Learning

Learning

Notes on social learning in business

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We just finished a month-long workshop at the Social Learning Centre which involved over 50 participants from many countries. The workshop was on social learning in business, and followed on from previous ones like the PKM workshop on individual, informal learning, and the Training to Performance Support workshop on tools that can often replace instruction. This was my last in a series that Jane Hart and I have done over the past year. Jane is conducting an April workshop on enterprise community management and sign-up ends this week. Jane and I also have a Summer Camp scheduled as our final joint offering, and it will cover a wide variety of topics, to be announced prior to starting in June.

The core themes in this workshop were around social aspects of learning at work: narrating our work for others; communities of practice & understanding networks. Social learning can happen in both formal instruction and informally. Many of the structures and systems that can support informal learning can also help social learning. While not interchangeable terms, they can often apply to the same activity. For example, when I learn informally in a social network, it is social learning as well. However, reading a book alone may be informal, but not social. As Albert Bandura wrote; “most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.” This is most often outside of formal instructional activities.

People learn socially at work, which is why organizational design is so important. We automatically ask those close to us for help, but they may not be the best people to ask. Social enterprise tools can help expand our social learning networks. Understanding that social learning is natural, we should look at ways to support and enhance it.

Training and instruction are all about control, with curricula, sanctioned learning objectives, and performance criteria. This works when the field of study is knowable. But fewer fields remain completely knowable, if they ever were. Many institutions and professions have been built on the premise that knowledge can be transferred in some kind of controlled process. If you question that premise, you threaten people’s jobs, status, and sense of worth. This is why you see some violent reactions to the notion of informal and social learning having validity within organizations.

A major difference between communities of practice and work teams is that the former are voluntary. People want to join communities of practice. People feel affinity for their communities of practice. You know you are in a community of practice when it changes your practice. If the groups are mandated by management, they are work teams, or project teams etc., but not communities of practice.

“Communities of practice are groups of people who share a passion for something that they know how to do and who interact regularly to learn how to do it better.” — Etienne Wenger

For those who want to promote social learning in the workplace, start by modelling good networked learning skills. Be the example and wait for opportunities. For instance, narrate your work for others to see. Consider the Buddhist proverb; “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” Be ready to appear once their eyes are open.

sitting buddhaBecoming comfortable with narrating your work takes time, practice and feedback. When I have worked with companies, it has taken several months for people to get comfortable with working and learning out loud. It also takes modelling of new behaviours, a gentle hand to guide, and once in a while, a bit of cajoling. I have not figured out a way to do this quickly, or without allowing time for practice and reflection. I don’t think it’s possible. That is often the problem with enterprise social software implementations. Once the initial training is over, management thinks all problems have been solved. Getting to social takes time.

Only open systems are effective for knowledge sharing

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Seth Godin makes a very good point about trusting the select few to curate information, whether they be leaders, managers, certified professionals, researchers, or any other group of experts.

We have no idea in advance who the great contributors are going to be. We know that there’s a huge cohort of people struggling outside the boundaries of the curated, selected few, but we don’t know who they are.

When it comes to knowledge, we often do not know in advance what will be useful in the future. I discuss this when coaching people how to narrate their work, an essential part of encouraging social learning in the workplace. Overly editing one’s own work is similar to overly editing who does the curation of our knowledge flows. Seth Godin explains it with this graphic.

open v curationIn software programming, the saying is that with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow. Or put another way, the more people who look at a problem, fewer errors will get through. In the case of enterprise knowledge-sharing, an incredibly inexact practice; with enough voices quality will emerge. Only an open system can ensure this, which is why I highlighted the knowledge sharing paradox.

When it comes to knowledge, and learning, only open systems are effective. All closed systems will fail over time, especially if discovery and innovation are happening outside that system. The question for organizational leaders is whether they think they can create an artificial, closed system that can compete with almost 3 billion people connected to that hive mind called the internet.  The good news is that they do not have to. Encouraging cooperation, along with workplace collaboration, ensures more open knowledge sharing.

collab coop

Military Training and Simulation

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aerospace allianceI’m attending the training and simulation conference, hosted by the Atlantic Aerospace & Defence Industry Alliance in Halifax this week and spent the day getting caught up on what is happening in the Canadian Armed Forces, an organization I left in 1998.

I learned about the current Army training review that is fundamentally changing the existing training system. The military seems to understand the changing times and its challenges. What is interesting is that “learner centric” is a new priority for the Army. What we call mobile & local is what the Army calls “location independent”.

