Work

business & working

Context and Community

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Wayne Hodgins raises the issue that information can be both a product and a service.

Information is a noun/product when it is in the form of a report or document created on spec or in advance of a specific use or client. Whereas it is a verb/service when it is a collection of “just the right” information matched to a specific person/group and context. I would posit that information in and of itself has little to no value.  The value of information comes when it is Snowflaked or “just right” as in just the right information for just the right person(s) at just the right time in just the right context on just the right medium/device, etc.

Lee Lefever described this product/service aspect of information as Stocks & Flows:

Flows = Timely & Engaging (e.g. radio, speeches, email, blogs)

Stocks = Archived, Organized for Reference (e.g. web site, database, book, voice mail)

In my experience, I’ve seen that with ‘products’, price tends to zero; or that the same item will continue to get cheaper over time. Services, on the other hand, remain stable, and may even go up in price as they become more popular. Note how famous speakers and consultants charge more money.

For example, generic educational course content keeps getting cheaper, with many free options now available, like wiki-how. Content (information as a product) is no longer king in the online learning world.

For a successful business model, content needs to be combined with both Community and Context — two critical factors in supporting learning environments. For example:

  • Online Courses where Community = your cohort & Context = a relevant (to you) credential
  • Performance Support where Community = your co-workers & Context = current need
  • Knowledge Management (and PKM) where Community = those with shared interests & Context = sense of belonging to a community.

The Chinese Pod model gets this right by understanding the user/learner. Their three step model is a good one for Web learning businesses — Reward Attention, Support the Community, & Keep Tweaking the Business Model.

Taking Wayne’s advice could be the first step in creating a successful online learning business model, by providing “just the right information for just the right person(s) at just the right time in just the right context on just the right medium/device”.

Your product may no longer be your product

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When I started this blog six years ago I knew that I would be “giving away” my thoughts for free. Some might say that’s all they’re worth. I’ve also kept the site ad free for a couple of reasons – ads don’t pay much, they get in the way of readers and I want people to focus on the conversations here or just get the information they need. No ads sets me apart from many other sites, so that’s a good thing in the long run. I make my money mainly by consulting and less from speaking and writing. Externally, this blog is one big business card. Internally, it’s my knowledge base that informs my work. In addition, it’s a way to communicate with my peers.

I would like to be paid for my writing on this blog but the economics of that are not really possible. On the internet, information wants to be free. That can be a good thing. Free has let me become much better known than I was seven years ago when I started this business. As Seth Godin says, on the internet, piracy is not your problem, obscurity is. The internet is changing a lot of business models. I’m interested in business models, especially since I’ve been personally affected by several failed ones.

Janet Clarey talks about the changes that have happened to her work as a researcher/analyst:

Now, I seem to work with hundreds [of people] and that brings me to a conflict I’ve had for the better part of a year: sharing. I share what I can and have taken some criticism for not making all knowledge available for free. Some seem to think that’s the way everything should be. Free. But research is our product. You might sell insurance. I’m not going to ask you for free insurance. So I’ve reconciled that in my mind. If anyone wants more than free, I’d be happy to be your analyst : )

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. This is like determining what degree of centralization works best for market and technology conditions.

Business models looking back and forward

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Everybody’s making predictions at this time of year, but I want to look back a bit. In 2004 Seth Godin made these predictions (and others) for 2009, and asked, and what then?

  1. Hard drive space is free
  2. Wifi like connections are everywhere
  3. Everyone has a digital camera & everyone carries a device that is sort of like a laptop, but cheap and tiny
  4. The retirement age will be five years higher than it is now
  5. Your current profession will either be gone or totally different

Given all those future predictions we read each year, it’s good to see that someone got it right.

In 2007 I examined these predictions from the perspective of business planning and made these recommendations:

  1. Don’t try to build another #$%* portal, because people have lots of places to put their stuff and they are getting information from a whole bunch of sources. Think small pieces, loosely joined.
  2. Anywhere can be a hotspot so adding wi-fi just might get some interesting people to gather around you and that’s what’s really important.
  3. All of those digital pictures are looking for a place to be shared. They might even improve your organisation’s learning about itself and its environment.
  4. Remember those folks that you thought would leave with all their knowledge? Well, they’re not leaving, or they’re probably interested in a new relationship, so get them while you can.
  5. Job? What’s a job?

