Learning

Learning

It starts with capturing knowledge

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In the Altimeter Group’s Report on Enterprise Social Networks, four areas of business value were identified:

  1. Encourage Sharing
  2. Capture Knowledge
  3. Enable Action
  4. Empower People

I would suggest an order of difficulty and business value for these four components.

Capturing knowledge is the foundation, and drives value up the chain, enabling sharing of  knowledge and the ability to take action on that knowledge. All three can then drive empowered people (if the organizational structure allows this, and if it doesn’t, consider the resulting frustration).

As Dave Gray wrote in The Connected Company, capturing tacit knowledge is tough:

“The learning challenge for the company comes from the dynamic relationship between the two forms of knowledge. Tacit knowledge is where the action is, and in most cases, it’s the people with the tacit knowledge that deliver the results. But the only way tacit knowledge can be broadly shared is by translating it into explicit knowledge — a very difficult task that very few companies have mastered.”

If capturing knowledge, or making tacit knowledge more explicit, is the core challenge for social businesses, what should we do?

For the organization: Make it easy to share

For teams and groups: Narrate your Work

For individuals: Practice personal knowledge mastery

For learning & development (training) professionals:

  • Be a lurker or a passive participant in relevant work-related communities (could be the lunch room) and LISTEN to what is being said.
  • Communicate what you observe to people around you, solicit their feedback and engage in meaningful conversations.
  • Continuously collect feedback from the workplace, not just after courses.
  • Make it easy to share information by simplifying & synthesizing issues that are important and relevant to fellow workers.

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from training to performance to social

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This past year I conducted an online workshop called “from training, to performance to social“. In November I will be running one on moving from training to performance support, and this will be followed by a workshop on social learning for business.

I have tried to put together the main themes in a slide presentation that covers some of my experience as well as recommendations I have implemented with my clients. My experience is that it is difficult to move a traditional training organization directly to a social learning focus and it is easier to start with performance consulting and then expand to social and collaborative learning. If you are interested in discussing these ideas, then join one of the workshops or contact me to deliver an online or onsite session with your organization.

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  • HJ: Harold Jarche
  • JH: Jane Hart
  • CJ: Charles Jennings

Don’t worry, nobody can steal your knowledge

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Why do I share my knowledge? Well, actually, I don’t. I could not share my knowledge with you, if I wanted. There is no such thing as knowledge transfer. Data and information can be transferred, but not knowledge.

So what is the idea behind behind personal knowledge mastery and the Seek>Sense>Share framework if knowledge cannot be shared in the first place? For me, PKM is a set of practices I can use to better articulate my knowledge. Seeking information from diverse sources gives me a better chance of seeing a fuller picture of our complex environment. Taking time to put my thoughts into words forces me to reflect and try to make some sense of the divergent voices coming from all over. Sharing the results of this sense-making gives back to the networks from which I drew my information and also provides more feedback loops from a variety of perspectives. It enhances serendipity.

Sharing information and viewing it through our individual filters is the best that we can hope for in terms of knowledge transfer. But not sharing would be much worse. As Luis Suarez writes on a very related post:

To me, since we are all embarked on a lifetime learning experience of what we know, what’s around us, who we are, what we do and why we do it, who we connect with, etc. etc. knowledge sharing is innate to our human nature of wanting to connect and collaborate with others. We, human beings, are social beings, and as such have been bound to share what we know with others, so that our learning curve never becomes flat. On the contrary.

While knowledge cannot really be shared,  our knowledge-making experiences can. Perhaps that is why we love stories. They are a glimpse into others’ knowledge, more nuanced than any other communication medium. Sharing is essential for our own sense-making. So share as much as possible. Nobody can steal your knowledge anyway. But we will all lose, if we don’t share it.
knowledge stealing

A quick case for social technologies

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I have been reviewing a number of resources I have collected on social media, social learning and return on investment. The bottom line seems very clear to me. Social technologies remove artificial organizational boundaries and let knowledge be shared more easily. I create slide presentations so that I have something ready in case I need to quickly review a subject, such as an impromptu client brief. I put this one together as an aid that might be helpful in presenting a few aspects of the positive impact of social technologies in the workplace.

#itashare

Validation and feedback

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Here is a new approach to evaluation, by Nick Shackleton-Jones:

After the event, however, the system automatically prompts the chosen peer group to reassess those same behaviours at intervals of say one, three and six months. At the end of this period a ‘change score’ is calculated: an average value representing the amount of observed behavioural change that has taken place. Knowing that they are living up to the expectations of their peers, people make an effort to change. By coupling a meaningful challenge to the event, learners will endeavour to practise what they have learned – and we can skip directly to robust ‘level 3’ results.

Which is based on an old military approach, Training Validation, as exemplified by the Canadian Army:

On-job Performance
On-job performance is an evaluation measure that aims to determine if the trainee has been able to transfer the knowledge, skills or attitude learned in the training environment to the real world of the job. Within the ASAT, on-job performance is an element of validation conducted after at least three months following the training event. There are many different approaches to conducting this form of evaluation. Trainees, superiors and peers can be queried both through written questionnaires and personal interviews, and the results can lead to measurement of the effectiveness of the course/training activity. The validation of individual training is the responsibility of Commander LFDTS.

