W. Edwards Deming, American management visionary, understood that systemic factors account for most organizational problems, and changing these has more potential for improvement than changing any individual’s performance. Therefore the role of executives should be to manage the system, not individuals. But the real barrier to systemic change is hierarchical management, as it constrains the sharing of power, a necessary enabler of organizational learning. People have to trust each other to share knowledge, and power relationships can block these exchanges. Just listen to any boardroom meeting and see how power can kill a conversation. If learning is what organizations need to do well in order to survive and thrive, then structural barriers to learning must be removed.
Work
business & working
Network Era Skills
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 in the network era. The duty of being transparent in our work and sharing our knowledge rests with all workers, including management.
Only people can enable knowledge, trust and credibility to flow within and between markets and companies. Business in the network era is connecting companies to their markets through knowledge workers having conversations in communities and social networks. The core skills for this emerging workplace are: 1) working & learning out loud 2) cooperating, 3) collaborating, and 4) self-organizing.
Working and learning out loud make implicit knowledge more explicit. Creating ‘knowledge artifacts’ that can be shared and built upon by others results in faster organizational learning, and being able to take action on that learning. In an organization, working out loud can take many forms. It could be a regular blog; sharing day-to-day happenings in activity streams; taking pictures and videos; or just having regular discussions. Developing these skills, like adding value to information, takes time and practice. Working out loud also means taking ownership of our learning.
The rapidly changing workplace
8) So what have I learned that will help us change our own experience of work? That knowledge is becoming more abstract, conceptual, distributed and complex.
9) We know what social and thinking skills are needed for complex contexts – we know how to hone these skills through practice.
Reinventing Organizations – Review
What is a “Teal Organization”? Frédéric Laloux, in Reinventing Organizations, uses a colour scheme, based on Integral Theory, to describe the historical development of human organizations: Red > Orange > Green > Teal. Laloux lists three breakthroughs of Teal organizations:
- Self-management: driven by peer relationships
- Wholeness: involving the whole person at work
- Evolutionary purpose: let the organization adapt and grow, not be driven
Organize for Complexity
Niels Pflaeging read my ebook Seeking perpetual beta and said that “after reading the book one yearns for more from you about the right learning architecture, about how to develop organizations applying this thinking, about how to build learning programs and infrastructure.” Well I think Niels has answered much of that question himself, in his recent book Organize for Complexity. Since I promote the fact that today work is learning, and learning is the work, then if you create better ways of working, you are also improving organizational learning. As Niels writes about the “learning riddle”:
Mastery is the human capability to solve new problems. It can only be developed through practice. We call this “disciplined practice”.
Fads like business analytics, knowledge management, and big data will never make organizations fit for complexity.
This is why I now call PKM: Personal Knowledge Mastery; to separate it from much of the traditional practice of knowledge management. #PKMastery is disciplined practice.
Connecting Companies and Markets
Management in the Network Era: 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, including management.
Organizing Talent
The opposite of ‘routine’ is ‘original’
Labour is routine. Talent is original. Even advanced technical Labour can be in essence routine. As Labour, once you learn how to do something, you are able to repeat it. Labour is the capitalist dream for human effort, because it can be quantified, controlled, and replaced. Labour is viewing humans as resources. What is becoming blindingly obvious is that Labour is increasingly getting automated which is disrupting how most people have worked for the past century, by doing a job.
On the other hand, original work has high task variety and requires continuous learning, as well as significant tacit knowledge that cannot easily be codified. Talent that does original work is difficult to replace. This means that Talent is much more difficult to push around.
Ten Years, Ten Thoughts
In compiling my ebook, Seeking perpetual beta: a guidebook for the network era, I tried to cover all the posts that resonated with readers, clients, and colleagues over a decade. Here are some highlights, representing one thought per year.
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- Taking control of our learning is a challenge for individuals used to working inside hierarchies that demand conformity and compliance.
- The mainstream application of knowledge management and learning management over the past few decades was mostly wrong; we over-managed information, knowledge, and learning because it was easy to do.
- The basic structure of the job presumes common skills and the mechanistic view that workers can be replaced without disruption.
seeking perpetual beta
New! Purchase all five e-books, ‘seeking perpetual beta’ – ‘finding perpetual beta’ – ‘adapting to perpetual beta’ – ‘working in perpetual beta’ ‘life in perpetual beta’- for €29.
After 10 years of blogging here, I have compiled my best posts into an ebook. It’s called Seeking perpetual Beta: a guidebook for the network era. Instead of digging through over 2,500 posts on this site, now you can read a cohesive narrative that covers learning, working, and managing in the emerging network era. This ebook is the result of a decade of seeking, sense-making, and sharing knowledge on the Web.
