Communities

communities of interest and practice

connected democracy

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As networks become the dominant organizational form, disciplines like personal knowledge mastery will be essential for all knowledge workers.

“By creating millions of networked people, financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away, info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being.” – End of Capitalism

Being educated is not enough. Effective citizens in a post-job, creative economy will also have to be connected. As objects get connected, the platform owners will aggregate more power and control.  Smart cities without smart citizens will result in the tyranny of the platform capitalists.

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no organization is an island

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Organizations are alive when people can exert their autonomy in ethical practice. This aligns with self-determination theory, which puts forward three basic needs for people: competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Even progressive organizations often miss out on the latter, described by the authors as an, “inherent tendency toward growth development and integrated functioning”. It takes more than a simple organizational structure to afford this relatedness. The organization also must be alive.

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smart cities need smart citizens

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I will be speaking this Wednesday in Issy-les-Moulineaux, France at a conference on ‘The Smart City, the Cloud, and Citizens’.  My presentation will be short and focused. Here are the main points, in English. The French version may be webcast, so watch my Twitter feed for updates.

We are connecting our cities to the cloud via the internet of everything, so that objects share data with each other. With these data, governments, organizations, and companies can sense patterns and make decisions – from traffic control to geographically specific advertising. But this is merely the tip of the iceberg of the real potential of smart cities and digital networks. A major challenge for society will be to enable an intelligent and aggressively engaged citizenry to build upon the potential of these growing digital interconnections.

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time to start cooperating

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In tribal societies, your family is your source of power. In institutions, it is your position in the hierarchy. In markets, dominance is through competition. We are a tri-form society: Tribal + Institution + Markets. The latter currently dominates how we organize as a society. It is competitive. School is competitive, with individual grades. Work is competitive, with many more applicants than positions available. Individual performance reviews dominate in the workplace. We are told that we have to create our personal brands, because the world is competitive.

As networks replace markets as the primary organizational form, will competition continue to be the best way for us to work?

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cooperation makes us human

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Automation of procedural  work is accelerating. What was considered knowledge work yesterday will be routine tomorrow, and workers will be replaced by software and machines. At the same time, access to real-time data is making individuals more powerful, and managers obsolete.

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our future of work

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Henry Demarest Lloyd wrote in March 1881, that “When monopolies succeed, the people fail …“, in his piece denouncing the practices of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. Capitalism does not have to be corporatism. There is little doubt today about the extent of corporate power and influence of monopolies, especially in their newest form: platform capitalism. In 1967, John Kenneth Galbraith warned of the dangers of blindly having faith in our corporate systems.

“The greater danger is in the subordination of belief to the needs of the modern industrial system … These are that technology is always good; that economic growth is always good; that firms must always expand; that consumption of goods is the principal source of happiness; that idleness is wicked; and that nothing should interfere with the priority we accord to technology, growth, and increased consumption.”

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We are the media, now what?

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One of the potential downsides of a network society is that deception, especially by those with power over the communications platforms, will become all-too-common. John Pilger takes a look at this, focusing much of the blame on professional journalists in War by media and the triumph of propaganda.

Why has so much journalism succumbed to propaganda? Why are censorship and distortion standard practice? Why is the BBC so often a mouthpiece of rapacious power? Why do the New York Times and the Washington Post deceive their readers?

Why are young journalists not taught to understand media agendas and to challenge the high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the essence of so much of what’s called the mainstream media is not information, but power?

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Workshop Bank

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If you conduct workshops, finding activities that relate to your themes can be a challenge. I have used one activity several times, first in Toronto in 2011. A while later, over a beer in Copenhagen, I met Nick Martin, who was beginning to develop a new website, WorkshopBank, to share ideas on ice-breakers and other workshop/training activities. He liked my use of the equilateral triangles collaboration exercise and it is now posted. In perusing Nick’s site, there are at least two new exercises I plan to try out.

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Networked Knowing

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I spoke at the UNL Extension conference in Nebraska last week. The theme was on the changing nature of work as we enter the network era and how learning is becoming integral to individual and organizational success. I noted how the period of 1900 to 1920 saw a significant shift in the American economy, with manufacturing replacing farming as the dominant economic activity. The resulting demographic shift was millions of men leaving farms and moving to factories.  The Cooperative Extension program was created in 1914 while this shift was taking place. One hundred years later and we are witnessing a similar shift, from the industrial economy to the network era and a creative economy. For a deeper look at this phenomenon, see Nine Shift.

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Inspiration for Working Out Loud

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It’s International Working Out Loud Week, also known as #WOLWeek. Working Out Loud is a relatively new term for me, picking it up from John Stepper in 2012. I have used the term, narrating your work, which to me is the same thing, though some may differ. My observation is that combining transparency (in the workplace) with narration (of work) results in increased serendipity, or more chances of fortuitous outcomes. My own working out loud on this blog has resulted in speaking opportunities and meeting interesting clients. The more you give, the more you get; though not in any way how you may have expected it.

Simon Terry recently asked me, “Who inspires you to practice and learn as you work out loud?”

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