It’s all about networks. Understanding networks that is. This is the shift our organizations, institutions, and society must make in order to thrive in an always-on, interconnected world.
Changing the mechanistic mindset: Work is changing as we get more connected. The old ways of organizing work are becoming obsolete, as 84% of workers in the US planned to change their jobs in 2011. Workers want out, in spite of a lacklustre economy. We are seeing mass, decentralized and social movements that confront existing hierarchies, politically and in the workplace. The uprisings in North Africa were good attention getters. There is no normal. All our institutions are facing the challenges of always-on connectedness and the need to adapt to Internet time. Social media are just the current tip of the Internet iceberg, making work relationships much more complex. Workers do have to step up, but they also need the tools and authority. Encouraging workplace practices like personal knowledge management is a start.
It’s the network: Thinking like a node in a network and not as a position in a hierarchy is the first mental shift that’s required to move to a collaborative enterprise. Nurturing Creativity is now a management responsibility. The old traits of the industrial/information worker were Intellect, Diligence, and Obedience. The new traits of the collaborative worker are Passion, Creativity, and Initiative. These cannot be commoditized. People cannot be creative on demand. The collaborative enterprise requires looser hierarchies and stronger networks.
Network Thinking: One major challenge in helping organizations improve collaboration and knowledge-sharing is getting people to see themselves as nodes in various networks, with different types of relationships between them.
Network Walking: One way to convince managers of the importance of network thinking is to force them to connect with their networks by getting out of their offices, physically and virtually. It’s not a question of what keeps managers awake at night, it’s what can we do to make sure they are awake to their networks during the day. Go for a walk.
Finally, this RSA Animate video provides an excellent overview of the power of networks and the challenge of mapping an increasingly complex world. It’s well worth watching.
The IBM study shows that CEOs and the companies they manage must constantly evolve to stay competitive. Partners, suppliers, employees and customers want CEOs to communicate with them on a personal level to build trust and to help align them to the organization’s strategy. There is a lot at stake here. —Mark Fidelman in Forbes
This report confirms what many of us have been observing, writing about, and trying to put into practice for a decade or more. For example, “They [CEO’s] simply expect unpredictability. For them, there is no “new normal.” This is why perpetual Beta is a constant theme here. It is a necessary perspective in dealing with increasing complexity.
“As CEOs ratchet up the level of openness within their organisations, they are developing collaborative environments where employees are encouraged to speak up, exercise personal initiative, connect with fellow collaborators, and innovate.” An essential part of enabling such an open organization is nurturing net work skills — the abilities needed for individual knowledge creators who are simultaneously collaborative workers.
“Across industries and geographies, CEOs consistently highlight four personal characteristics most critical for employees’ future success: being collaborative, communicative, creative and flexible.” Foundational skills that can foster these characteristics can be developed through personal knowledge mastery practices supported by social learning structures and emergent work environments.
“As CEOs, we need new ways of running the organisation – or more accurately, we need novel ways of letting the organisation run. —Shaun Coffey, Industrial Research Ltd.” Dealing with complexity means a focus on emergent practices, not looking back at best practices, which are already out of date. The “novel way” to run organizations is letting go of command and control and embracing change from both sides.
All CEO’s should have this cartoon by Nina Paley on their office walls.
What if your organization got rid of the Learning & Development function? What would the average manager or department head do? What would workers do?
I’ve been thinking about this for a while. When work is learning, and learning is the work, training that is pushed from outside has less relevance. The L&D department is supposed to ensure that training is appropriate for the job, but with jobs constantly morphing into something else, a major disconnect is developing between the doers and the trainers. How many people take courses that are not relevant to their current work or are provided at the wrong time?
Let me propose some things managers and knowledge workers can do without a Learning & Development department.
Observe how people are learning to do their work already. Find these natural pathways and reinforce them.
Connect any “how-to” learning to the actual task. Show and tell only works if it can be put into practice. The forgetting curve is steep when there is no practice.
Make it everyone’s job to share what they learn. Have you ever noticed how easy it is to find “how-to” videos and explanations on the Web? That’s because someone has taken the time to post them. Everyone in the organization should do this, whether it’s a short text, a photo, a post, an article, a presentation with notes, or a full-blown video.
Make space to talk about things and capture what is passed on. Get these conversations in the open where they can be shared. Provide time and space for reflection and reading. There is more knowledge outside any organization than inside.
