Work

business & working

A mobile workforce needs better on-site conversations

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The future of workplace learning is social, cooperative and especially mobile. One approach for this type of workforce is to support their mobility with something like a ‘genius bar’, instead of having to request a support ticket from IT or get an appointment with HR. There is a growing array of enterprise software tools to support the emerging workforce, but it takes more than technology, as Dion Hinchcliffe warns.

We forget at our peril that collaboration is a fundamentally human activity. This implies that any use of enabling technology without taking into account how people actually conduct their work, their inclinations to share information and interact with each other, and in particular how the proposed technology will empower them and alter their collaborative behavior for the better/worse, is bound to disappoint.

Providing mobile access for work and learning just makes sense today. Clark Quinn says that mobile technology makes a lot of sense, as “it decouples that complementary capability from the desktop, and untethers our outboard brain“. Sense-making is a critical skill for most knowledge workers today, and frameworks like PKM can help. When I refer to personal knowledge management, especially my blog, I often call it my outboard brain. Supporting mobile technologies can leverage every worker’s outboard brain and free up cognitive load for pattern recognition, the stuff that machines are not as good at.

clar quinn on mobileWhile sales of tablets are increasing, and mobile business is an expanding sector, there is still a lot of work to be done on how people actually conduct their work. Legislating mobile collaboration is probably not the best solution, but it does underline the huge cost-savings of abandoning the industrial age concept of being paid for merely putting in time. As Nancy Dixon writes, “The only reason to come together face-to-face is for people to be in conversation with each other!” Too often though, the workplace is not designed to enable conversations. While mobile technologies may be part of the solution to a more agile workforce, another component is improving the workplace environment so that people can do what they do best face-to-face — converse.

If you replace the word “learner” with “worker’ in this article on the SPATIAL model, you can see that there is a lot that can be done to make work environments more open. More open environments can encourage conversations [AKA, participation in complex work].

Participation is a critical variable in nonmandated education; thus, the physical environment’s impact on participation rates can be especially important in educational and training efforts outside of school settings.

Mobile work and learning proponents should also be looking at changing the physical workplace to further support a more nomadic workforce that is empowered with mobile technologies. Let me finish with another example from Nancy Dixon, a case study called The Hallways of Learning, where a change in the physical layout of a hallway significantly increased in-depth professional interactions.

The learning that occurred in Researcher’s Square did not come from presentations, rather the knowledge gained was through conversation. When we think about learning from others our first thought is to have someone make a presentation. But as ubiquitous as presentations are, they are a poor way to learn from peers. Typically, a presenter offers what happened in his or her own situation, but that is not what learners need to hear. Learners are interested in knowing how to adapt the lessons to their situation and for that they need to have a conversation so that the other person can understand their context, and they also can understand the context of the other.

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This post is brought to you by Mobile Enterprise 360 Community and Citrix

Note: I retained editorial control and take full responsibility for what is posted. Contract writing is one of the ways I make my living.

Knowledge Management for Decision Memories

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Institutional decision memories can describe how and why we, as an organization, chose one course of action over another. As Brian Gongol notes:

“If a capital project has an expected service life of 20 to 30 years, it’s entirely possible that people working in an institution in their 20s will be middle or upper-level managers in the same institution by the time the project has to be replaced or upgraded. Unless someone documents the process by which the original decision was made, including notes on the alternatives not taken, the 50-year-old manager who’s been with the institution all along will usually be guided more by 25 years of habits and built-in bias than by a fresh look at the available alternatives. And the situation is likely to be even worse if the 50-year-old manager making the decisions came into the institution recently and doesn’t even have a memory for when the original project was completed in the first place.”

Over time, these memories can be codified and institutionalized. This is Big Knowledge Management, leveraging the power of enterprise software platforms to store decision, process, and event memories. Process and event memories, like project outputs, are relatively easy to capture and codify. But decision memories are often hampered by our tendency to justify decisions after they have been made, and even create elaborate, and often fictional, stories around them. For this reason, it is important to capture decisions as they are being made, not after the fact.

Explaining why other decisions were not made, should also be normal practice. For example, I was working with a client that made decisions on which chemical compound to develop out of a possibility of thousands. There was a cost to initially create any compound, so not all possibilities could be attempted. Decisions were made by a committee on which compound to pursue. However, the decisions on why the other compounds were not developed were never recorded. Several years later, the situation had changed due to improvements in technology and new research findings, and now some of the rejected compounds may have had potential for development. Unfortunately, no records were available to search the rejected compound database and find ones that met the new criteria. Sometimes our decisions not to do something are just as important as our selected course of action, from the perspective of the future. But we never know this in advance.

