ConnectedEnterprise – Page 14

Learning is too important to be left to the professionals

2021-10-182013-07-01 by Harold Jarche

Workplace learning professionals are in for a shock. Business is waking up to the fact that learning is now mission critical. Will executives continue to allow learning policy to reside in a separate department or some sub-department of HR for much longer? Do you think they will let “learning professionals” maintain sole control? I doubt it; especially if the military, which is either training for war or engaged in one, is an example.

For example, the military lets training specialists and schools run individual training, but even more time and effort is put into collective training that emphasizes social and informal learning. The latter is run by operators (e.g. line of business owners) not learning specialists. I think business is going there as well, if the struggle over control of enterprise social media is an indicator – and the learning function seldom is allowed to run it. Using the 70:20:10 lens, it’s likely that these professionals may only look after the formal 10% of organizational learning. You could say that is being marginalized.

Enterprise social media and external social networks are where more business transactions will occur. They are also where a lot of learning will happen, but not separated from business. The networked business world is subverting the learning and development hierarchy. Scalable learning does not come from a separate departmental function.

The cost and difficulty of coordinating activities across entities, on a global scale, is far lower now. The pace of change is accelerating and the degree of uncertainty increasing. Perhaps a new rationale will be required to drive institutional success in the future. Perhaps we need to move from a rationale of scalable efficiency to one of scalable learning — designing institutions and architectures of relationships across institutions that help all participants to learn faster as more participants join. —John Hagel – HBR

Mainstream media are catching on that in the network era, work is learning and learning is the work. This article from BloombergBusinessWeek is an example of the growing understanding that social learning is a business imperative:

Staff who carry out day-to-day duties—and whose productivity you’re looking to improve—should ultimately be the source for defining what knowledge they need and what knowledge they know is valuable to others.

With learning in the business spotlight, questions will be asked about the efficacy of current methods and practitioners of those methods. We are seeing a growing demand for self-directed and networked professional development. Recently, Craig Wiggins told the ASTD (training & development) community to just stop pretending – “Let’s stop pretending that, at one point or another, we haven’t for a moment wondered if we deserve to be marginalized. (Opinions on learning are never short supply.)” Learning will not be marginalized, but the learning trades, like scribes of old, will be.

Social Business Needs Social Management

2019-10-172013-06-05 by Harold Jarche

Social business has the potential to change the way we work, but for the most part it has not. The social enterprise is not yet here, though many talk about it, and confuse it with using social tools. For that, we can blame management.

As many people, from W. Edwards Deming to Gary Hamel have observed, management is what really differentiates organizations. It was better management that allowed Japanese automobile manufacturers to dominate the North American market, using the same raw materials and work force. Most management practices have changed little since the beginning of the millennium. We still have many vestiges of early 20th century industrial management — hierarchies; work standardization; job specialization; planning; and control. Extrinsic rewards are then dispersed by management based on these principles.

The first elephant in the social room is compensation. As Gary Hamel describes:

… compensation has to be a correlate of value created wherever you are, rather than how well you fought that political battle, what you did a year or two or three years ago that made you an EVP or whatever.” —Leaders Everywhere: A Conversation with Gary Hamel

If compensation was really linked to value, then salaries, job models, and other ways of calculating worth would have to be jettisoned. As it stands, in almost all organizations, those higher up the hierarchy get paid more, whether they add more value or not. It is a foregone conclusion that a supervisor has more skills and knowledge than a subordinate. This has also resulted in the requirement for more formal education as one goes up the corporate ladder, whether it’s needed or not.

The other elephant in the room is democracy. For management to work in the network era, it needs to embrace democracy, but we are so accustomed to existing structures that many executives would say it is impossible to run a business as a democracy. But hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust, according to Warren Bennis, and trust is what enables networked people to share knowledge and innovate faster. A key benefit of social tools is to share knowledge quicker. Trust is essential for social business but management can easily kill trust. Democracy is the counterweight to hierarchical command and control.

As more people work in distributed networks they are beginning to realize how little they actually benefit from standard management practices. In an economy based on trusted knowledge networks of individuals, the organization should revert to merely a supporting role.

A hierarchy is nothing more than a centralized branching network. It is inadequate for the complex challenges facing all organizations today. Decentralized networks, based on intrinsic motivation, are a much better vehicle for rewarding work than hierarchies can ever be. Any organization driven by external direction, with social tools or not, cannot innovate as fast as self-motivated and hyper-connected workers can. Democracy in the workplace therefore makes for more resilient companies.

