Fridays Finds this week have been curated by the PKM workshop in Sydney, NSW. (Marion Louvel, @chemenesinson, @michelleockers, @soozietwits, Siobhan Sutherland Rogers, Julia, Elizabeth Robinson)
Friday’s Finds
Friday’s finds on social media
Good Friday Finds
Which Comes First: Engaged Employees or Customer Success? via @OscarBerg
You want to have tools to help employees get work done. Those tools are no longer the HR systems of performance management and compensation. — those don’t help to get your work done. What we’re seeing is heavy adoption of work management tools, task management, collaboration, file-sharing and so forth. People need tools to connect, to share knowledge, to build community and culture and, ultimately, to get their work done, which is about serving customers.
@AndrewJacobsLD – One Man’s Magic …
If you have a washing line, do you need to continually update your tumble dryer?
Does not having a tumble dryer put you at a disadvantage?
Is this a problem that learning technology suppliers have – how to sell us a more efficient tumble dryer?
Does knowing which clothes dry best in which circumstances make THAT much of a difference?
Points and counterpoints
@AndrewJacobsLD – “Phrase of the day: Klout is nothing more than a data selfie.”
@jbordeaux : “In complexity, the ‘edge’ is also referred to as the ‘onset of chaos’. May explain resistance [to change].”
Management is for suckers
@nilofer: “In the industrial era, what created scale was more resources. In the social era, what creates scale is trust.”
“When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?” – John Maynard Keynes – via @flowchainsensei
Knowing what we know
@CelineSchill — “We’ve hired & promoted generations of managers with robust analytical skills & poor social skills, and we don’t seem to think that matters.”
@flowchainsensei — “At all levels ‘leaders’ have no answers for our problems. We have to find our own solutions, together.”
@DocOnDev — “People cannot both follow orders without question and take responsibility for their own actions.”
@JohnRobb — “You can either compete with technology for a job, or use it to help you make a living outside of a job. Your choice.”
Psychology Today: Thinking Outside the Box: A Misguided Idea
After all, with one simple yet brilliant experiment, researchers had proven that the conceptual link between thinking outside the box and creativity was a myth.
Liz Ryan: ‘If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Manage It’: Not True — Forbes
Luckily, humans are very good at reading energy and responding to it. It’s always been human energy and mojo that have powered everything good that’s ever happened in business or institutional life. We delude ourselves when we pretend that the yardstick and the milestone matter … More measurement won’t do anything except clog the pipelines through which your company’s mojo flows.
A Different Way to Acquire Lessons Learned in Knowledge Management by @PaulJCorney
If you can’t write the action points and learnings down on a postcard then you have too many. The key point is lessons have to be acted upon; otherwise why bother capturing them!
@SeriousPony — “Curse of Expertise is not that experts forgot how they learned; it’s that they don’t really KNOW what they know & use.”
Culture is our nature
WSJ: Drop the nature vs nurture debate
But new research has led biologists to a different view. We didn’t adapt to a particular Stone Age environment. We adapted to a newly unpredictable and variable world. And we did it by developing new abilities for cultural transmission and change. Each generation could learn new skills for coping with new environments and could pass those skills on to the next generation.
As the anthropologist Pascal Boyer points out in his answer, it’s tempting to talk about “the culture” of a group as if this is some mysterious force outside the biological individual or independent of evolution. But culture is a biological phenomenon. It’s a set of abilities and practices that allow members of one generation to learn and change and to pass the results of that learning on to the next generation. Culture is our nature, and the ability to learn and change is our most important and fundamental instinct.
freelancers are shaping the new economy – via @C4LPT
Freelancers often work independently, but being “on your own” doesn’t mean “going it alone.” Freelancing successfully means building a network to line up new gigs, passing assignments to others when things are busy, and getting referrals from friends when they’re not.
@JonHusband – Learning at the Speed of Links and Conversations
In the information-and-hyperlink saturated workplace social networks we now inhabit, clarification, confirmation, and collaboration are but a click or two away. It’s mission-critical for individuals, groups, and organizations to be able to discern what kind(s) of personal learning strategies are necessary to survive and thrive in our new world of permanent information whitewater.
There just isn’t any choice other than continuous learning because ongoing change—permanent whitewater—is our only remaining constant.
