Volume, Velocity, Virtualization & Variability

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There are four V’s that should be kept in focus as Enterprise 2.0 becomes more of a reality in 2009, according to Mike Gotta:

  1. the volume of information is growing exponentially,
  2. the velocity of business is increasing,
  3. the virtualization of the workplace continues
  4. the variability of roles an employee may be expected to take on will become more diverse

What I like about Gotta’s post is that many of his comments are based on observations of real clients and workplaces. There is a lot to consider and I’m glad that Jon Husband pointed out this blog to me.

To address the increasing volume of information, processes such as Personal Knowledge Management become more necessary (note to self: time to update PKM diagrams).

The increasing velocity means accepting life in Beta, without becoming shallow thinkers and doers.

Virtualization of the workplace means that we had better figure out how best to work and learn collaboratively online. This of course, has been the focus of my work for the past decade. The key is making it work within individual and organisational contexts and accepting that there is more than one way to do anything.

Finally, variability of jobs may spell the end of job descriptions and a move toward multiple workplace roles, depending on context; a much less machinistic model, but one that still needs a lot of work in creating tools to help manage looser networks.

People, Events and Ideas

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“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

I don’t completely agree with this statement but it puts into perspective where our greatest effort should be. The discussion of ideas and finding ways to take action on those ideas is the great work that has fallen on the laps (laptops?) of the billions of people who now make up the “middle class”, a term with its own baggage, according to John Robb:

It’s hard to imagine a more derogatory and less descriptive label than “middle class consumers” for the group of people that created most of the world’s massive wealth, rich technologies, and societal complexity.

The comments to John’s post have some name suggestions for the group of people who have the education and the communications tools to change society. Social media provide a way for this new “Yeoman” class to act individually and collectively for change and self-determination. An example in my network is Rob Paterson with his work in mobilizing communities on PEI and in public broadcasting. There are many other free thinkers working at the local level with a mind to the global situation. Using Eleanor Roosevelt’s quote, I think that events and people are important in helping us come up with new ideas but they are merely grist for our cognitive mills.

The ideas of others, events that we watch or are involved with, and the people we meet and interact with; all provide the context for our own ideas. I believe that Ms. Roosevelt’s point was that we cannot narrow our focus to only people and events and that the true work for our minds is to develop our own ideas. Social media give us the opportunity to put forth ideas in progress and to evaluate and challenge ideas. Now that we finally have these tools, it is our duty as global citizens to use them wisely.

The feeds at the top of this diagram are mostly inputs, with varying levels of interactivity. At the bottom are outputs of knowledge work. This diagram is an evolution of my web tools for critical thinking post.

New year, new challenges

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I’m not sure what the next year will bring but I’m certain that it will be as full of changes as 2008. Change is accelerating. Blogging, which wasn’t even in the dictionary when I started this one, is getting competitive:

With all of this new competition, the future could be very interesting:

Happy New Year!

Innovation and Learning

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In Innovating in the Great Disruption, Scott Anthony suggests three disciplines necessary to foster innovation in difficult economic times – placing a premium on progress; mastering paradox; and learning to love the low end. He also discusses the importance of learning;

Innovators will need to continue to find creative, cheap ways to bring their ideas forward. Fortunately, they can tap into a plethora of powerful tools to facilitate rapid learning.

Rapid learning is not PowerPoint slides turned into online courses but rather increasing the ways to connect ideas and people. This is the future of training and e-learning, or what I call ABC (anything but courses). Anthony’s third point, love the low end, also speaks to the use of inexpensive tools such as web services or open source software. If learning professionals can be seen as catalysts for innovation, then even in difficult times will their future look bright.

New organisational DNA

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I’m going to take some time off work and writing over the holidays, with perhaps a post if the mood strikes me. What really interests me at this time is how The Great Disruption may be opening up possibilities for change that did not exist even six months ago. I have come to the realisation that for training, education, learning and development initiatives to work we need real organisational change, meaning a change in the way we create and run our organisations. I have some opportunities to write on the subject as well as ideas that may develop into projects. These may be difficult times but they can also be exciting times.