A stated commitment to democratic principles is often lacking in descriptions of social business practices. But without compensation for value in an open network, social initiatives likely will be seen in hindsight as just another management buzz-word. “Lipstick on a pig,” I believe is the term.

So what’s next in social business? A serious look at its foundations is needed. While social business may have changed the way some of us work, it has not changed the way most organizations are managed. As networked, distributed work becomes the norm, trust will only emerge in workplaces that are open, transparent and diverse.

In these trusted environments, leadership will be seen for what it is — an emergent property of a network in balance and not some special property available to only the select few. Leadership should be drawn from an aggressively intelligent and engaged workforce, learning with each other. Social business requires social management that marinates in and understands the work culture. This cannot be done while trying to control it.

Social business will become reality when management lets go of command and control, makes work transparent so that value is visible to all, and treats workers as adults, engaged in democratic work practices. We are a long way from that until management is reconnected to the work being done. People naturally like to be helpful and get recognition for their work. Leadership in a social enterprise is based on this assumption.

Connected leaders need to foster deeper connections with the entire enterprise, often through meaningful conversations. This is an ongoing process, not a “town hall” meeting from time to time. They have to listen to and analyze what is happening in order to help set the work context according to changing conditions, and then work on building consensus. Given the constantly changing conditions in hyper-connected work environments, a much higher tolerance for ambiguity is becoming a critical leadership trait.

This article was originally published in CMS Wire

Social networks require ownership

2013-05-28 by Harold Jarche

So Gartner states that only 10% of social networking roll-outs succeed. Surprised? I’m not. Computer World UK reports that certain characteristics are necessary for success, once a purpose has been provided:

The purpose should naturally motivate people to participate.

The purpose must resonate with enough people to catalyse a community and deliver robust user-generated content.

The purpose should have a clear business outcome.

Select purposes that you and the community can build on.

It’s a bit more complicated than that. First of all, most roll-outs focus on rolling-out, not changing behaviour. The hard work begins after the software vendors have provided the initial training and the organization is on its own. Social media, and social networks, change the way we communicate. Like any new language, they take time to learn, and adults are usually not very good at showing their lack of fluency with a second language. They don’t like to look foolish.

While people may say it’s not about the technology, unfortunately that’s where a large share of the budget goes in social network initiatives. The bigger change to manage is getting people to work transparently. Transparency is a necessity for cooperation and collaboration in networks, as 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.

It’s not a question of “motivating” people, but understanding why people are naturally motivated to share. I would surmise that the 90% failure rate may have a lot to do with the dysfunctional state of those organizations implementing social networks. Attempts to use enterprise social networks, that inevitably increase transparency, will only serve to illuminate organizational flaws.

The knowledge sharing paradox is that social networks often constrain what they are supposed to enhance. Why would people share everything they know on an enterprise network, knowing that on the inevitable day that they leave, their knowledge artifacts will remain behind? Enterprise knowledge sharing will never be as good as what networked individuals can do, because of ownership. Motivated or not, workers do not own the social network or their data. Individuals who own their knowledge networks will invest more in them.Those who do not, will not.

Even with a clear, resonating purpose, salaried employees still own nothing on the enterprise social network. Aye, there’s the rub.

Networked individuals trump organizations

2015-03-182013-05-21 by Harold Jarche

2005 was the year when more than 50% of US workers’ occupations involved non-routine cognitive work, that long-awaited milestone. – Stowe Boyd

“Work has become distributed, discontinuous, and decentralized, hence, 3D”, says Stowe. As hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, so does work fragmentation subvert organizations. Given the nature of 3D work, it may be possible that we are witnessing the end of the corporation as a wealth-generation machine, just as its current power seems to have no limits.

In knowledge-based work the primary unit of value creation has shifted from the organization to the individual. Work is modularized and distributed globally across algorithms and human work. – Ross Dawson

Stowe Boyd calls this the rise of the emergent business. We can look at this change from the perspective of knowledge networks, in which most of us will be working, whether we are farmers or software engineers. A knowledge network in balance is founded on openness which enables transparency. This in turn fosters a diversity of ideas, and promotes innovative thinking. The emergent property of all of these exchanges is trust.

In an economy based on trusted knowledge networks of individuals, the role of the organization may revert to merely a supporting one. We might even see corporations bidding for the privilege of supporting knowledge networks. This is quite the opposite from today, where someone recently stated on a forum that 95% of companies are not in the top 5%, yet they all demand the top 5% of talent. Perhaps in the future companies will have to fight for talent.

