Work

business & working

Organizational architecture

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Why do people do bad things? Is it because they have to? Here is Gary Stager discussing a re-enactment of the famous Milgram Experiment:

One of the subjects in the television program was a 7th grade teacher who explained that she didn’t stop shocking the learner because as a teacher she had learned when a student’s complaints were phony. I thought to myself, “Has she electrocuted many students?”

The teacher asked the researcher, “There isn’t going to be any lawsuit from this medical facility, right?” When told that the teacher was not liable, she replied, “That’s what I needed to know.” It is however worth noting that this was after she induced the maximum shock and the learner demanded that the experiment be terminated.

In this interview with Guy Kawasaki, Dr. Philip Zimardo discusses the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, where students played their roles as guards or prisoners and abuses started within 24 hours:

But on the second morning, the prisoners rebelled; the guards crushed the rebellion and then instituted stern measures against these now “dangerous prisoners”. From then on, abuse, aggression, and eventually sadistic pleasure in degrading the prisoners became the daily norm. Within thirty-six hours the first prisoner had an emotional breakdown and had to be released, followed in kind by similar prisoner breakdowns on each of the next four days.

German researchers have recently released horrendous stories of what went on with regular soldiers during the Second World War. As der Spiegel notes: “Newly published conversations between German prisoners of war, secretly recorded by the Allies, reveal horrifying details of violence against civilians, rape and genocide”.

In this report from Science News we learn that moral talk is cheap:

When faced with a thorny moral dilemma, what people say they would do and what people actually do are two very different things, a new study finds. In a hypothetical scenario, most people said they would never subject another person to a painful electric shock, just to make a little bit of money. But for people given a real-world choice, the sparks flew.

…

But when there was cold, hard money involved, the data changed. A lot. A whopping 96 percent of people in the scanner chose to administer shocks for cash.

It seems it’s not just authority, but money (from which we can derive a form of authority) that may drive us to do immoral things.

Part of the answer lies in the concluding paragraph of the der Spiegel article:

The morality that shapes the actions of people is not rooted in the people themselves, but in the structures that surround them. If they change, everything is basically possible — even absolute evil.

I have often quoted Winston Churchill, and it’s most appropriate here – “First we shape our structures and then our structures shape us”.

Adding new programs, such as diversity training, will not address structural issues. Organizational architecture, which should be a blend of the best from our management disciplines and neuro-sciences, is what’s really needed. My observations over several decades show that most people work within structures without really thinking about them. For our future, and our humanity, we need to change this. What kind of foundation is your organization built upon?

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a suit

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What is so different about working online? Why do social media scare the sh*t out of many organizational decision-makers?

As I wrote last year, working online is different:

But it’s not about the technology. The real issue is getting people used to working at a distance. For instance, everything has to be transparent for collaborative work to be effective online. Using wikis or Google Documents means that everyone can see what the others have contributed. There is no place to hide. For example, I once developed a Request for Proposals with a large group distributed across several time zones. Everyone could provide input for a specified period of time and then that issue was closed. Later, some people complained that their requirements were not being addressed. I was able to look at the revision history of the wiki and show that they had not even contributed on those issues. This stopped the complaints and we were able to move on.

A major aspect of online collaboration is that our symbols of power are stripped bare. No one knows what kind of fancy suit you’re wearing or if you have an expensive watch on your wrist [which only old folks use anyway]. Nobody has seen you drive into your private parking spot with your high price car. You are what you contribute. That’s it.

Computer technology has been a great equalizer in our society. I can buy one of the best computers on the market and the richest person in the world is not able to get one that performs much better. Consumer technology devices are great equalizers. I probably have as much computational power as most CEO’s of major technology firms. Actually, I may have more, because my system has not been crippled by the IT department.

The collaborative, networked enterprise saw its birth in open source software projects. From these widely dispersed groups we got blogs, wikis and micro-sharing as tools to help get things done. But these groups are fairly egalitarian. You’re as good as your code. The suits weren’t invited.

You see, on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a suit … and that’s a major barrier to adoption.

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Image: The New Yorker, 1993

Social learning is what managers do already

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Here are some more questions from our Working Smarter conversation on 30 March 2011, followed by my comments. Feel free to weigh in.

Q1: Our Legal department discourages social learning because the communication cannot be reviewed by them before being presented. How has this been addressed by others?

Q2: What social media/social learning methods are effective in regulation heavy business where a single mistake can cause business-wide repercussions.  I am actually afraid of peer-to-peer education because often even the most respected peers just don’t get it right.

Q3: How can any of this really be implemented effectively in an organization that is bound by confidentiality and regulatory red-tape such as healthcare?

Q4: Do you need to be concerned with a technical answer being wrong by non-experts in social learning and be responsible for that error.

