Barriers to Collaboration

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In Why Businesses Don’t Collaborate, Stewart Mader and Scott Abel ask 523 workers about their information sharing habits. In reading through the responses and sample comments, it becomes obvious that there are two technologies that limit workplace collaboration – e-mail & meetings. Both can do certain tasks well but these “technologies” have become overused and abused.

Most of us who work with social media already know that e-mail can be replaced by more appropriate tools such as wikis, instant messaging, blogs or micro-blogs for a number of tasks. Also, we free-agents know only too well how much time we’ve saved by being outside an organization and not having to attend useless meetings [I would say that by avoiding meetings & commuting, I gain 2-3 hours of productivity per day].

Some highlights from Why Businesses Don’t Collaborate (PDF):

The comments indicate that people consider email a significant time management issue, and the important information often gets lost in the volume of email.

… people … recognize that trying to conduct group collaboration and revision by email is not optimal.

75% of respondents … know that a wiki can be used for documents that require group input …

Only 6% regularly request changes to a meeting agenda.

A simple strategy to give workers some time back would be to require that all meetings have agendas (on a wiki) with accompanying minutes. Then take one task that is currently done by e-mail (request for input) and replace it with a wiki, blog or other more suitable medium. These are just two small steps that could save a lot of time and frustration.

Integrating Learning and Work

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Tom Gram discusses the integration of learning and work (my professional passion) and gives a list of ten strategies for integration, of which three are discussed in detail in Part 1 (I’m already looking forward to Part 2):

1. Understand the job
2. Link Learning to business process
3. Build a performance support system

Of Tom’s 10 suggestions, not one is related to creating a course. That shows how relevant training is to the integration of working & learning and something to consider at the dawn of the learning age.

Look at “understand the job” and see how much of a challenge that could be in today’s workplace. What do you do when everyone’s job is unique? The learning professional must be in constant contact with the realities of the everyone’s work. Interventions and support will likely be incremental, addressing changing circumstances, but using multipurpose platforms for information and knowledge-sharing. Understanding work needs good two-way communications.

As jobs become more unique (I think the notion of the job may disappear over time), training either becomes a very expensive option or must be focused on specific skills that are used by several people. The result in the latter case is increasingly smaller units of training, which merges training into performance support, making training in the traditional sense less relevant.

In a complex or changing workplace (yours perhaps?), with shifting roles and responsibilities, Tom’s other seven strategies make even more sense:

4. Build a community of practice
5. Use social media to facilitate informal learning
6. Implement a continuous improvement framework
7. Use action learning
8. Organizational learning tools
9. Design Jobs for natural learning
10. Bring the job to the learning

I would say that these ten strategies would be excellent preparation for the networked workplace.

Friday’s Finds #4

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This week marked six years as a free-agent. I announced it on Twitter and received many kind words – thank you. Once again, my weekly sense-making from the Twitter files:

@ellenfweber “Since brains integrate knowledge naturally, while humans falsely separate facts artificially, integration is central to great learning.”

via @1ernesto1 – 50 Ways to Use Twitter in the College Classroom

“all our HR and org design theory is based on nothing but dogma“; which is why we badly need new organizational & management models

RT @zecool – NB Community College Fredericton relocates to the University of New Brunswick; expect more physical mergers in higher education as costs increase

via @charlesjennings – “When it’s just so obvious NOT to train it’s painful to watch it happen”

via @Pistachio How to be Happy in Business (Venn diagram) – Reminded me of another Venn diagram (your purpose) by @DavePollard

College/university education at the undergraduate level is now merely credential farming

10 simple things (SlideShare) we can do to change our food system

via @gbrettmiller Theoria cum Praxi » Cynefin, concept work, and the role of deliberate practice

In chaos we are forced to develop novel practices, therefore we need chaos for innovation; then from  @nickcharney My favourite Nietzsche quote: “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star”.

Flow

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Scott Leslie has put together a number of media resources on the concept of the educator as disc jockey (DJ), including:

Open Educator as DJ Wiki

OE as DJ on Prezi (cool)

Metamedia Links & Comments

I like Scott’s diagram that looks at the flow of being an open educator. Flow is the operative term, because like digital media, everything is in Beta, constantly changing.

