Learning

Learning

subject matter networks

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“I think the singular SME is an antiquated a notion as the solitary game player & our development pipelines need to change.” writes Mark Oehlert, on Twitter. Mark coined the term, subject matter networks, as a change from the industrial concept of subject matter expert, or SME, a term I first heard in the military in the mid-1970’s. But the world has changed and most notably during the past decade.

Image: Clark Quinn

We have become connected

With all of these connections, complexity ensues. Markets in Asia can have an impact on a local grocer. The release of not-so-secret diplomatic cables influence events like the Arab Spring.

In a complex world the optimal social form is the multi-organizational network and emergent practices must be continuously developed through cooperation. In such an environment, the lone expert is at a disadvantage. He or she cannot learn and adapt as fast as a cooperative network.

So the critical skills for people formerly known as SME’s are how to become contributing members of subject matter networks. Part of this is in narrating one’s work and learning. I have called personal knowledge mastery (PKM) – our part of the social learning contract. One cannot be effective in professional networks without contributing. Subject matter networks are made up of many contributors. A key skill is in weaving the best networks together.

We collectively realized before forming the Internet Time Alliance that we were much less effective on our own than working cooperatively. Based on the feedback and interest from many people over the  past year, I think we will see more cooperative alliances created. Part of our advantage is the ability to bring many subject matter networks together.

Distributed research needs collaborative researchers

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“What Sanofi is doing is reducing its own internal research capacity,” he said. “The days when we locked all of our scientists up in a building and put them on a nice tree-lined campus are done. We will do less of our own research. We’re not going to get out of research. We believe we do certain things well in research but we want to work with more outside companies, startup biotechs, with universities.”

Chris Viehbacher, CEO of pharmaceutical company Sanofi recently stated that ” …  big companies, and not just Big Pharma, big companies I believe, are not any good at doing innovation.” It seems Sanofi is moving to a more networked way of doing business. But to be more innovative, companies must first become open and transparent.

That’s the challenge of the networked organization. Trust only emerges if knowledge is shared and diverse points of view are accepted. People who have been working in silos for decades may not immediately embrace a more diverse and complex networked way of doing business.

Part of working smarter is connecting the work being done with the identification of opportunities for future work. Innovative ideas often come from loosely knit external learning networks. These can later get developed in slightly tighter communities of communities of practice. But in order to capitalize on novel ideas, professionals have to be continuously sharing knowledge in their communities and testing new opinions in more dynamic external networks.

As research becomes more networked, researchers will need to be more collaborative. Social learning, or learning from and with their (distributed) peers, will become more important. New practices will emerge from these new relationships and more innovative tools & processes will have to support this complex work. The role of connecting and communicating what is happening in various widespread groups will become critical. This is the job of a CCO, or some similar role: to manage workforce collaboration.

The three principles of net work remain, in my opinion:

  1. Transparency
  2. Narration of Work
  3. Distribution of Power
Getting a workforce, and many organizations, to embrace and internalize these principles will take time and managed effort. It will require normalizing the act of working across boundaries and switching the default mode to sharing information. In addition, the organization will have to tolerate mistakes and encourage reflection. This could be a major culture shift. Any company that is going to open its work processes to a networked model must make a significant effort to support its people in integrating their learning and work because you simply cannot train people to be social.

Scientific management yields Scientific schooling

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Work is learning, and learning is the work – that’s what’s currently on this site’s masthead.

You could add the tagline – life is learning, and learning is life – to Seth Godin’s comprehensive piece on the state of public schooling, Stop Stealing Dreams.

This 30,000 word article echoes many of the sentiments of Paulo Freire, Ivan Illich, John Taylor Gatto and Ken Robinson in calling for systemic educational reform.

As is becoming obvious, the network era is here, and Godin reinforces many of the ideas found in Connectivism:

22. The connection revolution is upon us

It sells the moment short to call this the Internet revolution. In fact, the era that marks the end of the industrial age and the beginning of something new is ultimately about connection.

The industrial revolution wasn’t about inventing manufacturing, it was about amplifying it to the point where it changed everything. And the connection revolution doesn’t invent connection, of course, but it amplifies it to become the dominant force in our economy.

Connecting people to one another.

Connecting seekers to data.

Connecting businesses to each other.

Connecting tribes of similarly minded individuals into larger, more effective organizations.

