Work

business & working

JOB is a four-letter word

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A while back I wrote on the age of dissonance and how our way of structuring work, particularly the job, was inadequate for the networked, creative economy:

New design principles, from instructional development to job descriptions, are needed for our inter-networked society. I’ve started looking at a new design for the training department but redesign is needed everywhere. I think that more people are looking for new designs and are willing to try them out, if they can. The economic crisis may actually help bring about some needed change. So here’s a new job description to insert into all those talent management systems: work redesigner.

I’ve been thinking about jobs a bit more recently as I’ve taken a term position at a university and my job is knowledge transfer or more specifically, the commercialization of research. I’m responsible for certain projects: communications on research issues, partnership opportunities with industry, commercialization of research, patents, intellectual property protection, and technology disclosures.

But, like most people, I am more than my job description. As most readers know, I am fairly well-versed in organizational development, knowledge management, and educational technologies, which should be areas of interest in a university. However, I can’t get involved in activities related to these areas because that’s not my job.

Here’s the organizational common wisdom: I’m not faculty, therefore I can’t be involved in teaching. I don’t work in computing services therefore I can’t touch IT. I’m not in HR so I can’t help with organizational development. Stick to your knitting, is the implied message of departmental responsibilities and hierarchies. If I see an opportunity outside my job description there are few things I can do about it. I can initiate some collegial conversations, if I have the opportunity, but I’m not invited to the table.

This is not a ‘woe is me’ story. I accepted this contract already knowing the organization and what I would be able to do. I have learned something of course.

My ongoing recommendations on how the workplace must change, as written on this blog, have just been augmented by another, more personal, question: What happens to a person’s entrepreneurial and creative spirit after they repeatedly see that they can’t do anything with it? If you’re told often enough that it’s not your job, you will start saying, sorry, but that’s not my 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, including Enterprise 2.0. Jon Husband has written extensively on work redesign and how the Taylorist assumptions of division of labour and packaging of tasks are just plain wrong:

Just as important is the underlying assumption of these methods about the fundamental nature of knowledge. It assumes knowledge and its acquisition, development and use proceeds slowly and carefully and is based on the official taxonomy of knowledge, a vertical arrangement of information and skills that are derived from the official institutions of our society (Jane Jacobs has a fair bit to say about this in Chapter 3 titled Credentialing vs. Educating in her last book Dark Age Ahead, as do others like John Taylor Gatto and Alfie Kohn, and as does David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous – the power of digital disorder).

I can relate to Jon’s description of a typical organization here:

“Any of us familiar with medium to large sized organizations can begin to see, I believe, that the fundamental Taylorist assumption that knowledge is structured vertically and put to use in siloed pyramidic structures and cascaded down to the execution level must be straining at the seams in the increasingly highly-connected social networks in which many people work today.”

Our article on the evolving social organization addresses some methods to promote creativity through social learning and my post on organizational change, unpacked gives more details.  However, the corMucha-job-cigarette papers-1898e assumption of the job, that can be ‘filled’ [just like the minds of learners], is what needs to change. This is the constraining concept. It presumes common skills and the mechanistic view that workers can be replaced without disruption.

But who could replace Van Gogh, Picasso, or even Steve Jobs? As complex work requires more creativity, confining our complex individual creativity within the bounds of a mere job description is debilitating. Structured jobs can suck individual creativity and create an organizational framework that discourages entrepreneurial zeal. It’s time for a serious redesign of how we structure work.

 

Organizational change, unpacked

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In the evolving social organization, I included a table with several descriptive terms, which Amanda Fenton suggested needs to be “unpacked”.

Simplicity

basic hierarchy

 Complication

bureaucracy

 Complexity

wirearchy
Organizational Theory
 Knowledge-Based View Learning Organization Value Networks
Attractors
 Stakeholders (vision) Shareholders (wealth) Clients (service)
Growth Model
 Internal Mergers & Acquisitions Ecosystem
Knowledge Acquisition
 Formal Training Performance Support Social
Knowledge Capitalization
 Best Practices Good Practices Emergent Practices

I’ve linked the sections to my posts that describe some of these terms in more detail [Feel free to suggest better resources/links for the sections I’ve missed].

Many organizations today are based on complicated models but they should be developing ways of dealing with a more complex, networked business environment. Simplifying to a basic hierarchy won’t help, though there are many simple solutions sold as answers to our complicated organizations. Remember the wildly popular who moved my cheese series? Well, now you can use carrots instead of cheese. Works for vegans I guess, but simple answers for complex issues don’t work.

Real solutions require people to do some hard work.

Let’s look at Knowledge Acquisition. Formal training is easy to task out or outsource and then assume that everything has been taken care of. The training gets done and the organization can account for it. Managers can say, “my people got their training”. Courts can be assured that workers have been trained, so the company has met its responsibilities.

