Learning

Learning

A snapshot of life in perpetual Beta

by

I had the pleasure of meeting Eileen Clegg at the Internet Time Alliance Party in November. Eileen wanted to know what ITA does and I agreed to explain my personal perspectives on work and learning.

We moved into the Internet Time Lab, in Jay’s basement, and Eileen drew while I talked.

The result shows some of the main concepts and ideas that drive my work.

—

Life in Perpetual Beta is a primary theme.

Understanding complexity is central to my work.

Other themes include giving up control and letting people manage themselves.

Concepts such as ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate (Mark Federman) and wirearchy (Jon Husband) inform my work.

The idea that “humans don’t scale” is based on research such as the work of Robin Dunbar.

Probe-Sense-Respond comes from the Cynefin framework.

—

—

So that’s a snapshot of some of the ideas that I find important for my work … for now. Be sure to check out some of the great visuals Eileen has done with a wide variety of clients.

Will's Learning Landscape Model

by

Will Thalheimer has developed the Learning Landscape Model and created this 13 minute video to explain it.

Overall I find the model useful, though I would replace “Learning” (at 2:15) with “Instruction”, because that’s really what training departments provide in order to promote on-job-performance.

It is also good to see on-job-learning as part of the model. The various measurement points, beyond Kirkpatrick’s four levels of evaluation, (at 9:50) are really worth noting. There are over a dozen measurements noted that are often ignored in organizations.

If you’re in the learning & development (L&D) field I would highly recommend this video and further perusal of Will’s work.

As the video concludes (from 10:39) Will shows the divided responsibilities of Learning versus Business professionals. This division of responsibility highlights a problem with our current work support structures.

Handing-off from learning to working is a vestige of the industrial mindset and reminds me of Waterfall software development models. We need to integrate learning and working, using something more akin to an Agile model, as Sahana Chattopadhyay recently described. My challenge to L&D professionals would be to integrate and support the entire model, not just the parts in pink. This is what the 21st century training department needs to do.

The Learning Landscape Model is based on solid research, as is all of Will’s work, and provides an excellent framework for L&D departments to practice their craft. While I don’t think it’s enough, it’s a good place to start the journey of developing the necessary emergent work practices for the next century.

Interdependence: a sense of purpose

by

As we do more of our work in networks, workplace learning becomes an interdependent activity. Social and collaborative learning support the development of emergent practices needed for more complex work.

Esko Kilpi looks at different work tasks with the same framework as the above figure: independent, dependent or interdependent.

The Internet-based firm sees work as networked communication. Any node in the network can communicate with any other node on the basis of contextual interdependence and creative participative engagement. Work takes place in a transparent, wide-area, digital environment.

The focus is thus not on independent tasks, or predetermined processes, but on participative, self-organizing responsiveness that creates patterns of continuity and creativity.

Work and learning, as they merge, become increasingly interdependent activities. People haven’t changed over the years but with the Internet we have an opportunity to create work structures that may actually meet our core needs. Dan Pink discusses in Drive how various studies have shown that three basic things motivate people to do work (see video). These are:

  • Autonomy
  • Mastery
  • A sense of purpose

This applies to all but the most menial of tasks. We need to be in control, work at bettering ourselves and do this with the sense of some greater mission. We are social beings. As independent self-employed workers we were limited for centuries in developing our skills without support, adequate tools or feedback from others. We needed to study from masters and become part of a community of practice. Even with guilds and unions, there was limited access and individuals lacked autonomy. This same lack of autonomy and sense of purpose was magnified in the factory and is still evident in the modern workplace. Today, up to 84% of workers want to leave their jobs, in spite of the current economic climate.

It is only by working (and learning) interdependently, retaining our autonomy, co-developing our mastery and feeling a shared sense of purpose that we will be truly motivated. The opportunity the Internet has given individuals is the chance to work cooperatively toward a shared purpose (Seb Paquet calls this “ridiculously easy group-forming). The Internet also affords organizations the opportunity to loosen the dependence of workers through participative engagement (as The Cluetrain Manifesto explained a decade ago). The new organization must be some mix of free-agent autonomy, support mechanisms for mastery, and a wide enough span for each person to develop a personal sense of purpose.