Connecting machines to each other and creating value as a result.

In the connection revolution, value is not created by increasing the productivity of those manufacturing a good or a service. Value is created by connecting buyers to sellers, producers to consumers, and the passionate to each other.

This meta-level of value creation is hard to embrace if you’re used to measuring sales per square foot or units produced per hour. In fact, though, connection leads to an extraordinary boost in productivity, efficiency, and impact.

In the connected world, reputation is worth more than test scores. Access to data means that data isn’t the valuable part; the processing is what matters. Most of all, the connected world rewards those with an uncontrollable itch to make and lead and matter.

In the pre-connected world, information was scarce, and hoarding it was smart. Information needed to be processed in isolation, by individuals. After school, you were on your own.

In the connected world, all of that scarcity is replaced by abundance—an abundance of information, networks, and interactions.

An article this long may not be read by most people, especially those who need to read it. However, there is a lot here to foster further discussion and it is presented in clear language. This article, or manifesto, can and should be used to call for a new approach to public education, because making the current ineffective system merely more efficient would be a waste and a shame.

A new economy needs a new approach to education.

96. Big companies no longer create jobs

Apple just built a massive data center in Malden, North Carolina. That sort of plant development would have brought a thousand or five thousand jobs to a town just thirty years ago. The total employment at the data center? Fifty.

Big companies are no longer the engines of job creation. Not the good jobs, anyway.

What the data center does, though, is create the opportunity for a thousand or ten thousand individuals to invent new jobs, new movements, and new technologies as a result of the tools and technology that can be built on top of it.

There is a race to build a plug-and-play infrastructure. Companies like Amazon and Apple and others are laying the groundwork for a generation of job creation—but not exclusively by big companies. They create an environment where people like you can create jobs instead.

Pick yourself.

Every section in this article can be the subject of its own debate and discussion. Each one made sense to me, and while I may not be an education expert, I have spent a good part of the last two decades studying and practising at the edges of the field. Godin concludes with a very simple piece of advice to anyone who wants to change the way things are.

132. What we teach

When we teach a child to make good decisions, we benefit from a lifetime of good decisions.

When we teach a child to love to learn, the amount of learning will become limitless.

When we teach a child to deal with a changing world, she will never become obsolete.

When we are brave enough to teach a child to question authority, even ours, we insulate ourselves from those who would use their authority to work against each of us.

And when we give students the desire to make things, even choices, we create a world filled with makers.

“The best way to complain is to make things”

artisans.jpg

“Problems tend to be interdisciplinary”

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“If problems are one focal point for collaboration, tools can be another. An example: systems needed to deal with the gigantic data sets generated in finance, astronomy and oceanography. Such tools naturally bring together computer scientists and the statisticians, economists and scientists who might use the data. Goldin points to “crowdsourcing” as a second example of a cross-disciplinary tool, complexity science as a third and (optimistically, I feel) practical ethics as a fourth.” ~ Tim Harford

[emphasis added]

Workforce collaboration in the network era

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Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, and networks subvert standardization.

In the industrial era we saw the rise of specialized departments and specialized jobs. Any job could be generically designed and then filled by the most suitable applicant. People became interchangeable pieces for the mechanistic model of work. As jobs are to departments, roles are to networks. Eric Mcluhan states that in the new [network] era; “jobs disappear under electric conditions and they are replaced by roles. Roles mean audiences and participation.”

Roles are based on relationships. Without relationships, there are no roles. In the 21st century workplace, roles are emergent properties of value networks, not pre-defined by HR.

All of the support functions that grew during the late 20th century are like the blind monks examining the elephant in the room – the network. Everyone is struggling to understand the network era, but no one is budging from their observation position. And so they remain blind.

One of the biggest challenges I see on a regular basis is getting people to think in terms of networks, then in terms of relationships. From a learning perspective, this is what connectivism is about: knowledge exists within systems which are accessed through people participating in activities. It is by doing our work that we co-create our roles in our networks. Roles emerge from the activities involved in working with others toward some common purpose. This is social. Social media are merely a conduit for collaboration.

Social learning is an enabler. In the network era, systemic changes are sensed almost immediately so that organizational reaction times and feedback loops have to be faster. One obstacle to this is that we are more inclined to ask for advice only from those we trust, but trust takes time to nurture. By sharing experiences (learning socially), trust emerges. A trusting workplace is a learning workplace and one that can adapt faster to change.