As hyper-connectivity breaks down the walls between institutions and specialists, like universities and professional teachers, so too are the lines blurring between teaching and learning online. The components of Flow for Open Educators are not all that different from what I’ve described as the flow of personal knowledge management for individuals:

As learning and working get integrated in our networked lives, we not only become lifelong learners but lifelong educators. Teaching and learning are part of the same continuum. Previously separate fields like knowledge management and learning design are being put into one great online digital blender. As Mark Pesce says during his presentation on The Power of Sharing, the only thing that a network can do is share (and it’s happening in ALL directions).

Bridging innovation and commercialization

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Events during the past week have re-focused my attention on research, innovation and commercialization, especially as it pertains to learning technologies. I was engaged for my second time as the Scientific & Technical Evaluator for the SynergiC3 project, on behalf of the funding agency:

The main objective of the SynergiC3 project [a joint venture between l’Université de Moncton, the National Research Council of Canada and Desire2Learn] is to create a productivity enhancement framework that will allow a content development team to effectively manage its resources as well as provide tools that will significantly decrease production times and costs of developing learning resources while augmenting quality.

Meanwhile, David Campbell asked about the potential for a research campus in our region, “I’m always on the lookout for interesting economic development examples that may have relevance to us here in New Brunswick.” Several years ago I had completed a “diagnostic assessment” for the Miramichi region on the potential for “applied research, development and innovation options”, and recommended two economic development strategies – Community Wellness & Sustainable Living, with details on how the public and private sectors could work together. Each option included information, communication and learning technologies.

Here is some of the background material from that report on bridging research and commercialization.

In a series of three articles [not available online], Alan Cornford stated that increasing public R&D spending will not increase innovation capacity, as only 3% of public R&D spending results in measurable innovation. The only way to measure innovation is through the outputs of R&D – specifically local wealth generation. Cornford stated that there is plenty of venture capital money available, but not enough finance-worthy ventures. The key to driving innovation is having the right people.

Even more interesting is that Cornford showed that private sector investment has 15 times the return on investment as that of the public sector. His main recommendation was not to weaken public R&D spending, but to strengthen it through private partnerships, especially with small and medium sized businesses (SMB). Cornford favoured enhanced R&D tax credits and the channeling of government investment into “community innovation idea outreach” to communities and SMB’s.

Pertinent to any discussion on our region, Cornford believed that where local SMB R&D receptor capacity is limited (as in most of Canada), the universities, polytechnics and colleges can conduct applied R&D for local SMB’s and therefore benefit from these increased R&D investments, while community SMB innovative capacity grows. Closer to home, in 2002, Dr. Alan Cornford produced a report for ACOA – Innovation and Commercialization in Atlantic Canada [emphasis added]:

The four provinces of Canada’s Atlantic region face several challenges in achieving their competitive potential. Advancements in communications and information technologies can remove some of the region’s barriers associated with the small population base and geographic distance from major markets. Nevertheless, growth of a knowledge-based economy that either capitalizes on existing natural resources or supports new industry sectors will require significant changes in culture, attitudes and approaches to innovation and commercialization. With only a small foundation and infrastructure upon which to establish this new economy, Atlantic Canada must build partnerships and collaborate more than ever before.

Cornford went on to say:

Atlantic Canada requires an aggressive investment program, with funding increases focusing predominately on industry-driven applied R&D. An appropriate balance of relative capacity in each of the stages of the innovation process is also critical to accelerating competitiveness and creating a robust and innovative economy.

The table below is based on Cornford’s synthesis of innovation and commercialization development. It shows that both Innovation and Commercialization are supported by culture, awareness and understanding – key components of our educational systems. Cornford shows the stages of Innovation and Commercialization as separate but related.

I concluded that Stage 4, where Innovation and Commercialization meet, may be the “sweet spot” for any regional initiative on research development & innovation, helping to bridge university and college research (Innovation) with the needs of SMB’s (Commercialization). What is most interesting is that this is a core component of the SynergiC3 project – proofs of concept, prototypes and pilots.

