Learning

Learning

Make it relevant

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John Stepper describes his recent experiences in discussing working out loud in Berlin. The recommendations are those many of us are familiar with:

  1. Make it simple. Just changing someone’s home page can make the platform seem much more accessible. And curated suggestions of people, groups, and content relevant to a person’s division and location make the value more apparent.

  2. Start small. Create situations – such as town halls and other events – where people can find material or ask a question and feel the benefits themselves.

  3. Make it safe. Give every team a private online space to make posting seem less risky.

  4. Leverage social influence. Spend more effort on getting influential people, especially senior management, to model the behavior.

  5. Make it relevant. Provide more content and more integration with daily processes so it’s part of the daily work and not yet another thing to do.

The first four are pretty typical of any change initiative: start simple, small, safe & social. I have done this with clients, and these are usually good ways to get going, especially on limited budgets and competing priorities. I would like to focus on the fifth point: relevance. This is what makes a new change initiative become a different way of doing things all the time.

This is where KM, L&D, OD and many other projects break down. It’s also where enterprise software initiatives can fail. They are not relevant to the daily work being done because the change project never really looked at that.

working out loudThink about the term, “working out loud”. It’s what I call narration of work. The primary focus is on work. You don’t work out loud in a classroom because it’s not “work”. You don’t work out loud on stuff that isn’t really work. That’s just practice.

This is why I strongly advocate that work is learning and learning is the work. Working out loud has to be part of the work. Bolting anything on to the workflow just shows what it really is: an impediment to work. As John says, “Even getting people to simply login to a collaboration platform remains a challenge.” If the collaboration system is not also the work system, then it’s just a bolted-on appendage.

To make collaboration, and working out loud, work, the same tools must be used. This is why I am not the most popular person amongst LMS vendors, as I believe the underlying principle of learning management systems is in direct conflict with collaborative and cooperative work. Changing the way that daily work is done, how knowledge is shared, and what gets communicated, are the important things to focus on in improving knowledge work.

The criticism I hear most frequently about any learning or knowledge management project is that it lacks relevance. Maybe before starting the next major initiative, conduct a secret poll and see how many people think it’s relevant.

Learning is the work week

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It’s Learn @ Work week in Canada. A related article in the HuffPo states that, “Simply put, a culture of learning is nothing more than workplace leaders providing opportunities for learning in a supportive environment.” Is that really it?

learning is the workFor me, it’s never “Learn @ Work” week. It’s always, “Learning is the Work” week.

Thinking of learning as something additional to work is plain wrong in a knowledge-based, creative, networked society and economy.

It is not enough for workplace leaders to merely “provide opportunities for learning”. They need to model learning themselves. But it’s not just about those in leadership positions, as networked organizations need everyone to think and learn for themselves.

Organizational resilience is strengthened when those in leadership roles let go of control, because leadership in networks does not come from above, as there is no top. Leadership is an emergent property of a network in balance and not some special property available to only the select few. As networks become the dominant organizational principle, networked learning is essential to do any work of value. A real learning organization requires leadership from everyone – an aggressively intelligent and engaged workforce, understanding that:

The Mobile Enterprise

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Work is becoming predominantly social, collaborative & mobile. This mobile work requires mobile learning and a mobile workforce needs more flexible approaches in supporting learning. At the same time, a mobile workforce should have physical spaces that encourage conversations when nomadic workers do get together. With a mobile workforce, we cannot take for granted the hallway conversations of the last century, but should be optimizing our physical work spaces for conversations.

These conversations are necessary to help implicit knowledge be shared as explicit knowledge. As mobile workers become responsible for their own devices as well as their own learning, learning from colleagues gets even more important. Just look at the rise of video-conferencing.

Odds are again, if you’re a mobile professional you are probably doing more video calls lately than ever before — and far fewer, if any, are taking place in a “video room” or some other specialized broadcast facility. Instead, you’re likely doing it yourself, on a webcam built into your laptop or via a smartphone or tablet. It’s the way work is going to be done, increasingly, going forward. – Paul Kapustka in Mobile Enterprise 360

The increase in mobility will reinforce the need for openness in organizations. A mobile workforce must easily collaborate and cooperate across timezones in order to deal with complex and often time-sensitive issues. One reason workers are mobile is to keep them closer to their customers. This proximity means they can sense changes faster, but they also need to be able to react quicker. Trust needs to be pushed to the organization’s edges.