I wonder if a legal department would also recommend that people don’t talk to each other in passing, use the phone or send email? The real problem may be that the legal department doesn’t understand social media. Social learning is already happening. Any organization that is not social is not human.

One of the posted responses was that when social learning environments are done right, the community becomes self-correcting. When the community is transparent, with no anonymous posting, people tend to behave. Inaccuracies are found and corrected. As developers say, given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

There is an example of the CIA’s Intellipedia wiki in what one could consider a confidential, highly controlled, and regulation-heavy organization:

“During a typical workday, Intellipedia—the Intelligence Community’s version of Wikipedia—receives about 5,000 contributions. The third anniversary of Intellipedia on Friday, April 17, was anything but a typical workday. Intellipedia users broke the record for contributions in one day with 15,046 edits.”

If clear ‘answers’ are necessary for regulatory or safety purposes, then these are not the areas where you let anyone respond and make up answers. However, there are many places where people can learn with and from each other. Much time is wasted in finding information, locating expertise, scheduling meetings and dealing with redundant communications. Social media can help and concurrently free up time for learning and innovation. I have yet to find an organization that has too much innovation going on.

Q5: “social learning reduces waste of time” would be viewed as paradoxicial by our senior leaders who believe people waste time in social tools :)

The posted response said — “I’ve had success in asking senior leadership how often they learn and exchange information using social rather than formal mechanisms. Once they put their own learning experiences into this context, they are often more likely to accept the value of social mechanisms.”

For example, according to a UK white paper on How Managers Learn, respondents reported that their most-used as well as the most effective informal learning method was — informal chats with colleagues. Other top-rated methods include the use of (external) search engines, trial & error, informal on-the-job instruction, and professional reading.

That’s in their own words ;)

Working Smarter, one day at a time

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ITA 2011Yesterday we hosted a conversation on social learning and working smarter, facilitated by the folks at Citrix and the eLearning Guild. We all enjoyed the hour long session and participants will be sent the link to the recording by Citrix. In Jane’s social learning community a few comments arose about the lack of interaction. I responded that with 500 people in the audience and only one hour, we were limited in what we could do. Citrix provided the platform and support staff for one hour (plus several hours of rehearsal). We had already crowd-sourced the questions and also answered dozens of text questions that came in (however, it seems not all were posted back to the audience). It was great the community participated for 30 days before the event and hopefully will continue for many days after.

Yesterday’s event was only one part of many conversations that started several years ago on our blogs and continues on Twitter and other platforms.

I’ve highlighted some of the questions on performance improvement asked yesterday  and expanded on the responses, including links:

Q: Where does performance support as a process integrate into social tools and learning at the time and place of need? Where do you best recommend that HPT/ISD individuals gain the social/collaboration skills? What tools are you using to create the performance/support and learning communities?

Performance support starts as a complement to social learning, but then we move to having the community co-develop the performance support tools. The best way to develop any skill is to practice & get feedback – I suggest you  jump in and start using these tools in order to understand them and then see how they can be used in the workplace. Check Jane’s tool of the day site, but lots of potential solutions: open source, commercial, already out there (e.g. Yammer & Status.net)

Links:

Whither ISD, ADDIE & HPT? (includes definitions of these acronyms)

HPT and ISD

Getting to Working Smarter

Q: What do you opine regarding HPI/HPT practitioners (ASTD/ISPI) and the need for this type of specialized practitioner as a member of organizations’ HR or as a community resource?

I think HPT skills are a good addition to training development skills but we also need to add business skills and social/collaboration skills. I find that HPT doesn’t get “social” very well. Basically, HPT is only one toolset;  good for some things, but not all.

HPT, like many other workplace disciplines, creates silos. Networks require the integration of organizational support. We’re realizing that compartmentalized approaches to supporting work do not work in a highly networked world. Why should HR, IT, Finance, Training, KM, OD, Marketing etc. be separate functions? It’s time to rid our organizations of Taylor’s ghost and use radically different management. Clark Quinn calls it a unified performer-facing environment and I have said for a while that we need to break down the intra-organizational walls. I hear the same discussions in HR, OD, KM, Training and IT. They see their traditional roles and control eroding. Each field is trying to remain relevant but it’s only by working together that they will.

It’s not just about HPT, or L&D, or HR. Systems thinking is necessary.

Q: Did I miss it, or have you not defined the term “social learning”?

No cookie-cutter answers here ;)

Bandura’s Social Learning Theory

Bandura and Social Cognitive Theory

Working Smarter through Social Learning

Learning Socially

Social Learning Handbook

More to follow …

 

Life in Perpetual Beta – Director's Cut

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You read this blog, why not see the movie by the same name? [I have no affiliation with the film, though I like the title and enjoyed it]

Life in perpetual Beta – Director’s Cut is now available for purchase. Produced by Melissa Pierce @melissapierce and released this month, the documentary covers the effects of social media and the always-on Web on many facets of our lives. It includes interviews with Seth Godin, Biz Stone, Gary Vaynerchuk, Jason Fried, Liz Strauss and many others.