As more people work in distributed networks they may realize how little they have to gain from organizations. If autonomy, mastery, and a sense of purpose motivate people to work, as Dan Pink says, then networks are a much better vehicle for rewarding work than organizations can ever be. It’s the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. While the industrial era, based on the principles of scientific management, used extrinsic rewards, the network era requires personal motivation. Organizations, driven by external and formal direction, cannot compete with self-motivated and connected workers in the network era.

From hierarchies to wirearchies

2015-07-162013-03-17 by Harold Jarche

Work in the network era needs to be both cooperative and collaborative, meaning that organizations have to support both types of activities. This may not be an easy transition for companies based almost uniquely on command and control leadership. But in this emerging network era, cooperative innovation trumps collaborative innovation, writes Stowe Boyd.

My experience is that communities of practice can help make the transition from hierarchies to networks, or as Jon Husband describes the resulting structure; wirearchy. Communities of practice, both internal and external; can be safe places between highly focused work and potentially chaotic social networking. The Community Roundtable has a Community Maturity Model that describes this transition, in four stages. The model makes it relatively easy to see where your organization stands and where it should go.

The CMM aligns with my own way of looking at the need to balance structured work and the sharing of complex knowledge, with the concurrent requirement for unstructured social networking which can increase innovation through a diversity of ideas. I have added in the four CMM stages to the image below. Communities of practice can link collaboration and cooperation, and help weave the organization and its people into a wirearchy.

Wirearchy – “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.” – Jon Husband

Getting there may not be easy, but the evidence is showing that it is necessary. For example, here is how Yammer builds its products, according to Kris Gale, VP of Engineering:

Yammer’s biggest rule of thumb is 2 to 10 people, 2 to 10 weeks – which means they generally don’t do projects that are larger or more complicated. There is a non-linear relationship between the complexity of a project and the wrap-up integration phase at the end. If you go anywhere beyond ten weeks, the percentage of time in the wrap-up phase becomes disproportionate. – First Round Capital

This sounds like it’s aligned with the general rules of dealing with complexity, developed by Dave Snowden. Each project at Yammer is a probe. It’s also small enough so that the potential ROI does not drive the company off the rails. A small project failure is much easier to deal with than a large one. Yammer understands that working in a hyper-connected economy makes complex work less predictable, so project cycles are kept short. As Gale goes on to explain:

I don’t think you should be building a product. I think you should be building an organization that builds a product.

Be very wary of only trusting managers with engineering decisions; in fact, you should delegate these all the way down to individual contributors. If managers are the only ones making decisions as you grow past thirty to forty people, this should be a red flag. – First Round Capital

Becoming a wirearchy requires new organizational structures that incorporate communities and networks. In addition, they require new ways of doing work, like thinking in terms of perpetual Beta and doing manageable probes to test complex problems. It’s a new way of doing work, within a new work structure. Both are required.

From ideas to ideology

2015-03-182013-03-04 by Harold Jarche

Charles Green wrote a few years ago that management is still fighting the industrial revolution:

Ideas lead technology. Technology leads organizations. Organizations lead institutions. Then ideology brings up the rear, lagging all the rest—that’s when things really get set in concrete.

So basically, ideas are enabled by new technology around which new organizations are created. Only then do new institutions get built in order to support the new dominant ideology.

So what does the current set of pillars that informs management look like?

The industrial era was based on the notion of standardization and best practices. Factories and mass production enabled corporations, like General Motors, from which business schools such as MIT’s Sloan School of Management (Alfred Sloan was president & CEO of GM) were created to develop managers trained in some variation of the principles of scientific management. Here is an excerpt from F.W. Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911):

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.

The network era is starting to take shape and some of the pillars are getting set in place, while others are in the making and not yet guaranteed to be part of the mix. Ideas like wirearchy and open business have been taken up in conjunction with new internet technologies, especially social media. There are experiments with new organizations, like B Corporations that have social and environmental components, or peer to peer production. It’s not obvious what the new institutions will look like, but we are seeing frenzied action in the educational sector as new and old players vie for dominance.

Perhaps new institutions will look like Massively Open Online Courses (MOOC’s). Perhaps not. But before a dominant ideology emerges we will see much more experimentation during this shift period. Will the dominant ideology be more like the “unassailable techno-humanitarian” TED Talks, or perhaps have the grassroots qualities of Shareable? My initial stab at a new ideology is a Taylorist mash-up: The principles of Connected Management:

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. And the duty of being transparent in our work and sharing our knowledge rests with all workers.

