Work is learning. Learning is the work.
Networked learning
Over the years I’ve written a fair number of words on this blog, starting in 2004. Some words have resonated with others and have been picked up on blogs and shared via Twitter or other social media. The thoughts in this presentation reflect my perspectives on the work I have been doing for over a decade.
You might think of it as a visual business card.
“I think the singular SME is an antiquated a notion as the solitary game player & our development pipelines need to change.” writes Mark Oehlert, on Twitter. Mark coined the term, subject matter networks, as a change from the industrial concept of subject matter expert, or SME, a term I first heard in the military in the mid-1970’s. But the world has changed and most notably during the past decade.
With all of these connections, complexity ensues. Markets in Asia can have an impact on a local grocer. The release of not-so-secret diplomatic cables influence events like the Arab Spring.
In a complex world the optimal social form is the multi-organizational network and emergent practices must be continuously developed through cooperation. In such an environment, the lone expert is at a disadvantage. He or she cannot learn and adapt as fast as a cooperative network.
So the critical skills for people formerly known as SME’s are how to become contributing members of subject matter networks. Part of this is in narrating one’s work and learning. I have called personal knowledge mastery (PKM) – our part of the social learning contract. One cannot be effective in professional networks without contributing. Subject matter networks are made up of many contributors. A key skill is in weaving the best networks together.
We collectively realized before forming the Internet Time Alliance that we were much less effective on our own than working cooperatively. Based on the feedback and interest from many people over the past year, I think we will see more cooperative alliances created. Part of our advantage is the ability to bring many subject matter networks together.
“What Sanofi is doing is reducing its own internal research capacity,” he said. “The days when we locked all of our scientists up in a building and put them on a nice tree-lined campus are done. We will do less of our own research. We’re not going to get out of research. We believe we do certain things well in research but we want to work with more outside companies, startup biotechs, with universities.”
Chris Viehbacher, CEO of pharmaceutical company Sanofi recently stated that ” … big companies, and not just Big Pharma, big companies I believe, are not any good at doing innovation.” It seems Sanofi is moving to a more networked way of doing business. But to be more innovative, companies must first become open and transparent.
That’s the challenge of the networked organization. Trust only emerges if knowledge is shared and diverse points of view are accepted. People who have been working in silos for decades may not immediately embrace a more diverse and complex networked way of doing business.
Part of working smarter is connecting the work being done with the identification of opportunities for future work. Innovative ideas often come from loosely knit external learning networks. These can later get developed in slightly tighter communities of communities of practice. But in order to capitalize on novel ideas, professionals have to be continuously sharing knowledge in their communities and testing new opinions in more dynamic external networks.
As research becomes more networked, researchers will need to be more collaborative. Social learning, or learning from and with their (distributed) peers, will become more important. New practices will emerge from these new relationships and more innovative tools & processes will have to support this complex work. The role of connecting and communicating what is happening in various widespread groups will become critical. This is the job of a CCO, or some similar role: to manage workforce collaboration.
The three principles of net work remain, in my opinion:
“If problems are one focal point for collaboration, tools can be another. An example: systems needed to deal with the gigantic data sets generated in finance, astronomy and oceanography. Such tools naturally bring together computer scientists and the statisticians, economists and scientists who might use the data. Goldin points to “crowdsourcing” as a second example of a cross-disciplinary tool, complexity science as a third and (optimistically, I feel) practical ethics as a fourth.” ~ Tim Harford
[emphasis added]
“In Strategic Doing, metrics play a different role. We use metrics to facilitate learning. Whereas strategic planning is a deductive process of thought and action, Strategic Doing using inductive reasoning. We learn as we do. Metrics provide a convenient tool to accelerate our learning. With them, we figure out what works. Without them, we would be lost. Accountability in Strategic Doing comes through transparency and the mutual interdependence embedded in the relationships of the network. Forget command and control. It does not work in open networks. Mutual trust becomes the fuel for economic transformation. ” —Ed Morrison
The Globe & Mail: The diplomacy of knowledge
“Learning together is an important part of living together. While many of our greatest challenges arise through the interplay of complex problems, so, too, do our greatest advances often occur at the intersections between disciplines. Who knows what a greater understanding of quantum physics will be able to tell us about genetics, or what a better grasp of ecology can teach us about global networks?” ~ David Johnston, Governor-General of Canada.
