Work

business & working

Knowledge artisans choose their tools

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How can you be a knowledge worker if you’re not allowed to pick your own tools?

In the unattained summit of social business, Ton Zylstra writes:

So we talked about how corporate systems might integrate social media tools into sharepoint and ERP-software, but not about the notion that it is quickly becoming ridiculous that IT departments should be prescribing what tools professionals should use at all, and not just stick to managing and securing the data flowing through those tools. We let craftsmen and artisans pick the tools they think fit the task at hand and their personal skills best, but we still don’t allow our professionals in knowledge intensive environments to do so.

I like the term Knowledge Artisan to describe this growing field of economic activity. An artisan is a skilled worker in a particular craft, using specialized tools and machinery. Artisans were the dominant producers of goods before the Industrial era. Knowledge Artisans are retrieving the older artisan model and re-integrating previously separate skills.

Knowledge Artisans not only design the work but they can do the work. It is not passed down the assembly line. Many integrate marketing, sales and customer service with their creations. To ensure that they stay current, they become members of various Guilds, known today as communities of practice or knowledge networks. One of the earliest guilds was the open source community which developed many of the communication tools and processes used by Knowledge Artisans today: distributed work (CSCW); results-oriented work (your code speaks for you); RSS, blogs, wikis, flattened hierarchies, etc.

One problem today is that it’s hard to be a Knowledge Artisan in a hierarchical organization that tells you what to do and which tools to use. No wonder the more experienced and adventurous are leaving and the younger skilled artisans are not joining the Command & Control Industrial Organization.

Pilots or Beta?

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If you take the cynefin approach for working in complex environments you first Probe then Sense and then Respond in order to develop emergent practices. Backward-looking good or best practices are inadequate for changing complex environments. Constant probes of the environment are necessary to see what works.

beta

Enterprise performance should be looked at from the perspective of perpetual Beta. The values and culture can remain stable while the tools and practices keep evolving to take advantage of the situation. Perpetual Beta means an acceptance that we’ll never get to the final release and our learning will never stabilize. This is quite different from perpetual Alpha, or never getting to something concrete, as Jay Cross commented here several years ago:

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 respond 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.

Does perpetual Beta equate to doing lots of pilot projects? Ross Dawson is a strong proponent of pilot projects for implementing Enterprise 2.0 and lists five characteristics of great pilots: Enthusiasm; Roles & Functions; Skills; Personality & Network:

5. Network
The primary way in which pilots projects will become visible to other people the organization and adapted to new issues is through the personal networks of the pilot team members. Strong personal networks within organizations emerge through both personality, organizational role, and work history (e.g. having worked in multiple divisions or locations). In most organizations networks are fairly strongly correlated to longevity in the organization, meaning that recent recruits are unlikely to have strong personal networks.

On the other hand, Gartner’s Anthony Bradley says that piloting does not make sense for social media projects:

This practice is not prudent for social media where the software complexity should be minimal and the primary goal is to get people interacting. Community participants are fickle and unforgiving (especially external communities). You may only get one shot at catalyzing community formulation. Don’t pilot, test, prototype, or experiment on the community. Don’t artificially restrict participation. The law of numbers is a critical factor in building a thriving and productive community.

A key factor I see in these two articles is that it is important how you define a “pilot” project. If it is viewed as something done on the side and not part of the real business, then it may be doomed to failure. If being involved in pilot projects is a normal part of work, then it fosters a culture of life in perpetual Beta. You can still cancel projects or go in a different direction, but there is a cultural commitment to learning by doing. It’s the difference between our pilot and your pilot.

Favourite Workplace Learning Blogs

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This list is a result of a series of tweets, initiated by Janet Clarey who referred to a Top 50 list of educational technology blogs. Shortly after that, Maria Anderson suggested that I create a list for workplace learning. I don’t like creating “Top 50” lists so here are my current favourite sources of information and knowledge about learning, especially for the networked business environment. These are not all the blogs I read and I have another set of blogs that are more academic and purely learning related.

First of all, I follow my colleagues because that’s how I met most of them, by reading what they had to say [and I liked it].

