Work

business & working

Changing the training and development role in the 21st C.

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I received several comments on my last post on Learning and Performance in Balance. This post came about as I examined the role of training and development (T&D) in the workplace. My contention is that many organisational learning initiatives don’t achieve what they set out to do. They don’t enable learning at the individual level unless the person is already motivated and few are connected to performance objectives at the organisational level.

Instead, I think that a better approach would be for the organisation to focus on measurable performance and give workers the time and support to direct their own learning. The T&D function then provides support, but not direction, and also provides a feedback loop to develop better performance support from the organisation. This goes with Klaus Wittkuhn’s statement that:

It is not an intelligent strategy to train people to overcome system deficiencies. Instead, we should design the system properly to make sure that the performers can leverage all their capabilities.

The diagram that I developed is an attempt to show that workers know best about learning, given the time and support needed, while management understands the necessary performance indicators for the organisation to succeed.

There was some concern that such an approach would allow workers to prepare for their next job and rob the current organisation. This is a possibility but as the work environment becomes more complex it is better to have employees with diverse interests and skills who can adapt to changing circumstances, instead of only being able to deal with the current state. Management must support learning, but it is too far removed from the individual worker to be able to direct it. The real experts today are those workers closest to the problem, as I responded to Virginia Yonkers:

I think that a better approach in complex organisational environments, where there are few good practices, only emergent practices, we should look at the Cynefin Model. In a complex environment, “… in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe – Sense – Respond and we can sense emergent practice”. My view on this is that it is better if the Probing happens from the bottom-up and then management’s role is to support these individual probe’s of sense-making. The “experts” are now those who are closest to the problem or challenge – the knowledge workers.

I’m not advocating for a Utopian state of affairs in the workplace as regards learning. We need to allocate resources better and one way is to focus on what people do best. Management deals best with what is measurable. Individuals handle all the variables that affect their lives and know what is best for them. They’ll do what they feel is best for themselves anyway. As Karyn Romeis comments, “There is just too much just-in-case, sheepdip stuff still around. There is ample evidence that, for many managers in the corporate world, training provision is a box-ticking exercise.”

Finally, Dave Ferguson reminded me that even in workplaces that require defined processes and  standardization, the workers have the ability to improve things, but need support to have these implemented. This can be the role of the T&D group in the 21st Century – to communicate what the workers have learned in such a way that management can understand it. This is a reversal of the top-down role of the industrial era.

Learning and Performance in Balance

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If you scratch the surface of training and development in any organisation you realize that management doesn’t really care about learning; they want measurable performance. This is understandable and paying lip service to the learning organisation, et al, is a waste of time. At the organisational level, performance should be the only measure. However, there is much that cannot be measured and new work processes and skills are emerging in our digital economy. Management is usually the last to know about these, so they won’t likely be planning learning activities to support emergent processes.

In a complex work environment, where innovation is more important than following established procedures, responsibility for learning should be delegated to the lowest level  – the individual worker. These workers should be encouraged to collaborate in their learning activities, with little or no direction from above. Bottom-up emergent processes are better in a changing environment because those at the coal-face best understand the issues, even if they may not be able to articulate them.

I would suggest that in a knowledge-intensive work environment, where workers already have some degree of autonomy, it would be best to give them complete control over their learning. Just drop the organisational learning function and concentrate on performance. Management must then keep open communications with workers and can develop tools that will support emergent processes as they develop. Management will always be one step behind in this process, but that’s better than being completely out of touch.

It is a better balance to let workers direct their learning and collaborate as they see fit (within limits of privacy, security, etc). The modern organisation should get out of the learning business and into the business of supporting its workers.

My thanks to recent posts on this subject by Tony Karrer, Michele Martin and Clark Quinn.

The new nature of the firm

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Read/Write Web has taken up the call of Enterprise 2.0 with a new channel on the subject and starts by examining the nature of the firm, how large corporations have amassed huge wealth and control over the past 50 years and the factors contributing to a potential change in this situation:

  • Demographics: Retiring baby boomers and Generation Y’s network-savvy approach to work
  • Technology: How networks subvert hierarchy and force companies to focus on their core business.

The conclusion is that there are opportunities a-plenty.

That is huge opportunity for a lot of start-ups. There has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur. It also a huge challenge for the incumbents. Big companies need to re-define themselves in fundamental ways to find new ways to be big in a meaningful way.

The next post on R/WW is about the specifics of running an enterprise 2.0. It’s nuts and bolts kind of stuff. What is missing here so far, and I know that this is a new channel, is the foundation of enterprise 2.0.

