Work

business & working

Make imperfect copies

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Copying is an underrated business skill says Drake Bennett in Boston Globe’s The Imitation Economy. However, you have to be careful what you copy and from whom:

For example, while it’s tempting to copy direct competitors, especially when they’re doing well, it’s often more helpful to look for models in far-flung fields: It’s ground less likely to have been mined by competitors, but where unfamiliar ideas have already been tested. Shenkar points to how the toy firm Ohio Art has borrowed from the automotive industry and how the medical supply firm Cardinal Health copied the methods of food distributors, but there are plenty of examples beyond the business world: Today weapons designers imitate video game designers, traffic engineers borrow from particle physics, mechanical engineers copy the intricacies of plant structure, architects mimic airplane design, and psychologists use techniques perfected by magicians to design research studies.

In looking at organizational structures for complex environments we could learn something from how nature deals with complexity through copying. Natural selection is basically making multiple copies, with slight variations, of which only the best-suited survive; and then repeating this process over long periods of time. Perhaps organizations need to incorporate the creation of adaptations (slightly imperfect copies) into their business processes. A culture of encouraging the identification of and experimentation with emergent processes would be part of this.

Look at these recent web projects: Twitter is not that different from Jaiku, though only the former is hugely successful. However, Jaiku is now open source and may grow into something else, under Google’s umbrella. Meanwhile, Yammer started making some headway in business micro-blogging, but it’s a proprietary platform that could go the way of Ning and suddenly change its pricing model. Laconi.ca perhaps sees this weakness as an opportunity and has launched open source Status.net as an alternative for organizational micro-blogging. All of these are variations on a basic theme: short, mostly public text messages, with links & attribution.

When I work with clients I often bring the perspective of other fields to the organization. Like the copying cited above, you can learn from different disciplines but you have to understand the underlying patterns and structures and see how they can be used in your own context. The lesson from The Medici Effect is that old associative patterns must first be broken down and then new combinations can be found. Author Frans Johansson suggests [I suggest]:

diversifying occupations [abolish standard job competencies]

work with diverse groups of people [make everything transparent to as many people as possible]

Go intersection hunting [encourage reading outside one’s field and regularly “straying off the path”]

These are simple changes, made at the lowest levels of the organization, that when applied consistently and over time, can have major influences on the business. In dealing with complexity, we don’t need to add more complication to our business models, we need to make small, but fundamental changes to how work is done.

Working online is different

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With volcanic ash grounding most flights in northern Europe, I’ve been thinking about web conferencing and distributed work. I work predominantly at a distance, using networked communications (what we used to call computer supported collaborative work), and have been doing so for over a decade. I have never met several of my clients in person and the same goes with some of my business partners. I can go many months without stepping foot in an airport. Flight cancellations don’t have much direct influence on my work, though I do understand the economic ramifications of the current situation.

Over the years I’ve used a lot of different technologies, from video conferencing to collaborative work spaces. Currently, my favourites are Zorap, Skype, and Google Documents. I give more presentations online than I do in-person and I must say that online presenting has some real advantages — backchannels, ability to send links, engaged participants who can help others, etc.

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

I now take for granted my online personal knowledge mastery processes, such as social bookmarking, blogging, and tweeting, but these habits make online collaboration much, much easier. However, these habits and practices have taken several years to develop and may not come easily to many workers.  If  economic conditions and events that disrupt air traffic drive organizations to use more online social tools, many people may be in for a shock. Work, as they know it, will change.

HPT and ISD

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Clark Quinn discussed the Great ADDIE Debate and summarized the alternatives to exclusively using ADDIE (analysis, design, development, implementation, evaluation):

The obvious question came up about what would be used in place of ADDIE.  I believe that ADDIE as a checklist would be a nice accompaniment to both a more encompassing  and a more learning-centric approach.  For the former, I showed the HPT model as a representation of a design approach considering courses as part of a larger picture.  For the latter, I suggested that a focus on learning experience design would be appropriate.

