Learning

Learning

Trust is an emergent property of effective networks

by

It seems that markets, our dominant form of economic transactions, are not really designed to optimize trust. As Charles Green states:

The reason is simple: trust is not a market transaction, it’s a human transaction. People don’t work by supply and demand, they work by karmic reciprocity. In markets, if I trust you, I’m a sucker and you take advantage of me. In relationships, if I trust you, you trust me, and we get along. We live up or down to others expectations of us.

We currently organize around Tribal models, plus Institutions, plus Markets. In the 21st century, Networks are becoming the next dominant organizing model, as explained by David Ronfeldt in this diagram.

As the Network organizational model comes to dominance, I think we will see a return to trust as a lubricant of social and economic exchanges. Trust is an emergent property of effective networks.

If trust is a sign of healthy networks then, as Charles Green says, we are teaching the wrong things at school and at work.

Our public education and culture is loaded with the free-market versions of trust. We teach, “If you’re not careful they will screw you.” We passcode-protect everything. We are taught to suspect the worst of everyone, be wary of every open bottle of soda, watch out for ingredients on any bottle.

Then in business school, we are taught that if customers don’t trust you, you need to convince them you are trustworthy – partly by insisting on our trustworthiness.  You can’t protest enough for that to work: in fact, guess the Two Most Trust-Destroying Words You Can Say.

I have noted that there is significant difference between cooperation and collaboration, with the former often overlooked in the workplace. Collaboration works well when the rules (like markets) are clear, and we know who we are working with (suppliers, partners, customers). However, in networks, someone may be our supplier one day and our customer the next. Cooperation is a better behavioural norm because it strengthens the entire network, not just an individual node. Cooperation is also a major factor in personal knowledge management, for we each need to share and trust, as our part of the social business (learning) contract.

In the network era, trust will become much more important, and it is not something that, once lost, we may be able to regain in a world where the network remembers everything, for a very long time. It truly is becoming a global village, for better and for worse. Trust should be taught, discussed, promoted, and practised, in schools and in business.

Subverting management and education, one project at a time

by

I have been described as “a keen subversive of the last century’s management and education models”, a description I like. It’s a difficult business model though. That’s why I joined with my colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance in 2009. I finally had a close professional group to discuss nascent ideas. Our latest work is on the coherent organization.

We work together on projects, public speaking, workshops, and writing. I am starting to think that our customers and our clients are diverging. The people who could really use our help are managers and individual knowledge workers. For example, we have had incredibly positive feedback from individuals attending our workshops at the Social Learning Centre. We intend to continue to grow this community.

However, organizational budgets are often controlled by people who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Requests for Proposals are usually aligned to a certain solution type. For instance, asking for advice on selecting the appropriate LMS does not ask the deeper question of why you need an LMS in the first place. Requesting help to add informal learning learning to formal instruction does not look at whether the training courses are actually useful to begin with. As my colleague Charles Jennings says, knowing is not doing.

The thinking that hard-wires ‘knowing’ to ‘learning’ has set our efforts to build high-performing organisations back many years.

Learning and knowing sometimes coincide, but they are different beasts.

There is still a huge focus on ‘knowing’ in organisational learning. We build formal classroom courses and eLearning programmes that consist of pre-tests and post-tests. We then assume that if we gain a higher score after some formal learning process (almost invariably assessed through a test/examination/certification based on knowledge recall) than we did before, then learning has occurred.

Most of us know deep down that this is bunk.

Passing knowledge tests immediately following a course tells us little about real learning. It may tell us something about short-term memory recall, but real learning can only be determined by observable long-term changes in behaviour.

I often feel like a doctor in the days before diagnostics. The preferred solutions were the prettiest or the most expensive (and least effective). In this kind of system, it took a long time for doctors to start washing their hands or give up on practices like blood-letting. I was told by someone at a large multinational company that it is easier to hire a brand-name consulting firm to deliver what many in the company know they do not need, than to engage a much cheaper and more effective group like the Internet Time Alliance to try a novel approach. In many ways, it seems that the brands have successfully mounted the bandwagon. What they lack in skills and experience, they make up in marketing.

