Work

business & working

Being social for learning and performance

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Social learning has been a theme here for some time [my first post on the subject in 2005: from e-learning to s-learning]. Recent research by CMU, MIT & Union College shows that being social is also a key to group performance:

That collective intelligence, the researchers believe, stems from how well the group works together. For instance, groups whose members had higher levels of “social sensitivity” were more collectively intelligent. “Social sensitivity has to do with how well group members perceive each other’s emotions,” says Christopher Chabris, a co-author and assistant professor of psychology at Union College in New York.

“Also, in groups where one person dominated, the group was less collectively intelligent than in groups where the conversational turns were more evenly distributed,” adds Woolley. And teams containing more women demonstrated greater social sensitivity and in turn greater collective intelligence compared to teams containing fewer women.

However, many OD, HR and training departments still focus on individual skill development and the perennial favourite, leadership training. How often do people work in total isolation today? Why are skills taught separately from the workplace and co-workers? As for leadership, how can you decontextualize it from the workplace? Easy cookie-cutter solutions, like MBTI for leadership, are mainstream fare, even though MBTI is about as valid as astrology [I’m a reflector, completer finisher, ENTJ, inspirer – what are you?]

In the evolving social organization, we noted how knowledge workers get things done by conversing with peers, customers and partners, as they solve the problems of the day. Learning from these social interactions is a key to business innovation. To participate in their markets, organizations, customers and suppliers need to understand each other and this too, is social. Social learning is how knowledge is created, internalized and shared. It is how knowledge work gets done.

A serious re-focus is needed for organizations to take advantage of social learning in business and professional networks. Everything from team composition, job titles, performance evaluation and training approaches must be examined through the lens of [social] networks. There is solid research in social network analysis, value network analysis and social learning that can inform this shift. But leaders and managers must first put aside their old mental models, and that’s the real challenge.

With my ITA colleagues, we’re trying to start a shift to working smarter in networks, without some fancy, and unnecessary, software platform to enable it. It’s a cultural challenge to change mental models, not a technological one.

Related post: Let’s talk about work

Work is learning; so what?

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“Work is learning, learning work” – that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

(once again, apologies to Keats)

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I rewrote the above lines a while back and they sum up how networks have changed the relationship between learning and working. They’re one and the same thing, as the ubiquitous network merges work and learning.

Why?

Networks – Our workplaces, economies and societies are becoming highly networked. The transmission of ideas can be instantaneous. There is little time to pause, go into the back room for a while and develop something to address our challenges. The problem may have changed by then.

Complexity – The Cynefin framework is one way to examine established practices at work. For example, most simple and complicated work today is being automated and outsourced. Higher paid work often involves solving complex problems where there are no established answers and we need to engage the problem and learn by probing. Complexity is the new norm in the modern workplace.

Life in Perpetual Beta – Not just rapid change, but continual change, requires practices that evolve as they’re developed. In programming, this has meant a move from waterfall to agile methods. Beta releases are the norm for Web applications and as we do more on the Web, other practices are following.

The integration of learning and work is not some ideal, it is a necessity in a complex world.

Current models for managing people, training and knowledge-sharing are insufficient for a workplace that requires emergent practices to keep up with change. Looking back at best practices will only cause us to fall further behind. Formal training has only ever addressed about 20% of workplace learning and this was acceptable when the work environment was relatively stable. Knowledge workers today need to connect with others to learn and solve problems in real time.

Emergent practices can be developed collaboratively while solving problems for which there are no definitive answers. For instance, what’s the “best” Internet business model? Where once we could document knowledge and develop guidelines and practices to be followed by most workers, we now need to let workers develop their own practices, according to their particular context, which is constantly in flux. This is a very different approach from the way we designed jobs and training in the past.

So what?

Training, as a separate function from work, will become a luxury. It’s time to re-think your training strategies.

Supporting the development of emergent practices throughout the workforce will become critical to survival. Social media are tools that can help us develop emergent practices. They enable conversations between people separated by distance or time. Social media can facilitate the sharing of tacit knowledge through conversations to inform the collaborative development of emergent work practices. It’s time to master social media for your workplace.

With constant learning and unlearning required to do our work, the idea of a fixed job description and and core competencies becomes antiquated. Those who cannot adapt will be bypassed or ignored by the network. It’s time to rethink your ‘job’.