A mobile workforce can be a formidable way to deal with complexity. But this workforce needs to be supported for networked learning as well as networked working. Knowledge networks are optimized through openness, transparency and diversity. If your workforce is becoming increasingly mobile, it may be time to review how things get done:

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This post is brought to you by Mobile Enterprise 360 Community and Citrix

Note: I retained editorial control and take full responsibility for what is posted. Contract writing is one of the ways I make my living.

Experience, Exposure, Education

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70-20-1070%: Experience

20%: Exposure

10%: Education

The 70:20:10 Framework Explained is a holistic framework, a “reference model”, and not a recipe. “A reference model is an abstract framework consisting of an interlinking set of clearly defined concepts produced by an expert or body of experts in order to encourage clear communication.” —p.17. Charles Jennings explains the framework in detail so that organizations can use it to improve how people work and learn at work. Each organization will have to add its unique context in order to implement the framework, but this book provides an excellent start. The 70:20:10 institute can provide more contextual feedback.

The book gives clear guidance on dealing with the changing nature of work and organizations, such as:

  • Flattening organizations
  • Softening structures
  • Increasing complexity
  • Globalization pressures
  • Decrease in the half-life of knowledge
  • Rapid changes in business conditions
  • Increasingly dynamic market for expertise
  • Shifting and diminishing role of managers

The 70:20:10 Framework is based on learning at work, not in a classroom and not in a lab. Charles describes workplace learning as based on four key activities:

  1. Exposure to new and rich experiences.
  2. The opportunity to practice.
  3. Engaging in conversation and exchanges with each other.
  4. Making time to reflect on new observations, information, experiences, etc.

In today’s workplace, work is learning and learning is the work. This book helps you get there. Not only do I recommend this book, I think most organizations should buy several and keep them around so that everyone can read them. Why? Because experience with the framework, “tells us that reductions of 50% of spend on formal development are not unreasonable to expect.” That’s one good reason, and there are many more.

Top Tools for Learning

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Jane Hart compiles a list every year of what people find to be their best web tools for learning. Voting closes on 27 September. Here are my top tools this year, with last year’s position shown in brackets.

tools

9 (new): Wikimedia Commons is a great source for copyright free images to use in presentations.

8 (new): Feedly is my new feed reader, now that Google Reader has been shut down.

7 (8): Flickr: Still a great way to share photos online. I like the feature that automatically creates images in multiple sizes. Though the deletion of Pro accounts, for which I paid two years in advance, shows that Yahoo! (the owner) does not really care about its customers, only advertisers.

6 (10): Google Plus: I find G+ is very good for deep conversations and the live Hangouts feature is still a killer app, even though the features and interface keep changing, showing that the platform is built by engineers, for engineers.

5 (5): Keynote: Apple’s presentation application has enabled me to improve my slide presentations, through its simplicity and lack of clip art.

4 (9): Slideshare: A handy way to share presentations so that people can view them before or instead of downloading them.

3 (3): Diigo: Social bookmarks are a quick way for me to save a web page and find it easily (Diigo allows me to do an auto backup to Delicious).

2 (4): Twitter: Next to my blog, Twitter is my best learning tool and allows me to stay connected to a diverse network.

1 (1): WordPress: It powers my blog, which is the core of my self-directed learning and online reflection. It’s easy to use, has a huge community, and there are many plug-ins and additions available.

Three Amigos

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What happens when four independent consultants get thrown together and are told they are now a team? Sometimes, everything clicks and a wonderful new relationship begins. That’s what happened in Riyadh this week. Four of us were invited to work with a relatively new governmental organization focused on renewable energy, K.A. CARE:

“The world depends on energy and is moving inexorably towards more sustainable sources than fossil fuel as they are a non-renewable resource. Saudi Arabia is no exception  to this; it has the vision and drive to ensure the introduction of renewable sources of energy. To provide a sustainable and efficient energy future for the Kingdom, KA CARE has recommended a sustainable energy mix taking into account: the economics of the hydrocarbons saved; electricity and water demand patterns; technology choices; regulatory and physical infrastructure requirements; human capacity development; and value chain enhancement.”

