Work

business & working

Learning to work anew

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My Net Work Learning presentation on Slideshare has garnered a fair number of views in the past two weeks and I’m assuming there’s an interest in the themes presented. Slides alone are rather limited in getting a message across, so I’ve created a slide show with audio that covers most of the first part of the larger presentation. I will make more of these if there is any demand.

I like the audio & slide format because I don’t need video editing skills and the pictures/words seem to work well together. I used Jing Pro to make this.

Click image or link to launch MP4 (4 minutes):

Net Work Learning Screenshot

Net Work Learning

Presentation available on Slideshare (slightly modified)

Blind Monks 2.0

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David Guillocheau at Talent[Power]Management describes what I would call human resources in a wired world [enough of this 2.0 appendage]. He discusses (in French)  the various aspects of networked-enabled HR.

Recruiting: social networks; online events; serious games.

Integrating new workers: online mentoring; internal blogs.

Evaluation: online employee profiles; internal markets or currency.

Training: communities of practice; learning communities.

Internal communication: manager blogs; internal social networks, micro-blogs, chat.

Social interactions: private collaborative work space; blogs, internal polling.

HR management: communities of practice; project management space; blogs.

In the comments, Frédéric Williquet adds a definition of this new approach to human resources, which I’ve loosely translated: Human Resources is a community agent that ensures an environment where employees have the opportunity to collaborate, innovate and excel. It provides a framework to inspire employees to work collaboratively according to their interests and abilities.

This definition sounds very much like wirearchy, especially the notion of a two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility. The above examples of networked HR are wirearchy type work: based on knowledge, trust, credibility AND a focus on results – enabled by interconnected people and technology.

Enterprise 2.0, Learning 2.0, HR 2.0 or Social Business Design are all the same thing seen from different angles. They are the proverbial blind monks examining an elephant.

Blind_monks_examining_an_elephant

We are all examining how best to get work done in a networked economy, because the Internet has changed everything. This is most evident today in publishing and journalism, but ever more so in how we manage work without geographical boundaries. We are all learning how to work anew. It’s time for the blind monks to start working together.

Building common ground

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The focus of this blog is on learning and working on the web and how work and learning are becoming one in a digitally interconnected world. I believe there is a critical need for new organizational frameworks, such as wirearchy, and a shift from learning as training & schooling to a more agile approach. Evidence that the old management models are no longer effective abound – see The Future of Management or The Future of Work.

Lilia Efimova is looking into Agile software programming teams, where work is geographically distributed and has observed the challenges of communicating without “common ground:

From what we have seen, the communication in distributed teams often shrinks to purely functional and, compared to face-to-face settings, there is much less unstructured informal interactions – this works for getting the work done (at some level), but seriously limits the opportunities to build awareness of the bigger picture and relationships. Most of the solutions in respect to building the common ground in distributed Agile teams still rely on making sure that there are opportunities to visit each other, while there is a lot of space for a technology-mediated ways to do so next to the f2f.

commonground_lilia_efimova

Building common ground at work takes time and many informal interactions, such as those afforded in a shared physical space. For distributed teams to work well, they need to develop common ground through social grooming. My experience in working with distributed groups is that the more effective teams are those who know each other. I will be more forgiving with someone I know through several years of blogging than some new business acquaintance who has just joined the team. After several thousand tweets I have some understanding of people’s sense of humour, and perhaps they understand mine as well.These casual interactions make the leap to collaborative work much easier, as I am experiencing with my Internet Time Alliance colleagues.

For distributed teams, informal social learning has to take place with digitally mediated communications. Allowing, and indeed promoting, casual social media use may actually be good for work and business. Blocking these channels may inhibit the development of common ground.  This is something to consider as more work becomes distributed – break down those firewalls and let workers be people.

The Social Network Business Plan – Review

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SNBP_silverThe Social Network Business Plan: 18 strategies that will create great Wealth by David Silver

The central premise of this book is how to build “recommender networks“.

“The next great wave of online communities will focus on specific interests such as health, travel, improvement of government services, wealth, beauty, neighbourhood watches, hobbies, protecting one’s estate, and rating the abilities and prices of lawyers, realtors, electricians, hospitals, physicians, judges, school teachers, and vendors of a host of products and services for the home.”