“the best $25 you’ll ever spend on yourself” – Susan Scrupski
“One of the best purchases you’ll do this year!” – Luis Suarez
“masterful synthesis of 10 years of blogging about networks” – Jon Husband
“Harold knows just how to harness the power of equal, open collaboration in the networked economy.” – Ian Chew
Scroll down to read the introduction and table of contents.
Back on sale by popular demand, seeking perpetual beta is available for $20.
Introduction
The following essays are abridged and updated posts as well as combinations of posts made over the course of a decade. When I started my blog, I had three categories: learning; work; and technology. Today there are many others, as my professional interests have expanded and changed. My perspective on work and learning has been one of perpetual Beta, which also could be called strong beliefs, loosely held. Alpha is a mindset of pumping out flavour of the month drivel. Beta is more than Alpha, as you have to affirm to principles and actually commit to something, while remaining open to change. I have been observing the signs and indicators of the shift to the network era for the past decade. These articles have stood the test of time, and have been refined and discussed many times in order to be suitable for Beta.
The Network Era
The fundamental nature of work is changing as we transition into the network era. Creative work is beginning to dominate industrial work as we shift to a post- job economy. The major driver of this change is the automation of routine work, especially through software, but increasingly with robots. Valued work is in handling exceptions, dealing with complex problems, and doing customized tasks.
The products of this work are often intangible and not physical. As a result, our industrial work structures need to change. Organizations have to become more networked, not just with information technology, but in how workers create, use, and share knowledge.
The workplace of the network era requires a different type of leadership; one that emerges from the network as required. Effective leadership in networks is negotiated and temporary, according to need. Giving up control will be a major challenge for anyone used to the old ways of managing. An important part of leadership will be to ensure that knowledge is shared throughout the network.
Learning is a critical part of working in a creative economy. Being able to continuously learn, and share that new knowledge, will be as important as showing up on time was in the industrial economy. Continuous learning will also disrupt established hierarchies as no longer will a management position imply greater knowledge or skills. Command and control will be replaced by influence and respect, in order to retain creative talent. Management in networks means influencing possibilities rather than striving for predictability. We will have to accept that no one has definitive answers anymore, but we can use the intelligence of our networks to make sense together.
The shift to the network era will not be easy for many people and most organizations. Common assumptions about how work gets done will have to be discarded. Established ways of earning education credentials will be abandoned for more flexible and meaningful methods. Connections between disciplines and professions are growing and artificial boundaries will continue to crack. Systemic changes to business and education will happen. There will be disruption on a societal level, but we can create new work and learning models to help us deal with this next phase in human civilization. The statistician George Box wrote that, “essentially all models are wrong, but some are useful”. We will never know unless we try them out.
Table of Contents
(65 pages for tablet version)
Introduction
1. THE NETWORK ERA
The Changing Nature of Work
Complication: The Industrial Disease
A Networked Market Knows More
Job is a Four-letter Word
Knowledge Artisans
Working Socially
Figure 1 The Connected Enterprise
Tapping the Creative Surplus
2. WORK IS LEARNING & LEARNING IS THE WORK
PKM and the Seek > Sense > Share Framework
Figure 2 PKM = Seek > Sense > Share
PKM and Competitive Intelligence
PKM and Innovation
Managing Organizational Knowledge
Training and Complex Work
Narrating Our Work
Collaborate to Solve Complex Problems
3. LEADING & MANAGING IN NETWORKS
Network Thinking
Figure 3 Trust Emerges Through Openness and Transparency
The Connected Enterprise
The Knowledge Sharing Paradox
Managing Automation
Flip the Office
Connected Leadership
Figure 4 Connected Leadership
4. THE GLOBAL VILLAGE
Figure 5 Organizing Characteristics
Figure 6 TIMN (David Ronfeldt)
Figure 7 Tetrad of a Networked Society
Colophon
Layout and design by Tantramar Interactive
Three elements of digital transformation
Altimeter released a new report yesterday, called Digital Transformation: Why and How Companies are Investing in New Business Models to Lead Digital Customer Experiences.
For those of us in this field or related ones, much is not new, but confirmatory.
- Benefits:
- Leadership and employees feel empowered through education.
- Decision-making and processes become more efficient across departments.
- We found that businesses often remodel or bolt on mobile, social, and digital functionality to an aging offline/online infrastructure that is counterintuitive to customer behavior.
- Team members want to feel empowered to do the work that’s necessary while feeling a sense of ownership in the process.
- In its own way, digital transformation is making businesses more human.