Communities

communities of interest and practice

Instant private micro-sharing

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As we were discussing social learning this week, several people asked, where do I start? Jay Cross was talking to Dan Pontefract this week in San Jose and one of the lessons learnt by Dan was that micro-sharing (e.g. Twitter) is probably the best place to start. I can understand. Blogging takes time and you have to write a coherent train of thought. Staring at a blank screen can be daunting. Wikis only work when you have a group of people with a common purpose and a need to collaborate. Micro-sharing is easy, especially since it’s limited to 140 characters. Who doesn’t have time to tap out 140 characters?

Of course, the big question from anyone in a medium to large organization is the need for privacy. The usual answer is to use Yammer, which limits access to people with the same e-mail address. This works for company stuff but how do you get people from several organizations to collaborate?

Status.net, based on open source software, offers a range of options, some free and some fee. I’ve just set up a private site which is invitation-only. It’s free for 25 members and then costs $1.00 per user per month beyond that. Not bad at all. You can also download the software for free and host it in-house.

I set up a private community site today. It took only a few minutes and I was able to customize it fairly quickly. This is a great way to pilot micro-sharing with very little risk.

Once the site is established, the admin can invite people to the community. It takes only a few minutes to create a profile. The “public timeline” shows everyone’s posts so there’s no need to follow people, particularly with a community of only 25 people. The site-wide notice for the administrator is handy, so that a semi-permanent message can be displayed for everyone.

Status.net – I like it; though I haven’t figured out the automatic URL shortening feature yet.

The wisdom of lists

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Finding out how others perceive you can be an interesting professional exercise. Marketing and branding may have their place but understanding how the rest of world sees you reverses that lens.

One function of Twitter that I haven’t used much is the ability to create Lists. I only have two lists, but many people seem to find them useful. For example, I have one that includes my Internet Time Alliance colleagues, so I can stay up to date with their tweets, across 8 time zones, without any additional searching. Lists are just groupings of profiles and can be created by any user. All lists are named and some have a detailed description.

I’m on about 400 lists so I decided to take a look at them and I noticed that I’m categorized in many ways. I then went through all of the titles and descriptions, standardized the language & spelling, and put these words into a text document which I used to create a Wordle cloud.

Here’s what my social mirror reflected back to me.

Interdependence: a sense of purpose

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As we do more of our work in networks, workplace learning becomes an interdependent activity. Social and collaborative learning support the development of emergent practices needed for more complex work.

Esko Kilpi looks at different work tasks with the same framework as the above figure: independent, dependent or interdependent.

The Internet-based firm sees work as networked communication. Any node in the network can communicate with any other node on the basis of contextual interdependence and creative participative engagement. Work takes place in a transparent, wide-area, digital environment.

The focus is thus not on independent tasks, or predetermined processes, but on participative, self-organizing responsiveness that creates patterns of continuity and creativity.

Work and learning, as they merge, become increasingly interdependent activities. People haven’t changed over the years but with the Internet we have an opportunity to create work structures that may actually meet our core needs. Dan Pink discusses in Drive how various studies have shown that three basic things motivate people to do work (see video). These are:

  • Autonomy
  • Mastery
  • A sense of purpose

This applies to all but the most menial of tasks. We need to be in control, work at bettering ourselves and do this with the sense of some greater mission. We are social beings. As independent self-employed workers we were limited for centuries in developing our skills without support, adequate tools or feedback from others. We needed to study from masters and become part of a community of practice. Even with guilds and unions, there was limited access and individuals lacked autonomy. This same lack of autonomy and sense of purpose was magnified in the factory and is still evident in the modern workplace. Today, up to 84% of workers want to leave their jobs, in spite of the current economic climate.

It is only by working (and learning) interdependently, retaining our autonomy, co-developing our mastery and feeling a shared sense of purpose that we will be truly motivated. The opportunity the Internet has given individuals is the chance to work cooperatively toward a shared purpose (Seb Paquet calls this “ridiculously easy group-forming). The Internet also affords organizations the opportunity to loosen the dependence of workers through participative engagement (as The Cluetrain Manifesto explained a decade ago). The new organization must be some mix of free-agent autonomy, support mechanisms for mastery, and a wide enough span for each person to develop a personal sense of purpose.

Perhaps there is a new middle ground between lone wolves and corporate sheep:

Quotes from 2010

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I found many quotes this past year, especially via Twitter. Here are most of them, all together (this way I’ll be able to find them all when I want to use them). #NetworkLearning

Life

via @VasilyKomarov RT @nickthinker: Those who can lead an inexpensive (low cost) life and appreciate the simple and free things are actually the “new rich”!

@KareAnderson “Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

@bduperrin “The more social you are you [the] more opportunities you get, the more busy you are, the less social you become.”

via @CharlesHGreen “When you dig yourself into a hole, first, stop digging.” up by your bootstraps

@EskoKilpi “The everyday live interactions we experience do not exist in a meaningful way in any documents.”

@EskoKilpi “Control means being able to predict (if A then B); if we can’t predict, we can’t control.”

via @4KM Complexity is necessary … confusion & unnecessary complication should be eliminated. (Don Norman)

@GeorgeKao “There’s no such thing as ‘keeping up.’ There’s only checking in at high leverage times.”

@JohnDCook “He who marries the spirit of the age will soon be a widow.”

“Silence is golden but duct tape is silver!” @JaneBozarth

“Uncertainty is the certainty that the parameters will change.” @downes

“No matter how many pairs of reading glasses I buy & strategically place around the house they are never nearby when I need them.” @skap5

History

Abraham Lincoln: The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise — with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. (Annual Message to Congress: 1862)

Organizations & Management

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”- Howard Aiken; via @RudolfChristian

via @minutrition RT @umairh: in the age of strategy, what counted was knowing the terrain. in the age of wisdom, what counts is knowing the soil.

@jonhusband “Unfortunately, HR is the home base for the management practices based on old mental models about work & motivation .. not synched with networked work”

@tdebaillon “Most companies aren’t designed for collaboration.” My Little Enterprise 2.0 Diffusion Framework

@umairh “The problem isn’t that we need new jobs. It’s that we need a better economy, composed of new kinds of companies, built for a higher purpose.”

Henry Mintzberg: “In a word, corporate America is sick.” – “A viable economy needs to be led by explorers, not exploiters.” – “The Problem Is Enterprise, Not Economics” via @jonhusband

@faboolous “Knowledge work thus requires that each party offer something with no guarantee that they will get anything specific in return”.

via @planetrussell- “Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while giving the appearance of stability.” —Nassim Nicholas Taleb, PhD.

“when hiring, we don’t care about formal education” says @JasonFried of37Signals – the new workplace, the new normal

“Walmart exec (I’m not making this up) told me email was so time-consuming cause she had to approve everyone’s email in advance.” @jaycross

“I think “human capital” is an oxymoron. “Social capital” too. Test question: would you consider your spouse, children or friends “capital?” @dsearls

“If I am an effective leader then I have set up a system that is not dependent on me.” @gcouros

“The fact is that organisation and management sciences are not sciences at all but scientific emperors with no clothing.” Complexity & Management Centre

“Organizations not engaged in real-time sensemaking are going to find themselves getting Dumb and Dumber” by Jeff Jonas (& others). via @jonhusband

“Don’t pity the blind man, for he has never seen PowerPoint.” @MeetingBoy

Networks

@reactorcontrol “Tim Berners-Lee describes social networks as “vertical silos”, because they are not interoperable. #dzf4?

@charlesjennings “ROI on social learning? ‘social networks are necessarily loose-edged and impossible to make fully explicit’ (David Weinberger)”

@VMaryAbraham “These guys are some of the smartest in the microsharing room, but I haven’t yet heard the 140-nugget that makes the case.”

Education & Training

Catherine Lombardozzi – “One of my favorite quotes is from Kent Seibert: ‘Reject the myth that we learn from experience and accept the reality that we learn by reflecting on experience.’

“Most of what we know we learn from other people. We pay tuition to a few of these teachers … but most of it we get for free, and often in ways that are mutual – without a distinction between student and teacher … We know this kind of external effect is common to all the arts and sciences – the ‘creative professions.’ All of intellectual history is the history of such effects.” Does Milwaukee have enough college graduates to thrive?

“Anything you think is either unoriginal, wrong or both”

@courosa Look at a single Twitter page. Think about prior knowledge / literacies needed to decode that page. RTs. links. voice. events. #MediaLiteracy

@Dave_Ferguson My comment to @rnantel : fixing most performance problems with training is like fixing a leaky faucet by painting the kitchen.

“You can not have a superior democracy with an inferior system of education.” @ginab

My Favourites

Steven Johnson – Chance favours the connected mind. via @timkastelle

@ralphmercer – “committees are places to lure great ideas to be killed while absolving everyone of the blame”

“Hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust” … Warren Bennis” via @jonhusband

via @HealthCareerPro “I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.” ~ Winston Churchill.

Resonance

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Over the past year, I’ve posted 225 articles here, some popular, some a bit controversial and some ignored (but still useful for my own learning).

Here are some posts that resonated with readers.

Two posts, A Framework for Social Learning in the Enterprise (February) and The Evolving Social Organization (August), were popular, as was the white paper that combined these articles. This shows that blog posts do not need to be short to get attention. Longer posts will be read if people are interested in the subject.

A bit more controversial was the post; The LMS is no longer the centre of the universe (May). The great LMS Debate was a topic of conversation with my Internet Time Alliance colleagues for a period of time over the year as well. You get more spirited conversations when money is at stake.

Personal Knowledge Management (March) remained a popular subject, and a key focus of my research and practice, though by the end of the year I was calling it network learning (October).

I revived an article that I had written collaboratively with Michele Martin in 2008 as part of our Work Literacy series. The Ning site it was hosted on had changed its terms of service so I posted a copy of an Introduction to Social Networking (June) on this site. It got more attention here than on the Ning site.

Even though it was written in 2009, The Future of the Training Department remained popular. I really appreciated this comment by Donald Clark; “Close the training departments – love it!”

Thanks to everyone who dropped by, made a comment, wrote a blog post in response, or tweeted something they found here. Thanks for extending the conversation.

Making connections

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I haven’t attended a large face-to-face conference in the learning field for over a year, so DevLearn 2010 was a new experience after so much professional time mostly online. The biggest difference was the sense of community, which I can directly attribute to micro-blogging, or Twitter. For the first time I met dozens of friends and colleagues with whom I had already established relationships and shared various aspects of my life. Fellow Tweeps (as some folks call them) don’t just say hi, they give you a great big hug. Fellow bloggers hardly ever do that.

Twitter has significantly changed the nature of online relationships. Facebook connects people who have usually already met. Blogs share bigger ideas and thoughts. LinkedIn is an online version of the old Rolodex. Twitter strips bare our communication by limiting it to 140 character bursts which gradually meld into a stream from which patterns emerge. These patterns are not intended or designed by the originator, but sensed by the observer. It’s difficult to hide your true personality on Twitter. Each person I met confirmed my impressions on Twitter.

Later in the conference, we saw how the #lrnchat gang at DevLearn emerged as a visible tribe on Thursday evening. I am sure that at next year’s DevLearn the name tags will include a Twitter identifier [take that as a hint, Brent Schlenker].

Twitter is becoming an important connection machine. Via one of my Twitter pals, Paul McConaughy, aka @minutrition, I watched this fascinating video yesterday:

Dr. Brené Brown says that, “Connection is why we’re here; it’s what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. This is what it’s all about.” What keeps many people out of connection is that they feel they are not worthy of connection. Brown explains that people with a stronger sense of belonging believe they are worthy of love and belonging. These people also fully embrace vulnerability. Her conclusion, from many observations and interviews, is that the best way to live is with vulnerability and to stop controlling and predicting. To me, this sounds like adopting a perspective of life in perpetual Beta. I think that the vulnerability we show when embracing social media is actually a path to a better life. All of those embraces at DevLearn are pretty strong evidence of that.

Being social for learning and performance

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Social learning has been a theme here for some time [my first post on the subject in 2005: from e-learning to s-learning]. Recent research by CMU, MIT & Union College shows that being social is also a key to group performance:

That collective intelligence, the researchers believe, stems from how well the group works together. For instance, groups whose members had higher levels of “social sensitivity” were more collectively intelligent. “Social sensitivity has to do with how well group members perceive each other’s emotions,” says Christopher Chabris, a co-author and assistant professor of psychology at Union College in New York.

“Also, in groups where one person dominated, the group was less collectively intelligent than in groups where the conversational turns were more evenly distributed,” adds Woolley. And teams containing more women demonstrated greater social sensitivity and in turn greater collective intelligence compared to teams containing fewer women.

However, many OD, HR and training departments still focus on individual skill development and the perennial favourite, leadership training. How often do people work in total isolation today? Why are skills taught separately from the workplace and co-workers? As for leadership, how can you decontextualize it from the workplace? Easy cookie-cutter solutions, like MBTI for leadership, are mainstream fare, even though MBTI is about as valid as astrology [I’m a reflector, completer finisher, ENTJ, inspirer – what are you?]

In the evolving social organization, we noted how knowledge workers get things done by conversing with peers, customers and partners, as they solve the problems of the day. Learning from these social interactions is a key to business innovation. To participate in their markets, organizations, customers and suppliers need to understand each other and this too, is social. Social learning is how knowledge is created, internalized and shared. It is how knowledge work gets done.

A serious re-focus is needed for organizations to take advantage of social learning in business and professional networks. Everything from team composition, job titles, performance evaluation and training approaches must be examined through the lens of [social] networks. There is solid research in social network analysis, value network analysis and social learning that can inform this shift. But leaders and managers must first put aside their old mental models, and that’s the real challenge.

With my ITA colleagues, we’re trying to start a shift to working smarter in networks, without some fancy, and unnecessary, software platform to enable it. It’s a cultural challenge to change mental models, not a technological one.

Related post: Let’s talk about work

Twitter and the law of the few

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The Law of the Few, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point relates to the spreading of ideas & viruses in populations:

The attainment of the tipping point that transforms a phenomenon into an influential trend usually requires the intervention of a number of influential types of people. In the disease epidemic model Gladwell introduced in Chapter 1, he demonstrated that many outbreaks could be traced back to a small group of infectors. Likewise, on the path toward the tipping point, many trends are ushered into popularity by small groups of individuals that can be classified as Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.

Connectors are individuals who have ties in many different realms and act as conduits between them, helping to engender connections, relationships, and “cross-fertilization” that otherwise might not have ever occurred. Mavens are people who have a strong compulsion to help other consumers by helping them make informed decisions. Salesmen are people whose unusual charisma allows them to be extremely persuasive in inducing others’ buying decisions and behaviors.

Charlene Croft tipped me to the fact that Twitter is an amplifier for Mavens, Connectors & Salespeople:

Twitter is a social networking site predominantly used by individuals who are high-level communicators and organizations/businesses who want to reach those communicators.   Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point is a good lens through which to view Twitter users.  He talks about the Connectors, the Mavens and the Salesmen as being the three types of individuals which start and spread what he calls “social epidemics.”

Let’s look at some specific behaviours on Twitter.

Mavens: If you are already a writer or blogger, twitter amplifies your work to a wider audience. Posting your latest work, or having others tweet it, gets out your ideas. When someone as famous as Tim Berners-Lee signs up on Twitter, he automatically gets many followers and a new channel for communication, just as Margaret Atwood has done.

Twitter is becoming a great place to connect online, extending the reach of many bloggers. I’ve noticed that while my blog comments have decreased in the past year, links from Twitter have significantly increased.

People who tweet original ideas and comments tend to have a larger group of followers. This extends their influence and can lead to more speaking and writing opportunities. With more people following you, serendipitous moments have a greater chance of happening. For instance, I once tweeted that I was looking for new projects.  This was picked up by someone who followed me but I did not know previously. It led to paid work.

Connectors: These valuable people to know can make introductions across disciplines. They often follow many people and post lots of “retweets” [RT]. The more they give, the more influential they become in the network. Connectors are well-suited to be online community managers, a vocation that is in demand today.

Salespeople: Direct selling on Twitter usually doesn’t work, as most people will not follow a pure sales pitch. However, Twitter is an excellent resource for salespeople to find out what people are looking for or if they’re unhappy with a competitor. I think Twitter is one of the best free competitive intelligence tools on the web.

I remember when web pundits thought that some day everybody would have a blog. Today, many people have an online website, Facebook or LinkedIn profile, but relatively few blog regularly. It takes discipline to write year after year, especially if it’s more than a personal journal. Twitter, or micro-blogging in general, may be the current web darling but this too will fade. While Twitter, like blogging, is not for everyone, it can be quite useful for a certain segment of the population. This aspect of Twitter should be seriously examined by leaders and managers who want their organizations to work smarter.

CI and KM

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Jack Vinson asks: “Can anyone point me (and my friend) to some better resources around doing ‘competitive intelligence’ by asking people within the company to work together to develop the intel?  I’ve pointed him to the Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals.”