It was noted that legacy software systems will continue to be a barrier to adopting new technologies. This is the same as the other industries I have worked with. There is no money to replace existing expensive existing systems that still work. Even more interesting was an example of open learning resources. The US Army Ranger school has made all of its courses available online with open access for all. This facilitates the distribution of learning resources to all potential students, when and where they need them. The Canadian Armed Forces cannot (or will not) do this. This is a major barrier to access.

There was also a point about using subject matter experts as instructors. I was told that military personnel can get burnt out when employed as instructors at training units. It was questioned by the military if it was worth it to use SME’s in this role, due to the high demands of continuous teaching. Training seems to be a tough business in the military.

The major themes included the need to get agile in personnel development and training, as well as a strong requirement to address the increasing complexity faced by the military. There seems to be a significant impetus to integrate individual with collective training. Currently the two are separate. Military training needs simpler systems, we were told. It was suggested that mass customization for training was becoming an imperative. This means addressing the needs of individual soldiers, sailors and airmen, all within operational constraints. It was obvious that the existing Cold War structures [my time in the military] need to change, especially the Canadian Forces Individual Training and Education System. From the way I see it, the challenge is shifting to a Probe-Sense-Respond perspective on change.

One more thing, I did note that the military still love their massive bulleted lists on Powerpoint slides. Some thing do not change.

Work is already a game

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAI came across a statement saying how it would be a good thing to ‘gamify social learning‘, or words to that effect. I’d like to unpack that short statement. What does ‘gamify’ really mean? It could mean that people can be more engaged while playing games and therefore could learn while playing. Star Trek fans may think of the holodeck as the ultimate game-based learning platform.  I have spent a fair bit of time working with flight simulators and can attest to the value of simulation and emulation when it comes to learning how to fly aircraft. There is also significant research to show how epistemic games can be used for learning.

David Williamson Shaffer’s book, How Computer Games Help Children Learn, is mostly about epistemic games, or “games that are fundamentally about learning to think in innovative ways”. He begins the book by showing the fundamental weaknesses of our Industrial School System, another game:

“Not surprisingly, the epistemology of School is the epistemology of the Industrial Revolution – of creating wealth through mass production of standardized goods. School is a game about thinking like a factory worker. It is a game with an epistemology of right and wrong answers in which Students are supposed to follow instructions, whether they make sense in the moment or not. Truth is whatever the teacher says is the right answer, and actions are justified based on appeal to authority. School is a game in which what it means to know something is to be able to answer specific kinds of questions on specific kinds of tests.”

Shaffer shows the need for teaching how to think and how to be creative, instead of how to memorize, and lays the argument for the use of games in learning. Most of his examples are outside of the classroom because it is obvious that these kinds of epistemic games would disrupt classes and learning management. The games that are discussed are called monument games, or exemplars of good practice. The ideas and concepts presented are critical for anyone who wants to use games in learning, not just playing bingo and using words or figures out of context. The latter does not help learning. That’s a different sort of ‘gamification’.

The major problem with the ‘gamification’ of professional learning is that work is already a game. It is an artificial construct that society has created, and many of us have to play. Adding badges, or other extrinsic motivators, to professional learning only detracts from the real game. It also creates incentives that, when removed, may result in going back to previous behaviours.

So yes, good games, and especially epistemic games, can help people learn. The military has engaged in simulated exercises for millennia. However, adding a game layer to our work does nothing more than take us away from our work. As Dan Pink showed in his book, Drive: rewards, consequences and motivation at work, much of what we have taken for granted about work is just not supported by the research. Extrinsic rewards [gamification] only work for simple physical tasks and increased monetary rewards can actually be detrimental to performance, especially with knowledge work.

The keys to motivation at work are for each person to have a sense of Autonomy, Mastery and Sense of Purpose, as shown in this video. Pink’s work is based on the original research that developed self-determination theory, which states that relatedness — the universal want to interact, be connected to, and experience caring for others — is a primary psychological need, instead of a sense of purpose.

Where the ‘gamification’ movement could focus its efforts is on epistemic games, simulations, and meaningful contextual practice, not badges or making points.

Keep democracy in education

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Modern Education was the Result of a Shotgun Wedding

I liken our dominant educational structure as the offspring of a shotgun wedding between industrialists who needed literate workers to operate their machinery, and progressives who wanted to lift up the common person from poverty and drudgery. It wasn’t an easy marriage, and the children are a tad dysfunctional now. The union was never able to clearly identify the guiding principle of education. One book that has influenced many of my opinions on public education is Kieran Egan’s, The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape our Understanding. Egan says that Western education is based on three incompatible principles, where all three can never be achieved in a single system.