Recording and sharing our knowledge on a regular basis is what Little Knowledge Management is about, as it focuses on providing ways for groups to try new methods safely. Examples include curation, communities of practice, and mentoring. For complex work, Little KM is critical, as most of the knowledge required is implicit, and not easy to codify. According to the Cynefin framework, in the Complex domain “the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe – Sense – Respond , and we can sense emergent practice.” Teams working in the complex domain have to make “probes” on a regular basis in order to understand the changing environment. It then becomes essential to develop ways to capture and share the decisions made with each one.

decision memories

Institutional memory, especially the decisions taken over time, has to be part of the workflow of any knowledge worker doing complex work and making decisions. Ewen Le Borgne writes that, “Institutional memory feeds off strong personal knowledge management among individual staff members“. I define PKMastery as a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world and work more effectively. PKM is an ongoing process of filtering information from our networks; creating knowledge individually and with our teams, and then discerning with whom and when to share the artifacts of our knowledge. As Roger Schank states, “Comprehension is mapping your stories onto mine.” PKM helps to put your maps out there for others to see.

We have to remember that all of this “knowledge management” is nothing without people engaged in the process. Viola Spolin, creator of the “Theater Games” actor training system, says that, “Information is a weak form of communication.” But, it can be improved, as Gary Schwartz notes, “Story becomes important in the ordering of all this information.” Stories are the glue, holding information together in some semblance of order, for our brains to process into knowledge.

stories are personal

Related Posts

Institutional Memory
The Storytelling Animal
Building Institutional Memory
An Organizational Knowledge Sharing Framework

An organizational knowledge-sharing framework

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There is a lot of knowledge in an organization, some of it easy to codify (capture), and much (most) of it difficult to do so. Understanding how best to commit resources for knowledge-sharing should be in some kind of a decision-making framework that is easy for anyone to understand. This is a first attempt to do that.

[This post is a follow-up from my building institutional memory post].

Brian Gongol made an interesting observation on three categories of institutional memory. Decision memories are probably the most important, and likely the most open to rationalization in hindsight. The good decisions always seem obvious after the fact.

  • event memories, which are things like the construction of new facilities or the arrival of new employees

  • process memories, which note how things are done in order to save time and ensure their reliable repetition in the future

  • decision memories, which explain how the institution chose one path or policy or course of action over another

We can expand these three categories with Ewen La Borgne’s observation on the types of artifacts left by work projects. Outputs are quite explicit, while expertise is mostly implicit knowledge. Networks can be mapped, and are therefore explicit, but interpreting them requires implicit knowledge.

  • Information and outputs produced

  • Expertise (knowledge and know-how)

  • A network of connections

Put all of these together in order of difficulty in codifying memories/artifacts and the following graphic is my working interpretation. Explicit knowledge is easier to codify and more suitable for enterprise-wide initiatives, while implicit knowledge requires personal interpretation and engagement to make sense of it. Note that these six categories only serve as examples and are not a complete spectrum of knowledge representations.

codifying knowledge

So what types of knowledge management (KM) frameworks could help us support the codification of these knowledge artifacts? One way to look at it would be from a perspective discussed by Patti Anklam a few years back. Patti explained the differences between Big KM, Little KM and Personal KM and this distinction could be useful. Big KM is good for knowledge that can be easily codified, and Little KM can provide a structure for teams & groups to try out new things (in a Probe-Sense-Respond way). PKM puts individuals in control of their sense-making, but the organization can benefit from this by making it easier for workers to share knowledge.

structuring knowledge

Finally, there are certain types of tools and and platforms that would be more suitable for sharing of each type of knowledge artifact. I describe only a few in this image, but it gives an idea of how one could structure a full spectrum of knowledge-sharing in order to support institutional memory.

knowledge sharing

From here, one can now ask what types of platforms would help to codify and share the knowledge that is important to any organization. For larger organizations, all three types of KM are most likely necessary. Too often, Big KM is seen as sufficient, but in complex work environments, Little KM and Personal KM are also needed and should work in conjunction with Big KM. These are three important pieces, that should remain loosely joined in order for each to do what it does best.

