Learning

Learning

Hierarchical conversations

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Imagine a conference room in a convention centre in some metropolitan area [I’m sure you can]. It’s just after lunch and you’re stuffed on hotel food and wired from half a dozen cups of barely drinkable coffee. This morning you survived three presentations, each consisting of PowerPoint slides (at least Keynote slides have better default fonts) and the dreaded bullet points. Three presentations, 20-30 slides each and 5 to 20 bullet points per slide.

Quick Aside: Elliott Masie wrote a book, The Computer Training Handbook and discussed VCP  analysis. When teaching, he recommended: Vocabulary: limit new words to 6-8 per hour. Concepts: no more than 3 per hour. Procedures: More, but make memorization unnecessary.

Anyway, you’ve already been inundated with dozens of new words, while concepts are just dropped like buzzwords and there is obviously no common understanding of concepts. For example, my idea of a network is quite different from someone who has never experienced being a member of an online professional network.

The presenter [facilitator, director, cheerleader or whatever name is used] has now told everyone that it’s time for conversation. Let’s open things up!

Here’s a bird’s eye view:

This is how the conversation goes. A participant raises their hand, the presenter recognizes it and nods approval and then the participant asks a question or makes a comment. The presenter almost always makes a comment or a response, no matter the experience of the other participants. If the presenter disagrees with a statement or a perspective, he or she is able to shoot it down or deflect it before it gains any momentum.

It looks like this:

Meanwhile, the communication and understanding of the folks distributed about round conference tables (so very conducive for collaboration) remains in question. However, the presenter remains in charge, just like the school teachers who set the example so many times.

After some time listening to the same sub-group of extroverts in the audience, the presenter runs out of time and sums up with some statement of how productive this has all been.

Imagine trying to add a comment on the nature of networks in this setting. How can you imagine a learning network when all you’ve experienced are hierarchical conversations?

Now here’s the transcript of the last #lrnchat conversation on Thursday evening, where I jumped in as “asker of questions” when the regulars weren’t able to show up. In this type of conversation, everybody can talk at once and each person reads what they want. If you like a comment you add something to it, or “retweet” it to show you agree. People on the sidelines get brought into the conversation and there is no middle or gatekeeper, other than those who initiate questions. We ran out of prepared questions and participants just added more.

Many people say, “it’s not about the technology”, but the technology of the conference room with screen & presenter at the front has a significantly different effect on conversation than does the micro-blogging virtual “tweetchat”.

I always recommend that we choose our technologies with care but we have to have experienced the options in order to see the differences. That was my great challenge. How do you explain networks and networked learning to people who have never experienced them?

Exploring and free ranging

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Whatever happened to “free range learning”? Jay Cross  used the term free range learning for a while in reference to informal learning and Tom Haskins picked up on the free range chicken metaphor. I even suggested a logo, but I don’t hear much talk about it any more. I think it’s still a great descriptor for learning and working on the Web, especially for events like #lrnchat on Twitter.

Free range learning may help deal with the disorientation that is more and more common in our complex lives and workplaces. Marilyn Taylor developed a model of learning, based on classroom experience, that has workplace implications as well, I believe. Her work has not been widely published but there is a reference in this PDF from NALD [dead link] (see page 53). You can also read about the model in Making Sense of Adult Learning.

Taylor observed university students in classrooms, and saw a pattern of continuous Disorientation, Exploration, Reorientation & Equilibrium. Each stage took different periods of time with each student and not all students completing a cycle during a formal course. The successful students were the ones who could work through the entire process and continue into another cycle. When students are shown the cycle, many get an “ah ha ” moment and realize that their confusion (disorientation) is quite normal.

According to Taylor, disorientation is a natural state in formal education:

Stage 1 – Disorientation: The learner is presented with an unfamiliar experience or idea which involves new ideas that challenge the student to think critically about his/her beliefs and values. The learner reacts by becoming confused and anxious. Support from the educator at this point is crucial to the learner’s motivation, participation and self-esteem.

