Work

business & working

Learning Together

by

Today, at 8:00 PM GMT we’ll be introducing our new venture, TogetherLearn. Details are on the LearnTrends collaborative site.

This venture is a natural progression of my work over the past decade, after retiring as a military training development officer in 1998, with a freshly minted MEd in hand. At that time, I was reading Jay’s blog and making comments. Jay and I finally met in Moncton about the same time that I ventured out on my own as free agent (and started my own blog) and since then we’ve collaborated on several projects. Much of our work has been around informal learning and performance improvement in the workplace. Through Jay I met Clark and Jane. My work with Drupal, as an early adopter, introduced me to Bill who is now providing our platform of choice for TogetherLearn. The Drupal community is large and dynamic and as an open source advocate, I could not be happier than to support its development.

I see myself as a bridge between theory and practice, or between early adopters and the early majority,  as this picture shows. For me, technology is the application of organised and scientific knowledge to solve practical problems. Some of the methods I’ve developed are in my performance  Toolbox, so that I can share and also learn from others.

Our group is much like what I picture wirearchy to be, which is the clearest view of what I would like all workplaces to become:

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

Toward a Read-Write Society

by

With the election over and Bill C-61 dying with the last Parliament, the government is once again looking at making changes to copyright law. In A Copyright Call to Arms published in the Globe and Mail this week, the authors call for consultation from all sides of this complex issue:

Ministers Clement and Moore have a singular opportunity to consult with Canadians to develop reforms that will be fair for both consumers and rightsholders and position Canada for success in the 21st century.

I’ve just finished reading Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy by Lawrence Lessig and it should be required reading for all politicians involved in re-making copyright policy.

Lessig shows the differences between Read-Only (RO) and Read-Write (RW) cultures and how RO came to dominate in the 20th Century, while RW has been around for as long as humans have communicated with each other. An RW culture emphasizes learning. Lessig’s view is balanced and he does not call for the abolition of copyright but mostly for the removal of copyright protection from non-commercial uses. He uses US law to make his points, but much of what he says is applicable to other Common Law jurisdictions.

Perhaps the most damning indictment of current copyright laws is that they are making criminals out of an entire generation:

But the real failure of this war [on copyright violation] is the effect that this massive regulation has had on the basic integrity of our kids. Our kids are “pirates”. We tell them this. They come to believe it. Like any human, they adjust the way they think in response to this charge. They come to like life as a “pirate”. That way of thinking then bleeds. Like the black marketers in Soviet Russia, our kids increasingly adjust their behavior to answer a simple question: How can I escape the law?

It’s time to stop this madness and help our children become better citizens, not line the pockets of a few multinational corporations. Non-commercial copyright infringement should not exist and our educators should be leading on this issue. We don’t need special rights just for educational institutions, we need to encourage RW creativity for lifelong learning.

For further reading, see my bookmarks on copyright.

Performance Design Blog

by

The Centre for Learning Technologies was a hybrid organisation that was university-based, externally-focused and did both research and business consulting. In my three years at the CLT I was involved in about 40 projects and worked with a great team, especially in my first year with Tom Gram, the Director.

Tom moved on in 1999 and we’ve kept in touch, but much of his professional life has been behind the firewall. Well, he’s out on the WWW now and Gram Consulting has a blog. The focus is on “performance design”, and that is an area where there are fewer bloggers than in e-learning or Web 2.0.

So this blog is also for people who are in one way or another involved in the design of work processes and human systems that are at the heart of improving business performance in the modern workplace.  That will include Organization Development Specialists, Human Performance Consultants, Business Mangers, Quality and productivity specialists and performance oriented learning specialists.  Here’s my Word Map on topics that you will likely see in future posts on performance design.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Tom.

The Age of Dissonance

by

As Enterprise 2.0 initiatives continue to proliferate, I cannot see how the latent dissonance I perceive and have tried to articulate will be avoided. I think it will have to be addressed by using new design principles for knowledge work.

This is one of the conclusions that Jon Husband makes in Work Design – From Industrial to Networked Age Part 1, Part 2A, Part 2B. Jon talks about “vertical knowledge disrupted”:

Performance objectives, job assignments, compensation arrangements and bonus schemes are generally almost always predicated on causality derived from the vertical arrangements of knowledge and its use in planned and structured initiatives.  As more and more knowledge work is carried out by people communicating and exchanging information using hyperlinks in social networks, where the places knowledge lives and that facilitate its routing to where it is needed, at a point in time, the vertical arrangements for guiding the flows of knowledge are disrupted, if not subverted. Weinberger’s most recent work, Everything Is Miscellaneous, is a beginning treatise on this subject.