Stage Innovation

Using know-how to develop a new product or process

 Commercialization

Applying the results of R&D in a commercial setting
1 Basic Research —
2 Dissemination —
3 Applied Research —
4 Proof of Concept Prototype, Pilot, Pre-seed Investment
5 — Pre-commercial Seed Investment
6 — 1st Venture Investment
7 — 2nd Venture Investment

I suggested that the community college, on whose behalf I was developing options, should focus on Stages 3 & 4. Areas of overlap occur in these stages and this is where a college can create the most value. In order to work at these stages, the college needs “upstream” and “downstream” partners. These include research universities and NRC upstream with industry and investors downstream. Staking out a niche that enhances the work of universities, NRC and NRC-IRAP would be easier than going into a perceived competitive role.

Manage what matters — collaboration

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Knowledge is personal and it cannot really be managed, though we continue to try. Artifacts of knowledge can be managed and in many cases they can be helpful to others. Learning is the same, I can’t directly transfer my learning to you, but I can try to teach or even train you, based on some good practices. We each have to learn for ourselves, though we can take advantage of the knowledge artifacts passed on by generations of people. It’s also getting easier to take advantage of what other people know as we get more connected online.

My own focus has been on personal knowledge mastery because managing how each of us makes sense seems to be the required foundation of anything resembling organizational knowledge management. The same goes for organizational learning – it cannot even be conceived to exist without individual learning. When it comes to learning and knowledge, we may be going down the wrong path when we try to put these into organizational buckets and manage them.

As Dave Jonassen has said many times:

Every amateur epistemologist knows that knowledge cannot be managed. Education has always assumed that knowledge can be transferred and that we can carefully control the process through education. That is a grand illusion.

We need people in organizations who can learn and gain knowledge themselves, though not necessarily by themselves. At the organizational level we need people who can work together or in concert on solving problems. Organizations should focus their efforts on helping people work together. It’s about work, or performance, not learning and not knowledge. “How can we help you work?” should be the mantra of all workplace support departments.

Learning and becoming knowledge-able are now basic requirements for every worker. These are basic requirements for life, as much as food and water. We don’t manage what or how our employees eat and we don’t need to manage their knowledge or learning. We can make it easier for them to learn and share knowledge though, just like putting in a cafeteria or a water fountain. Workers need support and tools to develop these personal processes but the organization should stay out of the business of knowledge and learning and instead focus on collaboration.

As Stephen Downes wrote on one of my previous posts:

collaboration means ‘working together’. That’s why you see it in market economies. markets are based on quantity and mass.

cooperation means ’sharing’. That’s why you see it in networks. In networks, the nature of the connection is important; it is not simply about quantity and mass …

You and I are in a network – but we do not collaborate (we do not align ourselves to the same goal, subscribe to the same vision statement, etc), we *cooperate*

In a networked society, we are re-learning how to co-operate as we take our networks with us, wherever we go. Once inside an organization it is necessary to focus our group work on a task or mission and that requires collaboration. Collaboration is what organizations should primarily focus on. Successful collaborative efforts are the measure of a successful organization. All of that focus and energy on managing knowledge and learning is wasted because it can’t really be managed anyway.

Academic disruption

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Jon Husband referred me to The Impending Demise of the University, an interesting post but similar to many others on the subject.

Enter Don Tapscott, who is looking at the challenges the digital revolution poses to the fundamental aspects of the University.
“Universities are finally losing their monopoly on higher learning”, he writes. “There is fundamental challenge to the foundational modus operandi of the University — the model of pedagogy. Specifically, there is a widening gap between the model of learning offered by many big universities and the natural way that young people who have grown up digital best learn.”

My major take-away from this article is that larger institutions will have a greater challenge in the near future than smaller ones. This would put academia back to where it was for the 500 years prior to the post-war boom – a niche market for the rich and intellectuals.

The loss of monopoly creates new openings for new academic business models, especially disruptive ones.

Friday’s Finds #3

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From the Twitter files;

Some thoughts, ideas & comments that caught my attention this week:

Canadians are being set up by music/movie lobby groups & our politicians in a rather cozy relationship it seems … Is there a connection between crappy broadband and minimal use of open source in Canada? via Michael Geist

It seems that our economy may transition from Markets, back to Tribes & bypass Networks completely: The End of Business [related to my post on networks & complexity]

via @skap5 Powerful reminder of the shift from an industrial era. GM employed 395,000 building cars in the 1970’s. After latest closings it’s 40,000. GM’s US market share declined from 45 to 19% from 1980 to today. Meanwhile via @techberry The only way to save GM is to kill GM – we must convert auto factories to mass transit: Michael Moore.

