I’ve been putting together a series of thoughts on slides to share my perspectives on work and learning in the network era. I’ve called these presentations visual calling cards. The words on these slides come from the posts I’ve written here over several years.
While discussing my latest slide series with my colleague Jane Hart, we wondered which format would be preferable: a slideshow controlled by the viewer, or slides set to music in a streaming video. Does the music and flow enhance or detract from the presentation?
In the spirit of learning by doing, I’ll let you decide. Feedback is always appreciated.
The network era workplace requires collaboration and cooperation because complex problems cannot be solved alone. Tacit knowledge, that which cannot be codified or put into a database, needs to flow. Social learning, developed through many conversations, enables this flow of tacit knowledge. This is not ‘nonsense chat’, as traditional management might view it, but essential for creating stronger bonds in professional social networks. Companies have to foster richer and deeper connections which can only be built over time through meaningful conversations. This is why social learning in the workplace is necessary for business.
Worker autonomy is a foundation stone for effective social learning. It is also the lubricant for an agile organization, where initiative, creativity and passion are encouraged. Individual autonomy in turn fosters group diversity.
As traditional core business activities get automated or outsourced, almost all high value work will be done at the outer edge of organizations. Life is complex and even chaotic on this fuzzy edge. Here, where things are less homogeneous, there is more diversity and there are more opportunities for innovation. Individuals, project teams, and companies have to move operations to the edge to stay current. Business models today need to be more open, networked, and cooperative to stay competitive in the hyper-connected economy.
Change and complexity are becoming the norm in our work. We already see this with increasing numbers of freelancers and contractors. Any work where complexity is not the norm will be of diminishing value.
Embracing complexity is where the future of work lies.
“I think the singular SME is an antiquated a notion as the solitary game player & our development pipelines need to change.” writes Mark Oehlert, on Twitter. Mark coined the term, subject matter networks, as a change from the industrial concept of subject matter expert, or SME, a term I first heard in the military in the mid-1970’s. But the world has changed and most notably during the past decade.
Image: Clark Quinn
We have become connected
With all of these connections, complexity ensues. Markets in Asia can have an impact on a local grocer. The release of not-so-secret diplomatic cables influence events like the Arab Spring.
In a complex world the optimal social form is the multi-organizational network and emergent practices must be continuously developed through cooperation. In such an environment, the lone expert is at a disadvantage. He or she cannot learn and adapt as fast as a cooperative network.
So the critical skills for people formerly known as SME’s are how to become contributing members of subject matter networks. Part of this is in narrating one’s work and learning. I have called personal knowledge mastery (PKM) – our part of the social learning contract. One cannot be effective in professional networks without contributing. Subject matter networks are made up of many contributors. A key skill is in weaving the best networks together.
We collectively realized before forming the Internet Time Alliance that we were much less effective on our own than working cooperatively. Based on the feedback and interest from many people over the past year, I think we will see more cooperative alliances created. Part of our advantage is the ability to bring many subject matter networks together.
Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, and networks subvert standardization.
In the industrial era we saw the rise of specialized departments and specialized jobs. Any job could be generically designed and then filled by the most suitable applicant. People became interchangeable pieces for the mechanistic model of work. As jobs are to departments, roles are to networks. Eric Mcluhan states that in the new [network] era; “jobs disappear under electric conditions and they are replaced by roles. Roles mean audiences and participation.”
Roles are based on relationships. Without relationships, there are no roles. In the 21st century workplace, roles are emergent properties of value networks, not pre-defined by HR.
All of the support functions that grew during the late 20th century are like the blind monks examining the elephant in the room – the network. Everyone is struggling to understand the network era, but no one is budging from their observation position. And so they remain blind.
One of the biggest challenges I see on a regular basis is getting people to think in terms of networks, then in terms of relationships. From a learning perspective, this is what connectivism is about: knowledge exists within systems which are accessed through people participating in activities. It is by doing our work that we co-create our roles in our networks. Roles emerge from the activities involved in working with others toward some common purpose. This is social. Social media are merely a conduit for collaboration.
Social learning is an enabler. In the network era, systemic changes are sensed almost immediately so that organizational reaction times and feedback loops have to be faster. One obstacle to this is that we are more inclined to ask for advice only from those we trust, but trust takes time to nurture. By sharing experiences (learning socially), trust emerges. A trusting workplace is a learning workplace and one that can adapt faster to change.
A workplace that encourages social learning can more easily become a social business. Social business emerges from social learning that itself emerges from collaborative work. All of this happens within networks. Existing departments need to become contributing nodes in their respective networks or face obsolescence. As workers become more collaborative and networked, they will bypass non-contributing nodes. If a department is not part of the networked workflow, or tries to block it, it is part of the problem.
The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it – Gilmore’s Law
Those specialized departments of the 20th century need to engage in social learning, by modelling behaviour and continuously developing next practices to adapt to changing conditions. This is the challenge to remain relevant in the 21st century workplace. Learn or die.
This isn’t the Information Age, it’s the Learning Age; and the quicker people get their heads around that, the better – Prof Stephen Heppell
Look at how F.W. Taylor in Principles of Scientific Management (1911), described the role of management for the industrial era:
It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.
