the relationship era

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“In the agrarian age of the 19th century, when schools meant one-room rural schoolhouses, teaching morality and morals and character was all important. That’s because society needed, and so demanded, good moral character.”—Nineshift

Not so long ago ‘gee’ was an offensive word in the USA. It was considered to be short for Jesus. But a focus on morality shifted to a focus on responsibility, as we entered the factory era, where timeliness was necessary to keep the machines moving. We are nearing the end of this era, but its influence is still in our schools.

So today ‘responsibility’ means:
* Being present, not absent.
* Showing up on time.
* Handing in your homework on time.
—Nineshift

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more on meetings

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I listened to a podcast recently where Steven Rogelberg was interviewed about his 2019 book — The Surprising Science of Meetings. I think that meetings are prime areas of opportunity for workplace performance improvement. For example, optimizing meetings can make time for learning. So I reviewed Rogelberg’s web page that provides links to podcasts, interviews, and references in various media. Here are some of the highlights.

Why meetings?

“In many ways, meetings are the building blocks and core elements of our organizations. They are the venues where the organization comes to life for employees, teams, and leaders.” —Steven Rogelberg

Meeting managers

“The people who love meetings are the managers who run them.” —Quartz 2019

“In 1973, Canadian business management expert Henry Mintzberg was among the first to examine the problem [frustrations with meetings]. His book ‘The Nature of Managerial Work’ found that more than half of managers’ time in his sample was spent in meetings.” —CNBC 2015

Making meetings better

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making time for learning

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For over a decade I have promoted the idea that work is learning & learning is the work. It seems the idea has now gone mainstream, as it’s even noted in Forbes that, “Work and learning will become analogous”. It is much easier to just say that workflow learning is essential rather than putting in the structures and practices that can enable it. There are many structural barriers to learning in the workplace that have been established and embedded over the past century.

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the knowledge artisan

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An artisan is skilled in a craft and uses specialized tools or machinery. Artisans were the dominant producers of goods before the Industrial Revolution. Knowledge artisans are similar to their pre-industrial counterparts, especially when it comes to tools. Knowledge artisans not only design the work but they can do the work. It is not passed down an assembly line.

Augmented by technology, they rely on their networks and skills to solve complex problems and test new ideas. Small groups of highly productive knowledge artisans are capable of producing goods and services that used to take much larger teams and more resources. Many integrate marketing, sales, and customer service with their creations.

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media and massages

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

I just had the dumbest fight of my professional career, which I assure you is saying something, and there’s not a day we actually disagreed. We just hadn’t talked voice.

Oh. Well then.

Talk. No really. Actually talk. Don’t play telephone. Pick up the telephone. Lunch. TALK.

Text has enough bandwidth to escalate conflict between humans, but not enough bandwidth to de-escalate. Base assumptions — what people actually want — can get wrong and stay wrong really easily, without low latency, high metadata exchange.

Never fight over text. —@dankami

@johnrobb — “Incoherence makes group decision making impossible … Incoherence arises from a ​distrust of information​ (due to misinformation/bias), a ​distrust of messengers ​ (due to a loss of fictive kinship), and a ​distrust of the medium ​ (due to corporate interference).”

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the internet and democracy

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I got off Facebook about 10 years ago. I know that this has had no impact on the company or its business model. When I saw in 2007 that Facebook was selling user information, I knew I could not stay on the platform much longer. But the lure of network effects, where it takes almost no effort to connect with other people, is too powerful for most of us.

Facebook is convenient. For most businesses it is suicide not to be on Facebook. It is an extremely convenient way to connect all your online communication and most of your digital content consumption. It is so convenient that it is the only way some people connect online. In thinking about Facebook, I noted that we may be heading toward a platform-dominated global social network that will not only shape our behaviour but narrow the scope of our humanity.

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countering populism

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I would say that populism is the first refuge of a scoundrel and a literate, engaged, and networked citizenry gives no such refuge. But education alone is not the answer to the constant outrage we are witnessing as many societies polarize on political lines. Even highly educated people can be bigots, racists, and misogynists. Society’s answer to populism is not a return to the old ways, nor an ironic post-modern shrug, but rather a new meta-modernity — multi-layered, relational, and global.

Slovakia’s president, Zuzana Caputova elected in March 2019, suggests a way out of the populist quagmire. The answer is to be calm, rational, and to embrace others, much like a universal mother.

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filter success

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Clay Shirky’s statement — “It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure” — is an oft-quoted line when discussing online sensemaking. I was discussing filters last week during an interview on personal knowledge mastery which will be used to inform a program we are developing for a client organization, a large global corporation. The interview reminded me that it’s time to refine my work on knowledge filters because times have changed since I first wrote up the work of Tim Kastelle and his five forms of filtering in 2011. I slightly revised these knowledge filters in 2018 and recently discussed the importance of trusted filters.

One current challenge with machine filters (heuristic & algorithmic) is that in most cases the end-user does not know what logic or code is driving them. One machine filter that many of us use is Google Translate, which you could say is either the result of the wisdom of crowds, or the blind leading the blind — you choose.

“The main issue is the mechanism used by Google Translate itself. It does not actually translate anything, but it scours the web for similar or identical translations performed in the past, constantly learning and building upon what it has learned. This might sound great, but this also means that any time you plug your word, phrase or paragraph, or upload a document into Google Translate, it then becomes public domain.” —Robert Gebhardt

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change takes time and effort

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The idea that generalists and soft skills are needed in the modern workplace seems to be hitting the mainstream of HR, L&D, etc. I have written about these for the past decade or more, and I think it’s necessary to clarify some of the discussion.

1. Wicked problems need neo-generalists

Neo-generalists defy common understanding. They cross boundaries, and some break them. They see patterns before others do. They go against hundreds of years of cultural programming. I doubt this is what most employers in large organizations are looking for. But neo-generalists are necessary today — “It is through the hybridization of and cross-pollination between such disciplines [science & humanities] that we will arrive at solutions for our wicked problems.” Hiring and developing generalists will not be enough.

2. A centuries old schism is not addressed overnight

E.O. Wilson, in The Origins of Creativity, envisages a third enlightenment that will bring us closer to seeing humanity as one common group, uniting fields of knowledge. But how many in the humanities have deep science skills, and vice versa?

“Scientists and scholars in the humanities, working together, will, I believe serve as the leaders of a new philosophy, one that blends the best and most relevant from these two branches of learning.”

Recombining the sciences and the humanities will take some time. In the meantime, cross-disciplinary teams may be more practical.

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from training to learning

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While social learning may be one of the currently hot new trends in the education and training fields, we have known for a while “why tried-and-true training methods don’t work anymore”, as discussed by Brigitte Jordan (1937-2016) in the mid-1990’s while working at the Institute for Research on Learning. Here are the highlights — From Training to Learning in the New Economy.

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