Informl.com by Jay Cross (US)

Learnlets by Clark Quinn (US)

Social Media in Learning by Jane Hart (UK)

Performance, Learning, Productivity by Charles Jennings (UK/AU)

Wirearchy by Jon Husband (CA)

InternetTime.com another one by Jay Cross (US)

Blogs about Workplace Learning, in the broadest sense of the term

(in alphabetical order)

Anecdote AU: A blog focused on “putting stories to work”.

Bunchberry & Fern UK/JP: Simon Bostock’s blog on information engineering, learning, and organizational development.

Cognitive Edge UK: Dave Snowden focuses on rejuvenating management practices especially when addressing intractable problems.

Corporate eLearning Strategies & Development US: (the title says it all) by Brent Schlenker (includes a very long blog roll).

Dave’s Whiteboard US: Dave Ferguson (also a Canadian citizen) is an experienced workplace learning practitioner.

Donald Clark Plan B UK: Donald always gives us something to think about and question our assumptions.

ELSUA ES: Luis Suarez talks about knowledge management, community building, social computing and living in a world without e-mail [a very good thing].

e-Clippings: Learning as Art US: Mark Oehlert has particular expertise in gaming and learning.

eLearning Technology US: Tony Karrer has a deep and wide-ranging blog on all things learning and technology.

elearnspace CA: George Siemens is well-known in academic circles but also discusses business and workplace issues.

Green Chameleon SG: Blog of knowledge management consulting firm Straits Knowledge.

Growing Changing Learning Creating US: Tom Haskins’ insightful blog ranges from learning strategies to business models.

Janet Clarey US: Janet discusses emerging technologies in workplace learning with a strong research focus.

Karyn’s erratic learning journey UK: Karyn Romeis is an independent learning & development consultant who shares her passion for workplace learning.

Knowledge Jolt with Jack US: Jack Vinson blogs about knowledge management, personal effectiveness, theory of constraints, and more.

Mark Sylvester US: Mark writes about social networks, working together, learning together and being together.

Mathemagenic NL: Long-time blogger Lilia Efimova writes about personal productivity in knowledge-intensive environments,  PKM and more.

Networks, Complexity and Relatedness US: Patti Anklam specalizes in organizational network analysis and knowledge management.

The Obvious UK: Euan Semple is a deep thinker focused on helping people understand the web.

The Smart Work Company UK: Anne Marie McEwan writes about workplace trends and new ways of working, or working smarter.

Interdependent Thoughts NL: Ton Zylstra writes about knowledge work and management and the tools and strategies that help us navigate the networked world.

Trends in the Living Networks AU: Ross Dawson talks about opportunities for business and society in a hyper-connected world.

Will at Work Learning US: Will Thalheimer is focused on the research behind workplace learning practices.

Workplace Learning Today US/CA: Brandon Hall’s multi-author site that always has something of value.

This is not a complete list but all of these bloggers post regularly and I have followed each one for more than a year and some for many years.

PKM: a node in the learning network

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Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, or, in other words, digital networks enable multiple connections, so organizational communications are no longer just vertical. Somebody else, outside the hierarchy, is only one click away, and perhaps easier to deal with and a better source of information and knowledge. This is becoming obvious in the business world and frameworks such as Social CRM (customer relationship management) are one attempt to address it.

Too often we think of learning as school, training as something that is delivered, and complex problems as solvable with enough effort and resources. We are wrong on all three counts.

Social learning is about getting things done in networks. It is a constant flow of listening, observing, doing, and sharing. Effective working in networks requires cooperation, meaning there is no plan, structure or direct feedback. This can scare managers and organizational leaders because no one is in change of social learning and there is no end-state or final learning objective. But social learning in networks can help us deal with complexity by providing a platform to test out ideas and learn from and with each other.

Jane Hart has described five types of learning using social media, the lubricant of learning in digital networks. Then she looked at how they relate to formal/informal learning as well as the spectrum of dependent/independent/interdependent learning.

social pkm

I have circled those activities at the bottom of this grid to show what personal knowledge management (PKM) enables. I have described PKM as our part of the social learning contract and the more I look at implementing social learning, social CRM or social business models, the more convinced I am that PKM is a foundational skill-set.

knowledge-management

Keeping knowledge in our heads is not of much use in getting things done, though that is what most of our training and development efforts have focused on for the past century. Individual training, stemming from the military systems approach to training, addressed skills and knowledge acquisition, as directed by those in change. The organization wanted to drive stuff into our heads.

networks-n-nodes


In networks, though, one of our main jobs now is getting stuff out of our heads and sharing with others.

