Learning

Learning

Notes from 2006

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2006

What good are notes if you don’t review them from time to time? I reviewed my notes from 2004 as well as notes from 2005 last January, so now it’s time to review my half-baked ideas from 2006.

Non scholae sed vitae discimus (We learn, not for school, but for life – Seneca, Epistulae)

Curriculum is a solution to a problem we created, wrote Brian Alger, a quote that still sticks with me.

I started thinking about life in perpetual Beta – Perpetual beta is my attitude toward learning – I’ll never get to the final release and my learning will never stabilise. I’ve also realised that clients with a similar attitude are much easier to work with than those who believe that we will reach some future point where everything stabilises and we don’t need to learn or do anything else. I believe that this point is called death.

On the “learning profession”: As a learning professional, it’s time to take a stance. Enabling learning is no longer about disseminating good content. Enabling learning is about being a learner yourself, sharing your knowledge and enthusiasm and then taking a back seat. In a flattened learning system there are no more experts, only fellow learners on paths that may cross.

Foreshadowing my business future in 2011, I wrote that perhaps individual expertise is gradually being replaced by collaborative expertise.

I was asked for one or two sentences on where the field of adult e-learning is going. My response was that the overwhelming majority of the learning needs of Canadian adults are not addressed by formal training and education. In this post-industrial era, adults today require self-directed learning skills to thrive in the unstructured work environments outside of school. Efforts should be focused on the development of practical tools and strategies for adults to learn in a networked information society.

I riffed on Jay Rosen’s theme and wrote about the people formerly known as students:

The people formerly known as students do not believe this problem ”too many individual learners” is our problem. Now for anyone in your circle still wondering who we are, a formal definition might go like this:

The people formerly known as students are those who were on the receiving end of an oligopolist educational system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and few options, and accredited institutions competing to speak their truths while the rest of the population learned in isolation from one another – and who today are not in a situation like that at all.

My thoughts on a networked world were that in warfare, work and learning we are witnessing a major change in command and control and we will have to shift with it or suffer the fate of defeated armies.

Effective work and learning networks are composed of unique individuals working on common challenges, together for a discrete period of time before the network begins to shift its focus again. This is like small groups of guerrillas joining for a raid, conducting it, and then going their separate ways to reform as a different set for a new mission. If armies and businesses organisations are changing to networked models, then the best learning support has to be informal, loose and networked as well. We are shifting from a “one size fits all” attitude on work and learning to an “everyone is unique” perspective. If everyone is unique then there are no generic work processes and no standard curricula.

Near the end of 2006, I concluded that  in our networked world, modelling how to learn is a better strategy than shaping on a pre-defined curriculum.

 

Collective sense-making

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More of my online sense-making is in connecting to people, not accessing information sources. For instance, I read a few journals but I have dropped several, knowing that other people in my network will find the interesting articles and let me know. I used to read many of the technology blogs, like TechCrunch and Read/Write Web but have dropped them from my feed reader and instead read posts that have been referred via Twitter, Google Plus or blog posts.

The big shift for me in the past decade has been in weaving a network that brings me diversity of opinions and depth of knowledge. I am constantly following/unfollowing on Twitter in an attempt at optimal filtering, which is an impossible but worthwhile goal. I look for experts who share their knowledge or act as human-powered content aggregators, selecting quality information and discarding the crap. I look for people who have mastered Crap Detection 101.

Aron Solomon [dead link] has noted that:

2012 will be a year where the value of information finally seeps into the public consciousness. The conversation will become about not only what we know but how we know that what we know is meaningful. We will shift from an orientation of quantity to one of quality. It’s not that we won’t use the Internet, it’s not that Google will disappear – of course not.

