Learning

Learning

Becoming explicit

by

print to digitalOur old technology — paper — gave us an idea of knowledge that said that knowledge comes from experts who are filtered, printed, and then it’s settled, because that’s how books work. Our new technology shows us we are complicit in knowing. In order to let knowledge get as big as our new medium allows, we have to recognize that knowledge comes from all of us (including experts), it is to be linked, shared, discussed, argued about, made fun of, and is never finished and done. It is thoroughly ours – something we build together, not a product manufactured by unknown experts and delivered to us as if it were more than merely human. – David Weinberger

Helping people become explicit in their work, as David Weinberger suggests in the above article, was my concluding advice to delegates at the Learning Technologies Summer Forum in London yesterday [curated tweets by Martin Couzins]. As learning and work get integrated, the co-creation of organizational knowledge develops from the sharing of our implicit knowledge. This is a messy, never-finished process that requires continuous engagement, usually through conversation. I think it is becoming rather obvious that knowledge cannot be directly transferred, but better understanding can emerge from open sharing. In the digital age, supporting knowledge sharing can be a key role for learning and development in the organization.

The nature of work is shifting. The dominant framework is moving from corporations to networks. As I explained in my presentation, knowledge networks are optimized when they are based on openness, which enables transparency, and in turn fosters diversity, thus reinforcing the basic principle of openness. Over time, trust emerges. Openness can be supported through social networks, as they are non-hierarchical by design, allowing anyone to connect to everyone. Supporting social networks becomes a business imperative, and a potential role for learning & development staff. They can also help people develop personal knowledge mastery skills, a foundational competence for the connected workplace. As the graphic below shows, becoming explicit can have a direct impact on innovation.

becoming explicitBooks gave us the illusion that knowledge was stable. It never was. Now it’s time to think of organizational learning as a process of shared attempts to become explicit. As Gerd Leonhard remarked in the opening keynote yesterday, a critical skill in the near-future workplace will be sense-making. I could not agree more.

On the future of distance education

by

udme par jacques coolI attended the annual meeting of the Canadian francophone distance education network, REFAD, this week, opening the conference, attending most events and finally participating in a panel discussion. The hospitality by the folks in Edmundston was fantastic and as a speaker I could not have asked for better support. The conference was focused on the future of distance education and I spoke about some of the external influences on educational institutions. My presentation slides, in French, are available on Slideshare.

During the conference, Daniel Peraya explained that in his studies with both entry level university students and more advanced graduate students, both groups avoided the tools and platforms provided by the institution and instead preferred tools that were easy to find, free, flexible, and open. I noted afterwards that this happens in enterprises as well, where workers prefer to bring their own device or create hacks around their learning management systems. Stephen Downes discussed MOOC’s (English transcript – en français), saying that they are like languages and require practice and time to master. This is similar to all social media.

A question arose whether educators need to be deep subject matter experts or instead more focused on facilitating learning. I brought up the work of Marina Gorbis in The Nature of the Future, where she discusses the changing nature of the medical field. Gorbis sees a new role for doctors. “In a socialstructed health care system, the doctor is not an omniscient God but a great conversationalist, astute observer, and insightful partner, that is, she is less a robot and more a real human being.” If doctors are becoming more generalized – with specialist work like surgery getting automated or robotized – then will the same forces affect professors? If the most knowledgeable person on a subject is available via a mouse-click, will each institution need its own local specialist?

I closed with a quote from Marina Gorbis, which I think clearly paints a possible future for the focus of public education.

In a world where people’s jobs will not be given to them, each individual will need to look deeply and understand what she or he is good at, how she or he can contribute to multiple efforts and navigate multiple roles and identities as a part of different communities.

Jacques Cool, whose photo of the Edmundston campus appears above, kindly translated this into French for me.

Dans un monde où les emplois ne leur seront pas offerts directement, les individus ont besoin d’examiner en profondeur et dégager une meilleure compréhension de ce qu’ils ou elles peuvent faire, comment peuvent-ils contribuer aux différentes communautés dont ils font partie, ainsi que d’assumer de multiples rôles dans ces communautés.

Social networks require ownership

by

So Gartner states that only 10% of social networking roll-outs succeed. Surprised? I’m not. Computer World UK reports that certain characteristics are necessary for success, once a purpose has been provided:

  • The purpose should naturally motivate people to participate.
  • The purpose must resonate with enough people to catalyse a community and deliver robust user-generated content.
  • The purpose should have a clear business outcome.
  • Select purposes that you and the community can build on.

It’s a bit more complicated than that. First of all, most roll-outs focus on rolling-out, not changing behaviour. The hard work begins after the software vendors have provided the initial training and the organization is on its own. Social media, and social networks,  change the way we communicate. Like any new language, they take time to learn, and adults are usually not very good at showing their lack of fluency with a second language. They don’t like to look foolish.

