Work

business & working

Connecting and Communicating through Effective Conversations

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What if a company creates an IT infrastructure but nobody uses it? This is one of the questions posed by Dave Pollard in What’s Next after Knowledge Management? Dave’s work has helped me develop practical  processes for knowledge workers, such as sense-making with PKM and his observation that most workers want the company knowledge-base to be very personal informs this work.

So what have our efforts in enterprise knowledge management (KM) since 1975 yielded so far? According to Dave, only three information technologies were adopted wholesale by enterprises (fax, e-mail, intranets) with minimal results in the management of information or knowledge.

In other words, in adding to the volume and complexity of information systems, we have added relatively little value, and in some cases actually reduced value. The reason for this is simple:

  1. We have not done anything to substantively improve the ability of senior management to manage the business (i.e. to manage cash flow, share price, risks or opportunities).
  2. We have not done anything to substantively improve the effectiveness of any of the information flows … that matter in organizations, or the quality of the information.

We have, in short, implemented a solution that addressed no problem. We introduced new KM tools because we could.

Dave predicts the future organization may look more like this:

The IT department is still responsible for maintaining security around the organization’s proprietary information, but very little content is left in this category.

The KM department still manages the purchase of external information, though almost all information in 2025 is free; information producers have realized that their business model is to apply that information to specific customers’ business environment, in consulting assignments, rather than trying to sell publications.

Most of what the KM department does now is trying to facilitate more effective conversations among people within the organization and with people outside the organization, including customers.

And, when the organization holds sessions and conferences on strategy, risk, innovation or customer relationships, the KM department is on hand to do advance and just-in-time research.

The issue of the relevance of KM is not that different from the future of the training function. Both are support functions that have to be integrated with 1) the organization and 2) the individual. As workers become more nomadic (more jobs & contracts over a lifetime) they will be taking their networks and productivity tools with them. Connecting the organization’s networks to the individual’s, and vice versa, is the new organizational management challenge. In the diagram below, I show that Connecting & Communicating should be the focus of the training function, which is pretty well what Dave says is the role of the new KM department.

One of the approaches we’ve suggested at togetherLearn is Informal Learning 2.0 – supporting collaborative and self-directed work – very much like the new KM which is about facilitating more effective conversations. We’re all in this together and support functions (KM, IT, HR, T&D, OD) had better start working together. Now that’s a conversation worth having.

Push the Reset Button

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Charles Jennings made a comment on Corporate Learning Trends that got me thinking about the need for a reset of the whole training function:

Baldwin, Ford and Weissbein’s research (20 and 10 years ago, respectively) showed that the USA spends around $100 billion on training every year, but only about 10% of the expenditures result in transfer to the job. I’m sure if the research was re-run today the results would be similar, whether in the US, in Western Europe or anywhere else, for that matter.

In other words, if CLOs were in any other ‘C-Level’ jobs they wouldn’t last long. One look by the CEO/President at their P&L statement and they’d be shown the door…

The current economic situation is being called by some The Great Reset, or a time to re-evaluate our financial and economic systems. This is also an opportunity to reset our notions of learning and working. Face it, training and anything else that comes under the industrial umbrella of Human Resources are always secondary to operations. It doesn’t have to be that way, but sticking to “tried & true” methods is not going to get any breakthroughs in how we integrate learning and working, an essential part of thriving in a networked economy, in my opinion. Organizational learning and human performance need a great reset as well.

Here’s what I see for the great learning reset:

  • Think and act macro (what to do) and leave the micro (how to do it) to each knowledge worker.
  • Become a part of the business not a peripheral department – if you’re in Ford’s HR department, your business is cars & trucks, not human resources.
  • Throw away all notions of “delivery” and focus only on solving organizational challenges – training is a solution looking for a problem – just solve the problem.

Learning has to become part of the organizational and individual DNA and during a reset that may require learning specialists, but in the long run the learning function should be absorbed. That leads to the future role of the “learning specialist”. I would say it is to continuously make yourself redundant. Teach people how to fish and move on to the next challenge. If you’re maintaining a steady state, such as developing courses as requested, then you’ve failed in integrating learning into the work.

