I attended the Community Forests International planning session yesterday. This organization, located in our small town of Sackville, is working on two continents and recently received €1.2 million from the European Union for its work on the island of Pemba in Tanzania. The day included participation from many community groups, such as Renaissance Sackville, which I represented. It finished with a wine & cheese at Cranewood (a must-see for any visitor to town) which drew even more people from the community. I’d like to highlight what Jeff Schnurr, the founder had to say, as it reflects the advice I give to many organizations (my paraphrasing here).
Communities
communities of interest and practice
Self-determination at work
There’s a common saying that entrepreneurs should work on the business, and not in the business. It makes sense to stay above the day-to-day details in order to help steer the business. Perhaps it’s time to think of all businesses as networks of entrepreneurs. Everyone should be working on the business. As Peter Drucker said, “Nothing is less productive than doing what should not be done at all”. Being efficient at something that is not effective is a waste of time, and a cause for workers to mentally disconnect from the company. Efficiency for its own sake makes job a four-letter word.
How do you get an entrepreneurial mindset in a hierarchical, just-follow-the-rules, organization? Start by looking at what motivates people. Dan Pink popularized three key motivators in his book, Drive (2011): Autonomy, Mastery, Sense of Purpose. The basis of this is self-determination theory, which I think provides a much better understanding of motivation at work, and from which the following image comes.
our education system stumbles into the future
It’s back to school time and education issues come to the fore with a provincial election in a few weeks. According to a local professor, the New Brunswick education system is too centralized — but it’s not just education. Addressing the problems of centralization is an issue with all established institutions as we shift from an industrial to a networked economy. First we might look at the underlying premises of the current system. According to SFU Professor Kieran Egan, in The Educated Mind, three premises compete for attention in our public education systems:
- education as socialization
- education as a quest for truth (Plato)
- education as the realization of individual potential (Rousseau)
Guest Posts
I frequently receive requests for guest blog posts, which I always turn down, for several reasons.
My website has my name on it, and I feel personally responsible for everything written here. Any guest post would not reflect my views.
Much of my professional reputation is based on my writing, and many of my perspectives were formed here as ‘half-baked ideas’ on this blog.
All of my content is licensed for sharing as: Creative Commons – Attribution, Non-commercial, Share-alike so that other bloggers can easily use it and build upon it, negating any need for guest posts here.
It is ridiculously easy to create your own blog so you do not need mine to post from.
In addition, most of the requests come from people I do not know. Requesting a guest post is like inviting yourself over for dinner. I don’t even know you, but you want a free meal, and then want to tell everyone about it?
Instead, please join in the conversation, add some value with your own perspectives, and maybe we can learn from each other.
The Garden of False Learning – Wikimedia
The Internet of Everyone
Technology will rapidly change, consolidate, and probably change again. – John Chambers
Stop chasing the latest technology wave. It’s much better to make sense of it while also watching for the next wave. These waves of technology will most likely come faster and faster with the Internet of Everything (IoE). Faster feedback loops will be built into all product development cycles. Cloud-based technologies will mean constant change, much of it not even seen by end-users. As a result, better ways to negotiate a connected world will have to be developed. These will have to be human-centric if we expect them to last. Processes, data, and things may be able to change quickly, but people do not. While they may be agile, adaptable, and flexible, people cannot get a new operating system and start working in a different way overnight.
Update from Down Under
I’m sitting in the Toronto airport, waiting for the last leg of my journey home from Australia. I presented and ran workshops at AITD and talked at the Amplify Festival, in addition to taking a few days off and enjoying Sydney. Here are some updates from this week.
Make Work More Human
2013: The Incredibly Shrinking American Middle Class — Bill Moyers
2013: Five Myths about Canada’s Middle Class — Globe & Mail
2013: RIP: The Middle Class — Salon
2013: The Next Middle Class — Harold Jarche
2014: The Middle Class is Steadily Eroding — New York Times
The titles above indicate a shift in the economy and many of our assumptions about the nature of work, at least in my part of the world. There are many definitions of what middle class means, but for me it is the class of people who are experienced, trained or educated yet still have to work to earn a living. Where I grew up, many of our parents were immigrants who all had jobs. We were lucky. School did not require fees and most extracurricular activities were free. Many things have changed since then.
2497 and counting
Do you think you will still be working, in some capacity, in 10 years? What will you have learned during that decade? Will you remember much of it? Will you have access to reminders and artifacts that could jog your memory? Perhaps you need an outboard brain.
Yesterday marked 10 years of blogging here at jarche.com. This is post # 2,497. That’s a lot of words, concepts, and half-baked ideas. For example, I have the flow (148 posts to date) of my thoughts on personal knowledge management since my first post in 2004. The Seek > Sense > Share framework emerged in 2010. I have also developed ideas around the knowledge-sharing paradox; how our work structures drive sociopathic behaviours; and management in networks. These thoughts continue to evolve and provide the raw material for more refined posts like how to help the network make better decisions, or longer whitepapers for my clients.
