Friday’s Finds

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter, and also heard in passing at ICALT 2012 this past week in Rome.

@rosariocacao – “@adriancheok at ICALT: you don’t have time to make explicit your tacit knowledge”

@britz – PKM = People, Simplicity, Discipline

@AdrianCheok – “How to cope with email overload” – [nice succinct summary]

@cufa – “Serious case of info overload/illegible pics on too many slides at #icalt2012 – are we not meant to be learning and teaching experts?”

@RichardTheGeek – The Lord of the Phones – 3 phones to bind them [at ICALT 2012]

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week. 

“The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation ~ Bertrand Russell” – via @JenniferSertl

@MickSainsbury – PKM feeds the intellectual capital of an organisation

Organisations should be facilitating a culture of PKM and promoting its value to its people as a significant strategy for capacity building, continuous improvement, innovation, renewal, reconstruction and engagement.

PKM feeds the intellectual capital of an organisation.

@TomSpiglanin – Social Net Work and the Workplace Professional

This is the concept of net work: individual nodes who connect work teams to vast social networks through communities of practice, making the work teams significantly more productive and effective. If there is power in a single connected node, imagine the increased power of multiple nodes connecting the workplace to individually cultivated communities of practice. The net work product has the potential to grow exponentially better.

@JayCross – Learn Informal Learning Informally. Experiential

This workshop is not a course. It’s more like Outward Bound meets Oxford. You learn by doing.

 You work surrounded by the knowledge of others, Why on earth would you not use it?

Objection 4. “Our people are too busy for this. It will take too much time”
Too busy to learn, but not too busy to reinvent wheels, rework solutions, and revisit old problems? You need to explain that KM is a time-saver, that it cut project times by up to 16%, that it’s the lazy person’s way to work. As one of my colleagues said “You work surrounded by the knowledge of others, Why on earth would you not use it? It will save money and time, it will make your life easier, and you will do a better job”. Basically, if people are so busy, there is not argument NOT to introduce KM.

@JohnnieMoore – Strip out the strategising and you may create the conditions for swift trust

Of course in big organisations, talking strategy can be a high status activity – those who are seen to be good at it get the big bucks. That presents a pretty serious impediment to more agile processes happening inside the hierarchy. But it’s not going to stop them happening outside.

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@JamieNotter – “Key lesson: for people to give energy to these new things, they need to stop doing other things.”

@AnnaFMackenzie – “I agree. Writing is writing – it takes practice and discipline to write well. I find blogging helps thesis writing.”

@dominicad – “A richer organization has more options for slack time.”

«Il n’y a pas d’éducateurs, «mais seulement des gens qui montrent aux autres comment ils s’y prennent pour s’éduquer eux-même. ~ J. Guitton »  – via @PascalVenier

Team Wikispeed, where learning really is the work – via @jhagel

You can certainly gain knowledge by reading a textbook, but acquiring “tacit knowledge,” education that comes from first-hand experience, is a much more powerful and effective way to learn. Talent development in firms today typically comes in the form of stale training courses and presentations rather than a focus on tacit knowledge development. At WIKISPEED, however, the team learns almost entirely through hands-on experience. Volunteers work in pairings of inexperienced and experienced individuals who take on small projects. Not only does this help novice volunteers learn faster, it also reduces the time and cost of documenting every process because knowledge is exchanged between peers rather than consolidated in formal training programs.

90% of companies with >1,000 employees recently changed their organization structure. <50% were successful! – via @JostleMe

“an alarming statistic, and one with perilous implications. Apart from the high costs and squandered opportunity, a failed reorganization can leave an enterprise even worse off than it was before, with lost productivity, a weakened market position, and a disengaged workforce, among other impacts.”

 culture is an emergent property of all the little things you do – via @JDeragon

We are accustomed to thinking that the intangibles of life exist separately from tangible things; material things separated from spiritual, personal things distinct from commercial. This is not so. The knowledge economy has taught us how intangibles like intellectual property and design can be converted into money. Consider how much of the cost of a computer covers its tangible components versus how much you are paying for its technology and software. Tangibles and intangibles are often interchangeable. Material wealth can buy intangibles like lifestyle, time, rich human experiences, and education. In the same way, intangibles like knowledge, wisdom, culture, and caring can generate tangible wealth, too.

@TomSpiglanin – Why would I need to manage my own knowledge in the first place? 

At the end of the day, we are individually responsible for our own professional development, not our employer. After all, the only knowledge we can truly manage is our own.