David Silver is a venture capitalist and explains the type of online communities that he would invest in. He then goes on to explain several (18) models. You might think that Facebook already has the social network market cornered, but Silver thinks differently:

“Although the earliest social networks get their launch value by attracting massive memberships, the ones with highest revenues per member, are, at the end of the day, the social networks that have found the empty chairs in the musical chairs game of recommender social networks. It is the best execution of the cleverest business models that will decide the winners.”

This reminds me of the MD community of Sermo that charges sponsors about $100,000 each because it is a gated community for US registered physicians only.

Silver even thinks that recommender communities will one day usurp MySpace, Facebook, and other general communities. There are lots of specific tactics in this book so it’s quite appropriate for entrepreneurs. There is not much theory on groups or networks, but lots of anecdotes. For the theory behind social networks, read Connected: the surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives. For me, this is the kind of book to keep handy and refer to with the various communities that I’m engaged in. Who knows, maybe it’s time to start one myself.

PKM in 2010

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Personal Knowledge Management

Updated 5 Feb 2010: changed “Filter” to “Understand”

[This post is a continuation of Sense-making with PKM (March, 2009)]

Personal = according to one’s abilities, interests and motivation (not directed by external forces)

Knowledge = the capacity for effective action (know how)

Management = how to get things done

What is PKM?

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 learning is the difference between surfing the waves or being drowned by them.

PKM can be looked at as three types of activities [note: I’ve reduced this from seven activities in my previous articles on PKM as I believe that a simpler process is easier to teach and to begin with].

Aggregate

Filter

Understand

Connect
Observations & Notes

Information

Knowledge

Sources of Info & Knowledge

 Annotate, Tag,

List, File,

Classify, Clarify,

Expand, Question

 People – People


Ideas – Ideas


People – Ideas

Why PKM?

Human knowledge currently doubles about every year and personal knowledge management is one way of addressing the issue of TMI (too much information).

PKM is of little value unless the results are shared by connecting to others and contributing to meaningful conversations. Informal, social learning is the primary way that knowledge is created in the workplace. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts as we build on the knowledge of others. As knowledge workers or citizens, PKM is our part of the social learning contract. Without effective PKM at the individual level, social learning has less value.

A Model

There is more than one PKM process but here is a basic structure that works for me and makes sense to many others I show it to. This post is meant to be descriptive, not prescriptive. Take what you need, as there are no best practices for complex and personal learning processes.

Aggregate Understand Connect

PKM in the context of work:

Individuals have their unique methods of sense-making and by sharing cooperatively or working collaboratively they contribute to the social learning mosaic that creates organizational knowledge.

Aggregate – looking for good sources of information (people) – noting or tagging pieces of information while working collaboratively.

Filter Understand – saving information for later – considering how it may be useful in various contexts – making sense of it – finding the right information, at the right time, in the right format,  from the information repositories of our subject matter networks.

Connect – ongoing conversations while learning and working including connecting ideas and people.

Enhanced Serendipity – PKM increases the chances of serendipitous learning. and as Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favours the prepared mind”. According to Ross Dawson: “You cannot control serendipity. However you can certainly enhance it, act to increase the likelihood of happy and unexpected discoveries and connections. That’s is what many of us do day by day, contributing to others like us by sharing what we find interesting.”

Getting to work

One of the difficult aspects of PKM is triage, or sorting. It’s the ability to separate the important from the useless. Unfortunately, what we view as useless today could be quite important tomorrow. Developing good triage techniques takes time and practice. It depends on the depth and breath of our sources (aggregation), as well as the effectiveness of our filters.

When we find something of interest or value, we need to do something with it. Either file it, save it, add to it, send it on or discard it. Discarding or missing something is becoming less of a problem online because we have powerful search tools and if we participate in cooperative networks, more than one person will notice items of significance. This process also gives us time to make sense of things, to understand.

All of this aggregation and filtering isn’t of much use if we can’t find things later. Putting our knowledge online, in databases that enable tagging, filtering and searching makes it much easier to retrieve it when we need it. For example, I use this blog as a knowledge repository. It is searchable and I’ve added tags and categories. With over 1,500 posts and +4,000 comments, I have a an excellent tool for managing what I’ve learned. Add to this almost 2,000 online social bookmarks and weekly summaries of what I learn on Twitter and I’ve created an outboard brain.