A workplace that encourages social learning can more easily become a social business. Social business emerges from social learning that itself emerges from collaborative work. All of this happens within networks. Existing departments need to become contributing nodes in their respective networks or face obsolescence. As workers become more collaborative and networked, they will bypass non-contributing nodes. If a department is not part of the networked workflow, or tries to block it, it is part of the problem.

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it – Gilmore’s Law

Those specialized departments of the 20th century need to engage in social learning, by modelling behaviour and continuously developing next practices to adapt to changing conditions. This is the challenge to remain relevant in the 21st century workplace. Learn or die.

This isn’t the Information Age, it’s the Learning Age; and the quicker people get their heads around that, the better – Prof Stephen Heppell

Look at how F.W. Taylor in Principles of Scientific Management (1911), described the role of management for the industrial era:

It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.

In the network era, social learning must be supported, roles emerge from networks, work has more variety and less standardization, and businesses must be social in order to deal with increasing complexity. I have suggested something more like this:

It is only through innovative and contextual methods, the self-selection of the most appropriate tools and work conditions and willing cooperation that more productive work can be assured. The duty of being transparent in our work and sharing our knowledge rests with all workers.

It boils down to the fact that in the network era, value is derived from workforce collaboration, where you are either contributing to the network, or you are no longer required.

Strategic Doing is designed for open, loosely coupled networks

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Strategic Doing

“In Strategic Doing, metrics play a different role. We use metrics to facilitate learning. Whereas strategic planning is a deductive process of thought and action, Strategic Doing using inductive reasoning. We learn as we do. Metrics provide a convenient tool to accelerate our learning. With them, we figure out what works. Without them, we would be lost. Accountability in Strategic Doing comes through transparency and the mutual interdependence embedded in the relationships of the network. Forget command and control. It does not work in open networks. Mutual trust becomes the fuel for economic transformation. ” —Ed Morrison

Why is learning and the sharing of information so important?

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The Globe & Mail: The diplomacy of knowledge

“Learning together is an important part of living together. While many of our greatest challenges arise through the interplay of complex problems, so, too, do our greatest advances often occur at the intersections between disciplines. Who knows what a greater understanding of quantum physics will be able to tell us about genetics, or what a better grasp of ecology can teach us about global networks?” ~ David Johnston, Governor-General of Canada.

"you simply can’t train people to be social!"

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Over the past year I have been working on change initiatives to improve collaboration and knowledge-sharing with two large companies, one of them a multinational. In each case, implementation has boiled down to two components: individual skills & organizational support. Effective organizational collaboration comes about when workers regularly narrate their work within a structure that encourages transparency and shares power & decision-making. I have also learned that changing work routines can be a messy process that requires significant time, much of it dedicated to modelling behaviours. 

My Internet Time Alliance colleague, Jane Hart, notes, ” … as for the new social and collaboration skills that workers require, well you simply can’t train people to be social! What was required was getting down and dirty and helping people understand what it actually meant to work collaboratively in the new social workplace, and the value that this would bring to them.”

Jane refers to the collaboration pyramid by Oscar Berg, an excellent model to show what needs to be addressed to become a social business.

The low visibility activities link directly to personal knowledge mastery (PKM) skills, based on the process of Seeking information & knowledge; making Sense of it; and Sharing higher value information with others. These individual activities are not a single skill-set that can be trained in a classroom. They have to be internalized and perceived as valuable to each person in order to achieve the discipline to use them regularly. Every person’s PKM processes will differ. As Jane notes, one size doesn’t fit all.

It is a difficult path to get acceptance that each worker is responsible for his or her own learning and additionally must be a contributing member of a network. PKM is individuals retaking control of learning, and making it transparent. It takes time, but it also requires a receptive environment.

Creating a supportive social environment is management’s responsibility. These activities are shown on the upper part of the pyramid, above the water line. Some specific examples of activities I have been involved in over the past year include:

  • Support for small innovation teams to initiate and practice the new collaboration and knowledge-sharing skills.
  • Daily routines of posting observations and sharing with team members.
  • Weekly “virtual coffee” to catch up and help build social bonds.
  • Adding activity-stream technologies to productivity tool suites.
  • Constant analysis of activity data.
  • Providing dedicated time for reflection [this is a tough one to get management buy-in].
  • Regular mediated events like “Yam-Jams” on a select theme.
  • Creation of internal communications material to make social learning and social business more understandable.
  • Professional development activities using the same social media as will be used to work.
  • Face to face social activities.
  • Many conversations [usually Skype or telephone] and much one-on-one support as people work at becoming more social.
  • Social & Value network analyses to visualize network thinking.

