Learning

Learning

The learning organization: an often-described, but seldom-observed phenomenon

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What should a true learning organization look like?

W. Edwards Deming understood that systemic factors account for more organizational problems, and therefore more potential for change, than any individual’s performance. The role of managers should be to manage the system, not the individual functions. The real barrier to systemic change, such as becoming a learning organization, is command & control management. This is why the third principle for net work, shared power, is a major stumbling block to becoming a learning organization. Narration of work and transparency are easy, compared to sharing power. But learning is what organizations need to do well in order to survive and thrive.

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It's time to focus on your LQ

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Learning is everywhere in the connected workplace. Networked professionals need more than advice (training); they need ongoing, real-time, constantly-changing, collaborative, support.  However, many of us have relegated our own learning to the specialists over the years – teachers, instructors, professors. We’re not used to handling all of this learning on our own. But if we want to thrive in complexity and if we want our work teams to be effective, we have to integrate our learning into the workflow.

On 11 June 2012 we will start the next online personal knowledge management workshop.  PKM is the foundation of connected work. It’s up to each of us to develop, and continuously revise, our sense-making frameworks as we work inside and outside the increasingly permeable walls of our organizations. Unlimited information, distributed work, self-publishing, and ridiculously easy group-forming all point in one direction – the organization will no longer address all your learning needs in the network era.

Additional skills are needed to help groups and teams learn as they work. Narration is a base skill for the networked workplace. Other skills include network weaving, curation, and network analysis.  We also have workshops on how to use social media for professional development, as well as setting up and sustaining an online community. These workshops are not just for ‘learning professionals’ but for any role; from sales to marketing to production, and especially for management. More workshops are in development and we are always interested in getting suggestions. Custom workshops and skills coaching can also be arranged.

To improve our own and our organization’s learning quotient, we need to look at ways to be more self-directed,  social, and agile learners. Life in perpetual Beta requires a high LQ.

Leadership is an emergent property of a balanced network

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This is my second recent quote from Mark Fidelman, who writes in Forbes. He has a good perspective on the integration of work and learning, and how technology is only a very small part of social business.

Investment in social business platforms and mobile solutions are great – we’re finally on the right path. But ignoring the workplace infrastructure to accommodate them will be a missed opportunity. We have to move away from the Mad Men era office, to digital workplaces that take advantage of the entire social, mobile and content being produced by an organization’s greatest asset.

Its employees.

Fidelman discusses the new role of management in the future workplace.

The new role of management is to facilitate the finding of solutions; not to dictate them. The new role of management is to facilitate “connections”, to match people with the right skills and abilities to projects where those skills are most needed. The new role of management is to remove hurdles to engagement by building approvals mechanisms into workflows. Management won’t do this alone. They will leverage new technologies that automatically introduce employees to employees, partners and suppliers in order to build relationships that help you and the organization become more effective.

Culture is an emergent property of people working together. For example, trust only emerges if knowledge is shared and diverse points of view are accepted. As networked, distributed workplaces become the norm, trust will emerge from environments that are open, transparent and diverse. As a result of improved trust, leadership will be seen for what it is; an emergent property of a balanced network [“in-balance” may be a better term for this changing state] and not some special property available to only the select few.

Network Culture

Building on my previous post – that in complex environments, loose hierarchies and strong networks are the best organizing principle – here is my view of how a transparent, diverse & open workplace should function.

Networked contributors (full-time, part-time, contractors) need to work together in a networked environment that facilitates cooperation and collaboration. This is why the narration of work  and PKM will become critical skills, as work teams ebb and flow according to need, but the network must remain connected and resilient. A key function of leaders (think servant leadership) will be to listen to and analyze what is happening. From this bird’s-eye view, those in a leadership role can help set the work context according to the changing environment and then work on building consensus.

I’ve noted before that the power of social networks, like electricity, will inevitably change almost every business model. Leaders need to understand the importance of organizational architecture. Working smarter in the future workplace starts by organizing to embrace networks, manage complexity, and build trust.