Perhaps there is a new middle ground between lone wolves and corporate sheep:

Quotes from 2010

by

I found many quotes this past year, especially via Twitter. Here are most of them, all together (this way I’ll be able to find them all when I want to use them). #NetworkLearning

Life

via @VasilyKomarov RT @nickthinker: Those who can lead an inexpensive (low cost) life and appreciate the simple and free things are actually the “new rich”!

@KareAnderson “Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

@bduperrin “The more social you are you [the] more opportunities you get, the more busy you are, the less social you become.”

via @CharlesHGreen “When you dig yourself into a hole, first, stop digging.” up by your bootstraps

@EskoKilpi “The everyday live interactions we experience do not exist in a meaningful way in any documents.”

@EskoKilpi “Control means being able to predict (if A then B); if we can’t predict, we can’t control.”

via @4KM Complexity is necessary … confusion & unnecessary complication should be eliminated. (Don Norman)

@GeorgeKao “There’s no such thing as ‘keeping up.’ There’s only checking in at high leverage times.”

@JohnDCook “He who marries the spirit of the age will soon be a widow.”

“Silence is golden but duct tape is silver!” @JaneBozarth

“Uncertainty is the certainty that the parameters will change.” @downes

“No matter how many pairs of reading glasses I buy & strategically place around the house they are never nearby when I need them.” @skap5

History

Abraham Lincoln: The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise — with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. (Annual Message to Congress: 1862)

Organizations & Management

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”- Howard Aiken; via @RudolfChristian

via @minutrition RT @umairh: in the age of strategy, what counted was knowing the terrain. in the age of wisdom, what counts is knowing the soil.

@jonhusband “Unfortunately, HR is the home base for the management practices based on old mental models about work & motivation .. not synched with networked work”

@tdebaillon “Most companies aren’t designed for collaboration.” My Little Enterprise 2.0 Diffusion Framework

@umairh “The problem isn’t that we need new jobs. It’s that we need a better economy, composed of new kinds of companies, built for a higher purpose.”

Henry Mintzberg: “In a word, corporate America is sick.” – “A viable economy needs to be led by explorers, not exploiters.” – “The Problem Is Enterprise, Not Economics” via @jonhusband

@faboolous “Knowledge work thus requires that each party offer something with no guarantee that they will get anything specific in return”.

via @planetrussell- “Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while giving the appearance of stability.” —Nassim Nicholas Taleb, PhD.

“when hiring, we don’t care about formal education” says @JasonFried of37Signals – the new workplace, the new normal

“Walmart exec (I’m not making this up) told me email was so time-consuming cause she had to approve everyone’s email in advance.” @jaycross

“I think “human capital” is an oxymoron. “Social capital” too. Test question: would you consider your spouse, children or friends “capital?” @dsearls

“If I am an effective leader then I have set up a system that is not dependent on me.” @gcouros

“The fact is that organisation and management sciences are not sciences at all but scientific emperors with no clothing.” Complexity & Management Centre

“Organizations not engaged in real-time sensemaking are going to find themselves getting Dumb and Dumber” by Jeff Jonas (& others). via @jonhusband

“Don’t pity the blind man, for he has never seen PowerPoint.” @MeetingBoy

Networks

@reactorcontrol “Tim Berners-Lee describes social networks as “vertical silos”, because they are not interoperable. #dzf4?

@charlesjennings “ROI on social learning? ‘social networks are necessarily loose-edged and impossible to make fully explicit’ (David Weinberger)”

@VMaryAbraham “These guys are some of the smartest in the microsharing room, but I haven’t yet heard the 140-nugget that makes the case.”

Education & Training

Catherine Lombardozzi – “One of my favorite quotes is from Kent Seibert: ‘Reject the myth that we learn from experience and accept the reality that we learn by reflecting on experience.’

“Most of what we know we learn from other people. We pay tuition to a few of these teachers … but most of it we get for free, and often in ways that are mutual – without a distinction between student and teacher … We know this kind of external effect is common to all the arts and sciences – the ‘creative professions.’ All of intellectual history is the history of such effects.” Does Milwaukee have enough college graduates to thrive?

“Anything you think is either unoriginal, wrong or both”

@courosa Look at a single Twitter page. Think about prior knowledge / literacies needed to decode that page. RTs. links. voice. events. #MediaLiteracy

@Dave_Ferguson My comment to @rnantel : fixing most performance problems with training is like fixing a leaky faucet by painting the kitchen.