In the network era, social learning must be supported, roles emerge from networks, work has more variety and less standardization, and businesses must be social in order to deal with increasing complexity. I have suggested something more like this:
It is only through innovative and contextual methods, the self-selection of the most appropriate tools and work conditions and willing cooperation that more productive work can be assured. The duty of being transparent in our work and sharing our knowledge rests with all workers.
It boils down to the fact that in the network era, value is derived from workforce collaboration, where you are either contributing to the network, or you are no longer required.
Over the past year I have been working on change initiatives to improve collaboration and knowledge-sharing with two large companies, one of them a multinational. In each case, implementation has boiled down to two components: individual skills & organizational support. Effective organizational collaboration comes about when workers regularly narrate their work within a structure that encourages transparency and shares power & decision-making. I have also learned that changing work routines can be a messy process that requires significant time, much of it dedicated to modelling behaviours.
My Internet Time Alliance colleague, Jane Hart, notes, ” … as for the new social and collaboration skills that workers require, well you simply can’t train people to be social! What was required was getting down and dirty and helping people understand what it actually meant to work collaboratively in the new social workplace, and the value that this would bring to them.”
Jane refers to the collaboration pyramid by Oscar Berg, an excellent model to show what needs to be addressed to become a social business.
The low visibility activities link directly to personal knowledge mastery (PKM) skills, based on the process of Seeking information & knowledge; making Sense of it; and Sharing higher value information with others. These individual activities are not a single skill-set that can be trained in a classroom. They have to be internalized and perceived as valuable to each person in order to achieve the discipline to use them regularly. Every person’s PKM processes will differ. As Jane notes, one size doesn’t fit all.
It is a difficult path to get acceptance that each worker is responsible for his or her own learning and additionally must be a contributing member of a network. PKM is individuals retaking control of learning, and making it transparent. It takes time, but it also requires a receptive environment.
Creating a supportive social environment is management’s responsibility. These activities are shown on the upper part of the pyramid, above the water line. Some specific examples of activities I have been involved in over the past year include:
Support for small innovation teams to initiate and practice the new collaboration and knowledge-sharing skills.
Daily routines of posting observations and sharing with team members.
Weekly “virtual coffee” to catch up and help build social bonds.
Adding activity-stream technologies to productivity tool suites.
Constant analysis of activity data.
Providing dedicated time for reflection [this is a tough one to get management buy-in].
Regular mediated events like “Yam-Jams” on a select theme.
Creation of internal communications material to make social learning and social business more understandable.
Professional development activities using the same social media as will be used to work.
Face to face social activities.
Many conversations [usually Skype or telephone] and much one-on-one support as people work at becoming more social.
My experience is that changing to more collaborative, networked ways of work requires coordinated change activities from both the top and the bottom. It has to be a two-pronged approach and it will take some time and effort.
Note: Oscar Berg has made a higher resolution image available on Flickr with a CC-BY license: The Collaboration Pyramid
You are engaging with social media for marketing and customer support. You have also put in place a social intranet, with activity streams for sharing information, collaboration tools for work teams and document management systems that include social tags and easy sharing. Now the hard work begins. However, this usually occurs just after the software vendors have provided the initial training and you are now on your own as an organization. You’re ready to be a social business; everyone is connected but few know what to do.
Social Media are New Languages
Social media can have a strong influence on the individual, very much in a McLuhanesque tetrad of media effects way. Those who come to social media for the first time are like adults learning a new language. They cannot start with the same advanced mental models and metaphors they may have in a primary language. Furthermore, once they get to an advanced level in this new language, its idioms, metaphors and culture may have changed how they think in that language. This is the real change process enabled by social business; people will start thinking differently.
Social media change the way we communicate. Write a blog for a year or more and your writing will change. Use Twitter for some time and get a sense of being connected to many people and understanding them on a different level. Patterns emerge over time. Even the ubiquitous Facebook changes how we react to being apart from friends. Social media change the way we think.
Each time we adopt a new social medium we start at the bottom, or at the single node level. We have to make connections with what will become our network, either by connecting to existing relationships or doing something that helps to create new relationships, like creating content for sharing. Starting over, in each medium, can be daunting, especially for someone in a position of authority who is concerned about image or influence.
But we need to actually use social media to understand what it’s like to be a node in a social network. There is little in the industrial workplace or public school system to prepare us for this. Therefore we won’t even know what we’re talking about until we learn the new language of social media and online networks, and the only way to learn a new language is through practice.
The Transparent Workplace
While people may say it’s not about the technology, that’s where a large share of the budget goes in any major change initiative. The bigger change to manage is getting people to work transparently. Transparency is a necessity for cooperation and collaboration in networks. A major benefit of using social media is increasing speed of access to knowledge. However, if the information is not shared by people, it will not be found.
In this newly transparent workplace, there is no place to hide, or as Mark Britz wrote, “Social Media spreads your culture quickly … for better or worse.” This change alone can be enough to cause massive organizational upheaval. It must be addressed by modelling good network era behaviours. Working smarter is not just about using technologies but changing our routines and procedures. With greater transparency, information now flows horizontally as well as vertically. New patterns and dynamics emerge from interconnected people and interlinked information flows, and these will bypass established structures and services.
