Learning

Learning

Knowledge sharing paradox revisited

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The knowledge sharing paradox is that enterprise social tools can constrain what they are supposed to enhance. People will freely share their knowledge if they remain in control of it because knowledge is a very personal thing. Knowledge workers care about what they need to get work done, but do they care about the organizational knowledge base?

So my conclusion this time around was that the centralized stuff we spent so much time and money maintaining was simply not very useful to most practitioners. The practitioners I talked to about PPI [personal productivity improvement] said they would love to participate in PPI coaching, provided it was focused on the content on their own desktops and hard drives, and not the stuff in the central repositories. —Dave Pollard (2005)

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seeking perpetual beta

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New! Purchase all five e-books, ‘seeking perpetual beta’ – ‘finding perpetual beta’ – ‘adapting to perpetual beta’ – ‘working in perpetual beta’ ‘life in perpetual beta’- for €29.

After 10 years of blogging here, I have compiled my best posts into an ebook. It’s called Seeking perpetual Beta: a guidebook for the network era. Instead of digging through over 2,500 posts on this site, now you can read a cohesive narrative that covers learning, working, and managing in the emerging network era. This ebook is the result of a decade of seeking, sense-making, and sharing knowledge on the Web.

“the best $25 you’ll ever spend on yourself” – Susan Scrupski

“One of the best purchases you’ll do this year!” – Luis Suarez

“masterful synthesis of 10 years of blogging about networks” – Jon Husband

“Harold knows just how to harness the power of equal, open collaboration in the networked economy.” – Ian Chew

Scroll down to read the introduction and table of contents.

Back on sale by popular demand, seeking perpetual beta is available for $20.

Introduction

The following essays are abridged and updated posts as well as combinations of posts made over the course of a decade. When I started my blog, I had three categories: learning; work; and technology. Today there are many others, as my professional interests have expanded and changed. My perspective on work and learning has been one of perpetual Beta, which also could be called strong beliefs, loosely held. Alpha is a mindset of pumping out flavour of the month drivel. Beta is more than Alpha, as you have to affirm to principles and actually commit to something, while remaining open to change. I have been observing the signs and indicators of the shift to the network era for the past decade. These articles have stood the test of time, and have been refined and discussed many times in order to be suitable for Beta.

The Network Era

The fundamental nature of work is changing as we transition into the network era. Creative work is beginning to dominate industrial work as we shift to a post- job economy. The major driver of this change is the automation of routine work, especially through software, but increasingly with robots. Valued work is in handling exceptions, dealing with complex problems, and doing customized tasks.

The products of this work are often intangible and not physical. As a result, our industrial work structures need to change. Organizations have to become more networked, not just with information technology, but in how workers create, use, and share knowledge.

The workplace of the network era requires a different type of leadership; one that emerges from the network as required. Effective leadership in networks is negotiated and temporary, according to need. Giving up control will be a major challenge for anyone used to the old ways of managing. An important part of leadership will be to ensure that knowledge is shared throughout the network.

Learning is a critical part of working in a creative economy. Being able to continuously learn, and share that new knowledge, will be as important as showing up on time was in the industrial economy. Continuous learning will also disrupt established hierarchies as no longer will a management position imply greater knowledge or skills. Command and control will be replaced by influence and respect, in order to retain creative talent. Management in networks means influencing possibilities rather than striving for predictability. We will have to accept that no one has definitive answers anymore, but we can use the intelligence of our networks to make sense together.

The shift to the network era will not be easy for many people and most organizations. Common assumptions about how work gets done will have to be discarded. Established ways of earning education credentials will be abandoned for more flexible and meaningful methods. Connections between disciplines and professions are growing and artificial boundaries will continue to crack. Systemic changes to business and education will happen. There will be disruption on a societal level, but we can create new work and learning models to help us deal with this next phase in human civilization. The statistician George Box wrote that, “essentially all models are wrong, but some are useful”. We will never know unless we try them out.

