In understanding the shift, I wrote that as we make this transition — from a market-dominated to a network-dominated society — the confusion of post-modernism clouds our vision of a positive future. The traditional political Right wants to go back to the Pre-modern Era — dogmatic, faith, truth — while the traditional political Left wants to stay in the Modern Era — doubting, science, facts. However, the way ahead is to a Meta-modern Era — seeking, knowledge, combining. This new path may be the most difficult because creating a status quo is more difficult than maintaining an existing one.
Many of us are getting depressed and pessimistic about the state of society, whether it be the big one — climate change — or the many smaller problems facing us — populism, extremism, anti-science movements, xenophobia, etc. One of the biggest frustrations is that the various camps just do not talk to each other with any intention of understanding. In addition, social media — the preferred source of news for many people — tend to increase the outrage. The medium is the message, said Marshall McLuhan, and this medium is all about emotion. Often, our self-perception of knowledge acquired through social media is greater than it actually is. Social media have created a worldwide Dunning-Kruger effect.
The key to our transformation toward a network society is citizen sensemaking. The thinking that got us into our current state of affairs will not get us out. Hierarchical leadership, even in democratic governments, is inadequate for the complexity of a networked society. Our governments seem to be completely unprepared to regulate surveillance capitalism, let alone climate change. Leadership on these issues is coming from outside government and in spite of the market. “We want leadership distributed because this is too much weight even for the mightiest of us.” —Jennifer Sertl. A new form of cooperative leadership is needed today. It is emerging.
What network organizational models can we develop to address complex global issues? One local/global example is an initiative to adapt our forests to climate change, connecting governments with the market, through a non-profit — Community Forests International. One of the biggest climate change initiatives is being led by a 16-year old student from Sweden — Greta Thunberg. Now is the time to continue experimenting with new models, such as platform cooperativism.
My focus for over a decade has been to help people learn together. I have been a champion of social learning and developed the personal knowledge mastery framework to help people learn in networks, communities, and at work. The reason that learning is the work today is that our existing organizations and institutions do not have the answers. We have to create new ways to address what governments and the market cannot. First we have to be able to describe and discuss them. This kind of learning — making sense of our collective condition — has been ignored by schools and institutions. There is no curriculum to prepare us.
Work has always been about who you know, more than what you know. That’s why the rich and powerful send their children to elite schools. It’s not about the education but rather the connections. We still fool ourselves that a capitalist economy is a meritocracy — which any marginalized group can attest is false. However, the emerging network era and its democratization of media is giving voice to more of these groups.
I have advocated for retrieving gender balance in our organizations as the controlled linearity of the written and printed word — patriarchal in their essence — will be obsolesced by the connected, electric medium. This connected world requires each of us to develop broad and diverse social networks in addition to trusted communities of practice. Today, this is even more important for women than men, though I think it will be essential for all genders in the near future. Social networks are our professional safety nets.
Professor Brian Uzzi studied hundreds of MBA graduates and noted significant differences in the social networks of men and women. While social networks are important to both, successful women also had an ‘inner circle’ of trusted female advisors. Networks and communities are not the same. Communities are the connectors between diverse networks and work teams. They are essential. We all need an inner circle.
A fairly lengthy article in The New Humanist — Are we city dwellers or hunter-gatherers? — questions the accepted wisdom that it was agriculture that domesticated hunter-gatherer societies and as a result imposed hierarchies and created societal inequalities. The authors cite many discoveries of hunter-gatherer societies that managed to organize on a massive scale and create large complicated structures.
“Still more astonishing are the stone temples of Göbekli Tepe, excavated over 20 years ago on the Turkish-Syrian border, and still the subject of vociferous scientific debate. Dating to around 11,000 years ago, the very end of the last Ice Age, they comprise at least 20 megalithic enclosures raised high above the now barren flanks of the Harran Plain. Each was made up of limestone pillars over 5m in height and weighing up to a ton (respectable by Stonehenge standards, and some 6,000 years before it). Almost every pillar at Göbekli Tepe is a remarkable work of art, with relief carvings of menacing animals projecting from the surface, their male genitalia fiercely displayed. Sculpted raptors appear in combination with images of severed human heads. “
These required some form of institutions and command & control to coordinate work. But these works were mostly done on a seasonal basis with large groups of people getting together for a period of time and then going back to egalitarian tribal ways. This trend was also in evidence in North America and the Arctic. People were willing to get together and give up control in order to hunt or create something larger than themselves. There is also evidence that a selected few of these people were revered and their deaths celebrated to show their wealth and influence.
