Work

business & working

Beyond collaboration

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In A Wicked Problem, I said that all levels of complexity exist in our world but more and more of our work deals with real complex problems (in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect), whether they be social, technological, or economic. Complex environments and problems are best addressed when we organize as networks, work to continuously develop emergent practices; and cooperate to advance our aspirations.

Jay Rosen talks about covering wicked problems and describes how journalists could address this “beat”. I think that these approaches align quite well with my Collaboration/Cooperation – Work/Learning framework, based on the working smarter  graphic here.

Rosen says that the beat must be global and networked. This is why we must cooperatively engage in external social networks to understand the complexity of wicked problems. He also talks about the need for narrative, pattern-based understanding of multiple disciplines, and becoming a learning machine. This is the role that communities of practice can play. They are more constrained spaces, yet  still open to diversity of opinion. Work teams, filled with experts, remain good at solving Tame Problems, or those that can be constrained.

Rosen’s is one more perspective on the need to reframe our work structures to incorporate intentional connections beyond traditional business. The answers lie outside, not inside, the organization. As Rosen concludes:

The wicked problems beat is not a View from Nowhere thing. It starts from the limits of professional expertise. It is a reflection on unmanageable complexity. It preaches humility to the authorized knowers. It mocks the one best answer and single issue people. It seeks to deliver us from denial.

Organizations need to extend the notion of work beyond collaboration, beyond teams, and beyond the corporate fire wall. They need to make social networks, communities of practice, and narrative part of the work. It’s a big leap but we need to change the business conversation away from confident military terms (target market, strategic plan, marketing campaign) and instead talk in terms of complexity, wicked problems and cooperation. As Rosen writes, “Cliché is the vernacular in its spent state. Savage clarity is the vernacular coming alive again.” Let’s bring some savage clarity to the modern enterprise.

Learning and Marketing

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I had a great conversation with the Marketing Tech Blog folks on Blog Talk Radio yesterday.

Listen to internet radio with Marketing Technology on Blog Talk Radio

Douglas Karr and Marty Thompson of DK New Media were gracious hosts. One of the main reasons I accepted their invitation is that I think marketing and learning professionals have a lot to learn from each other. We have to stop thinking of learning as a separate thing from work. When you learn with and from your customers, marketing and learning are the same. Perhaps getting rid of the L word is a start. It’s all learning. Learning-oriented marketing, both internal and external, is both getting the message across and understanding the needs of others.

I’ve been watching marketing & training moving closer, just as work & learning get integrated in the networked workplace. I think many training departments in the future may become part of marketing. A great example of this is at  Intuit, where training is part of the marketing department and involves the customer directly. At Intuit, customers are paid to develop content, and as one person wrote in a chat comment, “The e-Learning has kept my CPA husband loyal to Intuit versus Peachtree, etc.”

Perhaps marketing and learning can work together and figure out how best to deal with complex issues and problems without a “how-to” guide. Think of the future of learning as a business, not just a supporting department. It also keeps the learning function customer-focused and not merely process-dependent.

In networks, cooperation trumps collaboration

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In networks, cooperation trumps collaboration. Collaboration happens around some kind of plan or structure, while cooperation presumes the freedom of individuals to join and participate. Cooperation is a driver of creativity. Stephen Downes commented here on the differences:

collaboration means ‘working together’. That’s why you see it in market economies. markets are based on quantity and mass.

cooperation means ’sharing’. That’s why you see it in networks. In networks, the nature of the connection is important; it is not simply about quantity and mass …

You and I are in a network – but we do not collaborate (we do not align ourselves to the same goal, subscribe to the same vision statement, etc), we *cooperate*

We are only beginning to realize how we can use networks as our primary form of living and working. David Ronfeldt has developed the TIMN framework to explain this shift – Tribal; Institutional; Markets; Networks. The TIMN framework shows how we have evolved as a civilization. Ronfeldt sees the network form not as a mere modifier of previous forms, but a form in itself that can address issues that the three other forms could not. This point is very important when it comes to implementing social business (a network mode) within corporations (institutional + market modes). Real network models are new modes, not modifications of the old ones, and cooperation is how work gets done. Some examples:

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Work is learning and learning is the work

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We have come to a point where organizations can no longer leave learning to their HR or training departments. Being able to understand emerging situations, see patterns, and co-solve problems are essential business skills. Learning is the work.

I had mentioned that I was talking to a financial advisor at a bank the other day and I asked her what kind of professional development she did. The bank has a central online learning portal where employees can take ‘courses’, particularly compliance training. The financial advisor told me she just went to the end of each course and did the test. She found it rather useless.