In early 2010 it is pretty obvious that nobody needs an other Web portal. Even the project for the Pan-Canadian Online Learning Portal that I was working on in 2006 was finally canceled. Wireless is becoming ubiquitous though it’s still too expensive in too many places. Of course, almost everybody has a digital camera, usually combined with a phone or other smart mobile device. So, would your business have made different decisions five years ago if these predictions were heeded?

I find the last two points most interesting today because we’re just starting to see their impact. The recession and financial crisis pushed many retirements back several years, if not decades. Mandatory retirement ages have been successfully challenged in courts in several countries. There is a real business opportunity in older adults who are not fully retired, still have money and have time. It’s also becoming evident that new jobs are being created just as older ones are obsolesced.

How’s your business model for the next five years? Which predictions and trends are you following? Of course, I’m staying out of the prediction business ;-)

Sharing tacit knowledge

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H.L. Mencken, American satirist, wrote that, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” That pretty much sums up the problems we are facing today in our organizations and institutions. We are using tools that assume simple, or at most complicated, problems when many are actually complex. A mechanistic approach to problem solving is inadequate in complex adaptive environments. Global networks have made all of our work, and all of our problems, interconnected. We live in one big, unfathomable complex adaptive system.

Managing in complex systems is more about influencing possibilities rather than trying to determine any predictability. This requires tacit knowledge, or ways of thinking that cannot be codified and written up as best practices. It’s a continuous process of trying things out, sensing what happens and developing emergent practices. This is the great potential of web social media. Social networking supports emergent work practices.  The true value of social networking is in sharing tacit knowledge.

What hinders the adoption of social media is that hierarchical leaders (those in power by virtue of their position, not their knowledge or ability) are not able to function when ideas and knowledge flow laterally as well as vertically. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. Social media bypass the organization’s information gatekeepers and render hierarchical leadership useless.

Over the past century, large organizations have simplified and codified their processes in order to get economies of scale. They have also centralized as many functions as possible, including anything related to learning and performance. This is the modern institution and corporation. The problem is that this will not work any more. Biological, technological, environmental and societal change are accelerating. Moore’s Law states that computational power doubles every 18 months while human knowledge doubles every year.

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.

In the 21st century, conversation is learning and learning is work.

complexity

Co-operation: from soft skill to hard skill

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What are known as soft skills, like getting along with others, are becoming much more important than commonly known hard skills. This is still not a general perception amongst business leaders; as recently as last year, Management-Issues reported:

The annual CEO study by PricewaterhouseCoopers has argued that what companies around the world are crying out for is CEOs with technical and business expertise, who have global experience, are strong leaders, innovative, creative and who can manage risk effectively.

People skills, while a bonus, were not seen as an essential, despite the fact that fewer than half of CEOs globally (and around a third in the UK) felt their HR department could manage the people agenda adequately by itself.

Work in networks requires different skills than in directed hierarchies, which have nurtured these CEO’s for the past decades. Co-operation is a foundational behaviour for effectively working in networks, and it’s in networks where most of us, and our children, will be working. Co-operation presumes the freedom of individuals to join and participate so that people in the network cannot be told what to do, only influenced. If they don’t like you, they won’t connect. That’s like being on Twitter with no followers and never getting Retweeted (RT). You are a lone node and of little value to the network. In a hierarchy you only have to please your boss. In a network you have to be seen as having some value, though not the same value, by many others.

Co-operation is not the same as collaboration, though they are complementary. Collaboration requires a common goal while co-operation is sharing without any specific objectives. Teams, groups and markets collaborate. Online social networks and communities of practice co-operate. Working co-operatively requires a different mindset than merely collaborating on a defined project. Being co-operative means being open to others outside your group and casting off business metaphors based on military models (target markets, chain of command, line & staff).

cooperation

We are moving from a market economy to a network economy and the the level of complexity is increasing with this hyper-connectedness. Managing in complex adaptive systems means influencing possibilities rather than striving for predictability (good or best practices). Co-operation in our work is needed so that we can continuously develop emergent practices demanded by this complexity. What worked yesterday won’t work today. No one has the definitive answer any more but we can use the intelligence of our networks to make sense together and see how we can influence desired results. This is co-operation and this is the future, which is already here, albeit unevenly distributed.

Co-operation is a soft skill? I think not.

The University Myth

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Forty-seven percent of Canadians have a post-secondary degree of some kind and, according to the CCL:

Even by 1950, less than 6% of Canadian 25- to 44-year-olds had university degrees. Today, secondary schooling is universally available, and the proportion of 25- to 44-year-olds with university degrees is near 20%.

