Work

business & working

attractive prisons

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Today we hear a lot about models like holacracy and teal organizations that are focused on changing how we work together in organizations.

Teal organization: A new kind of organization designed to enable “whole” individuals (not narrow professional selves) to self-organize and self-manage to achieve an organic organizational purpose (determined not through hierarchical planning but incrementally, responsively, and from the bottom up).

Holacracy: The most widely adopted system of self-management, developed in 2007 by Brian Robertson. Authority and decision making are distributed among fluid “circles” (defined below) throughout the organization, and governance is spelled out in a complex constitution.

Podularity: A system of self-management in which each basic unit, or “pod,” is treated as a microcosm of the whole business and acts on its behalf. Podularity has its roots in agile (defined below).

Agile: A theory of management originating in software development. In an agile system of work, cross-functional, self-managed teams solve complex problems iteratively and adaptively—when possible, face-to-face—with rapid and flexible responses to changing customer needs. —Harvard Business Review 2016-07

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life in the jungle

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How can you survive in the jungle when you live in a zoo?

“Our silos (I won’t even mention cubicles!), like the cages in the zoo, exist to control behaviour and reduce complexity by creating homogeneity and closed environments. OD & HR professionals spend an inordinate amount of time trying to find new and better ways of categorising, a direct result of which is the so-called ‘matrix organisation’. Linked to that are new and better ways of incentivising the ‘animals’ to keep performing because like zoos, many organisations aren’t particularly inspiring places. Besides food and other treats, there’s not much else that can motivate, engage or inspire creativity.” —Sonja Blignaut

In our efforts to tame complexity we constantly look for ways to simplify decision-making. It’s why best practices and case studies are still popular, despite their uselessness. It reminds me of a client who proudly declared that his company was a ‘fast follower’. Followers in the jungle are eaten or survive as scavengers.

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future hedging

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“The future of work will be based on hacking uncertainty and hedging risks through post-blockchain smart contracts, learning and social capital.

The main question is perhaps not what skills we should have in the future, but how we hedge the risks that are inbuilt in our world, our unique knowledge assets, the know-what, the know-who and know-how of our life.” —Esko Kilpi

In hedging the future of work, Esko Kilpi describes three areas of work that need to be negotiated by knowledge workers in the digital network era.

  1. Long-term Collectives
  2. Short-term Communities
  3. Flash Networks

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the missing half of training

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The training industry is based on models that were developed for the military. The Systems Approach to Training includes the ADDIE [analysis, design, development, implementation, evaluation] model, with variations used throughout industry. Robert Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction inform much of instructional design. Gagne’s early work was in military training. Other models were developed in the second half of the 20th century but they mostly remained in line with their military roots. One model for instructional design that I promote is Cathy Moore’s Action Mapping. It’s a welcome change, but is focused on individual training.

In the military there is much more training than individual, skill & knowledge-focused, course work. There is also ‘collective training’. Collective training is what military units do when they are not on operations. Collective training is run by operators, not trainers, and is informal, social, with an emphasis on simulation. Types of simulation can range from expensive highly technical combat mission flight simulators, to distributed war games, or command post exercises involving thousands of personnel.

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the uncertain future of training

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Training courses are artifacts of a time when resources were scarce and connections were few. That time has passed.

The roots of training are to get a lot of people to do the same thing competently. The Roman army trained soldiers for battle and many other duties, like building roads. Standard methods were developed. Drill and feedback over time helped to develop competence. But the modern training field exploded after 1945. Large organizations created training departments, now called ‘learning & development’ or some other variant, but still focused on one thing: looking backwards. Training looks at how people currently do work and then gets others to replicate this. These are described as competencies, made up of certain, skills, knowledge, and attitudes. The assumption was that what works today will work tomorrow. The training department assumed the status quo.

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simplifying the complexity

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Complex Problems

I like complex problem-solving. Perhaps my most interesting project was when a client gave me a statement of work to ‘simplify the complexity’. I did not have a solution but felt that with my extended network I would be able to solve their problem. I have explained this project in detail (video) and how I was able to make connections with people in my network as well as access the materials I had curated over the years and saved to my blog and other retrievable media. In this case, ‘chance favoured the connected mind‘, as Stephen B. Johnson would say.

In the end I was able to develop a simple lens to evaluate current and future tools against the learning and performance requirements of the company. One advantage of this project was that I had worked with the company previously and understood the context of the work. The image below is an example of how we evaluated each tool in the enterprise.

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training > performance > social

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Thank Goodness It’s Monday! This is my second TGIM post. Mondays for freelancers mean new opportunities. Weekends are often times to get work done when it’s quiet. Mondays are good days to take a day to reflect, as clients are usually busy going through their inboxes and catching up. So happy Monday to everyone.

In my last TGIM post I went through my social bookmarks on PKM. This post looks at resources related to my training-performance-social workshop.

One approach to supporting workplace learning, based on the 70:20:10 model, is for the organization to provide three types of enablers (see image at bottom):

  • Tools: that workers are dependent upon to do their work
  • Skills: competencies to work independently
  • People: social structures to work interdependently with others, inside & outside the organization

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leave the hierarchies to the algorithms

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What happens when you connect unthinking computer programs with a culture of obedience and compliance? Algorithms run much of society and business today, from applying for a mortgage to determining which passengers to eject from an overbooked aircraft. Coupled with authoritarianism, algorithms can produce devastating results, says John Robb at Global Guerillas.

“If a corporate algorithm yields a terrible result, smart organizations admit the failure. They admit it didn’t work to both your customers and employees. Algorithms don’t have feelings. They won’t cry if you talk trash about them. Also, smart organizations don’t punish employees for raising the flag on a broken algorithm. One last thought. Smart organizations know what their algorithms are (or that they even exist) and how to fix them. Dumb organizations see the process as inviable. It should be easy to spot the difference between these organizations by the number of disasters seen online,” —John Robb

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7 essential facets for enterprise knowledge sharing

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Most large organizations today have some suite of social tools to share information and knowledge. But how do they know if they have the optimum tools for their context? Too often the tools are selected and then the workers are left to figure out how to use them. Based on work with several clients over the past few years, I have identified seven essential facets for enterprise social networks.

The objective of these networks should be to help capture knowledge, encourage sharing, and enable action. This is the business value proposition implicit in these enterprise social networks — to make better decisions on which to take action.

There are three levels that must be aligned:

  1. empowered individuals
  2. appropriate tools
  3. organizational processes

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networked knowledge creates value

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As we enter the network era, the dominant technology is the internet and working knowledge is distributed through professional communities, many of which are hosted online. Compare this to the last 75 years where the company was connected to a factory and knowledge was delivered from business schools. Tangible goods, best practices, and standardization are being replaced by intangible assets, emergent practices, and transparency. In the network era, business is changing.

In the networked knowledge triad, I tried to show how real value creation today happens outside the organization. Therefore professionals should develop value creation networks that connect to the world, beyond the current workplace. These networks are the modern equivalents of degrees and certificates. They are the value we bring to our work teams and organizations. As the life expectancy of organizations decreases, we can no longer depend on employers to provide stability for our working lives. That stability now comes from our networks.

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