Using an HPT-like approach first, to ensure that a course is the right solution, is necessary.  Then, I’d focus on working backwards from the needed change (Michael Allen talked about using sketches as lightweight prototypes at the conference, and first drawing the last activity the user engaged in) thinking about creating a learning experience that develops the learner’s capability.  Finally, I’d be inclined to use ADDIE as a checklist to ensure all the important components are considered, once I’d drafted an initial design (or several).  ADDIE certainly may be useful in taking that design forward, through development, implementation and evaluation.

I think of HPT (human performance technology) as an enabler to get to first base in instructional systems design (ISD). Without the proper analysis of the organizational needs, constraints and performance factors, a “learning” project may be doomed from the onset, because too often, training is a solution looking for a problem.

Here are some images from past presentations that support Clark’s post and may be helpful.

Hpt and isd

Bigger is not better

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Common business wisdom used to be that nobody gets fired for buying IBM. Implicit in this statement is that it’s best not to rock the boat if you want to keep your job. The same culture permeates most large organizations. There is a belief that large companies have to buy products and services from other large companies. Bigger is better.

I have worked on both sides of the RFP/Proposal & purchasing/selling continuum. In the military, we developed our technical specifications and then some ‘professional’ from Public Works & Government Services would wrap those specs into a Request for Proposals. The additional caveats ensured that only a few bidders could ever meet the mandatory criteria. Often, it excluded the product or services that we, the operational users, really wanted. In the end, everybody’s job was protected, a large company got the contract, and the taxpayer was fleeced.

As an officer, I hired a consulting firm, through the proper channels, and they spent several months taking my own analysis and then selling it back to the military in fancy packaging. Money changed hands but the only value exchange was the consulting company learning something about the client.

Four years ago I wrote that free-agents offer better value, especially in consulting:

Many free-agents are also natural enterprises, not encumbered by the need for constant growth. I’ve worked as a sub-contractor on bids from large corporations who need my skills for a specific project. It’s usually good work for me, but in many cases I could have put together a team of free agents for a much lower cost and a more effective (in my opinion) project. However, most large corporations and government agencies write their requests for proposals (RFP) in such a way as to exclude small operators, thinking that they are mitigating their risks.

Three years ago I saw the big consulting companies were jumping on bandwagon 2.0  — It looks like social media (wikis, blogs & social networking) are going the way of e-learning and knowledge management (KM). That means big companies charging big fees for cookie-cutter solutions.

Clients may think they are hiring an expert team with much experience, but in many cases they are getting a bunch of recently graduated MBA’s. This story [now offline] about a high-priced consultant with the Boston Consulting Group motivated me to write this post:

Despite having no work or research experience outside of MIT, I was regularly advertised to clients as an expert with seemingly years of topical experience relevant to the case. We were so good at rephrasing our credentials that even I was surprised to find in each of my cases, even my very first case, that I was the most senior consultant on the team.

The culture of ‘nobody gets fired for buying …’ was obvious here:

I got the feeling that our clients were simply trying to mimic successful businesses, and that as consultants, our earnings came from having the luck of being included in an elaborate cargo-cult ritual. In any case it fell to us to decide for ourselves what question we had been hired to answer, and as a matter of convenience, we elected to answer questions that we had already answered in the course of previous cases — no sense in doing new work when old work will do.

When marketing is disconnected from sales and neither are integrated with client services you get cases like BCG above. Too often, sales & marketing are putting lipstick on a pig.

There’s more than one type of consultant and some of these folks are giving us a bad name. One key advantage of hiring independents or small companies is that those who write the proposals actually do the work. Marketing, sales, and consulting are one integrated unit, a real advantage for clients.

To make the relationship with clients as clear as possible, I’ve used these guidelines since I launched my practice seven years ago:

  1. Base recommendations and actions on an objective needs assessment conducted in partnership with the client.
  2. Define and achieve useful results that can be aligned with both the client organization’s mission, objectives and positive contributions to society.
  3. Focus on results and consequences of the results. Measure performance based on results, not on procedures performed for the client.
  4. Set clear expectations about the process to be followed and about the expected outcomes.
  5. Serve the client organization with integrity, competence, and objectivity.
  6. Respect and contribute to the legitimate and ethical objectives of the client organization.
  7. Prevent problems from occurring rather than solve problems that could have been predicted and avoided.

