Work

business & working

New roles for the networked workplace

by

The best definition of a professional I’ve seen comes from David Williamson Shaffer, author of How computer games help children learn [not really about children] as:

anyone who does work that cannot be standardized easily and who continuously welcomes challenges at the cutting edge of his or her expertise

Let’s face it, no professional can know everything and is dependent on others for knowledge and expertise, hence the growing need for effective networks in our work and learning. Our networks are becoming all-important in our work and this requires an attitude of openness and collaboration, not the norm in industrial corporations nor command and control organizations.

If you agree that networks are more powerful and flexible than closed hierarchies, especially in complex environments, what should the support departments (HR, OD, KM, L&D) do to make their organizations more networked?

Jay Cross suggests some new roles for the networked workplace: “When my colleagues and I advocate cutting back on workshops and classes, we don’t suggest firing the instructors. Rather, we recommend redeploying them as connectors, wiki gardeners, internal publicists, news anchors, and performance consultants.“

In looking at our current organizational roles that support the enterprise we should ask, how do these help to strengthen our networks? If they don’t, then it may be time to change, abolish or create new roles.

A longer view

by

Economy getting you down? Maybe the economy is someone else’s story and not yours. From Neal Stephenson’s Anathem (book) [more on Wikipedia entry]:

So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes [cars], and tried to fathom what it would be like. Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. Fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day’s end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were.

Perhaps this is a good time to take back the long view on our own story.

The Community Manager

by

In re-building the training function, we’ve recommended a move from content delivery to Connecting & Communicating. One role that will likely gain importance is that of Community Manager. As the electric media become embedded in our lives, we will all be constantly connected to many communities. Some of these will overlap.

The role of community manager in an organization will be to manage  organizational communities of practice, communities of interest and have an understanding of some of the other communities that touch each of us. In his Valence Theory of Organizations, Mark Federman identified “several specific forms of valence relationships that are enacted by two or more people when they come together to do almost anything; these are economic, social-psychological, identity, knowledge, and ecological.”

Effective collaboration brings all of these aspects into consideration. The communities we belong to address some or all of these valances. Workplace-related communities often address only the knowledge and economic aspects but as human beings we need more.

Because digital media are so easily reproduced and appropriated there are few walls between our online communities. Even our offline communities are getting digitally captured, by someone. Look at how difficult it is to maintain a clear line between LinkedIn and Facebook contacts. Even though many of us use the former for business and the latter for more personal communications, few are able to maintain two distinct groups of contacts. These lines will continue to blur (e.g. Twitter) and our online identities will be a composite of activities in several communities / teams / groups / networks.

The effective community manager will be less of a manager and more a well-connected node in many networks of importance to the organization. David Wilkins takes this a step further and says that the entire business should be run as a community:

It’s not about customer communities or workplace communties.  It’s about recognizing and fostering connections, and enabling information flow and information capture from multiple constituents.

If you can incorporate the best of eLearning; Human Performance Technology; Organizational Development; Knowledge Management; Communications and a touch of Marketing, then you may have the makings of a Community Manager. It seems like a pretty exciting place to be for the near future.

Management experts recommend Wirearchy

by

Some of the best known management experts were brought together last year to “lay out an agenda for reinventing management“. Their premise was that 1) management models are important social technologies; 2) that the current models are out-of-date; and that 3) we need to develop more human models for the near future.

The 25 recommendations included more community, democracy and diversity as well as redefining control and leadership. The experts also recommended that organizations, “Reinvent strategy-making as an emergent process. In a turbulent world, strategy making must reflect the biological principles of variety, selection, and retention.” This aligns with our recommendations to restructure the training department based partially on complexity theory [in complex environments we need to develop emergent practices as best & good practices are inadequate].

In reviewing all 25 recommendations it is clear that Wirearchy, as an overarching framework, is a perfect fit:

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

Since we already have a unique and well-researched conceptual framework, we can now get on with how to implement Wirearchy for the workplace.