A framework for the social enterprise

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I have put together two of the major articles on social learning in the enterprise that were posted here this year. A framework for social learning drew on my collaboration with colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance and the evolving social organization was co-authored by Thierry deBaillon.


Please feel free to share this 18 page white paper as I hope it will encourage more conversations on how we can integrate learning and working, a key part of enabling Enterprise 2.0.

Social Enterprise White Paper (PDF)

You need the right lever to move an organization

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Klaus Wittkuhn wrote an excellent article on the systemic approach required in human performance analysis in the March 2004 edition of Performance Improvement published by ISPI.

A key concept in the article is that you cannot engineer human performance. Human performance is an emergent property of an organization, and is affected by multiple variables. Therefore Witthuhn suggests to first address the “Steering Elements”. These “ensure that the right product is delivered at the right time to the right place”, and include – Management, Customer Feedback, Consequences, Expectations and Feedback. Once the steering elements have been addressed, then look at the “Enabling Elements” – Management (again), Design, Resources and Support.

Only after the steering and enabling elements (the non-human factors) have been aligned, should we look at work performance. The rationale here is that it is only within an optimized system that we can expect optimal human performance. As Wittkuhn states:

It is not an intelligent strategy to train people to overcome system deficiencies. Instead, we should design the system properly to make sure that the performers can leverage all their capabilities.

After several years, I still find this is the most succinct operationalization of performance technology that I have read.

A major lesson here for the training/HR/learning & development fields is that all the courses and training in the world will not overcome system deficiencies. Perhaps this is why the training department is usually not part of the C level (executive) conversations in most organizations. Even if training does its job, there’s a good chance it will be ineffective in  a flawed organization. I had this realization many years ago, which is why I focus on organizational models and systems design. Training is not an effective lever for organizational change and neither is HR for that matter.  In case you were wondering, that’s why these departments are often ignored by key decision makers.

It’s the Network

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Over the past decade I’ve come to the conclusion that networks are changing everything in our lives. Dealing with networks is the big challenge for leaders, managers and knowledge workers of all types. Because we are all inter-networked, work is learning and learning is the work. We can no longer separate learning and working, and all attempts to do so are fraught with problems. Instructional content developed earlier is quickly out of date. Those who should be attending formal training are too busy working, so they slowly lose their skills and currency and become out of date. This is usually realized just after being downsized and forced to look for new work.

Acceptance of life in perpetual Beta is a necessary attitude to survive and thrive in our networked society. As Jay Cross wrote here several years ago,

No human life goes beyond beta; life is a perpetual experiment and reshaping. Speaking for myself, I recognize that I still have a lot of bugs.

What’s beta and what’s not is a state of mind. Many people try to go into release prematurely: they put defective product on the market. (By productizing people, I mean locking in on attitudes, structure, opinions, etc.: becoming rigid.)

Life as beta is uplifting. You have the opportunity to streamline things, to resond to feedback, to become a killer app.

Lots of alphas are claiming beta status now. They debut on life’s big stage long before they’re prepared to play the part.

As Jay says, Beta is not Alpha. You actually have to do something concrete but you also have to be ready to let it go.

I am seeing a great need for senior managers to get some control over their work in an increasingly complex business environment. Paradoxically, they can gain control by giving up control:

Acceptance of life in perpetual Beta is the first step.

Developing personal strategies for sense-making, such as PKM, is the next step.

Sharing knowledge and participating in professional networks then becomes a necessity for work.

Being willing to create and test emergent practices is next.

Finally, we need to build new structures, like wirearchy, for how we work and learn together.

CI and KM

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Jack Vinson asks: “Can anyone point me (and my friend) to some better resources around doing ‘competitive intelligence’ by asking people within the company to work together to develop the intel?  I’ve pointed him to the Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals.”

I was introduced to CI by Conor Vibert about 10 years ago and I discussed on this blog how I did some small scale intelligence collection, collation and dissemination, five years ago. In Conor’s competitive intelligence class at Acadia University, he has students giving presentations on a business, while others are going online to question their claims, and other students are using chat to discuss the points without interrupting the speakers. It’s exciting to watch Conor’s classes in action. Last year, I suggested to a client, a small technology company, how they could set up a CI process. [The company is no longer in business, so I don’t consider this confidential information any more]

Conor wrote a book on CI — A framework for web-based analysis and decision making.

