Performance Design Blog

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The Centre for Learning Technologies was a hybrid organisation that was university-based, externally-focused and did both research and business consulting. In my three years at the CLT I was involved in about 40 projects and worked with a great team, especially in my first year with Tom Gram, the Director.

Tom moved on in 1999 and we’ve kept in touch, but much of his professional life has been behind the firewall. Well, he’s out on the WWW now and Gram Consulting has a blog. The focus is on “performance design”, and that is an area where there are fewer bloggers than in e-learning or Web 2.0.

So this blog is also for people who are in one way or another involved in the design of work processes and human systems that are at the heart of improving business performance in the modern workplace.  That will include Organization Development Specialists, Human Performance Consultants, Business Mangers, Quality and productivity specialists and performance oriented learning specialists.  Here’s my Word Map on topics that you will likely see in future posts on performance design.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Tom.

The Age of Dissonance

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As Enterprise 2.0 initiatives continue to proliferate, I cannot see how the latent dissonance I perceive and have tried to articulate will be avoided. I think it will have to be addressed by using new design principles for knowledge work.

This is one of the conclusions that Jon Husband makes in Work Design – From Industrial to Networked Age Part 1, Part 2A, Part 2B. Jon talks about “vertical knowledge disrupted”:

Performance objectives, job assignments, compensation arrangements and bonus schemes are generally almost always predicated on causality derived from the vertical arrangements of knowledge and its use in planned and structured initiatives.  As more and more knowledge work is carried out by people communicating and exchanging information using hyperlinks in social networks, where the places knowledge lives and that facilitate its routing to where it is needed, at a point in time, the vertical arrangements for guiding the flows of knowledge are disrupted, if not subverted. Weinberger’s most recent work, Everything Is Miscellaneous, is a beginning treatise on this subject.

I sat in a presentation of a talent management system last week and after being shown how skills could be categorized and people identified for progression, I had one question. How can you prepare for a job that does not even exist yet? Many of us are doing work that we would never have imagined one or two decades ago. How about professional blogger or podcaster? Imagine a talent management system in 1999 that was preparing junior journalists to become a newspaper’s full-time representative in Second Life. You cannot use an accountant’s rear view perspective to prepare for an unknown future. It is better to nurture a mix of people with a variety of skills, experiences and attitudes, much as nature does with ecosystems. A biological model trumps a mechanistic one in adaptation to change.

Picture: Knowledge work framework by Lilia Efimova

New design principles, from instructional development to job descriptions, are needed for our inter-networked society. I’ve started looking at a new design for the training department but redesign is needed everywhere. I think that more people are looking for new designs and are willing to try them out, if they can. The economic crisis may actually help bring about some needed change. So here’s a new job description to insert into all those talent management systems: work redesigner.

Blogger/Podcaster Dinner in Sackville

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Derek Hatchard is organising a regional Blogger/Podcaster Dinner:

What: Casual get-together for bloggers and podcasters

When: Friday November 21, 6:45pm

Where: Joey’s Pizza and Pasta, 16 York St., Sackville, NB

Who: Anyone who produces content for a blog or podcast (audio or video)

Why: Just cuz

No presentations, no sponsors, just good food and conversation.

RSVP on Derek’s blog post or e-mail/DM him. He is also coordinating car pooling from Moncton.

If you get into town early, stop at the Bridge Street Café with free wi-fi. You may also want to check out the Craft Gallery at the visitor information centre (off the Main Street Exit) where local artisans have unique gifts for sale. The Owens Art Gallery and Fog Forest Gallery are also worth a visit. If you’re in town for a while, give me a call.

Portlets and widgits

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My keynote at SkillSoft’s Canadian Perspectives conference yesterday gave some advice to the training department and how it may need to change to meet the demands of a complex environment. Several people said that they found the talk interesting and I will take the notes and feedback to write a paper on the topic which I should publish in a couple of weeks. All references to this presentation are on my Delicious bookmarks.

During the day I attended some breakout sessions, mostly focused on advancements in SkillSoft’s product and service lines as well as a few customer case studies. The first presentation of the day covered three market shifts that the company sees as having an impact on its business: mobile devices; ubiquity of content; and talent shortages.

I also noticed a theme that learning content has to move outside the LMS. The LMS is perceived as an appropriate tool for tracking objects but learning activities are being pushed outside the LMS box. SkillSoft’s strategy is to use an open (not open source) architecture to plug into other systems with “portlets”, which are similar to the web widgits that you see on most blogs today. It all reminded me of a discussion I had with Mark Dowds at the Brandon-Hall conference last year. Mark knows information technology but was new to e-learning. After a few days of presentations, Mark told me he had finally figured out what an LMS is, “It’s just another widgit”. It looks like that’s the way this technology is going.

Advice for the Training Department

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Last week I wrote about The Training Department in the 21st Century, part of a presentation I will be giving in Toronto on Thursday. This new model that I propose, which has its roots in knowledge management and wirearchy, is an attempt to take the theory and make some practical recommendations for those who have to do the day to day work.

The model is centered on Connecting and Communicating to enable knowledge flow in the organisation and is based on three processes:

  1. Facilitating collaborative work and learning amongst workers (esp. as peers).
  2. Sensing patterns and helping to develop emergent work and learning practices.
  3. Working with management to develop appropriate tools and methods for the workplace.

Here are some specific recommendations that I’m putting forward for the “new” training department:

  • Be an active & continuous learner and engage in activities that take you out of your comfort zone, so that you know what it’s like to be a learner.
  • Be a lurker or a passive participant in relevant work-related communities (could be the lunch room) and LISTEN to what is being said.
  • Communicate what you observe to people around you, solicit their feedback and engage in meaningful conversations.
  • Continuously collect feedback from the workplace, not just after courses.
  • Make it easy to share information by simplifying & synthesizing issues that are important and relevant to fellow workers.

None of these require Web tools or techniques but they can all be enhanced by the Internet.

NB Learning Industry

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I was recently asked by a consultant to help develop an asset map for the local learning  industry:

NRC-IIT [National research Council, Institute for Information Technology] and the Province of New Brunswick, via Business New Brunswick, are partnering to conduct two asset mapping projects. These asset maps will identify strengths, resources, and opportunities that exist within two key sectors in New Brunswick: Health/Life Sciences and Advanced Learning Technologies.

The goal is to develop a sound base of information to support the development of new strategic plans for both sectors. Additionally, the asset mapping projects will help to further forge connections between individuals, organizations, and institutions within these sectors and to provide a catalyst for investment and the formation of new collaborations.

I declined, stating that I had been involved in two such reports (1999, 2004) and that I didn’t feel like going through the process a third time. I had also put forth some recommendation on this blog in Rx for NB Learning in 2006.

The major recommendation made in 1999, while I was at the CLT, was that the Industry should move away from off-the-shelf content development and increase services such as performance improvement consulting and performance support solutions. This was ignored. In April 2002 the provincial government even purchased shares in Content Alive Inc. This company later became Vitesse Learning which closed in bankruptcy in 2007.

In 2004, I recommended to focus more on European markets and less on US ones. Instead, the government sponsored more US trade missions. I specifically recommended starting a new focus on a selected field such as open source for learning; performance technology or simulation & gaming. Open source would have been a good niche. Imagine if the province was now a centre of excellence for Moodle.

I have always seen the key to innovation being about people, especially educated, motivated and creative knowledge workers, who come from a wide variety of cultures and experiences. A diverse industry could capitalize on opportunities and markets throughout the world. Our province has home-grown, entry level skills in abundance but a major gap is  business leadership.  Generally speaking, the higher level business, technical and learning skills are in short supply, and these skills are necessary to create and grow companies. By focusing on making the province attractive for experienced individuals, the industry would be able to grow.

Finally, I think that a non-profit chaordic organisation (PDF), as recommended by Rob Paterson on the Fast Forward Blog, might be a better structure than the some of the models tried already. I hope that the asset map that is being developed will be published and that it will be made freely available for open discussion and even for remix.

Behaviour Online

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Michele Martin, in looking at our Work Literacy online course, concludes that Online Negative Behavior is a Product of Culture:

This is the conclusion I’m drawing from using social media for learning. If people have negative experiences with using social media in their organizations–if people are behaving unprofessionally or inappropriately–I think that there’s something a lot deeper going on that social media is simply bringing to the surface.

We assumed that this would be an environment for civil, professional discussions and never put in any limitations or rules. It seems that this approach worked through modeling appropriate behaviour by both facilitators and members. I have found this group of over 700 members to be polite and even caring for each other. It has been a real pleasure following the learning paths and stories in the blogs and discussion forums.

So why do we see many instances of bad behaviour online? Perhaps some of these forums with nastier comments are just places to vent. Maybe people cannot freely express their opinions at work or at school, or perhaps they feel that no one is listening.

Are social networks within organisations more difficult to nurture because 1) the organisation itself may be dysfunctional and 2) individuals recognize this dysfunctionality and 3) this tension may become evident in an online social network. Therefore, when management decides to create a place for an online community they naturally put in rules and workers naturally won’t open up because of these rules. These same workers/students/citizens vent their frustrations in the more open and wild discussion forums such as YouTube comments or CBC news stories (both of which I’ve given up reading).