I’ve mentioned this before about work literacy. We need a unifying principle for post-industrial work. Wirearchy is still, in my mind, that principle, as it includes the role of technology but is focused on how we interact in this workplace:

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

For enterprise 2.0 to work, it needs to embrace democracy in the workplace, something that rarely exists in industrial, command and control, organisations – which account for almost all of our businesses. Businesses run as monarchies or oligarchies but very few operate as democracies. We are so accustomed to this structure that most business people would say that it is impossible to run a business as a democracy. We know they are wrong and that there are democratic business models that work today.

I think that enterprise 2.0 will not fulfill its potential unless its foundation is more than just web technologies or networked businesses. We need to integrate this democratic organising principle into our discussions on enterprise 2.0 and I am sure that many captains of industry will loudly disagree. Without an architectural organising principle, the enterprise 2.0 ship will not sail very far.

Photo by S_K_S

Unmeeting

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I attended a learning conversation on Unmeetings with Jay Cross and several other very interesting people today.  This will be the first of a series of dialogs on Learnscape Architecture. Jay said initially that, “The conversation will go where it wants to, but we’ll begin by considering how unmeetings can facilitate learning.”

My reflections and notes from the hour-long conversation follow. Unstructured conferences allow people who wouldn’t normally speak up an opportunity to do so. There was a reference to the book Why Work Sucks and the notion that all meetings should be optional. A point was made that the core question around unmeetings was how much structure does it take to create value. More discussion led to the observation that set agendas may not be necessary and may even impinge on learning. An example is the World Cafe, a model where everyone has a voice, not just the official speakers.

A key to good meetings, including unmeetings, is more so in the facilitation, not any set agenda.  A facilitator is someone who can watch the flow. The idea of  flow from one type of tool to another came out. Perhaps we need some paths to enable better work flow, starting with unmeetings/openspace, which can produce artefacts such as visualisations/mind maps. These can then lead to participative structures like blogs/wikis and finally, once the path is clearer, to project management.

You do not own me

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Last year I went through a very long process applying for a job that had the potential to be interesting and challenging. It entailed no move on my part, mostly work from home, some international travel, and the opening of new lines of business, both geographically and in terms of industry sectors. The salary was OK and the benefits reasonable, so I seriously considered the offer.

Then I received the written offer of employment and was shocked by the non-compete clause. I would not be able to work for any company that was deemed by my employer to be a competitor, for two years. Nor could I go back to my own consulting practice and do work for any of these companies. My employer would have the right to determine who these companies were, after the fact. Needless to say, I turned down the job offer.

Charles Green at The Trusted Advisor reports on a recent decision by the California Supreme Court that strikes a major blow against non-compete agreements for employees, basically stating that no employer can deny future employment to a worker. As Green states:

This is simple human dignity; employers do and should have many rights, including various forms of intellectual property protection (trademarks, patents, copyrights)—but those rights have their own distinct protections and can stand on their own. Using employees as chattel to further a former employer’s competitive adventures is unnecessary—and thoroughly out of sync with a modern global business world.

I have often referred to salaried employment as indentured servitude, and practices such as non-compete clauses are examples of this culture. Perhaps with more worker mobility, a growing body of free-agents and less dependence on corporations for work, we may see this culture changing. Let’s hope that the lawyers hear about this soon.

Blogs and social media for beginners

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I was asked the other day how an established company could start using blogs, but I soon found out that they meant any social media. As a start, I’m going to tie together a few threads from my Delicious bookmarks.

Dave Snowden’s pithy advice is a good place to begin, when considering blogs for sharing knowledge across the company:

  1. Install software for blogs (designed for blogs that is, not a general package with blogs tagged on).
  2. Learn from what other people have done using blogs, but under no circumstances copy what someone else has done—no matter how successful. Your context is different.
  3. Now be patient.
  4. Find out what is working and what is not.

As Jon Husband says, when discussing the government’s use of social media, “It’s about finding and using pertinent information more quickly and more easily, and letting people do what they do best when addressing an issue using curiosity, common sense and a desire to do their work well. ”

I’ve mentioned the benefits of blogging for myself and any business that wants to show leadership in its field should consider the medium, as noted by Business Blog Consulting:

As you continue to build your blog over time, creating great content in a specific niche, Google’s more likely to return your blog as a result when a journalist starts researching a column or article. I’ve never hired a PR firm, and I work out of the top right corner of the US us locals call “Maine”, but I’ve gotten quotes in Inc., BusinessWeek Small Biz, and other periodicals and the local evening news because of our Web marketing blog.

