SocialLearning

Social learning

PKM live with Euan Semple

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Seb Paquet describes the social web as enabling “ridiculously easy group-forming”, and that’s what we did. During our PKM Workshop this week, we discussed the books we would recommend to others. Euan Semple’s “Organizations Don’t Tweet” came up and I mentioned that I had reviewed it. I also suggested that Euan might be available to discuss the book. He graciously agreed to talk with us, even though his work schedule is quite hectic. This evening we set-up a Google+ hangout and Euan talked about several ideas in the book as well as some of his experiences as a change agent in large organizations.

I started the conversation by mentioning the direct connection between PKM and the chapter on Literacy Re-discovered:

Things to remember:

  • Having somewhere to write like a blog or Twitter makes you more aware of what is happening around you.
  • We are communicating more to each other through the medium of writing than we have done for decades.
  • Writing an effective blog post or tweet is a literary skill.
  • Much business writing is badly done and ineffective.
  • The metaphor of the document has become a liability in the era of blogs and Wikipedia.
  • Improving our writing skills and seeing it as part of everyone’s job will improve the effectiveness of our organizations.

A number of other observations were shared, and the group is now gathering its notes together in our discussion forum and continuing to learn together. We practised Seek (find books & authors), Sense (get recommendations for our context), and Share (have a conversation and narrate our learning). It was great to see this in action. It was a real bonus for the workshop, and something we hope to keep doing in future workshops, when the opportunity arises. As Hugh says:

Getting people together across multiple timezones and several countries to have a meaningful conversation is now ridiculously easy. Sometimes we forget just how revolutionary this is.

How blogging changed my life for the better

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I guess I could be described as a hardcore blogger, as I’ve been writing here for over eight years. So I’m going to respond to Hugh MacLeod’s question about the importance of blogging to me.

Like I said many times before, for those of us crazy enough to take it seriously, blogging matters, so does freedom, that’s why I wrote the book. And yeah, we have a duty to convince those less fortunate than ourselves to give it some more thought.

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  1. I live in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada; population 5,000. Even our timezone is unknown to many people. Without my blog, nobody would ever have heard of me. This Spring, I have four speaking engagements out of town (Montreal, Ottawa, Washington DC, Rome). Without my blog, I am sure that IEEE and many other organizations would not have invited me to speak.
  2. My blog is a key part of my professional development and essential to my personal knowledge mastery processes. It’s how I make sense of many things. My blog keeps me connected.
  3. I initially met my business partners at the Internet Time Alliance through my blog. That was a very good thing!
  4. My blog has allowed me to connect to people all over the world. This year alone, I have had visitors from 168 countries. It means that I can often travel to a new city and already know someone at my destination.
  5. In addition, my blog gives me (just a little bit of) credibility with the much younger digital generation ;)

It's not about knowledge transfer

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In 2009 I listened to Peter Senge’s keynote address at the CSTD national conference. His research findings showed that the average life expectancy of large companies is about 30 years, but some are over 200 years old, and the key driver for their longevity is organizational learning. Individual learning in organizations is irrelevant, as work is almost never done by one person alone. Knowledge, Senge said, is the capacity for effective action (know how) and it is the only aspect of knowledge that really matters in business and life. Value is created by teams and mostly by networks of people. While learning may be generated in teams, this type of knowledge comes and goes. Learning really spreads through social networks.

Another point that stuck with me, as I had witnessed this, was Senge’s observation that the field of knowledge management had been co-opted by information technology vendors, and had become useless for organizational learning. I was reminded of this while reading, Lost Knowledge: What are you and your organization doing about it? –

Executives have known about “lost knowledge” and retiring Boomers for years, and yet very few companies have taken steps to insure that there is some sort of effective knowledge transfer from Boomers to younger employees.

Knowledge cannot be transferred. This is the big conceit of knowledge management. This “loss of knowledge” when older workers retire is a symptom of a structural problem. It shows that the company never gave any thought to organizational learning.

Successful, and long-lived, organizations do this all the time, not just when a demographic blip hits them.

Retiring baby-boomers are just one more wake-up call to dysfunctional organizations.

Feedforward

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One of the consultant’s dilemmas is that you have to stay ahead of the curve to remain relevant. Yesterday’s problem doesn’t need to be solved – there’s probably an app for that already. This is why “perpetual Beta” informs all of my work.

