Communities

communities of interest and practice

EEA Learning Day

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I will travelling and speaking for most of this week but will share what I have learned when I get back. This will be my first time addressing the European Environment Agency in Copenhagen and I look forward to meeting many new people. Here is what I will be talking about:

Keynote: Working Smarter in the Learning Organisation

As complexity increases in the networked economy, we need to integrate learning into the workflow. Communities of practice bridge the gap between getting work done and serendipitously connecting to looser social networks. Learning and development in the networked workplace must move from content delivery to community enablement. Harold Jarche will present a new framework for working smarter which includes the narration of work, transparency and knowledge-sharing to increase innovation.

I will also be running a workshop for managers:

Workshop: Coaching in the Learning Organisation

Harold Jarche will discuss some new approaches to support informal and social learning in the workplace. If problems and environments are becoming more complex, and are changing so quickly that our level of information will always be inadequate, there are some new qualities that learning coaches will need: 

1.       Openness to learning, not only from our peers, but from our employees and their contacts.

2.       Flexibility in our learning approaches; helping people understand how they learn best.

3.       The ability to be a generalist, moving in and out of learning situations as required.

4.       The skill to develop large-scale social networks in order to access help in solving  employee problems.

5.       An understanding of how networks operate in the exchange and development of knowledge.

"I am what I create, share and others build on”

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The Entrepreneurial Learner:

Takeaways. (1) in a world of constantly changing contexts, best practices don’t travel very well. (2) As contexts change, we need to move past stories (which explain a specific event) to narratives (which create a framework for moving us to action, perhaps in a new direction). (3) there are important shifts occurring: knowing what has moved to knowing what and where; making things moves to making things and contexts (e.g., remix); (4) in sense-making, we move from playing to reframing; in media, we move from storytelling to transmedia (e.g., how a story jumps from one medium to another — this has huge implications for corporate branding). (5) Identity Shift is the biggest shift of all. We’re moving from a sense of “I am what I wear/own/control” to “I am what I create, share and others build on.” How do I put something into play so others build on it? When you figure this out, you understand agency and impact. —John Seely Brown

fractal
A “built-upon” image by Joachim Stroh

We are moving to the edge, not just in our work but for a greater part of our interconnected lives.

Four circles to bind them

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I’m still playing with Google Plus and have not made it an integrated part of my personal knowledge mastery process yet. One aspect of G+ I do not like is the inability to add tags or categorize what I find of interest, or to easily share with other networks. Sharing inside, of course, is easy, as Google would prefer you stay inside their ecosystem. What I usually do with G+ posts I like is 1) post them to Twitter, 2) add as Twitter favourites 3) and then curate them on my weekly Friday’s Finds blog post. It’s a bit convoluted but it kind of works. I could do the same by checking my ‘+1’ tagged items and regularly curating them on my blog.

I really like the Google Plus Hangout feature, which allows for immediate video conferencing, for up to 10 people, and integrates tools such as Google Documents for collaborative writing. Using the ‘On Air’ function lets you live broadcast your meeting via YouTube, which is then automatically recorded and saved as a YouTube video. It is seamless. The audio/video is very high quality with much less lag than Skype.

There is a feature of G+ that makes me think it can be the one to rule them all. These are circles. You add people to circles (which you can name) and then post updates on G+ to one or more circles of your choosing, or make them Public. Almost all of mine are public. But circles work both ways. You can control how much you see from each circle. I would suggest starting out by creating four circles, one for each setting. The settings slider appears on the right when you click on one of your circle names from the G+ Home page.

 There are four settings available:

  • Show nothing
  • Show some posts
  • Show most posts (what G+ recommends, but that’s for them, not you)
  • Show every post

There is also a bell symbol on the right  to subscribe to notifications (it’s a push function so you don’t miss anything). You see these settings explained when you hover your cursor over the slider.

So if you create four initial circles, you could use them as a filter to get better signal and less noise. You don’t need to spend a lot of time making a decision on where to put someone, as it’s easy to move a person from one circle to another. Fine-tuning this over time  could make your G+ stream a valuable information resource.

None: For people who have you in their circles, but you are not really interested in what they have to say, but feel you should be connected anyway. This group is handy if you don’t want something to be Public but want to reach a broader audience.

Some: These are people you know slightly or perhaps post too many updates.

Most: For people you know better, or usually post interesting things, but you don’t feel to you need to see everything.

Every Post: Good for work teams or fellow employees. I use this for my Internet Time Alliance colleagues.

I have found some deep conversations on G+, which is not limited by 140 characters. It integrates with other Google platforms, so it’s easy to share from Google Reader to Google Plus. Over time, I am finding it a good place to have some meaningful conversations. As with Twitter, if you find G+ boring, then you are following (circling) the wrong people.