But every once in a while we meet a client who is open to innovative ideas, or at least trying a few probes in the spirit of addressing complexity. These clients have self-confidence and a sense of adventure. They are not afraid of the concept of failure. If something is guaranteed to be a success, it should not require much attention from management anyway.

We are not just an alliance amongst ourselves but we are building a wider network of individuals and organizations who know that we should create better work environments for society in the network era. We have learned that complex problems require different thinking and innovative solutions. There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution. We know that each organization’s situation is not only different, it is continually changing. We are not your average consultancy. But who would want one in times of great change anyway?

Supporting workplace learning

by

It takes much more than courses delivered through a learning management system to support workplace learning in the network era.

The basic building block, in my experience, is personal knowledge management. People who can seek new information, make sense of it, and share it with their colleagues, will be an asset to any work team. However, they need access to their learning networks while at work, and this is often a challenge. Reduce these barriers, and support PKM practices, and the organization will benefit.

Performance support tools can be developed by observing how work gets done and then creating ways to make it easier, or simpler, or safer. Good performance support enables workers to focus on the important things.

Communities of practice provide the bridge between new ideas and the workplace status quo, ensuring innovation.

Professional networks outside our workplaces keep us connected to new ideas and diverse opinions, which we may not come across, even in large organizations.

I haven’t mentioned knowledge management in general, because I think it underlies all of these components. As Patti Anklam explains:

In this last, the role of the corporation in supporting KM then becomes facilitating personal content management, providing methods (and training) to support information processing, and providing a rich and integrated infrastructure for employees to use the personal content management and the social tools that make sense for each them, their teams, and their communities.

 

Learning by doing

by

What does life in perpetual Beta mean for your business on the internet?

First of all, there is no real privacy online [Cluetrain Thesis #13 – There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.]

But … social media are very powerful business tools.

Understand your business first, and then understand social media.

Then set negotiable boundaries and be flexible.

It’s all about Probes [as in Probe-Sense-Respond]

How to launch a Probe, such as a community of practice:

1. What are you testing?
2. How will you know if you have made progress?
3. What is the smallest probe we can do?
4. Measure the results.
5. Do it again, and again, with slight variations as needed.
6. Measure the results and either amplify it or stop doing it.

Ensure that over 50% of your probes fail.

Is this how your organization functions? What are doing to encourage failure and learning by doing?

Here is how Jane Hart and I have been doing some probes this past year.

We started running workshops at the Social Learning Centre after a discussion about getting connected with our actual customers. For example, in most consulting projects, the client is a manager/exectutive but the end-users are distributed throughout the company. The client may be satisfied but we often do not get to interact with all of the actual users. We thought we would like to try something different from a standard consulting arrangement.

We thought it would be good to try something that could be purchased directly by individuals. Jane had done some online workshops previously and had learned what works and what doesn’t, though this is constantly changing, as we have learned. I did my first workshop on personal knowledge mastery in April and  35 people signed up. I learned that there was an additional need for a live meeting that would get people talking a bit more, so this was added. I ran two more workshops on PKM and kept adjusting the schedule and resources. It was definitely popular. Jane and I then tried out a five-week Summer Camp that finishes this week. This was something quite new and a real joint effort. We learned that it’s a lot easier to do these workshops as a team.

As these workshops progressed, we wondered if this was the best way to reach out and if we could build a larger community. There are currently +1,700 members registered at the SLC, so we had an idea that some of them were looking for what we can offer in the way of workshops. In slightly over two weeks (September 2012), we are launching a full year of workshops, with six themes, a Summer camp, and a private Salon for discussions amongst community members. Themes are: PKM; social media for professional development; from training to performance support; online communities; social learning in business; and enterprise community management.

