Work

business & working

how professionals learn for work

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Jane Hart has been asking her readers what are the most useful/valuable ways that they learn for or at work. In the sixth annual Learning in the Workplace Survey, which surveyed over 5,000 respondents from a wide variety of industries and types & sizes of organizations, the following methods were ranked in order.

  1. Daily work experiences
  2. Knowledge-sharing within your team
  3. Web search
  4. Web resources
  5. Manager feedback & guidance
  6. Professional networks  & communities
  7. Coach or mentor feedback & guidance
  8. Internal resources
  9. Blogs & news feeds
  10. E-learning courses
  11. Conferences & professional events
  12. Classroom training

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expectations

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I have worked as an external ‘consultant’ for the past 20 years. Prior to that, I was an internal consultant, with my last five years of military service as a training advisor in the aviation field. Consultant is a very general term and can mean many things in different fields. My company is called Jarche Consulting, a term I chose in 2003 that would allow me to change my lines of business without requiring a name change. For instance, in my first few years of freelancing I did a lot of advisory work on choosing learning technology platforms, something I do little of today. I am a different kind of consultant now than I was in 2003.

My experience is that as an independent external worker, there are three fundamental roles.

  1. expert outsider
  2. consultant
  3. contractor

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curious and fractal

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Some people seem to be naturally curious. Others work at it. Some just lack interest in learning. You can notice this when traveling. Some people can describe many aspects of their local vicinity while others don’t know anything about why certain features exist. They say that the most interesting people are those who are interested in others.

This is what I wrote about connected curiosity two years ago. Basically, curiosity about ideas can foster creativity, while curiosity about people can develop empathy (not sympathy). We get new ideas from new people, not the same people we see every day. We get new perspectives from people whose lives and experiences are different from ours.

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knowledge-sharing paradox redux

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Knowledge-sharing in the Enterprise

An effective suite of enterprise social tools can help organizations share knowledge, collaborate, and cooperate – connecting the work being done with the identification of new opportunities and ideas. In an age when everything is getting connected, it only makes sense to have platforms in place that enable faster feedback loops inside the organization in order to deal with connected customers, suppliers, partners, and competitors. It takes a networked organization, staffed by people with networked learning mindsets, to thrive in a networked economy.

Getting work done today means finding a balance between sharing complex knowledge to get work done (collaboration), and innovating in internet time (cooperation).

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tech career advice

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Here are some questions I was asked by the organizers of the Landing Festival in Lisbon, where I will be speaking on 28/29 June 2018.

How do you keep up-to-date with all the changes in the tech market?

I use my professional network to help filter information for me. For example, Valdis Krebs is an expert on social network analysis. Thomas Vander Wal has deep knowledge on enterprise network technologies. Jane McConnell understands the digital workplace in large multinational companies. All three of these people are fellow members of one of my online communities of practice. By engaging in these communities, and developing a diverse network of perspectives on Twitter and LinkedIn, I am able to stay abreast of the tech market, without being an expert myself. I practice personal knowledge mastery — a sensemaking framework for the network era — that I also teach to others.

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ask the difficult questions

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“Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.” —Garry Kasparov

The future of work will be humans augmented by machines, and those with the best processes will succeed. In How to Become a Centaur, Nicky Case outlines what machines (AI) are good for and what people are best at.

“So, how do you find the best “+” for humans and AI? How do you combine humans’ and AI’s individual strengths, to overcome their individual weaknesses? Well, to do that, we first need to know exactly what humans’ and AI’s strengths and weaknesses are.

Human nature, for better or worse, doesn’t change much from millennia to millennia. If you want to see the strengths that are unique and universal to all humans, don’t look at the world-famous award-winners — look at children. Children, even at a young age, are already proficient at: intuition, analogy, creativity, empathy, social skills. Some may scoff at these for being ‘soft skills’, but the fact that we can make an AI that plays chess but not hold a normal five-minute conversation, is proof that these skills only seem ‘soft’ to us because evolution’s already put in the 3.5 billion years of hard work for us”.