I talked about some of the communities that we have supported for sharing professional development, like my workshops, and she said it would be great to have access to something like this, but it most likely would be blocked. It is a major business mistake when learning is not connected to working.

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Meet Zedfast

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Living in a small town in Atlantic Canada (pop. 5,000), it’s not often I find people in my community who understand what I do, let alone work in similar fields. Zedfast, founded by Steve Scott, is the exception.

Zedfast is currently focused on developing eLearning content in HTML5 and Flash. They even have a Fortune 500 client, which is not bad, given our town’s distance from any major commercial centre. According to MacGregor Grant, building the app from scratch typically involves using the storyboards, source images, and audio files from the client to produce the course. Zedfast then continuously streamlines the conversion process. So far, most of Zedfast’s content has been developed for the iPad.

Here are MacGregor and Steve hanging out at the local café, which doubles as my downtown office ;)

This company, which has three full-time staff here in Sackville and another ±30 contractors in North America and Europe, is not just focused on e-learning. Several new project ideas are on the agenda, including wireless networks, mobile payments, and even social games. In addition, Steve is helping to create a work-sharing space in our community (a Commons), which is something I’ve tried to do a few times.

Great guys, great company; in a great little town.

a wicked problem

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All levels of complexity exist in our world but more and more of our work deals with real complex problems (in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect), whether they be social, technological, or economic. Complex environments and problems are best addressed when we organize as networks, work to continuously develop emergent practices; and cooperate to advance our aspirations.

There is no normal anymore. What we thought was normal is going away. It is really different this time.

“Technology is not only driving down the price to do things. It is driving down the cost of labor to the point where many people may simply never find a job that pays a living wage.” – A Man With A Ph.D.

Standardized and repeatable work is getting automated and outsourced. But there is an infinite amount of complex and creative work to be done. We are just not organized very well to do it. This is the huge challenge we face. Working smarter is not an incremental thing, it’s how we are going to transform society so that most of us can be productive AND earn a living. The JOB is not the answer. Freelancing is not a blanket solution. We need to get really creative about how we work, because work gives meaning, not just compensation. Social business may be part of the solution but the challenge is much bigger than that. Richard Florida alludes to it with the notion of a widespread creative class.

Do you want a complex problem? Figure out how we are going to keep producing stuff and still give people ways to buy that stuff. Think about what will happen if we don’t address this complex, wicked problem.
wicked-problem

The performance appraisal treadmill

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In The Paradox of Performance Pay, Allan Hawke shows how it has clearly led to decreases in organizational performance.

Peter Scholtes, who has researched and written extensively about performance, appraisal and pay, argues that such a performance ”management” regime is inherently the wrong thing to do because three faults are common to all variations on the theme:

  • It doesn’t work.
  • It’s wrong to focus only on individuals or groups, because most opportunities for improvement involve systems, processes and technology.
  • Performance ”management” is judgment, not feedback; it’s a hierarchical dynamic.

W. Edwards Deming called annual performance appraisals one of the five deadly diseases of management. Performance ratings are nothing more than a lottery, Deming said in 1984. This pertains to all levels in the organization.

ANNUAL RATING OF PERFORMANCE

  • Arbitrary and unjust system
  • Demoralizing to employees
  • Nourishes short-term performance
  • Annihilates team work, encourages fear.

Perhaps the performance appraisal treadmill is keeping organizations from testing out and adopting better management models for the networked economy. How could anyone possibly show progress in 365 days? It also makes one wonder about the effectiveness of publicly-traded companies that get a ‘performance appraisal’ from the market every quarter.

JFK Report Card 1930

Performance appraisals are like academic grades and keep the focus on the individual. In the collaborative, social enterprise this is counter-productive. There is no place for this practice in doing net work. In today’s enterprise, work is learning and learning is the work, and it has to be done cooperatively.

The Web changes business

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So you think the Web won’t change the business you’re in? Do you believe that education, training, and instructional design organizations will carry on with business-as-usual, as people keep paying for traditional courses? Look at how these business models, which were all created since the birth of the Web, have managed to change entire industries.

  • Google – Advertising
  • Craigslist – Classified Ads
  • Wikipedia – Encyclopedias (print & electronic)
  • Amazon – Books
  • LinkedIn – Recruiting
  • Elance – Freelancing
  • GMail – Email (web-based & almost unlimited storage)
  • WordPress – Custom Web Design, Hosting & CMS
  • Moo – Business Cards
  • Etsy – Local Artists & Artisans go global in minutes
  • iTunes – Music on demand

Given that 65% of todays’ students will end up in jobs that don’t exist today, we know work will change significantly in the next decade. The network economy is changing everyone’s business, and will significantly affect education and training as well.