“Shape Patterns, Not Programs”

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Excellent lessons and a wealth of references are included in this paper, Changing Homeland Security: Shape Patterns, Not Programs which is applicable to a wide and sundry audience.

Advice from Socrates to a man who over-planned his son’s birthday party – “ask the women”, with the following results:

We held the party at Panathinaikon Stadium. We set up places to eat, a site for crafts, a tent for shelter and rest, a station for music, and a space for art. Singers wandered and told stories. There was a field for wrestling and running and flying kites. We encouraged the children to try what they pleased. We helped if they asked, then we stepped back and watched. When there was hitting or crying or harsh words – and there was – we immediately spoke sternly or separated the offenders. Then we redirected them toward an established activity.

In sum, our strategy was to control only that which could be ordered. For those activities in the realm of that which is, and must be, unordered, we watched and we shaped – gently, but with insistence. Because I have learned to know the difference between the states of order and unorder, I am now seen by all Athens as the wisest of men. Second to you of course.

On planning for the future

We need to learn how to become a partner with an uncontrollable future.

Consider how one rears children. They are not little machines waiting to be directed by higher headquarters. They are people learning how to be free and responsible citizens. Their future emerges; it is not designed. So too with homeland security – it is only five years old.

There is much good advice here for all organizations dealing with complex issues.

Agility and Autonomy

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for social learning to be successfully implemented in an organisation it is not just about adding in the new tools or platforms but also about acquiring a new mindset and new skillset for both learning professionals and individuals.

Jane Hart  shows in this Table; Social Learning = New Toolset + New Mindset + New Skillset

New Mindset: Agility

A key part of the New Mindset is agility. This is one of the limitations of instructional design as it too often practiced. For instance, at one time, software engineers assumed they could design a program and then build it based on the initial  specifications. Today, that is not often the case and much software development has adopted more agile methods. Assuming you know everything at the start of a complex development project is rather arrogant. This article on the future of software development had me asking if instructional design is also arrogant:

The problem was that the Waterfall Model was arrogant. The arrogance came from the fact that we believed that we could always engineer the perfect system on the first try. The second problem with it was that in nature, dynamic systems are not engineered, they evolve. It is the evolutionary idea that led to the development of agile methods.

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 all applicable to developing good instructional programs.

A culture of perpetual Beta is critical. Perpetual Beta means we never get to the final release and that our learning will never stop. Agile organizations realize they will never reach some future point where everything stabilizes and they don’t need to learn or do anything new.

New Skillset: Autonomy

I have observed over the years that a significant portion of the workforce has not been able to develop the skills to learn for themselves. What many lack are tools, methods and practices to learn and to take action. Autonomous learners face many barriers on the job, particularly the pervasive attitude that you must look busy or you’re not working.

We are trained early in life to look to authority for direction in learning and work. The idea that there is a right answer or an expert with the right answer begins in our schools. John Taylor Gatto describes this in the seven-lesson schoolteacher.

The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. The expert makes all the important choices; only I, the teacher, can determine what you must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions which I then enforce. If I’m told that evolution is a fact instead of a theory, I transmit that as ordered, punishing deviants who resist what I have been told to tell them to think. This power to control what children will think lets me separate successful students from failures very easily.

The message from many workplaces continues to be that good employees wait for their supervisor to tell them what to do.

However, when we move away from a “design it first, then build it” mindset, we need to engage everyone in critical and systems thinking. Workers in agile workplaces must be passionate, adaptive, innovative, and collaborative. The way to begin is to become autonomous.

Developing practical methods, like PKM, is a start on the path to autonomy. A major premise of PKM is that it is Personal and there are many ways to practice it.  We need to think about and talk about work differently. For example, dropping the notion of being paid for time is one way to start this change.  An hourly wage implies that people are interchangeable, but no two minds are the same. Many of our human resource practices should be questioned and dropped.