Blogs and wikis can be used to organise knowledge and facilitate communication. They can also be ways of connecting with customers and sharing amongst fellow practitioners. They aren’t a one-way medium to direct your message to your “target market”, so learning by trying is highly recommended, especially if you’re used to one-way print, radio or TV media.

The bottom line is that it’s not about the technology and all about the organisation’s culture. The last question should be, “what blog platform should we use?”.

Related posts:

The business of social media

An ecosystem of knowledge

Blogs at the core of KM and collaboration

What business are you in?

A governing principle for work literacy

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Work literacy aims to help people develop skills necessary for the knowledge-intensive and interconnected workplace, or as the website says:

Work Literacy is a network of individuals, companies and organizations who are interested in learning, defining, mentoring, teaching and consulting on the frameworks, skills, methods and tools of modern knowledge work.

I’m all for that and believe it’s necessary; it’s just not enough. Michele Martin says on the Work Literacy blog that:

… knowledge workers need to figure out how to leverage the social aspects of the web to make their traditionally solitary online activities more effective and useful. As Tony [Karrer] points out, this will be a big challenge because people are not necessarily aware of the extent to which these social changes impact how they do their work. We first have to make them aware of this changed context and then help the develop the skills to be successful in this new world.

The context of work is definitely changing.

When Henry Ford developed his automobile mass production system he based it on the results of the time-motion studies of F.W. Taylor. Taylorism was the unifying theory that work could be standardized and workers could be organised around jobs, tasks and responsibilities. Ford implemented that theory. I think that for work literacy to become part of the workplace it needs to be grounded on a common vision. If not, then work literacy is just an incremental way of making the industrial workplace (with its org charts, line & staff, job classifications, etc) a bit more efficient.

The industrial model needs to be replaced because more and more work cannot be organised along Taylor’s guidelines. I think that the governing principle of Wirearchy, “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology” is a good start. Embracing this principle would create havoc in most organisations though.

A two-way flow of power and authority exists in few organisations but it is possible and I think necessary in an interconnected world. It’s how open source projects work and it is part of the tacit pact in many Web 2.0 ventures. Companies have to treat their customers in a trustworthy way or they may all leave, which of course will destroy the company as most of the value resides in the community. Think of YouTube without contributors.

Work literacy focuses on the tools and techniques for social media but there is an underlying subversive component. Social media are the equivalent of an industrial factory for each worker. Almost every worker has the ability to get a message out to the world in the blink of an eye. That message can go viral and the organization has no control over it. Workers can also connect to massive amounts of information or find specialists in any field. They don’t need the company database, which is probably out of date anyway.

As anthropologist Michael Wesch states, “when media change, then human relationships change“. The Internet has already changed everything. The social contract that we call employment has been changing for a while. Unions are shrinking, the self-employed are growing (2 million in Canada, which is more than all manufacturing workers) and low wage service jobs are our largest growth sector. What unites us is our ability to easily connect with each other, without traditional intermediaries. We’re just not used to it yet, but initiatives like CarrotMob show what the future may hold.

For me, work literacy is showing people that they have access to the most powerful communications medium in history and that individuals have to grab hold of it, understand it and use it for the good of society, because we are society. Work literacy is not about doing your job better. It’s understanding what it means to work, to create and to be responsible, all within the context of being visible to everyone else. For workers, work literacy means growing up, damn fast.

So here’s my reading of the situation. In an interconnected, interdependent and highly-stressed world there’s no more us and them. It’s just us. We can all figure this out together and maybe our organization will survive. It may not, but we may have learned how to cooperate in the process and then some of us may create something new. Trust is the foundation of the new workplace and work literacy can help us build trust because these social media tools are transparent. That means that bosses are going to lose control – better now than later.

Work literacy is the way in which we connect with information, build knowledge, gain trust and strive for credibility in the Internet age.

SocialLearn

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Yesterday, I attended Martin Weller’s presentation on SocialLearn, hosted by George Siemens, with the recording now available online. SocialLearn is a project of The Open University and takes Weinberger’s concept of small pieces loosely joined and applies it to higher education. I wrote about Small (learning) pieces loosely joined three ago and have long been a proponent of getting outside the LMS box set of constraints. In the case of SocialLearn, I think that they have the right concept for social learning on the Web and now have to clarify their own business model (yes, even universities must have business models).