Coordinated by Alan Kantrow, a seasoned professional, the remaining three of us were challenged to work together to weave together a single narrative on institutional memory and storytelling over two days. On the third day, it would be presented to the executive leadership. The three amigos improvisational team — Alex Barrera, David Hutchens, and myself — had to quickly understand each other and then develop a coherent narrative that made business sense for the client. Needless to say, there were many things to take into consideration, including the client’s cultural context. So a Spaniard, an American, and a Canadian walk into a Saudi organization, and …. [see the photos]

As Alex and David presented, I learned a lot about storytelling from these experts. First of all, don’t confuse story with narrative, said Alex, as stories contain emotion. Stories are how we best remember and a story can be thought of as what happens in the gap between expectations and results. David provided an excellent structure for stories, discussing story mining, crafting & telling, and sharing & sense-making. It reminded me of PKM‘s Seek-Sense-Share.

storytelling frameworkMy presentation was based on several of the posts on institutional memory & knowledge management that I’ve shared here over the past few weeks, particularly looking at the different ways to deal with implicit and explicit knowledge. Our client commented that implicit knowledge is the glue that connects explicit knowledge together. I think our gluing together of the explicit knowledge that we presented was aided by the fact that we could spend several days together, get to know each other, and try to share some implicit knowledge, such as our perspectives on life, the universe and everything. The answer of course, was 42 ;) press42-logo-smallAfter our presentation to the senior leadership on Wednesday, one participant asked to confirm that we were not all from the same company and had never worked together. He did not believe that three individuals, from different backgrounds and countries could come together so quickly and speak with a unified voice. I think our collective participation in social media made this a lot easier, as were were able to integrate our networked thinking into a larger network. It seemed quite natural to all three of us.

The End (for now)

stop

Dismantling hierarchies

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Can organizations still function if we dismantle hierarchies?

childs-eye

In the social imperative, Jay Cross asked me how can organizations restructure in order to deal with complexity. In other words, how can they loosen hierarchical (direct) control and strengthen network (indirect) control?

“So essentially, we need to rely on others (via networks) to thrive above the midline of Verna’s chart, but we must become flexible in order to deal with the left hand side. Dave Snowden implies that mistaking the left for the right is fatal, since they require different responses.

Harold, is this a tipping point phenomenon or can organizations dismantle bureaucracy incrementally? What drives the lessening of top-down control to enable the flex to deal with the increasingly complex world?”

Read more

A portrait of a conversation

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I talk a lot about the narration of work, how it can help implicit knowledge to flow, and how our collective words can become a force for change. Recently, I’ve been watching a most interesting narration of the art of painting, from the perspective of the subject. This is not any subject, but a professor emeritus of art and an established art critic.

Virgil Hammock is narrating a series of blog posts on how Stephen Scott is painting Virgil’s portrait. It’s a fascinating read. In Stephen Paints a Picture: Part One, we learn about the inspiration behind the project.

I told him [Stephen]  about a book, Man with a Blue Scarf, I had read written by British art critic, Martin Gayford, of sitting for a portrait by Lucian Freud and how interesting it was to follow their conversation over the very long time it took Freud to complete the painting. One thing led to another and we decided to repeat the idea with me as the subject

In Part Two, we learn about a painting of Stephen’s that Virgil had used in a show this Spring.

It was a portrait of Stephen’s based on photographs, that of the poet Alden Nowlan (2009, 125cm x 100cm), that was included in an exhibition I curated at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Art Treasures of New Brunswick, earlier this year that made me want to learn about how the artist worked. Stephen did the painting as a commission for the University of New Brunswick Library. What drew me to the painting was the evidence of the artist’s struggle. This was no slick photo realist painting or usual university official portrait. I have seen plenty of both. They are all over the place at universities, mine included, which look like painted photographs of really boring people. I had known Alden and he wasn’t boring and Stephen’s painting made him look like how he was, a very interesting person.

alden nolan by stephen scott

As Virgil describes his conversations with Stephen, we learn about the artist’s particular craft, techniques and perspectives. There is a lot to discover. I think a lot of work is like that – easy to see the surface but much more difficult to perceive the undercurrents. Having a knowledgeable second party narrate the work in progress is also effective in ensuring that things are not taken for granted. Virgil asks questions that Stephen may not have offered up on his own. It shows the power of conversation in sharing knowledge.

These posts also highlight the need for reflective conversations, done while working, but with a goal in mind, to draw out better understanding. I think it is a good example for anyone involved in organizational knowledge management. Sharing knowledge takes time, usually one conversation at a time, and over an extended period of time. Management has much to learn from artists.

Stay tuned to the continuing story to find out how the portrait turns out.

Networked Professional Development

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It can sometimes be difficult to see oneself as a node in multiple networks, as opposed to a more conventional position within an organizational hierarchy. We have become used to titles, job descriptions, and other institutional trappings. But network thinking can fundamentally change our view of hierarchical relationships.

