Work is learning. Learning is the work.
business & working
There are three structures that exist in all organizations, with three different sources of power, and three types of leadership required for each structure. This is the thesis that Niels Pflaeging puts forth in Organizational Physics.
Organizational performance improvement is comprised of reducing errors and increasing insights, according to Gary Klein. For the past century, management practice has focused very much on error reduction, with practices such as Six Sigma, especially in manufacturing.
“Fifty-eight of the top Fortune 200 companies bought into Six Sigma, attesting to the appeal of eliminating errors. The results of this ‘experiment’ were striking: 91 per cent of the Six Sigma companies failed to keep up with the S&P 500 because Six Sigma got in the way of innovation. It interfered with insights.” —Gary Klein
Learning and development (L&D) practices reflect this priority on error reduction. Subject matter experts are interviewed or observed, good practices are noted, and then training programs are designed to develop the skills that make up some or all of a job. Anyone with the requisite abilities, as quantified in the job description, can then be trained.
Are networks the new companies? Can our markets shift from capitalism to cooperativism? Can our institutions become networks? Can any of us escape our tribal roots and become network era citizens of the world?
We still lack good network models for organizing in society. Instead, many turn back to older, and outdated organizational models, like nationalism and tribalism, in an attempt to gain some stability. But our institutions and markets will fail to deliver in a network era society because they were never designed for one.
“It seems obvious to me that an individual value proposition for an organisation or nation state that makes a promise (which in itself is an outdated industrial concept) and fails to deliver will have to cope with every customer, citizen and employee holding them to account. In real time. From *within* their own organisations; not just by the hardening of their perimeters. The recognition that individual pathways transcend organisational boundaries is a good place to start.” —Robert Pye
In Only Humans Need Apply, the authors identify five ways that people can adapt to automation and intelligent machines. They call it ‘stepping’. I have added in parentheses the main attributes I think are needed for each option.
This evening I will be presenting a session on Working in Perpetual Beta, at Implement Consulting in Copenhagen. I will be discussing the economic, technological, and communication shifts that are driving us to become a networked society. But as I mentioned in my last post, the Tribal form is posing a significant threat to the development of what David Ronfeldt calls a Quadriform society. This would be a society that includes Tribal, Institutional, and Market organizations, co-existing with dominant network organizations.
But at this time there are few positive network era organization examples to give inspiration to others. We are stuck between the Market and the Network era, with significant yearnings in certain sectors to go back to our insular Tribal ways. While the Tribal form may be comforting, its structure threatens the foundations of democracy.
The perpetual beta working model tries to show how work and learning are related as we negotiate various types of networks to get new ideas, test them out, and innovate how we work. We seek, sense, and share knowledge in different social circumstances, sometimes with strangers and other times with close and trusted colleagues. Our social networks can help us increase our awareness of new ideas. We can test alternative models and concepts between trusted members in communities of practice, if we have the luck or foresight of being actively engaged in one. Then in our workplaces we take action on the new knowledge we have developed from our looser-knit networks.
In The Rise of Emergent Organizations, Beth Comstock, Vice Chair at GE, provides some rules of thumb to guide organizational design for the emerging network era. It is wonderful to see a large corporation putting into practice the recommendations I, and many others, have been making on organizational design for more than a decade. I have taken five of these rules of thumb and annotated them with images from my last book in the perpetual beta series: Working in Perpetual Beta. With such an example set by GE, more organizations should be able to convince their executives that a serious redesign of how they work is essential. The alternative does not look good.
“The Elephant in the Room: Our current approach to business and employment (two crucial drivers of the economy) are designed to screw and take advantage of far too many people in the workforce. Extensive changes are required to fix this, much faster than most leaders are willing to admit, talk about, or address.
The elephant in the room is the future of work and every person’s place in that future.”
“When monopolies succeed, the people fail …”, Henry Demarest Lloyd wrote in March 1881, denouncing the practices of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. Almost a century later, John Kenneth Galbraith warned of the dangers of blindly having faith in our capital market system and the organizations and institutions that support it.
“The greater danger is in the subordination of belief to the needs of the modern industrial system … These are that technology is always good; that economic growth is always good; that firms must always expand; that consumption of goods is the principal source of happiness; that idleness is wicked; and that nothing should interfere with the priority we accord to technology, growth, and increased consumption.” —The Atlantic 1967-06-01
Both Demarest Lloyd and Galbraith saw the flaws in the capitalist system, especially the tendency to think of people as mere replaceable human capital. In 1994, Peter Drucker discussed the rise of the knowledge worker, a term Drucker coined in 1959. This had the potential to shift the focus of our production systems from capital to labour. But Drucker saw that the shift to a society of knowledge workers would not be easy, as we are still struggling with it today.
“It is also the first society in which not everybody does the same work, as was the case when the huge majority were farmers or, as seemed likely only forty or fifty years ago, were going to be machine operators.
This is far more than a social change. It is a change in the human condition.” —The Atlantic 1994-11-01
Today, we deal with some of the same struggles against monopolies as Demarest Lloyd, but we are several billion more people, facing climate change and environmental degradation. At the same time, our democracies are under attack from the abuse of surveillance technologies by corporations and governments.
The political tide is shifting to embrace tribalism. The change in the human condition identified by Drucker requires new thinking and putting new models in practice. Our existing institutions do not offer these. Our markets, especially our labour markets, are not designed for this change in the human condition. Automation, coupled with non-routine work as the norm, fundamentally changes our concepts of labour and earning a living.
The perpetual beta working model is just that: a working model about working. I have developed several models that inform my professional practice, such as the network learning model that shows how work and learning have to be connected. The triple operating system describes how organizations can connect three types of networks. All of these models are founded on individuals taking control of their learning and professional development while actively engaging in social networks and communities of practice. This is the personal knowledge mastery (PKM) framework and the Seek > Sense > Share model.
So it’s international working out loud week [AKA Narrating Our Work] and this year people are encouraged to follow a seven-day structure.
These seven components can help make work teams more effective as they collaborate to achieve some purpose. Narrating Our Work requires purpose, or it’s not work. Collaboration means taking action. In order to learn, people need to share. They need to make connections, between ideas as well as people.
But Narrating Our Work needs people who are actively engaged in learning. If not, the work space can become an echo chamber. Experimentation with alternatives is how we learn to do new things. This is what #wolweek encourages. Doing this outside the work team means it can be more playful and creative. This is why we all need to find communities of practice beyond our work teams.
We also need to be aware of what is happening outside our spheres of influence. We need to be curious and find others who are not like us. This means we have to give without expectation of direct benefit. This is cooperation. Our social networks can provide this diversity and increase the potential for serendipitous discoveries. “Chance favors the connected mind”, says Stephen B. Johnson.