Basically, “AIs are best at choosing answers. Humans are best at choosing questions.”

If you are looking at how best to change our training and education systems to prepare for an augmented future, then ‘asking better questions’ should be at the top of the list. Those soft (permanent) skills are our secret sauce when it comes to working with ever smarter machine intelligence.

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network management protocols

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My principle of network management is a modern progressive remake of the principle of scientific management put forth by F.W. Taylor in 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.” —F.W.Taylor

Based on this format, I have proposed the following principle for work in a post-industrial network society.

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, especially management.

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fifteen years

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Today marks fifteen years of self-employment. After two years I had noted that my business was good enough for some cheeses but still too young for most wines. Today I’m a very old chunk of cheese but a much better wine, I hope.

By the four-year mark I had experienced clients not paying me and one going bankrupt before paying me. I had many slow periods which I attributed to my location and the lack of face to face meetings. I would say this is still the case. On marking my fifth anniversary I noted that I now had a great international community of bloggers, from whom I keep learning, though the comments on our blog posts are much less frequent today.

At the seven-year point I took a full-time job but kept the business open, with some blogging and a web conference or two. I also gave some freelancing advice. That job lasted six months and then it was back to the financial roller coaster of ups & downs which continues to this day. Once I hit 10 years, in 2013, I decided to write a compilation of my thoughts here. Seeking Perpetual Beta was the first of the perpetual beta series which now counts five volumes. I followed this with a quick summary of 10 thoughts in 10 years.

On my 13th anniversary I reiterated my commitment to democratic workplaces in democratic societies. I wrote that interconnected and engaged citizens are our hope for a better future. We need to learn how to navigate the emerging network era. People have to take control of their learning: being connected, mobile, and global while conversely contractual, part-time, and local.

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autonomous workers in learning organizations

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The Learning Organization

Continued from mastery & models.

Harvard Business Review described The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge, as one of the seminal management books of the previous 75 years. The five disciplines necessary for a learning organization are:

  • Personal Mastery
  • Mental Models
  • Shared Vision
  • Team Learning
  • Systems Thinking (which integrates the other four)

Personal Mastery

Mastery comes through deliberate practice. Personal knowledge mastery is the ability to see patterns hidden to the undisciplined eye. It is the sharing and explaining of implicit knowledge in order to push the boundaries of understanding. PKM is very much based on informal learning through communities of practice and professional social networks.

Mental Models

A model is not a map but a compass that can help guide organizations. It takes time to understand these models and use them to inform our work. But they are necessary for complex work and essential as the organization gets larger.

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human capital

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“No, people are NOT capital. YOUR ‘human capital’ is what you’ve learned and not forgotten. It’s ‘capital’ each person ‘owns’ themselves; FAR more equally distributed than financial capital. Our economy needs institutions to make learning and earning better for those with less money.” —Byron Auguste

In firms that are ‘human capital-intensive’, “Should employees be shareholders?”

With context-specific human capital, the productivity of a particular individual depends not just on being part of a firm, but on being part of a particular group of people engaged in a particular task.

More importantly, once acquired, knowledge and skills that are specialized are assets that are at risk following the very same logic as that by which financial assets are at risk.

Is human capital then conceptually the same as financial capital and should investors in firm specific human capital also be seen as principals? Should employees be shareholders? Should capitalism accordingly create a much larger number of capitalists? —Esko Kilpi

Our human capital is a combination of our skills & knowledge, reputation, and social capital. This social capital is based on expertise and my relationships. Workers — human capital — are multi-faceted complex social beings who create the real value for creative and knowledge-based organizations. The greatest enemies of human organizations are our accounting methods, as I noted in automation + capitalism = a perfect storm. Our bookkeeping practices and capitalist systems are the main culprits in edging out human labour in favour of technological and financial capital.

The foundation for organizational knowledge is the human capital of each and every worker (expertise & relationships). This is increased as people work together (decisions & processes). What the organization sees and accounts for (events & outputs) is only the tip of the iceberg.

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