More on democratic workplaces

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A little while back I mentioned democratic workplaces and WorldBlu. Some may find the notion of democracy in the workplace an interesting idea, but not really practical. To change your mind, listen to Ricardo Semler as he explains the flaws of our industrial work structures and what he has done with his company of 1,400 workers who vote for their bosses, only attend meetings that they want to and figure out their own remuneration plan. After 25 years in business, the company has had an average of a 20% rate of return, even with the economic turmoil of its host country, Brazil. It also has only 1% employee turnover.

Semler, author of Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace and The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works, says that historically no real change has ever come from inside an industry. In my mind this questions the whole assumption of letting the market decide what is best for society and gives a very important role to government – forcing innovation on industry, such as more fuel-efficient cars.  He says that the primary key to innovation is intuition, not analysis or faster processing or access to more information.

myopia

The main message of this talk at the MIT Sloan School of Management is that we need to undo our dominant  business models which are the legacy of military hierarchies because they are inefficient, ineffective, and stifle innovation. He uses the automobile industry as an example of an industry that has only made incremental advances in the last 100 years, still relying on the combustion engine and fossil fuels.

Even the ‘new economy’ has been undone by our hierarchies. Semler cites the example that many of us have learned how to send e-mails on a Sunday night but few of us have learned how to go to a movie on a Monday afternoon. As a result, we have unbalanced our lives. During the second half of this 48 minute video/audio Semler gives some examples on how his company has created a truly democratic and competitive company.

Can OpenSocial become OpenLearning?

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One of the problems with our online social networks is that they don’t talk to each other. What is happening in our Ning learning community is walled off from some interesting Facebook groups, though many of us are members of both. With the announcement of OpenSocial, it seems that social networking has just opened up (to Google’s advantage again) enabling developers on the edges to create and connect.

I’ve found that the information technology community has always been years ahead of the educational technology community. There is little that is technologically innovative in any LMS or VLE that doesn’t already exist in enterprise IT. Ed Tech usually follows Info Tech [it’s all about the pedagogy] and I wonder if that means a similar opening up of learning environments, forcing training & education to follow. For instance, Clive Shepherd has been asking for input on Facebook about the use of this platform for learning. Of course, you can’t follow this thread unless you’re a FB user.

If you were investing in educational technology, where would you be putting your money as of today – into a walled garden or an open, worldwide, shared ecosystem? I’ll be interested to see if OpenSocial becomes the learning platform that some thought Facebook could be (as of yesterday) or if there is room for a separate learning-oriented social network.

Update: I like Dave Winer’s not so upbeat perspective on OpenSocial, as well as Dion Hinchcliffe’s Six Essential things you need to know about OpenSocial.

Are you rarefied?

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Hugh Macleod posted a thought-provoking article showing that many workers are just commodities, living out their lives in quiet desperation. A more politically correct term would be “human resources”. It seems that the good ol’ days are over, even for many self-described knowledge workers:

Last week I was on the phone to an old friend of mine, a guy in his late forties, who was born and bred in Michigan, and is living there now. He was telling me about his uncle, who, about four decades ago, got his highschool sweetheart pregnant. So instead of going off to college, he found himself with a new wife, a child on the way, and an assembly-line job at General Motors. But even though this situation clipped his wings considerably, he still ended up having a nice life in the end, with a home, a big yard, two cars, a steady paycheck, weekends fishing or hunting deer, and vacations in Hawaii every year or so. “The days where a blue collar guy like my uncle could have a nice life without doing much,” my friend said, “those days are gone. Gone forever.”

And in the back of my mind, I’m thinking the same is starting to happen to white collar guys more and more, as well. But it’s not quite out in the open yet. Society’s not quite ready to have that conversation.

Hugh has called the need to become unique “de-commodification”, but asks for a new term which has been provided by John Dodds:

You don’t need to decommodify – you need to rarefy.

rarefy
– to make more complex, intricate, or richer.
– to refine a design or pattern.