Knowledge in a networked society is different from what many of us grew up with in the pre-Internet days. While books and journal articles are useful in codifying what we have learnt, knowledge is becoming a negotiated  agreement between connected people. It’s also better shared than kept to ourselves, where it may wither and die. Like electricity, knowledge is both particles and current, or stock and flow.

streamThe increasing importance of fluid knowledge requires a different perspective on how we think of it and use it. If change is constant, then the half-life of codified knowledge (stock) decreases. We see this with the increasingly combative debates on intellectual property (IP) expressed as copyright. Both vestiges of an economy dominated by knowledge as stock. The digital world is harshly bumping against the analog world and we are caught in-between.

I think the only way to navigate this change is collaboratively. No one has the right answer, but together we can explore new models of sense-making and knowledge-sharing. We each need to find others who are sharing their knowledge flow and in turn contribute our own. This is the foundation of personal knowledge mastery. It’s not about being a better digital librarian, it’s about becoming a participating member of a networked society.

Working smarter, daily

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My blog functions as my outboard brain, a place to get half-baked ideas out in the open and work on them in public. It’s also a repository of thoughts and notes I use in my daily work. I often refer to a blog post instead of writing the same email a dozen times. However, it can be difficult to find a single post amongst the more than 2,000 here.

Recently I’ve been using Working Smarter Daily as a more intelligent front-end for my blog. WS Daily consists of what members of the Internet Time Alliance have identified as essential reading, assisted by the curation of Jay Cross and aided by a layer of intelligent filtering based on social signals. It’s more than a mere aggregation of blog feeds, though.The comprehensive topic search function yields interesting results from 42 different perspectives, on everything from culture to complexity.  You can also look at a single author (Source=Harold Jarche) and then filter. Filtering can be single or multiple terms. For example, here are my feeds for Innovation, Collaboration & Network:

 

This is one more, rather powerful, tool for my personal knowledge management processes that makes my life a bit easier. Getting things done is the final measurement in determining if any PKM system works. My thanks to Xyleme for sponsoring Working Smarter Daily again for 2012 and giving me and others another way to seek, sense and share.

Network thinking

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Curtis Ogden at The Interaction Institute for Social Change provides a very good summary of the differences between network-centric and hierarchy-centric thinking, called Network Thinking:

  1. Adaptability instead of control
  2. Emergence instead of predictability
  3. Resilience and redundancy instead of rock stardom
  4. Contributions before credentials
  5. Diversity and divergence

One major challenge in helping organizations improve collaboration and knowledge-sharing is getting people to see themselves as nodes in various networks, with different types of relationships between them. Network thinking can fundamentally change our view of hierarchical relationships. For example, using value network analysis, I helped a steering group see their community of practice in a new light, mapped as a network. They immediately realized that they were pushing solutions to their community, instead of listening to what was happening. Thinking in terms of networks, networks, networks lets us see with new eyes.

1. Adaptability instead of Control

Here are some recommendations for moving to a new social contract for creative work:

  • Abolish the organization chart and replace it with a network diagram (some new tech companies have done this).
  • Move away from counting hours, to a results only work environment (with distributed work, this is becoming more common).
  • Encourage outside work that doesn’t directly interfere with paid work, as it will strengthen the network (such as Google’s 20% time for engineers).
  • Provide options for workers to come and go and give them ways to stay connected when they’re not employed (like Ericsson’s Stay Connected Facebook group). Build an ecosystem, not a monolith.

2. Emergence instead of predictability

As we learn in digital networks, stock (content) loses significance, while flow (conversation) becomes more important – the challenge becomes how to continuously weave the many bits of information and knowledge that pass by us each day. Conversations help us make sense. But we need diversity in our conversations or we become insular. We cannot predict what will emerge from continuous learning, co-creating & sharing at the individual, organizational and market level but we do know it will make for more resilient organizations.

3. Resilience and redundancy

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

4. Contributions before credentials

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

5. Diversity and Divergence

My approach to working smarter starts by organizing to embrace diversity and manage complexity.  Diversity is a key factor in innovation and I’ve yet to find an organization that does not want to improve innovation.