While people may say it’s not about the technology, unfortunately that’s where a large share of the budget goes in social network initiatives. The bigger change to manage is getting people to work transparently. Transparency is a necessity for cooperation and collaboration in networks, as a major benefit of using social media is increasing speed of access to knowledge. However, if the information is not shared by people, it will not be found.

It’s not a question of “motivating” people, but understanding why people are naturally motivated to share. I would surmise that the 90% failure rate may have a lot to do with the dysfunctional state of those organizations implementing social networks. Attempts to use enterprise social networks, that inevitably increase transparency, will only serve to illuminate organizational flaws.

dysfunctional

The knowledge sharing paradox is that social networks often constrain what they are supposed to enhance. Why would people share everything they know on an enterprise network, knowing that on the inevitable day that they leave, their knowledge artifacts will remain behind? Enterprise knowledge sharing will never be as good as what networked individuals can do, because of ownership. Motivated or not, workers do not own the social network or their data. Individuals who own their knowledge networks will invest more in them.Those who do not, will not.

Even with a clear, resonating purpose, salaried employees still own nothing on the enterprise social network. Aye, there’s the rub.

Perspectives on work and learning

by

A couple of months ago I added a visual presentation to my About section, as I thought that might help convey my perspectives regarding my professional services a bit better. It’s what guides me, in my work.

I think many of my perspectives on learning were planted when I first went to school, in a one-room schoolhouse in the Rocky Mountains of BC. With only three pupils in my grade, we had a lot of freedom and we got to see what the older kids were doing. I was allowed to be quite independent and even more so later when I was home-schooled after the schoolhouse closed.

A basic assumption that I have developed is that many things can, and should, be simplified. Principles and values are often more resilient as guidelines than complicated rules and regulations, especially in dealing with complex issues. When it comes to learning, simplicity usually works best, as in simple systems to support learning. Often it’s just a case of removing barriers to learning.

Our networked world is changing work fundamentally. In hyper-connected work environments, learning has to be part of working. This is because labour is increasingly based on unique talents, not easily replaceable tasks. This is also shattering our divisions of labour that many organizations are structured around, like IT, HR, KM and others. With an increase in customized, high-variety work we are seeing concepts like time at work or pay by the hour becoming obsolete.

With these changes, organizational dysfunction is becoming obvious to all. Things aren’t worse today, there is just more exposure. To succeed in this networked world, organizations need to promote openness, transparency, and diversity. This enables innovation through more and better connections. It’s not just social business, but open business, that is needed to move from hierarchies (simple networks) to wirearchies (complex, human networks).

London Summer Picnic

by

For the past 18 months, Jane Hart has been hosting the Social Learning Centre, offering a wide variety of resources, coaching, and workshops. I have run several workshops as well, some alone, and others jointly with Jane. We have learned much in supporting social learning with hundreds of participants from around the globe. Last year, we decided to offer a workshop series, which will be ending with our second Summer Camp in June. The series consisted of workshops on:

  • Personal Knowledge Management
  • Social Media for Professional Development
  • Social Learning in the Workplace
  • From Training to Performance Support
  • Online Communities
  • Enterprise Community Management
  • Social Learning in Business

For our Summer Camp, we are planning on doing something different. It will be a chance to reflect on what we have learned together. The focus will be on synthesizing all the conversations from our workshops over the past year and more. We will curate the conversations and observations and present them to Summer Campers. We will then work collaboratively on weaving these threads together into a narrative that makes sense. Jane and I will do the initial curation but then each person will be able to add to it, in view of the other participants, working cooperatively as desired. Each person will be able to create a mind-map, or other form of sense-making to make a cognitive toolbox.

Robinson_picnic_PDIn addition to these online activities, we will start the Summer Camp with a “picnic” in London, on the afternoon of Thursday 20 June 2013. Jane and I will present our initial findings and observations in a semi-formal way. Weather permitting, this will start in a park, if not, we will find a suitable pub. This will be followed by us all “walking the talk” where we will go for a casual stroll through an interesting part of London, conversing as we walk.

After the walk, we will weave our conversations back together. Jane and I will be ready with a few other short presentations on topics of interest, kind of like a fast-paced Ignite! format. We will also be available for one-on-one chats or more open discussions. This will be an informal Summer camp, but Jane & I will bring a basket full of social goodies. Much of this will be recorded and curated, and shared with the other online participants. We will try to live-cast this as well, but it will depend on our connectivity. We will stay in London and we invite anyone who wishes to get together for an evening meal to join us.

If you wish to participate, please sign up for the Summer Camp, for £99

If you wish to attend our Summer Picnic, the cost is £49 for the afternoon or £119 including the online Summer Camp.