Recommendations:

Developing an internal Competitive Intelligence process:

1. Start by asking questions internally and seeing what kind of answers you get. Use your existing social media tools to do this. A blog or a wiki would work.

2. As a distributed team, each person can be responsible for a specific information source that is monitored regularly.

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.

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, such as Hoover’s, only buy one at a time. Use that source as much as you can (squeeze it dry) and until you realize you should eliminate it or augment it with another purchased source.

Fluctuating support networks

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I had the recent pleasure of meeting Judith Holton, a colleague at Mount Allison University. Judith passed on a couple of papers which I found most interesting, as she has looked deeply into the theory behind the need for what I would describe as social learning networks. Judith uses the term, “fluctuating support networks”. In Exploring the informal organization in knowledge work: A grounded theory of  fluctuating support networks (2008), Judith concludes [my emphasis]:

The study contributes to management praxis by raising awareness and offering insights into the practical value of fluctuating support networks and their power to rehumanize the knowledge workplace. As an informal response to the formal organization, fluctuating support networks deviate from the conventions of the formal organization and provide network members with a venue for fulfilling unmet social and psychological work-related needs. Knowledge and understanding of such networks may enable managers to understand their functionality in resolving knowledge workers’ concerns and needs in response to persistent and unpredictable change and may offer managers an additional resource for achieving strategic organizational goals, especially those goals that require cross-functional integration and non-conventional perspectives to address increasingly complex organizational problems. Adopting the basic social process of rehumanizing as a conceptual framework may assist managers and human resource professionals in developing organizational strategies that support a broader humanistic paradigm. Such perspective also highlights the value of the informal organization, and fluctuating support networks in particular, as important psychological infrastructure for the knowledge workplace.

Rehumanising Knowledge Work through Fluctuating Support Networks [PDF] (2005) describes the three stages of rehumanising (Finding & Likening; Igniting Passions; Mutual Engagement). I was most surprised when I noticed that each of these steps parallels the three parts of personal knowledge management, namely: Seeking; Sense-making & Sharing. I’ve added some of my previous statements on working smarter, after the colon:

Finding & Likening, which is serendipitous or intentional: PKM prepares the mind to be open to new ideas (enhanced serendipity)

Igniting Passions, which amplifies causal looping process:  Aids in observing, thinking and using information & knowledge (I Sense)

Mutual Engagement, which facilitates creative problem solving: “You know you’re in a community of practice when your practice changes” (We Use)

Judith Holton’s research confirms my observations and readings over the past decade. Knowledge workers cannot work effectively within the confines of hierarchical structures that are beset by change from within and without. Social networks, facilitated by social media, provide the fluctuating support networks that are necessary. The problem is clear:

Knowledge workers identify this increasing sense of dehumanisation in their work and work environments as a particular concern. The loss of the human dimension in workplace interactions is characterized by a work environment that is compressed, fearful, isolating, bureaucratic and legalistic; by interactions that are atomised and inauthentic; and, by work assignments that erode autonomy and identity. (Holton, 2008)

Once again, I see that social learning in informal networks is key to getting things done in today’s knowledge-intensive workplace.

Networks and complexity

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[Dilbert cartoon removed]

Jane Hart alerted me to this cartoon, which is already being spread throughout the Net.

My first thoughts on reading this, after I laughed, are that social media are not about the latest web technologies and that they are of importance to more than just the marketing department. A cultural change is required in the way we organize our work because of two related factors: Networks & Complexity.

Wirearchy may be a neologism, but I’ve found it to be a most descriptive term for discussing what happens when you connect everyone via electronic networks. To paraphrase Jon Husband:

It is generally accepted that we live and work in an increasingly ‘wired’ world.

There are emerging patterns and dynamics related to interconnected people and interlinked information flows, which are bypassing established traditional structures and services.

The cynefin model shows that emergent practices are needed in order to manage in complex environments and novel practices are necessary for chaotic ones. Most of what we consider standard work today is being outsourced and automated. We are facing more complexity and chaos in our work because of our interconnectedness.