We don’t know how this will go, as it is another probe. It’s based on what we have learned so far, but we don’t kid ourselves that this will be a huge success. The feedback to date has been quite positive, so we are confident that most participants will gain something. We are doing it for one year, and during that time we will assess, monitior and evaluate our progress. Where it will lead, we do not know.

My hope is that the Social Learning Centre will become a dynamic community that we can support and guide with a gentle hand. Dealing with people who are directly paying you is a validating experience. Repeat customers mean you are doing something right. As people can vote with their feet, we will have to stay connected to the needs of community members. This year has been a wonderful learning experience for me and I am sure that next year will be as well.

By the way, if you are looking for an example of a failed probe, one workshop I proposed three years ago, has never been conducted.

Let the droids do the boring stuff

by

Is simpler work getting automated and outsourced? I think so. That leaves complex and creative work that continue to be in demand, and even increase. Work that has a high degree of task standardization is getting replaced by machines, and this trend will only accelerate.

Andrew McAfee discusses technology’s impact on the labour force in a TEDx Boston presentation, particularly 1) language translation (already here & growing) and 2) automated vehicles (coming soon). If something as complex as translating an article or negotiating a vehicle in heavy traffic is already being automated, how many of today’s jobs will go that way? There will be less demand for standardized human labour, and the whole notion of a standard job will quietly go away. The end of Taylorism cannot come soon enough, in my opinion.

McAfee says that networked computers are as revolutionary as was the steam engine, in how they change the way people do work. The steam engine overcame our physical limitations and computers will help us overcome our cognitive limitations. Here’s why, says McAfee:

  • economies run on ideas, which drive innovation
  • computers are making innovation more open and inclusive (especially for the bottom of the pyramid)
  • technology is freeing us to do better things and this trend will increase

We are not just losing standardized work tasks but we are gaining the tools and the time to do greater task variety, and of our own choosing. Networked computers allow us to learn informally and share tacit knowledge, leaving the boring stuff to the droids. Probably our greatest limitation is our ability to cast away our old ideas about how we learn. We need to think for ourselves and take advantage of network technologies, wider social connections, improved peer interactions, and informal learning. Economies run on ideas, not assembly lines. Work is learning, and learning is the work.

Idea management requires shared power

by

Nancy Dixon discusses The Three Eras of Knowledge Management, an excellent read on how lead organizations are using idea management. This post confirms, in my mind, the three principles of net work, or how work gets done in the network era. The description of convening  is similar to openness, though in the explanation below, it is a more deliberate process than what might be thought of as a community of practice. .

The NASA example illustrates the three enablers of the third era, 1) convening, 2) cognitive diversity and 3) transparency.

1. Convening
Convening is the skill and practice of bringing groups together to develop understanding of complex issues, create new knowledge and spur innovation. It is about:
• designing meetings as conversations rather than presentations
• identifying who needs to be in the conversation, including those who do the work and are impacted by it
• framing the question in a way that opens thinking
• arranging the space to facilitate conversation
• using small groups as the unit of learning
I have written about convening and the role of the leader in The Power of the Conversation Architect to Address Complex, Adaptive Challenges

Cognitive Diversity
Cognitive diversity is the deliberate use of difference to bring new understanding to an issue. When faced with complex issues our inclination is to collect more data, survey, or assign a task force to conduct interviews; when what is needed is a new way to frame the issue. Cognitive diversity brings people trained in different heuristics, problem solving strategies, interpretations, and perspectives into the room. Cognitive diversity can be found in different parts of the organization (e.g. marketing, finance, engineering), in different disciplines (e.g. biology, neuroscience, archeology), or outside the organization (e.g. suppliers, customers, consultants, academicians, alliances).