Even performance support tools can be developed centrally, by external consultants or an internal team. The resulting tools are then sent throughout the organization to be used at work. The organization can say, “they have the tools”. For example, all bank officers can use the same mortgage calculator, so risk is managed fairly easily once the system is in place. The system is under control.

However, social knowledge acquisition in the organization is a different case. It requires a very different approach. First of all, centralized control won’t work. Secondly, individuals will become responsible for their learning and their actions. This requires trust. Control systems become counter-productive. There is no easy way to move an organization into this wirearchical space. It requires some serious thinking about how things get done. It means giving up control. It means organizational life in perpetual Beta, and that can be a scary thought. But I’m convinced that it’s worth doing.

Image by Cynthia Kurtz

The Evolving Social Organization

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Co-author: Thierry deBaillon – @tdebaillon

Simplicity and the Enterprise

Most companies start simple, with a few people gathering together around an idea. For small companies, decision-making, task assignments and direct interaction with clients are rather straightforward.  With growth, the simplicity ends. As every entrepreneur knows, the initial growth of a company is often synonymous with efficiency drops and decreases in profits, since administrative tasks, indirect structural costs and middle-term forecasts add financial and human pressure on early growth.

Overcoming these obstacles is one of the main burdens of start-ups and young businesses. Innovation abounds in the early stages and knowledge capitalization is aided by a common vision of the business. Further growth equates to sustainable efficiencies and market share increases. For decades, organizational growth has been viewed as a positive development, but it has come at a cost.

Complication: the industrial disease

As organizations grow, the original simplicity gets harder to maintain. Current management wisdom – based on Robin Dunbar’s research; the size of military units through history; and the work of management experts such as Tom Peters – considers the ideal size of an organization to be around 150 people. Beyond this size, knowing everybody in person becomes impossible. Intermediate layers of power and delegation begin to develop above 150 people and companies then enter the realm of complication.

Most of today’s larger companies have a complicated structure. To enable growth and efficiencies, more processes are put in place. This is what management schools have been doing for over half a century.  To ensure reliable operations and risk mitigation, the core competencies of decision-making and innovation are moved to the periphery. The company’s vision, if there is one, is now supported at the board level but not the individual level. New layers of control and supervision continue to appear, silos are created, and knowledge acquisition is formalized in an attempt to gain efficiency through specialization.

As companies get even bigger, internal growth and innovation reach a tipping point, and companies rely on mergers and acquisitions to maintain the illusion of  growth. At some stage of complication, companies do not even create jobs anymore. In France, a study from INSEE showed that large organizations have a tendency to destroy internal jobs: by transferring jobs to subsidiaries, contractors and subcontractors. Large firms barely participate in job creation. Similar studies conducted in other countries show the same results. However, knowledge, and the acquisition of new knowledge, are still key factors for innovation and effectiveness. To compensate for its complicated processes, the enterprise attempts to shift to another paradigm, and tries to become a learning organization, putting significant effort into training.

Complexity and the new Enterprise

Today’s large, complicated organizations are now facing increasingly complex business environments that require agility in simultaneously learning and working. Typical strategies of optimizing existing business processes or cost reductions only marginally influence the organization’s effectiveness. Faster evolving markets challenge the organization’s ability to react to customer demand. Decision-making becomes paralyzed by process-based operations and chains of command and control; thereby decreasing agility. Training, as “the” solution to workplace learning needs, fails to deliver and then gets marginalized, often being the first department to have its budget cut.

Many organizations today are also facing significant demographic challenges. Baby boomers, once the lifeblood of business, are retiring, while Generation Y wants to communicate and interact in a completely different manner. There may be four generations in the modern workplace and each has its unique traits and demands. There is growing complexity both inside and outside the organization.

Organizations need to understand complexity, instead of simply increasing complication. This lack of understanding, as well as some existing, but minor, efficiency improvements in tweaking the old system, are the major barriers to adopting Enterprise 2.0 concepts and practices. Companies need to get a clearer view of the competitive advantages of Enterprise 2.0 before an organizational framework like wirearchy can co-exist with hierarchical structures and thinking.

Wirearchy: a dynamic two-flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results enabled by people and technology.

Here are some key organizational changes during the journey from simplicity to complexity:

Simplicity
 Complication
 Complexity
Organizational Theory
 Knowledge-Based View Learning Organization Value Networks
Attractors
 Stakeholders (vision) Shareholders (wealth) Clients (service)
Growth Model
 Internal Mergers & Acquisitions Ecosystem
Knowledge Acquisition
 Formal Training Performance Support Social
Knowledge Capitalization
 Best Practices Good Practices Emergent Practices

Let’s look at how social learning can support emergent practices in the enterprise:

Implementing Social Learning

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. In a globally networked economy, based increasingly on intangible goods and services, constant innovation is necessary to stand out. Markets such as software, financial services, consulting and consumer goods have to continuously adapt their offers to keep up with changing demands and advances in technology.