When cooperating, people perform together (co-operate) while working on selfish yet not-conflicting goals. by @StoweBoyd

As swift trust and ad hoc project teams become the dominant form factor for working over the next few years, we will see the transformation of large businesses away from monolithic power and belief systems, to something much more of a mosiac. In  this not-too-distant future businesses may principally be organized around helping every employee find and achieve their personal meaning for work, instead of trying to indoctrinate workers to a corporate agenda.

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. ~ Oscar Wilde” – via @PeterWinick

Cheating” is (finally) recognized as a 21st century learning skill – via @rbgayle

The IEEE’s Computer and Reliability Societies recently published “Embracing the Kobayashi Maru,” by James Caroland (US Navy/US Cybercommand) and Greg Conti (West Point) describing an exercise in which they assigned students to cheat on an exam — either jointly or individually. The goal was to get students thinking about how to secure systems from adversaries who are willing to “cheat” to win. The article describes how the students all completed the exam (they all cheated successfully), which required them to provide the first 100 digits of pi, with only 24h to prepare. The students used many ingenious techniques as cribs, but my heart was warmed to learn that once student printed a false back-cover for my novel Little Brother with pi 1-100 on it (Little Brother is one of the course readings, so many copies of it were already lying around the classroom).

[I really enjoyed the book Little Brother, and so did my sons]

@RosabethKanter – “If can’t have certainty about outcomes, try fast achievable projects & certainty of process.”

Clouds eventually give way to clarity. What separates the best from the rest is whether leaders communicate, improve, engage, invest in relationships, and remain true to principles. This can make the difference in getting stuck or emerging triumphant.

@TheEconomist – “There is a remarkable tendency to trust experts, even when there is little evidence of their forecasting powers”

There may be another, psychological, reason why investors want to pay for advice: the avoidance of regret. If you choose to put all your money into technology stocks on the back of your own research, and such stocks collapse, you only have yourself to blame. But if you have listened to the advice of an expert, then the decision is not your fault.

@edCetraT – “couldn’t make it to #IEL12 ?No worries @LnDDave curated the shared resources for you”

Note: I talked about the future of the training department at IEL12 but no one picked it up, so here is a picture, which should be worth 1,000 words ;)

@sjgill – “A learning organization needs tools that people can use to discover information”

So the question becomes, “How do we make work and learning part of the same process?” One way is to help people develop new knowledge in the course of their work when faced with a new task or a new challenge, whether that is operating a new tool or becoming an effective leader. This is done by making information accessible and by making the tools to create knowledge from that information accessible, too.

@gwynnek – “Remember when people only lurked? Now 76% of Twitter users post status updates. Up from 47% in 2010. ht @mbjorn”

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@LucianT – “3M publicly hire for ‘Misfits’ – people that don’t fit into the norm. 35% of their revenue comes from products created within last 5 years”

@LeeJCarey – “Don’t be an instigator, don’t interrupt, don’t be disruptive, don’t talk back, don’t rock the boat; now get out there and lead”

elearnspace: What is the theory that underpins our moocs? by @gsiemens

The Coursera/EDx MOOCs adopt a traditional view of knowledge and learning. Instead of distributed knowledge networks, their MOOCs are [mostly] based on a hub and spoke model: the faculty/knowledge at the centre and the learners are replicators or duplicators of knowledge.

Shelley Wright: A wicked problem – via @SheilaSpeaking

Finally, we need to encourage and support the risk-takers and innovators in our school systems. Too often the status-quo is supported because of the comfort level it affords. As Brian Harrison stated in a recent blog post, “…it is clear to me that we cannot sustain a great system of public education by rewarding those in our schools and systems who do not innovate at the cost of those who do.”  Too often those who are engaging students in meaningful learning close their doors, so they can do what is best for their students. Why? To reduce the backlash from others. I know. I’ve done it, and I’ve listened to the stories of many other educators who have experienced this same phenomenon. If we truly want to do what is best for kids, we need to support teachers who willingly engage the messy landscape of student-centred learning.

Tweets from DAU/GMU Innovations in eLearning where I spent much of the week:

@moehlert – “You can’t research social learning without being a participant yourself”

@Dave_Ferguson – “Thought: do some (many) people not see collaboration with others as “learning” because it doesn’t look like the schoolhouse model?”

Jane Hart: “Between 33% and 66% of employees are meeting their own needs by going AROUND the training department.” via @jsuzcampos

@wadatrip – “It is ok to fail if you learn a lesson and even more so if you share the lesson you learned from the failure.”

Craig Wiggins @oxala75 live-blogging @quinnovator Clark Quinn’s session

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

“A System is a set of variables sufficiently isolated to stay constant long enough for us to discuss it. ~ W. Ross Ashby” via @cyetain

@dlnorman – “that’s not curation, it’s hoarding. curation is a mindful act of storytelling, which is not what these scoop.it / paper.li things do.” [I definitely agree]

@JeanHouston – “It is as if a worldwide nervous system is in the works. Each of us is a brain cell in that system, with powers that once belonged to kings”

@metaphorage – “Life is complex, unpredictable & messy: just admit it & act accordingly. “7habits” & “10 Rules” can be helpful, but overly simplistic”

@HildyGottlieb – “Nobody convinces anybody of anything. People come to their own learning. What does that mean for how you’re doing your work?”

The rise of social everything – by @marciamarcia

The organization began using social tools as an internal document repository for operations; yet over time, it grew to become a dynamic communications tool across their internal and external partners. By capturing learning in the moment, the organization could quickly leverage the collective knowledge of its consultants and provide more value and collective intelligence, to the organizations it served.

Networked Individualism: what in the heck is that? – via @LindaP_MD

At the same time, the networked individualism operating system requires that people gain new social skills to operate within it. They need to develop new strategies for handling challenges as they arise. They must devote more time and energy to practicing the art of networking than their ancestors did in order to get their needs met. They can no longer passively let the village take care of them and protect them. They must actively network to leverage the human resources they need, and they must actively manage the boundaries of their self-presentation in these networks.

Organizational models for social business – via @VernaAllee

You can’t plan networks or force fit them into any pattern. You can’t constrain a network to be purely within your own organization – at least not if you want to get any value from it. Networks involve customers/citizens and partners. In fact every participant in a network is a partner – not in some corny marketing sense but in the reality of the exchanges in the network. Networks support communication across channels you didn’t predict in advance. They cross any organizational unit you might have defined – even following the VSM [Viable Systems Model]. For all these reasons networks are great sources of innovation – and that innovation is emergent.

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@ChrisNahr – “Socrates would haunt discussion forums. And probably get banned for trolling.” – via @lemire

@nilofer – “In the Industrial Era, the unit of power = Organization. In Information era, power was = Data. Social Era, unit of power = Connection”

@MeetingBoy – “Boss asked for ‘some impressive-sounding stats to support my presentation.’ Decision first, then check the data. That’s how LEADERS do it.”

@montberte – “With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine.”

Five Whys – Business Plans Don’t Work – via @TimKastelle

Let’s take a look at some of the activities which are not being done:

• The business is not validating who its customers are, what problems the product is solving, or how well the product is meeting customer needs
• The business is not finding out which customers will actually buy the product, which distribution channels and pricing strategies work best, or whether the sales model will scale
• The business is not revisiting the business plan in any way, or making any corrections as it discovers new information about its customers, its suppliers or the operational activity needed to generate revenue
• The business is not controlling cash burn, or waiting to find out whether the business model actually works before committing itself to a series of execution milestones and sales targets

@JohnnieMoore – Hierarchy, innovation, disruption

I think innovation often eludes big organisations because they’re just too fat-fingered to pick it up.

I wasn’t there and can’t judge the difference all this made but I am struck by how easy it is to reinforce hierarchy in the name of constraining it.

@sjgill – The unexamined leadership program is not worth doing [I also came across a similar post on measuring the effectiveness of a leadership programme, by Paul Kearns]

Evaluation is not an option; it’s an integral part of the learning process. If you want a leadership development program to be more than entertainment and you want it to achieve learning that results in significant performance improvement, than you must evaluate the program and the organizational environment of that program.

@EskoKilpi – in the social workplace, there can never be just one “boss”

Thus, an individual always has many leaders that she follows. You might even claim that from the point of view taken here, it is highly problematic if a person only has one leader. It would mean attention blindness as a default state.

Following is at best a process of active, creative learning through observing and simulating desired practices. Leading is doing one’s work in an open and transparent way. Leading is engaging with people and being openly reflective. Patterns of recognition and patterns of communication are the most predictive activities there are in forecasting viability, agility and also human well-being.

Identity is a pattern in time. The individuals are forming in the social. You can’t add a social layer to what you do, or to your IT-systems – you are social!

Victorian Family socializing at the Beach
On the Shores of Bognor Regis by Alexander M. Rossi

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@gapingvoid – “Marketing is not mathematics. There are no solutions, only experiments.”

@gapingvoid – “I think Twitter alone is now a bigger cultural force than Hollywood; a fact the old cultural elite isn’t quite ready for.”

@RalphMercer – “the 4 horsemen of technology adoption: trust, curiosity, leadership and culture”

The Automattic (WordPress) company creed starts with “I will never stop learning“- by @photomatt

I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable.

@johnstepper – “Every single bank I know recognizes that their collaboration solutions are inadequate”

When it comes to sharing information, banks are conflicted. They aim to enforce “need to know” policies and “only use bank devices for work” policies. Yet they also want to break down the silos and discover more cross-selling opportunities.