Even going back to the 1970’s, when I started university, it was almost a ticket to a good job. Stay in school, get a degree, get a job, etc. However much there may have been a correlation between having a university degree and getting a good job, this is not a causal relationship. It was a social and cultural norm, based on the fact that for most of the twentieth century, having a degree put you in an elite, minority situation. This was coupled by the fact that HR departments had found an easy criterion to reduce the number of applicants; just require that certain positions require a degree. Many workers (e.g. junior managers) also had the comfort of taking time to learn on the job, so day one job ready skills were not a requirement.

Universities had it easy too. They could say that getting a degree helped you get a good job, because salaries were correlated with education. Enrolment increased, universities expanded and the academic system flourished. If it were so easy today.

The problem is that universities do little to prepare for work. The skills learned are seldom workplace oriented. But then, that is not the nature of the university. We as a society bought into the myth that university education equated to good jobs. From 1950 to 2003, the ratio of current university undergrads to the general population increased five-fold in Canada. As long as there were few university graduates, we had obvious correlation to good jobs, even though universities had not changed their basic operating models, established centuries earlier. Perhaps more science and logic would have prepared parents and students for our current situation.

I’m not advocating for the closure of universities, but we need to expand our horizons on other options for work preparation. We have put a lot of money into universities, less into community colleges and even less into apprenticeship programs. For those not believing the university myth, there are limited choices. Learning professionals need to get out of their boxes and help create some better choices. There is some correlation between learning professionals and learning, isn’t there?

Workforce collaboration

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I find that many reports from large consulting firms are like pablum; no grist and easy to swallow by the masses. However, this McKinsey Report on Using technology to improve workforce collaboration actually held my attention.

The authors describe how companies can see large savings by using web technologies for collaboration (not a new concept). For instance, Cisco saved $100 million by mandating the use of web technologies which reduced travel and the need for face-to-face meetings. P&G increased its use of collaborative web technologies and in addition mandated that 50% of new product development come from outside the company. This resulted in shorter product cycle times and increased innovation. Good examples from very large firms.  You now have two more data points to throw into an ROI discussion.

The report includes an interactive graphic that shows profiles of typical knowledge worker roles and then suggests collaborative tools for typical tasks.  Some of the key tools include shared workspaces, wikis, and document sharing [I’m not sure why the fax was included as a collaborative technology though]. There are 12 role types described but I think we will see more hybrid roles such as community manager, which would be an amalgamation of aspects from several roles: instructor, manager, counselor. The graphic is a good model to start discussions but I would not recommend being limited to the 12 roles without further research and observation of your own workplace.

The report also discusses waste in collaboration, and while it is important to understand the potential costs, I wouldn’t want to eliminate all “waste” or you wouldn’t have any opportunities for what Jane Hart calls accidental serendipitous learning.

Overall, there is much food for thought but the recommendations are a bit too structured and could be taken to a level that actually decreases collaboration. You can get a lot of benefits by just using networked collaboration technologies, without implementing structured business process re-engineering and sucking the life out of work communities.

Communities and Work

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A recurring, and popular, theme here over the past year has been communities:

The Community Manager and this follow-up, the Role of an online community manager

Communities of Practice

Connecting Ideas with Communities

Networked Community Management

Some observations on communities:

The role of online community manager is fast becoming a hot job opportunity for people who not only understand the technologies but how to exert influence in a network. It’s like pushing a rope. Leadership by example (or modelling instead of shaping) is a good starting point. Think of multiple communities divided by low stone walls that serve to delineate areas but also are places to meet and converse “over the fence”. The bottom line is that the community manager doesn’t manage much, but is more of a coach and facilitator.

An important issue is what we call, and how we define, communities in our work practice. I see online communities more as networks than groups. In a network, joint activities are co-operative and non-directive. No one is in charge. Communities and networks exemplify complexity, with fuzzy boundaries, shifting cultures and mostly autonomous members. On the other hand, online work groups have lower levels of complexity in order to get things done in a timely manner. Members have less autonomy and there are clearer roles for managers. The work in these groups may be complicated but there are rules, boundaries and processes.

Networked communities are better structures in dealing with complexity, when emerging practices need to be continuously developed and loose ties can help facilitate fast feedback loops without hierarchical intervention. Collaborative groups are better at making decisions and getting things done. The constraints of the group help to achieve defined goals.

