broader look at learning in the organization:

“Your charter as head of L&D [learning & development] is to optimise learning throughout the organisation, not just in the pockets that once belonged to HR. This takes a broader perspective than what you deal with day-to-day. You’ve got to rise above the noise to see the underlying patterns and then optimise them.”

In the comments, Martine Parry adds to this topical article, saying that the ” … training role will become responsible for large deployments and for legal and governance issues – only.” This is the root of the change that we are facing in organizations today: relevance in the network. There are many silos of support functions in any large organization, each with their own culture and perspectives on business performance – HR; L&D; IT; KM; Marketing; Communications; et al. And of course there are also the individual business units as well as the key driver of revenue in many companies – Sales. If roles have to merge, who will win out, a business unit or a support function? It’s quite possible that the traditional training function will become marginalized.

History shows that significant changes in how we communicate result in significant changes in how we work. Many silos of support functions will not work in a network-centric organization as there’s too much redundancy, duplication of effort and slowness to react. It’s becoming obvious that only highly networked organizations are going to be successful. As another colleague, Jon Husband, puts it:

“The performance management schemes, grade levels in the organizations and compensation practices have yet to recognize how work gets done in networked environments and increasingly, in a networked world.”

Does it really matter that training or L&D will be marginalized? In the long run, I think not. We are seeing the merging of roles and functions as networks bypass command & control. That means that each departmental silo will lose some of its traditional power. What will emerge will have to be more effective for the networked organization. As a learning or workplace performance professional your choice is clear:

  1. Fight to ensure that your department wins the short-term internal political game of leading organizational learning; or
  2. Park your ego (and that of your tribe) to work with everyone in the organization to make it more effective in the long-term.

It’s obvious which choice I would recommend but #2 will be fraught with problems, such as being ostracized by your departmental colleagues and maybe even working yourself out of a job. However, if your organization doesn’t succeed in the long run, neither will your job.

silos_flickr_zoomzoom-304135268

Photo by ZoomZoom

Being participative

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Matthew Hodgson asks at The AppGap what participation and engagement really mean and he refers to the IAP2  core values of public participation. These values, based on “the belief that those who are affected by a decision have a right to be involved in the decision-making process” are important for a participative democracy but I think that something is still missing. The values seem to imply that people are involved during the decision-making process only, as in let’s get some public input and set up some round tables, forums and discussion areas; much as the government is doing on copyright in Canada.

Like voting every four years, even the most participatory models offered by our institutions fail to grasp the nature of our networked world. Today, much of the public is always-on and you can find someone talking about the issues. Participation doesn’t stop any more. One shot deals, even those that are open and inclusive, do not recognize this sea change in communications.

Euan Semple discusses how different life and work in a global network are going to be:

I am currently reading Manuel Castells’ fantastic book The Power of Communication. In it he talks of the global network society’s tendency to truncate time and how the industrial society, with its ideas of progress, deferred gratification, Protestant work ethic etc. made becoming more important than being. In his view in the networked society “being cancels becoming”.

As a fellow freelancer, Euan is being rather than becoming. There is no corporate ladder to climb or professional designation to achieve. If everyone felt this way, many of our institutions (schools, universities, certification bodies) would collapse. Perhaps that is why many will in the near future.

The challenge for organizations and institutions in a global networked society will be to incorporate “being” into their management models. Participation becomes a constant and dynamic flow through the organization and outside it. How can you be participative in everything, not just to make the initial decision? How does that change the role of management? What is management in a network? There are probably some answers from those who are already being, accepting life in Beta, as well as those who never embraced the industrial model of becoming. We have to look to the edges of modern society to see the possibilities.

Living on the EdgePhoto: Living on the Edge by Giant Ginkgo

Friday’s Finds #14

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From the twitter files this past week:

Many US films don’t even bother to register in Canada and they complain about copyright infringement? via @michaelgeist

The Search Engine Optimization scam via @jonhusband

The corporation is so clueless … that sometimes [change] really does depend on a single individual

Our collective challenge: how to empower workers for self-organization

“I declare social media sufficiently mainstream” says @jclarey

“nature imbued us with an unquenchable drive to discover, to explore”  via @jonhusband

Meta-analysis of 99 studies: showed that students online performed better (9 percentiles) than in face to face classroom situations via @pwmartin

The real reason why you, the individual, should blog via @jocenado

@jayrosen_nyu If ever you run into trouble understanding what “social media” is… just substitute “connecting across, rather than up.” via @jonhusband

Blogs: Social Media’s Home Base

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I’ve called my blog my persistent presence on the Web. It’s the one place that hasn’t changed over the years — it’s just a bit bigger. As more social media applications come and go and we see value in some of them and maybe even use them more than our blogs, it becomes even more important to have a spot that doesn’t change too much. Here at jarche.com is where you will always be able to find me. The look has changed over the years, as has the underlying system (from Drupal to WordPress).

I noted that it’s important to know where’s your data but you also need some control over all the social media you’re using. The problem is that you’re on somebody else’s platform. A blog can be used as the more stable node in your social media ecosystem. For example here are several social media applications I’ve used but have pretty much discarded for one reason or another — Furl, Magnolia, Spoke, Xing, Blogflux, Eduspaces (insert your own list). However, my blog hasn’t changed — it’s my social media home base. In addition, blogging also helps to develop meta-cognitive processes and as Tom Peters says in this interview “no single thing in the past 15 years has been more important to my professional life than has blogging”.
blog-homebase
My four C’s of social media can be addressed through many social media applications but these processes do not need to be owned by any single application. I would say that it would be a mistake to use a single SaaS (software as a service) platform as your only way to engage in these processes. You can create, contextualize, connect and co-create in many ways; most of which can, and perhaps should, be linked back to your blog. Having watched MySpace get marginalized while Facebook dominates for now, it’s only a matter of time before more new platforms that we don’t own come along and lure the next bunch of digital sharecroppers. To see where blogging may be headed (Blogs 2.0?) check out Om Malik’s The Evolution of Blogging.