  1. Education as Socialization (age cohorts, class groupings, team sports)
  2. Education as learning about Truth & Reality, based on Plato (varied subjects, academic material, connection to culture)
  3. Education as discovery of our nature, based on Rousseau (personal sense-making, teacher as facilitator)

If you put emphasis on one of these principles, the others get ignored. The industrialists would have preferred education as socialization and the progressives would have leaned toward education as learning about truth. We have seen some attempts, like Waldorf schools, to develop systems that promote education as discovery of our nature, but that does not go well with a standardized curriculum, whether it has a corporatist agenda or a progressive one.

As Egan says:

“Socialization to generally agreed norms and values that we have inherited is no longer straightforwardly viable in modern multicultural societies undergoing rapid technology-driven changes. The Platonic program comes with ideas about reaching a transcendent truth or privileged knowledge that is no longer credible. The conception of individual development we have inherited is based on a belief in some culture-neutral process that is no longer sustainable.”

Shotgun Wedding 2.0

I think we may soon get invited to another shotgun wedding, this time between techno-utopians, with financial speculators as bridesmaids, and libertarians, who feel the state and teachers have screwed-up education. It’s education as socialization, but socialization to the dominant business paradigm. But any problems with the education system are a result of the governance and economic environment in which it resides. It is through democracy, all of us, that we can improve education. Public education does not need a VC-backed Silicon Valley start-up to be saved. It needs more of us to participate in it. It needs democracy.

deweyIf social business is merely a hollow shell without democracy then the same goes for the new social education, currently manifested as xMOOC’s, those backed by large institutions or private interests. Audrey Watters provides a good overview of the flaws around the notion that our new education couple will be any better than the last arranged marriage:

“Hacking Your Education advances the notion that education is a personal (financial) investment rather than a public good. The School in the Cloud project posits that education is a corporate (financial) investment rather than a public good. Why fund public schools when we can put a kiosk in a tech company’s annex? Why fund public schools when you can learn anything online?

The future that TED Talks paint doesn’t want us to think too deeply as we ask these questions. But what happens,when we “hack education” in such a way that our public institutions are dismantled? What happens to that public good? What happens to community? What happens to local economies? What happens to social justice?

As such, the vision for the future of education offered in Stephens’ new book is an individualist and incredibly elitist one. It contains a grossly unexamined exceptionalism, much like the Hole in the Wall which, at the end of the day, worked best for the strongest boys on the streets.

So despite their claims to be liberatory — with the focus on “the learner” and “the child” — this hacking of education by Mitra and Stephens is politically regressive. It is however likely to be good business for the legions of tech entrepreneurs in the audience.” —Audrey Watters

We have not yet been able to effectively integrate democracy and business. Our current education systems, while flawed, still have some democratic oversight. In a networked world, our society needs to be more democratic, not less. Just as some business leaders are beginning to realize the potential of democracy in the enterprise, now is not the time to remove democracy from education. If work is learning, and learning is the work, there is little hope for democratic business if education becomes a business. For our future to remain democratic, both education and business need to be based on its fundamental principles. We are at a crossroads. Let’s cancel this wedding.

France_in_XXI_Century_School

We need to learn how to connect

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From danah boyd’s presentation at ASTD TechKnowledge 2013, on the future of work:

But if you want to prepare people not just for the next job, but for the one after that, you need to help them think through the relationships they have and what they learn from the people around them. Understanding people isn’t just an HR skill for managers. For better or worse, in a risk economy with an increasingly interdependent global workforce, these are skills that everyday people need. Building lifelong learners means instilling curiosity, but it also means helping people recognize how important it is that they continuously surround themselves by people that they can learn from. And what this means is that people need to learn how to connect to new people on a regular basis.

I’ve highlighted the last phrase because this is what social learning is all about; connections. No person has all the knowledge needed to work completely alone in our connected society. Neither does any company. Neither does any government. We are all connected AND dependent on each other.

One of the barriers to connecting people is the nature of the JOB, seen as something to be filled by replaceable workers. Shifting our perspective to treating workers as unique individuals, each of whom have different abilities and connections with others, is a start in thinking with a network perspective. Another barrier is viewing knowledge as something that can be delivered, or transferred. It cannot. Knowledge from a network perspective is about connecting experiences, relationships, and situations.