Working and learning in our information-rich environments with constantly changing tools and business rules presents us with frequent and longer periods of disorientation.

Leaders and managers today should be helping fellow workers with their disorientation and exploration . A first step would be to show that disorientation is quite normal. It’s OK to be confused, but the strategy is not to close up but to be open to free range learning. Instead of looking for a simple solution, sometimes it’s necessary to poke around and explore to reorient our thinking. Consider what implications this has for training and workplace norms. Maybe I’ll go for a walk or perhaps I’ll check out Twitter or Facebook. How many workplaces encourage that? In the long run, it may be best to allow for a fair degree of exploration. Aren’t workers constantly encouraged to think outside of the box?  That’s where the free range chickens are.

DevLearn2010

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Join me and my colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance at DevLearn in San Francisco next month. We all plan to be there.

Jane Hart provides a snapshot of the State of Learning in the Workplace Today on at 10:45 am on Wednesday, November 3.

At 4:00 pm on Wednesday, we all will be engaged in a conversation entitled Work Smarter: Learning is the Real Work.

We expect to pop up at a few other places as well. (Surprise!)

Being social for learning and performance

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Social learning has been a theme here for some time [my first post on the subject in 2005: from e-learning to s-learning]. Recent research by CMU, MIT & Union College shows that being social is also a key to group performance:

That collective intelligence, the researchers believe, stems from how well the group works together. For instance, groups whose members had higher levels of “social sensitivity” were more collectively intelligent. “Social sensitivity has to do with how well group members perceive each other’s emotions,” says Christopher Chabris, a co-author and assistant professor of psychology at Union College in New York.

“Also, in groups where one person dominated, the group was less collectively intelligent than in groups where the conversational turns were more evenly distributed,” adds Woolley. And teams containing more women demonstrated greater social sensitivity and in turn greater collective intelligence compared to teams containing fewer women.

However, many OD, HR and training departments still focus on individual skill development and the perennial favourite, leadership training. How often do people work in total isolation today? Why are skills taught separately from the workplace and co-workers? As for leadership, how can you decontextualize it from the workplace? Easy cookie-cutter solutions, like MBTI for leadership, are mainstream fare, even though MBTI is about as valid as astrology [I’m a reflector, completer finisher, ENTJ, inspirer – what are you?]

In the evolving social organization, we noted how knowledge workers get things done by conversing with peers, customers and partners, as they solve the problems of the day. Learning from these social interactions is a key to business innovation. To participate in their markets, organizations, customers and suppliers need to understand each other and this too, is social. Social learning is how knowledge is created, internalized and shared. It is how knowledge work gets done.

A serious re-focus is needed for organizations to take advantage of social learning in business and professional networks. Everything from team composition, job titles, performance evaluation and training approaches must be examined through the lens of [social] networks. There is solid research in social network analysis, value network analysis and social learning that can inform this shift. But leaders and managers must first put aside their old mental models, and that’s the real challenge.

With my ITA colleagues, we’re trying to start a shift to working smarter in networks, without some fancy, and unnecessary, software platform to enable it. It’s a cultural challenge to change mental models, not a technological one.

Related post: Let’s talk about work

Work is learning; so what?

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“Work is learning, learning work” – that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

(once again, apologies to Keats)

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I rewrote the above lines a while back and they sum up how networks have changed the relationship between learning and working. They’re one and the same thing, as the ubiquitous network merges work and learning.

Why?

Networks – Our workplaces, economies and societies are becoming highly networked. The transmission of ideas can be instantaneous. There is little time to pause, go into the back room for a while and develop something to address our challenges. The problem may have changed by then.

Complexity – The Cynefin framework is one way to examine established practices at work. For example, most simple and complicated work today is being automated and outsourced. Higher paid work often involves solving complex problems where there are no established answers and we need to engage the problem and learn by probing. Complexity is the new norm in the modern workplace.