The most important aspect of PKM is making our knowledge not only explicit but public. This is part of connecting. Going public means looking both inward and outward. However, let me add one caveat. Sometimes, just publishing online for our own learning and perhaps later retrieval, is enough. It doesn’t matter if nobody links to it. If we get too focused on what others think, we won’t become good critical thinkers.

Net Work Learning article

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Net Work LearningThe New Security Learning  Foundation held its conference just prior to Online Educa last year in Berlin. I wrote an article, called Net Work Learning, for the journal that is distributed to members and conference attendees. Parts of it have appeared on this site but here is the complete unabridged version as a PDF:

Net Work Learning 2009

I just received a few copies of the print version in the mail this week. Believe it or not, what I really like about print publishing is that an editor makes changes and also decides what to highlight or what works best as a call-out. It’s very good feedback on my writing.

Here are the call-outs from the journal article:

Individuals can act both locally and globally without the aid of formal organizations. That means that the traditional command and control organizational pyramid is getting much more porous.

Change begins when ideas meet new technology.

Command and control matters less and less on the business fringes. Look to business models that understand the importance of community as we become a global village.

If training departments want to remain relevant in this kind of environment, they will need to reconsider their role. In order to help organizations evolve in a networked environment they have to move away from training delivery and focus on connecting and communicating.

No single, sure-fire, cookie-cutter approach can be implemented in a top-down or consultant-driven manner to create a networked workplace performance model that works. No single method will work.

With hyper-linked information and access to expertise, not only are internal departments of less value, they can subvert the organization’s future by not responding quickly and appropriately.

A linchpin culture

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Here is Seth Godin being interviewed by Hugh Macleod:

In a sta­ble envi­ron­ment, we worship the effi­cient fac­tory. Henry Ford or even David Gef­fen… feed the machine, keep it run­ning smoothly, pay as little as you can, make as much as you can. In our post-industrial world, though, fac­tory worship is a non star­ter. Cheap cogs are worth what they cost, which is not much. In a chan­ging envi­ron­ment, you want peo­ple who can steer, inno­vate, pro­voke, lead, con­nect and make things hap­pen. That’s my the­sis. This is a new revo­lu­tion, and just as Marx and Smith wrote about the indus­trial revo­lu­tion, I’m wri­ting about ours.

Godin’s new book is called Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? and he hits the nail on the head that the industrial model for work design is no longer of much use. The work that we will be paid for is the difficult, innovative, one of a kind, creative stuff.

The cynefin model (below) shows that emergent practices are needed in order to manage in complex environments and novel practices are necessary for chaotic ones. We will be facing more complexity and chaos in our work. There are fewer easy answers, easy jobs with good pay, or simple ways to keep a job for life.

I don’t believe that it’s any longer a question of whether standardized work will be outsourced or automated, but when. How much time do we have to prepare people for the new revolution? Any scenario that I consider – peak oil, global warming; globalization; Asian dominance – still requires that the developed world’s workforce deals with more complexity and even chaos. We need to skill-up for emergent and novel practices and that means a completely different mindset toward work.

cynefin linchpin

It’s not enough that I am ready or that you are prepared. We have to be able to deal with change as a society. How can we help get our communities out of their comfort zones or overcome their fears and get their innate creativity flowing? Becoming a linchpin is the first challenge, but enabling a linchpin culture is the greater one.

PKM: aggregate, filter, connect

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Knowledge Squared equals Power Squared, says Craig Thomler:

However the knowledge hoarding model begins to fail when it becomes cheap and easy to share and when the knowledge required to complete a task exceeds an individual’s capability to learn in the time available.

This has been reflected in a longitudinal study of knowledge workers that Robert Kelley of Carnegie-Mellon University conducted over more than twenty years. He asked professionals “What percentage of the knowledge you need to do your job is stored in your own mind?”

In 1986 the answer was typically about 75%. By 1997 workers estimated that they had only about 15% to 20% of the knowledge needed in their own mind. Kelley estimated that by 2006 the answer was only 8% to 10%.

Given that professionals now need to draw 90% or more of the knowledge they need to do their jobs from others, in my view ‘Knowledge equals Power’ is no longer true.

I believe it is now more accurate to state Knowledge Shared equals Power Squared.