Life in Perpetual Beta is a documentary film about the ways in which technology has/is/will change the ways in which we think about ourselves as individuals and a society. It is exploring the cultural shift that technology creates as it enables people to live more passionate, less planned lives. Life in Perpetual Beta was made by the same principles it explores, all aspects of the film were crowdsourced on social networks, from who to interview, what to ask, camera crews and how to pay for production. Life in Perpetual Beta will inspire you to believe that with a little faith in humanity and help from the internet, anything is possible.

Check out the movie’s website.

There are a lot of interesting stories and perspectives in this video. No answers, but many lenses to see our mixed-up world and how perpetual Beta is becoming the norm.

“There’s no map” – “You have to be open” – “Authenticity is obvious” – “Everybody is in the design business” – “You can change your mind” – “You have to know where you are now and plan forward from that”

Note: The video is only available for purchase in the USA, though you can watch it in the screening room.

Crossing the social media threshold

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My ongoing conversation with Michael Cook continues (Organizational Development Talks: OrgDevTalk), with these thoughts:

Harold: With the delays that seem to be following each of your recent responses to me you may be thinking I have fallen through the web someplace and cannot find my way back. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth, although I have been on a journey thanks to everything you have provided me to think about. From when we started by talking on the phone to where we are now has for me been a very long journey. I am reminded of one of those scenes from the Lord of the Rings films where one or the other of the wizards was looking into either a crystal ball or a boiling pot and could see something going on very far, far away. Maybe that time difference between where you are in New Brunswick and where I am in Washington is actually much greater than the four hours that show on the clock!

Perhaps you saw me after that last exchange wandering lost among the hyperlinks you provided. I wasn’t lost, that’s just the look on my face most of the time, especially when I am considering connectivity. Maybe its just my natural tendency to go inward to address a big question.

After spending a good deal of time with the various references you provided I found my mind wandering back to current client relationships. I have one in particular that years ago began by addressing a problem and providing a service that handles a complicated issue for clients. Over the years they added in a couple more twists to further reduce the complicated issue. Then, maybe 10 years ago they ventured outside the simply complicated and began to address areas of complexity, I say without recognition of the looking glass they had passed through. Since that time they have continued along the path of complexity and had increasing problems with their margins.

How might I begin a conversation with this client’s leadership to have them begin to consider that they have evolved into an entirely different type of animal than they were at the beginning? In the context of our conversation thus far around the use of social media inside business this would seem like a fairly fundamental threshold to cross before a management group might begin to consider the use of these technologies.

How do you tell people that the world is different? This is especially difficult for those in postions of authority who owe their position to the past. Why change what still works?

You could start with a list of events to describe how the world is significantly different, like when a singer from Halifax, Nova Scotia can publish a music video seen by millions of viewers and it affects the stock price of a major corporation: United Breaks Guitars or a group of distributed computer hackers shatter the diplomatic world as they join forces with traditional media outlets: Wikileaks. There are many other examples, such as regional protests coordinated through Facebook or some other social medium.

But you also have to show that the organization itself has changed.

If you have someone coming over for the first time, do you Google them? You can be pretty sure that if they’re under 30, they’ve already checked you out online. If you don’t have a profile on the Web they may even have decided not to show. For many people, if you’re not the Web, you don’t exist. Now that’s a change from a decade ago. Find out if the HR department uses LinkedIn to recruit. Maybe they don’t even know what it is.

Social media for marketing is the tip of the iceberg. The real power of social media is for getting things done. They facilitate learning and working; which are now joined at hip in the creative, complex workplace that’s 24/7 in multiple time zones and always-on.

If the organization doesn’t embrace the values of the external network, it will move at a snail’s pace while the rest of the world spins around it. Does this reflect the inside?

Open & transparent
Need to share
Continuous learning
Conversation is valued
Time for reflection
Perpetual Beta
Business metrics are understood

It’s what’s happening outside.

Finally, you can throw some return on investment figures at them. Simply put, social media give you more time to get things done. There are many other reasons, some of which the folks at Socialcast have neatly put out as an infographic:

Not sure if this addresses your questions, Mike, but we have much more time and all the digital space we need.

Embrace chaos

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When I discussed Emergent Value, some very good comments ensued, from Jon Husband, Gordon Ross, Peg Boyles, Ollie Gardener and Monika Hardy. This image was my first attempt to show how real value creation happens at the edge of organizations and requires different management and communications practices. Social networks, collaboration and cooperation must be the norm when dealing with complex or chaotic situations.