PKM is focused on accidental, serendipitous, personal-directed, informal, independent learning.

PKM enables group-directed, intra-organizational, interdependent learning.

PKM enriches formal, structured learning and helps learners be less dependent.

PKM is taking control of our learning, as well as making much of it transparent. It makes us a valuable node in our various networks. We share our learning riches without diminishing them. If more people start seeking, sensing & sharing then we’re on the social learning path. Notice how I did not mention that you need some special “social learning” technology platform to do this?

Learning is what we will do for a living

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Some of the interesting things I learned on Twitter this week:

Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century via @crazyquote

Innovation via @timkastelle

Innovation = learning x diverse connections
I disagree with the argument that innovation is the child of desperation. I wish it was so, because if it was, we would be on a planet devoid of incredible amounts of preventable child deaths, failed economies, and the rest of what would otherwise be tragedies that could be prevented by innovations of all kinds. The pragmatic reality is that innovation happens at the intersection of learning and cultivating diverse connections. When you have diverse connections in a network, learning almost cannot not happen. Networks literally become learning disabled if the connections become too homophilous and without learning, no innovation is possible.

whistle – but don’t tweet – while you work 54% of companies prohibit access to social networking sites for any reason via @charlesjennings

The No. 1 benefit of Enterprise 2.0 is Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)

… most E2.0 vendors are doing it wrong. If the #1 benefit is personal knowledge management, why are all the big players selling to the CEO, CIO, and IT departments? Where are the tools targeting individual knowledge workers?

How to Decentralize Traditional Employee Structures via @WorldBlu

Touchstone uses a democratic “Bubble” structure, which means that any person at any level of the organization can lead a group of staff – not just managers or senior-level people. The leader of the team can ask for and receive whatever level of talent they need to achieve the mission of the project. One result is that senior staff sometimes ends up working under a less-senior staff person who is managing a given project. The reasoning is that the leader is in charge of the deliverable, and has the freedom to develop and implement the project as they fit with the team they need to get the job done well.

social snake oil

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Knowledge management (KM) was a most promising field until it was hijacked by software vendors who were selling IT systems for six figures. A lot of money went into information technology systems and there was little left to help the individual make sense of it. Dave Pollard noted this several years ago:

“So my conclusion this time around was that the centralized stuff we spent so much time and money maintaining was simply not very useful to most practitioners. The practitioners I talked to about PPI [Personal Productivity Improvement] said they would love to participate in PPI coaching, provided it was focused on the content on their own desktops and hard drives, and not the stuff in the central repositories.”

Personal Knowledge Mastery is one counter movement to centralized document repositories. As Mary Abraham wrote, during a recent discussion on PKM: “Perhaps PKM is growing in importance because so few organizational KM methods work for individuals.” As soon as the software vendors and marketers get hold of a good idea, they pretty well destroy it. Maybe that’s why there’s a constant flow of new business books — the authors are trying to keep ahead of the snake oil salesmen.

snake oil 2
Image: gapingvoid.com

I saw this happen with e-learning. In the late 1990’s e-learning was an all encompassing term for learning online. However, the IT systems vendors and the course providers (AKA: shovelware) turned e-learning into online courses. Building simplistic document management systems coupled with generic information presentation was an easy way to keep profits high.

Now if you say you’re in the e-learning business, everyone thinks you do online courses. That’s why I coined the term, ABC Learning [Anything But Courses]. Yes, I know there are some good e-learning programs, but these are more than information presentation. The better ones resemble simulations.

Is the same thing happening with social learning? Jane Hart recently changed her title to Social Learning Consultant so people will not think she creates online courses. Now social learning is being picked up by software vendors and marketers as the next solution-in-a-box, when it’s more of an approach and a cultural mind-set. In A framework for social learning in the enterprise, there is no suggestion whatsoever that an organization can implement some software system and suddenly social learning will just happen. Perhaps PT Barnum was right and there is an innate desire to buy some magic potion to solve all our problems.

Why are businesses buying their productivity tools from traveling circuses?

Communication and working together

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Lilia Efimova is looking at teams, communities & networks in terms of communication forms:

One of the things I came up when playing with different ideas was to position teams, communities and networks in respect to the most prevalent forms of communication in each case (in all cases the other forms of communication are there as well, but are not at the core of it).