My experience is that changing to more collaborative, networked ways of work requires coordinated change activities from both the top and the bottom. It has to be a two-pronged approach and it will take some time and effort.

Note: Oscar Berg has made a higher resolution image available on Flickr with a CC-BY license: The Collaboration Pyramid

Getting to Social

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You are engaging with social media for marketing and customer support. You have also put in place a social intranet, with activity streams for sharing information, collaboration tools for work teams and document management systems that include social tags and easy sharing. Now the hard work begins. However, this usually occurs just after the software vendors have provided the initial training and you are now on your own as an organization. You’re ready to be a social business; everyone is connected but few know what to do.

Social Media are New Languages

Social media can have a strong influence on the individual, very much in a McLuhanesque tetrad of media effects way. Those who come to social media for the first time are like adults learning a new language. They cannot start with the same advanced mental models and metaphors they may have in a primary language. Furthermore, once they get to an advanced level in this new language, its idioms, metaphors and culture may have changed how they think in that language. This is the real change process enabled by social business; people will start thinking differently.

Social media change the way we communicate. Write a blog for a year or more and your writing will change. Use Twitter for some time and get a sense of being connected to many people and understanding them on a different level. Patterns emerge over time. Even the ubiquitous Facebook changes how we react to being apart from friends. Social media change the way we think.

Each time we adopt a new social medium we start at the bottom, or at the single node level. We have to make connections with what will become our network, either by connecting to existing relationships or doing something that helps to create new relationships, like creating content for sharing. Starting over, in each medium, can be daunting, especially for someone in a position of authority who is concerned about image or influence.

But we need to actually use social media to understand what it’s like to be a node in a social network. There is little in the industrial workplace or public school system to prepare us for this. Therefore we won’t even know what we’re talking about until we learn the new language of social media and online networks, and the only way to learn a new language is through practice.

The Transparent Workplace

trust-emerges

While people may say it’s not about the technology, that’s where a large share of the budget goes in any major change initiative. The bigger change to manage is getting people to work transparently. Transparency is a necessity for cooperation and collaboration in networks. 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.

In this newly transparent workplace, there is no place to hide, or as Mark Britz wrote, “Social Media spreads your culture quickly … for better or worse.” This change alone can be enough to cause massive organizational upheaval. It must be addressed by modelling good network era behaviours. Working smarter is not just about using technologies but changing our routines and procedures. With greater transparency, information now flows horizontally as well as vertically. New patterns and dynamics emerge from interconnected people and interlinked information flows, and these will bypass established structures and services.

With the democratization of information, user-generated content is ubiquitous. Search engines give each worker more information and knowledge than any CEO had 10 years ago. Pervasive connectivity changes organizational power structures, though the full effects of this take time to be visible. From this transparent environment new leaders and experts will emerge.  It will take different leadership, or leadership for networks, to support collaboration and social learning in the workplace.

Agile organizations need people who can work in concert on solving problems. People need to change how they work and all the knowledge and courses won’t help. Management must ask – “How can we help you work in this new transparent environment?” – and take action, not once, but continuously.

Setting the Example

In social networks we often learn from each other; modelling behaviours, telling stories, and sharing what we know. While not highly efficient, this can be very effective learning. There is a need to model the new behaviours of being transparent and narrating one’s work. There is also a need to share power, for how long will workers collaborate and share if they cannot take action with this new knowledge? Modelling the new behaviours will take time and trust.

Since all these social technologies cannot model the new work behaviours themselves, who will? The organization will, by fostering communities of practice. These can be bridges between work teams and open social networks, with narration of work an enabler of knowledge-sharing. One determinant of effective professional communities is whether they actually change practices. Only then will we know if the social business initiative has been successful.

Organizations adopting social business need to find people who can model the behaviours, not just talk about them. They should identify people who already narrate their work, share transparently and create user-generated content. Organizations should get advice from people who share power and do most of their work in networks. If there is nobody to model network era behaviours in the organization, how will people learn? From Facebook?

Blind Leading the Blind by Pieter Bruegel