Hyper-linked knowledge flows have made organizational walls permeable. Official channels are competing with an expanding number of informal communications. A collaborative enterprise is becoming  the optimal organization for such a networked economy, capitalizing on these expanding knowledge flows. To innovate, organizations need to collaborate internally and this is social. 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.

In complex environments, learning is much more than just a matter of structured knowledge acquisition. However, that is all that training enables. Corporate training methods often consist of delivering content and perhaps providing drill and practice sometime prior to doing the task. There is often a gap between training and doing. Training alone cannot address the wide variety of informal learning needs of workers. Nor can it help to transfer the tacit knowledge on which many of us depend to do our jobs.

We know that informal learning happens all of the time but often the best answers or experts are not connected to the person with the problem. Social learning networks can address that issue by giving each worker a much larger group of people to help get work done.  Regularly publishing to our networks is how we can stay connected. Here is an approach to embed social learning into organization work flows. This is an iterative process that can be adapted to fit the context.

Listen & Create: Being open to self-education is the foundation of individual learning. Part of this is the development of habits of continuous sense-making by recording what we hear, read and observe; e.g. personal learning environments (PLE) & personal knowledge management (PKM).

Converse: Sharing is an act of learning and can be considered an individual’s responsibility for the greater social learning contract. Without sharing, there is no social learning. Through ongoing trusted conversations we can share tacit knowledge, even across organizational boundaries; e.g. social learning.

Co-create: Group performance enables the creation of new knowledge and is a source of innovation; e.g. collaborative work, customer experience.

Formalize & Share: Some informal knowledge can be made explicit and consolidated through the formalization and creation of new structured knowledge; e.g. taxonomies, document management, storytelling.

Enterprise social learning

Social learning consultant Jane Hart has created a comprehensive, and growing, list of social learning examples in the workplace. Companies listed here include British Telecom, Sun Microsystems, NASA, Nationwide Insurance, and SFR. The SFR case study, reported by Sue Weakes, shows how a younger workforce is demanding better access to social media.

French mobile phone company SFR implemented ActiveNetworker from Jobpartners to support its new social network. My SFR comprises a company blog, a central space for discussion, and the ability to build profiles that allow employees to share information on career progress, learning and development and aspirations. They can also join groups of interest … ActiveNetworker has been well received and SFR is averaging 80,000 visits per week from the 10,000 employees that are using it.

Dave Wilkins at Learn.com, describes the case at ACE Hardware in which the company set up a web-based social learning platform for its 4,600 independent hardware dealers to share and seek advice. They were able to look for new sales leads, find rarely used items through the community and share merchandising display strategies. This social learning community strategy resulted in a 500% return on investment in just six months.

Cristóbal Conde, CEO of SunGard, a software and IT services company, was recently interviewed in the New York Times. He discussed how he has flattened the company’s hierarchy as a way of dealing with the globalization of the company. One important social communication tool at SunGard is Yammer, a micro-blogging platform similar to Twitter but used internally. NYT: “What kind of things do you write on Yammer?”

I try to see a client every day, and because of my title I get to see more senior people. And so then they’ll tell me things — you know, what are their biggest problems, what are their biggest issues, what are their biggest bets. All this information is incredibly valuable. Now, what could I do with that? I’m not going to send that out in a broadcast voice mail to every employee. I’m not even going to write a long e-mail about it to every employee, because even that is almost too formal. But I can write five lines on Yammer, which is about all it takes.

A free flow of information is an incredible tool because I can tell people, “Look, this is one of our largest clients, and the C.E.O. just told me his top three priorities are X, Y and Z. Think about them.”

The Ford Motor Company has used social media for learning, beginning with SyncMyRide, and now integrating it as a way to connect customers and the company.

Ford’s intention is to consider how social media can inform the company as a whole, rather than judging its efforts by the criteria of one department and those “holistic” lessons filter up and down through the company, says Monty [head of social media]y. That includes the company’s executive board and goes as far as putting up senior execs for online Q&As through Twitter and on the corporate Facebook page. “There is a healthy respect for [social media] and how we participate in it. Two-way dialogue is healthy for a company like Ford, and we’ve grown as a result of having participated in it,” says Farley [Chief Communications Officer]. At some point, as executives grow in seniority, they tend to become “isolated from reality,” adds Monty. Making the Ford board aware of and engaged with social conversations counters that isolation. “When [CEO Alan Mulally] says we are making the cars people want, well, how do we know unless we are listening?” asks Monty.