Life in Perpetual Beta – Not just rapid change, but continual change, requires practices that evolve as they’re developed. In programming, this has meant a move from waterfall to agile methods. Beta releases are the norm for Web applications and as we do more on the Web, other practices are following.

The integration of learning and work is not some ideal, it is a necessity in a complex world.

Current models for managing people, training and knowledge-sharing are insufficient for a workplace that requires emergent practices to keep up with change. Looking back at best practices will only cause us to fall further behind. Formal training has only ever addressed about 20% of workplace learning and this was acceptable when the work environment was relatively stable. Knowledge workers today need to connect with others to learn and solve problems in real time.

Emergent practices can be developed collaboratively while solving problems for which there are no definitive answers. For instance, what’s the “best” Internet business model? Where once we could document knowledge and develop guidelines and practices to be followed by most workers, we now need to let workers develop their own practices, according to their particular context, which is constantly in flux. This is a very different approach from the way we designed jobs and training in the past.

So what?

Training, as a separate function from work, will become a luxury. It’s time to re-think your training strategies.

Supporting the development of emergent practices throughout the workforce will become critical to survival. Social media are tools that can help us develop emergent practices. They enable conversations between people separated by distance or time. Social media can facilitate the sharing of tacit knowledge through conversations to inform the collaborative development of emergent work practices. It’s time to master social media for your workplace.

With constant learning and unlearning required to do our work, the idea of a fixed job description and and core competencies becomes antiquated. Those who cannot adapt will be bypassed or ignored by the network. It’s time to rethink your ‘job’.

Network Learning

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I mentioned in my last post that the term “personal knowledge management” (PKM) does not adequately describe the sense-making process that I attribute to it. It’s rather obvious that knowledge cannot be managed, as Dave Jonassen has said many times:

Every amateur epistemologist knows that knowledge cannot be managed. Education has always assumed that knowledge can be transferred and that we can carefully control the process through education. That is a grand illusion.

I am extremely interested in personal sense-making processes because the Web has had a profound effect on how we communicate. The big change is not the technology per se, but the underlying structure of web technologies: the network. Without the surround of the network in a ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate world, traditional activities of journalling, letter writing and note taking would be unchanged. However, they are quite different in a network.

In a network, connections matter as much, if not more than content.

Sharing knowledge produces network effects.

In a network, nodes gain respect and trust from their activities, not their hierarchical position.

In a network, cooperation is more important than collaboration or teamwork.

As we get interconnected, networking is learning.

This is network learning; it’s an essential part of working smarter.

I plan on gradually shifting the conversation from PKM to network learning because quite often I see that what is holding back organizational change is a failure to understand that networks are quite different from hierarchies. Being a contributing node in a network is not the same as doing your job to the satisfaction of your boss. Trust is multi-way in a network while hyperlinks and social media subvert organizational control mechanisms.

Here is a note I made at a conference this week: All this talk about the digital economy and nobody really understands networks – hierarchical mental model dominates – sad :(

As Stephen Downes wrote, “In a chaotic environment, knowledge is nothing more than pattern recognition.”

Network learning helps with pattern recognition and we need to develop shared mental models of networks to get out of our command & control organizational mindsets. Personally engaging in network learning is the first step.

Using our knowledge

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“Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful.” Margaret J. Wheatley.

All the information and knowledge in the world will not help us unless we take time to reflect upon what we have learned and also do something with it. When I discuss personal knowledge management [a term that really needs to be changed and I welcome suggestions] I emphasize reflection through doing. In my case, this happens most often on my blog. Blogs are powerful tools for reflection.