Break down barriers. Establish transparency as the default mode, so that anyone can know what others are doing. Unblock communication bottlenecks, like supervisors who control information flow. If supervisors can’t handle an open environment, get rid of them, because they are impeding organizational learning and it’s now mission critical.
If you do have an L&D department, share what you are doing and perhaps they will help you become more self-sufficient for your organizational learning. If they don’t, ignore them, as they will be going away anyway.
These days it’s more productive to think of organizations as organisms. Managers become stewards of the living. Their role is to energize people, empower teams, foster continuous improvement, develop competence, leverage collective knowledge, coach workers, encourage collaboration, remove barriers to progress, and get rid of obsolete practices.
Living systems thrive on values that go far beyond the machine era’s dogged pursuit of efficiency through control. Living systems are networks. Optimal networks run on such values as respect for people, trust, continuous learning, transparency, openness, engagement, integrity, and meaning. ~ Jay Cross
Do we really need managers? Is management as we currently practise it out of date for the networked era?
In Network Thinking I said that as we learn in digital networks, stock (content) loses significance, while flow (conversation) becomes more important — the challenge becomes how to continuously weave the many bits of information and knowledge that pass by us each day. Conversations help us make sense. But we need diversity in our conversations or we become insular. We cannot predict what will emerge from continuous learning, co-creating & sharing at the individual, organizational and market level but we do know it will make for more resilient organizations.
Gina Minks thinks that “This isn’t going to happen till there is a way to measure it, or a way to convince people that we’ve not ever measured anything in a meaningful way. And I’m not just saying that to make Harold freak out.”
I’d like to follow up on this as Gina raises a good point. There is an existing managerial culture that says we need to measure things in order to control them. But what happens when most of our work is intangible and the business objective is something not easily measurable, like trust or reputation?
Dr. W. Edwards Deming, champion of continual improvement in manufacturing, way back in 1984 talked about the five deadly diseases of management which unfortunately still ring true today. The fifth deadly disease is a reliance on ‘visible figures’ only. There is no consideration of the unknown and unknowable. For example, Deming asks what are the multiplying effects of a happy or unhappy customer. Even in the 1980’s Deming accused the business schools of merely teaching creative accounting by overly relying on visible figures.
I use an example from my military career when I talk about measurement. Every commander knows how important morale is, even though there is no definitive way one can measure it. We can get indicators and data points, but we have to rely on our understanding of the organization and its environment to have a sense of the current state of morale.
Image by Stefan Eggert
To get more and better information, managers need to be more involved in the actual business. Deming said that managers need to have roots in the company. Another term, coming from the army before it was coined at HP, is the concept of leadership by walking around, AKA MBWA. I learned this concept during leadership training in the mid 1970’s. It works because it ensures that information is not filtered by the bureaucracy.
“There is a limit to how much honest feedback most leaders really want to hear; and because we know this, most of us sugar-coat our opinions whenever we speak to a powerful person. In a deep hierarchy, that process is repeated many times, until the truth is utterly concealed inside a thick layer of sweet-talk.”
Today we have the added benefit of technologies that can bypass that thick layer of sweet-talk and (re)enable leadership by walking around — social media:
“As a CEO, that’s what I most appreciate about enterprise social software: The way it bridges the gap between what’s personal and what’s business. For example, my company, like virtually all others, has offices all over the world, and visiting them is one of the most important things I do. In the old days, a visit to branch office or an overseas development lab was a blur of new faces and unfamiliar names. But with enterprise social software, everything is different.” —Tom Kelly CEO of Moxie Software
Being actively involved in the way work is done and understanding the real issues is what’s necessary to be of service as a manager or even as a workplace performance professional. I remember working with the head of nursing who was also responsible for performance and training for all nursing staff in a large hospital. I asked to do an on-site performance analysis over several days. As a visitor I had to be accompanied by a member of the hospital staff.
The senior clinician took me around to all floors and let me interview a number of staff. What was surprising to me was that after two years on the job, it was the clinician’s first time on the wards. Just connecting the clinician with the staff saw some immediate results in changing outdated and redundant procedures. I had achieved some organizational performance improvement before I had even completed my analysis!
Getting managers out of their offices is a low-tech method that can reap major business benefits. Incorporating this mindset into the use of social media then becomes a business accelerator, increasing speed of access to knowledge and empowering people to get things done.
One way to convince managers of the importance of network thinking is to force them to connect with their networks by getting out of their offices, physically and virtually. It’s not a question of what keeps managers awake at night, it’s what can we do to make sure they are awake to their networks during the day. Go for a walk.