“You can not have a superior democracy with an inferior system of education.” @ginab

My Favourites

Steven Johnson – Chance favours the connected mind. via @timkastelle

@ralphmercer – “committees are places to lure great ideas to be killed while absolving everyone of the blame”

“Hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust” … Warren Bennis” via @jonhusband

via @HealthCareerPro “I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.” ~ Winston Churchill.

What is working smarter?

by

I’m in the business of helping organizations work smarter. What does that mean?

Our industrial and information age is nearing an end as we transition into an era where creativity becomes the most important element in our economy. We are also living in a more complex time as traditional disciplines blur and as information explodes. For the developed world, that means the future does not lie in doing manual or simple work because much of it will be automated. Merely complicated work, which is most of the work done in traditional industrial or office jobs, is being outsourced to the cheapest source of labour. That leaves complex work, requiring initiative, creativity and passion.

How does this affect our daily lives?

First of all, look at the restructuring that is happening in our economy. Jobs are being shed that will never be replaced. Can your work be done remotely by someone who doesn’t cost as much? Then at some point in the near future, it will. Companies are finally realizing that they need to work smarter. That means automating and outsourcing where necessary (if they don’t, their competition will) and then figuring out how to get things done in complexity.

The core of working smarter in complexity is the integration of learning and working. It sounds easy, but it’s not. There are two major parts to this. At the individual level it requires people to think critically and embed sense-making processes into their work and their lives. This takes skill and practice. It also takes a work environment that supports and encourages individual learning, sharing, and collaboration.

Hierarchy is the enemy of creativity but we still need some structure to get things done. As Vera John-Steiner writes in Creative Collaboration; “…the achievement of productive collaboration requires sustained time and effort. It requires the shaping of a shared language, the pleasures and risks of honest dialogue, and the search for a common ground.” The risks of honest dialogue will be a major barrier for many organizations to transition to more creative work.

Successful organizations will need to:

1. support creative collaboration (not merely team work)

2. support each person in developing critical thinking skills

3. put this together in order to get things done

There is no specific recipe to do this. Every organization and business will have to find its own path. However, that path will not include:

– standard job competencies; job descriptions & JOBS;

– one-size-fits-all instruction;

– equating time to value;

– and many other vestiges of the industrial era.

Resonance

by

Over the past year, I’ve posted 225 articles here, some popular, some a bit controversial and some ignored (but still useful for my own learning).

Here are some posts that resonated with readers.

Two posts, A Framework for Social Learning in the Enterprise (February) and The Evolving Social Organization (August), were popular, as was the white paper that combined these articles. This shows that blog posts do not need to be short to get attention. Longer posts will be read if people are interested in the subject.

A bit more controversial was the post; The LMS is no longer the centre of the universe (May). The great LMS Debate was a topic of conversation with my Internet Time Alliance colleagues for a period of time over the year as well. You get more spirited conversations when money is at stake.

Personal Knowledge Management (March) remained a popular subject, and a key focus of my research and practice, though by the end of the year I was calling it network learning (October).

I revived an article that I had written collaboratively with Michele Martin in 2008 as part of our Work Literacy series. The Ning site it was hosted on had changed its terms of service so I posted a copy of an Introduction to Social Networking (June) on this site. It got more attention here than on the Ning site.

Even though it was written in 2009, The Future of the Training Department remained popular. I really appreciated this comment by Donald Clark; “Close the training departments – love it!”

Thanks to everyone who dropped by, made a comment, wrote a blog post in response, or tweeted something they found here. Thanks for extending the conversation.

Working Smarter Cracker Barrel

by

Next week, at our Working Smarter event hosted by Tulser in Maastricht, NL, we will have a series of short sessions on selected topics. Each Principal of the Internet Time Alliance has three topics of 20 minutes to be discussed in small groups. My topics are listed below and include links to relevant posts as well as a short description of the core ideas behind each topic.

Complexity, perpetual Beta & the need for emergent practices

Networks & Complexity:

It is generally accepted that we live and work in an increasingly ‘wired’ world. There are emerging patterns and dynamics related to interconnected people and interlinked information flows, which are bypassing established traditional structures and services.