A business imperative

Deloitte’s Shift Index of 2009 highlights the challenges facing several industries today, that of declining return on assets and the need for innovation. One recommendation is to enable knowledge flows, a key benefit of social learning:

Given the growing importance of knowledge flows, perhaps the most powerful form of innovation in this context may be institutional innovation –re-thinking roles and relationships across institutions to better enable them to create and participate in knowledge flows.

One of the great things about web social media is that they are for the most part free. Experimentation does not require an enterprise-wide software deployment strategy at the onset. As Seth Godin, marketing and branding expert, says:

You guessed it: new media is largely free. So why teach it in school as if it were a scary theory? Why encourage people to be afraid? Just do it. Build your own platform. Appear in the places that seem productive or interesting or challenging or fun. Experiment quietly, figure out what works, do it more. No need to be a dilettante, and certainly you shouldn’t spread yourself too thin or quit at the first sign of failure… but… quit waiting for the right answer.

Our social networks have a greater influence on us than we think. Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler explain the latest research in great detail in the book, Connected: The surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives (Little-Brown, 2009). Robin Hanson shows that we seldom change our behaviour based solely on getting new information. “People don’t believe something works until they’ve seen it work in something pretty close to their situation. A media story about something far away just doesn’t say much.” Again, social learning is about getting things done in networks.

Getting started

According to Rebecca Ferguson at The Open University, social learning can take place when people:

  • clarify their intention – learning rather than browsing
  • ground their learning – by defining their question or problem
  • engage in focused conversations – increasing their understanding of the available resources.

Following the process explained earlier:

Listen: The first step in social learning is paying attention and watching what others are doing. Finding trusted sources of information is very important. Hearing what others are doing and connecting to them with social media such as Twitter or blogs increases the chances of accidental and serendipitous learning. For example, one can follow conversations on Twitter by searching for “hashtags”. Typing “#PKM” shows current conversations on personal knowledge management.

Converse: By engaging in conversations and providing valuable information to others one becomes part of professional networks. Many experts are willing to help those new to the field but newcomers first must say what they don’t know.

Co-create: Over time one can engage more in co-operative activities, such as adding comments to a blog post or extending the thought in an article or discussion thread. For many people used to traditional work, working transparently in the open takes some time to get to used to.

Formalize & Share: Writing professional journals or lessons learnt can ingrain the important process of formalizing aspects of social learning. Sharing with others, internally or externally, over time becomes part of a normal daily work flow.

As our work environments become more complex due to the speed of information transmission via ubiquitous networks, we need to adopt more flexible and less mechanistic processes to get work done. Workers have many more connections, to information and people, than ever before. But the ability to deal with complexity lies in our minds, not our artificial organizational structures. In order to free our minds for complex work, we need to simplify our organizational structures. According to the authors of Getting to Maybe, in complex environments:

  • Rigid protocols are counter-productive
  • There is an uncertainty of outcomes in much of our work
  • We cannot separate parts from the whole
  • Success is not a fixed address

This is the basis of the evolving social organization.

Some additional thoughts on social learning

Learning Executives Discuss Social Learning at ASTD 2009 (video):

Mike McDermott (T Rowe Price): “I think the impact of social learning will dramatically increase in the future, in a number of ways, both internally with our associates and externally with our clients.”

Karie Willyerd (Sun Microsystems): “we see the death of newspapers … the same thing is going to happen with learning functions and training materials … if we don’t learn how to publish with social media … through social learning.”

Walt McFarland (Booz Allen Hamilton): “The environment is going to demand it [social learning]. The problems are just tougher and they’re too big for any one consultant or any consulting team”

Dave Pollard on bridging generational differences in the workplace:

Our job, as people who appreciate the value and perspective of both generations, and value diversity, is what Nancy White calls “building bridges” — translating Gen Y’s ideas and requests into language “the man” can understand (value creation and ROI), and translating the boss’ and IT’s restrictions into language that Gen Y’ers can understand (the risk of catastrophic financial loss, loss of business reputation, and insolvency). The best way to build these bridges is by telling stories — of history, of unexpected and astonishing success, and of unintended consequences.

Tony Karrer on measurement:

What’s interesting to me is that with eLearning 2.0 or social learning or more specifically with using social tools to do things like have interesting conversations – what I want to measure is really not at all what is learned. I want to measure whether the results produced are better. I am not sure I know what they should have learned at all.

PKM Workshop – Toronto 13 November 2010

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Update: This course was cancelled and is re-scheduled for 1 April 2011. If interested, please contact the iSchool and let them know. I am also available for private workshops.

I’m offering a one-day course at the iSchool Institute (University of Toronto).

“In the period ahead of us, more important than advances in computer design will be the advances we can make in our understanding of human information processing – of thinking, problem solving, and decision making…”
Herbert Simon, Economics Nobel-prize winner (1968)

PKM is an individual, disciplined process by which we make sense of information, observations and ideas. In the past it may have been keeping a journal, writing letters or having conversations. These are still valid, but with digital media we can add context by categorizing, commenting or even remixing it. We can also store digital media for easy retrieval.

The Web has given us more ways to connect with others in our learning but many people only see the information overload aspect of our digital society. Engaging others can actually make it easier to learn and not become overwhelmed. Effective networked learning is the difference between surfing the waves or being drowned by them.

Learning Objectives:

At the end of the course, students will be able to:

* Understand the concepts and models underlying PKM
* Select Web tools for critical thinking
* Determine PKM methods and processes that will work in their own context
* Begin to use some of the web tools that support PKM

PKM includes:

Personal Directed Learning – how individuals can use social media for their own (self-directed) personal or professional learning; and
Accidental & Serendipitous Learning – how individuals, by using social media, can learn without consciously realising it (aka incidental or random learning).

Prerequisite:
A current e-mail account
Basic understanding of how the Web works

Target Audience:
Knowledge workers, or anyone who wants to improve their learning skills using Web tools

PLC3033-10F1
Sat. 13 Nov 2010
1 day (6 hours) – 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM
Instructor: Harold Jarche
Fee: $250.00 ($250.00 U.S.)

Register

Marketing for Free Agents redux

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I’ve often said that learning and working are becoming the same thing in our hyper-connected workplaces. As a free-agent there are great opportunities to integrate work and learning and that is by thinking of marketing as education, both for you and your clients. Since a one-person business doesn’t have separate marketing and training departments, there’s no need to worry about any turf wars. Marketing is the same as Learning & Development.

Marketing and education have certain similarities – gaining attention; getting your message across; and changing behaviour. Much of our learning is through conversations with others, as is marketing, or as the Cluetrain Manifesto states in Thesis #1 – Markets are conversation.

Without conversation (oral, written, graphical, physical) there are no social transactions. This has been the key aspect of the un-marketing approach for my own consulting business. Learning and working are mostly conversation as well. To market yourself as a free-agent online, start by giving. That means be a valued contributor to conversations with your professional community. Helping to educate potential clients is an excellent path to develop relationships

The Cluetrain’s Thesis #6 is that the Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media. I started blogging here in 2004, and my blog is my pervasive presence on the Web. This is where you can find me as well as links to other things I may be doing. It has now become my knowledge base and provides fodder for articles and presentations. My blog enables me to have conversations with other professionals about things that matter to us. I’ve said many times that my blog doesn’t get me clients but, using a baseball metaphor, it gets me from 1st base onward. It’s also my business card that tells more about what I think than any interview ever could.

Cluetrain Thesis #7 is that hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. The advantage of being a free-agent today is that you can use the Internet to get around most hierarchies. Information on almost any field is available for free. Tools like Twitter let you “follow” people in fields that interest you; making it excellent for competitive intelligence. Checking out “crowd-sourced” tags on Delicious lets you see what others find important. You can connect with people on Facebook or on Linked-In, with its discussion groups. Personally, I use Linked-In for business and Facebook for friends & colleagues. Both networks, as well as Twitter, have connected me to paid work.

Cluetrain Thesis #9 says that networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge. It still requires hard work, perseverance, skill and knowledge but you can get recognized for your expertise. Kathy Sierra has an excellent graph showing the work required, but the tools to disseminate your expertise are here now:

Posting questions on blogs, Twitter or social networks usually results in a lot of good advice. I revamped my website in 2007 after asking advice from readers, which increased traffic to my consulting section. Once you go online, you are no longer alone, for better or worse.

We now have many tools to engage in conversation and to create some wealth along the way, without giving up our rights in indentured servitude as salaried workers.

Cluetrain Thesis #10 concludes that markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. I have found that participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally. This is supported by Jeff Jarvis:

To make the money I don’t make teaching, I consult and speak for various media companies and brands. The only reason I get those gigs is because companies read the ideas I discuss at Buzzmachine and ask me to come and repeat them in PowerPoint form and explore them with their staff. I’ve also been asked to teach executives how to blog (a class that should, by rights, take about two minutes). That work and the teaching get me to a nice income in six figures. So I’m not looking quite as idiotic now, I hope.

Rob Paterson explains how important blogging is for his work:

NPR, all my work in New Media, Blackwater, Education – all my paying gigs have come through this medium [blogging].

Some Quick Start Tips to market yourself online:

  1. Get your own domain name
  2. Free your Bookmarks and start sharing what you do
  3. Read blogs & make comments and don’t forget to Aggregate before you’re swamped
  4. Establish a consistent presence on Linked-In, Facebook, etc.
  5. Start your blog (WordPress, Typepad) without any fanfare
  6. Check out other social media like Twitter or what others are talking about
  7. Watch for patterns and see what makes sense for you

These Small Business Blogs may give some inspiration.