Blogs act as the glue between our interactions with others, whether they be projects, meetings or conferences
Blogs are ways of mapping our personal learning journey
Every blog is unique and, over time, gives a whole-person view
Blogs encourage dialogue and help us relate to a wider audience and be more professional
Blogs provide peer feedback
Blogs can also be emotional and playful, to show and share our humanity

Reflecting by writing is a start, but then we need to integrate new ways of thinking and doing into our lives. This is the tough part, of course. It’s difficult to change old habits, but I think that by posting our vision on our blogs we raise the stakes. We are telling the world what we stand for. We are setting higher expectations. And this is a good beginning: reflection, followed by making our thoughts explicit and public. As I mentioned in my last post, we’re often too busy to reflect. The discipline of writing is one way to begin our journey to wisdom. Then we need to act on our words.

The conference rut

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I’ve been thinking about knowledge sharing, after attending a couple of conferences in a row and heading off to another. One thing missing in these discrete time-based events is that there is litle time for reflection. Most presenters hold back their knowledge in order to “deliver” it just before the big official presentation. This presentation is followed by some immediate questions & discussions and a coffee break. Then it’s off to see the next presentation. Reflection, if it occurs, comes much later, and usually after the participants have gone home.

Of course, those of us who live in the internet cloud have no difficulties staying in touch, both before and after these events, and often during the event on some backchannel.

Observing inefficient, and I believe ineffective, knowledge sharing due to the lack of opportunities to connect before or after the event is rather frustrating. For instance, a problem is presented in a plenary session and participants are immediately asked to brainstorm & give feedback. Why was the issue not presented weeks ahead of time? What can be achieved in 10 minutes of thinking on demand?What is really achieved with 50 to 100 people in a room, a presenter and then questions from the floor? If we want to innovate in our organizations, we should be innovating how we share information. The tools and techniques are there, but the conference rut is a deep one to get out of.

A framework for the social enterprise

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I have put together two of the major articles on social learning in the enterprise that were posted here this year. A framework for social learning drew on my collaboration with colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance and the evolving social organization was co-authored by Thierry deBaillon.


Please feel free to share this 18 page white paper as I hope it will encourage more conversations on how we can integrate learning and working, a key part of enabling Enterprise 2.0.

Social Enterprise White Paper (PDF)

Open Innovation

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The most interesting presentation at last week’s ACCTCanada Directors Forum was, in my opinion, on open innovation by Angus Livingstone, UILO at UBC. Much of the discussion by other presenters focused on patents and other control mechanisms, while Angus showed the shifting paradigms that we are experiencing in university knowledge transfer. He explained that the main shift over the next five years will be from closed to open innovation, in parallel with shifts from outputs to impacts and from transactions to relationships. Angus highlighted the old paradigm:

  • Patents
  • Licenses
  • Spin-offs
  • Proprietary industry research funding

and showed the new paradigm:

  • Industry engagement
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Knowledge mobilization

Since hearing that presentation and reflecting on the slides that Angus sent me, I came across Ed Morrison’s paper on how regional innovation clusters form. The initial step is to change the conversation.


The shifting conversation then encourages learning networks to develop, from which can emerge a concerted strategy for innovation. Ed calls the underlying activity, strategic doing:

Networks are complex adaptive systems. We can guide these networks, even manage them, if we follow simple rules. And that’s the point. We cannot guide complexity with complexity. Strategy in complex adaptive systems emerges from  following simple disciplines.

Both Angus Livingstone and Ed Morrison show that innovation is dependent on learning in networks. Social learning is about getting things done in networks. It is a constant flow of listening, observing, doing, and sharing. Effective working in networks requires cooperation, meaning there is no fixed plan, structure or direct feedback. Through social learning we can co-develop emergent practices. Social learning is how we move from transactions to relationships and foster knowledge mobilization.

Social learning is not some buzz word from the HR department but is a critical component in fostering innovation and hence prosperity. It’s the ‘how’ of business innovation and is important for decision-makers to not only understand but to embrace by doing. This is why I say that work is learning and learning is the work. Life in perpetual Beta is what every leader and manager needs to understand today.