SocialLearning

Social learning

keeping in front of change

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When the SARS-2 pandemic hit the global community, many organizations were able to quickly pivot to remote work, among other adaptations. This will likely not be the last pandemic and other crises will emerge that will require more adaptations to how work gets done. The AI tidal wave may even increase the pace of change. In these environments, learning and innovation have to be woven into the fabric of daily work.

“In a crisis, you should always deploy an innovation team alongside the business recovery teams … to capture the novel practices … put naive observers in alongside the incident team to capture the key learning points.” —Dave Snowden, Complexity Expert

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“it was 20 years ago today”

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Today marks the 20th anniversary of Jarche Consulting. There were several times when I thought that I would not make it this far. The roller coaster ride continues, having weathered the great recession and a pandemic. Who knows what the future will bring? For now, I am grateful to my friends, colleagues, and especially my repeat clients who continue to have confidence in my work. It has been a great pleasure.

Writing on this blog, after +19 years, continues to be a primary way that I make sense and connect with people around the globe. Here are some thoughts I shared along the way as I marked other anniversaries.

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“a pandemic of thoughtlessness”

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Christopher Lydon, host of Radio OpenSource, interviews two humanists on failing intelligence.

“Robert Pogue Harrison is our Dante scholar at Stanford, our professional humanist, and a West Coast friend in smart podcasting. We asked ChatGPT about his voice, and we got the instant answer that his voice “has a certain mellowness and introspection” that go with his ‘keen ear for language and a precise, articulate way of expressing his ideas’. He’s joined by Ana Ilievska, initials A.I. She is Robert’s colleague from Europe in humanistic studies at Stanford. Recently, in the podcast Entitled Opinions, they both defended AI as a wake-up call, maybe in the nick of time, to rescue humanity, human stewardship, human culture from its corrupted condition. They both said they expect their students to use AI and to learn from it.” —2023-05-04

Highlights

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diversity > learning > trust

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“What is dumbing so many people down?” asks Henry Mintzberg. His explanations 1 and 2 [quote below with my emphasis added] resonate with me, as I have promoted the idea that we need to connect our work, our communities, and our networks to make sense by engaging with people and ideas. The core of this is curiosity, especially about other people, as well as ourselves.
Be a curious learner — about ideas, people, and oneself

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start planting

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Social learning is a regular topic on this blog and I gave a presentation on the power of social learning earlier this year. The following quotes show how learning from and with each other is a critical part of human and societal development.

“Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.” —Albert Bandura 1977

“As part of a social network, we transcend ourselves, for good or ill, and become a part of something much larger. We are connected.” —Katherine Giuffre 2010

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“the future cracked open”

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Race Bannon sees AI (or really machine learning) changing many jobs, such as technical writing, in the near future.

“I believe within 5-10 years much of technical documentation will be written by AI. Certainly, the basic procedural stuff (Step 1, Step 2, and so on) will be written by AI, but even the contextual stuff surrounding the procedural documentation (use cases, examples, and implementation tips) will be written by AI eventually too.” —The Future of Technical Writing

In The Atlantic, Derek Thompson thinks that creativity will not save our jobs from AI.

We may be in a “golden age” of AI, as many have claimed. But we are also in a golden age of grifters and Potemkin inventions and aphoristic nincompoops posing as techno-oracles. The dawn of generative AI that I envision will not necessarily come to pass. So far, this technology hasn’t replaced any journalists, or created any best-selling books or video games, or designed some sparkling-water advertisement, much less invented a horrible new form of cancer. But you don’t need a wild imagination to see that the future cracked open by these technologies is full of awful and awesome possibilities. —The Atlantic 2022-12-01

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revisiting self-determination theory

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Self-determination theory states that there are three universal human drivers — autonomy, competence, and relatedness. We need some control over our lives, we want to be good at something, and we want to feel that we can relate to other people. These three drivers are what make us do what we do. Skills are just one aspect of being engaged at work. Even highly competent skilled workers can be disengaged or aimless.