Everyone talks about change today, and how people will have many careers and vocations through their working lives. Company lifespans are decreasing and losing your job is becoming a rather common, but unfortunate, occurrence. Having a blog, a public presence to share ideas, enables you to grow a professional network beyond your organization’s walls. It can provide useful insights while you have a job, and connect you to people who can help you if you need to look for new work. Given the usefulness of blogs, it’s amazing that many professionals still cannot be bothered with them.
My business would not exist without my blog. Period.
Note that I live in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada; population 5,000. I am 1,000 km away from the closest internationally recognized city (Boston or Montreal). Even our timezone is unknown to many people. Without my blog, nobody would ever have heard of me. My speaking engagements are an indication of the reach my blog has provided. Finally, thanks to Automattic for making WordPress, which I adopted in 2006, and it made my online life much simpler.
Renaissance Sackville
Like most professionals, I have many facets to my life in addition to my business. For the most part I do not discuss these here on my blog. However, I mentioned my community work recently to Christian Renard, and he suggested that I write about it.
I have had the privilege of serving as Chairman of the Board of Renaissance Sackville (RS) for the past five years. This not-for-profit organization was created 20 years ago when our town faced economic uncertainty. Several large businesses had recently closed, such as a foundry and a grocery distribution centre, leaving Mount Allison University as the only major employer. RS started as a forum to increase economic activity, including tourism.
When I joined the board, our focus had changed a bit, due to changing circumstances and our previous successes. Our current mission is: to help Sackville become a vibrant, economically and environmentally responsible, aesthetically pleasing, caring, friendly and gracious community. We receive about $50,000 annually from the Town of Sackville and get special project funding from other sources, such as Heritage Canada for the town’s 250th anniversary celebrations in 2012.
RS acts mostly as a seed funding agency for small projects that test new ideas. For example, we provided some funds to Community Forests International, an organization active in Africa and Canada, and as a direct result they are now headquartered here in Sackville, generating more economic development. Other recent examples include a bike co-op, a car share program, and a video camp for teenagers. One key aspect of our funding is that we do not expect a direct return on our investments. We believe in seeding as many ideas as possible, knowing that some will flourish and some will not, but we can learn something from each of them.
For me, one great attribute of RS is our ability to pay our beneficiaries very quickly, sometimes in less than 24 hours. The board works very well together, and in addition to our monthly meetings, we have discussions and make decisions using web-based tools. For small projects, where quite often a young person has taken the initiative, we know they cannot afford to be out of pocket for any length of time. We will even hand-deliver the cheque!
The measure of success for RS is in its aggregate work, not any specific project. Over time, we have been involved in every aspect of our community. This enables the board to make very informed decisions. We know the applicants and what they have done in the community. We do not expect short-term success. We want to make Sackville, population 5,000, a better place to live, work, and play. In the past five years, I have not come across another organization like RS that works independent of politicians and town officials, yet stays closely connected to the entire community. As a volunteer, it has been a pleasure to serve on the board of RS.
I think our operating model can be adopted by other communities in order to distribute economic and community development decision-making. I will try to add some more details and stories about Renaissance Sackville here over time, and I invite any questions, especially from other small communities. I may not be able to provide all the answers but I really think this is a much better way to grow a more resilient community for less than the cost of one full-time municipal employee. Our independence, with transparent processes, ensures we stay agile and able to test out many new projects and programs.
From the observed to the observers
The other day, in our Change Agents Worldwide community forum, Susan Scrupski mentioned that she was taking an online course.
It floors me that the learned teachings of academia have come to the same conclusions on some of these matters involving networks of people that we have by actually doing it (vs. studying it). The first series of videos talks about the “Tragedy of the Commons.” Reciprocity, the spirit of cooperation, and Trust are major themes.
Richard Martin responded with an experience of his.
I had a similar experience a few years ago when I started a course on information rights. As day-to-day practitioners, the students were at the cutting edge and knew far more than the theory-constrained academics. I dropped out after one semester as I was learning far more on the job and getting the opportunity to put that new knowledge into action.
The nature of social science research may be shifting away from academia, who are losing the initiative as the rest of us become participating members and simultaneously researchers/observers in an enormous petri dish of over 2 billion connected world citizens. Like the scribes of old, replaced by a literate citizenry, today’s social scientists may soon be out of work. We are all social scientists now. A recently retired sociology professor, with whom I shared this idea, agreed.
I noted a similar case with a research dissertation that developed a theoretical model for PKM which was a fairly extensive literature review and corroborated what many practitioners already know. In addition, the dissertation was frozen in time by the nature of academic publishing, and while it cited my frameworks, it did not use my latest work at the time. In the creative economy, knowledge distribution in business is moving from academia to professional networks.
Maybe it is not just business schools that will have their knowledge dissemination model disrupted but the social sciences as well. A networked citizenry no longer has to play only the role of the observed, but now can become the observer in education, sociology, and many other fields of human behaviour.
