Communities

communities of interest and practice

It's not about knowledge transfer

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In 2009 I listened to Peter Senge’s keynote address at the CSTD national conference. His research findings showed that the average life expectancy of large companies is about 30 years, but some are over 200 years old, and the key driver for their longevity is organizational learning. Individual learning in organizations is irrelevant, as work is almost never done by one person alone. Knowledge, Senge said, is the capacity for effective action (know how) and it is the only aspect of knowledge that really matters in business and life. Value is created by teams and mostly by networks of people. While learning may be generated in teams, this type of knowledge comes and goes. Learning really spreads through social networks.

Another point that stuck with me, as I had witnessed this, was Senge’s observation that the field of knowledge management had been co-opted by information technology vendors, and had become useless for organizational learning. I was reminded of this while reading, Lost Knowledge: What are you and your organization doing about it? –

Executives have known about “lost knowledge” and retiring Boomers for years, and yet very few companies have taken steps to insure that there is some sort of effective knowledge transfer from Boomers to younger employees.

Knowledge cannot be transferred. This is the big conceit of knowledge management. This “loss of knowledge” when older workers retire is a symptom of a structural problem. It shows that the company never gave any thought to organizational learning.

Successful, and long-lived, organizations do this all the time, not just when a demographic blip hits them.

Retiring baby-boomers are just one more wake-up call to dysfunctional organizations.

Variety and diversity

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Esko Kilpi made a series of tweets today that I wanted to collect in a single post:

Unlike mechanical systems, human systems thrive on variety and diversity.
An exact replication of behavior in nature would be disastrous and seen as neurotic in social life.
The Internet changes the patterns of connectivity.
The Internet transforms our understanding what “local” is, makes possible wide participation and new enriching variety in interaction.
All human systems are connected and connected systems cannot be understood in terms of isolated parts
The unit of analysis is now communication and emergence, not entities.
The perspective of network science views knowledge as socially created and socially re-created.
Management literature typically emphasizes individuals and locates explanatory power in their personal properties.
The potential of social media cannot be realized without a very different epistemological grounding, a relational perspective.
Independently existing people and things then become viewed as co-constructed in coordinated networked action.

variety diversity

CSTD Montreal Symposium

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I will speaking this week in Montréal at CSTD’s Symposium. Please note there are two Harolds as keynote presenters! My topic is The Future of the Training Department.

Here’s the set up.

Most training activity for the past century assumed that you could prepare people for the future by training them in what had worked in the past. Yesterday’s best practices were the appropriate prescription for today’s problems. That worked when the world was stable and things remained the same over time.

At this point in the 21st century, the game is changing. Complexity and our interconnectivity have rendered the world unpredictable. The orientation of learning is shifting from the past (efficiency, best practices) to the future (creative responses, innovation). Workplace learning is morphing from blocks of training followed by doing the work, to a merging of work and learning. Change is continuous, so learning must be continuous.

To justify its continuing existence, the training department must shift direction in three areas:

  • Embrace complexity and be open to uncertainty
  • Move from a Push to a Pull orientation
  • Adopt new frameworks to support learning in the workflow

I’ll be discussing a potential framework for the future training department this Friday.

One final thought. In the future, it will not likely be called the training department and may not even be a department.

Social business drives workforce development

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In a workscape perspective I described how new frameworks help management, HR and L&D professionals get away from the trees to see the forest of workforce development.

Earlier, in Bridging the Gap; Working Smarter, I explained how loose external networks are necessary to have access to diverse opinions, while work teams need to share complex knowledge and therefore have to build strong, collaborative relationships.

Communities of practice are the bridges between the work being done and diverse social networks, fostering cooperation without hierarchical structure.

Basically, collaboration is necessary to do complicated, but manageable, project tasks; while a looser form of cooperation helps to understand more complex and not yet manageable problems. Cooperation is moving from a soft skill to a required hard skill.

From this perspective, the best way to develop internal workforce support structures (what used to be called learning & development) is from the outside in.

Start with what is being constantly learned in professional social networks and harvest it for insights.

Discuss these ideas cooperatively in communities of practice and then test out ways to enhance collaboration (Probe-Sense-Respond).

Through collaborative work, get feedback on where performance support may be required and if training is needed.

In this way, the externally focused social business, and everyone in it, drives the development tools and methods to support the work being done.

Everyone is involved in what used to be the instructional design process, but now there is a focus on collaboration first, performance support when needed, and training as the last choice.

Thoughts on perpetual Beta

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I’ve been putting together a series of thoughts on slides to share my perspectives on work and learning in the network era. I’ve called these presentations visual calling cards. The words on these slides come from the posts I’ve written here over several years.

While discussing my latest slide series with my colleague Jane Hart, we wondered which format would be preferable: a slideshow controlled by the viewer, or slides set to music in a streaming video. Does the music and flow enhance or detract from the presentation?

In the spirit of learning by doing, I’ll let you decide. Feedback is always appreciated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r0z7Xaj7aA

Working on Internet Time

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An artisan is a skilled manual worker in a particular craft, using specialized processes, tools and machinery. Artisans were the dominant producers of goods before the Industrial Revolution. Knowledge artisans of the post-industrial era are retrieving old world care and attention to detail, but using the latest tools and processes in an interconnected economy.

Artisans did not watch the clock and neither do knowledge artisans.

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Next generation knowledge artisans are amplified versions of their pre-industrial counterparts. Equipped with and augmented by technology, they rely on their human capital and skill to solve complex problems and develop new ideas, products and services. Small groups of highly productive knowledge artisans are capable of producing goods and services that used to take substantially larger teams and resources. In addition to redefining how work is done, knowledge artisans are creating new organizational structures and business models. Knowledge artisans are retrieving the older artisanal model and re-integrating previously separate skills.

Knowledge Artisans not only design the work but can also do the work. It is not passed down an assembly line. Many integrate marketing, sales and customer service with their creations. To ensure that they stay current, they become members of various “Guilds”, known today as communities of practice or knowledge networks. One of the earliest knowledge guilds was the open source community which developed many of the communication tools and processes used by knowledge artisans today: distributed work; results-only work environments (your code speaks for you); RSS, blogs & wikis for sharing; agile programming; flattened hierarchies, etc.

It is hard to be a knowledge artisan in a hierarchical organization that tells you what to do and which tools to use. Today, we are seeing the more experienced and adventurous knowledge artisans leaving, while younger skilled artisans are not joining command & control organizations.

Are knowledge artisans the mainstay of the network era economy? If so, what does that mean for your organization or business?

Preparing for change

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One of the reasons (not the only one)  behind our Net Work Literacy programme [and PKMastery] is to prepare people for a digital economy, much of which is blocked by organizational firewalls. It is difficult to be a connected and networked person when you can only communicate with people inside your organization. As I wrote in Net Work Skills: Imagine if we limited our conversations to only those in the same office.  We would miss out on so many learning opportunities. Well it seems some people are still missing out.  Today, people with larger and more diverse networks have an advantage as professionals and in dealing with change. They are engaged in a constant flow of sense-making through multiple conversations.

Our programme is designed to be a starting point for anyone relatively new to developing professional learning networks, as these are a core part of the distributed, digital workplaces that are slowly replacing hierarchical organizations. The pace of change will quicken though, so it’s best to be prepared.

On Twitter, I asked: “Did you have an unexpected career change recently? What advice would you have given yourself 1 year earlier if you had known? #NWL” [The #NWL is for Net Work Literacy]

Initial responses so far:

@MsNair09 – be comfortable with being uncomfortable.

@DonaldHTaylor – My advice: always foster your whole network and give as well as take. Don’t wait until you need them. I always say “Never let your first message to someone be a demand for help.”

@theCMEguy – Don’t wait another year to make the change…

@learnwonder – If I’d have known 1 year earlier, I would tell myself not to bother going to those boring and pointless corporate ‘away days’

@nassimlewis – From teacher to Ed tech industry. When multiple perspectives coexist, ‘tell a story’ to create common ground.

Any other words of wisdom from the trenches?
no normal
Related Posts

Preparing your own Business 2.0 (good comments)

Preparing for No Normal<

Net Work Literacy

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Working online is different. Few traditional jobs prepare anyone for this. How can you develop a professional network that is not dependent on a job or an employer?

For people who have been working in the same job for 10 years or more, when they step out they will see that it’s a different world today. Almost everything is online and connected and there’s no social media policy regulating it all. For many people, including potential employers, if you’re not on the Web, you don’t exist. Now that’s a change from a decade ago.

Social media for marketing is just the tip of the iceberg. The real power of social media is for getting things done. They facilitate learning and working; which are now joined at the hip in the creative, complex workplace that’s 24/7 in multiple time zones and always-on.

Networked working habits and practices take a while to develop and may not come easily to everyone. This is where to start – by developing net work literacy, where work is learning and learning is the work.

Join us for the Net Work Literacy programme – 26 March to 6 April 2012

Hosted by Harold Jarche and Jane Hart of the Internet Time Alliance

This onine programme on adapting to the networked economy includes tools, tips & techniques from people who have been connecting, communicating and collaborating online for over fifteen years. The programme is for anyone who has spent the last decade or more inside an organisation and is now looking to branch out and connect with the digital reality of the connected economy. Whether you are considering freelancing, working as an alliance or just connecting beyond the corporate walls, this programme is designed to give you a head start.

Net Work Skills

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Imagine if we limited our conversations to only those in the same office.  We would miss out on so many learning opportunities. Well it seems some people are still missing out.  Today, people with larger and more diverse networks have an advantage as professionals and in dealing with change. They are engaged in a constant flow of sense-making through multiple conversations.

Every professional needs to be open to continuous learning and to make much of it transparent in order to cooperate with others. Nothing remains the same, and the only way to remain relevant in the network era is to stay connected. This is life in perpetual Beta.

An open attitude is increasingly important. The people who blog or connect on social media can get things done quicker, find answers faster, get advice and just be more effective. All of this requires professional networks and these take time to build the necessary trust before one can even ask for help. For instance, strangers usually have to know something about someone before they will help out. Without some persistent point of presence (blog, Twitter, LinkedIn), one is invisible online unless he or she is already famous. Most of us are not.