Table of Contents

(65 pages for tablet version)

Introduction

1. THE NETWORK ERA
The Changing Nature of Work
Complication: The Industrial Disease
A Networked Market Knows More
Job is a Four-letter Word
Knowledge Artisans
Working Socially
Figure 1 The Connected Enterprise
Tapping the Creative Surplus

2. WORK IS LEARNING & LEARNING IS THE WORK
PKM and the Seek > Sense > Share Framework
Figure 2 PKM = Seek > Sense > Share
PKM and Competitive Intelligence
PKM and Innovation
Managing Organizational Knowledge
Training and Complex Work
Narrating Our Work
Collaborate to Solve Complex Problems

3. LEADING & MANAGING IN NETWORKS
Network Thinking
Figure 3 Trust Emerges Through Openness and Transparency
The Connected Enterprise
The Knowledge Sharing Paradox
Managing Automation
Flip the Office
Connected Leadership
Figure 4 Connected Leadership

4. THE GLOBAL VILLAGE
Figure 5 Organizing Characteristics
Figure 6 TIMN (David Ronfeldt)
Figure 7 Tetrad of a Networked Society

Colophon

Layout and design by Tantramar Interactive

Enterprise knowledge sharing requires trusted relationships

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As the economy gets more networked, open organizations are becoming a necessity. Businesses are increasingly dependent on complex social interactions. Products are becoming services, as we can see with web apps, software, and even books. Trading intangible goods and services today requires trusted relationships, and often across distances. Internally, work teams that need to share complex knowledge require tighter social bonds. These are developed through time, with experience, and most often informally. Trust is a human quality. But the major barrier to encouraging informal social relationships at work often comes down to a question of control.

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The CEO will be the next CLO

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Chief Learning Officers will be the next CEO’s say John Hagel and John Seely Brown, in this short video from Deloitte. I disagree, because I do not see business leadership coming from Organizational Development, Human Resources, or Training & Development. I think it will be much easier, and more important, for business leaders to understand the significance of learning in the workplace. Even Adidas has adopted my adage that today, work is learning and learning is the work.

A well-rounded CEO can more easily become the CLO than vice versa. In addition, the generalists are already in charge. Often, the learning professionals are not core to the business. So where will learning leadership come from? I think it will come from business, and that is where I am focusing my efforts, helping business understand workplace learning, not helping learning professionals understand business.

If business is waking up to the fact that learning is now mission critical, will executives continue to allow learning policy to reside in a separate department? Will they will let learning professionals maintain sole control? I doubt it.

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Learning and Emergent Leadership at Google

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Two themes I have discussed here for a number of years are: 1) work is learning and learning is the work; and 2) leadership is an emergent property of networks. Helping people work on complex problems in networks is one of our management challenges for this decade. Learning has to be part of the workflow. In addition, leadership in networks does not come from above, as usually there is no top. This challenges the practice of management by hierarchical position. Leadership is an emergent property, not something bestowed from on high. Some companies understand this, but most do not. Google seems to get it. Gideon Rosenblatt highlights a conversation in the New York Times that Thomas Friedman had with Google’s VP of People Operations, Laszlo Bock.

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some useful models

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Unless we test new work models now, we will not be ready for the demands of the future. Trying out new management structures while we have time is better than trying to make a quick shift during a crisis. Change management today means practicing change, not waiting for it to hit you on the side of the head. Smart companies don’t wait for change, they constantly experiment in anticipation of change. Whether it’s climate change or a new market demand, chance favours the prepared company.

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A simple approach to KM

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Knowledge management (KM) does not have to be a major enterprise effort. But the lack of a KM strategy can be a drag on innovation or hamper decision-making in a knowledge intensive organization. While not perfect, a simple approach to KM may be better than none at all, and preferable to a flawed and expensive enterprise-wide approach. At least this model can be implemented with relative ease and no costly software platforms.

A simple approach to KM in the organization is to look at it as three connected but independent levels. The simplest is organizational KM, which ensures that important decisions are recorded, codified, and easily available for retrieval. This is mostly explicit knowledge that ensures the organizational memory remains clear on what key decisions were taken and why others were not. Over time, this becomes more valuable. Focusing only on decision memories ensures that enterprise KM does not require significant resources but does yield useful results.

