looking to the past for the future

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“Pass on what you have learned. Strength, mastery. But weakness, folly, failure also. Yes, failure most of all. The greatest teacher, failure is. Luke, we are what they grow beyond. That is the true burden of all masters.” —Master Yoda, Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Leading by allowing failure is a feature of all the strong female characters in the latest Stars Wars movie. These women rebuke several male characters, while still having positive feelings for them [apologies for the spoiler]. This type of leadership: listening, watching, understanding, and caring stem from our 90,000 year history in oral societies. Our written, print, and digital eras combined, have been much shorter. We should look to the deep past to understand the present and future.

“Swedish scientists have done extensive research on this and they found we first lived in small groups of 20 to 100 people who in any given week averaged 2.5 days for gathering and hunting and 4.5 days on talking. The conclusion they came to from this data was that the brain, the neurological system, and our hormonal systems have had 90,000 years of programming us for talk and collaboration, and only 10,000 years for competition and fighting.” —World Cafe 2007

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connecting work, learning, and life

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The 70:20:10 reference model states that, in general, what we learn at work comes 70% from experience, 20% from exposure to new work, and 10% from formal education. At the 70:20:10 Institute [disclosure: I am a service partner], the basic approach is to start with the 70 (experience) because this is where learning and working are most connected. When we learn as we work, at the moment of need, then we learn in context and we remember what we have learnt.

“70:20:10 uses the performance paradigm to achieve working = learning in the context of the workplace and thus to contribute to the desired organisational results. In our practice we have seen many applications of the learning paradigm in 70:20:10, which is not the intention. The paradigm starts from the idea that skills need to be developed so it begins with the 10 and uses these to flesh out the 20 and 70.

This is a back-to-front approach. In 70:20:10, it’s not learning or the 10 that are central, but rather the principle of working = learning. Here again it is about achieving the desired performance improvement in the context of the individuals or teams who want to work better together.

70:20:10 is about performance enhancement: the performance paradigm starts with the desired organisational results and uses performance consulting to establish what interventions are needed in the 70, 20 and 10 to improve individual and organisational performance. This should not be confused with the learning paradigm approach in which learning is added to working. In the performance paradigms, working = learning is achieved using such models as performance support, microlearning and social learning. This makes it possible to learn at the speed of performance.” — 70:20:10 Institute

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friday’s neutral finds

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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.

US Net Neutrality Debacle will Impact People in Canada

“It’s time to clearly and directly call for Canada’s big telecoms to be split apart so that our telecom networks can be open to a range of independent providers and community-based solutions, operating in a decentralized market. The U.K. and others have adopted this “structural separation” approach to telecom markets, where the old telecom operates parts of the network the network but a range of providers service users.

Let’s be clear – the centralization of wealth and power is increasing in many facets of our society, not just telecommunications. We can’t tweak our way out of this or hope a few enlightened bureaucrats and politicians will stand up to entrenched interests.

Let’s acknowledge the centralization of power that is under way and the deepening democratic deficit that is inherent to that kind of structure. Secondly let’s align towards a common goal of a decentralized economy based on collaboration (not competition), equal opportunity, open participation and shared prosperity.”

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it’s not complicated – review

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“In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists” —Eric Hoffer

A major focus of my work is getting people to think in terms of complexity and understand the difference between complicated and complex systems. I use the Cynefin framework as the main point of reference. In It’s Not Complicated, by Rick Nason, the Cynefin framework is never mentioned but it covers similar territory, namely that much of business is complex and we have, unsuccessfully, been using mostly complicated models and tools to understand business for the past century. As Nason states at the beginning of the book: “Engineers, scientists, and ecologists have been thinking in terms of complexity for fifty years, and it is time that the business community considered some of the valuable and interesting lessons the field has to offer.”

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networked failure and learning

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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.

“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” —W.E. Demming via @DaimenHardie

@projectania: “Don’t just think hierarchy. Think networks of influence. Be prepared to switch from predictability and compliance to disruption and goal-driven surges and back again, depending on the need or context.”

The Jobs that AI will Create – MIT Sloan Review

  • Trainers: “human workers to teach AI systems how they should perform”

  • Explainers: “bridge the gap between technologists and business leaders”

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self-managing for complexity

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“What processes will be effective in helping people to unlearn the disposition or stance that made them successful in the ordered domains of Cynefin?
How can they most effectively learn the skills required in the complex domain?
How do leaders start creating environments that support this transition – if we simply focus on training people, but the environment remains the same, nothing will change.
Many current ‘obvious’ environments are very compliance driven with rigid constraints.
In this transitionary phase, how do we create enabling spaces within these constrained environments?”
—Sonja Blignaut

Let me paraphrase what Sonja has asked. How can we prepare people to work in complex, and not highly ordered, work environments in which most problems are exceptions from which some emergent solutions can be continuously developed, learned, and shared? In a world of organizational compliance training, where following orders is the best practice, how can we get people to come up with their own creative ways of doing work?

This is pretty well what many executives are saying, if you read between the lines. They want creative and critical thinkers, but saddle them with compulsory compliance training. They want people who take the initiative, then create so many rules that there is little room left to even change what time people are at their desk. Even in work environments where workers have some flexibility many are still constrained with a job description, meaning that someone in marketing cannot decide to collaborate with another person in human resources, without getting special permission through a circuitous chain of command. I wrote about this the last time I had a JOB: a four-letter word.

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3000 half-baked ideas

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“The commons is the only genuine alternative today that allows us to build a truly participatory economic production system. The commons can cause a global cultural revolution.” —Yochai Benkler

Starting this blog in 2004 helped me connect with a global audience and share ideas with many people who over the years have become friends and colleagues. I was more optimistic at that time because we were not dealing with constant outrage on social media, fake news, surveillance capitalism, and the extinguishing of net neutrality. Given the online land grab by the platform monopolists it is becoming even more important for individuals to have a space they control on the web. It seems fewer of us are blogging because there are many more convenient options that require less time and thought. But we need thoughtful bloggers, unconstrained by platforms and publishers, now more than ever before. An aggressively engaged citizenry is essential to democracy.

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bias thwarts innovation

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My recent blog post on our future is networked and feminine has had more online attention than any other post I have written in the past two years. I was even asked to change the title, something that has never happened before. For me, the topic is not new, and I have presented these ideas to live audiences many times. I just wanted to get the ideas written out and the references linked. It is a fact that many of our current institutions and workplaces are not favourable to women.

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beta conversation 2017-11-28

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I will be hosting the next Beta Conversation on Tuesday, 28 November at 14:00 UTC. This will be the last one for 2017.

The subject will be understanding media for professional development, management, and leadership. The Harvard Business Review article, The Best Leaders are Constant Learners, provides some background reading. Participants can add their own questions in advance.

The session will be 90 minutes long. For participant confidentiality, these sessions will not be recorded.

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our future is networked and feminine

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TIMN is an explanatory model of how human societies have organized: first in Tribes, later with Institutions added (T+I), and in our current society where Markets dominate (T+I+M). As we enter an era where the Network form (T+I+M+N) gains dominance, most of the previous organizational forms will evolve to adapt to the new form. The Network form puts into question our current market dominated forms, including our institutions and our families. Consider that the nuclear family is no longer the dominant Tribal form in many developed countries. Fewer people have faith in our existing institutions and our capitalist markets are seen as inadequate in distributing wealth. One example is the move to establish a universal basic income in many countries because our markets are unable to effectively distribute wealth.

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