I used to work as a training designer but there’s really not much to differentiate one course from another. Training content development has become a commodity and many companies are forced to compete on price. Even performance consulting, a good part of my consulting business for the first five years, is becoming more commonplace (and that’s a good thing). I’m now focused on working smarter, helping organizations integrate learning into the workflow, especially using social media.

More and more people in the workforce are now facing the same challenges as consultants. How can they re-skill and provide services for today’s and tomorrow’s problems, not yesterday’s? Schools don’t help much, with curriculum that is developed looking back at best practices and only reviewed every few years. Off-the-shelf training programs sure aren’t of much use, having been reduced to the lowest, and simplest, common denominator.

As I work with our PKM Workshop, now in progress, I realize that I have to keep things up to date and reflective of the participants’ needs. Before I release an assignment or resource, I have to review it in light of the current context. Sometimes I add in new discoveries just hours before publishing. This is professional development in perpetual Beta. I think more and more professional programming will go this way in time. MOOC’s are another example of this non-fixed curriculum perspective.

There is no normal. We need to think like artists, less concerned with feedback and more focused on feedforward.

Thus, the artist’s job is to dislocate the old media through their art to reveal the ground effects of the new media. McLuhan’s observations are as relevant now as they were forty years ago: The artist is the person in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. S/he is the person of integral awareness. ~ Mark Federman

Variety and diversity

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Esko Kilpi made a series of tweets today that I wanted to collect in a single post:

Unlike mechanical systems, human systems thrive on variety and diversity.
An exact replication of behavior in nature would be disastrous and seen as neurotic in social life.
The Internet changes the patterns of connectivity.
The Internet transforms our understanding what “local” is, makes possible wide participation and new enriching variety in interaction.
All human systems are connected and connected systems cannot be understood in terms of isolated parts
The unit of analysis is now communication and emergence, not entities.
The perspective of network science views knowledge as socially created and socially re-created.
Management literature typically emphasizes individuals and locates explanatory power in their personal properties.
The potential of social media cannot be realized without a very different epistemological grounding, a relational perspective.
Independently existing people and things then become viewed as co-constructed in coordinated networked action.

variety diversity

learning is not something to get

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“When times were tough, training departments slashed budgets by replacing face-to-face instruction with online reading. They failed to follow through with the discussions, practice, social processing, and reinforcement that makes lessons stick. It didn’t work. Most eLearning is ineffective drudgery.” —Jay Cross

In too many cases we view learning as something that is done to people. It’s almost as if we are goin’ to get some learnin’! We think we can ‘get’ an education or ‘get people trained’. This is absurd.

university class bologna 1350s
University Class, Bologna, 1350s

A wonderful example is provided from a possible near-future in one of Margaret Atwood’s absorbingly dystopic novels.

“I was going to Martha Graham [College] partly to get away from Lucerne, but also I had to do something so I might as well get an education. That’s how they talked about it, as if an education was a thing you got, like a dress.” —The Year of the Flood

We need to look at work and learning together. A workscape perspective can help us see how learning and working are interrelated in a business environment that is a complex, interconnected ecosystem today. But this causes problems for our current management and organizational models.

“Workscape: A metaphorical construct where learning is embedded in the work and emerges in ‘pull’ mode. It is a fluid, holistic, process. Learning emerges as a result of working smarter. In this environment learning is natural, social, spontaneous, informal, unbounded, adaptive, and fun. It involves conversation as the main ingredient.” —Jay Cross

If learning is everywhere, then who is in charge of it?

If learning is the work, why do we need a separate department responsible for managing it?

If workers are responsible for learning, why can’t they take control of it?

Our networked reality is changing how we view workplace learning. The questioning is already happening.  The basics of our economy are in question. Copyright is no longer the bastion of our knowledge economy. Complexity informs every aspect of our lives. So why should learning be controlled by some external, and usually not that important, department?

Individuals need to take control of their learning in a world where they are simultaneously connected, mobile, and global; while conversely contractual, part-time, and local. Organizations must also move learning away from training and HR, as some external band-aid solution that gets called in from time to time, to an essential part of doing business in the network age. Learning has to be owned by the workers and learning support has to be a business function. Then we can get on with net work.

