Innovation

Innovation

Let the droids do the boring stuff

by

Is simpler work getting automated and outsourced? I think so. That leaves complex and creative work that continue to be in demand, and even increase. Work that has a high degree of task standardization is getting replaced by machines, and this trend will only accelerate.

Andrew McAfee discusses technology’s impact on the labour force in a TEDx Boston presentation, particularly 1) language translation (already here & growing) and 2) automated vehicles (coming soon). If something as complex as translating an article or negotiating a vehicle in heavy traffic is already being automated, how many of today’s jobs will go that way? There will be less demand for standardized human labour, and the whole notion of a standard job will quietly go away. The end of Taylorism cannot come soon enough, in my opinion.

McAfee says that networked computers are as revolutionary as was the steam engine, in how they change the way people do work. The steam engine overcame our physical limitations and computers will help us overcome our cognitive limitations. Here’s why, says McAfee:

  • economies run on ideas, which drive innovation
  • computers are making innovation more open and inclusive (especially for the bottom of the pyramid)
  • technology is freeing us to do better things and this trend will increase

We are not just losing standardized work tasks but we are gaining the tools and the time to do greater task variety, and of our own choosing. Networked computers allow us to learn informally and share tacit knowledge, leaving the boring stuff to the droids. Probably our greatest limitation is our ability to cast away our old ideas about how we learn. We need to think for ourselves and take advantage of network technologies, wider social connections, improved peer interactions, and informal learning. Economies run on ideas, not assembly lines. Work is learning, and learning is the work.

Narration is only the first step

by

I think that narration is one of the key principles of an effective networked workplace, or social business. Narration is making one’s tacit knowledge (what one feels) more explicit (what one is doing with that knowledge). Narrating work is a powerful behaviour changer, as long-term bloggers can attest. In an organization, narration 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 good narration skills, like adding value to information, takes time and practice. Narrating work also means taking ownership of mistakes.

Jane Bozarth discusses the nuts and bolts of narrating our work in this Learning Solutions Magazine article:

By sharing what we are doing and how we are learning, we distribute the tacit knowledge otherwise so hard to capture; invite feedback and encouragement from others; invite others to learn with us; document our work and learning for future use; and tie our learning to the efforts of others. Here’s a true story about physical rehab turned learning turned hobby turned community of practice turned two successful businesses, all via informal, social means. And all within six months.

The story that Jane tells happens outside the walls of an organization. I think this is important to note, because one of my other principles for an effective networked workplace is shared power. Shared power enables faster reaction times so those closest to the situation can take action. In complex situations there is no time to write a detailed assessment. Those best able to address the situation have marinated in it for some time. They couldn’t sufficiently explain it to someone removed from the problem if they wanted to anyway. This shared power is enabled by trust. Power in knowledge-based organizations must be distributed in order to nurture trust.

But sharing power is really difficult. In the video Dare to Disagree, via Jim Hays, Margaret Heffernan describes how people inside organizations, and professional communities, are afraid to challenge conventional wisdom, even when the data are overwhelming. The power structure exerts great pressure to conform. Only organizations that share power and encourage conflict can advance different ideas. As she says, “openness alone can’t drive change”.

Power-sharing decreases the fear of conflict. When those at the top hold most, or all, of the power, then  those near the bottom will try to avoid conflict. But conflict is essential for learning. As Heffernan describes in the video, only in trusted relationships can conflict for learning happen. Sharing power creates trust.

Unfortunately, power is addictive. For example, simulations reveal that when there are no levels of hierarchy, everyone shares in the rewards of the system. When only one level level is added, then those at the top get 89% while those only one level down have to share the remaining 11%. No wonder hierarchies are so appealing. Power, and its effects on organizational performance, are holding us back. This is why we need to experiment with new and much flatter work structures.