For example, I once used value network analysis to help a steering group see their community of practice in a new light. For the first time, they saw it mapped as a network. They immediately realized that they were pushing solutions instead of listening to their community. As a result, they decided to change their Charter and develop more network-centric practices. Thinking in terms of networks can enable us see with new eyes.

effective networks are open

Managing in Networks:

Here are some recommendations for organizations moving to more networked and creative work.

  • Abolish the organization chart and replace it with a network diagram (some new tech companies have done this).
  • Move away from counting hours, to a results only work environment.
  • Encourage outside work that doesn’t directly interfere with paid work, as it will strengthen the network.
  • 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.
  • Organizations should promote connected leadership.

Learning in Networks:

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.

Networked Professional Development:

A professional learning network, with its redundant connections, repetition of information and indirect communications, is a much more resilient system than any designed development program can be. Redundancy is also a good principal for supporting social learning diffusion. There is always more than one way to communicate or find something and just because something was blogged, tweeted or posted does not mean it will be understood and eventually internalized as actionable knowledge. The more complex or novel the idea, the more time it will take to be understood.

Programmers often say that you are only as good as your code. Credentials and certifications often act as blinders and stop us from recognizing the complexity of a situation. As Henry Mencken wrote, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

One approach to working smarter starts by organizing to embrace diversity and manage complexity.  Diversity is a key factor in innovation and there are few organizations that do not want to improve innovation.

At the Connected Knowledge Lab, we offer a place and time to develop network skills. Our next event will focus on building a professional network, providing resources and feedback for anyone interested in getting started. Our workshops are designed to give just enough structure, without constraining personal and social learning, all at a reasonable price.

All things to all people

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It was reported that only 2% of social sharing happens on Google Plus (G+). I too, do not share much on G+. I recently posted on G+ that it did not fit in with my professional use of social media, even though discussions are often fun, interesting, and informative. That G+ post I made now has 52 comments, more than any post on this blog has had.

In that post, Jeff Roach described G+ as “a network that looks like Facebook (media rich) but functions more like twitter (streams etc) but is more friendly to conversations and sharing than both of them.” Joachim Stroh suggested that I create a community on G+ but I countered that I preferred to cooperate in the open, not in another social media walled garden:

I think one of the problems today is that many online social networks are trying to be communities of practice. But to be a community of practice, there has to be something to practice. One social network, mine, is enough for me. How I manage the connections is also up to me. In some cases I will follow a blogger, in others I will connect via Google Plus or Twitter, but from my perspective it is one network, with varying types of connections. Jumping into someone else’s bounded social network/community only makes sense if I have an objective. If not, I’ll keep cooperating out in the open.

Nollind Whachel then weighed-in with several thoughtful comments and Joachim Stroh continued to engage. I stood on the sidelines, and a few others added comments, including one commentator unknown to me who felt I was being unprofessional because I did not understand G+. By the way, all of my G+ posts have been public, so anyone can jump in.

Nollind provided a good way to describe the sense-making process in these online social networks:

Connect = producing content
Empower = making sense of content patterns
Inspire = leap of logic, the patterns form a story, you see the bigger picture

Joachim made an interesting subsequent comment:

So, I’m still looking for the connection to go from unstructured to structured content, without doing a lot of curation. It’s not easy if you are doing this on your own (as you describe), it’s almost impossible to do this collectively (without a CM role).

Nollind added an emergent thought, that I think is important, and is partially what this blog post is all about:

Hmm, just had an interesting thought. It actually may be easier to do the writing and sense making within one community and then do the outlining and structuring in another community.

My interest in all of this comes down to PKM, and so far, G+ is a mere extension of my PKM processes. Perhaps it could be more, but I strongly believe in the centrality of my blog, which I own and control. I am not ready to give that to Google or any other third party. Nollind also made an excellent comparison of my PKM framework with his own methodology,

Seek = Connect = Play
Sense = Empower = Learn
Share = Inspire = Work

At this time, G+ provides a nice place for deep discussions with people who probably would not post as much on my blog and would be throttled by Twitter’s 140 character limit. I know that others use it much more, adding tags to make search and retrieval easier, and engaging with communities. G+ does add to my weak & diverse ties and even enables the sharing of complex knowledge. Perhaps G+ is trying to be all things to all people, and for those of us with existing PKM processes, that’s just too much.

social ties collaboration cooperationImage: Social Ties for Cooperation & Collaboration