However, if history is to be repeated, things will only stabilize after the new dominant ideology sets in place. Meanwhile, we will continue to live in very interesting times.

We need to learn how to connect

2016-02-062013-03-03 by Harold Jarche

From danah boyd’s presentation at ASTD TechKnowledge 2013, on the future of work:

But if you want to prepare people not just for the next job, but for the one after that, you need to help them think through the relationships they have and what they learn from the people around them. Understanding people isn’t just an HR skill for managers. For better or worse, in a risk economy with an increasingly interdependent global workforce, these are skills that everyday people need. Building lifelong learners means instilling curiosity, but it also means helping people recognize how important it is that they continuously surround themselves by people that they can learn from. And what this means is that people need to learn how to connect to new people on a regular basis.

I’ve highlighted the last phrase because this is what social learning is all about; connections. No person has all the knowledge needed to work completely alone in our connected society. Neither does any company. Neither does any government. We are all connected AND dependent on each other.

One of the barriers to connecting people is the nature of the JOB, seen as something to be filled by replaceable workers. Shifting our perspective to treating workers as unique individuals, each of whom have different abilities and connections with others, is a start in thinking with a network perspective. Another barrier is viewing knowledge as something that can be delivered, or transferred. It cannot. Knowledge from a network perspective is about connecting experiences, relationships, and situations.

Work and learning today is all about connecting people. Managers, supervisors, and business support functions should be focused on enabling connections for knowledge workers. Like artists, knowledge workers need inspiration. Too few connections mean few sources of inspiration and little likelihood of serendipity. Innovation is not so much about having ideas as it is about making connections. We know that people with more connections are also more productive. Chance favours both the connected mind and the connected company.

connected-company.001

Increasing connections should be a primary business focus. It should also be the aim of HR and learning & development departments. Connections increase as people cooperate in networks (not focused on any direct benefits for helping others). Diverse networks can emerge from cooperation that is supported by transparency and openness in getting work done. Basically, better external connections also make a worker more valuable internally. Fostering this perspective will be a huge change from the way many organizations work today.

Social Learning in Business

2017-06-052013-02-18 by Harold Jarche

Social learning is how work gets done in the network era. But what does that really mean?

Our dominant frameworks for structuring work are currently hierarchical structures, like corporations and bureaucracies. But these structures are failing us, as the world gets so networked that traditional command & control structures cannot deal with the rapid change and increasing complexity. As Umair Haque asked last year, “Name a ‘working’ institution. Just one. Better yet, define a ‘working’ institution. See the problem? ”

Because of powerful software and cheap worldwide communications, routine work is getting automated and outsourced. Routine means work that can be standardized, and that applies to any work that can have a ‘job description’. Here are some examples:

– get ready to lose your job

– recession & technology kill middle class jobs

– job commoditization

If routine and standardized jobs are relics of the past, what can we do now to ensure that we have meaningful work?

The answer lies in our networks. Knowledge networks are like the paradox of life; the more you give, the more you get. If you don’t engage, you get nothing.

“We learned that individual expertise did not distinguish people as high performers. What distinguished high performers were larger and more diversified personal networks.” —Rob Cross, et al

In knowledge networks, openness enables transparency, which fosters a diversity of ideas. Diversity is essential for innovation, and innovation drives business success.

“We need input from people with a diversity of viewpoints to help generate innovative new ideas. If our circle of connections grow too small, or if everyone in it starts thinking the same way, we’ll stop generating new ideas.” —Tim Kastelle

Social learning is how work gets done in the Internet age. As John Kelldon observed, “In a network, one of the few things that scales really well is social learning.” It’s the secret sauce for organizational success today, increasing return on engagement for both employees and customers.

On March 1st, I will start my last workshop of our series at the Social Learning Centre, on Social Learning in Business. It is based on my work over the past few years, with both large organizations and free agents around the world. The focus will be on understanding networks and how social learning is the lubricant that helps intangible capital flow. In a world where intangibles drive the economy, we need practical ways to work in this fuzzy space.

Jay Deragon says that, “Work is a by-product of intangible capital that creates tangible results beyond expectations.” Intangible capital, unlike tangible capital, cannot be stored, moved, or transferred. It needs the constant involvement of people and their complex relationships. Supporting social learning is essential for organizations today. Understanding social learning is critical for managers. Practising social learning is important for all of us.