Of course, this is a completely untested hypothesis.

Source?

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There are some ideas that capture our imagination and provide us with a way forward or a framework for further action or study. For me personal knowledge management (PKM) and wirearchy are two such ideas. These are not my ideas and even though I may not cite the original sources in all cases that I discuss them, I give credit where it is due. I learned this many years ago as an undergraduate. I remember my History professors demanding, “Source?” whenever we made a bold  statement of fact or brought in some new line of thought. I have a link to wirearchy on my header and I ensure that I add references when I publish or distribute any work that mentions PKM. I will mention work by Lilia Efimova, Denham Grey and Dave Pollard on PKM or Jon Husband on wirearchy.

*** Update: There are some “self-corrections” in the comments pertaining to this next section [how’s that for speed?] ***

On a related note, George Siemens posts that The Rhyzome Project fails to even mention the published work of Dave Cormier on Rhyzomatic Education. With the simplicity of adding hyperlinks to web pages, citing your main sources should not be a problem, and this is something that the project could rectify quickly. I wonder how long it will take to give the appropriate citations? This could be an interesting case study of the self-corrective nature of the Web and blogs.

Academic Upstarts

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The latest book from Clay Christensen and his team, authors of The Innovator’s Dilemma and others, is Disrupting Class, where they examine education. Tom Haskins reviews the book and provides his own perspectives in Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and finally his own assessment on the value of college diplomas.

Tom thinks that the value of a diploma will decrease because knowledge in one field will not be enough for a generation facing multiple job changes and that the economies of scale offered by physical institutions will no longer be as obvious as they were in an industrial, fossil-fuel driven economy. I agree with Tom, and have discussed the challenges faced by universities, most recently in Moving the Ivory Tower to the Web: Part 1 and Part 2:

This is the same problem facing established academic institutions. Current revenues rest with the old way of doing business – students in classes. Going to the new Web model threatens those who make their living with the old model. Therefore leaders in the old hesitate because they are tied to their existing revenue streams. They cannot put the new inside the old. The answer is to locate the new outside of the old infrastructure and let the new unit go after customers who are not served by the current model. This way institutions can hold onto the value of their existing business for as long as possible while building up new capabilities with a different business model.

Furthermore, I would venture that many online universities are not real upstarts in this business, they are just variations on the same theme. Take local Meritus University for instance. An online BBA costs $36,000 for tuition and electronic documentation fees, compared to the average tuition at a Canadian university of $20,000 for four years. Customers pay a premium for the convenience of space and time. This model is not a great threat to traditional universities as it only targets those willing to pay more for flexibility. It may be a threat to more expensive US colleges though and that may be their target market. Still, it isn’t disruptive.

An example of the changing landscape is that participation rates in free learning programs are increasing, witnessed by over 700 members in Work Literacy and over 2,000 in Connectivism & Connected Knowledge. No one is making any money on these, except for the few students registered through the university for CCK08. This is a disruptive model of semi-academic courses being provided to mostly non-consumers (people who would not have paid for it anyway). At this time, these offerings are no real challenge to the existing structure, but acceptance of these programs may prepare the way for an upstart.

The challenge for academia will be in finding where the potential revenue is moving in the new value chain. For example, I give away all of my content on this website, because I know that my revenue is generated through consulting. This has been clear to me ever since I started. The blog helps me learn and connect and raises my profile on the Web. Charging for my content wouldn’t make any sense. Free generates the fees. How will universities be able to meet the challenge of more free content? Would they be able to compete with free tuition, even if it’s not as good? How about free accreditation?

I have some ideas about some new business models, which I’ve discussed with people such as Rob Paterson, and I’m sure that there are other people looking at this challenge as well.

The amplified individual

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The Institute for the Future published a report last year, that I just came across, on The Future of Work. It discusses the integration of work and technology, which of course is part of my area of focus – learning, work & technology.

Looking at a piece of the Future of Work Map (pdf) I note a good description of many of the themes and issues in my own practice:

future of work - amplified individual
future of work - amplified individual

Theme:
the Amplified Individual

Forecast Clusters:
Highly – Collaborative, Social; Improvisational; Augmented

Dilemma:
Collective Creation vs Individual Recognition

Signals:
Co-working Arrangements; Teamwork in Virtual Environments; Social Filtering; Life Hacks; Visualization Tools

Underlying Technologies:
Sense Making & Visualization; Ubiquitous Displays; Amplified Collaboration Tools

There is a lot of food for thought and frameworks for further discussions on the future of work and what it means to our own work. All three documents are available for free download.