Using social media for onboarding

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Last year, I looked at new hire practices and found some interesting methods:

Ensuring new hires understand the shadow or informal part of the organization through the use of tools such as network maps (Jon Katzenbach, Senior Partner of Booz & Company, author of The Wisdom of Teams).

Pairing with another worker or even tripling with two experienced workers and getting to work immediately, in order to reduce formal training (Menlo Innovations)

Two actions that can begin even before a formal offer is made:

  1. Providing access to an online knowledge base.
  2. Connecting to an internal social network to connect online & ask questions.

Embedding collaboration from the start by co-developing an individualized new hire program.

Giving time for new hires to just look around and talk to people (Semco SA; New Seasons Market).

Good practices can be summed up with three key lessons, I later wrote in new hire emergent practices:

  1. Connect People
  2. Connect with Social Media (less hierarchical than other forms of communication).
  3. Start the process as early as possible

I collected several online resources and bookmarked “onboarding” on Diigo & Delicious.

Yesterday, Jane Hart had Mark Britz in conversation on the uses of social media for onboarding at Aspen Dental. The conversation was recorded and will be available at the Social Learning Centre shortly. Here are some of the highlights of what Mark had to say, via the Twitter stream that accompanied yesterday’s conversation:

  • Getting new hires to narrate their work, through blogs and other social media, is a good practice.
  • Allow Community to be the cornerstone of the onboarding process.
  • Use the tools you have already for social learning. Focus on building community for onboarding.
  • As new hires come across work “exceptions”, they will need to leverage a community of peers to deal with these types of problems for which training does not prepare them.
  • Mark used a wiki to capture 85 questions Senior Recruiters were being asked by Dentists in an FAQ for new-hire managers & recruiters. Any initial mistakes were corrected and now these FAQ are on a Yammer page for easy access.
  • You should get new hires to share their learning and narrate their work via blogs (one blog, multi-user) by just making it a part of the work process.
  • When the organization didn’t support networking after training, the employees created their own Facebook group.
  • Social media can be used as tools for 1) collaboration, 2) community, 3) sharing – about equal use for each was observed.
  • Using social media (Yammer) for peer to peer learning, completely eliminated the need for any formal training of the remote recruitment team [though the organization is not opposed to formal training].

learning is not something to get

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“When times were tough, training departments slashed budgets by replacing face-to-face instruction with online reading. They failed to follow through with the discussions, practice, social processing, and reinforcement that makes lessons stick. It didn’t work. Most eLearning is ineffective drudgery.” —Jay Cross

In too many cases we view learning as something that is done to people. It’s almost as if we are goin’ to get some learnin’! We think we can ‘get’ an education or ‘get people trained’. This is absurd.

university class bologna 1350s
University Class, Bologna, 1350s

A wonderful example is provided from a possible near-future in one of Margaret Atwood’s absorbingly dystopic novels.

“I was going to Martha Graham [College] partly to get away from Lucerne, but also I had to do something so I might as well get an education. That’s how they talked about it, as if an education was a thing you got, like a dress.” —The Year of the Flood

We need to look at work and learning together. A workscape perspective can help us see how learning and working are interrelated in a business environment that is a complex, interconnected ecosystem today. But this causes problems for our current management and organizational models.

“Workscape: A metaphorical construct where learning is embedded in the work and emerges in ‘pull’ mode. It is a fluid, holistic, process. Learning emerges as a result of working smarter. In this environment learning is natural, social, spontaneous, informal, unbounded, adaptive, and fun. It involves conversation as the main ingredient.” —Jay Cross

If learning is everywhere, then who is in charge of it?

If learning is the work, why do we need a separate department responsible for managing it?

If workers are responsible for learning, why can’t they take control of it?

Our networked reality is changing how we view workplace learning. The questioning is already happening.  The basics of our economy are in question. Copyright is no longer the bastion of our knowledge economy. Complexity informs every aspect of our lives. So why should learning be controlled by some external, and usually not that important, department?

Individuals need to take control of their learning in a world where they are simultaneously connected, mobile, and global; while conversely contractual, part-time, and local. Organizations must also move learning away from training and HR, as some external band-aid solution that gets called in from time to time, to an essential part of doing business in the network age. Learning has to be owned by the workers and learning support has to be a business function. Then we can get on with net work.