As Heffernan says, the truth will not set us free until we have the courage to use it. Our organizational structures, and their power systems, are a major part of the problem. Command and control are the barriers to an effective networked workplace. I have written that Enterprise 2.0 and social business are hollow shells without democracy because without power sharing, narration of work & transparency are a useless two-legged stool.

 

A guide to complexity and organizations

by

Via Jay Cross is this amazing synthesis – Organize for Complexity – of how complexity affects our work and the ways in which we can change our organizational structures to account for complexity, instead or adding more complication. If you know nothing about complexity, read this. If you know a lot on the subject, keep it as a job aid or use it to help others.

I like the depiction of market dynamics, to which I have added the upper image. It shows the fundamental shift we are going through as the network era unfolds.

The definition of complex systems is quite useful:

Complex systems have presence or participation of living creatures. They are living systems – that’s why they may change at any moment. Such systems are only externally observable – not controllable.

A complex system’s behavior is non-predictable. Here, it’s natural that there is a level of error, uncertainty and illusion that is much higher than in complicated systems.
A complex system may possess elements that can operate in standardized ways, but their interaction would be constantly changing, in discontinuous ways.

The paper includes design principles as well as “how-to” implementation suggestions. Start with, “Design principle ‘Beta’: Self-regulation within the team. Control through peer pressure and transparency. Principles and shared responsibility.” This is a comprehensive, but not heavy, read. I am sure I will turn to it often.

I must say that I agree with pretty much everything in this paper, so I strongly recommend it.

It is time to simplify

by

The five informal learning methods described in yesterday’s post on Learning in the Workplace have one thing in common. They are all relatively simple.

Most of today’s larger companies have a complicated structure. Over time, to enable growth and efficiencies, more processes have been put in place. New layers of control and supervision continue to appear, silos are created, and knowledge acquisition is formalized in an attempt to gain efficiency through specialization. As companies get bigger, internal growth and innovation reach a tipping point, and companies rely on mergers and acquisitions to maintain the illusion of growth.

But knowledge, and the acquisition of new knowledge, are still key factors for innovation and effectiveness. To compensate for its complicated processes, the enterprise attempts to shift to another paradigm, and tries to become a learning organization, putting significant effort into training. Unfortunately, training is often not the right solution.

Today’s large, complicated organizations are now facing increasingly complex business environments that require agility in simultaneously learning and working. Typical strategies of optimizing existing business processes or cost reductions only marginally influence the organization’s effectiveness. Faster evolving markets challenge the organization’s ability to react to customer demand. Decision-making becomes paralyzed by process-based operations and chains of command and control; thereby decreasing agility. Training, as “the” solution to workplace learning needs, fails to deliver and then gets marginalized, often being the first department to have its budget cut.

Organizations (and training departments)  need to understand complexity, instead of simply increasing complication. This lack of understanding is a major barrier to adopting social business concepts and practices. We should always take into consideration that people can handle complexity much better than our constructed systems can.

We need to think of organizations as parts of Value Networks.

We need to move away from shareholder value and become client-focused

We need to base growth on cultivating ecosystems, not the illusion of mergers and acquisitions.

We need to think of knowledge acquisition and sharing as social.

We need to constantly develop emergent practices.

All of these changes can be started by doing a few  simple things. As with Lego bricks, using a single unifier (the pin size) we can create an infinite variety of solutions. The examples of how to support informal learning do not require expensive technology or detailed needs analyses. They can be implemented quickly and modified over time. For too long our organizations have suffered from the disease of complication. It’s time to simplify.

When we remove artificial boundaries

by

“The central change with Enterprise 2.0 and ideas of managing knowledge [is] not managing knowledge anymore — get out of the way, let people do what they want to do, and harvest the stuff that emerges from it because good stuff will emerge. So, it’s been a fairly deep shift in thinking about how to capture and organize and manage knowledge in an organization.” — Andy McAfee
boundaries

Boundaries are for learning

by

Opportunity lies at the edge of systems. Real value creation happens at the edge of organizations. That’s also where we find learning opportunities. Understanding the role of boundaries in human systems can also give us ways to take advantage of them for learning, as Kathia Laszlo writes in Reflecting on Boundaries: Who is teaching and who is learning?