Many work teams today are distributed geographically, culturally, or in different time zones. But trust is required before real knowledge-sharing can happen. This is especially the case of sharing complex knowledge which requires strong social ties for trusted professional relationships.
“Being motivated to share what you know with others requires trust — not only trusting those others (something that is diminished with competition), but also trusting the larger institution within which the sharing of expertise is occurring.” —Hinds & Pfeffer (2003)
However, new ideas come from diverse networks with structural holes, often outside the organization. Therefore increasing innovation requires weak and diverse social ties.
“Connections drive innovation. We need input from people with a diversity of viewpoints to help generate innovative new ideas. If our circle of connections grow too small, or if everyone in it starts thinking the same way, we’ll stop generating new ideas —Tim Kastelle (2010)
For the Web is part of the Worldwide Web Foundation — “established in 2009 by web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee to advance the open web as a public good and a basic right … fighting for digital equality — a world where everyone can access the web and use it to improve their lives.”
For the Web is currently asking for stories.
How has the web changed your life? What do you use it for? What are your hopes for its future?
Well I have to say that the web changed my life. My blog has given me almost everything that is positive for my work. It has allowed me to connect with a global network. In 2003 I started freelancing, working from here in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada — population 5,000. Even our timezone [Atlantic Time] is unknown to many people. In 2003 my professional network was comprised of my ex-military connections, a few university ones, and some professionals in our rural region. The Canadian Maritime Provinces — New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island — have about 1.7 million people, with no large cities. The region has relatively high unemployment, no head offices of large companies, and my town is 1,000 KM away from the next major urban centre — Montréal or Boston. There are few regional opportunities for me to find good paid work.
Communities of practice are trusted spaces to learn and experiment.
In January 2018 I started the coffee club as a professional community of practice focused on work and learning. We have a private community space for the members. There are now [2019] over 60 members of the Perpetual Beta Coffee Club. As it grows — which is my hope — I will focus more of my energy there. So far we have a discussion forum and I host live web video chats monthly. These are recorded and available for 30 days. We try to ensure that what is discussed inside the coffee club stays there. It is intended to be a trusted space. If the club grows, I will offer more services to meet demand.
We are now one year in [updated January 2019] and there are members from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, New Zealand, Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, & USA. It’s a pretty eclectic group and while the main focus is workplace learning, we talk about whatever interests our members. The surveillance economy, and how to deal with it, was a recent topic. We also talk about books and current events.
Coffee Club Topics
If you are looking for a trusted space to share ideas and learn from fellow professionals, please join us.
The Internet Time Alliance Award, in memory of Jay Cross, is presented to a workplace learning professional who has contributed in positive ways to the field of Real Learning and is reflective of Jay’s lifetime of work.
Recipients champion workplace and social learning practices inside their organization and/or on the wider stage. They share their work in public and often challenge conventional wisdom. The Award is given to professionals who continuously welcome challenges at the cutting edge of their expertise and are convincing and effective advocates of a humanistic approach to workplace learning and performance.
We announce the award each year on 5 July, Jay’s birthday.
Following his death in November 2015, the partners of the Internet Time Alliance (Jane Hart, Harold Jarche, Charles Jennings, Clark Quinn) resolved to continue Jay’s work. Jay Cross was a deep thinker and a man of many talents, never resting on his past accomplishments, and this award is one way to keep pushing our professional fields and industries to find new and better ways to learn and work.
An understanding of the research on how and why groups of people change can lead to better ways of organizing as a society or an organization. For instance, small groups of committed individuals who want to influence society need a significant presence to make that change happen: twenty-five percent.
“When a minority group pushing change was below 25% of the total group, its efforts failed. But when the committed minority reached 25%, there was an abrupt change in the group dynamic, and very quickly the majority of the population adopted the new norm … “And if they’re just below a tipping point, their efforts will fail. But remarkably, just by adding one more person, and getting above the 25% tipping point, their efforts can have rapid success in changing the entire population’s opinion.” —Science Daily 2018
However, if the people have an unshakeable belief, such as religious zealots or fervent believers, then you need fewer committed people: ten percent.