Which is it? Well, it’s all of the above. Yet, the combination of old tools combined with restrictive policies leads to a set of incoherent, inconsistent, and ineffective controls.

@MarionChapsal – Anyone Can Cook, says Chef Gusto. Can Anyone Present?

I believe, like Pro­fes­sor Max Atkin­son and like Chef Gusto, that any­one can learn to make deli­cious and yummy pre­sen­ta­tions!

Organizational Hierarchy: Adapting Old Structures to New Challenges – by @orgnet

The U.S. government is currently facing a dual problem in the intelligence community:

improve accuracy — WMD in Iraq?
improve agility — stop terror attacks
One of the solutions being discussed is adding a new formal position to the intelligence community. This new box would be an ‘intelligence czar’ to which all other intelligence leaders and their agencies would report. The thinking behind this proposed solution is for there to be one aggregation point for all intelligence. Node 017 in Figure 2 represents this new position.

@tomspiglanin – On using Twitter & URL shorteners

The best practice then seems simple. Paste a link directly into a native Twitter application to share it. If a blog site has a Tweet button that goes directly to Twitter with no additional link shortening/tracking (like the one immediately below), that’s essentially the same. At a minimum, post only a full link using your app or link shortener of choice.

Larry Lessig on Facebook, Apple, and the Future of Code – via @RossDawson

Much worse (and more frustrating) are the easy problems which the government also can’t solve, not because the answer isn’t clear (again, these are the easy problems) but because the incumbents are so effective at blocking the answer that makes more sense so as to preserve the answer that makes them more dollars. Think about the “copyright wars” — practically every sane soul is now focused on a resolution of that war that is almost precisely what the disinterested souls were arguing a dozen years ago (editor’s note: abolishing DRM). Yet the short-termism of the industry wouldn’t allow those answers a dozen years ago, so we have had an completely useless war which has benefited no one (save the lawyers-as-soldiers in that war). We’ve lost a decade of competitive innovation in ways to spur and spread content in ways that would ultimately benefit creators, because the dinosaurs owned the lobbyists.

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@birgittaj – “Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power. ~ Benito Mussolini”

HCI : “more than 50% of line managers believe that shutting down the L&D function would have no impact on employee performance!”

Too many training departments have become mere “order takers,” responding to requests for training by harried but ill-informed managers who believe that training is the solution to every kind of performance problem. (Managers probably don’t really believe that, but ordering training is easier than tackling the real issues.) I call this the “McDonald’s Clerk” approach to training; take the order and, at most, see if they want fries with it.

Governance in a Networked World : SNA is an 80+ year old science but has been largely ignored by the social analytics community.

Now there may be good reasons for this. Some of the language is frankly impenetrable for the newcomer. The SNA measures can be quite complex and as with traditional statistics, need to be applied with care. That said there is clearly an opportunity here to build a bridge between the current social analytics practice to the more sophisticated but far more powerful world of SNA. It will require some careful translation of the language and some very selective use of the measures, but the potential I believe is worthy of a genuine 2.0 label.

Humans were not born to read – The brain has to be rewired in order to perform this newfangled skill – via @anniemurphypaul

“Reading is a cultural invention,” [Dr. Guinevere] Eden said. “There’s nothing designed in the brain to make us readers. Reading has only been around for 4,000 years, maybe a little longer. There are no systems in place from an evolutionary perspective designed for reading.”

@dpontefract – Analysis: Coursera, EdX & Udacity

There is the possibility that edX and Coursera in particular are using these non-credentialed courses as loss leaders. (see the FAQ of edX – no Harvard or MIT recognition comes with a completed course nor are any credits issued) If the courses are free, and they lead to nothing more than a certificate of completion (affiliated by no university whatsoever) students may want an actual official degree or designation from one of the Academic institutions at some point for their efforts. Do you really think Harvard is simply going to give away their crest for free? MIT? Princeton? Highly unlikely. I see these projects as opportunities to upsell fee-based programs and degrees that otherwise might not have occurred due to the lack of a sales channel.

@sjgill – Do you need a CLO?

The unintended consequence has been to reinforce the notion that work and learning are separate and that one has higher value than the other when, in fact, the success of the organization depends on continuous learning. To break out of this mental model, companies should stop doing things that appear to centralize responsibility for learning. Don’t put all the emphasis on a course catalogue and don’t hire a CLO.

XKCD on teachable moments:

Note the XKCD cartoon’s Alt Text – “Saying ‘what kind of an idiot doesn’t know about the Yellowstone supervolcano’ is so much more boring than telling someone about the Yellowstone supervolcano for the first time.“