Complexity

Complexity

Sense-making Skills

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The most difficult part of personal knowledge mastery is developing a sense-making routine. A recent academic paper from the Association for Psychological Science examined various methods to improve learning.

In this monograph, we discuss 10 learning techniques in detail and offer recommendations about their relative utility. We selected techniques that were expected to be relatively easy to use and hence could be adopted by many students. Also, some techniques (e.g., highlighting and rereading) were selected because students report relying heavily on them, which makes it especially important to examine how well they work. The techniques include elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, summarization, highlighting (or underlining), the keyword mnemonic, imagery use for text learning, rereading, practice testing, distributed practice, and interleaved practice. – Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques

This paper was summarized at BigThink.com in an article entitled The lesson you never got taught in school: How to learn! which is how I came across it.

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Build trust, embrace networks, manage complexity

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Hierarchies

A new model for work is required. Hierarchies, simple branching networks, are obsolete. They work well when information flows mostly in one direction: down. Hierarchies are good for command and control. They are handy to get things done in small groups. But hierarchies are rather useless to create, innovate, or change.

We have known for quite a while that hierarchies are ineffective when things get complex. For example, matrix management was an attempt to address the weakness of organizational silos resulting from simple, branching hierarchies. In matrix management people have more than one reporting line and often work across business units. However, the performance management system and job structure usually remain intact so that it adds more complication, rather than increased effectiveness.

Any hierarchy, even one wrapped in matrices, becomes an immovable beast as soon as it is created. The only way to change a hierarchical organization is to create a new hierarchy. This is why reorganization is so popular; and so ineffective. Most organizations still deal with complexity through reorganization. Just think of the last time a new CEO came in to “fix” a large corporation. A connected enterprise starts by building a foundation of trust, embracing networks, and then managing complexity.

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Mastering the Internet of Everything

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In a recent interview, John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, stated that the major hurdle for the Internet of Everything is the underlying architecture or it will not happen, as too much effort will have to be spent on systems integration. As with most technical hurdles, this will likely be addressed, sooner or later.

Many people are just figuring out Web 1.0, mastering their web browsers, email and the like. Others are getting into Web 2.0, using social media to connect to people and join communities of practice. And now along comes the internet of everything (IoE). How will we be able to master this new network paradigm, or will it master us?

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Network Era Skills

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It is only through innovative and contextual methods, the self-selection of the most appropriate tools and work conditions, and willing cooperation, that more productive work can be assured in the network era. The duty of being transparent in our work and sharing our knowledge rests with all workers, including management.

Only people can enable knowledge, trust and credibility to flow within and between markets and companies. Business in the network era is connecting companies to their markets through knowledge workers having conversations in communities and social networks. The core skills for this emerging workplace are: 1) working & learning out loud 2) cooperating, 3) collaborating, and 4) self-organizing.

Working and learning out loud make implicit knowledge more explicit. Creating ‘knowledge artifacts’ that can be shared and built upon by others results in faster organizational learning, and being able to take action on that learning. In an organization, working out loud can take many forms. It could be a regular blog; sharing day-to-day happenings in activity streams; taking pictures and videos; or just having regular discussions. Developing these skills, like adding value to information, takes time and practice. Working out loud also means taking ownership of our learning.

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Reinventing Organizations – Review

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What is a “Teal Organization”? Frédéric Laloux, in Reinventing Organizations, uses a colour scheme, based on Integral Theory, to describe the historical development of human organizations: Red > Orange > Green > Teal. Laloux lists three breakthroughs of Teal organizations:

  1. Self-management: driven by peer relationships
  2. Wholeness: involving the whole person at work
  3. Evolutionary purpose: let the organization adapt and grow, not be driven

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Learning in a connected enterprise

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In 2003 I was suddenly unemployed, jettisoned shortly before the learning technology company where I was CLO went bankrupt. Look where I live, in Sackville. My network in 2003 was quite small and mostly Canadian. So how did I get to Sydney, NSW today? How did I learn to do what I now do? The same way everyone will be learning as the network era emerges. I learned by doing; but mostly through sharing, especially on this blog. Today at the Amplify Festival I spoke about this journey and discussed how learning is becoming something we may not even be talking about in the future, as everyone will be doing it as part of their work.

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Re-wiring for the Complex Workplace

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Note: The following article appears in Inside Learning Technologies & Skills – May 2014. This is the “No Flash Required” version.

Complexity is the new normal

We are so interconnected today that many cannot imagine otherwise. Almost every person is connected to worldwide communication networks. News travels at the speed of a Tweet. Meanwhile, inside the enterprise, reaction times and feedback loops have to get faster to deal with markets that can create multi-billion dollar valuations seemingly overnight. But are they getting faster?

Expectations for digital competencies for workers keep increasing, without much of a clue from management what these really are. Today’s workplace demands emergent practices just to keep up, but there is little time or thought provided to develop these. In most cases our current models for managing people and supporting their knowledge-sharing are ineffective.

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A world of pervasive networks

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According to Derrick de Kerckhove, Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture, the McLuhans’ tetradic Laws of Media state that every medium (or technology in the broader sense of the word) has four major effects:

  1. extends a human property (the car extends the foot);
  2. obsolesces the previous medium by turning it into a sport or an form of art (the automobile turns horses and carriages into sports);
  3. retrieves a much older medium that was obsolesced before (the automobile brings back the shining armour of the chevalier);
  4. flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its limits (the automobile, when there are too many of them, create traffic jams, that is total paralysis)

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Organize for Complexity

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Niels Pflaeging read my ebook Seeking perpetual beta and said that “after reading the book one yearns for more from you about the right learning architecture, about how to develop organizations applying this thinking, about how to build learning programs and infrastructure.” Well I think Niels has answered much of that question himself, in his recent book Organize for Complexity. Since I promote the fact that today work is learning, and learning is the work, then if you create better ways of working, you are also improving organizational learning. As Niels writes about the “learning riddle”:

Mastery is the human capability to solve new problems. It can only be developed through practice. We call this “disciplined practice”.

Fads like business analytics, knowledge management, and big data will never make organizations fit for complexity.

This is why I now call PKM: Personal Knowledge Mastery; to separate it from much of the traditional practice of  knowledge management. #PKMastery is disciplined practice.

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