Training Efficiency
Examination of trainee reaction, the learning process and the transfer of learning to the job against the anticipated results and resources expended is the final method of determining efficiency. This analysis is a strategic responsibility, and the results are used to modify the conduct of future courses/training.

These are good systems if training was the correct solution in the first place, but note that formal instruction only accounts for 5% of workplace learning. As I wrote in a previous post, these types of methods work very well when you know what you are trying to achieve and understand the systems you are operating in. They work well when you have established best or good practices to base the training on. But what happens in complex environments, when ”the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance”? This is the situation many workers find themselves in today.

Feedback and validation have to be part of our daily work, not just for training events. This is where PKM practices can help on a personal level, work narration for teams, and communities of practice for disciplines. Once again, work is learning and learning is the work.

Networked sharing

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Why diversity is essential for innovation, and ultimately survival, is shown in this wide-ranging article on How Culture Drove Human Evolution:

You start out with two genetically well-intermixed peoples. Tasmania’s actually connected to mainland Australia so it’s just a peninsula. Then about 10,000 years ago, the environment changes, it gets warmer and the Bass Strait floods, so this cuts off Tasmania from the rest of Australia, and it’s at that point that they begin to have this technological downturn. You can show that this is the kind of thing you’d expect if societies are like brains in the sense that they store information as a group and that when someone learns, they’re learning from the most successful member, and that information is being passed from different communities, and the larger the population, the more different minds you have working on the problem.

If your number of minds working on the problem gets small enough, you can actually begin to lose information. There’s a steady state level of information that depends on the size of your population and the interconnectedness. It also depends on the innovativeness of your individuals, but that has a relatively small effect compared to the effect of being well interconnected and having a large population.

It’s not about innovative individuals so much as the ability of the network (society, organization, company) to stay connected to its collective knowledge.  This is an important factor to consider in knowledge-intensive organizations. How quickly would your lose collective knowledge if people do not share their knowledge? Are your knowledge networks large enough to ensure that collective knowledge does not get lost? Is your organization more like an isolated island or part of a connected and diverse continent?

 

An artistic mindset

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My colleague Jane Hart writes that, “supporting social collaboration is underpinned not only by new technologies but by a new mindset“.

Perpetual Beta is my attitude toward learning and work – I’ll never get to the final release and my learning will never stabilise. I’ve realized that clients and colleagues with a similar attitude are much easier to work with than those who believe that we will reach some future point where everything stabilizes and we don’t need to learn or do anything else. I think this point is called death. Perpetual Beta is pretty well an artist’s perspective, always seeking a new creative endeavour and not just producing the same work over and over. As industrial and even some knowledge work gets automated and outsourced, adapting to an economic life in perpetual Beta may soon become the norm.

With 2 billion people connected by the Internet, we are entering a post-industrial Network Era. Effective knowledge networks are composed of unique individuals working on common challenges, together for a discrete period of time before the network shifts its focus again. We are moving from a “one size fits all” attitude on work and learning to an “everyone is unique” perspective. The network enables infinite combinations between unique nodes. For example, better connections enabled a high school student to create a better cancer diagnostic tool. We will see many more of these connected discoveries in the network era. Also, in a networked world, where everyone is unique, there is little need for generic work processes (jobs, roles, occupations) and no need for standard curricula. Institutions, and mindsets, will collapse.

The real challenge to be productive in this new networked workplace will be an attitude shift. In the near future, organizations may no longer be concerned if you work a full shift or are spending time at your work space. Compensation may become focused not just on results but creative solutions. The core work attitude may be creativity, as in “what have you done that’s different?” Artists think about the impossible, as Hugh Macleod shows:

About one hundred years ago we moved from morality as our core behaviour, to responsibility, as workers left their agrarian communities, where your word was your bond, and became reliable factory workers instead. Are we now shifting from responsibility to creativity? If we are, then most of our organizational tools and measurements about productivity may be obsolete, as well as our mindsets about work and learning. Perhaps, metaphorically speaking, the MFA will become the new MBA.

Trust is an emergent property of effective networks

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It seems that markets, our dominant form of economic transactions, are not really designed to optimize trust. As Charles Green states:

The reason is simple: trust is not a market transaction, it’s a human transaction. People don’t work by supply and demand, they work by karmic reciprocity. In markets, if I trust you, I’m a sucker and you take advantage of me. In relationships, if I trust you, you trust me, and we get along. We live up or down to others expectations of us.

We currently organize around Tribal models, plus Institutions, plus Markets. In the 21st century, Networks are becoming the next dominant organizing model, as explained by David Ronfeldt in this diagram.

As the Network organizational model comes to dominance, I think we will see a return to trust as a lubricant of social and economic exchanges. Trust is an emergent property of effective networks.