CSTD Presentation References

by

Here are the links for my presentation today on The Future of the Training Department for the Canadian Society for Training & Development:

Main Article co-authored with Jay Cross

Slideshare presentation

Wirearchy framework

Cluetrain Manifesto

Cynefin framework

Delicious bookmarks on Personal Knowledge Management

Creative Commons search engine for shareable images

Wikimedia Commons for shareable and copyright-free images

GapingVoid cartoons

In response to questions from participants:

Twitter in plain English

ROI of Social media

Why the Government of Canada needs PKM

by

David Eaves writes in Why the Government of Canada needs Bloggers:

“One theme that came up was that public servants feel they are suffering from information overload. There is simply so much going on around them and it is impossible to keep up with it all. This is especially true of those in the senior ranks.”

I saw this when I was working on the Advanced Leadership Program with the Canada School of Public Service last year. I can’t discuss any specifics of what I observed, but there is no doubt that senior public servants are inundated with information and that their time is not their own, with many days filled with meetings and other time-consuming activities.

However, blogging is not enough because managing information overload is more a question of attitude than skills. We need to understand that we’ve been in a state of information overload since the 15th Century when there were more books than one person could read in a lifetime (watch Clay Shirky’s interview on FastForward). Blogs, or their equivalent, are only one part of the knowledge management equation.

I think that public servants really need PKM (personal knowledge mastery). PKM is a way to help make sense of the information flows that face us and I’ve written about PKM many times. It is basically a process of:

  1. Sorting & Filtering (e.g. Feed Readers & following on Twitter )
  2. Annotating and Filing (e.g. social bookmarks)
  3. Tentative Sense-making (e.g. Blog posts & Twitter Posts)
  4. Engagement and conversations in these venues and others

The bottom line of web-based PKM is to develop a process of sense-making. It’s much like the discipline of maintaining a professional journal, attending lectures or reading good books and does not negate any of these activities.

So I would say that public servants, especially in senior positions, need more than blogs and that they need their own, individual PKM process, incorporating various web social media tools. If the Indonesian Minister of Defence has been able to maintain a blog for the past fours years, our public servants can do that and maybe a bit more, n’est-ce pas?

Soft skills are foundational competencies

by

Aaron Chua at Wild Illusions sees financial measurements as no longer able to tell the complete story. He mentions various other areas for measurement, including “talent development” but in a different context from the tired “talent management” perspective we’ve heard for several years:

This means a total redefinition of what talent development means in organisations. The first implication is of course to throw out the idea of having a talent development unit. Instead, we need to think about ways to rebuilt how talent is truly developed via connections to the resources at the edge, connections to different organisational competencies that plugs their gaps, connections that increases cognitive diversity and brings about unexpected learnings et al. All these are rich areas for a new breed of talent development companies to think about and to create new products/services upon.

If you buy into Richard Florida’s concept of the Creative Class (which I mostly do) then it becomes obvious that for organizations to succeed they will have to nurture creativity in their workforce. Creative people are at all levels, including the janitor, and are not ‘human resources’ but individuals who have the capability of  gaining wisdom. From the Creative Class Blog is an article on The Workplace in a Wiki World, with this idea about the changing emphasis for workers:

Therefore, for an individual to succeed in a wiki-corporation or wiki-organization it will increasingly require being more than an engineer, programmer, economist, or accountant. It will also require the “soft skills” to do media relations or “wiki” relations, interacting daily with a range of customers and outside contributors, as well as collaborating with others in the company.

Here’s my speculation on workplace learning in ten years.

Soft skills, especially collaboration and networking, will become more important than hard skills. Smart employers have always focused more on attitude than any specific skill-set because they know they can train for a lack of skills and knowledge. The soft skills require time, mentoring, informal learning and other environmental supports. Once you have the soft skills to perform in a networked workplace, you’ll have foundational competencies.

I think many people will say of course we’ve known this all along, but in a workplace where our networks are as important as our skills, it will be more difficult to hide the fact that you’re a highly skilled jerk.

Workplace learning in ten years

by

The LCB Big Question for March is, What will workplace learning look like in 10 years?

I’ll start by going back 10 years to my workplace and see what is different from early 1999:

  • I was still using a paper-based Day Timer, so I can’t quickly see what I was doing at that time. I switched to a Handspring (Palm) in 2001.
  • I had high-speed Internet access at work ( a university) but not at home until 2003.
  • We had digital cameras at work but our camera at home used film.
  • My professional network was the people at work, our clients and partners and a very few people (e.g. Jay Cross) who were blogging and giving me a way to interact with them without having met.
  • To set up a collaborative work space for our clients, Lotus Notes was one of the few options. Most of our clients balked at the idea of online collaborative work and preferred e-mail or the telephone (some things don’t change).
  • We were pushing workplace learning options like EPSS, KM, and CSCW but most of the money was being invested in online courses, LMS, and LCMS.
  • Big conferences, like OnlineLearning, were attracting thousands of attendees.