“The boundaries of a system are part of its structure. There are structures that are enabling and others that are limiting. There is a delicate balance between openness and safe space. Diversity is healthy, but with certain limits. As systems thinkers, observing and reflecting on the role of the boundaries is an important practice. We need to remember that social systems are human creations. We must recover our power as social systems designers in order to reconfigure those boundaries and enable new and more life-affirming interactions.”

For example communities of practice can be bridges between our work teams and our loose social networks. Perhaps the boundaries between each of these systems — teams, communities, networks —  can be used for learning opportunities as well.

Think of opportunities to open doors between the work space and the looser dialogue in communities of practice. Bringing in specific examples from the work space to the community is another opportunity for learning. Finding new metaphors and models in our social networks and discussing these within the context of our community of practice can foster innovation. Perhaps there are roles in communities of practice that can be used in your work teams. Maybe looser social network protocols will revitalize a community of practice. Think about where the boundaries are and their influence on learning.

None of this is profound, but I think it’s helpful for community managers and facilitators: guide people to the boundaries to get new ideas to flow in and out. As Kathia writes:

“How can I facilitate the evolution of this organization or community?” is a question I frequently ask myself. And often I find that the answer to this question relies on my ability to expand the boundaries of the system so that we can move from either/or to both/and. If in the old system there where those who teach and those who learn, how can we create a culture in which everybody teaches and everybody learns? How can we move beyond acquiring knowledge to creating meaning? How can we collaborate rather than work against each other?

Three Principles for Net Work

by

Work is changing

The nature of work is changing in our increasingly networked economy. What was considered good, dependable work in the 20th century is now getting automated or outsourced. Automated tellers have replaced thousands of bank clerks but even more advanced jobs are getting automated as we connect the world with computers. The New York Times reported in March of 2011 that armies of expensive lawyers, who once did “discovery” work have been replaced by software programs that do the work at a fraction of the cost. The same applies to computer chip designers, loan officers and tax accountants. Furthermore, any work that can be outsourced is going to the place of cheapest labour, wherever in the world that may be.

The main driver behind this shift is the interconnectivity of the Internet. It enables hyper-competition, destroying geographical barriers for anything that can be digitized. This includes all information and visual products, from creative writing, to photography and video, to radiological images.

For knowledge workers, there is diminishing value in standardized work, as it will be either automated or outsourced over time. Standardized work usually falls into simple or complicated knowledge domains. According to the Cynefin knowledge management framework, developed by Dave Snowden, in the simple domain, “the relationship between cause and effect is obvious to all” while in the complicated domain, “the relationship between cause and effect requires analysis”. For each of these domains, jobs can be standardized and training can be designed based on accepted practices.

But longer term value today resides in non-standardized work that requires creativity, imagination and innovation. This type of work falls into Cynefin’s complex domain where, “the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance”.

Consider that neither training nor education can adequately prepare workers for the complex domain because there are no best practices, only emergent practices that have to be developed as the work gets done.

This is why, in the network era, work is learning and learning is the work.

Known Problems and Exceptions

Look at a knowledge worker and how things can get done in an interconnected enterprise. Any situation can first be examined from the perspective of being a known problem or not. If it is known, then the answer can be looked up or the correct person found to deal with it. That answer may have been automated and put into a digital knowledge base or even outsourced to a company overseas.

Known problems require access to the right information to solve them. This information can be mapped, and frameworks such as knowledge management (KM) help us to codify it. We can also create tools, especially electronic performance support systems (EPSS) to do the work and bypass any background knowledge in order to accomplish the task. This is how simple and complicated knowledge continuously gets automated.