@DigitalTonto – Social media speed disruption
In the past, media provided a filter. If something was on the front page or the evening news, it was considered important. If not, it wasn’t. Yet today, anyone can broadcast—whether it be a distraught mother or a crusading journalist. Nobody needs to ask for permission, even in a corrupt, authoritarian country.
And that’s why social media is playing an increasing role in shaping events. A small group of passionate people can influence others that are slightly more reticent, still others take notice and also join in. Before you know it, a movement ensues …
@ActivateLearn – How do we enforce independence in workplace learning? – via @C4LPT
You have to wonder how the world got to where it is today where we have to FORCE people to be INDEPENDENT. Two words that look weird together in a sentence. It’s come to this – you have to force people to be independent? Isn’t that something that would create mistrust or curiosity in people?
Networked monkeys
@flowchainsensei – “Even when companies don’t pay peanuts, seems like they still mostly want monkeys. If I’m gonna be a monkey, at least it’ll be a Chaos Monkey.”
@hreingold – “In 5th grade, I tried to drop out. My teacher regarded me as a problem and I hated school. My parents moved me to a new school … On the first day of my new school, the new teacher praised my writing and asked me to interview the principal for the class newspaper … Is that why I became a writer? I don’t know. Obviously, it made an impression on me. The right word and the right time can go a long way.”
@eekim – The Real Importance of Networks: Understanding Power
Networks are not a rejection of hierarchy. Networks are a rejection of rigidity. A hierarchy is an efficient form of decision-making, as long as it’s the “right” hierarchy. Powerful networks allow the right hierarchies to emerge at the right time.
@smartco – Complexify yourself – and others
An obvious way to expand our range of responses is to develop our skills and capabilities, and to connect with others whose knowledge complements our own – as well as connecting to inspire and trigger-off new ideas together.
And this was Stafford Beer’s influence on me. He developed W. Ross Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety. He uses variety as another word for complexity. And Ashby said that “only variety absorbs variety.”
This is what I mean by complexify yourself and others. It’s about making sure that your skills and capabilities are up to the job of dealing with complex and uncertain situations. They need to be equal to the context – complex situations need diverse, agile, collective and creative thinking.
Automattic’s (not so) secrets: 1. allow experimentation 2. hire the right people 3. permit autonomy + measure output – via @folletto
Matt Mullenweg (of Automattic):
This is where open source gets really interesting: it’s not just about the legal wonkery around software licensing, but what effect open sourced software has on people using it. In the proprietary world, those people are typically called “users,” a strange term that connotes dependence and addiction. In the open source world, they’re more rightly called a community.
As a final note, here’s an image representing the impact of openness on innovation in society:
A few points of view
“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.” – Marshall McLuhan – via @gcouros
“Information is shared within the murder so that group decisions can be made” Crow Brains Reveal Secrets of Their Intelligence
“political equality that is required by democracy is always under threat from economic inequality” Cardiff de Alejo Garcia – via @toughloveforx
If democracy becomes plutocracy, those who are not rich are effectively disenfranchised. Justice Louis Brandeis famously argued that the United States could have either democracy or wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but not both. The political equality that is required by democracy is always under threat from economic inequality, and the more extreme the economic inequality, the greater the threat to democracy. – Angus Deaton
@euan – Why blogging still matters in business – and always will.
It’s not about marketing, or SEO, or “going viral”. It is not about internal “enterprise social” or external “social media” It is not even about the platforms or tools on which you choose to write. It is much simpler and much more powerful. It is about developing our awareness, our communication skills, and our collective intelligence. It is about thinking harder and writing better. Blogging is a means by which to rediscover your voice, to learn to share your thoughts with others, and by doing so to help us all get smarter faster.
PEW: Social era challenges: trust, focus, coordination, loyalty, managing complexity; institutional memory.
The new social operating system is affecting the world of work as well. It’s not about being in one small bounded group in a hierarchy. Many people are now doing simultaneous work on multiple projects, in multiple, distributed teams and with multiple “bosses” and heavily reliant on technology for communication and coordination. Rainie characterized this as moving from a traditional ‘fishbowl’ of shopfloor or cubicle cities to a networked switchboard model – where the individual is the orchestrator of things.
The Leadership Paradox – Leadership is … an activity or behavior that can arise anywhere in a human system.
The overall conclusion of this research was that the leaders of successful organisations did play a key role in radical transformations of those organisations, but not by specifying it or directing it but by creating the conditions which allowed for the emergence of such change.