Living and working in non-hierarchical networks is our challenge this century. The effective use of social media, to learn from and with others, is essential for individuals and organizations to be productive in this networked age. That is why social learning is of great interest to me as a workplace learning professional and I’ve come to the realization that work is learning and learning is the work.  Social learning is getting things done in networks.

There is little doubt that industrial management and all that it has created (chain of command, human resources, line & staff, production, etc.) are the wrong models for the emerging, networked workplace. This is a workplace with increasing numbers of free-agents and permanent employees who don’t have a job for life, especially as the average lifespan of corporations decreases while those of workers increases. Many workers, including white collar ones, can’t afford to retire. Existing management models and support functions were developed to keep things stable and ensure that people conformed to corporate culture. There is much less time to do that as workplace culture evolves with society, markets and technology.

Mark Federman called this world, ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate, and that was five years ago.

Whither the learning organization?

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Why aren’t we all working for a learning organisation? ask John Seddon and Brendan O’Donovan,  authors of this same-titled 2010 AMED Network paper ( PDF ). This article is well worth the read for anyone interested in learning organizations, an often-described but seldom-observed phenomenon in my experience. The Deming quotes show that this is not new conceptual territory:

“Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers – a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars – and on up through the university.

On the job people, teams, and divisions are ranked, reward for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by Objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable.” (Deming in Senge 2006)

Deming understood that systemic factors account for more organizational problems, and therefore more potential for change, than any individual’s performance. The role of managers should be to manage the system, not the individual functions. The authors target the real culprit: command & control management. This is why the learning organization has never taken hold in business.

For many years I have been fairly certain that the model we use for our structures is the problem, not the people doing the work.  This article, and the works it cites, help to confirm this.

I have only perused Deming slightly and I read Senge’s work 15 years ago, while completing my Master’s thesis. It’s time to revisit these important works, as also suggested to me by Bertrand Duperrin. I like that this article clearly articulates the work to be done in organizational design and new management theory, based on the research of Senge, Deming, Argyris and many others. It is an excellent synthesis of the work that has been done in the field as well as a call for the work to be done in our organizations.

“The basic precepts of command and control have remained unquestioned whilst the underlying paradigm has outlived its usefulness. The problem is not a general problem of culture, but more specifically is one of management thinking. In order to change this mindset, managers must learn to study their organisation as a system, and to understand the true nature of the problems facing them.”

Organizations don’t need heroes

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In the HBR article IT in the Age of the Empowered Employee, the author explains the concept of a “new contract to empower employees to solve the problems of empowered customers”, by identifying innovators:

In our new book, Empowered, we call these covert innovators HEROes — highly empowered and resourceful operatives. HEROes are those employees who feel empowered to solve customer problems and act resourcefully by using whatever technology they need to use. HEROes comprise 20% of the U.S. information workforce, but your industry may have many more or many fewer highly empowered and resourceful operatives.

The picture they use to explain this organization framework is a pyramid.

I don’t doubt their findings that about 20% of information workers act resourcefully and take the initiative in dealing with customers. I do take issue with the acceptance of the status quo and even supporting it with something like the HEROes model. That’s just not good enough, in my opinion, and shouldn’t be acceptable for any business leader.

The pyramid needs to flipped and organizations should develop ways to encourage innovation amongst 80% or more of the workforce, not the minority already performing in covert ways. I’ve suggested this before, in workers, management and work support.

It is time to invert the organizational pyramid mental model and integrate learning, both self-directed and social, into all that we do. As the systems that we work in become more complex and even chaotic, we have to develop sharing-based accountability practices.

However, most of our HR and work practices are still premised on the assumption of stable systems. This is no longer the case. Some of the project-based work that I do uses learning-based accountability, where we are all responsible to help the rest of the team learn. For those who work on the Web, this becomes a natural way to do things. The same can be said for sharing-based accountability, especially amongst bloggers and others who share online. We have learned that the more you give, the more you get back in the form of feedback and more learning opportunities.

Inverting the organizational pyramid requires serious work from management by optimizing connections between people and enabling better communication. Innovation, in the form of emergent practices, come from the dynamic interface between workers and those outside the organization. It’s management’s job to facilitate the creation of new tools and processes to support the work being done. Focusing on a minority of workers will not create a system that can improve the entire organization.