This is my work

by

The ability to learn is the only lasting competitive advantage for any organization. Hyper-connected work environments require people with better sense-making, collaboration, and cooperation skills. Social learning plays a significant role in this. Democratic workplaces that foster trust can share knowledge better and faster. To this end, I am a keen subversive of many of the last century’s management and education practices.

jarche services

Collaborative Work

Social Learning

Connected Leadership

Personal Knowledge Management

Adapting to perpetual Beta

Enterprise Social Tools

Communities of Practice

The subject of education

by

I mostly focus on workplace learning here, but I want to put together some of my previous thoughts on public education. My opinions are based on watching our two boys go through a public education system, now complete, plus a fair bit of reading, in addition to many conversations with educators over the years. If we change how we think about public education, we may also be able to improve how we support workplace learning.

school_country__abiclipa_01.jpgWe do not live our lives based on academic subjects, and no workplace is subject-based, but almost all of our curricula are stuffed into subject silos. Education systems should focus on facilitating learning and critical thinking. When students are ready to enter the workforce they will then have the learning skills to blast through whatever job training interests them. Getting the education system out of the job training business will likely make for happier learners, teachers and and maybe even parents.

What would a curriculum look like if you eliminated any specific content and any reference to particular technologies and instead focused on universal cognitive processes? Many varieties of this “curriculum” could be created, using various content areas or communication technologies. I imagine a curriculum that is open to teachers’ expertise and students’ needs, based on processes like those suggested by Marina Gorbis in The Nature of the Future:

  • Sensemaking
  • Social and emotional intelligence
  • Novel and adaptive thinking
  • Moral and ethical reasoning

What would be different about this more basic curriculum is that students would be able to choose how they would learn these process skills and how they would show mastery. Self-expression could be shown through writing, blogging, art, drama, mechanics, etc. This approach would also free up a whole bunch of teachers in administrative curriculum development positions. Without a subject-centric curriculum, teachers could choose the appropriate subject matter for their particular class and the school system could concentrate on ensuing that students have mastered the important processes.

All fields of knowledge are expanding and artificial boundaries between disciplines are disintegrating. Our education systems need to drop the whole notion of subjects and content mastery and move to process-oriented learning. The subject matter should be something of interest to the learner or something a teacher, with passion, is motivated to teach. The subject does not matter, it’s just grist for the cognitive mill.

Discussing what subjects we should teach is the 21st Century equivalent of determining how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The answer is infinite. The real debate in education is whether we need subject-based curriculum at all.

The risky quadrant

by

Donald Taylor asks where your learning & development (training) department resides.

  1. Are you unacknowledged prophets, with a manager or executive who understands that you need to change, but the organization lags behind?
  2. Are you facing comfortable extinction, like the once dominant but now bankrupt Kodak?
  3. Or are you in the training ghetto, disconnected from the business and unable to be part of any change?

training extinctionThe reality today is that risky leadership is needed. As Don notes:

If both the department and the organisation are changing fast, this is a great opportunity. We can invest in new procedures and systems, build our skills and experiment with different ways of working with the business, and the business – because it is also changing fast and open to new ideas – will respond. It’s in this quadrant that we find really progressive L&D teams that are making an impact. While they are undoubtedly leaders, this quadrant is also risky, because that’s the nature of change.

Unacknowledged Prophets: If you are in this quadrant I would advise you to bide your time, build up your skills, create alliances, and wait for opportunities. As Stephen Berlin Johnson says, “Chance favours the connected mind.” Get collaborative, cooperative & connected. Louis Pasteur said that “Chance favours the prepared mind“. Be prepared.

Comfortable Extinction: This is a difficult quadrant because there is no understanding of the need for change. Everything is just fine. If you are the only person in your organization without rose coloured glasses, I would try to become a lone unacknowledged prophet, preparing for the inevitable crisis. If nobody sees it, then it would be best to let the training department drift into obscurity so that others can take the lead in promoting cooperation, collaboration and knowledge sharing. Sometimes it’s best to let natural selection do its thing.

Training Ghetto: Getting out of the basement and becoming relevant may take some time, which departments in this quadrant may not have. I would suggest first moving from training delivery to performance improvement. Get someone (yourself?) skilled at performance consulting. Forget about social learning, for the time being, and focus on performance support tools and job aids. Become useful to the business by bringing practical tools that can be used right away.

So how will you get to the risky quadrant?

The Connected Workplace

by

The Connected WorkerToday’s digitally connected workplace demands a completely new set of skills. Our increasing interconnectedness is illuminating the complexity of our work environments. More connections create more possibilities, as well as more potential problems.

On the negative side, we are seeing that simple work keeps getting automated, like automatic bank machines. Complicated work, for which standardized processes can be developed, usually gets outsourced to the lowest cost of labor.