Creative time

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Being self-employed, I never complain about being too busy. Of course, there are periods when I’m not busy and these give me time to write on this blog or on togetherLearn or pick up an interesting book. I have even taken up reviewing books for some publishers because I can usually find the time to do so and it’s cheap professional development for me. My friend and colleague, Michele Martin talks about the breathing room we independents have for thinking or “creativity” that many salaried workers just don’t have the time for:

But  it’s easy to focus on doing cool things in new and different ways when you have some breathing room. When you don’t, I can see where it’s just annoying to hear people tell you that you should be open to new ideas. Hello–I’m just trying to get through the day here. I have no time for your “creativity.”

I believe that this “breathing room” makes me a much better consultant to my clients. I have the time to read or research a topic in depth. I can spend time trying out a new tool or platform. This “luxury” is my business advantage. No one pays for this learning time, only my productive time, but in many cases I’ve spent a fair bit of time on a generic problem before I’m contacted by a client. At the risk of putting consultants out of business, I would even suggest that employees be given more time to think and even play so that they can become internal consultants for workplace change. As Michele says:

Creativity shouldn’t–can’t–be a luxury, though. It can’t be something that we bring to a problem only when we have the space and time for it, because more often than not, we will be in situations where we lack both.

Changing how people and organizations interact

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Jon Husband has recently published a paper, What is wirearchy? In case this is a new term, the definition of wirearchy is was posted on the top right of my site. In the paper, Jon starts with the origin of the framework:

In that context of ubiquitous impact, reams have been written about the erosion of the effectiveness of command-and control as the dominant model for leading and managing purposeful organized activities in business, education, government and governance, politics, culture and the arts … all the areas in which humans act together to create and get things done. That mode of getting things done is evolving to champion-and-channel … championing ideas and innovation, and channeling time, energy, authority and resources to testing those ideas and innovative possibilities).

There is little doubt that rigid, hierarchical command and control is not working very well in any field, including its originators: the military and the church. On Twitter yesterday the togetherLearn gang discussed the roots of human computer interaction (HCI) and how we need something akin to “human organizational interaction” as a similar combined field of practice for the post-industrial workplace. I see wirearchy as a framework for practitioners of such a new discipline as HOI.

For instance, Jon gives some specific advice for leaders, managers, employees and citizens. Taking from each of these, I would suggest something like the following for organizational performance professionals (HR, T&D, OD, IT, etc):

Understand the scope and reach of interconnected markets, people and flows of information. Learn how and why people are connecting, talking and sharing information by doing so yourself. Listen, set an example and be a coach in your work. Be responsible, accountable and transparent in all you do.

Jon concludes his paper with the “Fundamental Sociology of Networked Knowledge Work”:

An adult-to-adult model (rather than parent-child) is emerging – with all of the attendant responsibilities for both parties in the relationship.

Many workers, as well as supervisors and managers, will find this kind of a transition rather difficult as too many of our structures have been developed from an opposite sociological perspective. That does not mean that a restructuring of how we organize our work is not neccessary, it will just be difficult in some cases.

Don’t look to business schools for leadership

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Business schools tout themselves as thought-leaders, but they only appeared on the scene after the mass production industrial model had been proven. We shouldn’t expect leadership from our academic institutions, with their profitable business schools, until we have a proven new organizational model for the post-industrial era. Actually, business schools may be to blame for our current economic problems. According to renowned management professor Henry Mintzberg:

From where I sit, management education appears to be a significant part of this problem. For years, the business schools have been promoting an excessively analytical, detached style of management that has been dragging down organizations.

Every decade, American business schools have been graduating more than a million MBAs, most of whom believe that, because they sat still for a couple of years, they are ready to manage anything. In fact, they have been prepared to manage nothing.

The current economic situation is the result of an utterly failed management model. It’s obvious when you compare Japanese automakers with the “Big Three” in North America – the same materials, the same technology and the same base of workers, but DIFFERENT management. Yes, it’s management’s fault.

Mintzberg also says that, “Management is a practice, learned in context.” That means that book-learning is not enough. Thomas Malone’s The Future of Work and Gary Hamel’s The Future of Management are two good books that look at the need for new management models. They’re a start. What’s missing from both are practical models to implement and that is one of my key interests in consulting. I think that adding the framework of wirearchy and the practical examples of natural entrepreneurship would be useful. Since both of these are completely ignored by business schools, I take that as a positive indicator. However, we still need to try these models, frameworks and ideas in the context of managing real businesses. That’s the challenge.