Social Learning

Social learning is how things get done in networks. For example, Sue Schnorr recently asked if Networking = Learning?. It seems that way to me. Learner autonomy is a foundation for effective social learning within and without the enterprise and social learning is the lubricant for an agile organization. Agility is a necessity because we are dealing with increasing complexity.

Esko Kilpi puts it very succinctly. Let me paraphrase his words:

In order to develop the necessary emergent practices to deal with complexity you need to first cultivate diversity [autonomy of each learner] .

You also need rich and deep connections, but these are not enough if you don’t also have meaningful conversations [social learning].

Learning is the work …

The business of information

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The internet era has allowed almost anybody to self-publish and we’re doing it in droves, on blogs, wikis, YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter. This has shifted our relationship with information because we can find most information we need for free.

I wrote earlier this year about the changing information business.

I would surmise that ten years ago it was easier to sell a research report than it is now. There was less information available online for free. However, I think there is still a growing market for mass customization. That means a customized research report for me that’s different than one for somebody else. That’s pretty well what I sell: customized strategy & analysis for the specific context of each client. The challenge for Janet (and all of us in the custom information business) is figuring out the 90% that we should give away for free and the 10% that has market value and that we can charge for. The problem is that this sweet spot keeps changing so we need to keep tweaking and reinventing our business models.

With ease of publishing comes increased competition and most content publishers today are looking for new and better business models. Ross Dawson sees an exclusive class of online content creators developing, but at a cost. Dawson sees increasing demands to publish more frequently:

I don’t know how professional bloggers who are parents of young children manage. You’d be torn in both directions. It’s hard to keep the blog posts flowing every day, all the time, while you have other demands.

However it will be an imperative for almost all of us to create content in some form, just to have any visibility at all in an overloaded world.

So those who choose to belong to the exclusive class of content creators are automatically drawn into this spiral of intensity, whether they like it or not.

This seems kind of scary, especially when my own publishing is not for money. I wonder if I’ll feel this increasing pressure in the future.

Blogging is part of my learning (PKM) process and has a side benefit of connecting with potential partners and clients. I don’t spend any money on traditional marketing. Everything on the blog is free because I get intrinsic and extrinsic non-monetary rewards for doing it.

Of course, one concern is that people will take my ideas and sell them as their own. This is a risk of being on the internet and I don’t see this changing. It can be frustrating to see work that was developed over years of practice and reflection get repackaged and sold as a poor imitation. An alternative is not to share, but that would be self-defeating.

I don’t think that charging for general information is a viable online business model. When I look at how to price information, a rule of thumb I’ve adopted is that anything that requires context can be fee-based, while context-free information, like blog posts, can be given away. That rule may change some day but constantly tweaking our business models is just part of life in perpetual beta.

The collapse of complicated business models

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Clay Shirky, in the collapse of complex business models, notes:

Bureaucracies temporarily reverse the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.

The premise of his article is that successful organizations and industries become more complex over time and are unable to embrace new ways of doing things, which at the onset are much simpler. He discusses the complex television industry and how it cannot produce simple, and low cost, fare for the web.

I’m not sure if complexity is the issue. I see it more as complication. Companies and industries start out as relatively simple operations and then become more complicated. Complicated systems can be analyzed, and we can tell how things work. Modern organizations are not complex, they are merely complicated. A complex organization could not be managed.

The real problem is on the outside, not the inside, of the typical complicated organization. The outside environment has become complex and the complicated organization lacks the ability to deal with it. Systems like the Neilson ratings don’t give us the kind of information we need to make decisions on programming. The media landscape is too fragmented to completely analyze.

The Cynefin framework describes the complicated & complex domains as:

  • Complicated, in which the relationship between cause and effect requires analysis or some other form of investigation and/or the application of expert knowledge, the approach is to Sense – Analyze – Respond and we can apply good practice.
  • Complex, in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe – Sense – Respond and we can sense emergent practice.