Transparency
Transparency includes the willingness of management to say, “I don’t know” and therefore to employ the organization’s collective knowledge. It is also about management providing all the available information and data on an issue so that those convened have what they need to do the work of sensemaking. Organizational members also have a role in transparency, that is, to be open about what is happening at their level, rather than hiding or discounting bad news to appease management – to bring the best available knowledge to bear on organizational issues

What I find implicit in the notion of idea management though, is shared power. Just doing idea management, like narration of work, is not enough. If the high-value work today is in facing complexity, not in addressing problems for which a formulaic or standardized responses have been developed, then learning and solving problems together is a real business advantage. If idea management requires those in control to say, “I don’t know”, then there are many organizations where this will not happen. If idea management requires  employees “being open about what is happening at their level”, then personal knowledge management skills need to be widespread (something I have yet to see in most organizations).  Command & control remain the major stumbling blocks in effective idea management. However, it is great to see that there are lead organizations, like NASA,  setting the example.

PKM starts new workshop series

by

So far in 2012, I have hosted three online workshops on personal knowledge mastery (PKM), as well as a Summer Camp that included one week on the topic. Over 125 people have participated in these online sessions, compared with about a dozen who came to the on-site classroom course that I offered through the University of Toronto’s iSchool Institute for the past two years. I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves.

Read more

Reducing email

by

I noted last year that workers waste a lot of time doing useless activities, like managing unwanted communications, and suggested that the cause of the problem, digital overload, was also the potential solution: social media. The ROI for social media in business is quite obvious: reducing wasted time. That’s how we can also find the time for networked learning.

The Atlantic Monthly reports a similar study that shows workers spend 28% of their time managing email. They also spend another 33% of their week managing communications and gathering knowledge, which can probably be done more effectively and efficiently, if my observations are indicative of most businesses. Without becoming industrial-era efficiency experts or doing detailed time & motion studies, we can still look at redundant work tools and habits and find ways to replace them.

Reducing email seems to be a very good place to start, as Luis Suarez has described in a world without email.

Skills 2.0 redux

by

We are now in the second week of our Summer Camp on informal and social learning. The first week’s assignment was to read and comment on an article I wrote in 2008. I wondered what had changed in the last four years and if these thoughts were still pertinent. Here’s what I asked:

  • What has changed?
  • What has not?
  • Do you agree with the thoughts here?
  • What do you think are Skills 2.0, or perhaps even Skills 3.0, for you, your colleagues and your fields of expertise?

One participant said that, “This article is as pertinent to 2012 as to 2008.” Another wrote: One of my favourite quotes from the article is “Being a learning professional is becoming more about your network than your current knowledge.” 

I have noticed with my writing here over the past eight years that timing is very important. Some articles get little notice when originally posted and then are picked up by the network many years later. It’s one reason I never close commenting on my posts. You never know what might be of interest.

Here is the article, Skills 2.0 (PDF).

Marketing and learning are the same

by

When you learn with and from your customers, marketing and learning are the same. If companies are focused on their customers, why are learning resources not customer focused? Google’s power-searching course is an excellent example of marketing integrated with learning. As Jay Cross described:

This has to be one of the least expensive marketing campaigns ever devised. The only tools required are a video cam and the free Google suite of applications. Other out-of-pocket costs are employee time to design and create the course, and a little more time tending the Google+ sessions and answering questions.

Everything is connected to everything else

The big lesson of the 21st century thus far is that everything is connected to everything else. It’s all one big network, folks.

No corporation is an island. (Everything’s a node.) A corporation and its connections form an extended enterprise.

For Us to prosper, we have to be on the same wave length as our connections in the extended enterprise. Since the environment of our enterprise is forever changing and learning is the way we adapt to change, we all need to be learning together. Otherwise, someone will be falling behind, and our combined performance will suffer.

I’m going to call learning with other players in the extended enterprise co-learning. If I were an instructional designer in a moribund training department, I’d polish up my resume and head over to marketing. Co-learning can differentiate services, increase product usage, strengthen customer relationships, and reduce the cost of hand-holding. It’s cheaper and more useful than advertising.

Read more