After several years of blogging and engaging in educational (un-marketing) conversations online, here are some of the tangible benefits to my business. Many of these practices are interwoven with my personal knowledge management processes as well.

  • Using a feed reader (via RSS), saves a lot of time and bookmarking.
  • The information I get from blogs and Twitter is usually weeks ahead of the mainstream press. This is competitive intelligence.
  • By blogging and tweeting I have raised my profile on the web, which is cheap, but time-consuming, marketing.
  • I use my knowledge base of blogs posts when preparing reports, proposals and presentations. WordPress is an excellent tool and has become much easier to use with version 3.0.
  • Blogging forces me to think and reflect in order to write, so that what was just an idea in my mind becomes more concrete. I am better prepared when asked questions by potential clients.
  • Through blogging and Twitter I have met a number of business partners.
  • Online writing keeps me in touch with a lot of interesting people and expands my view of the world, providing new ideas for my business.
  • When I have a problem, especially a technical one, I post it on Twitter and usually get an informed answer within 24 hours. It’s like a large performance support system.
  • My web presence allows people to get to know my opinions before they engage me as a consultant; saving time and potential frustrations.

Conversations and collaboration

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Robert Kelley, in How to be a Star at Work, describes how tacit, or implicit, knowledge has come to dominate the knowledge economy:

What percentage of the knowledge you need to do your job is stored in your own mind? Or put another way: What percentage of your time do you spend reaching out to someone or something else for knowledge that is essential for you to get your job done? Do you know how much you don’t know?

In 1986, the average answer from responses to surveys or hands in the air at group seminars was that most people had about 75 percent in their heads. In recent years [late 1990’s], the percentage has dropped  15 to 20 points, and in the case of one company I worked with recently, it has fallen as low as 10 percent!

We could extrapolate that this trend has continued since the book was published in 1999 and that a decade later the percentage of knowledge required that is stored in our minds is closer to 10% in many companies. We can also induce that workers today need  to regularly reach out to someone or something in order to access the tacit knowledge they need. They need to be social. Social learning is how we get things done in the increasingly complex modern workplace.

The figure above shows how documentation (explicit knowledge) may be suitable in less complex environments, but we need to exchange tacit knowledge through conversations in more complex environments. In order to apply tacit knowledge, we need to develop emergent practices for rapidly changing (and non-repeatable) tasks. Collaborative work is fueled though ongoing social learning, making the integration of learning and working essential in any organization.

The current challenge is that we have tools and processes for storing explicit knowledge (content management systems – CMS) and for managing training (learning management systems – LMS) as well as platforms for enabling distributed conversations (social media). What we really need are systems and processes for collaborative work (enterprise 2.0). However, the solution is not to enhance a CMS or an LMS, based on assumptions of simplicity and repeatability,  but to develop ways to enhance complex webs of conversations to get work done.

Existing enterprise software systems, and the thinking behind them, are not able to do this. With up to 90% of our work requiring tacit knowledge, the role of enterprise content management is just a minor contribution in how we get work done. Investment needs to done in processes that support conversations and collaborative work as well as tools that support them. Platforms such as Thingamy are an indication of how future work systems can be developed.

If 90% of the knowledge needed to get work done is not supported by enterprise software or organizational learning departments, then there is a significant imbalance in most organizations today. Any time you wonder why things aren’t working in your organization, it’s because you’re in a system optimized for only one tenth of what you need to get done.

Thanks to my ITA colleague Clark Quinn for inspiring me to write this post.

Trust

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A while back, Charles Green responded to my post about the knowledge economy being a trust economy:

Your title captures an important insight; the knowledge economy allows significant distribution of nodes of knowledge, means of production, etc. To get the value of that, resources have to be distributed. If people can’t figure out how to trust other people, all that value goes unachieved. Or, more likely, it accrues to other organizations or networks who HAVE figured out how to trust each other.

I’ve referred several times to articles at the Trusted Advisor because trust is such an important factor in knowledge work as knowledge and innovation cannot be effectively coerced from workers.

Here’s Charles on Measuring and Managing:

If you can measure it, you can manage it; if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it; if you can’t manage it, it’s because you can’t measure it; and if you managed it, it’s because you measured it.

Every one of those statements is wrong. But business eats it up. And it’s easy to see why …

The ubiquity of measurement inexorably leads people to mistake the measures themselves for the things they were intended to measure.

And a post on measuring ROI for soft skills training [because we don’t trust workers] and the perversion of individual measurement:

Most soft skills deal with our relationships to others. The drive to individually behavioralize, then metricize, has the effect of killing relationships—an ironic outcome for relationship-targeting training.