Work and learning today is all about connecting people. Managers, supervisors, and business support functions should be focused on enabling connections for knowledge workers. Like artists, knowledge workers need inspiration. Too few connections mean few sources of inspiration and little likelihood of serendipity. Innovation is not so much about having ideas as it is about making connections. We know that people with more connections are also more productive. Chance favours both the connected mind and the connected company.

connected-company.001

Increasing connections should be a primary business focus. It should also be the aim of HR and learning & development departments. Connections increase as people cooperate in networks (not focused on any direct benefits for helping others). Diverse networks can emerge from cooperation that is supported by transparency and openness in getting work done. Basically, better external connections also make a worker more valuable internally. Fostering this perspective will be a huge change from the way many organizations work today.

perpetual beta is the new reality

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When I discuss life in perpetual Beta, it is often from the perspective of the individual. My interest in personal knowledge mastery (PKM) started with my own need to stay up to date in my field. It has since become a core part of my professional services. Sometimes it seems it’s the workers who are always spinning around, trying to find or keep work, while organizations move at a glacial pace, or even seemingly backwards.

A recent article in Businessweek shows that companies are facing life in perpetual Beta as well.

“A study by economists Diego Comin and Thomas Philippon showed that in 1980 a U.S. company in the top fifth of its industry had only a 10 percent risk of falling out of that tier in five years; two decades later, that likelihood had risen to 25 percent. In finance, banks are losing power and influence to nimbler hedge funds: In the second half of 2010, in the midst of a sharp economic downturn, the top 10 hedge funds—most of them unknown to the general public—earned more than the world’s six largest banks combined. Multinationals are also more likely to suffer brand disasters that clobber their reputations, revenues, and valuations, as companies from BP (BP) to Nike (NKE) to News Corp. (NWS) can all attest. One study found that the five-year risk of such a disaster for companies owning the most prestigious global brands has risen in the past two decades from 20 percent to 82 percent.”

Disaster may be just around the corner, it seems.

PKM, through seeking, sensing & sharing, can help networked individuals deal with the complexity of the network age. We’re finding that this is not a nice-to-have, optional set of skills but core to business survival. BP, Nike & News Corp. could have handled things better if people were actively and openly sharing their knowledge.

Soft skills, like collaboration and cooperation, are now more important than traditional hard skills. While cooperation is not the same as collaboration, they are complementary. Collaboration requires a common goal, while cooperation is sharing without any specific objectives. Teams, groups and companies traditionally collaborate. Online social networks and communities of practice cooperate. Working cooperatively requires a different mindset than merely collaborating on a defined project. Being cooperative means being open to others outside your group. It also requires the casting-off of business metaphors based on military models (target markets, chain of command, strategic plans, line & staff).

Cooperation, sharing with no direct benefit, is needed at work so that we can continuously develop emergent practices demanded by increased complexity. Collaborating on specific tasks is not enough. We have to be prepared for perpetual Beta. What worked yesterday may not work today. No one has the definitive answer any more but we can use the intelligence of our networks to make sense together and see how we can influence desired results.

Work in networks requires different skills than in directed hierarchies. Cooperation is a foundational behaviour for effectively working in networks, and it’s in networks where most of us will be working. Cooperation presumes the freedom of individuals to join and participate so that people in the network cannot be told what to do, only influenced. If they don’t like you, they won’t connect. In a hierarchy you only have to please your boss. In a network you have to be seen as having some value, though not the same value, by many others.

As we transition from a market to a network economy, complexity will increase due to our hyper-connectedness. Managing in complex adaptive systems means influencing possibilities rather than striving for predictability (good or best practices). No one has the definitive answer any more but we can use the intelligence of our networks to make sense together and see how we can influence desired results. This is life in perpetual Beta. Get used to it. Preparing for this will require time, social learning, and management support.

Find out more about the skills needed for PKMastery.

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The future is connected, messy, loose and open

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Why is self-directed learning and professional development so important today? Rawn Shah, commenting on one of my presentations, said that knowledge is evolving faster than can be codified in formal systems and is depreciating in value over time. This pretty well sums up the situation.

Think about the fact that knowledge is evolving faster than can be codified in formal systems … and what does that mean for all of our formal systems? Schools, government, and even religion are no longer stable bastions of knowledge. The logarithmic curve of knowledge, like our population, has hit us like the proverbial hockey stick it portrays.