In the intervening decade I wondered about some of the technological changes. We now have practically unlimited digital storage, increasing bandwidth, almost ubiquitous connectivity, and the ability to digitally capture and share everything we see and hear. I’ve also had the ability to work on my own, from a small town in Atlantic Canada, because of our networked infrastructure. This was not really possible in 1999 but by 2003 it was feasible, though a challenge.

Workplace learning in 2019:

  • Much of the workforce will be distributed in time & space as well as in engagement (part-time, full-time, contract, mix).
  • More learning will be do-it-yourself and gathered from online digital resources available for free and fee. More workers will be used to getting what they need as they change jobs/contracts more frequently but remain connected to their online networks (online/offline won’t matter anymore).
  • Work and learning will continue to blend while stand-up training will be challenged by the ever-present back channel. Successful training programs will involve the learners much more — before, during, and after.
  • Conferences, workshops and on-site training will become more niche and fragmented (smaller,  focused, & connected online) as travel costs increase and workers become more demanding of their time.
  • The notion of PKM will have permeated much of the workplace.
  • These changes will not be evenly distributed.

A Learning Reformation

by

In — No more “learners” — Jay Cross uses the preacher-congregation metaphor to show the dysfunction in our educational and training systems. Much as the Reformation, sped by the new technology of the printing press, ushered in an era of believing and thinking for ourselves, we have the makings of our own Learning Reformation.

The removal of overt rules (Jay uses traffic signs as an example) can empower people, while thinking of them as just “learners” is condescending and plays to the power game of teacher-students. Let’s face it, especially in light of how our institutions have screwed up the world, we all have to be learning together.

In The future of the training department, Jay and I put forth the idea that in order to help organizations evolve in a complex environment we have to move away from training delivery and focus on Connecting & Communicating. Workers, provided the right tools and resources, can figure out what they need to learn. Tony Karrer has picked up on this, as has David Wilkins.

Here are some suggestions for people in training organizations as they shift to supporting the networked workplace:

  1. Be an active & continuous learner yourself (e.g. personally manage your knowledge).
  2. Be a lurker (passive participant) & LISTEN
  3. Communicate what you observe.
  4. Continuously collect feedback, not just after formal training (yes there’s still a place for some of this).
  5. Make it easy to share information by Simplifying & Synthesizing.
  6. Use Networks as research tools.
  7. Identify learning skills and develop them in yourself and others [thanks, Clark]

All of these skills are dependent on #1. You can read about being a good learner and then put the book back on the shelf, but learning is a process and leadership by example is needed. Be an example.

Q: What’s the best way to use social media in your organization?

A: Start by using them yourself.

Steve Simons recently wrote:

I read with interest your article “The future of the training department”, particularly the last paragraph. As an IT trainer in the UK (I train on a contract basis for large organisations), I’ve often wondered what uses people will get from their learning. Sometimes my general feeling is “none”. Your phrase “shift the focus to creativity, innovation, and helping people perform better, faster, cheaper” really hit the spot with me.

I recommended the book From Training to Performance Improvement to Steve, as it helps get training departments out of the “solution looking for a problem” approach. As much as books like this are a good start, a shift to performance improvement is not enough. There is no single best approach and we need to bring in other frameworks such as connectivism, wirearchy and social network theory. The era of silos is over.

Here’s some advice for anyone in charge of a training department:

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 for “your” organization. Don’t believe the hype that one technology or one method will save you, because no single method in the past has done that. You have the best knowledge about your organization. You may need some direction, support, data, advice or a sounding board, but you have to create your own inter-dependent network.

From schools to skunk works

by

I’m following up on yesterday’s post discussing how established institutions (schools, universities, research facilities) change only after working organizations (businesses, enterprises, social groups) have. Hugh’s cartoon of work as a “loose confederation of skunk works, joined by insanity” aptly describes the modern workplace and the surrounding social and technological environment. I find it more appropriate every day. The big questions is, how can we move from the mindset of schools to skunk works? Now there’s a worthwhile quest.