It is not just an advantage to belong to diverse professional networks but in recent years the situation has tipped so that it is now a significant disadvantage to not actively participate in social learning networks.

With social media, anyone can easily create digital content and collaborate with others without any special programming skills. And the kinds of skills needed for all professionals today are not so much specific social media platforms, but rather changes in attitudes and perspective.

It is getting difficult for anyone to be an expert other than in a very narrow field for a short period of time. Bloggers can quickly get the scoop on professional journalists. As knowledge workers, we are like actors — only as good as our last performance. For a fleeting time, we may be viewed as experts. This erosion in perceived and conferred expertise means that professionals have to become learners themselves and follow the flow of the ever-expanding bodies of knowledge related to their fields. It is a shift away from subject matter experts and toward subject matter networks.

“Creativity is a conversation—a tension—between individuals working on individual problems, and the professional communities they belong to.”~ David Williamson Shaffer

Conversation is an essential part of being a networked professional today. One person cannot know everything, but can add to, as well as benefit from, the knowledge of others by engaging in various online conversations. Social media let anyone join in professional conversations, and conversely, may isolate those who do not.

Professionals immersed in communities of practice, or those continuously pushing their informal learning opportunities, may have a larger zone of proximal development (the gap between a person’s current development level and the potential level of development). They are more open to learning and to expanding their knowledge. Active involvement in informal learning, particularly through web-based communities, is key to remaining professional and creative in any field.

Being a professional in the network era is becoming more about your network than your current knowledge.

Fields of knowledge are expanding, new tools are constantly being introduced, and over a billion people are connected via the Internet. However, blogging still stands out as nearly ubiquitous, especially for professional development. Varieties of blogs include text, video, and audio, but blogs are relatively simple, give individuals voice, and enable conversation to flow. One can think of a blog as a professional journal to record thoughts and ask questions of peers.

Each blog post has a unique identifier (permalink) which can be referenced by others, without permission. This is where blogs still remain superior to many walled information gardens, like Facebook. Blogs enhance serendipity. Blog posts do not need to be perfect essays but can help make sense of the learning process. The comments between blogs help create networks of conversations around issues or topics.

Even once connected with social media, the critical aspect that remains is attitude. Accepting that we will never know everything, but that others may be able to help, is the first step in becoming a networked professional. This is an acceptance of a world in flux, and that knowledge is neither constant nor fixed.

Instead of trying to know everything in the field, we can concentrate on knowing with whom to connect. The network becomes all-important. That means embracing an attitude of openness and collaboration—joining others on a journey of understanding. Giving up control is a first step on this journey.

Having a blog, a permanent presence on the web, becomes the jumping off point for deeper professional discussions. I call it my home base. Producing a blog also opens a person up to criticism, so once again, an open attitude to learning is essential.

Networked professionals can no longer rest on their past accomplishments while their fields of knowledge change and grow. 

Through sharing and exposing their work on the web, networked professionals can connect to communities of practice and get informal peer review. There is no way to stay current all by ourselves. With blogs and other collaboration methods, each of us can become a participatory node in various communities of practice.

The whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts, and knowing who to call becomes more important than having the right answer. But we are all humans and we relate on a human level, which means that we first have to get to know others and develop a level of trust before real sharing can happen. Collaboration is a two-way street.

Finally, critical thinking – the questioning of underlying assumptions, including our own – is becoming all-important as we have to make our own way in the network era. Critical thinking can be looked at as four main activities, which social media can help us achieve:

  • Observing and studying our fields
  • Participating in professional communities
  • Building tentative opinions
  • Challenging and evaluating ideas

In the early 21st century, it’s time for all professionals to develop net work skills.

subject matter networks

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“I think the singular SME is an antiquated a notion as the solitary game player & our development pipelines need to change.” writes Mark Oehlert, on Twitter. Mark coined the term, subject matter networks, as a change from the industrial concept of subject matter expert, or SME, a term I first heard in the military in the mid-1970’s. But the world has changed and most notably during the past decade.

Image: Clark Quinn

We have become connected

With all of these connections, complexity ensues. Markets in Asia can have an impact on a local grocer. The release of not-so-secret diplomatic cables influence events like the Arab Spring.

In a complex world the optimal social form is the multi-organizational network and emergent practices must be continuously developed through cooperation. In such an environment, the lone expert is at a disadvantage. He or she cannot learn and adapt as fast as a cooperative network.

So the critical skills for people formerly known as SME’s are how to become contributing members of subject matter networks. Part of this is in narrating one’s work and learning. I have called personal knowledge mastery (PKM) – our part of the social learning contract. One cannot be effective in professional networks without contributing. Subject matter networks are made up of many contributors. A key skill is in weaving the best networks together.

We collectively realized before forming the Internet Time Alliance that we were much less effective on our own than working cooperatively. Based on the feedback and interest from many people over the  past year, I think we will see more cooperative alliances created. Part of our advantage is the ability to bring many subject matter networks together.