In the network era, developing the skills of a master artisan in every field of work will be critical for success. While getting work done collaboratively will continue to be of importance in all organizations, it will not be enough. New ideas will have to come from our professional networks in order to keep pace with innovation and change in our fields. More importantly, a safe place is needed to connect these new ideas to the work to be done. Communities of practice will continue to grow as knowledge artisans need to integrate their work and learning in a trusted space. As the gig economy dominates, communities of practice can bring some stability to our professional development. These are owned by the practitioners themselves, not an association and not an organization. You know you are in a real community of practice when it changes your practice.
Communities
communities of interest and practice
Jay Cross Memorial Award 2016
Reposted from the Internet Time Alliance website.
The Internet Time Alliance Jay Cross Memorial Award is presented to a workplace learning professional who has contributed in positive ways to the field of Real Learning and is reflective of Jay’s lifetime of work. Recipients champion workplace and social learning practices inside their organisation and/or on the wider stage. They share their work in public and often challenge conventional wisdom. The Jay Cross Memorial Award is given to professionals who continuously welcome challenges at the cutting edge of their expertise and are convincing and effective advocates of a humanistic approach to workplace learning and performance.
We are announcing this inaugural award on 5 July, Jay’s birthday. Following his death in November 2015, the partners of the Internet Time Alliance (Jane Hart, Harold Jarche, Charles Jennings, Clark Quinn) resolved to continue Jay’s work. Jay Cross was a deep thinker and a man of many talents, never resting on his past accomplishments, and this award is one way to keep pushing our professional fields and industries to find new and better ways to learn and work.
knowledge catalysts add value
In the article, The Creative World’s Bullshit Industrial Complex, Sean Blanda says the main interest of too many writers and pundits “is not in making the reader’s life any better, it is in building their own profile as some kind of influencer or thought leader”.
“The bullshit industrial complex is a pyramid of groups that goes something like this:
Group 1: People actually shipping ideas, launching businesses, doing creative work, taking risks and sharing first-hand learnings.
Group 2: People writing about group 1 in clear, concise, accessible language.
[And here rests the line of bullshit demarcation…]
Group 3: People aggregating the learnings of group 2, passing it off as first-hand wisdom.
Group 4: People aggregating the learnings of group 3, believing they are as worthy of praise as the people in group 1.
Groups 5+: And downward….
The Complex eventually becomes a full fledged self-sufficient ecosystem when people in group 4 are reviewing books by people in group 3 who are only tweeting people in group 2 who are appearing on the podcasts started by people in group 3.”
reflecting on freedom and democracy
Today marks my 13th anniversary of freelancing. It was a situation I was forced into, getting pushed out of the company where I worked, but I do not regret. The only downside to freelancing, in my experience, is the uncertain financial situation. Perhaps that’s a small price to pay for freedom.
I have been traveling these past few weeks and not blogging much. This will continue through June with more travel planned. A few ideas have been percolating in my ‘to be blogged’ notes and I plan to expand upon them over the Summer.
self-organization is the future
If we as a society think it is important that citizens are engaged, people are passionate about their work, and that we all contribute to making a better world, then we need to enable self-organization. Central planning and hierarchical decision-making are just too slow and ineffective, especially for complex situations involving lots of people. In my network learning model, people constantly navigate between social networks, communities of practice, and work teams. Personal knowledge mastery is the individual discipline that can enable this, while working out loud is how groups stay in touch and learn. It all hinges on individuals taking control of their learning, and organizations giving up control.
“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.” – Isaac Asimov
a dire shortage of alternative models
The shift from a market-dominated society to a networked society is well on its way. The TIMN [Tribes + Institutions + Markets + Networks] model shows how civilization grew from a collection of tribes, added institutions, and later developed markets, as the dominant form of organization. These, in my opinion, aligned with revolutions in communications: from oral, to written, to print. The network era began with the advent of electric communications (telegraph), though it is by no means completely established. As with previous shifts of this magnitude, there is a tendency in parts of society to retreat to the old ways.
social media: an unrealized opportunity
“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?
farewell jay cross
I first got to know Jay Cross through his blog (it was before we even used the term) in the late 1990’s. I was one of the few people to comment on his posts and that was the beginning of our friendship. Several years later (2002) I got an email from Jay saying he would be in Moncton, New Brunswick, asking if that was near where I lived. Our first face to face face meeting was in a pub, 50 km from my house. Jay started the conversation saying that since we already knew each other so well, there was no need for small talk. “Let’s figure out how we can work together”, he said.
step aside for network era democracy
Verna Allee says that in states of ‘complex unorder’, loose hierarchies and strong networks are necessary. This point was driven home this morning as I listened on CBC radio about the closure of a rural school in Nova Scotia and how the option of turning it into a ‘hub school’ was beyond the comprehension of the school board and department of education. These are strongly hierarchical organizations, while the community has been strengthening its networks between multiple actors in the region and beyond. The community understands it is dealing with a state of complex unorder, while the bureaucrats still think it is merely ‘complicated order’, as the departmental guidelines on hub schools attest.
“The neo-liberal argument is that the demand for school space is down and surplus inventory should logically be discarded. School sites are just property, a disposable public asset, and a potential public liability if they do not yield a return on their investment. By this logic fewer school children mean fewer schools. Schools have no place in neighbourhoods too small to supply a large enough clientele to make them ‘viable’. Market forces and market thinking trump democratic ideals for local communities.” – The School as Community Hub
cooperation for the network era
Clark Quinn recently asked, as have many others, the difference between collaboration and cooperation, and why it is important.
“collaboration means ‘working together’. That’s why you see it in market economies. markets are based on quantity and mass.
cooperation means ’sharing’. That’s why you see it in networks. In networks, the nature of the connection is important; it is not simply about quantity and mass …
You and I are in a network – but we do not collaborate (we do not align ourselves to the same goal, subscribe to the same vision statement, etc), we *cooperate*” —Stephen Downes
Cooperation makes more sense as the term to describe working together in a networked and non-directed relationship. This is an important distinction from collaboration. For example, Jérôme Delacroix also sees cooperation as the suitable term for what we do in networks [in French]. Jérôme explains why his site is called Coopératique and not Collaboratique – collaboration happens around some kind of plan or structure, while cooperation presumes the freedom of individuals to join and participate. He also says that cooperation, not collaboration, is a driver of creativity. It is difficult to be creative while collaborating, because the objective has already been established.