Learning mobility

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How would you like a ‘genius bar’ to take care of you at work, instead of having to request a support ticket from IT or get an appointment with HR? It’s something that could easily work with mobile device support and help in implementing an effective BYOD (bring your own device) program.

When it comes to customer support, the genius bar is a revolution in customer care. The idea that you don’t have to make an appointment, don’t have to call in a trouble ticket, don’t have to deal with a traditional support team that is “way backed up” is nothing short of amazing for most people. Yes it requires resources, both human and capital-based. But I can’t imagine a better way to get a grip on what is happening on the mobile user front of an enterprise than by opening up a genius-bar like outlet. – Paul Kapustka, Mobile Enterprise 360

As workers get more mobile, for better and worse, supporting a mobile workforce’s learning and performance needs requires a more flexible approach. Screen size limits what you can do, so it has to be short and focused. It also has to be personalized. Jane Hart describes the role of learning concierge as providing “personal advice directly to workers on how they can address their own workplace learning and performance problems in the way that works best for them“. Mobile devices are perfect for personalization and direct to the end-user delivery.

Mobile delivery and support could be a great opportunity to make training & development departments more relevant. Start with just-in-time service, such as genius bars. Combine technical support with learning and performance support. For instance, the last time I was at an Apple Genius bar, I showed up at opening time and saw many people attending training sessions. These people showed up voluntarily and it looked like they were interested and engaged. Shouldn’t all training sessions be like this?

The future of work is social, cooperative & mobile. This should also be the future of performance and technical support. As I noted in the future of the training department, the main objective should be to enable knowledge to flow in the organization. The primary function of learning & performance professionals in the networked enterprise is connecting and communicating, based on three core processes:

1. Facilitating collaborative work and learning amongst workers, especially as peers.

2. Sensing patterns and helping to develop emergent work and learning practices.

3. Working with management to fund and develop appropriate tools and processes for workers.

Using mobile platforms can support listening and analyzing by staying in direct contact with workers. They can also help the organization stay connected in order to set context and build consensus. Connecting leadership with the work being done, or learning as we go, should be a prime function of learning professionals in the mobile enterprise.

supporting 21c work—

This post is brought to you by Mobile Enterprise 360 Community and Citrix

Note: I retained editorial control and take full responsibility for what is posted. Contract writing is one of the ways I make my living.

PKM and competitive intelligence

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What’s competitive intelligence? The Wikipedia says:

“A broad definition of competitive intelligence is the action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers in making strategic decisions for an organization.”

Several years ago I advised a client on how to develop a CI process:

1. Start by asking questions internally and seeing what kind of answers you get. Use your existing social media tools to do this.

2. As a distributed team, each person can be responsible for a specific information source that is monitored regularly. This should be narrated and posted for all to see and comment.

3. Ask a weekly question and see who can get some information that may be able to answer part or all of it.

4. In the feedback to these questions people may ask you to re-frame the questions. Continue to learn and refine this process for your unique context. Better questions will make for better CI. Keep this process visible.

5. You may not need to hire anyone else to collate the data, but if you do, keep your team (who have industry knowledge) involved.

6. Don’t just hand CI over to a junior staff member. CI should be part of the conversational flow in the company. Marketing, sales, developers and management should be actively involved.

7. The process of asking questions, seeing if there are answers and in turn asking questions about the questions can hone the team’s ability to gather competitive intelligence.

8. If you decide to purchase access to information sources, only buy one at a time. Use that source as much as you can (squeeze it dry) until you realize you should eliminate it or augment it with another purchased source.

CI, like knowledge management, needs people to be continuously involved and engaged. CI is really just a focused type of knowledge management. Therefore, people with good PKM skills should also be better contributors to CI.

In How to Map Sources for a Competitive Intelligence Project, Cate Farrall provides a basic set up guide to those practicing CI, and describes a 3 step process.

competitive-intelligence-project-source-map
Image: Cate Farrall

This map can also be used as a way to initially set up the Seek part of a personal knowledge mastery framework. Once your PKM objective(s) is/are clear, then identify one or more resources from each part of the map. This should give a fairly broad selection of knowledge resources.

Preparing for the network era workplace

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My presentation at the Learning Technologies Summer Forum in London two weeks ago concluded with the advice to help people be more explicit in their work. Leading up to that conclusion, I showed how the nature of work is changing. We are moving into a creative economy, as Gary Hamel says. Customized work, with high task variety, is becoming the norm. Routine work is being replaced by software and robots. Formal instruction cannot keep up with workplace needs, so there is an increasing requirement to support informal learning and the sharing of implicit knowledge. Finally, much of what we produce at work today is intangible.