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2497 and counting

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Do you think you will still be working, in some capacity, in 10 years? What will you have learned during that decade? Will you remember much of it? Will you have access to reminders and artifacts that could jog your memory? Perhaps you need an outboard brain.

freedomisblogginginyourunderwearYesterday marked 10 years of blogging here at jarche.com. This is post # 2,497. That’s a lot of words, concepts, and half-baked ideas. For example, I have the flow (148 posts to date) of my thoughts on personal knowledge management since my first post in 2004. The Seek > Sense > Share framework emerged in 2010. I have also developed ideas around the knowledge-sharing paradox; how our work structures drive sociopathic behaviours; and management in networks. These thoughts continue to evolve and provide the raw material for more refined posts like how to help the network make better decisions, or longer whitepapers for my clients.

Everyone talks about change today, and how people will have many careers and vocations through their working lives. Company lifespans are decreasing and losing your job is becoming a rather common, but unfortunate, occurrence. Having a blog, a public presence to share ideas, enables you to grow a professional network beyond your organization’s walls. It can provide useful insights while you have a job, and connect you to people who can help you if you need to look for new work. Given the usefulness of blogs, it’s amazing that many professionals still cannot be bothered with them.

My business would not exist without my blog. Period.

Note that I live in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada; population 5,000. I am 1,000 km away from the closest internationally recognized city (Boston or Montreal). Even our timezone is unknown to many people. Without my blog, nobody would ever have heard of me. My speaking engagements are an indication of the reach my blog has provided. Finally, thanks to Automattic for making WordPress, which I adopted in 2006, and it made my online life much simpler.

 

Complex knowledge

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Last week I spent several hours each day, for four consecutive days, trying to share complex knowledge. I had my understanding of communities of practice, personal knowledge management, leadership, and innovation that I wanted to share. My friend and colleague Christian Renard had his knowledge about marketing, business, and digital power to share. From the time I was picked up at the Gare du Nord we began to share our knowledge through many conversations. But it was not easy, simple, or direct.

Gare du Nord
Gare du Nord and Metropolitain Entry, Paris
Source: User: ‘Jorgeroyan’, Creative Commons A-SA 3.0, wikimedia.org

What proved helpful in our coming to a common understanding was that we both practice a form of personal knowledge management. Each of us has written articles, and more importantly, created images to describe many concepts. These visual metaphors accelerated our knowledge sharing.

Sharing information and viewing it through our individual filters is the best that we can hope for in terms of knowledge transfer. It is a very inexact process. Christian and I shared many stories over the four days and these too helped us come to some common understanding. Most importantly, we trusted each other and did not judge. We were both on similar journeys of understanding and were not trying to sell our ideas.

I was reminded once again of how much time it takes to share complex (implicit) knowledge. Four days, some long car rides, a few meetings with others, and several wonderful meals later, I think we came to a joint understanding of certain concepts. In the hurried pace of many businesses today, this would have been nearly impossible. If most organizations have a real need to share knowledge, which I believe they do, then they have to make time and space available for deep conversations. This may be one of the greatest challenges for organizational redesign as we enter a creative economy.

The aim of knowledge-sharing in an organization is to help make implicit knowledge more explicit. It’s important to understand that each of us only has an approximation of knowledge in our understanding. Knowledge should be seen as a fluid, not a solid. The cumulative pieces of information, or knowledge artifacts, that we create and share can help us have better conversations and gain some shared understanding. Our individual sense-making can be shared and from it can emerge better organizational knowledge. For organizations to share knowledge, even organizations of just two people, individuals have to have the bits necessary to put together. Knowledge is like electricity, with many small particles that enable flow. PKM helps to create the bits that will enable the conversational flow.

To really share complex knowledge takes a willingness to listen as well as the time and space to do so. Jon Husband’s definition of wirearchy is an excellent framework for organizations to start with:

Wirearchy – “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.”

Enterprise social technologies

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I am presenting on enterprise social technologies, learning and performance at the Learning Technologies conference in London today. Most large organizations have something like  Microsoft Sharepoint, an intranet, or perhaps a social tool such as Socialcast. But how can you tell if these tools are right for the job? How can these tools support a coherent social strategy across the enterprise?

7 facets ESN

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