Medecins sans frontières [MSF], or Doctors Without Borders, is marking its 40th anniversary with a collection of stories exposing what it’s like to confront those difficult decisions. The book is called Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience and it comes out later this month.
CBC’s program The Current covers the uncomfortable compromises that humanitarian aid workers regularly face. As The Guardian reports:
Marie Noelle Rodrigue, operations director of MSF in Paris, said: “The time has come to explain the fragile equilibrium between the price it is necessary for an organisation to pay so that you are helping the victims.
“Often that means making a compromise to a degree where you are helping the authorities. This is a question that no-one has wanted to examine and it is good that MSF have looked into it and I think we are happy that we’ve done it honestly.”
MSF is keenly focused on learning from its mistakes and this book is part of that process. Some of those lessons:
Everything is political and influences medical assistance.
Gut feeling is very important to assess complex situations.
Finding common ground between parties in conflict is very difficult and too often simple, but ineffective, solutions are chosen.
The situation is always changing and there is a need for constant reflection, as individuals and at an organizational level.
Impartiality [trust] is the “red line” that cannot be crossed.
Every action is a compromise.
Conflicts are messy & dirty – therefore the humanitarian assistance is messy & dirty.
Learning through constant discussions is critical for all members of the organization.
MSF has a culture of debate and exposing the truth and this lets the organization move forward.
MSF follows the principles of narration and transparency to ensure it stays a viable organization facing complex, messy situations. Many organizations who are trying to adapt to the network era could learn from MSF.
I see three major principles for working smarter in networked organizations:
I spoke about the distribution of power in my last post on the democratization of the workplace. The narration of one’s work is an essential practice that enables this. Hans de Zwart discusses a narrating-your-work experiment that had a 17 member team use Yammer to share daily experiences with colleagues. He talks about the barriers to narration as well as the perceived benefits of this two-month experiment.
His conclusions and recommendations:
- Don’t formalize narrating your work and don’t make it mandatory. Many people commented that this is one aspect that they didn’t like about the experiment.
- Focus on helping each other to turn narrating your work into a habit. I think it is important to set behavioural expectations about the amount of narrating that somebody does. I imagine a future in which it is considered out of the norm if you don’t share what you are up to. The formal documentation and stream of private emails that is the current output of most knowledge workers in virtual teams is not going to cut it going forward. We need to think about how we can move towards that culture.
- We should have both a private group for the intimate team (in which we can be ourselves as much as possible) as well as have a set of open topic based groups that we can share our work in. So if I want to post about an interesting meeting I had with some learning technology provider with a new product I should post that in a group about “Learning Innovation”. If have worked on a further rationalization of our learning portfolio I should post this in a group about the “Learning Application Portfolio” and so on.
The recommendation of both private and public narration components aligns with the need to support both strong and weak social ties. Covering the public/private spectrum can promote social learning, increase collaboration, and nurture an environment for cross-disciplinary innovation – and bridge the gap to working smarter.
I have offered to give a course on understanding social media at the Tantramar Seniors College, consisting of four two-hour weekly sessions. This will not be a traditional course where I decide what curriculum is important and then deliver it to participants. Instead, I am providing opportunities to connect information, knowledge and people. This afternoon is the sign up session and instead of providing an outline, I will solicit needs – “What do you want to do?”
Here are some potential topic areas:
Social bookmarks – here are mine on social media.
Introduction to social networking (see also social media in plain English video)
Using social media for personal learning.
Social media in business and privacy issues.
My intention is to spend class time showing how I use social media and how my network lets me learn faster. I will connect with my online networks to find answers to any questions that arise. I would also like to engage the class in co-developing resources, guidelines and other materials that will help them after the classes are over.
I will narrate on this blog what transpires over the next month, as the main reason I volunteered to give this course was to learn.
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.
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.
As Tim Harford wrote in, Adapt: Why success always starts with failure:
“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.