A quick case for social technologies

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I have been reviewing a number of resources I have collected on social media, social learning and return on investment. The bottom line seems very clear to me. Social technologies remove artificial organizational boundaries and let knowledge be shared more easily. I create slide presentations so that I have something ready in case I need to quickly review a subject, such as an impromptu client brief. I put this one together as an aid that might be helpful in presenting a few aspects of the positive impact of social technologies in the workplace.

#itashare

Trust is an emergent property of effective networks

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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.

Sharing with discernment

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I was asked to elaborate between collaboration and cooperation in my last post. I responded that in the network era, collaboration specialists need to cooperate. Cooperation is quite different from collaboration, but is necessary for a networked, coherent enterprise. I hope this image makes it clearer.

I also looked at how PKM is a core skill set in a networked enterprise, empowering workers to take control of their own learning. A Seek-Sense-Share framework helps people to seek new contacts in their social networks, and communities of practice. The basic flow goes from outside, to inside, and back out.

First seek information and connections in your social networks and communities of practice. This of course requires that one connects in the first place. Good filtering skills are necessary to ensure a decent signal to noise ratio.

Filtered information can then be used in our sense-making processes. A key aspect of sense-making is creating something. This can be an information product or an action, like a probe, or experimental way of doing something, like a new work practice.

An important aspect of sharing is knowing when, with whom, and how to share. It may be posting to the web, like this blog, or it may be more directed and to a certain community. Sharing using a blog, with permalinks, categories and tags, makes it easier to share when a need arises in your networks or communities. Sharing with intent is curation, while PKM can be viewed as pre-curation. It takes discernment to know when and how to share.

A shotgun approach to knowledge sharing will not work. Showing discernment in knowledge sharing helps to build trust. Becoming a trusted node in your communities and networks (with a good signal to noise ratio) ensures that your voice will be heard.

Connecting learning and work and life

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In discussing how communities of practice can bridge the gap between innovation (new ideas) and getting work done (usually in project or work teams), I derived this graphic. For a detailed explanation of my thinking behind this, see my presentation on communities and the coherent enterprise.

I have observed that what underlies creative and complex work (the future of work in the network era, in my opinion) is  empowered workers who take control of their own learning. This is the premise of personal knowledge management. PKM is not just about finding information, but also connecting to people.

Using the Seek-Sense-Share framework, people seek new contacts in their social networks, and over time (filtering), some become co-members in communities of practice. Communities of practice help to inform our work and life, some of our learning and observations creating new ideas or practices. We can then share these new ideas with our communities, discerning who and how to share with, at the appropriate times. For instance, we may share a new practice first with a professional community of practice before publishing it to our general social networks.

A key part of PKM is connecting our networks, our communities, our work, and our lives together in order to make sense, be more productive, and open ourselves to serendipity. It’s a holistic approach, not one that compartmentalizes work and life, but something that helps us to make sense of the whole messy, complex world we live in. As such, it’s always a work in progress, but it starts by connecting to others.

Idea management requires shared power

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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.

Coherent communities

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Jay Cross has initiated an online conversation about the Coherent Organization/Enterprise:

At the Internet Time Alliance, we’re big fans of narrating our work. We encourage clients to get their people to narrate their work, through blogs or other sharing media, for a number of reasons.

If you are a blogger, you know how blogging makes you reflect on your experience and draw conclusions. What’s more, if you are transparent about what you’re doing, your colleagues and acquaintances will know when and how to lend you a hand. Sharing your discoveries adds to the value of the networked Commons; I think of it as a requirement of good network citizenship.

In the last ten days, Harold Jarche, Clark Quinn, and I have been building on one another’s thoughts in public. We’re each teasing out the meaning of what we call the Coherent Organization with models.

Let me narrate my work so far.

I am interested in the role of communities of practice in knowledge sharing. I have been looking at how communities of practice can bridge our social networks with our work teams, helping us get the job done while being open to innovative ideas. This presentation is a work in progress but I think it is ready to go public and get your feedback. Here is my logic:

  1. Sharing complex knowledge requires strong social ties, but only working with our peers may blind us to outside ideas.
  2. Networks with diverse and weak ties are the best places to get new ideas, yet these are often unstructured and difficult to manage.
  3. Communities of practice, which share strong & weak social ties and have some purpose & structure, can bridge the gap between getting the job done and innovating.
  4. Therefore, encouraging and supporting communities of practice is essential for the knowledge-based enterprise.

Effective, or coherent, knowledge-sharing requires not just collaboration, but also cooperation and especially connections (communities).

PKM starts new workshop series

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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.

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