CSTD Montreal Symposium

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I will speaking this week in Montréal at CSTD’s Symposium. Please note there are two Harolds as keynote presenters! My topic is The Future of the Training Department.

Here’s the set up.

Most training activity for the past century assumed that you could prepare people for the future by training them in what had worked in the past. Yesterday’s best practices were the appropriate prescription for today’s problems. That worked when the world was stable and things remained the same over time.

At this point in the 21st century, the game is changing. Complexity and our interconnectivity have rendered the world unpredictable. The orientation of learning is shifting from the past (efficiency, best practices) to the future (creative responses, innovation). Workplace learning is morphing from blocks of training followed by doing the work, to a merging of work and learning. Change is continuous, so learning must be continuous.

To justify its continuing existence, the training department must shift direction in three areas:

  • Embrace complexity and be open to uncertainty
  • Move from a Push to a Pull orientation
  • Adopt new frameworks to support learning in the workflow

I’ll be discussing a potential framework for the future training department this Friday.

One final thought. In the future, it will not likely be called the training department and may not even be a department.

The only knowledge that can be managed is our own

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“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.” – Dave Jonassen

The only knowledge that can be managed is our own. In my opinion, knowledge management should be about supporting personal knowledge mastery in networks, with a distributed, not centralized, approach. Net Work Literacy entails self-organized learning while cooperating in diverse networks. Each of us is responsible for our own learning and in this network era we are now obliged to share that learning. If no one shared what they have learned there would be no Wikipedia or other free learning resources on the web.

Shifting to Net Work

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Our first Net Work Literacy session ends this week. There were several reasons why Jane Hart and I decided to offer this two-week online programe. The idea first came to me as I realized how many of my clients and colleagues were not as connected as they could be, too often wasting their time on routine things and not building networks that could help them get work done.

I’ve also noticed that people in their mid to late job careers are woefully unprepared to adapt to a post-job world, where work is simultaneously connected, contractual, part-time, global and local. Once the job is gone, many also lose their professional networks. The Net Work Literacy programme aims at getting people to think in terms of networks, with a focus on taking control of their professional development.

Our programme is global in scope, with participants from four continents so far. However, a key to long term success in learning and working in a post-industrial society is connecting these global learning networks with one’s local community. As energy costs increase, more of our resources will have to be local. Using network skills at the local level, connected to a global support network, is one way to develop a sustainable way of life.

As we continue with the Net Work Literacy programme, I intend on getting more stories about what is happening in various localities and learn how people are dealing with what my friend Bill Draves calls a Nine Shift.

There are 24 hours in a day. We have no real discretion with roughly 12 of those hours. We need to eat, sleep, and do a few other necessary chores in order to maintain our existence. That hasn’t changed much through the centuries, so far.

That leaves approximately 12 hours a day where we, as individuals, do have some discretion. That includes work time, play time, and family time.

Of those 12 hours, about 75%, or 9 hours, will be spent totally differently a few years from now than they were spent just a few years ago. Not everything will change, but 75% of life is in the process of changing right now.

Social business drives workforce development

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In a workscape perspective I described how new frameworks help management, HR and L&D professionals get away from the trees to see the forest of workforce development.

Earlier, in Bridging the Gap; Working Smarter, I explained how loose external networks are necessary to have access to diverse opinions, while work teams need to share complex knowledge and therefore have to build strong, collaborative relationships.

Communities of practice are the bridges between the work being done and diverse social networks, fostering cooperation without hierarchical structure.

Basically, collaboration is necessary to do complicated, but manageable, project tasks; while a looser form of cooperation helps to understand more complex and not yet manageable problems. Cooperation is moving from a soft skill to a required hard skill.

From this perspective, the best way to develop internal workforce support structures (what used to be called learning & development) is from the outside in.

Start with what is being constantly learned in professional social networks and harvest it for insights.

Discuss these ideas cooperatively in communities of practice and then test out ways to enhance collaboration (Probe-Sense-Respond).

Through collaborative work, get feedback on where performance support may be required and if training is needed.

In this way, the externally focused social business, and everyone in it, drives the development tools and methods to support the work being done.

Everyone is involved in what used to be the instructional design process, but now there is a focus on collaboration first, performance support when needed, and training as the last choice.