I was introduced to CI by Conor Vibert about 10 years ago and I discussed on this blog how I did some small scale intelligence collection, collation and dissemination, five years ago. In Conor’s competitive intelligence class at Acadia University, he has students giving presentations on a business, while others are going online to question their claims, and other students are using chat to discuss the points without interrupting the speakers. It’s exciting to watch Conor’s classes in action. Last year, I suggested to a client, a small technology company, how they could set up a CI process. [The company is no longer in business, so I don’t consider this confidential information any more]

Conor wrote a book on CI — A framework for web-based analysis and decision making.

Recommendations:

Developing an internal Competitive Intelligence process:

1. Start by asking questions internally and seeing what kind of answers you get. Use your existing social media tools to do this. A blog or a wiki would work.

2. As a distributed team, each person can be responsible for a specific information source that is monitored regularly.

3. Ask a weekly question and see who can get some information that may be able to answer part or all of it.

4. In the feedback to these questions people may ask you to re-frame the questions. Continue to learn and refine this process for your unique context. Better questions will make for better CI.

5. You may not need to hire anyone else to collate the data, but if you do, keep your team (who have industry knowledge) involved.

6. Don’t just hand CI over to a junior staff member. CI should be part of the conversational flow in the company. Marketing, sales, developers and management should be actively involved.

7. The process of asking questions, seeing if there are answers and in turn asking questions about the questions can hone the team’s ability to gather competitive intelligence.

8. If you decide to purchase access to information sources, such as Hoover’s, only buy one at a time. Use that source as much as you can (squeeze it dry) and until you realize you should eliminate it or augment it with another purchased source.

Fluctuating support networks

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I had the recent pleasure of meeting Judith Holton, a colleague at Mount Allison University. Judith passed on a couple of papers which I found most interesting, as she has looked deeply into the theory behind the need for what I would describe as social learning networks. Judith uses the term, “fluctuating support networks”. In Exploring the informal organization in knowledge work: A grounded theory of  fluctuating support networks (2008), Judith concludes [my emphasis]:

The study contributes to management praxis by raising awareness and offering insights into the practical value of fluctuating support networks and their power to rehumanize the knowledge workplace. As an informal response to the formal organization, fluctuating support networks deviate from the conventions of the formal organization and provide network members with a venue for fulfilling unmet social and psychological work-related needs. Knowledge and understanding of such networks may enable managers to understand their functionality in resolving knowledge workers’ concerns and needs in response to persistent and unpredictable change and may offer managers an additional resource for achieving strategic organizational goals, especially those goals that require cross-functional integration and non-conventional perspectives to address increasingly complex organizational problems. Adopting the basic social process of rehumanizing as a conceptual framework may assist managers and human resource professionals in developing organizational strategies that support a broader humanistic paradigm. Such perspective also highlights the value of the informal organization, and fluctuating support networks in particular, as important psychological infrastructure for the knowledge workplace.

Rehumanising Knowledge Work through Fluctuating Support Networks [PDF] (2005) describes the three stages of rehumanising (Finding & Likening; Igniting Passions; Mutual Engagement). I was most surprised when I noticed that each of these steps parallels the three parts of personal knowledge management, namely: Seeking; Sense-making & Sharing. I’ve added some of my previous statements on working smarter, after the colon:

Finding & Likening, which is serendipitous or intentional: PKM prepares the mind to be open to new ideas (enhanced serendipity)

Igniting Passions, which amplifies causal looping process:  Aids in observing, thinking and using information & knowledge (I Sense)

Mutual Engagement, which facilitates creative problem solving: “You know you’re in a community of practice when your practice changes” (We Use)

Judith Holton’s research confirms my observations and readings over the past decade. Knowledge workers cannot work effectively within the confines of hierarchical structures that are beset by change from within and without. Social networks, facilitated by social media, provide the fluctuating support networks that are necessary. The problem is clear:

Knowledge workers identify this increasing sense of dehumanisation in their work and work environments as a particular concern. The loss of the human dimension in workplace interactions is characterized by a work environment that is compressed, fearful, isolating, bureaucratic and legalistic; by interactions that are atomised and inauthentic; and, by work assignments that erode autonomy and identity. (Holton, 2008)

Once again, I see that social learning in informal networks is key to getting things done in today’s knowledge-intensive workplace.