Social learning is how work gets redesigned in the network era

2015-03-182013-02-17 by Harold Jarche

Jon Husband referred me to a 2005 paper by Martin Weisbord, Techniques to Match our Values (PDF) that discusses the shifts in approaches to work design over the past century, from scientific management, to socio-technical redesign, to “whole system in a room”. The paper is a must-read for anyone involved in organizational design & development. Weisbord shows that even large group, participatory redesign efforts may not be good enough to deal with the rapid environmental changes all organizations face today in a networked world.

No matter what strategies we choose, if we organization designers want job satisfaction, we still are stuck with finding techniques equal to our values. Techniques cascade down the generations like Niagara Falls. Values move like glaciers. Techniques fill whole bookshelves. Values take up hardly space room at all. I can still say mine in eight words: Productive workplaces that foster dignity, meaning and community.

In the intervening years since Weisbord wrote this paper describing his whole system in a room technique, there has been one major change – the room is virtual and it is almost immeasurable. This change has the potential to involve everyone in the constant process of organizational redesign. Social learning can help organizations address rapid and constant organizational change, and get people committed. As Weisbord states, “Nobody has yet figured out how to commit people to organizational designs, even very good ones, over which they have no influence.” Social learning, facilitated by transparency, work narration and shared power, keeps everyone involved in organizational redesign, through ongoing conversations. John Kellden clearly shows the value of social learning, in The 11 Conversations: it’s return on engagement.

Weisbord’s conclusion tells us that we have to work on these things together.

I can tell you right now, though, what the future holds: unpredictable change. All we have to work with is our own experience . The learning curve belongs to all of us.

But for once, we have the technologies that can help enable this.

Social learning is also how work gets redesigned in the network era.

Collaboration is a means not an end

2019-03-282013-02-14 by Harold Jarche

Collaboration Isn’t Working: What We Have Here is a Chasm writes Deb Lavoy in CMS Wire.

Why do teams fail to act the way we think they will? Are we oversimplifying the notion of team? What about organizations? Where is the deeper insight on the relationship between teams and organizations? Why isn’t a sophisticated vocabulary breaking out? Why do we not yet have 100 words for different kinds of collaboration and teams, as expert in it as we think Eskimos are about snow? What is the difference between an intranet, a community and a team?

My immediate response was to say to myself, why of course it isn’t working, based on my own observations and client experiences. Collaboration is only part of the solution to building social or open businesses. I have looked at the two types of behaviours necessary in a social enterprise: collaboration and cooperation. Cooperation differs from collaboration in that it is sharing freely without any expectation of reciprocation or reward. Try to get people to openly cooperate in most businesses and they will be reprimanded for not being focused on their jobs, the bottom line, or shareholder value. However, cooperation contributes to the REAL bottom line: the entire business ecosystem.

One other necessary change in becoming a real social business is much more difficult. Both Don Tapscott (via Ross Dawson) and I see certain principles necessary for open networked business. Transparency, Collaboration, Sharing, and Narration are all relatively easy. Empowerment, or distributed power, is rarely, if ever, discussed when it comes to social business. It’s the big gorilla in the room that can scare owners, executives, and managers senseless. But we have the technology to move away from command & control, because, as Gwynne Dyer clearly shows, “Tyranny was the solution to what was essentially a communications problem.” We no longer have that communications problem in business.

Social business lacks overarching principles. Social business is a means to an end, not an end in itself. For me the objective is clearly the democratization of the workplace. Many business leaders shirk away from such thoughts. Wirearchy, as Deb notes, is an excellent example of such a principle [notice the bit about “power & authority”]. It sounds more like a democracy than a well-oiled industrial business machine.

“Wirearchy: a dynamic flow of power and authority based on trust, knowledge, credibility and a focus on results enabled by interconnected people and technology.”

Vendors of collaboration platforms are selling tools that can enable a more democratic workplace, but most clients don’t want that, so vendors don’t mention it. Business just wants more efficient and effective work. Networks, by their very nature, subvert hierarchies, whether those in charge like it or not. But hyper-connected work environments require different operating principles. That’s the big shift that has happened over the past two decades. It’s becoming much more obvious now because people outside the business structures are seeing the value of cooperation in a networked world; Wikipedia being the best-known example. Many in business still need to wake up to the notion of cooperating with your environment, your customers, your suppliers, and especially your workers.

Until workplaces becomes more cooperative, enterprise collaboration software will amount to very little. Social business is just a hollow shell without democracy (I wrote that a year ago and little has changed). Businesses can harness the powers of knowledge networks by promoting cooperative behaviours, within an overarching organizing principle like Wirearchy. While it’s not about the technology, the technology has changed everything. I cannot see any other way that businesses will remain relevant in a networked world other than by becoming more open, and democratic.