25-10-3

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An understanding of the research on how and why groups of people change can lead to better ways of organizing as a society or an organization. For instance, small groups of committed individuals who want to influence society need a significant presence to make that change happen: twenty-five percent.

“When a minority group pushing change was below 25% of the total group, its efforts failed. But when the committed minority reached 25%, there was an abrupt change in the group dynamic, and very quickly the majority of the population adopted the new norm … “And if they’re just below a tipping point, their efforts will fail. But remarkably, just by adding one more person, and getting above the 25% tipping point, their efforts can have rapid success in changing the entire population’s opinion.” —Science Daily 2018

However, if the people have an unshakeable belief, such as religious zealots or fervent believers, then you need fewer committed people: ten percent.

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artificially intelligent

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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.

@Tom_Peters: “Networks increase your ability to get things, especially complex things, done. Period. And if well developed, they do make you more powerful. Period. Like anything else on earth, they can be used for good or for ill.”

Enabling adaptive space, by @sonjabl

“Pressure and crisis tend to open up adaptive space naturally – I often hear stories of how cross-silo collaboration happens spontaneously when a crisis occurs. The problem is our natural tendency to impose order when under pressure. Organisations that have healthy adaptive processes respond from a complex paradigm and enable adaptive space where the tension between exploration and exploitation is productive even in the midst of external and internal pressures.”

Will AI replace KM?

“Also AI and Big Data still only work in the realm of documents, information and data, and in the processes of analysing and retrieving; they don’t help with the transfer and creation of knowledge through conversation, or with tacit knowledge. So AI will be a massively powerful tool in the KM toolbox, but it won’t replace the toolbox. We will need the roles and the processes and the governance to interplay with the technology. KM shifts up a gear, but still will be needed.”

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fifteen years

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Today marks fifteen years of self-employment. After two years I had noted that my business was good enough for some cheeses but still too young for most wines. Today I’m a very old chunk of cheese but a much better wine, I hope.

By the four-year mark I had experienced clients not paying me and one going bankrupt before paying me. I had many slow periods which I attributed to my location and the lack of face to face meetings. I would say this is still the case. On marking my fifth anniversary I noted that I now had a great international community of bloggers, from whom I keep learning, though the comments on our blog posts are much less frequent today.

At the seven-year point I took a full-time job but kept the business open, with some blogging and a web conference or two. I also gave some freelancing advice. That job lasted six months and then it was back to the financial roller coaster of ups & downs which continues to this day. Once I hit 10 years, in 2013, I decided to write a compilation of my thoughts here. Seeking Perpetual Beta was the first of the perpetual beta series which now counts five volumes. I followed this with a quick summary of 10 thoughts in 10 years.

On my 13th anniversary I reiterated my commitment to democratic workplaces in democratic societies. I wrote that interconnected and engaged citizens are our hope for a better future. We need to learn how to navigate the emerging network era. People have to take control of their learning: being connected, mobile, and global while conversely contractual, part-time, and local.

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autonomous workers in learning organizations

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The Learning Organization

Continued from mastery & models.

Harvard Business Review described The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge, as one of the seminal management books of the previous 75 years. The five disciplines necessary for a learning organization are:

  • Personal Mastery
  • Mental Models
  • Shared Vision
  • Team Learning
  • Systems Thinking (which integrates the other four)

Personal Mastery

Mastery comes through deliberate practice. Personal knowledge mastery is the ability to see patterns hidden to the undisciplined eye. It is the sharing and explaining of implicit knowledge in order to push the boundaries of understanding. PKM is very much based on informal learning through communities of practice and professional social networks.

Mental Models

A model is not a map but a compass that can help guide organizations. It takes time to understand these models and use them to inform our work. But they are necessary for complex work and essential as the organization gets larger.

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human capital

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“No, people are NOT capital. YOUR ‘human capital’ is what you’ve learned and not forgotten. It’s ‘capital’ each person ‘owns’ themselves; FAR more equally distributed than financial capital. Our economy needs institutions to make learning and earning better for those with less money.” —Byron Auguste

In firms that are ‘human capital-intensive’, “Should employees be shareholders?”

With context-specific human capital, the productivity of a particular individual depends not just on being part of a firm, but on being part of a particular group of people engaged in a particular task.

More importantly, once acquired, knowledge and skills that are specialized are assets that are at risk following the very same logic as that by which financial assets are at risk.

Is human capital then conceptually the same as financial capital and should investors in firm specific human capital also be seen as principals? Should employees be shareholders? Should capitalism accordingly create a much larger number of capitalists? —Esko Kilpi

Our human capital is a combination of our skills & knowledge, reputation, and social capital. This social capital is based on expertise and my relationships. Workers — human capital — are multi-faceted complex social beings who create the real value for creative and knowledge-based organizations. The greatest enemies of human organizations are our accounting methods, as I noted in automation + capitalism = a perfect storm. Our bookkeeping practices and capitalist systems are the main culprits in edging out human labour in favour of technological and financial capital.