Here is the video recording: enterprise social technologies, learning & performance

 

Learning is too important to be left to the professionals

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profWorkplace 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, Cooperative, Mobile

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Work is an activity, not a place. – NineShift

Is mobile the future of work? Are we social creatures? Social learning is for human work, I wrote in my last post. Staying connected while we move, maintains our social networks. Mobile connections also help us get things done. Mobile devices give access to what we need, wherever we are. All indicators are that mobile work is increasing.

Mozilla now has the Firefox OS phone for the ‘next billion’ people. Many developers design first for mobile, and then for the web. IDC forecasts worldwide tablet shipments to surpass even portable PC shipments this year. At the Mayo Clinic, iPads and iPhones are standard.

Cooperation is becoming necessary to get almost any work done. The majority of people use social tools at work, to communicate with customers, or for professional development. Cooperation differs from collaboration. Cooperation is sharing freely without any expectation of direct reciprocation. It’s what most people do naturally. Mobile enables wider cooperation by being continuously available. Cooperation drives the networked enterprise — customers, suppliers, partners, and beyond. Cooperation strengthens networks by increasing trust between people (nodes). As work gets more complex and value more intangible, cooperation across previous boundaries of time and space will change the nature of work, from place, to activity.

Mobile also provides complementary tools for sense-making, an essential skill not just for work in the network era, but for life. Clark Quinn writes, “That’s why mobile makes so much sense: it decouples that complementary capability from the desktop, and untethers our outboard brain.” If you believe that work is learning and learning is the work, then mobile work requires mobile learning. The future of learning is Social, Cooperative and especially Mobile (SoCoMo).

SoCoMo—

This post is brought to you by Mobile Enterprise 360 Community and Citrix

Note: I retained editorial control and take full responsibility for what is posted. Contract writing is one of the ways I make my living.

Social learning is for human work

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This past week I came across the theme of the changing nature of work several times.

As computers transcend many human capabilities and work is dehumanized, we must focus on the skills and abilities where humans excel beyond any imaginable machine capability. At the heart of those human capabilities are creativity and innovation. – Ross Dawson

“Focus on the human factor,” says Gerd Leonhard, “If our work – and our output – is robotic we will soon be surpassed by intelligent software agents and machines.”

This is exactly the message I am trying to convey in the image below. Standardized work (blue) is already being outsourced to the lowest cost of labour and will eventually be automated. This includes knowledge work. Customized work (yellow) is human. Its dominance will mark the end of the industrial era. Talent will replace labour as intangible assets will provide value while machines and software will handle any work that can be standardized.

jobs and workThe learning imperative for the new workplace is not to know more stuff, because software can do that for us, but to become more human. Social learning will help us collaborate and cooperate in doing customized work, requiring thinking and building skills in order to innovate and craft unique products and services.

Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.” –Albert Bandura, Social Learning Theory, 1977

Social learning helps groups of people share their knowledge in non-hierarchical ways and is not limited to the confines of instruction. Training courses take too long to develop and will be obsolete before they are launched. Most organizations today have a 95% informal learning gap they are not addressing. Social learning, using PKM methods and social networks, can address much of this.

Social learning networks enable better and faster knowledge feedback loops, essential for innovation and creativity. In an environment of constant innovation and faster market feedback, social learning is how we will share implicit knowledge and get work done. Social learning is for human work.

social learning is how work gets done

Getting the suds out of the bathtub

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What did the industrial era look like, and how did it differ from the network era? The industrial era epitomized rational, centralized control, replacing local, customized ways of doing things. The network era opens communications so wide that control is no longer possible. For instance, in the network era, leadership is about giving up control.

disconnected to high dynamicImage: From disconnected to centralized to networked

In Organize for Complexity by the BetaCodex network, the authors show the result of centralization on markets as a bit of an anomaly over time. Both decentralized and networked markets are dynamic, while centralized markets are not. In some ways, we are returning markets back to their pre-industrial state.

market dynamics betacodexImage by BetaCodex network

One clear example of this shift is shown by one of my favourite markets – beer. The US Brewer’s Association created this graph of the number of breweries over time. It shows the “Taylor Bathtub” effect very clearly (other than the Prohibition dip). This is just one more indicator that the industrial era is over. I’ll drink to that!

125_Brewery_Count