The cynefin framework shows that emergent practices are needed in order to manage in complex environments and novel practices are necessary for chaotic ones. Most of what we consider standard work today is being outsourced and automated. We are facing more complexity and chaos in our work because of our interconnectedness.

Network Learning (aka PKM)

Network Learning: Working Smarter

One way (not the only way) to look at network learning is as a continuous process of seeking, sensing and sharing.

Seeking is finding things out and keeping up to date. Building a network of colleagues is helpful in this regard—it not only allows us to “pull” information, but also have it “pushed” to us by trusted sources.

Sensing is how we personalize information and use it. Sense-making includes reflection and putting into practice what we have learned. Often it requires experimentation, as we learn best by doing.

Sharing includes exchanging resources, ideas and experiences with our networks and collaborating with our colleagues.

The 21st Century Training Department

Information is no longer scarce and our connections are now many. The role of the training department must shift from content delivery to enabling people to connect more easily and communicate more effectively. Connecting & Communicating are central roles for organizational leaders whose workplaces are becoming more complex, either in terms of evolving practices, changing markets or advances in technology. Enabling the integration of collaborative learning with work is a more flexible model than designing courses that are outdated as soon as they’re published.

Here are some guidelines for what informal learning development could look like:

  1. Spend less time on design and more on ongoing evaluation to allow emergent practices to be developed.
  2. Build learning resources so that they can be easily changed or modified by anyone (allow for a hacker mentality)
  3. Allow everything to be connected, so that the work environment is the learning environment (but look for safe places to fail)
  4. There is no clearly defined start or finish so enable connections from multiple access points.

Learning socially

by

Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week:

“We spend a billion dollars globally on training …. and what we get is worth shit.” From training to learning in the new economy (c. 1996)

In a fundamental way, all work is about learning: it is about learning to fit in and to collaborate, about learning to take initiative when appropriate, it is about really understanding customers, about acquiring intimate knowledge of the products and services the company sells and how they can fit into customers’ lives. Acknowledged as such or not, learning has to be an integral part of work. But, somehow, integrated [work+learning] activities have become split into the separate spheres of [work] and  [training] which have come to be dominated by quite different interests.

@hypergogue : “Piracy creates demand” – Wabi-sabi

Japanese lawyers seem to understand that some things are too complex to control or, at least, that attempts to control and simplify may destroy the beauty (ahem, the ‘value’, cough) of the things they’re trying to defend. They show an understanding of obliquity. Wabi-sabi is the opposite of the Pyrrhic Victory – it’s a triumphant surrender? This seems, somehow, too neat an idea, too symmetrical.

@amcunningham : If you are wondering what social learning might look like for health professionals, have a look at TILT (Today I Learnt That)

All Social is Learning ,by @JBordeaux [If all learning is social and work is learning, we need to focus on the social aspects of business]

This weekend, I was struck by a logic stick.  If all learning is social, is all social learning?  We know this is not automatically so, learned that in the intro to Logic, Sets and Numbers (an actual college course I took in the 70’s).  But when we engage in a social setting, online or offline, are we ever not learning?  Let’s add in a third statement: we are constantly learning.  Even while asleep, some research indicates, the brain assembles and makes sense of what it experienced that day.  There isn’t a time when our brains aren’t rewiring themselves based on input from our environment.

Technological Change must always precede economic growth, by @ingenesist

Technological Change must always precede economic growth – economic growth cannot sustainably precede technological change. If you throw money at a problem, you are not guaranteed technological change.  If you throw technological change at a problem, you are guaranteed money.

Harold’s Note: I agree that institutions follow :

We’re now at the stage where we have some new ideas for work (wirearchy, natural enterprises, workplace democracy) and some new technologies (social media, nano-bio-techno-cogno). The next step in this evolution is the new organization. Remember that business schools only followed after the mass production model had been proven. Therefore we cannot expect leadership from our institutions until we have proven a new organizational model. It’s time to get to work.

Learning in public

by

In a succinct post on the nature of knowledge management in a knowledge-intensive field, Jasmin Fodil looks at how rocket scientists learn. She shows how workers at the NASA Goddard Space Fight Center reapply their knowledge:

–

Goddard is doing a pretty good job of knowledge sharing:

The Knowledge Management life-cycle at Goddard seems solid to me; the focus is on the individual’s learning processes, structures, and needs, rather than content management systems, which is already leaps and bounds ahead of the curve, and there are many practices and resources to facilitate the process. Because of that, the system is unique in that is dovetails nicely with a socialized knowledge management system. People are already used to residing within a learning organization, and social software will enhance the on-the-ground process that are already so robust.