In the learning & development business there is much focus on compliance training, especially since regulatory compliance accounts for a significant amount of learning content development and learning management technology sales. However, there are few sales pitches that say, go ahead, let your employees decide what’s best for them. Trust, it seems, doesn’t sell stuff. If you trust workers to manage their learning, you don’t need an LMS. If you trust them to get things done, you don’t need a tracking system. If you trust them to learn you don’t need as much pre-programmed training because they will find what’s best. If you trust them to be self-directed or group-directed learners they would have a say in their own training budget and I doubt they would vote to buy an LMS.

There is little doubt that organizational structures need to change and that management models need to adapt to deal with increasing complexity. Shifting from a hierarchy to a wirearchy requires a foundation of shared information, knowledge, power and trust. Trust shifts not only how an organization works but also many of traditional relationships with customers and suppliers. If all businesses trusted employees, how many training companies would go out of business?

Agility through collaboration

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Instead of factory-style production teams, agile programming uses far fewer, but better, programmers. The principles of communicating, focusing on simplicity, releasing often and testing often are also applicable to developing good instructional programs. Does instructional systems design (ISD) need more agility? An ISD project team should be able to return to the Analysis or Design phase and make changes while instructional content Development is taking place. If not, changing conditions cannot be accommodated and the programme is outdated before it’s even finished. I wonder how many content development shops actually have a process that enables them to rebuild after the design specification has been signed off.

The root of the problem is that ISD views instruction as separate from work. Instruction is perceived as something that can be designed, developed and delivered as a programme, not integrated with the work to be done. Subject matter experts are consulted, but the ISD professionals remain in control. It’s a good model when things change slowly. The current fascination with rapid e-learning only exacerbates the problems with ISD. Rapid is just a faster version of ADDIE, with less time for reflection and feedback: Garbage-In; Garbage-Out.

I think that ISD and agility are fundamentally incompatible. Clark Quinn proposes a better approach, collaborative co-design:

Things are moving so fast, and increasingly the work will be solving new problems, designing new solutions/products/services, etc, that we won’t be able to anticipate the actual work needs.  What we will need to do, instead, is ensure that a full suite of tools are available, and provide individuals with the ability to work together to create worthwhile working/learning environments.

In short, tying back to my post on collaboratively designing job aids, I think we need to be collaboratively designing workflows. What I mean is that the learning function role will move to facilitating individuals tailoring content and tools to achieve their learning goals.

Collaborative co-design is one more way to integrate work and learning, and give our organizations more agility. Embedding the principles of communicating, focusing on simplicity, releasing and testing often; just make sense in an increasingly complex workplace. Once again, the major barrier, like Enterprise 2.0 or social media for work, is that the traditional gatekeepers have to give up control.

Leveraging collective knowledge

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This week, a few related knowledge management (KM) articles crossed my path and I’d like to weave them together.

Here’s a model that shows how KM has progressed over the past 15 years. Nancy Dixon discusses three eras of knowledge management as moving from Explicit Knowledge (document management) to Experiential Knowledge (communities of practice; expertise locators)  and now to Collective Knowledge (social media). This post and Nancy’s previous ones, are well worth the read as a primer on KM.

Leveraging collective knowledge may be our collective challenge but there are no guaranteed solutions at this time. This is still new territory.

“Although the first thinking about Leveraging Collective Knowledge began to appear around 2005, there are only a few leading edge organizations that have developed new practices for making use of their organization’s collective knowledge. Most organizations are still centered in the perspective of the second era and some, who have come late to knowledge management, are still struggling with getting good content management in place.”

The need for KM is evident. In the gorilla illusions, Nick Milton points out that we need to create knowledge artifacts in order to counter the tendencies of our brains to make things up over time. These illusions include:

  • The illusion of memory
  • The illusion of confidence
  • The illusion of knowledge

As Nick concludes, “The implication is that if you will need to re-use tacit knowledge in the future, then you can’t rely on people to remember it.” With more information passing by us from multiple sources, our ability to keep track of it with only our brains is rather limited. We need systems, but more powerful and more flexible ones than currently offered by enterprise software systems like document management, expertise location, learning management or communities of practice.

Each person’s knowledge needs and knowledge use are unique. For example, Owen Ferguson explains that experts shouldn’t design online resources for novices:

The curse of the expert when it comes to online presentation is that they often decide they know better and produce a design that matches their own knowledge map – totally confusing the user. IT experts design the IT part of the intranet, HR experts design the HR part of the intranet, product experts design the product information parts of the intranet and all express surprise that users never seem to use them.

Actually, designing “for” anybody becomes a problem. Valued professional* work is non-standardized, as standardized work today just gets automated and outsourced.  Who really knows what knowledge needs any professional may have? How many levels of novices, journeymen and experts are there in an organization? Hence the need for the mass customization of (knowledge) work processes.