If there is a new problem, or an exception, then the knowledge worker has to deal with it in a unique way. Exception-handling is becoming more important in the networked workplace as standardized work provides no competitive advantage in a hyper-connected economy. These complex exceptions need tacit knowledge to solve them, but tacit knowledge cannot be codified in a KM system or EPSS. Tacit and complex knowledge gets shared when people work together and develop trusted ties. Therefore, exception-handling requires more collaborative approaches to work.

In addition, once an exception is dealt with, it is no longer new. It is now known. As each exception get addressed, some or all of the solution will get automated. The exception boundary is a constantly changing edge that knowledge workers have to negotiate.

Yesterday’s exceptions will be tomorrow’s examples. The challenge is to make sense of both today. Today’s complex work is tomorrow’s merely complicated or even simple work.

Narration, Transparency and Power-sharing

Narration is making one’s tacit knowledge (what one feels) more explicit (what one is doing with that knowledge). Narrating work is a powerful behaviour changer, as long-term bloggers can attest.

In an organization, narration 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 good narration skills, like adding value to information, takes time and practice. Narrating work also means taking ownership of mistakes.

For example, just adding finished reports to a knowledge base does not help others understand how that report was developed. This is where activity streams and micro-blogging have helped organizational learning. Workers can see the flow of sense-making in small bits that over time become patterns. Humans are very good at pattern recognition. Narration of work is the first step in integrating learning into the workflow.

Transparency is an easy concept to understand but much more difficult to implement in an enterprise. It means switching the default mode to sharing. This can be enabled by social media, but social media also make the company culture transparent. A dysfunctional company culture does not improve with transparency, it just gets exposed.

With complex work, failure has to be tolerated, as there are no best practices for exceptions (this is why they are called exceptions). Transparency helps the organization learn from mistakes, but only if the mistakes are shared. Organizations cannot know what is known unless the entire business ecosystem is transparent. Workers need to be able find information fast, which is what McKinsey & Company has reported in the last two years as the main benefit of using social media in the enterprise: increasing speed of access to knowledge.

Distributed power enables faster reaction times so those closest to the situation can take action. In complex situations there is no time to write a detailed assessment. Those best able to address the situation have marinated in it for some time. They couldn’t sufficiently explain it to someone removed from the problem if they wanted to anyway. This shared power is enabled by trust. Power in knowledge-based organizations must be distributed in order to nurture trust. But the challenge, as John Hagel describes it, is “One of the big challenges for companies is that unlike information or data flows, knowledge does not flow easily – as it relies on long-term trust-based relationships”.

Jon Husband defines “wirearchy” as; “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology.” This is the desired state, but getting there is difficult. Examples of shared-power organizations are growing (e.g. Semco SA; The Morning Star Company; W.L. Gore & Associates) but they are not yet the majority.

Conclusion

These three simple principles of narration, transparency, and shared power should provide enough guidance to motivated leaders in an organization. Implementation depends on the specific context of each organization and the ability to keep things in what I call, “perpetual Beta”.

Power-sharing and transparency enable work to move out to the edges and away from the comfortable, complicated work that has been the corporate mainstay for decades. There is nothing left in the safe inner parts of the company anyway, as it is being automated and outsourced.

The high-value work today is in facing complexity, not in addressing problems that have already been solved and for which a formulaic or standardized response has been developed. One challenge for organizations is getting people to realize that what they already know has increasingly diminishing value. How to learn and solve problems together is becoming the real business advantage.

 

 

Awareness

by

Part of Personal Knowledge Management is seeking sources of knowledge (Seek-Sense-Share).

To be able to seek, first you have to be aware. Wolfgang Reinhardt has looked at knowledge workers, researchers in particular, and examined how they can be aware in their fields of expertise. Wolfgang graciously sent me a copy of his PhD thesis (Awareness: Support for knowledge workers in research networks) which he will be defending on 5 April at the Open Universiteit Nederland in Heerlen.

Wolfgang describes 10 knowledge worker roles that I think are helpful in understanding how all collaborative workers can share their knowledge.