The foundation for organizational knowledge is the human capital of each and every worker (expertise & relationships). This is increased as people work together (decisions & processes). What the organization sees and accounts for (events & outputs) is only the tip of the iceberg.

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knowledge filters revisited

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The concept of filtering sources of knowledge has informed the personal knowledge mastery framework for many years, as explained here in knowledge filters (2011). Recently, a “CBC News investigation found that a YouTube channel devoted to putting misleading headlines on TV stories from other stations is getting recommended more often than many mainstream news outlets.” Given the current general election in Ontario, this could be a concern for our democratic processes. But the real culprit is that our society — especially elected officials, educators, and businesses — has done little to promote real media literacy. We need better information, knowledge, and opinion filters, and nobody will give them to us. We have to create them ourselves.

Let’s review the types of filters that Tim Kastelle so kindly shared in 2010.

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capitalist algorithms

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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.

“The Edge … There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.” —Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels, 1966, via @moehlert

@deehock: “Unrecorded thoughts are fragmentary, illusive and evanescent. When recorded they take on permanency, enabling us to give them context, discover error, improve content and refine expression.”

“The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don’t you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good. The good is no longer even being measured.” —Hannah Arendt, via @cyetain

@white_owly: “I once completed a psych test for a job I didn’t want (long story). So I self-sabotaged and answered ‘yes’ to ‘are you happier when people fail than when they succeed?’ and ‘no’ to ‘do you consider yourself a team player?’. I then got invited to the final interview.”

“Susan Sontag was asked what she had learned from the Holocaust, and she said that 10% of any population is cruel, no matter what, and that 10% is merciful, no matter what, and that the remaining 80% could be moved in either direction” —Kurt Vonnegut, via @holdengraber

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no more email subscriptions

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There are several ways to subscribe to this blog and I have just removed two: Feedburner (Google), and Webfish.

This will be the last post you receive via email as I am cancelling subscriptions and deleting all subscribers in the next 24 hours.

Update: There is now an email subscription service in the navigation bar. No data is shared with third parties.

Why am I doing this?

1. I do not agree with Google’s business model and how they are a key part of a global surveillance system. In the past year I have deleted Google Analytics from this site and I have moved my email from Gmail to Fastmail.

2. I do not want to share my subscriber list with third parties who may also share this data.

3. Webfish is no longer online, so I do not know what is happening with the data.

4. I know there are better ways to subscribe to blog posts.

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making your education

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When I first encountered the web I was certain it would change the world. Today there is little doubt that networked society is developing into a very different world than the pre-internet days. My personal knowledge mastery (PKM) framework developed out of a need to master the exponentially growing information flows and personal connections enabled by digital networks. I developed my own ways to Seek > Sense > Share information, knowledge, and experiences. This framework is now used by many other people around the globe. I created my PKM methods out of necessity 14 years ago. Today, sensemaking frameworks are needed by everyone. As Steven B. Johnson says, “Chance favours the connected mind”. This has never been more true in our connected world.

The writers of Age of Discovery say that we are living in a period similar to the Renaissance of the early 1500’s. “I am still learning,” Michelangelo said in his eighties. He and Leonardo da Vinci epitomized the Renaissance, pushing against traditional boundaries and expanding knowledge and understanding. The Renaissance brought wonderful new discoveries (universities, astronomy, print) as well as new challenges (the pox, war, mass slavery). Our age is bringing similar discoveries (nano materials, gene therapy, artificial intelligence) and new threats (Ebola, extremism, climate change).

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agile sensemaking

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“Complex environments represent a continuous challenge for sensemaking in organizations. Continuous ambiguity exerts continuous pressures on organizations to modify their patterns of interaction, information flow and decision making. Organizations struggle to address situations that are precarious, explanations that are equivocal and paradoxical, and cognitive dilemmas of all kinds. This creates a demand for innovative approaches in sensemaking. Since agility is what is required in navigating complexity, we can call these new approaches ‘agile sensemaking.'” —Bonnita Roy

Working in complex environments requires constant sensemaking, connecting outside the organization with the work being done inside. Increasing awareness of new ideas, methods, and processes often comes through serendipitous encounters outside the workflow. Radical innovation can appear here. Radical innovation only comes from diverse networks with large structural holes, according to Steve Borgatti. This is why our social networks cannot also be our work teams, or they become echo chambers. In our work teams we can focus on incremental innovation, to get better at what we already do. This is collaboration. Communities of practice then become a bridge on this network continuum.

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