I believe that future management models can find inspiration and clues in web-based service companies as well as small, community-based businesses. A networked society means that businesses have to be nimble and small-thinking because every individual transaction is unique. One bad experience can go viral. Lack of transparency is mistrusted. Command and control matters less and less. Look to business models that understand the importance of community.

Any new management models will have to break down long-standing silos between departments and let people connect on a more human level. We are not “human resources”. We need models that keep everything at a human scale, so biological metaphors, instead of mechanistic or military ones, may be more appropriate. This is the kind of thinking that the Internet Time Alliance is extending: tearing down the training department and instilling human performance into the organizational DNA. Learning is not something that is ‘done to you’ and management should not be an external force but instead an internal motivational driver of the organization. Once again, look at the definition of wirearchy:

a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology

This would be a good foundation for the next generation of business schools.

Perpetual Beta

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It hadn’t really occurred to me before that pilots are an almost inextricable aspect of Enterprise 2.0. Of course the ‘iterate and refine’ concept can be implemented in other ways, but I think it’s fair to say that organizations absolutely need to get good at running pilots, if they’re not already there. It is a key facet of the path that leads to improved organizational performance.

So says Ross Dawson in pilots as a key instrument for improving organizational performance in a complex world. If you take the cynefin approach for working in complex environments you first Probe then Sense and then Respond in order to develop emergent practice. There are no good or best practices that will work for  your context in a changing complex environment, so probing (AKA: piloting or Beta releases) is necessary to see what works. However, changing from a highly designed approach to an agile method is difficult. I previously recommended that instructional design adopt agile methods but even in the programming world, letting go of old ways is difficult as Sara Ford at Microsoft explains in how I learned to program manage an agile team after six years of waterfall.

There is no silver bullet solution to running the human performance side of an organization in the complexity of a highly networked economy with ubiquitous access to information and people. New tools keep being developed that can change the way we work and learn. Today it’s Twitter and tomorrow it will be something else. Approaching enterprise performance from the perspective of perpetual Beta is a way to maintain your sanity in all of this change. The values and culture can remain stable while the tools and practices keep evolving to take advantage of the situation.

Pilots are key to improving organizational performance but the culture of perpetual Beta is critical. Perpetual Beta is my attitude toward learning – I’ll never get to the final release and my learning will never stabilize. I’ve also realized that organizations with a similar attitude are much easier to work with than those that believe that we will reach some future point where everything stabilizes and we don’t need to learn or do anything new. I think that point is called death.

Starting an Online Community

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There are several factors that should be looked at when creating a collaborative working/learning space. I’ve previously referred to Column Two’s three tiers of collaboration – Capacity, Capability & Strategy and it’s a good model to start with. Part of capacity are the existing processes and culture of collaboration while capability includes the best tools for the job. It’s not easy for a group of individuals, who do not know each other, to work collaboratively from the onset. It is even more difficult to ask that this collaboration occur online when the participants are not in the habit of working on the Internet. The practice of sharing needs to be joined with the tools that work for the culture. Finally, strategy includes the leadership, direction and project management of getting things going to work collaboratively online.

It’s important to get participants/members first used to processing their information flow online. A framework such as Personal Knowledge Mastery can be used, but each person must be given time to practice, connect and get feedback. The community also needs to be nurtured, one relationship at a time, as the creators of Flickr realized:

A lot of our success came from George, the lead designer, and Caterina. Both of them spent a lot of time in the early days greeting individual users as they came in, encouraging them and leaving comments on their photos. There was a lot of dialogue between the people who were developing Flickr and their users to get feedback on how they wanted Flickr to develop. That interaction made the initial community very strong and then that seed was there for new people who joined to make the community experience strong for them too.

Because culture is slow to change I would recommend starting with the simplest tool-set possible. Turn off most functions and only enable new ones when people start asking for more. As with tools, the same minimization principle goes for content. It is more important to build relationships and to draft the right people than it is to build the best content. Community trumps content online. Therefore, the focus should be on building connections.

A model we used for a CoP prototype (the first of several to be implemented on a variety of ‘topics’) was based on these roles in the core team:

Process Lead (Communities) – Stays current on online communities, evaluates progress, helps members with knowledge-sharing, develops processes and records progress.

Recruiter (Early Adopter) – Identifies and connects with other potential Early Adopters.