  1. Controller
  2. Helper
  3. Learner
  4. Linker
  5. Networker
  6. Organizer
  7. Retriever
  8. Sharer
  9. Solver
  10. Tracker

Think of these roles, and who will do them, as you start or support a community of practice. There are also 13 different knowledge actions conducted by these researchers, to varying degrees, that Wolfgang has found in his research.

  1. Acquisition
  2. Analyze
  3. Authoring
  4. Co-authoring
  5. Information search
  6. Dissemination
  7. Expert Search
  8. Feedback
  9. Formal & Informal Learning
  10. Information organization
  11. Monitoring
  12. Networking
  13. Service search

How many of these are done on a regular basis, and with some degree of consistency, in knowledge-intensive organizations? How can this be improved?

Finally, the generic model of awareness describes how “the overall awareness of objects declines the further an object is away from oneself”.

  1. Self-awareness
  2. Awareness of current practice
  3. Awareness of the local research organization
  4. Awareness of the personal research network
  5. Awareness of the research domain

In complex fields, where various researchers are working on similar problems, it becomes rather important to know who has done what. The challenge for distributed research teams is to find ways of understanding what is happening and ensuring it is communicated throughout the network.

Not only does distributed research need collaborative researchers but there must be an understanding of the role that awareness plays amongst knowledge workers. In complex networks, basic management approaches are no longer adequate.

Some final notes from Wolfgang’s defence:

The term “awareness” in Research Networks is a multilayered term that reaches far deeper than just emulating face-to-face situations in distributed collaboration.

Without supporting the awareness of network researchers, innovation, collaboration and knowledge exchange will not reach its potential.

Omitting support for social interactions between stakeholders in scientific events amounts to wasting the opportunity to recommend objects and increase the strength of research networks.

Innovation is about making connections

by

connections
The network era workplace requires collaboration and cooperation because complex problems cannot be solved alone. Tacit knowledge, that which cannot be codified or put into a database, needs to flow. Social learning, developed through many conversations, enables this flow of tacit knowledge. This is not ‘nonsense chat’, as traditional management might view it, but essential for creating stronger bonds in professional social networks. Companies have to foster richer and deeper connections which can only be built over time through meaningful conversations. This is why social learning in the workplace is necessary for business.

Worker autonomy is a foundation stone for effective social learning. It is also the lubricant for an agile organization, where initiative, creativity and passion are encouraged. Individual autonomy in turn fosters group diversity.

As traditional core business activities get automated or outsourced, almost all high value work will be done at the outer edge of organizations. Life is complex and even chaotic on this fuzzy edge. Here, where things are less homogeneous, there is more diversity and there are more opportunities for innovation. Individuals, project teams, and companies have to move operations to the edge to stay current. Business models today need to be more open, networked, and cooperative to stay competitive in the hyper-connected economy.

Change and complexity are becoming the norm in our work. We already see this with increasing numbers of freelancers and contractors. Any work where complexity is not the norm will be of diminishing value.

Embracing complexity is where the future of work lies.

Enabling Innovation – Book

by

I had the pleasure of writing an article for the book, Enabling Innovation: Innovative Capability – German and International Views as a follow-up to some work I did with the EU’s International Monitoring Organisation. An interesting aspect of this book is that major articles are written by German researchers and then shorter comments or additions are presented from an international perspective. My article was in response to a weighty paper by Sibylle Peters, entitled, New Forms of Project Organisation and Project Management – Dynamic and Open.

–

Abstract
The increasing structuring of work and organizational processes by forming project involves new challenges to the handling of knowledge work and expands the scope to generate innovations. The classic project management alone is less and less able to manage complex, uncertain, knowledge-based processes. Through alternative approaches social, actor-oriented topics of management will be adressed.

If all you want to read is my short article, then let me save you the $189.00 list price for this book.

—

Managing in Complexity

In New Forms of Project Organisation and Project Management – Dynamic and Open a key theme discussed is the lack of flexibility of traditional project management methods in dealing with complexity.

With increasing requirements for complex and creative work we need new models to get things done. Many of our practices are still premised on work being simple or complicated. Simple systems are easily knowable, whereas complicated systems, while not not simple, are still knowable through analysis. These can be easily managed. However, complex systems are not fully knowable though they can be partially understood through interaction with them. This is antithetical to many of the control protocols of traditional project management.

In the developed world, simple work is constantly getting automated (e.g. automatic bank tellers) while complicated work is outsourced to the cheapest labour market (e.g. off-shore call centres). If companies want to remain competitive in the global market, they need to focus on complex and creative work. Much of complex work is in exception-handling and when exceptions are the rule, rigid rules must become the exception.

We have to understand complex adaptive systems and develop work structures that let us focus our efforts on learning as we work in order to continuously develop next practices. In a knowledge-intensive and creative workplace the role of leadership becomes supportive and inspirational rather than directive. Artificial boundaries that limit collaboration and communication only serve to drag projects (and companies) down and create opportunities for more agile competitors.

While agile methods for project management are discussed in New Forms of Project Organisation and Project Management, an overall agile mindset is also required. This can be fostered in a culture of perpetual Beta. Perpetual Beta means we never get to the final release of our work and that our learning will never stop. Agile organisations realize they will never reach some future point where everything stabilizes and they don’t need to learn or do anything new.

In additional to a mindset of agility, workers need a skillset of autonomy. However, we are trained early in life to look to authority for direction in learning and work. The idea that there is a right answer or an expert with the right answer begins in our schools. Too often, the message from the workplace continues to be that good employees wait for their supervisor to tell them what to do. This is counter-productive in dealing with complexity and working in perpetual Beta. It destroys creativity.

When we move away from a “design it first, then build it” mindset, we can then engage everyone in critical and systems thinking. Workers in agile workplaces must be passionate, adaptive, innovative, and collaborative. Autonomy is the beginning.

Fostering autonomy and agility means that we talk about work differently. For example, dropping the notion of being paid for time is one way to start this change. An hourly wage implies that people are interchangeable, but no two minds are the same. Being paid for time fosters neither autonomy nor agility. There are many other human resource practices should be questioned and dropped, such as job competencies.

The new networked workplace requires collaboration and cooperation. Complex problems cannot be solved alone. Tacit knowledge flows in networks through social learning. Learner autonomy is a foundation for effective social learning. It is the lubricant for an agile organisation. Agility becomes a necessity as we deal with increasing complexity. In order to develop the necessary emergent practices to deal with complexity we therefore need to cultivate the diversity and autonomy of each worker. We also must foster richer and deeper connections which can be built through meaningful conversations. This is social learning in the workplace.

Even in project management, learning is the work.

One example of encouraging social learning is the government of British Columbia, Canada which developed an interactive intranet in order to foster collaboration and communication.

The success of a social intranet ultimately has less to do with technology than with planning, governing and managing change. Walsh [B.C.’s Manager of Creative Strategies] had these lessons to share.

Ditch perfectionism [perpetual Beta]

Communicate! Communicate! Communicate! [social learning]

Trust your team [Autonomy]

Not your government’s voice

As traditional core activities get automated or outsourced, almost all high value work will be done at the outer edge of organisations. At the fuzzy edge of the organisation life is complex and even chaotic. On this periphery, where things are less homogenous, there is more diversity and more opportunities for innovation. Individuals, project teams and organisations have to move operations to the edge to continue learning and developing. In agile organisations, a greater percentage of workers will be on the edge. The core will be managed by very few internal staff. What does this mean for project management? No matter what model one prefers, it will have to be more open, networked and cooperative.

Change and complexity are becoming the norm in our work. We already see this with increasing numbers of freelancers and contractors. Any work where complexity is not the norm will be of diminishing value.

Embracing complexity and chaos is where the future of work lies.