One effect of the network era, and its pervasive digital connections, is that networks are replacing or subverting more traditional hierarchies. Three aspects of this effect are — access to almost unlimited information, the ability for almost anyone to self-publish, and limitless opportunities for ridiculously easy group-forming.

Clay Shirky discussed this third aspect in Here Comes Everybody (2008).

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“warts and all”

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Helen Blunden is the inaugural winner of the ITA Jay Cross Award (2016). Jay had a significant influence on my life and it was sad to say farewell in 2015. Helen’s latest blog post in many ways reflects some of the challenges that Jay faced. He was outside the mainstream. Jay was constantly shifting his business model. He was always looking for ways to be innovative but not a slave to the status quo. Helen has also been transparent and open with the challenges she has faced, doubly so as a woman in business.

“Some time ago, I asked the question Should I Get Off YouTube?

The reason is that after getting off social media, I’m reflecting on every single aspect of my working life and my output that I have shared online since 2011.

With over 500 videos of working and sharing my lessons, experiments, projects, questions out loud to the world, I realised that I had an immense body of work that I put out to the world. Some of which helped me in my working life but in many aspects, putting myself ‘out there’ meant that I was also at a greater risk of failing publicly because showing the ‘warts and all’ is bad for business. To be successful in business is to create illusions.

And so fail I did. I never was a good illusionist.

Instead I wanted to build a model that wasn’t following what others were doing. In some way, I wanted to lead something new and different – something inspirational.

In particular, I baulked at the idea of having to build myself into a ‘thought leader or entrepreneur’ and then base a consulting business where I had to rely on being at the whim of platform algorithms; to build a business around my expertise, which then I could extract huge amounts of money from subscribers or corporate customers.

That business model never sat well with me as I espoused continual and lifelong learning NOT as a ‘thought leader’ of lifelong learning.

There was always a contradiction that never sat well with me because I was always learning.” —Helen Blunden 2022-10-22

As Hugh McLeod so articulately captured, there are challenges to being either a sheep or a wolf. Helen is a wolf.

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the power of story

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Stories are powerful ways of sharing knowledge

In 2006 while the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry was fighting in Afghanistan, Professor Anne Irwin observed how soldiers decompressed and learned through storytelling.

When they are out in the field and return from a patrol, the exhausted soldiers relax together in small, tightly-knit groups – Irwin calls them “nesting circles” – and recount the events of the day or the mission.

Each soldier contributes a story, an anecdote or even a joke, adding stock and spice into what becomes a collective stew of experiences, she said. They also playfully insult each other.

The storytelling not only helps forge the individual identity of each soldier, it builds interpersonal relationships that can have a bearing on how well the unit performs on the battlefield.

“Joking is a big part of it, and teasing,” she said. “It is not abuse. If you have been teased harshly it lets you know that you are part of the group.”

—John Cotter, Canadian Press, July 03, 2006

Even though these soldiers had all been formally trained and had worked and fought together, there was still a need to make sense of their continuing experiences. Informal and social learning can be the glue that helps keep them together during tough times.

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learning on the edge of chaos

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“the future of work will be based on hacking uncertainty” —Esko Kilpi

Esko Kilpi passed away in early 2020 and his work had informed my own for many years. He published a number of essays on Medium and I would like to curate some of the highlights from 2019.

“Instead of thinking about the organization let’s think about organizing as an ongoing thing. Then the managerial task, but not necessarily a manager’s task, is to make possible very easy and very fast responsive interaction and formation of interdependent individuals into value creating groups.” —2019-01-15

“We live in a time when we have compartmentalized ourselves into disciplines, using highly engineered processes in the name of efficiency and productivity. But if success is a result of learning and innovation, we need to think differently, we need to cross boundaries to create new insights.
Crossing boundaries is always about working with differences. This is why differences are potentially conflictual in nature, and this is something we should now welcome. Conflicts give rise to the possibility of innovation and the potential for finding totally new solutions.” —2019-01-21

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