Notice that, “How Can I Learn It?” does not include sharing through information flows, such as blogs, wikis or micro-blogs (social media). As Fodil asks at the end of her article, I also wonder how much more effective the organization would be if most learning was in public, or was a “socialized knowledge management system”. Of course, Goddard may already be doing this. If not, there can be a lot of knowledge loss between discrete events such as the development of case studies or the collection of lessons learned. Workshops and case-based events may not be frequent enough. All of these are knowledge “stock” and I think there is much potential, in most organizations, to improve knowledge flow to connect these events.

PKM is my suggested framework to enhance knowledge flows in the organization by first focusing on the needs and desires of the individual and then making each person’s flow public (Seek-Sense-Share). Network learning requires sense-making in public. But, as Fodil concludes:

Sometimes learning in public is a difficult process, but the feedback, support, and resultant improvements are worth it.

Transparency is the first, and perhaps largest, hurdle in creating new management frameworks for a networked world. Learning in public makes our work transparent and can help us develop critical next practices in our increasingly complex workplaces. We all have to start thinking and working like rocket scientists.

Transparent work

by

People are now the engine of change and the fuel is communications, says Jay Deragon in Systemic Impact of Social Technology

System outcomes can be influenced by numerous factors such as:

  1. Competitor innovation that attracts the market away from your business
  2. Cost of goods increases and margins shrink. You cut expenses to survive.
  3. Employee turnover which fuels inconsistency and waste.
  4. Customer leave due to dis-satisfaction
  5. Market shifts that you are unaware of and don’t understand

The #1 influence that is threaded through all five examples above is communications.

I’ve attended various meetings over the past six months; meetings with groups that I haven’t had dealings with before. These were professional associations, networks of researchers and administrators, and others. I would say that all the problems discussed at these meetings were, at root, communications issues.

Communication in a network is not the same as what we may have considered as traditional business communications. Sending out a clear memo (email) may have worked before, but looking for that email or document six months later on some kind of shared intranet drive is another issue completely. Sharing the emails of a previous worker in a certain position may make sense at first, but becomes totally impractical when 20,000 emails arrive, all in folders that make no sense to the incumbent [I speak from personal experience here]. Adding an enterprise resource system (LMS, TMS, HRIS, etc) doesn’t help much either, because the enforced knowledge structure makes little sense to the individual worker.

What may be considered a knowledge problem is really a transparency one. If I want to find general information, I search the Web, and quite often find what I need. For more contextual knowledge, I ask my network via text message, Twitter, blog or forum. The reason I can do this is that either the knowledge or the knowledgeable person is visible on the web.

Visibility is the key for knowledge work inside the organization as well. Jay Cross described it in Informal Learning, with the case study of CGI using an “Internet Inside” tool approach.

Just compare informal learning on the web with what happens inside the firewall. Online, we all benefit from others who openly share. We read free blog posts, comments, tweets and wikipedia articles. We watch descriptive YouTube videos and check out wiki-how or a host of other self-help sites. We may do all of this without even thinking about the millions of people who share in order to make our lives better. Meanwhile, inside the organization, we’re trying to find that document that got filed away on some shared drive, but nobody remembers the date or the title (about all the metadata available) so it is lost to us.

When I note how easy it is to find the stuff we need on Google, most people understand and agree. Then I explain that it only works if some people are making the information public. Making the information that results from our daily work visible is a huge step in enhancing communications. The simplest and easiest way is to replicate the tools and processes used on the open Internet – blogs, micro-blogs, social networks, social bookmarks, etc. The problem with enterprise systems is that they don’t act as networks. They were not built with network DNA but rather hierarchical frameworks. Therefore, they cannot scale to complexity the way a much simpler protocol can. Simplicity leads to complexity. Complicated systems just get more complicated.

My advice is to keep the tools simple and replicate the web; it works, and the basic protocols are very simple. Use a DIY approach and let the IT department focus on data security not tools.

Effective networked organizations are those with a sharing culture, embracing a new social learning contract.