F.W. Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management, written in 1911, is still the basis of many of our management practices today. Taylor’s ghost is everywhere.
It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.
One hundred years later, we need to get away from these ideas and adopt methods that enable creative work in an interconnected economy. I would suggest something like the following:
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. The duty of being transparent in our work and sharing our knowledge rests with all workers.
In the TechCrunch article, What if this is no accident?, Jon Evans looks at the current boom in software engineering jobs in comparison to the lack of jobs elsewhere. He wonders if this is how the new economy will look for a while.
It’s beginning to look like we might have entered a two-track economy, in which a small minority reaps most of the benefits of technology that destroys more jobs than it creates. As my friend Simon Law says, “First we automated menial jobs, now we’re automating middle-class jobs. Unfortunately, we still demand that people have a job soon after becoming adults. This trend is going to be a big problem…”
I’ve been saying for a while that simple and merely complicated work will continue to get automated and outsourced (read this post if you don’t believe it or look at this example of legal work getting automated). To keep a job in the creative economy (with core skills of Initiative, Creativity & Passion) one must become an indispensable linchpin in the organization.
I think more opportunities are being created than destroyed, but our institutions and our cultural mindset still are not ready for this change. Politicians continue to think in terms of jobs. Universities still have job fairs, hinting that such a thing as a career will exist in a hyper-networked world. Parents push their children into undergraduate programs that cost more than graduates can ever repay. Laws are structured so that corporations create wealth in return for indentured servitude, where employees own none of the intellectual property they generate. In such an environment, why would workers try to innovate? The indicators that the underlying nature of work and wealth generation have changed are everywhere.
I’ve questioned the rationale of continuing practices such as:
Mass training with standard performance objectives for everyone. What two people really have the same job any more?
Limited options for part-time work at the control of the worker.
Banning access to online social networks at work and disconnecting workers from their social safety nets and innovation sources.
So why aren’t we all working for learning organizations, in this day and age? The work that we will be paid for in the foreseeable future is the difficult, innovative, one-of-a-kind, creative stuff. Educational institutions need to help get people ready for this, and standardized tests or common curriculum are of little use in the networked workplace. A core part of this change, in my opinion, is integrating learning and work, because change is continuous, not some special initiative to implement and then get back to normal. I’ve recommended some changes that I now see taking hold in a few places:
Abolish the organization chart and replace it with a network diagram (some new tech companies have done this).
Encourage outside work that doesn’t directly interfere with paid work, as it will strengthen the network (such as Google’s 20% time for engineers).
Provide options for workers to come and go and give them ways to stay connected when they’re not employed (like Ericsson’s Stay Connected Facebook group). Build an ecosystem, not a monolith.
Our challenge is not saving those jobs that will be automated and outsourced anyway, but focusing on creating more opportunities for creative work. For institutions, employers, educators and workers, that means giving up control and co-creating a new social contract for the creative, networked economy.
I wouldn’t wait if I was in charge of an organization. I would get these changes going as soon as possible. Successfully implemented, this organization would not have a talent acquisition or retention problem for a long time.
I presented on Managing in a Networked World at DevLearn 2011 today in Las Vegas.
How do you manage a workforce that is both nomadic and collaborative? In a 24/7 always-on- and-interconnected world, do we need to rethink the industrial-workplace social contract that’s based on hours worked and being on-the-job ? Join Harold Jarche to discuss how these and other trends mean a shift to perpetual Beta, where learning is the work.
A total of four people attended, as compared to about 50 for a session this morning on some new learning technology tool. Many of my conversations with training/learning professionals have shown a general lack of interest in management, leadership or business issues. Too many learning folks are interested in the tools of THEIR trade and not the businesses they are supposed to serve.
Thinking like a node in a network and not as a position in a hierarchy is the first mental shift that’s required to move to a collaborative enterprise. Nurturing Creativity is now a management responsibility. The old traits of the industrial/information worker were Intellect, Diligence, and Obedience. The new traits of the collaborative worker are Passion, Creativity, and Initiative. These cannot be commoditized. People cannot be creative on demand. The collaborative enterprise requires looser hierarchies and stronger networks. What does that mean for learning & development?
The learning delivery model is being obsolesced by ubiquitous connectivity and diverse social networks. If learning professionals do not participate in the emergent leadership of the networked enterprise, they will be outsourced and sooner than later, automated. There is no room for those who just do their job within their job description (these were industrial-age constructs). The automation of physicians and lawyers was discussed during this morning’s keynote. What makes instructional designers et al, think they are any different? The 21st century workplace is all about understanding networks, modelling networked learning, supporting and strengthening networks.