World_population_growth_(lin-log_scale)

 Image by Waldir

One of the ways to deal with this knowledge explosion is to use what we have, our humanity. We have developed as social animals and our brains are wired to deal with social relationships. By combining technology with our brainpower, we can figure things out. We are naturally creative and curious. We just have to build systems that nurture our inherent abilities. Schools do not do that. Most workplaces do not. Our economy does not. Most of our governance systems do not. The answers to our problems are within us, collectively. We have more creativity (for good and bad) than any other creature. We need to harness it.

This is what social learning is all about. Not just solving problems, but creating new ways of working. There are amazing technological inventions and discoveries every day, yet we and our media focus too often on our problems. On the edges of society people are experimenting with new ways of working and living together. What is most amazing is that now we can learn about these things with a simple search or click. Two billion people connected to each other is absolutely amazing, yet many of us cannot see the forest for the trees.

Here are just a few examples:

Learn about almost anything, with excellent commentary, from A Man with a PhD

Find out about the new economy from Shareable and Fast Co-exist

Follow what is happening in learning and education with Stephen Downes and his extensive daily newsletter

The Internet is a cornucopia of people sharing what they know. All one needs is the interest and a few skills to filter this. Don’t have the skills? Ask somebody. There are many people willing to help.

It seems so obvious to me, but most organizations are trying to deal with this complexity in simplistic ways. Humans have the ability to deal with some very complex things, yet too often our cultural and organizational barriers block us from using our innate abilities The future is connected, messy, loose, and open. Anything else will be sub-optimal.

The post-job economy

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Learning may be the work in the network age, but that does not mean that learning will get you the work. Inge De Waard discusses this in MOOCs change education, but jobs decline in a knowledge era:

The simple truth is that not all of us get jobs even when graduating from universities, and if MOOCs add to that particular degree market (universities), we are stuck, for indeed if even the ones that graduate now are not always finding jobs, with the declining job market in mind, most of the new wave of graduates will get stuck as well. A knowledge era is a fine thing, it sounds great … for a minority of people. So how do we (re)find a balance between jobs and people having them?

I’ve highlighted Inge’s question because other people are asking similar ones. Much of my professional focus is about learning at work, and improving how people collaborate, cooperate and innovate in internet time. I call it sense-making for the connected workplace. Helping people adapt to this type of workplace is a big challenge. An even bigger challenge, for which I do not have any simple answers, is: How do people adapt to a post-job society?

Many MOOC’s are based on an educational model that has a curriculum from a body of knowledge that, so the logic goes, when mastered will prepare someone for meaningful work. Improving one’s education to get a job is often a primary motivator for participation. It’s the way the system has worked for decades. The “job” was the way we redistributed wealth, making capitalists pay for the means of production and in return creating a middle class that could pay for mass produced goods. That period is almost over. America has hit peak jobs TechCrunch informs us. The New York Times calls it  the rise of the permanent temp economy. The recession, combined with technology, is killing middle class jobs, reports the Associated Press.

We will not find a rebalance between jobs and people having them.

We have connected the world so that data and information can flow in the  blink of an eye. There are fewer information asymmetries, as companies like Amazon bust down one industry after another. One recent example is a local startup that is reducing information asymmetry in the used car business. This interconnectedness and increasing computational power will continue to automate work and outsource any job that can be standardized. New businesses are employing fewer employees, while manufacturing is moving to an increased use of robots.

One of my clients is an educational institution and I was heartened to learn that they are moving away from job preparation to a focus on entrepreneurship. They see the numbers. Their graduates are not getting jobs. Creating our own work will be the only option for many of us.

Ross Dawson provides some good advice on what we can do to prepare for a post-job economy.

As I often say, in a connected world, unless your skills are world-class, you are a commodity.

However there are three domains in which individuals and organizations can transcend commoditization and push their value creation to the other end of the spectrum, where they can command their price and choose their work.
The three domains are:

    • EXPERTISE …
    • RELATIONSHIPS …
    • INNOVATION …

The future is stark. There will be a large and increasing divide between those who have one or more of these core strengths, and those who do not and whose livelihoods are on an ongoing path of commoditization.

labour and talent

 

Image Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Motor_Manufacturing.jpg

Scaffolding and capability building

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Jane Hart’s recent post on changing the role of L&D (learning & development) explains how training departments need to move beyond packaging content and toward scaffolding and capability building.

What I like about this matrix is that it makes it easier to describe my professional services in the organizational learning area. I have highlighted my areas of focus in red. The rest is not really my business, as there are plenty of companies that do that. I used to say I did ABC Learning [Anything But Courses]. Jane’s graphic makes it  much more clear, and it’s what our new Connected Worker site is all about.
scaffolding