Everyday experience is not the same as it was

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The learning and development field has a lot of good research on how to support workplace performance. Tom Gram has some excellent posts and resources that discuss performance by design. His most recent post, Everyday Experience is Not Enough, summarizes what it takes to support workplace learning. It’s definitely worth reading and following the links to other resources.

Some of the best learning approaches that work well in helping people challenge their current skill levels fall into that fuzzy middle ground between formal and informal learning (see this post for a continuum of learning experiences) and can include the following:

Designing, fostering and supporting work experiences that develop expertise is an emerging role for the learning professional. That role is to assure that people are working in a setting where they can challenge and develop their knowledge and skills. You can’t make them learn but you can help surround them with the resources they need to learn. This approach to learning is truly a partnership between the individual, their managers and you as a learning professional. In doing that work you are practicing and developing your own expertise.

I agree with Tom. But I have a sense that things are changing and our interconnectedness is shifting the ground rules, without being so kind to inform our institutions or professional associations. Tom starts his post with his own admonishment of those “social” folks:

A core tenet of informal and social learning is that we learn through experience. It’s the elephant in the 70-20-10 room. It’s often used as an admonishment to formal learning. Advocates of the most laissez-faire approaches informal learning suggest that given the right tools (social anyone?) employees will do just fine without all the interference by the learning department, thank you very much.

Like I said, I agree with Tom, and highly respect his work. But there’s stuff happening that isn’t following all our best practices based on years of research. Cases like children learning at the Hole-in-the-Wall (HiW), without any guidance. Peter Isackson has described the subversive nature of social learning in the HiW experiments:

It seems to me that the fundamental key to the success of HiW is the notion of “self-organized groups” who learn on their own. If education is to become truly non-invasive, as Jay suggests, it must refrain from defining both the goals and the means to reach them, entrusting the groups with this task. If educational gurus (authorities) notice that a group is neglecting what is considered “essential” in the curriculum (for whatever reason, whether it’s basic security, survival or inculcating an existing set of values), the group could be challenged to account for why they may be neglecting a certain topic or reminded of the interest in pursuing it. Respecting the self-organizing group and its decision-making capacity is the sine qua non of success. It also happens to be the absolute opposite of the organizational principles of traditional education and training.

John Seely Brown (JSB) often tells the story of a group of young surfers, The Grommets, who learn by watching videos of those who are better and constantly improve their skills through practice and collaboration. This Singapore Educational Consultants’ review sums it up [more links at bottom of the article]:

According to JSB, The Grommets underwent these stages in their pursuit of excellence:

a) Deep collaborative learning with/from each other;
b) A passion to achieve extreme performance and a willingness to fail, fail, fail on the way;
c) Accessing and learning frame by frame the best surfers around the world via videos of the pros;
d) Use of video tools to capture and analyze each of their own improvisations;
e) Pulling the best of ideas from adjacencies: wind surfing, skate boarding, mountain biking, motor-cross and others;
f) Accessing spikes of capabilities around the world – leveraging networks of practice around the world; and
g) Attracting others to help them around the world

The Grommets are a case of self-directed learning done collaboratively. Cognitive apprenticeship is now available for the taking because many experts are narrating their work, or are being captured by video while doing their work. This phenomenon will continue to pervade our society. We’ve all gone mobile now. We’re getting continuous feedback from our networks, as The Grommets and even the kids at HiW did. It’s not uncommon today for a 12 year old to have an international network. These can often act as learning networks. More and more people will be coming to your workplace with their own feedback systems already in place.

I think the game has changed. I’m not a social learning, laissez-faire, utopian but I am seeing fundamental changes with networked learning. The learners now own their networks. Workplace learning will change as well, and it will change how work gets done. People are creating their own narratives. Today, content capture and creation tools let people tell their own stories. Weaving their stories together enables serendipitous learning at the adjacencies. Gamers, hackers, The Grommets and HiW learn by:

  • Sharing their stories.
  • Knowing there is no user manual.
  • Embracing the flow.
Some day, perhaps very soon, everyday experience for networked workers may be much broader, deeper and richer than any workplace learning professional could ever design. Perhaps I’m thinking too far ahead of the curve, but I get the sneaking suspicion that things are changing faster than we suspect.