This is her model in progress [please read Lilia’s full post]:

communication_efimovaThis maps to the group work matrix I developed, based on TIMN and the Cynefin framework. For types of work that have clear goals, then communications for getting things done can be mostly coordination (traditional project management), as there is structure and clearly understood goals. With less structure and goals, collaboration entails working together, with less management but shared objectives (communities of practice). In informal environments, where group work seeks opportunities, then cooperation is the best way to work together (networks).

CCC_ based on mathemagenic

One can easily envision someone working on all three levels on any given day:

  1. a small team producing a deliverable on a deadline for a client (coordination);
  2. members of that team providing advice and information to other teams on related projects (collaboration);
  3. team members working with a larger and looser network in identifying new business opportunities (cooperation).

It would be important for an organization to allow for collaborative and cooperative communications and activities, and not constrain all work and communications with too much structure and the need for controlled coordination.

Seek Sense Share

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Note: my blog is where I hammer out ideas, so you may be finding some of these posts a bit repetitive. Sorry about that ;)

My working definition of personal knowledge management:

PKM: a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world, work more effectively and contribute to society.

PKM is also an enabling process for wirearchy: ” a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results enabled by interconnected people and technology”

Some Observations:

PKM is part of the social learning contract.
PKM works best when knowledge is shared.
Organizational Knowledge Management (KM) is dependent on effective PKM processes.
Standardizing PKM destroys it.

Explaining PKM:

I have looked at the PKM process as:

Sort-Categorize-Make Explicit-Retrieve
Connect-Contribute-Exchange
Aggregate-Filter-Connect.

Currently I use:

Seek > Sense > Share

Social computing in knowledge-intensive workplaces

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Ross Dawson discusses a Gartner report on social software, looking at some particular forecasts for the next three to five years out:

20% of businesses using social media instead of e-mail by 2014

50% of businesses using activity streams, such as micro-blogging, by 2012

20% of businesses will use social network analysis by 2015

70-95% of IT dominated driven social media initiatives will fail through to 2012

I’ve highlighted the last point because it’s time to look at social media as a connecting force in the enterprise. Here are some notes from a Twitter conversation with Treena Gravatt and Dennis Callahan yesterday:

Harold: RT @ecollab The Real Secret to Social Learning Success in 2010 by @LearningPutty

Treena: @hjarche That post made so much sense – I hadn’t seen it framed so clearly before but it makes utter sense & I agree with you. So many parallels

Harold: @tgrevatt I think the training department of the future will be part of marketing (already is at Intuit)

Harold: @tgrevatt I’ve been watching marketing & training moving closer, just as work & learning get integrated in the networked workplace

Dennis: @hjarche – re: marketing & training moving closer. Interesting – what’s the connection? I haven’t seen this trend.

Harold: @denniscallahan when you learn with & from your customers, learning & marketing are the same

Treena: <- nicely put Harold!

Dennis: <good connection>

The lines are blurring between marketing and training just as they are between learning and working. The connectivity enabled by social computing gives us an opportunity to identify overlapping areas and redundancies in organizational human performance support.  A unified support function, focused on really serving workers and helping them grow, could significantly reduce the 77% of CLO Magazine survey respondents who feel that people in their organization are not growing fast enough to keep up with the business.

Every department in the enterprise is part of the problem:

IT: for locking down computers and treating all employees like children, closing off a wealth of information, knowledge and connections outside the artificial firewall.

Communications: for forcing employees to use approved messages that do not even sound human.

Training: for separating learning from work.

HR: for forcing people into standardized  jobs and competency models that do not reflect the person.

It’s time for all departments to become part of the solution.

We’ve been discussing the blurring of lines between traditional organizational departments at the Internet Time Alliance and the general consensus is that any organizational change, especially using social computing, needs to look at the whole of the organization and not just the parts. Organizational culture, or its DNA, is an emergent property of the various components working, hopefully, in concert. Enabling only one department to initiate the change to a more cooperative and networked organization, may be a recipe for failure (70-95% of the time).

Wired Work

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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.

This presentation covers my interpretation of wirearchy and is a continuation of my presentation on Net Work: learning to work anew. Once again, it is in MP4 format and runs less than 5 minutes.

Wired Work: complexity, the web and business:

2 way flow

wired work (MP4)