Learning is everywhere

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There are lots of “learning specialists” in organizations and they work for variously named departments. As learning specialists, I assume they are supporting workplace learning, so let me ask:

  • If I’m sitting at my desk with a work-related problem, can I call the Training Department to quickly get me up to speed?
  • If I want to learn about a new market sector, will the Learning & Development specialist help me?
  • If I need some coaching to prepare me for a meeting with a new client, can I call Human Resources to connect me with the right person who is available?
  • If I’m stuck on trouble-shooting an unfamiliar piece of software, can I get someone from Training to walk me through it?
  • If I’m looking for great examples of collaboration and social learning, do the folks in Training & Development model them?
  • If I want to become a better networked learner, can I call a Training specialist to get me started and coach me?

Learning & working are interconnected in the network era. If learning support is not connected to work, it’s rather useless. Learning is the new black — it’s everywhere, and that’s exactly where learning specialists should be. Net workers need more than advice (training), they need ongoing, real-time, constantly-changing, collaborative, support.

Sharing is good for all of us

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When I was writing my Master’s thesis on Learning in the New Brunswick Information Technology Workplace (completed in 1998) I based a part of it on a framework developed  in 1991. The SPATIAL model looks at how the physical and non-physical attributes of the work environment influence learning. I had used the book available in the university’s  education library as my source material and then forgot about it. In 2008 I wrote a blog post about SPATIAL as I had found a digital copy of the article. Rodney Fulton, the author, even commented on my post.

This past week, Cindy Jennings asked about educational ergonomics on Twitter. I wasn’t quite sure what she was looking for, but I passed on the link to my 2008 post. Cindy sent me an email later and said, “this model is ideal for our purposes and I am thrilled to learn of it.”

This is the real value of narrating our work in public. If I had not written a blog post on the SPATIAL model, I would not have been able to easily retrieve it. If Cindy had asked the same question, I may have said to myself, “darn, I wrote about that during grad studies”. However, I put it in my outboard brain and I was able to help Cindy. Yes, folks, the network is more powerful than the node – share!

Image by @gapingvoid

PKM Workshop Introduction

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My next Personal Knowledge Management online workshop is scheduled for 11-22 June 2012. PKM is also one of the topics for our social learning Summer Camp during July/August 2012. Here is a 10 minute video that covers PKM and gives an introduction to the workshop. It should help in deciding if this workshop is for you. Feel free to ask any questions. The last two workshops fostered some good conversations and I look forward to this next one.

 

It is time to simplify

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The five informal learning methods described in yesterday’s post on Learning in the Workplace have one thing in common. They are all relatively simple.

Most of today’s larger companies have a complicated structure. Over time, to enable growth and efficiencies, more processes have been put in place. New layers of control and supervision continue to appear, silos are created, and knowledge acquisition is formalized in an attempt to gain efficiency through specialization. As companies get bigger, internal growth and innovation reach a tipping point, and companies rely on mergers and acquisitions to maintain the illusion of growth.

But knowledge, and the acquisition of new knowledge, are still key factors for innovation and effectiveness. To compensate for its complicated processes, the enterprise attempts to shift to another paradigm, and tries to become a learning organization, putting significant effort into training. Unfortunately, training is often not the right solution.

Today’s large, complicated organizations are now facing increasingly complex business environments that require agility in simultaneously learning and working. Typical strategies of optimizing existing business processes or cost reductions only marginally influence the organization’s effectiveness. Faster evolving markets challenge the organization’s ability to react to customer demand. Decision-making becomes paralyzed by process-based operations and chains of command and control; thereby decreasing agility. Training, as “the” solution to workplace learning needs, fails to deliver and then gets marginalized, often being the first department to have its budget cut.

Organizations (and training departments)  need to understand complexity, instead of simply increasing complication. This lack of understanding is a major barrier to adopting social business concepts and practices. We should always take into consideration that people can handle complexity much better than our constructed systems can.