The Hyper-social Organization – Review

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The main premise of The Hyper-social Organization is that social media, connectivity, and always-on technology are enabling what humans do naturally — be very social.

The authors on knowledge management:

Of course, one of the big challenges for companies is that, unlike information or data, knowledge does not flow easily, as it relies on long-term trust-based relationships. Indeed, data and information are facts that describe a situation and can be generated by machines, whereas knowledge consists of truths, beliefs, methods, solutions, ideas and other elements that are created by humans and shared among people who trust one another. So one of the keys to success in this new economic reality is to move from a transactional world to a long-term trust-based world.

I have to like these questions the authors ask organizational leaders:

How good are you at engaging your detractors? How much of a “perpetual beta” culture do you have in your company? Do you consider your customer service department to be a cost center, or something more?

On the value of marketing materials:

McKinsey estimates that two-thirds of all buying decision-focused conversations do not involve anyone from the company. In a separate study, IDC estimated that only 20 percent of all content developed by the typical marketing department is actually used by the sales organization. What we can extrapolate from this information is that the content developed by most marketing departments is used in less than 7 percent of all buying decisions.

The most interesting part of the book is the Hyper-Sociality Index, based on four pillars:

Tribes vs Segments — “In a hyper-social environment you need to reach the tribes whose members influence one another – not the market segments that can be targeted with direct mail and ad campaigns”

Human-centricity vs Company-centricity — “… the shift in attention to the human elements of your business can help to improve product development, marketing, sales, talent management, knowledge management, and customer service.”

Networks vs Channels — “Data and information flow through channels, whereas networks allow knowledge to flow.”

Social Messiness vs Process and Hierarchy — “SEAMS: sensing, engaging, activating, measuring, storytelling” [Note: this does not align with the Cynefin framework that advocates a Probe — Sense — Respond approach to complexity, so I think SEAMS lacks the flexibility necessary in complex environments.]

The authors pose a similar question I have been asking for years as well, “Will traditional hierarchical organizations, with multiple levels of management between the tribes and corporate decision makers, enjoy any sort of advantage in a hyper-social future?”

Finally, here are 8 characteristics of hyper-social leaders:

  1. Behave like humans, not faceless entities
  2. Ditch the rule books and embrace values
  3. Live their values
  4. Trust people and create trusted environments
  5. Embrace transparency
  6. Embrace diversity
  7. Never compromise on quality
  8. Let go of control

If these concepts are new to you, I would recommend this book. I noticed that John Hagel is often quoted in this book, so you may want to pick up his latest book as well, or instead — The Power of Pull

Sense-making through conversation

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One of our clients referred me to a post by Nick Milton on another great Boston square that pulls “apart the KM world on dimensions of Knowledge Push and Knowledge Pull (which you might call “Sharing” and “seeking”), and the dimensions of Explicit and Tacit. We get 4 quadrants, which we could call Ask, Tell, Search, Share.”

The similarity to PKM with its seek/sense/share processes had me look back on that for any additional insights from Nick’s Boston square (my additions in red).

Sense-making consists of both asking and telling. It’s a continuing series of conversations. We know that conversation is the main way that tacit knowledge gets shared. So we continuously seek out explicit knowledge, in the form of written work or other knowledge artifacts left by others. We then have conversations around these artifacts to make sense of them. Finally, we share new, explicit knowledge artifacts which then grow our bodies of knowledge. Sharing closes the circle, because being a personal knowledge manager is every professional’s part of the social learning contract.