The typical large modern organization tends to thoroughly assess a situation before acting, assuming it can be analyzed. This does not work in complex environments where we need to first do something and then see what happens. We see this with Beta releases of web services, which adapt as they are used by more people. many web companies understand this.

I don’t see simplicity as the solution to dealing with complex environments. A new organizational structure is required that is 1) based on simple units but is 2) connected as a network that is much more complex than any hierarchical organization could ever be. This type of organization will be too complex to manage directly. It will self-manage and adapt. The best work structures to deal with complexity will be complex networks, and likely some mix of wirearchical, chaordic, democratic, etc.

Knowledge work revisited

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In knowledge work (2004) I commented on how Lilia Efimova described the main uses of blogs for knowledge work: personal knowledge repositories, learning journals, or networking instruments.

Another point in Lilia’s paper is that knowledge work is “discretionary behavior”, in that knowledge workers have to be motivated to do knowledge work. Many companies are tryng to find ways to motivate their knowledge workers. This makes me wonder about Peter Drucker’s comment that the corporation as we know it won’t be around in the next 25 years (Managing in the Next Society, 2002). Perhaps the actual structure of work, especially the Corporation itself, is an obstacle to knowledge work. Instead of tweaking the mechanisms of the corporation, through job redesign or cultural initiatives, we should be re-examining the basic structure of the corporation. It is an industrial age creation, designed to maximize physical capital and may not be optimal for maximizing “knowledge capital”.

Yesterday, Jack Vinson asked, Is the term Knowledge Worker no longer useful?:

When Drucker coined the term and others borrowed it, I don’t think the idea was differentiation so much as identification.  Traditional “work” was the physical labor variety.  As management ideas grew into the information age, they wanted ways to categorize (and measure) other workers within the organization.  Knowledge work seemed a good way to describe what a larger and larger portion of the working population were doing.

The challenge for our society, our economy and all organizations will be to ensure that most, if not all, workers are knowledge workers. If not, we may not have a functioning society because simple, mechanical work will continue to be automated and merely complicated work will be outsourced to the cheapest labour market. The only work of value that is left in the developed world is complex work that requires passion, creativity and initiative.

As long as there remains a difference between workers and knowledge workers, the latter term is useful in reminding us how far we have yet to go.

Critical thinking in the organization

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Even the mainstream training field is realizing that reduced layers of bureaucracy mean decision-making gets pushed down the organization chart. This is the message of the AMA in the promotional video – Critical Thinking: Not just a C-suite skill.  However, wirearchy takes this one important step further by advocating a two-way flow of power and authority. In both cases, the need for critical thinking is evident. Here is Edward Glaser’s definition:

“Critical thinking calls for a persistent effort to examine any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the evidence that supports it and the further conclusions to which it tends. It also generally requires ability to recognize problems, to find workable means for meeting those problems, to gather and marshal pertinent information, to recognize unstated assumptions and values, to comprehend and use language with accuracy, clarity, and discrimination, to interpret data, to appraise evidence and evaluate arguments, to recognize the existence (or non-existence) of logical relationships between propositions, to draw warranted conclusions and generalizations, to put to test the conclusions and generalizations at which one arrives, to reconstruct one’s patterns of beliefs on the basis of wider experience, and to render accurate judgments about specific things and qualities in everyday life.”

A personal knowledge mastery process can help to develop critical thinking skills, where sense-making includes observing, studying, challenging (especially one’s assumptions), and evaluating. Developing these skills takes practice, appropriate feedback and an environment that supports critical thinking.

seek sesne share critical thinking

Several web tools can be used to develop critical thinking skills; the foundation of PKM:

critical thinking tools

Flattening the organization is one way to open communications and delegate responsibility but asking employees to engage in real critical thinking, and accepting the resulting actions, will not work unless there is a two-way flow of power and authority. Critical thinking is not just thinking more deeply but also asking difficult and discomfiting questions. Without power and authority, these become meaningless.

So yes, critical thinking is not just for the C-suite, but unleashing it requires a new framework for getting work done. Wirearchy as the organizational framework, coupled with active personal knowledge management processes, is a step in that direction.