I sat in a presentation of a talent management system last week and after being shown how skills could be categorized and people identified for progression, I had one question. How can you prepare for a job that does not even exist yet? Many of us are doing work that we would never have imagined one or two decades ago. How about professional blogger or podcaster? Imagine a talent management system in 1999 that was preparing junior journalists to become a newspaper’s full-time representative in Second Life. You cannot use an accountant’s rear view perspective to prepare for an unknown future. It is better to nurture a mix of people with a variety of skills, experiences and attitudes, much as nature does with ecosystems. A biological model trumps a mechanistic one in adaptation to change.

Picture: Knowledge work framework by Lilia Efimova

New design principles, from instructional development to job descriptions, are needed for our inter-networked society. I’ve started looking at a new design for the training department but redesign is needed everywhere. I think that more people are looking for new designs and are willing to try them out, if they can. The economic crisis may actually help bring about some needed change. So here’s a new job description to insert into all those talent management systems: work redesigner.

Advice for the Training Department

by

Last week I wrote about The Training Department in the 21st Century, part of a presentation I will be giving in Toronto on Thursday. This new model that I propose, which has its roots in knowledge management and wirearchy, is an attempt to take the theory and make some practical recommendations for those who have to do the day to day work.

The model is centered on Connecting and Communicating to enable knowledge flow in the organisation and is based on three processes:

  1. Facilitating collaborative work and learning amongst workers (esp. as peers).
  2. Sensing patterns and helping to develop emergent work and learning practices.
  3. Working with management to develop appropriate tools and methods for the workplace.

Here are some specific recommendations that I’m putting forward for the “new” training department:

  • Be an active & continuous learner and engage in activities that take you out of your comfort zone, so that you know what it’s like to be a learner.
  • Be a lurker or a passive participant in relevant work-related communities (could be the lunch room) and LISTEN to what is being said.
  • Communicate what you observe to people around you, solicit their feedback and engage in meaningful conversations.
  • Continuously collect feedback from the workplace, not just after courses.
  • Make it easy to share information by simplifying & synthesizing issues that are important and relevant to fellow workers.

None of these require Web tools or techniques but they can all be enhanced by the Internet.

NB Learning Industry

by

I was recently asked by a consultant to help develop an asset map for the local learning  industry:

NRC-IIT [National research Council, Institute for Information Technology] and the Province of New Brunswick, via Business New Brunswick, are partnering to conduct two asset mapping projects. These asset maps will identify strengths, resources, and opportunities that exist within two key sectors in New Brunswick: Health/Life Sciences and Advanced Learning Technologies.

The goal is to develop a sound base of information to support the development of new strategic plans for both sectors. Additionally, the asset mapping projects will help to further forge connections between individuals, organizations, and institutions within these sectors and to provide a catalyst for investment and the formation of new collaborations.

I declined, stating that I had been involved in two such reports (1999, 2004) and that I didn’t feel like going through the process a third time. I had also put forth some recommendation on this blog in Rx for NB Learning in 2006.

The major recommendation made in 1999, while I was at the CLT, was that the Industry should move away from off-the-shelf content development and increase services such as performance improvement consulting and performance support solutions. This was ignored. In April 2002 the provincial government even purchased shares in Content Alive Inc. This company later became Vitesse Learning which closed in bankruptcy in 2007.

In 2004, I recommended to focus more on European markets and less on US ones. Instead, the government sponsored more US trade missions. I specifically recommended starting a new focus on a selected field such as open source for learning; performance technology or simulation & gaming. Open source would have been a good niche. Imagine if the province was now a centre of excellence for Moodle.

I have always seen the key to innovation being about people, especially educated, motivated and creative knowledge workers, who come from a wide variety of cultures and experiences. A diverse industry could capitalize on opportunities and markets throughout the world. Our province has home-grown, entry level skills in abundance but a major gap is  business leadership.  Generally speaking, the higher level business, technical and learning skills are in short supply, and these skills are necessary to create and grow companies. By focusing on making the province attractive for experienced individuals, the industry would be able to grow.

Finally, I think that a non-profit chaordic organisation (PDF), as recommended by Rob Paterson on the Fast Forward Blog, might be a better structure than the some of the models tried already. I hope that the asset map that is being developed will be published and that it will be made freely available for open discussion and even for remix.

Academic Upstarts

by

The latest book from Clay Christensen and his team, authors of The Innovator’s Dilemma and others, is Disrupting Class, where they examine education. Tom Haskins reviews the book and provides his own perspectives in Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and finally his own assessment on the value of college diplomas.