One other comment, straight to the heart of the matter, was by David St-Lawrence, “Being a commodity is inevitably dehumanizing, no matter how much they pay you.”

That’s the option for many people, isn’t it? Take the cash and the temporary shelter of a job and keep your head down. But you don’t develop your unique brand by doing this and when the day comes that you’re out the door, you’re not ready with a rarefied offering. You’re just one more brick in the wall, to be checked-off by HR, competing against other commodities.

KM & Web 2.0

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How’s that for a geeky title?

Anyway, I took the time yesterday morning to listen to Jon Husband’s podcast interview with Dave Snowden. Let me say that this is worth your time if you’re interested in how knowledge management (KM) can be accomplished in our current technological surround. I intend on listening to this podcast again (thanks, Jon).

I took a few notes but there’s a lot more than this in the interview. Here’s what struck me [my comments in brackets]:

  • The most important word in Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 is “Context” [same for learning, IMO]
  • There should not be any rewards/incentives/money for knowledge work. It should be intrinsic and based on trust. External rewards will only have people gaming the system. [Sounds like every organisation I ever worked in]
  • You cannot create a knowledge-sharing culture, but you can make it easier for people to connect.
  • Knowledge work is not subject to corporate objectives, it is by its nature, “informal” [so informal learning supports knowledge work?]
  • It doesn’t matter what tools you use, because all web 2.0 tools should inter-operate; so why do companies spend time trying to figure out what wiki/blog software to use?
  • Most effective knowledge exists in flows and is contextually created in times of need [makes it difficult to tap and impossible to stick into a database].
  • The major Web 2.0 KM issue is the recall of knowledge in blogs over time (keywords, tags, search, narrative).
  • Dave: “Since I’ve left IBM I’ve had fewer virus attacks working in an open Web environment than I did in a secure corporate environment.”

Update: Jack Vinson and Ray Sims have more commentary on this interview.

Spiders and Starfish

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Reading The Starfish and the Spider only took one day [resting with a cold] and it’s an illuminating book. Spider organizations are those with centralized control and if you cut off the head, the rest will die. In starfish organizations, cutting off one leg will not kill it, because intelligence is distributed throughout the organism. The authors start by examining the two hundred year struggle between the Apache (starfish) and the Spanish Army (spiders), showing how a decentralized Apache nation was almost impossible to conquer because there was no head. A modern day equivalent is Al Quaeda.

What I found most interesting is that the degree of centralization for an optimal organization depends on many factors, so there is no magic recipe [like informal versus formal learning]. Finding what the authors call the “sweet spot” requires constant monitoring of the environment. Today’s sweet spot may be tomorrow’s lost cause.

spider-and-starfish.jpg

One of the five requirements for a successful starfish organization is to have a catalyst. In many ways, I think that is the role I’ve played, or tried to, in various organizations over the years, and it explains why I quickly lost interest in climbing the corporate ladder.

Catalysts are bound to rock the boat. They are much better at being agents of change than guardians of tradition. Catalysts do well in situations that call for radical change or creative thinking. They bring innovation, but they’re also likely to create a certain amount of chaos and ambiguity. Put them into a structured environment and they might suffocate. But let them dream and they’ll thrive. (p. 131)

I would recommend this book, especially the chapters on “The Hybrid Organization” and “In Search of the Sweet Spot”. The book should provide a new lens to look at your organization and its environment, whether it be for-profit, non-profit or a government agency.

If you think that decentralization is not an option for your organization, consider that your employees may strongly disagree, as reported by Ross Dawson:

In the first boom we [WPP Group] lost a lot of our staff to start-ups. When the companies failed, many came back to work for us. At the re-entry interviews, they didn’t say they were grateful to have a job. They said to a man and woman that if they could go back to work in a more unstructured and flexible work environment they’d go in a heartbeat.