Jon Husband sums up the real work to be done in developing the post-industrial workplace:

If I am not mistaken, the issue of centralised control remains one of the core issues in play … when it comes to considering whether and how to engage with or commit to a path towards Enterprise 2.0 architecture, applications and dynamics.

How can we have effective businesses without centralized control? Wirearchy is one potential framework but we need to seriously discuss this because our environment is far too complex for mechanistic models. Instead of tweaking the existing ineffective organisational models that many labour under I want to focus on the root causes of our challenges. Workers feel disconnected and disempowered especially when layoffs are the first corporate reaction in any economic downturn. We need more resilient organisations that can in turn foster a more resilient economy. There is much inspiration from the natural sciences:

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

On-job support is critical

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I don’t usually get information about training and performance improvement in the Wall Street Journal but this article clearly spells out the benefits of linking training directly to the workplace. In Lessons Learned, Harry Martin describes two cases and provides several links for further reading. Basically, formal training is more effective if followed up with specific objectives for change in the workplace. I think most of us know this, but many organisations don’t practice it. What I found most interesting was the effectiveness of engaging peer support in the workplace, as shown in this figure:

This reinforces the influence of peers, which parents of teenagers already know, and shows the potential for informal structures that encourage peer interaction at work. If you’re looking for better ROI for your training initiatives, the best place to put your effort may be AFTER the training.

Need for collaboration continues to grow

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We’re starting to see some interest in our TogetherLearn initiative and one of the main drivers seems to be cost-reduction. I came across this future-looking ZDNet article via Bertrand Duperrin and it sums up the situation nicely:

However, for business-driven internal enterprise Web 2.0 collaboration projects, I see growth. Why?  Because the business will find their collaboration needs to grow in 2009, while they see IT providing them with fewer services. Collaboration needs grow as a result of layoffs, mergers, and deepening external partnerships (requiring new infrastructure to collaborate outside the firewall with trusted, external partners).  And this happens while IT’s services shrink as a result of layoffs, a focus on streamlining operational costs, while not taking on new projects.

The need for online collaboration is growing as organisations make cost-cutting decisions in travel and training. The recession is just the catalyst that shows the redundancies of industrial, command and control systems in the hyperlinked economy. The need for online collaboration and the integration of work and learning will continue as long as we have the Internet.

Our value proposition for TogetherLearn is fairly simple. We set up a collaborative space outside the firewall and work with clients in their particular business context. We provide support, coaching and access to a network of resources. Clients pay for what they need and no more. The aim is to help online community managers learn and practice their role. We use open source technologies so clients can decide how and where they grow their communities, with no strings attached. Everything is transparent and senior consultants are involved in every step of the process.

Last year at this time I noticed that Big Consulting Firms are Jumping on Bandwagon 2.0. “As I’ve said before, Free-agents and natural enterprises are better. The upstart independents and small consultancies have Clayton Christensen’s disruptive Sword & Shield which the incumbents (large consultants) don’t have. With early motivation to enter this emerging field (Shield) and now with with years of experience and skills (Sword), we the “upstarts” should be able to hold our own.”

The current economic situation has just made the business case for a nimble, low overhead, web-enabled consultancy that much easier.

Blogs are not a “substitute”

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Print media are in dire trouble – but blogs are no substitute says Andrew Sullivan in the Times Online:

The terrifying problem is that a one-man blog cannot begin to do the necessary labour-intensive, skilled reporting that a good newspaper sponsors and pioneers. A world in which reporting becomes even more minimal and opinion gets even more vacuous and unending is not a healthy one for a democracy. Perhaps private philanthropists will step in and finance not-for-profit journalistic centres, where investigative and foreign reporting can be invested in and disseminated by blogs and online sites. Maybe reporter-bloggers will start rivalling opinion-mongers such as me and give the whole enterprise some substance. Maybe papers can slim down sufficiently to produce a luxury print issue and a viable online product. There’s always a hunger for news, after all.