Net Work LearningEffective knowledge workers participate in communities and networks and work co-operatively, sharing openly and learning from each other. Communities of practice are more clearly defined communities, focused on a particular field of work. Groups may form within or across communities in order to get work done, often this is project work with deliverables and remuneration. Online communities are where knowledge workers can learn and share and from which they can gel as groups from time to time in order to get work done. This is the nature of net work in an interconnected world.

Embracing complexity at work

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After our session at Online Educa this morning (well, it was early morning for me anyway) I thought some more about one of the models I used. The Cynefin framework is a good way to explain different types of work and how training can only help in some cases: when work is simple (cause & effect are obvious) or complicated (cause & effect can be determined through analysis). Training is of little use in developing the necessary emergent practices for dealing with complex problems in our work environment.

cynefin and training
Source: Wikipedia

My basic guideline for the workplace is that:

  • Simple work will be automated
  • Complicated work will go to the lowest bidder, as processes & procedures become more defined and job aids more powerful (e.g. mortgage applications)
  • Complex work requires creativity and is where the value of the post-industrial (network era) organization lies
  • Dealing with Chaos sometimes has to be confronted and this requires creativity as well as a sense of adventure to try novel approaches

Reading between the lines of many comments from Online Educa, one thematic question would be: This stuff may be interesting from a conceptual perspective, but what can organizations do right now to address increasing complexity? Initially, I would say there are two laws at work over which you will have little control:

  1. The bottom of the complexity pyramid (simple work) will continue to be automated.
  2. All work that is merely complicated will be done as cheaply as possible (outsourced, partially automated, done as cheap piece work)

Here is a possible strategy to consider:

Work that is merely complicated does not require all of a worker’s cognitive capabilities (really). Use this cognitive surplus and couple it with a time surplus, like Google’s 20% for engineers to work on pet projects. Have incentives for workers to find the complexities in their work and try out creative ways to address them. This will encourage people to move up the creative ladder, into more complex work. Remember, almost all of this complexity is man-made. We decided to network the planet and increase the speed of human communications. We will continue to create more complex work to do.

As for people whose work already requires creativity in dealing with complexity there are a few things they can do. First, they can become mentors and guides for those doing merely complicated work. This is one way to address Richard Florida’s concern that we need to make the service industries more creative. Who we work with makes a significant difference in how creative we are. Everyone can be creative – just watch this video involving the highest and lowest paid staff in a hospital creating a powerful message together.

Those dealing with complex work situations can also be further encouraged to take on Chaotic situations. It’s one thing to be creative and quite another to jump into the unknown by taking action without any idea of what will happen. Here’s a good video on systemic, organizational change explaining some aspects of simple, complicated, complex and chaotic work environments.

The bottom line is to make organizations more flexible, able to deal with change and even create change. Complexity should be embraced as the future of work and the key to an engaged workforce. Few are bored with complex challenges.  The more people who are engaged creatively, the more effective the organization will be and no, there isn’t a course you can take to address this.

Success depends on who we work with

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Here’s a description from Connected: The surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives, in which sociologist, Brian Uzzi, describes how creative teams (musical productions) function:

Uzzi found that teams made up of individuals who had never before worked together fared poorly, greatly increasing the chance of a flop. These networks were not well connected and contained mostly weak ties. At the other extreme, groups made up of individuals who had all worked together previously also tended to create musicals that were unsuccessful. Because these groups lacked creative input from the outside, they tended to rehash the same ideas that they used the first time they worked together. In between, however, Uzzi once again found a sweet spot that combines the diversity of new team members with the stability of previously formed relationship. The networks that best exhibited the small-world property were those that had the greatest success.

Production company networks with a mix of weak and strong ties allowed easy communication but also fostered greater creativity because of the ideas of new members of the group and the synergies they created. Thus, the structure of the network appears to have a strong effect on both financial and critical success.

As the need for creativity in the workplace increases, organizations should give some serious thought to the structure of work groups and networks. As Gary Hamel described at the Spigit Customer Summit, traditional (industrial) employee traits of Intellect, Diligence & Obedience are becoming commodities (going to the lowest bidder?). The Creative Economy requires more independent workers (like musical productions?) with the following traits that can not be commoditized:

  • Initiative
  • Creativity
  • Passion

It seems that successful creative work groups need to be just cohesive enough with some additional “friction” from new members in order to keep the passion and creativity flowing. This brings into question the rationale for practices such as:

Mass training with standard performance objectives for everyone

Predominantly full-time, salaried employment (few options for part-time work at the control of the worker)

Standard HR policies

Banning access to online social networks at work

With working life in perpetual beta, it’s time to re-think not just how we work, but with whom we work.