This square is a good model to look at our own processes. Is the (limited) time we spend on PKM well balanced between the four activities? Missing one of them completely would destroy most of the value in any PKM process. Seeking and sharing information without any conversation around it would only serve to create additional noise with no signal. It’s the individual context, gained through conversations, that provides the real value. This is why narrating our work and making it transparent (shareable) is so important in the creative, networked workplace. It’s how the organization makes sense, from multiple conversations.

Bridging the gap: working smarter

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Nigel Paine recently produced a very good ten-minute video on The Learning Explosion. Nigel used one of my diagrams in his presentation and this motivated me to explain it in a bit more detail.

The slide presentation is designed to be self-explanatory and may help convince management of the need to integrate working and learning. As Nigel says, and I agree, being an effective team player is just one aspect of the 21st century workplace. We must also share our expertise across the organization while encouraging people to develop external networks. That’s what this model tries to explain. Communities of practice are bridges between the work being done and the diversity of social networks.

A key role for any learning and development department today, and for the near future, is to enable and support communities of practice that integrate learning and working.

Where Good Ideas Come From – Review

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“The premise that innovation prospers when ideas can serendipitously connect and recombine with other ideas, when hunches can stumble across other hunches that successfully fill in their blanks, may seem like an obvious truth, but the strange fact is that a great deal of the past two centuries of legal and folk wisdom about innovation has pursued the exact opposite argument, building walls between ideas, keeping them from the kind of random, serendipitous connections that exist in dreams and in the organic compounds of life.”

This one sentence sums up the core ideas in Steven Johnson’s book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The natural history of innovation. Johnson goes on to explain what organizations can do to foster innovation:

“The secret to organizational inspiration is to build information networks that allow hunches to persist and disperse and recombine. Instead of cloistering your hunches in brainstorm sessions or R&D labs, create an environment where brainstorming is something that is constantly running in the background, throughout the organization, a collective version of the 20-percent-time concept that proved so successful for Google and 3M. One way to do this is to create an open database of hunches, the Web 2.0 version of the traditional suggestion box.”

This is what organizational social learning using social media can do – enable a free flow of hunches and ideas. The chapter on The Fourth Quadrant provides some specific advice for business innovation. The quadrant is the Non-market/Network which “corresponds to open-source or academic environments, where ideas can be built upon and reimagined in large, collaborative networks.” Innovations in this quadrant include: Braille, RNA splicing, Quantum Mechanics, Punch Cards, Germ Theory and many others developed at an increasing pace post-1850, as we became electrified [my observation here].

“Participants in the fourth quadrant don’t have these costs [protecting intellectual assets through barricades of artificial scarcity]: they can concentrate on coming up with new ideas, not building fortresses around the old ones. And because these ideas can freely circulate through the infosphere, they can be refined and expanded by other minds in the network.”

Steven Johnson presented this morning at the CSTD conference , reinforcing these points and making several others. He talked about the concept of getting more parts (or ideas) on the table in order to have more to work with and more potential connections. I liked his view of intellectual property protection as an ‘innovation tax’. He also talked about the emerging role of the organizational translator who can help break down silos and enable better communication and collaboration, similar to the ideas in the post, adapting to a networked world.

Overall it’s a great book with some solid advice for any organization.

Update: Video of SBJ discussing Maple Syrup, Airplane Crashes & the Power of non-Market Innovation (the fourth quadrant).

CSTD 2011

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Here are my notes from the session this afternoon at CSTD 2011 in Toronto. If you need other links or information, just add a comment.

I’m glad we had a chance to field test a variation of the improv icebreak activity of equilateral triangles. It seems to have got things going a bit.

My slide presentation is available for viewing or download here:

Integrating learning and work CSTD 2011

I also showed two videos, the trailer to Networked Society: On the Brink as well as Dave Snowden’s How to Organise a Children’s Party.

Update: some people asked about selling social learning in their organizations, so these posts may be useful:

Social Learning for Business – 10 phrase elevator pitch

Why do we need social business? – many links to other resources & posts

Also: my social bookmarks on social media policies in a wide variety of organizations