Work

business & working

Experience-Performance-Reflection

by

The above diagram, by Nick Milton, shows some important aspects of what influences performance [hint: blue]. First, knowledge is the result of information (e.g. learning content) AND experience. Knowledge is directly influenced by one’s own experience. Therefore there is no such thing as “knowledge transfer“. Second, performance is taking action on knowledge. This is what is evident to others in the workplace. They observe what we do. It’s not what we know that is important to others, but what we do with it. In the workplace, what we do with knowledge is usually in a social context. This influences the third key point, that reflection of one’s performance is an important part of the learning process and this is often in a social context as well. Learning from what others do is the foundation of Albert Bandura’s social learning theory:

“Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. 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.”

Nick Milton’s diagram shows the inherent weakness of the pervasive workplace technology called learning management systems. LMS are disconnected from 1) Experience, 2) Performance & 3) Reflection. Their focus is on formal learning (a mere 10% of workplace learning) usually in the form of information transmission. As Jane Hart explains, the LMS is not part of the experience-performance-reflection workflow:

Although the LMS has in recent years become the de facto place to store learning content in the form of courses, it is not the first port of call for a worker when they need to solve a problem – since an LMS is generally a separate, password-protected system, which is not easily searchable and the content within in it is not available in a usable format.

Smart Work starts with an understanding of what is important for the 21st century workplace. It’s not content delivery. We are awash in content. Smart workers need ways to enhance their experience-performance-reflection processes, not have more information dumped into the pipeline.

 

Free-agents and enlightened despots

by

A recent NYT article on The Auteur vs. The Committee compares Apple and Google, describing Steve Jobs as an “auteur”:

Two years ago, the technology blogger John Gruber presented a talk, “The Auteur Theory of Design,” at the Macworld Expo. Mr. Gruber suggested how filmmaking could be a helpful model in guiding creative collaboration in other realms, like software.

The auteur, a film director who both has a distinctive vision for a work and exercises creative control, works with many other creative people. “What the director is doing, nonstop, from the beginning of signing on until the movie is done, is making decisions,” Mr. Gruber said. “And just simply making decisions, one after another, can be a form of art.”

As I wrote in 2004 – I’ve heard and discussed the film crew metaphor many times over the past five or so years. It makes sense that in order to address the constantly changing market needs that a more flexible work organization is necessary. The film production crew model seems viable, but the dark side, according to Gautam, is that the producer gets the lion’s share of the profits, and the superstars command the enormous fees, while the average worker just survives. I think that a more cooperative model, like the independent productions, where more of the workers share in the risk and the profit, is more sustainable. This is becoming evident as the barriers to production are coming down – such as lower-priced digital editing suites.

I agree that innovation needs diversity and the film-making model enables this by re-forming the team for each production while keeping the singular vision with one producer/director. I see the future of “net work” is in rapidly forming new teams who work under the vision of a Director. The model is kept dynamic by enabling these teams to quickly disperse and be re-created in new forms. An automatic exit strategy is baked into the business model, ensuring constant destruction of the old model and enabling evolution in successive group-forming.

The more free-thinkers and independent learners that an organization has, the more resilient it will be in times of change. Add this to a constantly evolving organizational model and it might let us keep up with life in perpetual Beta. The key for a successful work organization will be balancing diversity with singular focus. Countries that have a social safety net may be more successful with this, as free-agents will have more control in selecting what “enlightened despot” they wish to work with next and not be pressured to just take any gig. Shifting to a new work model will require systemic changes in education, employment laws, social security and many other areas, but I have little doubt that the older model of indentured servitude has outlived its usefulness.

The community dance hall

by

In Diversity, Complexity & Chaos I highlighted several articles by others that discussed these themes and I finished with this graphic:

Karen Jeannette (@kjeannette) noted that her challenge is to “foster movement between the bubbles” and I responded that my own experience and with my clients has been that negotiating these boundaries is an art form and is highly contextual and quite fluid. To which Karen responded, “which is why I’m glad I had dance lessons when I was young …. always dancing, negotiating the next step”. This is an important metaphor. Supporting communities of practice is a lot like dancing, there’s constant give and take.

Another useful metaphor is to think of social media as languages. Learning to use one is like learning a new language, and as anyone who works with adults learning new languages has observed, most grown-ups do not want to look stupid, so they are inhibited in embracing the new language and making mistakes as they go along. Younger children don’t have this aversion.

So here we are, speaking new languages, where some people are fluent and others less so and then put on the dance floor learning new routines, while in fleeting but pervasive contact with partners of varying skills, abilities and mannerisms.

Instead of trying to find the perfect recipe for supporting communities of practice in the organization, think more like a social convener of a community dance hall. Many people have come, some will dance well, some poorly with gusto, and others will watch. Your aim is not to make it perfect for everyone but to make sure that people come to the next dance. That means changing the tempo of the music or perhaps introducing new dance partners or maybe taking a break. It takes keen observation, pattern recognition and a suite of subtle tools (a gentle hand) to help guide the flow.

The community hall is where those who work together can be more social while meeting some new folks from out of town. It’s a constantly negotiated space, dependent on who shows up, who plays, and who dances.  It depends on getting introduced to interesting people; some to dance with and others to talk to.

Leadership, Connectivity, Execution, Organization

by

Powerful metaphors guide our collective thoughts. It took a long time to understand heliocentrism and then modern science even blasts that model apart somewhat. In spite of all our scientific knowledge, many people still believe in the geocentric model.

Metaphors that provide the common mental frameworks for our organizations are also powerful tools. For example, the company as a well-oiled machine conjures up a certain image. Today, more people are viewing the organization as a biological system, bringing new metaphors that can change the way we think, and act. The Socialcast blog has an infographic that shows what ants can teach the enterprise about teamwork starting with four challenges of distributed teams:

  1. Too much Focus on Technology and Process.
  2. Focus is on Doing, not Goals.
  3. Weak team Cohesion.
  4. Trouble adopting Technology.

One answer is the concept of bioteams, with four key zones that should be supported by the organization.

“We are all leaders. We must keep one another informed in real time. We trust living systems to self-organize”; writes Jay Cross on bioteams. A self-organizing, living system versus a well-oiled machine: pick the company you would rather work for.

My experience with distributed teams confirms these four essential components. I would also add an essential ingredient that strengthens the bonds between these four components and that is trust. However, even with new frameworks and models, the hard work is in changing practice, as those persevering geocentrists show.

Training departments will shrink

by

The Epic social learning debate for Summer 2011 states:

“This house believes that as social learning grows, so the requirement for traditional training departments shrinks.”

Let’s examine why they grew in the first place. Training on a massive scale was a requirement for preparing citizen soldiers for war and initial methods were tested during the second world war (1939-45). A systems approach did not become standardized until after the war, led by applied research done by Robert Gagné, as noted by Donald Clark:

One of the interesting system development projects discussed in Gagne’s book is building a revised course of instruction for armor crewman training at Fort Knox, Kentucky. The project was code named SHOCKACTION and undertaken during the late 1950s. The course trained tank crewmen to act as a tank commander, driver, gunner, or loader of the Army’s main battle tank. The course was considered important and worthy of considerable investment of research and development funds. It was noted by officers that the present course was not training armor crewmen to a level of proficiency.

The famous ADDIE model did not get adopted until 1975, just as the baby boomers were entering university and the business world. There was a need to train lots of people in North America and later elsewhere as economies grew. Training departments rose to the challenge.

For thousands of years people have developed work skills through apprenticeship. This worked for small numbers and developed into the highly structured guild system in Europe. Industrialization marked the fall of the guild system. The nation state and the industrial economy adopted a new competency development framework, from which we have modern training departments, professional associations, job competency models, etc. But the industrial economy no longer drives the developed world. Even the information economy  is giving way to the creative economy.

 

In Social learning, complexity & the enterprise, I go over many of the factors that are forcing us to change how we think about learning and work, which is what training departments are supposed to focus on. The most significant change is in how we relate to, and deal with, information and knowledge. We no longer have to go to the library to get a book and we have access to a growing network of expertise from people (like bloggers) who are willing to share their knowledge for free. Instructional content is no longer a scarcity. Neither are “instructors”. Expertise is becoming ubiquitous though the likes of Wikipedia and social networks.

The draining of the hierarchical pyramid will change not only training, but also intellectual property and the social contract with workers. In a shifting networked world, every artificial  structure will be affected, so why should the training department be impervious to these effects? Even money will change, as this article about  The Bitcoin Epoch being akin to the Printing Press Revolution shows.

We are in a management revolution, testing out new models such as the social enterprise, democracy in the workplace, chaordic organizations and networked free-agents. Will the rise of social learning be the “cause” of the shrinking training department? Probably not. But it will be one of the effects.

The job bubble

by

Formal education exploded as we moved into the industrial age one hundred years ago, with larger organisations demanding Taylorist job functions. As the industrial age gives way to a networked age, there is less need for well-defined, cookie-cutter jobs. With fewer standardized jobs, why do we need standardized education, or even standardized training? [I know that there are exceptions to this statement, but they are becoming fewer].

This was my concluding paragraph on a 2006 blog post, Informal economy; informal learning.

Thomas Friedman wrote this week in the New York Times that a job may be a thing of the past, which I have thought for a long time now:

Look at the news these days from the most dynamic sector of the U.S. economy — Silicon Valley. Facebook is now valued near $100 billion, Twitter at $8 billion, Groupon at $30 billion, Zynga at $20 billion and LinkedIn at $8 billion. These are the fastest-growing Internet/social networking companies in the world, and here’s what’s scary: You could easily fit all their employees together into the 20,000 seats in Madison Square Garden, and still have room for grandma. They just don’t employ a lot of people, relative to their valuations, and while they’re all hiring today, they are largely looking for talented engineers.

The job bubble may be over. It didn’t last long; about 100 years. Now we have to figure out better ways of getting work done and ensuring fair recompense. It doesn’t mean getting rid of social safety nets either, but our policy-makers had better catch on quickly. In Canada there’s some discussion about employment insurance for the self-employed. It doesn’t really work so far, but at least there is public discussion.

Digging through my old posts on jobs, I came across some interesting links:

If you ever have a choice, never have a job.

Jobs, which can be “filled”, turn people into commodities (human resources): “Being a commodity is inevitably dehumanizing, no matter how much they pay you.”

Our economy, with jobs as an important part of the social contract, is just someone else’s story.

Freelancing is still a difficult option.

In Let’s talk about work, I wrote:

In a networked, knowledge-based economy where initiative, creativity and passion trump intellect, diligence and obedience; being “at” work 8 hours a day makes little sense. The Internet makes “time at work”, an antiquated notion. It also makes many of our traditional management and personnel policies irrelevant. The recession has only amplified this trend.

Finally, this was my last experience in a JOB – I think that the construct of the job, with its defined skills, effort, responsibilities and working conditions, is a key limiting organizational factor for the creative economy.

 

Outliers, success and chance

by

Summer seems to be for reading and I just finished Gladwell’s Outliers: the story of success, in two days. Like his other books, it’s an easy read with lots of anecdotes. At the end, I thought to myself, what I can take away from this, other than some interesting stories?

The culture of our community strongly influences our health. This culture is more than what we see and can be affected by norms that are hundreds of years old and no longer visible.

When and where we were born have a significant impact on our chances for success. Just being intelligent or creative is not enough. We need chance to favour us; such as reducing competition during periods of low birth rates, or to be born early in the year so that we physically develop ahead of our peers and are perceived as “better”.

It takes a long time to develop deep skill in an area, about 10,000 hours, says Gladwell. The advantage is to those who develop these skills just before they come into great demand, like computer programming before the 1980’s or tailoring prior to an explosion of the garment industry. Like being born at the right moment, timing is everything.

Culture can also help or hinder a society as it changes. For example, Korean culture initially hindered effective communications in airplane cockpits but its culture and language have positioned it well in mathematics, science and education in general.

Echoing Dan Pink’s Drive (Autonomy, Mastery, Sense of Purpose), Gladwell concludes that meaningful work has three defining attributes:

Those three things – autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward – are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five.

I was born in a year with heavy competition, 1959, the bulge of the baby boom. I have had lots of peer competition. Luckily, I got on the Web early, part of my second career, because my first career was good, but not a huge success (I was not on a promotion track when I left the military). I’ve developed skill with social media, especially blogging, amounting to close to 10,000 hours by now. There are about ~2,000 posts on this blog, I’ve made +17,000 Tweets and I’ve spent a lot of time in countless social network systems.

I got a head start because I saw the potential of the Web before my peers did. This was based on a series of serendipitous chances like transferring to the military Training branch and then getting posted to a project that required knowledge about flight simulation and computer based training, which few of us had, so I had to learn as I went along. This pushed me to go back to school and get a Master’s degree which then helped me get a job at a university where I got deeper into learning technologies.

My Canadian culture seems to make me less entrepreneurial than my American counterparts but I think I’m better at understanding other cultures. Good for supporting a business, but probably not leading one. Consulting seems to be a good fit, but I may not have gone into freelancing had I not been laid-off (twice in two years).

For someone 20 years younger than me, I think Outliers would be a good read and might help make some of life’s decisions a bit easier.

The adaptive organisation

by

Continuing from the post: Adapting …

The adaptive organisation is the second-last chapter of Adapt: Why success always starts with failure, followed by Adapting and you. In the final chapters, Tim Harford examines how groups and individuals can strive to adapt, and here are some highlights.

“So let’s first acknowledge a crucial difference: individuals, unlike populations, can succeed without adapting.” This statement explains a lot about what happens in organizations ;)

Case study of Timpson:

The first thing Timpson does when it buys another business is to rip out the electronic point-of-sale machines (there are always EPOS machines) and replace them with old-fashioned cash registers. ‘EPOS lets people at head office run the business’, explains John Timpson. ‘I don’t want them to run the business.’ EPOS machines empower head offices but they make it harder to be flexible and give customers what they need.

… how senior executives must feel when their cutting-edge, market-leading business finds itself being disrupted by a foolish-looking new technology:

A sufficiently disruptive innovation bypasses almost everybody who matters at a company: the Rolodex full of key customers becomes useless; the old skills are no longer called for; decades of industry experience count for nothing. In short, everyone who counts in a company will lose status if the disruptive innovation catches on inside that company — and whether consciously or unconsciously, they will often make sure that it doesn’t.

These, then, are the three obstacles to heeding that old advice, ‘learn from your mistakes’:

  1. denial, because we cannot separate our error from sense of self-worth;
  2. self-destructive behaviour, because … we compound our losses by trying to compensate for them;
  3. rose-tinted processes … whereby we remember past mistakes as though they were triumphs, or mash together our failures with our successes.

How to overcome these obstacles:

“Honest advice from others is better.”

Perhaps there is one reason why researchers find that self-employed people tend to be happier than the employed: they receive implicit approval of what they do every time somebody pays their invoice, whereas people with regular jobs tend to receive feedback that is both less frequent and less meaningful.

“So it’s worth remembering once again why it is worth experimenting, even though many experiments will, indeed, end in failure. It’s because the process of correcting the mistakes can be more liberating than the mistakes themselves are crushing, even though at the time we so often feel that the reverse is true.”

The book covers and cites several key points from The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Future of Management, which may make it a bit tedious for those who’ve read many management books, but overall I would recommend it as a fresh perspective on some key organizational and structural issues.

 

Adapting

by

I’ve just started reading Tim Harford’s book, Adapt: Why success always starts with failure.

Here are my highlights/notes from Chapter One, Adapting:

Planning vs Adapting

“Ormerod’s discovery strongly implies that effective planning is rare in the modern economy.”

“The Soviet failure revealed itself much more gradually: it was a pathological inability to experiment.”

Design Principles

Palchinsky principles’:

first, seek out new ideas and try new things;

second, when trying something new, do it on a scale where failure is survivable;

third, seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes as you go along.

[note that Palchinsky worked in the Soviet Union]

Hierarchies

“There is a limit to how much honest feedback most leaders really want to hear; and because we know this, most of us sugar-coat our opinions whenever we speak to a powerful person. In a deep hierarchy, that process is repeated many times, until the truth is utterly concealed inside a thick layer of sweet-talk.”

Next: the adaptive organization

Tribes and networks coexist

by

So the social networking utopia is not coming, writes Mashable’s Chris Taylor on CNN. He cites one Dunbar number (now all the rage) and concludes:

Turns out we’re hardwired to get along best in tight groups of no more than 150, and have been since we were living on the African savannah. Armies take advantage of this hardwiring, as do the smartest corporations, not to mention wedding planners.

Dunbar’s research looked at relationships among primates and didn’t take into account loose ties or electronically mediated & enhanced communications. It is not a fair comparison. But Taylor’s words on Tribalism triggered an old connection for me:

A study released this month shows that digital tribalism is alive and well in the social network era. The tribes I’m talking about aren’t nations, corporations or sports teams, though clearly these brands all matter as much as they ever did.

I’m talking literally about tribes — as in the kind of village-sized small groups most of us lived among for nearly all of human history, right up until the 20th century. Small groups that we now seem to be organizing ourselves into again — virtually.

A few years ago I came across a framework of our four primary historical modes of organizing – Tribal; Institutional; Markets; Networks. The TIMN framework shows how we have evolved as a society. It has not been a clean progression from one mode to the next but rather the new form built-upon and changed the previous mode.

A key point of this framework is that Tribes exist within Institutions, Markets AND Networks. We never lose our affinity for community groups or family, but each mode brings new factors that influence our previous modes. So yes, tribalism is alive and well in online social networks. It’s just not the same tribalism of several hundred years ago.

We are in a transition from a market to network-dominated society, and according to David Ronfeldt, each transition has its hazards. While tribal societies may result in nepotism, networked societies can lead to deception, as Mashable itself has reported. It’s interesting that tribes of hackers are a potential counter to network deception.

Ronfeldt states that the initial tribal form informs the other modes and can have a profound influence as they evolve.

Balanced combination is apparently imperative: Each form (and its realm) builds on its predecessor(s). In the progression from T through T+I+M+N, the rise of a new form depends on the successes (and failures) achieved through the earlier forms. For a society to progress optimally through the addition of new forms, no single form should be allowed to dominate any other, and none should be suppressed or eliminated. A society’s potential to function well at a given stage, and to evolve to a higher level of complexity, depends on its ability to integrate these inherently contradictory forms into a well-functioning whole. A society can constrain its prospects for evolutionary growth by elevating a single form to primacy — as appears to be a tendency at times in market-mad America.

So tribes are not dead, and neither are institutions and markets, in a networked society. We need to understand all four modes as we make the current transition. Saying that tribes render social networks useless after 150 connections is a bit trite. The real work is in figuring out how best to create organizations, and societies, that balance combinations of all four modes, emphasize their bright sides and remain in perpetual Beta [what Ronfeldt calls incomplete adaptation].

The TIMN framework is very useful for having deeper conversations and increasing our understanding of what we’re going through as a society. It should be required reading for organizational leaders and politicians as well.