Tom thinks that the value of a diploma will decrease because knowledge in one field will not be enough for a generation facing multiple job changes and that the economies of scale offered by physical institutions will no longer be as obvious as they were in an industrial, fossil-fuel driven economy. I agree with Tom, and have discussed the challenges faced by universities, most recently in Moving the Ivory Tower to the Web: Part 1 and Part 2:

This is the same problem facing established academic institutions. Current revenues rest with the old way of doing business – students in classes. Going to the new Web model threatens those who make their living with the old model. Therefore leaders in the old hesitate because they are tied to their existing revenue streams. They cannot put the new inside the old. The answer is to locate the new outside of the old infrastructure and let the new unit go after customers who are not served by the current model. This way institutions can hold onto the value of their existing business for as long as possible while building up new capabilities with a different business model.

Furthermore, I would venture that many online universities are not real upstarts in this business, they are just variations on the same theme. Take local Meritus University for instance. An online BBA costs $36,000 for tuition and electronic documentation fees, compared to the average tuition at a Canadian university of $20,000 for four years. Customers pay a premium for the convenience of space and time. This model is not a great threat to traditional universities as it only targets those willing to pay more for flexibility. It may be a threat to more expensive US colleges though and that may be their target market. Still, it isn’t disruptive.

An example of the changing landscape is that participation rates in free learning programs are increasing, witnessed by over 700 members in Work Literacy and over 2,000 in Connectivism & Connected Knowledge. No one is making any money on these, except for the few students registered through the university for CCK08. This is a disruptive model of semi-academic courses being provided to mostly non-consumers (people who would not have paid for it anyway). At this time, these offerings are no real challenge to the existing structure, but acceptance of these programs may prepare the way for an upstart.

The challenge for academia will be in finding where the potential revenue is moving in the new value chain. For example, I give away all of my content on this website, because I know that my revenue is generated through consulting. This has been clear to me ever since I started. The blog helps me learn and connect and raises my profile on the Web. Charging for my content wouldn’t make any sense. Free generates the fees. How will universities be able to meet the challenge of more free content? Would they be able to compete with free tuition, even if it’s not as good? How about free accreditation?

I have some ideas about some new business models, which I’ve discussed with people such as Rob Paterson, and I’m sure that there are other people looking at this challenge as well.

The amplified individual

by

The Institute for the Future published a report last year, that I just came across, on The Future of Work. It discusses the integration of work and technology, which of course is part of my area of focus – learning, work & technology.

Looking at a piece of the Future of Work Map (pdf) I note a good description of many of the themes and issues in my own practice:

future of work - amplified individual
future of work - amplified individual

Theme:
the Amplified Individual

Forecast Clusters:
Highly – Collaborative, Social; Improvisational; Augmented

Dilemma:
Collective Creation vs Individual Recognition

Signals:
Co-working Arrangements; Teamwork in Virtual Environments; Social Filtering; Life Hacks; Visualization Tools

Underlying Technologies:
Sense Making & Visualization; Ubiquitous Displays; Amplified Collaboration Tools

There is a lot of food for thought and frameworks for further discussions on the future of work and what it means to our own work. All three documents are available for free download.

The Training Department in the 21st Century

by

I’m speaking in Toronto next month at the SkillSoft Canadian Perspectives conference and have been developing my presentation, which is based on this post and a previous one, on the changing role of training. The presentation is scheduled for one hour but I have taken the highlights and condensed it to less than 5 minutes, which is the time limit for Jing, which I’m trying for the first time. It’s also my first time using Apple’s keynote application.

This is an Adobe Flash file (*.swf), including audio, and should open in a new window:

21c_training

Updated presentation: Training & the Networked Workplace

References:

Dave Snowden

Cynefin

Wirearchy

Related: Complexity, Connection & Learning by Dave Pollard

Wrong Medium, No Message

by

Last month, in Learn the language before you speak to me, I said that you have to understand what it’s like to be a node in a social network and that there is almost nothing like it in the industrial workplace or school system to prepare you for this. The basic premise is that you have to walk the talk before you can criticize.

A recent post by Dave Pollard highlights what can happen when the older generation [my age cohort of which many are in positions of authority] does not engage with the same media as the younger generation. It seems that most young people in the workplace (generation millennium) use IM, text messages and especially their mobile devices to connect with their peers. This generation is ignoring the desktop and the organisational knowledge bases and turning to their own age cohort for timely help and advice. This is a real cultural and age gap that can have a detrimental impact on our organisations:

Aside from the wasted content effort, this means that most young people will learn from peers, not from mentors. How much of what senior people know will never be learned by younger workers, simply because the networks of trust necessary for valuable conversations will not have been forged (and given that Gen Millennium workers are expected to change jobs on average every four years, might never be forged)?

Our generation should know better than to just ignore this situation. It is up to us to engage younger workers, not to complain that they don’t get it. Leadership by example is required, but first we have to be able to communicate. That means observing communication behaviours in our organisations and seeing how we can best connect. It may mean getting a Twitter account and a mobile device so that we can see that quick post about an issue that someone is facing.