Jon Husband commented on my post with a suggested wirearchy framework for implementation:

– Identify a purpose (this is what may or will be emerging in chaotic activities)
– Identify and enroll the skills, motivations and personalities necessary to address the purpose in a constructive and/or creation-of-value way (typically, within one or more social networks).
– Identify and create the infrastructure for effective and constructive communication and collaboration (the web services and social tools that are increasingly commonplace and free or inexpensive)
– Open the infrastructure to the “crowd of interest” on the web (unless it is a commercial endeavour on the part of a now-grouping of people, as in a consulting group that emerges from peoples’ interactions) .. it can be participative social media marketing on the part of companies, or advocacy and activist dynamics on the part of not-for-profits
– Create practical metrics that a group or network actually understand and believe in, and refine as the networked wirearchy grows, sustains or wanes.
– Refine, adjust, adapt (it’s critical to ensure social ‘hygiene’ and seek, then instill ways of building and sustaining trust)

Start with Purpose > People > Platform then open it up to Network > Metrics > Community.

Ollie Gardener noted that, “The wirearchy of connections need to form not just to meet the collective needs/goals, but to support people’s independent work both within and across company boundaries (the work that we do in parallel).” This is high-value work/learning on the edge, where life is complex and chaotic. It’s from the periphery of a network, where it is less homogenous, that we get diversity and innovation. This is where individuals and organizations have to go to continue learning and developing.

As Seely Brown, Hagel and Davison noted two years ago in How to Bring the Core to the Edge:

In today’s fast-moving, chaotic world, edges are beginning to take on greater meaning. Not only in their ability to help us recognize new ideas but, perhaps more importantly, in the power they give us to escape the old ones.

I think the edge will be where almost all high value work gets done in organizations. Core activities will be increasingly automated or outsourced. Most of the people in an organization will be on the edge. The core will be managed by very few internal staff. This is a sea change, in my opinion. It means that change and complexity will be the norm in our work. We already see this with increasing numbers of freelancers and contractors. Any work where complexity is not the norm will be of diminishing value.

We need to embrace complexity and chaos, it’s where the future of work lies.

Mapping quality with VNA

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Our NetWorkShop on Saturday was a great success and I think everyone left with a better understanding of networks, as well as some ideas for future pursuit. One main message that came through early in the workshop is that you cannot manage a network. That’s probably the biggest barrier to Net Work in most organizations. We also went through a few exercises to describe some of our networks and created value network maps that looked much messier than this one, by Patti Anklam.

Our value network analyses (VNA) looked like this:

One key insight for me is that when analyzing networks we need to describe the connections in detail. It’s not just mapping the nodes, but understanding how they are connected. With Value Network Analysis, one looks at tangible and intangible asset transfers. Process maps often ignore the type of connection and show it as an arrow without describing all the fuzzy relationships. This is a limitation of performance analysis as it often misses the social aspect of organizations.

Incorporating a process map like performance analysis into a value network analysis might give us deeper insights into how an organization and its people actually work. Given that more of our work collaboration happens in networks and uses social media platforms, this is the direction our analysis should go. As Jay Deragon notes, it’s not the outputs that really matter but the quality of the connected processes. I’ve added comments on the need for descriptions of relationships and quality of connections to the performance analysis process map above. It’s just a start.

More photos of our NetWorkShop are on Flickr.

Patti Anklam’s book on Net Work is now available on the Kindle.

A Working Smarter Conversation

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Join the five of us for an online conversation

Ask a question; win a book. Then register to join us online on 30 March 2011

We will discuss whatever interests you in the realm of Working Smarter.

Do you have burning questions about social learning, web 2.0, or working smarter? Want to find out how other organizations are grappling with the culture, politics, and governance of implementing informal learning?

Ask us a question or suggest a topic. The more controversial the better.

We will give free copies of the Working Smarter Fieldbook to six people who leave a comment below.

REGISTER


Four very interesting folks to follow, in my opinion ;)

 

 

Frictionless learning

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Gary Wise, in Close to the Edge: The Radicalization of Training,  suggests that workers need an environment with:

seamless, frictionless and ubiquitous access to/from the right learning assets – at their moment(s) of learning need – in work context-friendly amounts – in compelling, readily-consumable formats – to/from the right devices.

This is definitely part of the solution and goes a long way in addressing the training department’s predominantly event-based, fire & forget, mindset. However, it’s also content-centric and appears to assume that if you have the right content, learning will happen.

But more of our work is in exception-handling or is increasingly complex and requires the sharing of highly contextual tacit knowledge. That means we also need to be connected to the right people at the right time. Professional social networks enable these connections. I would add to Gary’s description, “seamless, frictionless and ubiquitous access to/from the right learning assets as well as a dynamic network of colleagues/co-workers …”. Once again, this sounds like wirearchy:

a dynamic [multi-way]  flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology