Work – Page 61 – Harold Jarche

Literacy and numeracy for complexity

2011-01-11 by Harold Jarche

The need for competency in developing emergent practices is not a new theme here. Neither is the democratization of the workplace. It’s all about dealing with increasing complexity.

In addition to new work practices, it seems there might also be a need for different types of literacy and numeracy, as described by Daniel Lemire. Increasing complexity blurs traditional fields of understanding:

We teach kids arithmetic and calculus, but systematically fail to teach them about probabilities. We are training them to distinguish truth from falsehoods, when most things are neither true nor false.

Most of our organizations and institutions seem to be stuck in a medium-complexity mindset. That’s not good enough in a highly complex world but there are forces that want to drag us back to a low-complexity world; one that does not exist. Standardized testing and “back to basics” movements are manifestations of this simplistic mindset. Unfortunately, it’s going to be difficult to upgrade skills for higher complexity work when we lack the necessary basic numeracy (understanding of probabilities) or literacy (seeking truth on our own).

Perhaps this is the underlying challenge in getting people to think about and be comfortable in developing emergent practices. Maybe they lack the required literacy and numeracy.

* More from Daniel on Demarchy and probabilistic algorithms

Exchanging knowledge in Ottawa & Montreal

2016-12-072011-01-09 by Harold Jarche

I have two scheduled engagements with The Conference Board of Canada in February.

On 3/4 Feb I will be presenting a framework for social learning in the enterprise in Ottawa with the Canadian Council for Learning and Development as well as the Knowledge Strategy Exchange Networks.

Later in the month on 16/17 Feb I will be presenting in Montréal to the Councils of Human Resource Executives where the topic is the future of work. My presentation will discuss:

Social media, distributed work and unlimited information are changing our relationships in the workplace. We can connect to anyone, anywhere and find out almost anything. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchies, making many industrial work practices redundant. Yet we cling to the traditional ways of measuring and valuing work. Job competencies were based on stable, measurable work. Courses are an artifact of a time when information was scarce and connections were few. The future of work is in the integration of learning and working. It is in working smarter.

If any friends and colleagues in these cities want to get together, let me know. I haven’t made my travel bookings yet and I will be in Ottawa for a few extra days for some other client work. If you know of an organization that is looking for speakers or workshops please pass the word. It’s a small world.

A snapshot of life in perpetual Beta

2011-01-05 by Harold Jarche

I had the pleasure of meeting Eileen Clegg at the Internet Time Alliance Party in November. Eileen wanted to know what ITA does and I agreed to explain my personal perspectives on work and learning.

We moved into the Internet Time Lab, in Jay’s basement, and Eileen drew while I talked.

The result shows some of the main concepts and ideas that drive my work.

—

Life in Perpetual Beta is a primary theme.

Understanding complexity is central to my work.

Other themes include giving up control and letting people manage themselves.

Concepts such as ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate (Mark Federman) and wirearchy (Jon Husband) inform my work.

The idea that “humans don’t scale” is based on research such as the work of Robin Dunbar.

Probe-Sense-Respond comes from the Cynefin framework.

—

So that’s a snapshot of some of the ideas that I find important for my work … for now. Be sure to check out some of the great visuals Eileen has done with a wide variety of clients.

Transparency: embrace it

2011-01-04 by Harold Jarche

How do you make work more effective? Make it transparent, as Sigurd Rinde did with his client. He redesigned an advertising agency’s workflow, identifying the main choke points, four “big meetings” where one of the “owners” had to be present, and then made the workflow visible so anybody could see what was happening.

With an average seven weeks from start to end for their projects, where I assumed half a week average delay from instant for each meeting due to “sorry, I’m busy on Thursday”s (that I would argue was very optimistic), we could cut the time from seven to five weeks per project, on average, without losing anything but thumb twiddling. With a 20% profit margin today it would translate to a tripling of their profits.

Of course the clients would think this was a great idea.

Did they go for this no-brainer? Nope, the two owners would not hear of it, their controlling habits and methods where not to be touched, and bah humbug to tripling of profits. Ah well, their prerogative, they did not have outside investors. Maybe I should have had a chat with their spouses over lunch at Harrods?

Oh, I guess they didn’t.

Transparent work is the one of biggest opportunities we have in creating more effective organizations but it seems to be a major barrier in any hierarchy. The owners didn’t want a transparent workflow to show they were the cause of the problem. Too often, the leadership IS the problem. Whether they like it or not, these types of owners/managers had better adapt. More and more, workers know where the problems are because they have access to the data. They can see alternatives and find solutions blindingly fast on the web. The hard reality for business leaders is that in an inter-connected world, we need less management, not more.

In a transparent workplace, the role of management is to give workers a job worth doing, the tools to do it, recognition of a job well done and then let them manage themselves. Working smarter means using social media tools, which are inherently designed for transparency, and doing something worthwhile. Social media are the equivalent of an industrial factory for each worker. Today, every worker has the ability to get a message out to the world in the blink of an eye. Workers can also connect to massive amounts of information. As anthropologist Michael Wesch states, “when media change, then human relationships change“. The Internet has changed everything. The social contract that we call employment has been changing for a while. Unions are shrinking, the self-employed are growing and low wage service jobs are becoming our largest growth sector. What can unite us is our ability to easily connect with each other, without traditional intermediaries.

For me, an essential part of working smarter is showing people they have access to the most powerful communications medium in history and that individuals have to grab hold of it, understand it and use it for the good of society, because we are society. Working smarter is not about doing your job better. It’s understanding what it means to work, to create and to be responsible, while being visible to everyone else. This can be a bit scary, but I firmly believe that transparency is the foundation for a much better workplace.

Will's Learning Landscape Model

2011-01-03 by Harold Jarche

Will Thalheimer has developed the Learning Landscape Model and created this 13 minute video to explain it.

Overall I find the model useful, though I would replace “Learning” (at 2:15) with “Instruction”, because that’s really what training departments provide in order to promote on-job-performance.

It is also good to see on-job-learning as part of the model. The various measurement points, beyond Kirkpatrick’s four levels of evaluation, (at 9:50) are really worth noting. There are over a dozen measurements noted that are often ignored in organizations.

If you’re in the learning & development (L&D) field I would highly recommend this video and further perusal of Will’s work.

As the video concludes (from 10:39) Will shows the divided responsibilities of Learning versus Business professionals. This division of responsibility highlights a problem with our current work support structures.

Handing-off from learning to working is a vestige of the industrial mindset and reminds me of Waterfall software development models. We need to integrate learning and working, using something more akin to an Agile model, as Sahana Chattopadhyay recently described. My challenge to L&D professionals would be to integrate and support the entire model, not just the parts in pink. This is what the 21st century training department needs to do.

The Learning Landscape Model is based on solid research, as is all of Will’s work, and provides an excellent framework for L&D departments to practice their craft. While I don’t think it’s enough, it’s a good place to start the journey of developing the necessary emergent work practices for the next century.

Interdependence: a sense of purpose

2011-01-02 by Harold Jarche

As we do more of our work in networks, workplace learning becomes an interdependent activity. Social and collaborative learning support the development of emergent practices needed for more complex work.

Esko Kilpi looks at different work tasks with the same framework as the above figure: independent, dependent or interdependent.

The Internet-based firm sees work as networked communication. Any node in the network can communicate with any other node on the basis of contextual interdependence and creative participative engagement. Work takes place in a transparent, wide-area, digital environment.

The focus is thus not on independent tasks, or predetermined processes, but on participative, self-organizing responsiveness that creates patterns of continuity and creativity.

Work and learning, as they merge, become increasingly interdependent activities. People haven’t changed over the years but with the Internet we have an opportunity to create work structures that may actually meet our core needs. Dan Pink discusses in Drive how various studies have shown that three basic things motivate people to do work (see video). These are:

Autonomy
Mastery
A sense of purpose

This applies to all but the most menial of tasks. We need to be in control, work at bettering ourselves and do this with the sense of some greater mission. We are social beings. As independent self-employed workers we were limited for centuries in developing our skills without support, adequate tools or feedback from others. We needed to study from masters and become part of a community of practice. Even with guilds and unions, there was limited access and individuals lacked autonomy. This same lack of autonomy and sense of purpose was magnified in the factory and is still evident in the modern workplace. Today, up to 84% of workers want to leave their jobs, in spite of the current economic climate.

It is only by working (and learning) interdependently, retaining our autonomy, co-developing our mastery and feeling a shared sense of purpose that we will be truly motivated. The opportunity the Internet has given individuals is the chance to work cooperatively toward a shared purpose (Seb Paquet calls this “ridiculously easy group-forming). The Internet also affords organizations the opportunity to loosen the dependence of workers through participative engagement (as The Cluetrain Manifesto explained a decade ago). The new organization must be some mix of free-agent autonomy, support mechanisms for mastery, and a wide enough span for each person to develop a personal sense of purpose.

Perhaps there is a new middle ground between lone wolves and corporate sheep:

2011: Integration

2011-01-01 by Harold Jarche

I was asked to make some predictions for 2011 but missed the deadline. Instead of predictions, I think there are some trends that may cross the chasm this year. This follows on a post I wrote a year ago that included this table:

(2009)	Innovators	Early Adopters	Crossing the Chasm
Technology	Simulations	Micro-blogs	Blogs
	Role-playing	Social Networks	Wikis
	Waves	Mobile	Social Bookmarks
Ideas	Emergent Learning	PKM – PLN – PLE	Performance Support
	Subject Matter Networks	Complexity	Informal Learning
	Group-centric Learning	Flow	Online Collaboration

I would say the PLE/PLN is across the chasm, while I now call PKM network learning and Beth Kanter describes a similar framework of networked professional learning. Micro-blogging, or Twitter, is definitely across.

As for ideas, more of my clients have accepted the need to support workplace informal learning. Performance support (EPSS) is now seen as a viable alternative to formal training (finally).

Adding to the growth of mobile, already across the chasm in much of the world, is the rise of video. Video for organizational sharing, video for instruction and video instead of manuals.

The big idea that is catching on and may take shape in 2011 is the integration of organizational support. Enough people are realizing that our compartmentalized approach to supporting work doesn’t help 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 I’m detecting a small groundswell of similar sentiments like 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. They are trying to remain relevant.

However, they think they have the solution, based on their existing mental models.

They don’t.

Perhaps in 2011 these departments will wake up and start talking to other.

I think the timing is right.

What is working smarter?

2010-12-26 by Harold Jarche

I’m in the business of helping organizations work smarter. What does that mean?

Our industrial and information age is nearing an end as we transition into an era where creativity becomes the most important element in our economy. We are also living in a more complex time as traditional disciplines blur and as information explodes. For the developed world, that means the future does not lie in doing manual or simple work because much of it will be automated. Merely complicated work, which is most of the work done in traditional industrial or office jobs, is being outsourced to the cheapest source of labour. That leaves complex work, requiring initiative, creativity and passion.

How does this affect our daily lives?

First of all, look at the restructuring that is happening in our economy. Jobs are being shed that will never be replaced. Can your work be done remotely by someone who doesn’t cost as much? Then at some point in the near future, it will. Companies are finally realizing that they need to work smarter. That means automating and outsourcing where necessary (if they don’t, their competition will) and then figuring out how to get things done in complexity.

The core of working smarter in complexity is the integration of learning and working. It sounds easy, but it’s not. There are two major parts to this. At the individual level it requires people to think critically and embed sense-making processes into their work and their lives. This takes skill and practice. It also takes a work environment that supports and encourages individual learning, sharing, and collaboration.

Hierarchy is the enemy of creativity but we still need some structure to get things done. As Vera John-Steiner writes in Creative Collaboration; “…the achievement of productive collaboration requires sustained time and effort. It requires the shaping of a shared language, the pleasures and risks of honest dialogue, and the search for a common ground.” The risks of honest dialogue will be a major barrier for many organizations to transition to more creative work.

Successful organizations will need to:

1. support creative collaboration (not merely team work)

2. support each person in developing critical thinking skills

3. put this together in order to get things done

There is no specific recipe to do this. Every organization and business will have to find its own path. However, that path will not include:

– standard job competencies; job descriptions & JOBS;

– one-size-fits-all instruction;

– equating time to value;

– and many other vestiges of the industrial era.

Teamwork

2021-06-102010-12-21 by Harold Jarche

Most of us have seen those great teamwork motivational posters and almost every job description includes teamwork as a critical competency. Teamwork is over-rated, in my opinion. It can be a smoke screen for office bullies to coerce fellow workers. The economic stick often hangs over the team — ‘be a team player or lose your job’.

In the workplace, teamwork seldom takes into consideration the uniqueness of individuals. Usually you have to fit into the existing team like a cog in a machine. Team members can be replaced. In work teams, it’s business first. But we are more complex and multi-faceted than simplistic Homo Economicus. Our lives have psycho-social aspects. We are more than our jobs. Teams promote unity of purpose, not diversity, creativity, and passion.

Think of a football team, a common business metaphor in North America. There is only one coach and everybody has a specific job to do while ‘keeping your eye on the ball’. In today’s workplace, there’s more than one ball and the coach cannot see the entire field. The team, as work vehicle, is outdated.

As much as organizations advertise for ‘team players’, what would be better are workers who can truly collaborate by connecting to each other in a more balanced manner with multiple facets of their lives. There are other ways of organizing work. Orchestras are not teams — neither are jazz ensembles. There may be teamwork on a theatre production but the cast is not a team. It is more like a social network. Teams are what we get when we use the blunt stick of economic consequences as the prime motivator. In a complex world, unity can be counter-productive.

Slimmer Werken

2010-12-15 by Harold Jarche

For past two days, the Internet Time Alliance has been working with Tulser [a play on the word “RESULT”] in Maastricht, NL, focused on how organizations can work smarter by integrating working and learning. Jos and Vivian, the co-owners of Tulser, have created a successful company by getting out of the training business, which was profitable at the time, and creating a performance improvement company. Tulser has about 20 full-time staff and a network of almost 80 freelancers. Talking to people here, you quickly understand how focused the company is on helping their clients and measuring the results of their work. A solid business case precedes all work.

If you think your organization is trapped on the “training is a solution looking for a problem” treadmill, check out what this company has done. They walked away from guaranteed revenue (training content development requested by their clients) and rebuilt the company over the past 10 years. This takes guts, but it is paying off now. Tulser has decided not to be part of a compliant training industry.

During the many discussions yesterday at Slimmer Werken (Working Smarter), it became obvious that the key barrier to working smarter is management. However, it seems that people are willing to take on the task of re-educating managers. I summed by reminding people:

“Knowledge workers of the world, Collaborate. You have nothing to lose but your managers!”

Several participants thought this was a very good idea.

More photos here.