On the positive side, complex work can provide unique business advantages and creative work can help to identify new business opportunities. However, complex work is difficult to copy and creative work constantly changes.

But both complex and creative work require greater implicit knowledge. Implicit knowledge, unlike explicit knowledge, is difficult to codify and standardize. It is also difficult to transfer.

Implicit knowledge is best developed through conversations and social relationships. It requires trust before people willingly share their know-how. Social networks can enable better and faster knowledge feedback for people who trust each and share their knowledge. But hierarchies and work control structures constrain conversations. Few people want to share their ignorance with the boss who controls their paycheck. But if we agree that complex and creative work are where long-term business value lies, then learning amongst ourselves is the real work in organizations today. In this emerging network era, social learning is how work gets done.

Becoming a successful social organization will require more than just the implementation of enterprise social technologies. Developing, supporting, and encouraging people to use a range of new social workplace skills will be just as important. Individual skills, in addition to new organizational support structures, are both required.

Personal knowledge mastery (PKM) skills can help to make sense of, and learn from, the constant stream of information that workers encounter from social channels both inside and outside the organization. Keeping track of digital information flows and separating the signal from the noise is difficult. There is little time to make sense of it all. We may feel like we are just not able to stay current and make informed decisions. PKM gives a framework to develop a network of people and sources of information that one can draw from on a daily basis. PKM is a process of filtering, creating, and discerning, and it also helps manage individual professional development through continuous learning.

Collaboration skills can help workers to share knowledge so that people work and learn cooperatively in teams, communities of practice, and social networks. In order to support collaborative working and learning in the organization, it is important to experience what it means to work and learn collaboratively, and understand the new community and collaboration skills that are involved. “You can’t train someone to be social, only show them how to be social.” Practice is necessary.

The power of social networks, like electricity, will inevitably change almost every existing business model. Leaders need to understand the importance of organizational architecture. Working smarter in the future workplace starts by organizing to embrace networks, manage complexity, and build trust. The 21st century connected enterprise is a new world of work and learning.

For example, traditional training structures, based on institutions, programs, courses and classes, are changing. Probably the biggest change we are seeing is that the content delivery model is being replaced by more social and collaborative frameworks. This is due to almost universal Internet connectivity, especially with mobile devices, as well as a growing familiarity with online social networks.

Work is changing and so organizational learning must change. There is an urgent need for organizational support functions (HR, OD, KM, Training) to move beyond offering training services and toward supporting learning as it is happening in the digitally connected workplace. The connected workplace will not wait for the training department to catch up.

#itashare

We need more sandboxes

by

Earlier this week I wrote that practices like personal knowledge mastery (PKM), and its potential for enhanced serendipity can give us the underlying structure to become better hackers and be more creative. Behaviour change comes through small, but consistent, changes in practice. So how do you move from responsibility, to creativity, and potentially to innovation? Play, explore and converse. But first you need to build a space to practice. PKM can be your cognitive sandbox.

But what can be done at the organizational level to promote playing, exploring and conversing?

Informal learning environments tolerate failure better than schools. Perhaps many teachers have too little time to allow students to form and pursue their own questions and too much ground to cover in the curriculum and for standardized tests. But people must acquire this skill somewhere. Our society depends on them being able to make critical decisions, about their own medical treatment, say, or what we must do about global energy needs and demands. For that, we have a robust informal learning system that eschews grades, takes all comers, and is available even on holidays and weekends. – Scientific American

Organizations should think about building sandboxes as well. These could be shared resources, like the museums used by schools in the article, or even virtual spaces. The greatest challenge, if organizations did create learning sandboxes, would be resisting the urge to control them. Perhaps the best way to develop a “robust informal learning system” that eschews control would be through joint efforts, public and private. We have museums for the public, mostly aimed at basic levels of learning and often focused on children. Is there a new role for museums to develop spaces aimed at working adults? Can these be aligned with market needs? Instead of boring courses for the unemployed, how about access to a maker space instead? Again, it would mean giving up control.

Last year I witnessed a company close operations. A very good benefits package was provided as well as access to “re-training”. This was provided by an HR services company. Courses were available on how to write a resume or how to search for a job. I heard from attendees that these courses were interesting but not that useful. I suggested that something like PKM might be useful. However, the company would not provide anything beyond what the HR service provider offered. The company had met its legal commitments and it was time to turn the page.

sand playInstead, some employees set up their own sandbox. It was just a blog, connected to LinkedIn and other social media. People shared stories and passed on opportunities to others. Now this filled a gap, but it was temporary and the network was not that strong. Imagine if this sandbox had been in existence prior to the closure and was already a learning community of practice? What if community managers were already plugged in to other networks? Would this not be better for employees, the company, and especially society? Let’s build some sandboxes.