Recruiter (Maven) – Identifies subject areas of interest to the community and finds knowledge or human resources.

Technical Lead – Identifies technologies and ensures that the community has the right tools.

Topic Lead – The ‘go-to’ person on all questions relating to implementation. This person is supported by the other core team members.

Break down the walls

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If we don’t bust down the industrial-age silos in our organizations, their walls will inevitably crash down on us. Just ask the News department that had walls between print and the Web.

Three years ago Jon Husband called for an amalgamation of support functions in the networked workplace or eOD (e-OrganizationalDevelopment). Luis Suarez has suggested the merging of knowledge management and learning. Most recently Euan Semple calls for combining HR, Communications and IT. Euan says that HR are “maintainers of order, rather than enablers of staff”; that Communications manages rather than enables communication; while IT controls risk instead of enabling the business. These are generalizations, but expose the weaknesses of our current management system.

I’ve recommended before that a wide range of silos (HR, Training, Personnel, KM, OD, Communications, PR, Marketing, etc.) should be incorporated into one support function. Individuals could have a variety of roles, depending on organizational needs but all have to be focused on the organization. Separate departments create tribes and internal cultures that may be at cross-purposes with other departments or the overall organization. With hyper-linked information and access to expertise, not only are internal departments of less value, they could subvert the organization’s future by not responding quickly and appropriately.

I know that there’s more than one way to achieve better functioning organizations but tearing down the walls is a good place to start.

Disruptive business models already here

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The Great Disruption is on. Globalized, kleptocratic powers are trying to control the change by grabbing the monetary system while at the same time the Web has enabled empowering, grassroots initiatives like Kiva.org to spring up. As stock prices plummet and currency fluctuates, even the unwashed masses, who never understood derivatives, are realizing that money has no real value. That’s good because two types of organizations don’t need a lot of money.

First, a lot of Web services start with sweat equity and their service fees fuel organic growth with little need for investment until they are are already proven businesses. Second, natural enterprises, based on community, continue to spring up all over. Starting your own small business is one way to deal with down-sizing. In our town we have witnessed the launch of an organic bakery, a community supported agriculture association and a green builders cooperative in the past few years. All three are growing. At the same time, I’ve seen local web-based businesses going global with niche products and services.

A presentation from CFIB this week showed that 1) Farmers and 2) Small Business Owners are the most trusted professions in Canada. Investment bankers did not even make the list. So who is going to suffer from any future lack of talent, the big guys or the little guys? The big firms can only offer money, while smaller businesses usually offer lifestyle and a sense of doing something worthwhile. If we enter into a period of currency devaluation, then money will be of even less value. The barter system actually works at the local level.

In the networked, always-on workplace, community is king, as it has always been at the local level. Today, organizations, public, private & non-profit, need to connect with their communities. People are already doing this on the Web and it’s becoming unnatural to go to work and not be connected to our communities. Workers only surf the Web or play solitaire when they’re disconnected from their work. Keeping people connected and engaged is the great challenge, especially for larger organizations. This can be a role for the training department, but I’m not sure if most are up to it.

To weather the great disruption a successful organization will have to be more like 1) a web-based service company and 2) a small, community-based business. It will have to be nimble and remain small, or small-thinking. That means breaking down silos and giving autonomy to sub-organizations. It also means sharing and enabling people to connect on a human level, not with some document or policy. The future belongs to an organization that can think like a small business, where your word is your bond, and at the same time act as an inter-connected global citizen.

Social media without the BPR

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Last night at ThirdTuesdayNB the conversation came around to how to implement social media in large, bureaucratic organizations without creating a white elephant type of project that takes years to implement. Michele Martin just posted some social media baby steps that have worked for her, particularly:

Static website => blog

Wikis for committee work to replace/reduce e-mail

Other small steps that I think can work without major business process re-engineering (BPR):

  • Use e-mail only for contractual/legal/official communications that need to be tracked, and add an internal Jaiku or Yammer instance of Twitter for business conversations inside the firewall.
  • Use social bookmarks and tags (Delicious or open source variants) to highlight external information, once again to replace e-mail and to open everyone’s browser “favorites” to the rest of the organization.
  • Replace multi-recipient e-mails with internal blog posts and send the link via e-mail or IM. All comments get added to the blog post and if the position holder leaves, the replacement takes over the blog. Great for non-sensitive discussions like training schedules.