We need to think of organizations as parts of Value Networks.

We need to move away from shareholder value and become client-focused

We need to base growth on cultivating ecosystems, not the illusion of mergers and acquisitions.

We need to think of knowledge acquisition and sharing as social.

We need to constantly develop emergent practices.

All of these changes can be started by doing a few  simple things. As with Lego bricks, using a single unifier (the pin size) we can create an infinite variety of solutions. The examples of how to support informal learning do not require expensive technology or detailed needs analyses. They can be implemented quickly and modified over time. For too long our organizations have suffered from the disease of complication. It’s time to simplify.

Learning in the workplace

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Jane Hart asked readers “how regularly are you “learning” in the workplace?” Here are the top five ways that people learn, with my comments below on how this can be facilitated in the organization, either by management or the learning support group. Notice that these are all informal. The more formal methods, like courses, ranked much lower on the survey results.

Email (keeping up to date inside the organization)

Since email is the number one method of keeping up to date, find ways to make it easier or replace it with a world without email.  Using internal blogs for any multi-recipient email is a start. That way it’s visible, in one permanent place, with all the comments attached.

In-person conversations (keeping up to date inside the organization)

Create space for people to talk. Regular company coffee breaks can be supplemented with white boards or flip charts to encourage knowledge sharing. Take pictures of what’s going on and post them. Photos can encourage conversation. Small nooks with comfortable seating invite conversations. Changing office layout can change behaviours and even encourage inter-departmental conversations.

“At Pixar, east of San Francisco, [Steve] Jobs oversaw the design of the new building. Because the software jockeys worked in one area and the marketing folks worked in another and so forth, he decided to put the bathrooms in a central atrium. That way, employees had to run into each other each day.”

Read blog posts/online articles (keeping up to date outside the organization)

Point out good reading resources. Aggregate learning resources and get input on the best sources, as we have done with Working Smarter Daily. Use social bookmarks to share what you’re reading.

Search the Social Web using search engines (solve problems)

Put together resources on how to search. You may be surprised how few people know how to search effectively. For example: Compfight for images; GoogleGuide; Tools for Search; Four Ways to Search the Social Web.

Connect with others in public social networks or in private groups or communities (keeping up to date outside the organization)

Participate in and recommend social learning communities that meet the needs of your organization. If you don’t have any private social networks, try some out, like Yammer or Socialcast.

These are all relatively simple and fairly inexpensive things that can be done to support workplace learning. It’s amazing how many Learning & Development departments do not get involved in these types of activities. Not supporting active, informal workplace learning will just make the formal training function even less relevant.

The college in transition

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I really enjoyed my visit to Algonquin College in Ottawa today. I met many motivated educational change agents who are looking at how they can improve their learning environment, with and without technology. The campus is home to a wide range of students, though I was surprised that most are under 24 years of age. I had expected more mid-career students

I must admit that on arrival this morning (using the highly efficient Ottawa transit system), I found the new construction trades building to be quite stunning.

As the opening keynote speaker, my job was talk about some of the bigger issues facing Canadian colleges today. One of the topics was the appearance of new open, online offerings from US universities like Stanford, Harvard, Princeton and MIT. If these folks are offering free courses, why would you want to take the bus to a community college, one might ask? Here’s an interesting perspective on what EdX might mean.

Perhaps these new(ish) models, like MOOC’s, will address some of the issues facing higher education, as I heard a few stories of students being completely tuned-out of the formal education process.

Like most organizations adapting to the networked society, the college is trying to balance its existing hierarchies (there are many) with the impact of ubiquitous connectivity & pervasive proximity.

It will be interesting to see how the shift to a mobile campus develops and what external forces will influence the direction of this college. I think colleges, with their work-oriented programmes, are in a much more resilient postion than their brethren at four year universities. But on the other hand, I’m not a futurist. I just tried to show how communication revolutions lead to fundamental shifts in how we organize work, and how this changes our relationship with knowledge, and society’s view of education.

It’s perpetual Beta.