If trust is a sign of healthy networks then, as Charles Green says, we are teaching the wrong things at school and at work.

Our public education and culture is loaded with the free-market versions of trust. We teach, “If you’re not careful they will screw you.” We passcode-protect everything. We are taught to suspect the worst of everyone, be wary of every open bottle of soda, watch out for ingredients on any bottle.

Then in business school, we are taught that if customers don’t trust you, you need to convince them you are trustworthy – partly by insisting on our trustworthiness.  You can’t protest enough for that to work: in fact, guess the Two Most Trust-Destroying Words You Can Say.

I have noted that there is significant difference between cooperation and collaboration, with the former often overlooked in the workplace. Collaboration works well when the rules (like markets) are clear, and we know who we are working with (suppliers, partners, customers). However, in networks, someone may be our supplier one day and our customer the next. Cooperation is a better behavioural norm because it strengthens the entire network, not just an individual node. Cooperation is also a major factor in personal knowledge management, for we each need to share and trust, as our part of the social business (learning) contract.

In the network era, trust will become much more important, and it is not something that, once lost, we may be able to regain in a world where the network remembers everything, for a very long time. It truly is becoming a global village, for better and for worse. Trust should be taught, discussed, promoted, and practised, in schools and in business.

Subverting management and education, one project at a time

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I have been described as “a keen subversive of the last century’s management and education models”, a description I like. It’s a difficult business model though. That’s why I joined with my colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance in 2009. I finally had a close professional group to discuss nascent ideas. Our latest work is on the coherent organization.

We work together on projects, public speaking, workshops, and writing. I am starting to think that our customers and our clients are diverging. The people who could really use our help are managers and individual knowledge workers. For example, we have had incredibly positive feedback from individuals attending our workshops at the Social Learning Centre. We intend to continue to grow this community.

However, organizational budgets are often controlled by people who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Requests for Proposals are usually aligned to a certain solution type. For instance, asking for advice on selecting the appropriate LMS does not ask the deeper question of why you need an LMS in the first place. Requesting help to add informal learning learning to formal instruction does not look at whether the training courses are actually useful to begin with. As my colleague Charles Jennings says, knowing is not doing.

The thinking that hard-wires ‘knowing’ to ‘learning’ has set our efforts to build high-performing organisations back many years.

Learning and knowing sometimes coincide, but they are different beasts.

There is still a huge focus on ‘knowing’ in organisational learning. We build formal classroom courses and eLearning programmes that consist of pre-tests and post-tests. We then assume that if we gain a higher score after some formal learning process (almost invariably assessed through a test/examination/certification based on knowledge recall) than we did before, then learning has occurred.

Most of us know deep down that this is bunk.

Passing knowledge tests immediately following a course tells us little about real learning. It may tell us something about short-term memory recall, but real learning can only be determined by observable long-term changes in behaviour.

I often feel like a doctor in the days before diagnostics. The preferred solutions were the prettiest or the most expensive (and least effective). In this kind of system, it took a long time for doctors to start washing their hands or give up on practices like blood-letting. I was told by someone at a large multinational company that it is easier to hire a brand-name consulting firm to deliver what many in the company know they do not need, than to engage a much cheaper and more effective group like the Internet Time Alliance to try a novel approach. In many ways, it seems that the brands have successfully mounted the bandwagon. What they lack in skills and experience, they make up in marketing.

But every once in a while we meet a client who is open to innovative ideas, or at least trying a few probes in the spirit of addressing complexity. These clients have self-confidence and a sense of adventure. They are not afraid of the concept of failure. If something is guaranteed to be a success, it should not require much attention from management anyway.

We are not just an alliance amongst ourselves but we are building a wider network of individuals and organizations who know that we should create better work environments for society in the network era. We have learned that complex problems require different thinking and innovative solutions. There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution. We know that each organization’s situation is not only different, it is continually changing. We are not your average consultancy. But who would want one in times of great change anyway?

Supporting workplace learning

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It takes much more than courses delivered through a learning management system to support workplace learning in the network era.

The basic building block, in my experience, is personal knowledge management. People who can seek new information, make sense of it, and share it with their colleagues, will be an asset to any work team. However, they need access to their learning networks while at work, and this is often a challenge. Reduce these barriers, and support PKM practices, and the organization will benefit.

Performance support tools can be developed by observing how work gets done and then creating ways to make it easier, or simpler, or safer. Good performance support enables workers to focus on the important things.

Communities of practice provide the bridge between new ideas and the workplace status quo, ensuring innovation.

Professional networks outside our workplaces keep us connected to new ideas and diverse opinions, which we may not come across, even in large organizations.

I haven’t mentioned knowledge management in general, because I think it underlies all of these components. As Patti Anklam explains:

In this last, the role of the corporation in supporting KM then becomes facilitating personal content management, providing methods (and training) to support information processing, and providing a rich and integrated infrastructure for employees to use the personal content management and the social tools that make sense for each them, their teams, and their communities.