With the democratization of information, user-generated content is ubiquitous. Search engines give each worker more information and knowledge than any CEO had 10 years ago. Pervasive connectivity changes organizational power structures, though the full effects of this take time to be visible. From this transparent environment new leaders and experts will emerge. It will take different leadership, or leadership for networks, to support collaboration and social learning in the workplace.
Agile organizations need people who can work in concert on solving problems. People need to change how they work and all the knowledge and courses won’t help. Management must ask – “How can we help you work in this new transparent environment?” – and take action, not once, but continuously.
Setting the Example
In social networks we often learn from each other; modelling behaviours, telling stories, and sharing what we know. While not highly efficient, this can be very effective learning. There is a need to model the new behaviours of being transparent and narrating one’s work. There is also a need to share power, for how long will workers collaborate and share if they cannot take action with this new knowledge? Modelling the new behaviours will take time and trust.
Since all these social technologies cannot model the new work behaviours themselves, who will? The organization will, by fostering communities of practice. These can be bridges between work teams and open social networks, with narration of work an enabler of knowledge-sharing. One determinant of effective professional communities is whether they actually change practices. Only then will we know if the social business initiative has been successful.
Organizations adopting social business need to find people who can model the behaviours, not just talk about them. They should identify people who already narrate their work, share transparently and create user-generated content. Organizations should get advice from people who share power and do most of their work in networks. If there is nobody to model network era behaviours in the organization, how will people learn? From Facebook?
What if your organization got rid of the Learning & Development function? What would the average manager or department head do? What would workers do?
I’ve been thinking about this for a while. When work is learning, and learning is the work, training that is pushed from outside has less relevance. The L&D department is supposed to ensure that training is appropriate for the job, but with jobs constantly morphing into something else, a major disconnect is developing between the doers and the trainers. How many people take courses that are not relevant to their current work or are provided at the wrong time?
Let me propose some things managers and knowledge workers can do without a Learning & Development department.
Observe how people are learning to do their work already. Find these natural pathways and reinforce them.
Connect any “how-to” learning to the actual task. Show and tell only works if it can be put into practice. The forgetting curve is steep when there is no practice.
Make it everyone’s job to share what they learn. Have you ever noticed how easy it is to find “how-to” videos and explanations on the Web? That’s because someone has taken the time to post them. Everyone in the organization should do this, whether it’s a short text, a photo, a post, an article, a presentation with notes, or a full-blown video.
Make space to talk about things and capture what is passed on. Get these conversations in the open where they can be shared. Provide time and space for reflection and reading. There is more knowledge outside any organization than inside.
Break down barriers. Establish transparency as the default mode, so that anyone can know what others are doing. Unblock communication bottlenecks, like supervisors who control information flow. If supervisors can’t handle an open environment, get rid of them, because they are impeding organizational learning and it’s now mission critical.
If you do have an L&D department, share what you are doing and perhaps they will help you become more self-sufficient for your organizational learning. If they don’t, ignore them, as they will be going away anyway.
In social networks we can learn from each other; modelling behaviours, telling stories, and sharing what we know. This may not be highly efficient, but it it can be very effective. You will know you’re in a real community of practice if it changes your practices.
Education and training are shaping technologies. They reward successive approximations of the desired behaviour. Modelling, on the other hand, is the foundation of social learning:
Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory posits that people learn from one another, via observation, imitation, and modeling. The theory has often been called a bridge between behaviorist and cognitive learning theories because it encompasses attention, memory, and motivation.
If we look at how organizational training & development has functioned, it has been separate from the work being done and focused on shaping behaviours. There is strong evidence that we need to integrate learning into our work in order to deal with the increasing complexity of knowledge work. The valued work in the enterprise is increasing in variety and decreasing in standardization. I have suggested that communities of practice are the bridge between work teams and open social networks, with narration of work an enabler of knowledge-sharing, and of course, modelling behaviour.
The way that Triple Creek [I have no relationship with this company] positions its Open Mentoring platform is a current example of a tool that could enhance social learning (modelling) in the bridging area that communities of practice can offer.
As long as this type of tool is not tied to any team, project or supervisor, it could help connect members of a community of practice. The challenge would be in finding a balance between intrinsic and extrinsic goals. Too much shaping and not enough modelling could turn this into one more thing that has to be done (like annual performance reviews).
Communities are more like dance halls than factories. Platforms that have too much control will not be adopted on a community level. As a consultant, I would like to be able to recommend a variety of these platforms, that can inter-operate on some level, so that enterprise communities can choose the most suitable ones for their stage of development. All communities of practice are unique and will grow, mature and often die over time. No single platform will meet all community needs, but if it supports one of these principles for working smarter – Transparency, Narration of Work or Distribution of Power – it would be worth checking out.
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:
Behave like humans, not faceless entities
Ditch the rule books and embrace values
Live their values
Trust people and create trusted environments
Embrace transparency
Embrace diversity
Never compromise on quality
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