I see the basis for sharing knowledge in the connected workplace is personal knowledge management or what I’ve called our part of the social learning contract. You need to have something to share in the first place and that happens when you make your work transparent. This means showing your sources (aggregation) and then what you find important (filtering) and sharing that with others (connecting).

In my case I use Google Reader as a feed aggregator, with shared items public. I also share articles with my Internet Time Alliance colleagues using Posterous. I filter more with this blog by writing about and commenting on much of what I have read and learned. I also filter information with Twitter and my weekly Friday’s Finds. I connect through this blog and the comments left by others, by leaving comments, via Twitter and in the increasing number of web conferences and discussions becoming available. Essential in all of this are the tracks I’ve left for others and for myself to retrieve as necessary, as I do during my frequent searches of this blog, Twitter favourites and my social bookmarks.

None of this is new, but I think that the three-step process of Aggregate/Filter/Connect is much simpler than my previous model of four internal actions and three external ones.

pkm-flow

A simpler model, inspired by Ross Dawson’s post on enhanced serendipity, may be easier to communicate (and remember).

You cannot control serendipity. However you can certainly enhance it, act to increase the likelihood of happy and unexpected discoveries and connections. That’s what many of us do day by day, contributing to others like us by sharing what we find interesting.

I’ve found that this diagram works better in explaining my PKM process and how it relates to other people, all engaged in similar, but not identical, sense-making endeavours [Updated here: PKM in 2010].

PKM-AFC

The business of information

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I have been discussing business models for information-based businesses and in those talks realized how Tim Kastelle’s Aggregate, Filter, Connect model makes good sense. If you’re in the information or knowledge business, which is any media company, then it’s exceptionally important to master each of these three processes.

You need to aggregate from your network and your suppliers in order to have access to just-in-time as well as just-in-case information. Good aggregation means that you can write an article on short notice or summarize a complex event, such as the situation in Haiti. If you only have have access to limited information, your analysis will be poor.

Filtering is the ability to not only find the needle in the haystack of bookmarks, files, reports and blog posts, but knowing which ones are trusted and most suitable for the task at the hand. The perfect picture for a specific context can tell a great story. We can filter with the assistance of our subject matter networks – knowing who to ask about what and when.

Once again, based on the context of the situation, which still requires mostly human skills, we can connect objects, ideas and people. The more complex the situation, the more important it is to connect the right pieces together. Connecting is getting the best information at the optimal time to those who need it.

Here is part of the presentation that I used in my discussions this past week:

Net Work

View more documents from Harold Jarche.

Work is learning, learning work

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My Twitter bio reads, “Work is learning, learning work – that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know [apologies to Keats]. That’s pretty much what I believe will be a necessity for the post-industrial and post-information era that we are beginning to enter. Some call it the knowledge economy or perhaps even the learning age. Whatever it will be called, our networks of networks are making life and work more complex. We need to adapt to better ways of working with abundant information and expanding connections, as I said in sharing tacit knowledge:

Our current models for managing people, training and knowledge-sharing are insufficient for a workplace that demands emergent practices just to keep up. Formal training has only ever addressed 20% of workplace learning and this was acceptable when the work environment was merely complicated. Knowledge workers today need to connect with others to co-solve problems. Sharing tacit knowledge through conversations (the only way to do this) is an essential component of knowledge work. Social media enable adaptation (the development of emergent practices) through conversations.

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

Social media are the tools that can help us develop emergent practices. They enable conversations between people separated by distance or time. The organizing framework for using social media for business is the learning network. Learning networks are not just for what we used to call training & development, but can also help us engage (not target) our markets. Chris Koch, marketing and sales strategist, shows no doubt with: There is only one objective in social media: create learning networks

The purpose of social media is to create learning networks that buyers want to join. The enticements are ideas and education. That means social media are extensions of our content development and dissemination processes. By creating content that offers relevant, timely, and useful ideas and education for buyers at all stages of the buying process, we create the incentives for buyers to engage with us in conversation and community. Whether it’s blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, or private communities that we build ourselves, the common thread is that by focusing on learning we build and retain buyers’ interest.

Social media are the vehicles by which we can share our tacit knowledge through conversations to inform the collaborative development of emergent work practices.

emergent practices