social media: an unrealized opportunity

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“The difference between a community and a network is that you belong to a community, but a network belongs to you. You feel in control. You can add friends if you wish, you can delete them if you wish. You are in control of the important people to whom you relate. People feel a little better as a result, because loneliness, abandonment, is the great fear in our individualist age. But it’s so easy to add or remove friends on the internet that people fail to learn the real social skills, which you need when you go to the street, when you go to your workplace, where you find lots of people who you need to enter into sensible interaction with. Pope Francis, who is a great man, gave his first interview after being elected to Eugenio Scalfari, an Italian journalist who is also a self-proclaimed atheist. It was a sign: real dialogue isn’t about talking to people who believe the same things as you. Social media don’t teach us to dialogue because it is so easy to avoid controversy… But most people use social media not to unite, not to open their horizons wider, but on the contrary, to cut themselves a comfort zone where the only sounds they hear are the echoes of their own voice, where the only things they see are the reflections of their own face. Social media are very useful, they provide pleasure, but they are a trap.” – Zygmunt Bauman

I would rather say that social media can be a trap, but are not by their nature an inevitable one. Social media don’t teach us anything. We have to teach ourselves how to use social media. For the first time in history, 3 billion people are connected to each other. Is this a trap or an unrealized opportunity?

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70:20:10 – towards 100% performance

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Many books provide a good read and then go on the shelf, where they stay. The latest publication from the 70:20:10 Institute, entitled 702010 towards 100% performance, is not that type of book. It should stay on the desk of any learning & development professional and be used as a constant resource. The book is big, in number of pages, size, and content. I was amazed at how much practical information the authors were able to put into it, and how accessible it is.

The book consists of 100 practitioner-focused  articles, many of which provide checklists and examples. It is focused on helping people to implement the reference model. Five roles are identified (not all for traditional L&D professionals) with sections focused on each:

  • Performance Detective
  • Performance Architect
  • Performance Master Builder
  • Performance Game Changer
  • Performance Tracker

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connecting cooperation and collaboration

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According to The Collaboration Paradox: Why Working Together Often Yields Weaker Results, some of the reasons that workplace collaboration fails is due to:

  • overconfidence in our collective thinking;
  • peer pressure to conform; and
  • reliance on others to do the work.

The article goes on to show that collaboration works when:

  • we work with people with different skills;
  • we do what each person does best; and
  • we all contribute our own work.

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talking about the next economy

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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.

@kasthomas – “You have to wonder what happens to ‘official’ unemployment numbers when everyone has two jobs. Do they go negative?”

@kerihw – “How department names change over time: Personnel > Human Resources > Sentient Assets > Flesh Liabilities”

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implementing a useful model – 70:20:10

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The 70:20:10 framework is a useful model based on observations that generally, people learn 70% of what they need to do their job from experience. About 20% is learned from exposure to new tasks or environments. Only 10% is learned through formal education. These numbers are not firm but they provide a rule of thumb, especially for planning and resource allocation to support learning at work.

PKM-connectsThe most important aspect of 70:20:10 is that it requires leadership to hold the space so that workplace learning is connected through experience, exposure, and education.  Leaders have to promote learning and themselves master fast, relevant, and autonomous learning. There is no other way to address the many wicked problems facing us today. If work is learning and learning is the work, then leadership should be all about enabling learning. Holding space means protecting the boundaries so that people can work and learn.

Personal knowledge mastery is the core competency for each person working in the networked era. But organizations have to provide the support and remove barriers to learning. Leaders need to provide the space for learning.

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the core competency for network era work

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I developed the personal knowledge mastery (PKM) framework of Seek > Sense > Share from a need to stay current as a working professional. As a framework it is not a defined set of practices nor a recipe book, as there are many unique PKM routines. Since first writing about PKM in 2004, I have continuously worked at improving the model, identifying emergent practices and tools, and promoting the need to let people manage their own learning in the workplace. My conclusions in 2004 remain today:

My conclusion for a while has been that knowledge cannot be managed, and neither can knowledge workers. It will take a new social contract between workers and organizations in order to create an optimally functioning enterprise. Adding management and technology won’t help either. This is the crux of everything in the new “right-sized, lean, innovative, creative” economy – getting the right balance between the organizational structure and the knowledge workers.

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it’s about the network

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“Network thinking lets us scientifically understand the world around us as one of connections that shape observed phenomena, rather than as one where the intrinsic properties of people, genes, or particles determine outcomes. Like previous scientific revolutions, the network revolution also has the promise of reshaping our basic commonsense expectations of the world around us, and may allow us to recognize that we are not a basically individualistic, asocial, and quarrelsome creature that comes in bounded linguistic, ethnic, racial, or religious types, but a social species linked to one another by far-reaching network ties.” – How Networks Are Revolutionizing Scientific (and Maybe Human) Thought – Scientific American

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on the net without a net

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I have spent the past 20 years figuring out what changes the internet era might bring. During the last 12 years I’ve run a web-powered business. What have I learned as a freelancer on the Net? First of all I am lucky that blogging gave me an international reputation, and that I started early enough. But all the benefits from blogging have been indirect. It is impossible to proactively increase sales through this model. Word of mouth travels at its own speed and in unknown directions. All things come in time: usually a long time.

I have found that business value keeps shifting. I used to get paid well to help companies select new learning technologies. I have not done that type of work for over five years. I have also seen organizations move away from using external consultants. I think the entire consulting model is ripe for disruptive change. When LinkedIn advertises ex-McKinsey consultants available for $60 per hour, you know that it’s an obsolete business model.

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walking to extinction

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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 price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” – Henry David Thoreau – via @dennisdenktmee

@hvaelama – “get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social behaviors that will avoid extinction.”

@monkchips – “holacracy is Greek for bullshit, right?”

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best finds of 2015

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Every second Friday I review what I’ve noted on social media and post a wrap-up of what caught my eye. I do this as a reflective thinking process and to put what I’ve learned on a platform I control: this blog. Here are what I consider the best of Friday’s Finds for 2015.

Quotes

“All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” – Friedrich Nietzsche – via @surreallyno

@ericgarland – “Humility is often painful, but arrogance is always fatal.”

@willrich45 – Engagement: “Not a metric for learning. A prerequisite.”

“I think it’s a discovery all artists make: the most interesting and bravest work is likely the hardest to make a living from.” – @berkun

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”  — Upton Sinclair – via @jerrymichalski

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