I’m not a journalist nor a reporter and have no experience in mainstream media but I understand the Web and I think Sullivan gets it completely wrong. First of all, there is no such thing as a “one-man blog”, as all blogs are connected to other blogs and media. Also, blogs are not limited by print space, so articles can be much longer than print media offers and most have hyperlinks to more information. This is a richer reading experience, where facts can be checked while reading and engage the reader to do more than receive the wisdom imparted by the journalist. Comments and self-corrections keep blogs on-track, as opposed to corrections that appear in a newspaper the next day on page 12. What Sullivan proposes with a slimmed-down paper and online presence already exists with magazines, like FastCompany. On one thing I will agree; blogs are not a substitute for newspapers, they are an entirely new medium and are just starting to find their place after the initial exuberance.

Directly comparing print media with digital media is the wrong approach but is often heard in education as well. A webinar is not as rich as a classroom, or you cannot replace face-to-face interaction with the instructor, are common complaints. Digital media enable new kinds of relationships, some richer and some more limited, but the Web offers much that we did not have before. I am certain that democracy, and learning, can be enhanced with digital media, but we have to stop looking back with simplistic and direct comparisons, and get on with making our interconnected world work.

Learning Fluidity

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Mark Pesce’s post on Fluid Learning has been picked up several people and I like his four recommended processes for networked education:

  1. Capture everything [especially since digital storage is so cheap]
  2. Share everything [e.g. public feed readers, social bookmarks, blogs, photos, videos]
  3. Open everything [no walled gardens a.k.a. LMS]
  4. Only connect [less control allows for more connections]

What Mark calls fluid I’ve referred to before as flow.

Stories are an excellent example of learning flow. For millennia, we’ve learned through stories. Today, content capture and creation tools on the Web let us tell our own stories. Weaving our stories with those of others enables serendipitous learning and becomes a powerful way to reinforce our learning. This is how gamers and hackers, the digital pioneers, learn:

They share their stories.

They know that there is no user manual.

They embrace the flow.

Going Solo

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Pawel Szczesny has decided to give up on his attempt to be a freelance scientist. Here are some of the hard lessons that this PhD candidate from Poland has learned:

  • The consultant’s dilemma: when you’re working you’re not generating new ideas or business, and vice versa.
  • It’s tough to launch a freelancing career outside the major urban centres.
  • You will need more cash in the bank than you expected.

On a more positive note, Pawel found out that you learn a lot on your own; more than you ever would inside an organisation. That’s because you have to do a heck of a lot more. Pawel also learned that he was not alone, “Many times I was blown away by the help I had not expected.”

I’ve discussed similar issues in So you want to be an e-learning consultant? and want to underline a critical factor in going on your own. Having a good skill set as well as contacts is not enough to keep a solo business going. It’s possible to be a long-term contractor, which is what Pawel actually wound up doing, but it’s much more difficult to sustain all the components of a business just by doing contract work. Contracting will pay the bills but won’t grow the business. For that, you need a sustainable business model.

After five years, I’m still not certain about my business model but generally it includes:

  1. Integrating my professional development with marketing and connecting with my peers; AKA Blogging.
  2. Raising my professional profile and enlarging my network by writing articles, doing product/book reviews,  facilitating online communities, etc. – mostly for free.
  3. Consulting on a wide range of services in order keep the cash flow positive

The first two activities, though enjoyable, are a cost of doing business and I view them as replacements for marketing & advertising, which I don’t spend any money on. All of my consulting projects come through my network and luckily I had existing contacts when I went solo.

Most of my revenue is generated through consulting. Some projects are interesting and challenging but some are just work. My plan is to continue to publish through various media and discuss what I learn through my consulting and other activities. The aim is to do fewer and more interesting projects and increase the writing and speaking aspect. I know that I won’t get rich on this model but as long as I can have a sustainable business and an enjoyable lifestyle, then I’m fine with that.

To get to this point, I have kept my costs very low, spending only when necessary and taking advantage of every free or cheap option for my work. It’s a simple business model but it seems to be working. It’s also not a quick and easy way to success, however you measure it.

I think that Pawel had a great idea as the freelancing scientist and that this is a model very much enabled by the Internet, as is my own. However, it’s still not easy to go solo in any field.