Quote from @swoodruff “Writing a social media consulting proposal for a potential biotech client. Contact came via Twitter. Return On Networking!” [who says Twitter is useless?]

via @VMaryAbraham “What produces results? Knowledge. Got it? No, then get it!”  Content Management Connection

via @nineshift The rise of public places in Canada, and @scottstonehouse replies: “Right on. Just started telecommuting and I expect to be spending more time than ever at the public library.”

via @c4lpt The future is people, not technology – Jay Cross

via @derkdegeus The end of Intellectual Property

“Alan Kay shares a powerful idea about ideas” on TED Talks

Grains of sand

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Though she calls it micro-planning, in my view Beth Kanter describes one way of developing emergent practices for complex environments or situations, which more workplaces are facing each day. When faced with complexity, I propose that we should organize as networks, continuously develop emergent practices, practice open cooperation, and collaborate around common goals. Micro-planning is a process that could enable the development of emergent practices.

Beth describes micro-planning as it could be used for non-profits, especially in campaigns:

“We are trying to illustrate a real-time, lighter assessment process that activists can use to engage their community and make real-time improvements and adjustments.   Because social media can lend itself to low-cost experimentation, this process doesn’t not necessarily require the “grand campaign plan” that takes a year and lots of resources to implement.”

The same activities can be used while working for profit, namely engaging our community (including customers), making real-time improvements and then adjusting our work processes (requires a devolution of power & authority). This is not a one-shot deal and then we move on, but a way of working and doing business. It sounds very much like wirearchy: a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology.

To support work in Perpetual Beta we should be looking at more micro processes that could in the aggregate make a significant difference due to network effects. A little extra influence distributed among many people in a network can have an impact. Much as the 140 character limitation of Twitter forces people to jettison extraneous words, it also enables a larger network because we can scan more tweets than blog posts. Each tweet is like a grain of sand, but thousands can form patterns and be a source of information, knowledge and connections. We need more ways to add individual grains to the constantly growing and moving sand dune that our work now rests upon. An industrial dump-truck would only disturb the harmony of that dune.

Workers, Management and Work Support

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Learning professionals are facing similar issues that others (HR, KM, IT & Marketing) do, but in many ways it’s a case of the blind men and the elephant. We are constrained by the blinders of our profession’s models. That’s one reason I like to take my models from a variety of fields, not just training or HPT. I previously wrote that we should integrate our work support departments and Tom Gram shows how this can be done by designing an organizational effectiveness function or creating internal management consultants, though these approaches can create their own bureaucracies as well, as Tom recognizes.

As effective as these approaches may be for now, I don’t think they’re adequate for the future. Everyone is struggling to keep up with change but most are using outdated tools and models. As Lou Sagar commented on Umair Haque’s post, ” … the emergence of new business models are ahead of the organizational framework to embrace and manage the impact.” That pretty well sums up the problem in my mind. We are all blind men unable to understand the new realities of work. Look at a business model as new as e-Bay’s, which many companies have yet to understand, and then add in the fact that it is already outdated and may even be declining.

The real conversation has yet to surface in the mainstream about the organizational change needed to address complexity and networks. There are models surfacing but as yet to be embraced, such as Haque’s work, wirearchy or valence theory. Creating a Chief Performance Officer out of the previous HR/Training/OD/KM functions may seem like progress but not if the realities of networked wealth creation don’t need a Chief “X” Officer any more.

Models such as chaordic organizations (PDF) show that command & control is not always necessary to be effective, especially within networks:

Given the right circumstances, from no more than dreams, determination, and the liberty to try, quite ordinary people consistently do extraordinary things.

Here’s the model that I’ve constructed on how training should adapt to a world where working and learning are synonymous, but even this shows a difference between management and workers, and perhaps that distinction is no longer pertinent.

In complex environments and networks, if workers need to be managed, they should not be hired in the first place, but then neither should managers.