zoom is not the problem — meetings are

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When all you have is Zoom, every work-from-home office looks like an endless face-to-face video call. I have been working remotely since 2003. Video calls have been a regular part of my work and I have used pretty well every platform available. In the early days my favourite platform was Marratech, until they were bought by Google and some of the technology created Hangouts. But video communication was only part of my work.

Asynchronous communication — threaded discussions, blogs, and wikis — was always part of my work conversations. Writely — which became Google Docs — was a great tool and helped our distributed team, from British Columbia to New Brunswick, write the specifications for the Pan-Canadian Online Learning Portal. This was the first time that all the Ministers of Education had agreed to do something together. But CMEC cancelled the project after a vendor was selected. It would be interesting to see how the current pandemic would have been handled by schools, with a national online learning resource already in place and with over 10 years of experience. But I digress. Let’s just say that technology is not usually the issue in the workplace — it’s how the technology is used.

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the reality of missing out

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When Tim Berners-Lee invented the Worldwide Web he made it free and open source, so others could build upon it. In the early days it was quite open with individuals sharing knowledge through blogging and collectively building knowledge with wikis, the largest being Wikipedia. But as more people joined the web two things happened.

Commercial forces found ways to monetize their audiences. They built attractive ways for people to get online as easily as possible. They even hired psychologists and anthropologists to study human behaviour and then devised ways to manipulate it. They aggregated this data and used it to sell targeted advertising. All the giants on the internet use targeted advertising — Amazon, Google, and especially Facebook.

Meanwhile, many people found blogs to be too much work, and wikis to be confusing. They wanted convenience so that they could connect with their grandchildren. Facebook was the solution. It was convenient and allowed easy sharing and connections. But convenience, like a principle, has a cost.

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lockdown

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Every fortnight — now known as a decade — I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence, it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” —Peter Drucker

But in our knowledge economy, says Drucker, “if you haven’t learned how to learn, you’ll have a hard time. Knowing how to learn is partly curiosity. But it’s also a discipline.”

@mathemagenic — “When experts open up and become part of sense-making networks, their expertise travels to become part of informed choices of non-experts. It’s a better option than pushing packaged solutions via authority lines assuming that people are not able to understand complex matters.”

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beyond civil society, governments, and markets

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Binary thinking is an easy sell. It appeals to our emotions which we developed as children. Binary thinking blinds us. It’s not black and white, or right and wrong, or even Left and Right. Human society is many shades along various spectra. But often politicians and others tell us it’s a simple, binary choice — ”You’re either with us, or with the terrorists.’‘ —President George W. Bush (2001)

Thinking of our society as only Markets and Government (Institutions) ignores the influence and potential of families, communities, and the volunteer sector.  For instance, Public-Private Partnerships are not inclusive. They ignore the Civil sector.

“Every day I’m told our society, our system, has two sectors: the public sector and the private sector — the former referring to government and its agencies, the latter to the market system and its businesses. I’m also told that one sector or the other, or both in partnership, say as a public-private hybrid, offers the best way to deal with this or that domestic policy problem.

Our politicians, policymakers, and media commentators constantly rely on this public-private framework when they talk about fixing America’s health, education, childcare, housing, welfare, infrastructure, energy, communications, and environmental issues. Some proposals call for broader government programs; others urge more privatization; a few recommend improving public-private collaboration.” —David Ronfeldt

Incorporating the third sector, civil society, into decision making is becoming evident in our connected world, especially with an ongoing pandemic.

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time to change the world

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Universities may be going online temporarily, or perhaps permanently, but the curriculum does not seem to have changed. What should be taught at university is how to learn once out of university. In 2013, Jane Hart and I worked with Bangor University in Wales to incorporate personal knowledge mastery into the Psychology curriculum.

We started by working with the faculty:

  • Strategies for using social tools for personal and professional learning
  • Understanding the seek > sense > share framework
  • Personal network mapping
  • Where and how to build your professional network

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time for re-schooling

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A lot of parents have become teachers during this pandemic as they work from home and their children learn online. I have heard many parents say how difficult teaching is and how they have new-found respect for teachers. But are we getting the best and brightest to educate the next generation?

And now we have the data to prove it. According to “Academically Adrift,” a new book by my New York University colleague Richard Arum and the University of Virginia’s Josipa Roksa, just 45 percent of students in education and social work reported taking a course in the previous semester requiring more than 20 pages of writing, while 61 percent took a class with more than 40 pages of reading per week. By comparison, 68 percent of social science and humanities students took a class with 20 pages of writing, and 88 percent had a class with 40 pages of weekly reading.

So it shouldn’t surprise us that students in education and social work reported studying less, too: 10.6 hours per week, as opposed to 12.4 hours in the social sciences and the humanities. The hardest workers are science and math majors, who study 14.7 hours a week. —CSMonitor 2011-03-02

Well, anecdotally, I know of several university students who failed in the sciences and then went into education. I have a Master’s degree in adult education, and of the over 200 students in my graduating class, only two of us wrote a thesis. The rest took two additional courses and did not have to face a thesis defence.

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optimizing distributed work

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Now that distributed work has become the norm — permanently for some and temporarily for others — there are two things any organization can do to work, learn, and innovate in internet time.

  1. Optimize meetings for a digital workplace
  2. Help all workers become knowledge catalysts

Back in 2008 I noted that cooperating, reflecting, and supporting each other are necessary for groups of knowledge workers to collectively achieve common objectives. That year, my colleague Jay Cross surveyed 237 workers from various countries and in different sized organizations. They identified a number of key issues preventing them from doing their best work.

  • a lack of cooperation
  • no time for reflection
  • no ability to create DIY tools for work
  • no communities of practice for support
  • lack of professional development
  • poor training
  • working in organizations that are slow to change

I have no doubt that the same survey today would yield similar results.

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learning in the time of corona

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Here are two important questions to ask ourselves as we work remotely and connect digitally.

1. Where do we go for trusted information on matters important to us?

2. Who do we talk to when we have to make difficult decisions?

Sharing complex knowledge requires trust, and trust takes time. We can start by connecting with people in social networks to learn from, and finding communities to improve our professional practices. Trusted knowledge networks are a professional safety net when problems are non-linear and situations are complex.

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changing patterns of connectedness

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Every fortnight — now known as a decade — I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

The Fourth Doctor — “The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: they don’t alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views, which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.” via @GarethLPower

@alexia — “If you are the smartest person in the Zoom, then you are in the wrong Zoom.”

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creative desperation for desperate times

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My personal knowledge mastery framework was a result of creative desperation. I had just lost my job. My wife was a stay-at-home mother, we had two young children, and we live in a remote economically depressed part of the country. I had spent the last five years working for a learning technologies research centre and then an e-learning start-up. Suddenly I was a freelancer, physically disconnected from any potential clients. It was 1,000 km to the nearest major urban centre.

Gary Klein’s research in, Seeing What Others Don’t, identified five general ways that we gain insights.

  1. Curiosity
  2. Connections
  3. Coincidences
  4. Contradictions
  5. Creative Desperation

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