The basic model is to provide the interface (API) that enables learners to connect with other systems and platforms. This strategy allows the “connector agency”, in this case the university, to quickly adopt new applications as they are used by students and teachers. Check out the diagrams on the SocialLearn blog for examples.

I see this approach as enabling critical thinking tools for each learner, as the situation warrants, and I strongly support this model.

Changing the role of The Open University from main content and application provider to a more facilitative role, with constantly changing technologies, will require a new business model and that is what Martin and his peers are looking at. The real money in higher education has almost always been around certification. That’s why Harvard can charge more, because Harvard certification is worth more on the market. Universities charge more than community colleges and for the most part, on-line degrees aren’t valued as much in-place ones. Certification, or how many degrees are granted, also drives the funding model for many state-subsidized institutions. Control the valued certification and you control the money flow. Just remember that the market may change its mind on what is valued.

Here is an excerpt from a proposal that Rob Paterson and I wrote this year:

Organizations that are decisively moving to the web are doing well. For example, iTunes is the second largest music store in the world, and the BBC have so much action online now, that some ISP’s in the UK are having bandwidth problems. NPR in the US is decisively moving to the Web and has a number of pilots out in the market and tools in development. Organisations that only partially moved to the open Web are doing less well – Barnes & Noble is really a bookstore with a web presence that fears that if its web presence was successful it would damage its store business.  The New York Times has the same issue. It has more web subscribers than paper subscribers but all its costs are tied into the paper. The music business tried to stop downloading and to hold onto bundling where its main revenues were derived. But in working to protect its current model it killed its future.

This is the problem. In this revolution, the old model is where the current revenues are located. Going to the new has to threaten this model. So leaders in the old hesitate or act half heartedly. They cannot put the new inside the old.

The answer to this paradox is to locate the new in a separate unit and to go after customers who are not served by the current model. This way you can hold onto the value of your existing franchise for as long as possible while building up the new in parallel.

Perhaps the best way for SocialLearn to go forward is to create a completely new playing field for the millions of non-consumers of higher education and become the de facto leader in a new space, much as the OU did in the 1960’s. It will be interesting to see if there is room for several players in this space and who else is moving into it.

New work, new attitude

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Nine Shift has a series of posts on the changing nature of work and how the idea of responsibility usurped morals during the industrial age (See Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3).

“In the Industrial Age of the 20th century, you didn’t have to be of good moral character to work in the factory. But you did have to be responsible.  And so teachers in the 20th century schoolhouse and college taught (still teach) responsibility.   And by that  teachers mean specific behaviors.

Those behaviors are now obsolete. They made sense in the factory …  But not in the virtual office.”

This post had me thinking about our approach to work literacy, and its foundation on skills, such as how to deal with information flows or personal knowledge mastery. What if the real challenge to be productive in the new workplace will be an attitude shift? Organisations may not be concerned if you work a full shift or are spending time at your work space. Compensation may become focused not just on results but creative solutions to the organisation’s issues. The required attitude may be creativity, as in “what have you done that’s different?”.

As we moved from morality to responsibility one hundred years ago, are we now shifting from responsibility to creativity? If we do, then most of our organisational tools and measurements about productivity may have to get thrown out.

Distributed Work Rules

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About ten years ago it was called computer supported collaborative work (CSCW) but today I would just call it getting things done using the Web. Most of my work is at a distance and I’ve been using Web collaboration tools since they became available. The Web has been around for the past 15 years or so, which means that for anyone under 35, it’s been part of the surround for most of their working lives.

I’ve been working as part of a distributed team that is composed mostly of people over 40 and as a result have accumulated several hundred e-mails on one project alone. I usually get maybe a dozen e-mail per day, but this month has required some serious triage of a hundred at a time. I guess this is how “normal” people work every day. Perhaps the next time I join a distributed team, I’ll ask everyone to accept certain ground rules. If not, I may decide not to play.

  1. Documents that are edited by more than one person must be created, edited and commented upon on a wiki or other collaborative web document such as Google Docs, Central Desktop, etc. (This graphic explains it quite well)
  2. The group must select a text chat method for small details that need to be discussed (Skype, MSM, Google Chat, etc). [Dozens of threads using “Reply All” saying things like, “well done” are a waste of the team’s time]
  3. Document formatting should only be considered/discussed once the content has been agreed upon, and then only one person/agency is responsible.
  4. E-mail should only be used for official correspondence that requires a date/time stamp for archival reasons. Contracts, acceptance of deliverables and official feedback would be examples.

Any other suggestions? Perhaps we need a Distributed Work Manifesto.