The relationship with personal knowledge mastery (PKM) is clear. The challenge is to enable “small pieces (individuals) loosely joined” – to seek, make-sense of, and share their knowledge. I use a combination of my blog, bookmarks, and tweets to inform my outboard brain so I can retrieve contextual knowledge as I interact with my clients and colleagues. My process works for me, but it cannot be copied as a standardized process. The real challenge is to help each person find a process that works on an individual basis while supporting the organization in leveraging collective knowledge.

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* “A professional is anyone who does work that cannot be standardized easily and who continuously welcomes challenges at the cutting edge of his or her expertise.” —David Williamson Shaffer

A personal learning journey

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I became interested in knowledge management (KM) as I was introduced to it in the mid 1990’s while practising instructional systems design (ISD) and human performance technology (HPT) in the military. In the late 1990’s knowledge management was part of our solution suite at the Centre for Learning Technologies (CLT via The Wayback Machine).

The Centre for Learning Technologies is an applied research, consulting and resource centre for the use of new media in learning, knowledge management, and workplace performance support.

I continued to work with enterprise knowledge repositories and KM related projects until I started freelancing in 2003 and was faced with the challenge of creating my own knowledge management system with a minimal budget. Luckily the web had evolved and there were consumer alternatives to enterprise systems. I became a consumer and simultaneously a sharer of online knowledge.

Lilia Efimova (2004) was one of my earlier inspirations, “To a great extend PKM [personal knowledge management] is about shifting responsibility for learning and knowledge sharing from a company to individuals and this is the greatest challenge for both sides.” This still sums up the core concept of PKM. As a free agent it was rather easy for me to take responsibility for my learning and knowledge sharing, but it was much more difficult for people working within organizational hierarchies. I saw a need for PKM inside all businesses so I began investigating and practising PKM while reflecting on my own attempts to manage my knowledge.

I had turned my website into my knowledge base (2005) combining blogs, RSS and social bookmarks to help manage my knowledge flows. By explaining my process in public, I hoped to clarify my methods and get feedback from others. I then played with metaphors to explain my emerging processes (2006); “Basically, you can take a few free web tools and start controlling your information streams (Input). Then you can file the good stuff somewhere you can always find it (Filing & Sharing).”

By 2007, PKM had become my best tool and I had once more revised my processes. My own area of interest was PKM with web tools, though of course a PKM system can be unplugged. I was also seeing the similarities with personal learning environments: PLE.

The need for some type of PKM process for people in many walks of life was becoming clear in 2008. However, it was only part of the solution in creating better workplaces and encouraging critical thinking:

Developing practical methods, like PKM and Skills 2.0 (PDF) can help, but at the same time we need to work on creating and supporting new models of work that are more democratic and human. This means that we need to think about and talk about work differently. For myself, I have found that not being a salaried employee has freed my mind in many ways. I know that this is not the answer for everyone, but it’s time to make slogans like, “our business is our people”, a reality.

I forecast (2009) that PKM would be an essential part of workplace learning by 2019, but it now seems that will happen much earlier in many sectors with the cheap abundance of social learning tools.

Workplace learning in 2019:

  • Much of the workforce will be distributed in time & space as well as in engagement (part-time, full-time, contract mix).
  • More learning will be do-it-yourself and gathered from online digital resources available for free and fee. More workers will be used to getting what they need as they change jobs/contracts more frequently but remain connected to their online networks (online/offline won’t matter anymore).
  • Work and learning will continue to blend while stand-up training will be challenged by the ever-present back channel. Successful training programs will involve the learners much more – before, during and after.
  • Conferences, workshops and on-site training will become more niche and fragmented (smaller,  focused & connected online) as travel costs increase and workers become more demanding of their time.
  • The notion of PKM will have permeated much of the workplace
  • These changes will not be evenly distributed.

I also observed that government managers especially needed to develop ways of prioritizing and coping with information flows while leaving space for real time conversations. In 2009 I wrote 34 posts related to PKM on this blog, as it was becoming evident that there was a need and an interest. I came to the conclusion that PKM was our part of the social learning contract as we increasingly engage in online professional and learning networks.

This year, I engaged with the KM community and gained many insights talking about PKM on Twitter: “I am more convinced now of the importance of PKM (or PKSharing) in getting work done in knowledge-intensive workplaces. It is a foundational skill, of which only the principles can be formally taught, and like any craft it must be practised to gain mastery.” My latest metaphor/model  is described in PKM in a Nutshell and of course there are several other models.

I will continue to explore better ways to manage information, encourage reflection and share what we are learning. Technology plays a role in this but changing attitudes is the key.  Learning is a process, not a discrete event and it needs to become part of the work flow, not directed by a separate department, with a separate budget that is itself separate from the work that has to be done. Encouraging and supporting PKM* is one part of this.

*PKM is the term that I have used here, but other terms may become more meaningful to the world at large. I will continue to use PKM but am open to others, especially if they are more useful in getting the work done:

  • personal knowledge sharing
  • personal learning environment
  • personal learning network