I was asked by Ryan McClure, a regular reader of this blog, to “have a go at the fear of change by addressing it directly“. He was referring to situations where senior executives seem to be on a different plane of reality. For example:
The CEO who doesn’t see the value of social networks and lumps them all into the “Facebook for fun” category.
The successful business leader who is milking the current cash cow and sees the Internet as frivolous and of no interest to his customers.
The President who gets others to handle his information needs without understanding the underlying technology infrastructure that is hampering knowledge-sharing and collaboration across the enterprise.
I addressed some of these issues in social media for senior managers, as Michael Cook had asked a similar question. I concluded that blocking social networks slows learning, reduces effectiveness and may in the end kill the organization. Senior managers need to understand social media in order to support learning in social networks which will enable practitioners to produce results.
But that’s probably not enough to change the status quo.
I work on these issues in two ways. One is by showing the big picture. These are patterns that, with any luck, are difficult to ignore. Most executives agree that their work and business environment is getting more complex. I try to show that we need to organize for complexity and diversity in new ways. A different corporate culture is required. Both of these will take some time, so it’s best to balance this message with specific practices that can be started right away.
I will demonstrate the benefits of networks in getting things done. Many times I have shown how simple tools, like social bookmarks, can make professional information gathering and sharing much more efficient. I explain how the organization should leverage collective knowledge from varied individual practices of personal knowledge management (PKM).
This is done by telling stories, showing examples and modelling behaviours, usually over a significant period of time. There is a lot of repetition. It’s also worth revising your message, based on feedback and observation. PKM made sense to my clients only once I had it boiled down to three alliterative words: Seek – Sense – Share. This took a few years to develop.
Even five years ago it was not the norm to work at a distance. Employers wanted to keep workers on-site, when it made no sense, as this post from 2005 noted: virtual work, but we need you onsite. Virtual work is no longer limited to mostly free-agents, as many salaried employees today work at least part-time off-site. It’s becoming the norm and bringing change with it, even though that change may not be visible.
When people work at a distance, an implicit shift occurs. They have to be trusted to get the work done. Management also shifts from measuring time to measuring results. A new culture emerges. It becomes more trusting. Trust is the glue that holds creative organizations together, not rules and regulations.
Culture is an emergent property of people working together. Leadership is also an emergent property, I am becoming more convinced, as I recently wrote. This post received a lot of attention and Johnnie Moore referred me to an interesting, though rather expensive, book on Managing Without Leadership:
I propose that we consider the phenomenon of leadership in like manner, and conceive of it as part and parcel of organisational practice. In a naturalistic redescription of the phenomenon, we might view it as an emergent, self-organising property of complex systems. There would then be no need for engaging in more leadership studies: instead, we could redirect our attention to the study of the fine-grained properties of contextualised organisational practice.
Donald Clark also passed on a post he made a few years ago on Leadership Training:
Leadership Training: Complex behaviours and skills are reduced to simple geometric diagrams, a pyramid here, an interlocking circle here, a four quadrant typology there. Leadership training became a byword for contradictory theories and over-simplification. A few choice quotes are thrown in, preferably from historically famous leaders, some interactive exercises, straight out of traditional management courses and you’re off.
One way to look at leadership in our complex work world is through the lens of improvisation. In improv, nobody is in charge and leadership is shared. John Moore [not Johnnie] says that from improv, one can also learn how to:
be a passionate follower;
be a better listener and reactor;
make instinctive decisions and deal with the consequences;
trust others; and
make others look good
These all seem like good advice for organizational leadership as well. Everyone can practise improv skills and everyone can exert leadership in the organization. John Moore says that a major benefit of embracing improv skills for business is that failure is an option, which aligns with Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework, that advises organizations to Probe-Sense-Respond in order to manage in complexity.
Dave also underlines the fact that over half of your probes will fail and hence the need to have a culture where failure is an option. It’s what Dave calls “safe-fail”: “We conduct safe-fail experiments. We don’t do fail-safe design. If an experiment succeeds, we amplify it. If an experiment fails, we dampen it.” Failure is not just an option, it’s a common occurrence.
As networked, distributed workplaces become the norm, trust will emerge from environments that are open, transparent and diverse. As a result of improved trust, leadership will be seen for what it is; an emergent property of a balanced network and not some special property available to only the select few. This shift may give us the real democracy our organizations need to realize their full creative human potential.