Faith & Optimism

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Want to escape from your cubicle? Then read Escape from Cubicle Nation. Yesterday, Pam wrote about the difference between theory and practice in bootstrapping your own business. She discussed all the things that can go wrong and I can relate to them all – projects shutting down; cashflow issues; paperwork; family; etc. However, Pam finished on a high note, noting that attitude is extremely important:

Don’t underestimate the power of faith and optimism. While all the financial basics I mentioned above are critical, belief in yourself and the greater good in the universe is essential to get through tough times. On a practical level, you come across as a confident and positive business partner as you are wooing new clients and financial institutions. And on a metaphysical level, why not call upon all the good, magical, miraculous energy in the universe to help make things happen? On many occasions, I have witnessed unanticipated “miracles” manifested in the form of money coming out of nowhere, the right friends showing up at the right time, and new business opportunities coming from unexpected places. One thing is sure … worrying all the time will do nothing to move your business forward.

Of course, a dose of insanity helps, so I guess I’m OK ;-)

insanity.jpg

Creative Business in the Digital Era

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The Open Rights Group (UK) has created a wiki to collaboratively design a course on building businesses that are more open with their intellectual property:

Right now, this week, we need your ideas. What open-IP business models have you come across? And who is experimenting with opening up their IP? We’re thinking of examples like Radiohead letting their fans decide a fair price for the digital version of their new album. Or Magnatune’s use of Creative Commons licences to allow music buyers to sample songs before they buy. Or writers like Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig and Tom Reynolds giving away their books for free under a CC licence whilst also publishing and charging for print copies. Or websites that produce an API so that others can build third party applications using their data, such as Google Maps. Once we’ve gathered a list of examples, we will pick a few case studies to focus our research on.

The easiest way to help is to add pertinent pages on del.icio.us (tag = org-cbde).

New models for living, working and learning

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This week I’ve noticed that everything seems to come back to our artificially created systems. If I’m waiting for a decision it’s because of poor information flow at some bottleneck in a hierarchy. If I’m not able to take action on an idea that would help many people it’s due to some artificial construct called a regulation or policy. No one is responsible; it’s the system. I feel blocked at every turn and I’m not alone. Mark Federman sums it up best with his thesis pitch:

I make the observation that almost all organizations that we have in our world – be they business corporations, non-profits, volunteer organizations, sewing circles, soccer clubs, schools, religious organizations – they all look like factories. By this I mean that they are Bureaucratic, Administratively controlled and Hierarchical – in other words, BAH! I suggest that this is not because it is human nature to be BAH, but rather this is an artefact of the Industrial Age that was mechanistic (with roots in the Gutenberg Press), industrial, fragmented, and functionally oriented. Now, as I look around, I observe that we are no longer in the Industrial Age. Rather, we are living in a world in which everyone is, or soon will be, connected to everyone else – an age of ubiquitous connectivity. This brings about the effect of being immediately next to, or proximate to, everyone else – in other words, pervasive proximity. I therefore ask the question, what form of organization is consistent with the ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate world of today, rather than with the 19th century?

We are in desperate need of new models for living, working and learning. Rob Paterson has been discussing the messy world that we now live in and how modern armies cannot win against insurgents or stabilize failed states. Dave Pollard & Jon Husband recently talked about the value of leadership. Leaders may be required in hierarchies but are they necessary in wirearchies?

The great work of our time is to design, build and test new organizational models that reflect our democratic values and can function in an inter-connected world. Failure by our generation to do so will leave the next one to deal with the reactionary forces of corporatism; something our children are already facing.

Difficult, unpleasant, messy, but necessary

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I listened to the EdTechTalk Weekly webcast last night; something I’ve missed for several months. The Weekly highlights things of interest to the educational technology community. I noted UNESCO’s listing of free and open source courseware tools as well as a directory of free web and mobile applications (I like free).

There was also a discussion, or perhaps a brouhaha, around James Farmer’s criticisms of EduCon 2.0:

… the real, overarching issue I have with all of this is that it’s humming to the choir and ignoring the difficult, unpleasant, messy and sometimes just darn impossible questions that make up the reality of successful teaching and learning in any different context …

I think that we need more critical discussions in our field and be open to criticism from within. If your friends can’t give call you to task, who can?