Wirearchy

Wirearchy

Learning to work

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Learning to Work & Working to Learn

The way we work is definitely changing, due partly to:

  • Increased connectivity to more people;
  • Increasing complexity in the work we get paid to do;
  • Distributed work that is more global in nature or influence; and
  • The need to learn as we work.

Look at these changes over the past century:

Individual Work — from Vocations to Jobs to Roles

Learning to Work — from Apprenticeship to Training to Collaboration

Organization of Work — from Local to Regional to Networked businesses

Consider this. Friends of mine have four children in their late twenties and early thirties. All are in the ‘workforce’. All four went to university and some have completed graduate degrees. At this time, not one has a ‘job’.

The world has changed and we had better get used to it and learn to adapt.

What are your roles? How do you collaborate? Where are your networks?

Freelancers unite

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I’m following up on my post earlier this month on “free-agentry“:

My own observations include the notion that Work 2.0 has resulted in more fluid and ongoing job searches, that learning is becoming part of work routine and that we now take our social networks wherever we move and need the workplace less for socialization. I’ve also observed a rise in self-employment and made my recommendations on how free-agents can market themselves online.

The Creative Class blog just raised some more points on free-agency:

  • More Canadians than Americans are moving into freelancing
  • Companies are hiring more contract and temporary workers, who have all the downsides of freelancing without any of the benefits. Contract workers are told where, when and sometimes how to work.
  • Lack of medical coverage (US) or a drug plan (Canada) can be barriers to freelancing, as mentioned in one of the comments.

Fewer jobs in manufacturing, a recession and a shift to networked business makes for an increasingly itinerant workforce. Contract work is what companies may want but it is in the worker’s best interest to approach non-salaried work from a consultant’s perspective. You are there to solve the client’s problem, not just do as you are told. Also, if you have to be in a workplace where the employer provides you with office space and tells you when to show up for work, the tax man may not regard you as self-employed, so you lose what few deductions you have.

If contract work seems like the only option, then start networking with co-workers and competitors. Band together as a guild or association and help each other out. Think of it as a freelancers union and look into group health care, joint marketing and shared administration. You can’t do this working 40 hours a week for The Man. The deck is stacked with laws supporting either employers and employees but the future of knowledge work is free-agency. The powers that be, corporations and unions, won’t change to help out freelancers, we have to help ourselves.

Check out: Freelance Switch

Recombining Organizational DNA

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The survey results from the Chief Learning Officer survey show that 77% of respondents feel that people in their organization are not growing fast enough to keep up with the business. Is this anyone’s fault or just a sign of the times?

Human performance in most organization is an afterthought, if thought of at all. Various deparments handle certain components of it, as if you could actually separate workers’ skills from their knowledge and then separate again their attitudes. Here are some possible culprits:

IT: for locking down computers and treating all employees like children, closing off a wealth of information, knowledge and connections outside the artificial firewall.

Communications: for forcing employees to use approved messages that do not even sound human.

Training: for separating learning from work.

HR: for forcing people into standardized  jobs and competency models that do not reflect the person.

Individual growth is not promoted when communication, learning, and even curiosity are blocked. If 77% of senior learning professionals feel that people are not growing fast enough, then either these professionals are not doing their job or they have the wrong job. I think it’s the latter. Separating the responsibility for ‘people’ among an assortment of departments makes no sense from the individual worker’s perspective, it’s just administrative efficiency. With better communication tools available today, these divisions are no longer necessary.

There is an opportunity to identify overlapping areas and redundancies in organizational human performance support. It’s doubtful that departmental incumbents will address the issue because of tribal loyalties, but an anonymous employee survey would be a good start.  A unified support function, focused on really serving workers and helping them grow, could significantly reduce this 77%.

We were discussing this amongst the InternetTime Alliance team and Jon Husband asked why all human processes in an organization are in silos. Jay Cross said it was because of different DNA. Training, HR, OD, KM use different models, speak different languages, and go to separate conferences. However, they’re all in the business of connecting and communicating. They just don’t do it with each other. Given the imperatives for continuous growth today, organizations need to give serious consideration to recombining their organizational DNA.

“like changing tires on a speeding car”

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“How it Works” is a 5 minute video by IBM Research that describes the changing nature of the way we work. There’s not much “new” but it is well-presented and I think would be useful as an opener or adjunct to many of my workshops and presentations on learning & working on the Web. I’m sure many of my colleagues would find it useful for similar purposes.

It discusses the main challenges in today’s workplace:

  1. embracing change, and
  2. connecting & working with people far away

IBM Research provides a good metaphor for dealing with constant change in the workplace – ” like changing tires on a speeding car”. I particularly agree with the statement that “Employees are ready … it’s the processes that guide their work that haven’t kept up”.

Everyone is facing these challenges and, once again, the crux of the matter is giving up control in order to have a more resilient organization. Resilience, or the ability to learn and adapt, will be the key factor in successful tire changes.

Sowing seeds of destruction

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John Hagel’s Labour Day manifesto calls for institutions to change and embrace the “passionate creativity” of workers.

Twentieth century institutions are not succeeding in the twenty-first century as new infrastructures take hold. They must change or they will slowly shrink into shadows of what they once were and make way for a new generation of institutions more suited to the harnessing the potential of these new infrastructures.

Meanwhile, back in institutional reality c. 2009, Andrew McAfee’s book on Enterprise 2.0 has been delayed for six months by Enterprise 1.0. Will we see institutions voluntarily changing their business models and then getting on with the new order of business? I strongly doubt it and don’t know of many historical examples of this kind of organizational adaptation. IBM managed a significant shift from products to services and Microsoft embraced the Internet before it was too late, with Internet Explorer. But many industry leaders were originally upstarts in their field. Ford didn’t come out of the carriage industry, Google wasn’t built by a telecom, Amazon did not grow out of a book store, and Craigslist wasn’t into newspaper classifieds. These companies changed the game by building a new playing field. New business models require different organizational DNA and this is doubly true for new management models.

How many consultants and experts are selling the idea that a hierarchical industrial-model organization can tweak a few things and then adapt to a two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility? With leadership that is willing to cede control, some organizations will successfully transform, but I think that most will fail. It’s more likely that enterprise 2.0 initiatives will excite some passionate creatives in the organization but when this fails they will leave and either start up or work for a 2.0 competitor. In this way, many organizations will sow the seeds of their own demise, but in the long run that will be a good thing.

Working and Learning Together

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I found a recent HBR article on The Big Shift by Hagel & Brown via Betrand Duperrin, who provides his own comments in French (and in English). The key point of the HBR article is that Return on Assets have diminished over the past several decades, in spite of increases in productivity. The authors say that many organizations no longer reflect the realities of the external environment which now includes networks of transparency and multiple knowledge flows.

Twentieth-century institutions built and protected knowledge stocks—proprietary resources that no one else could access. The more the business environment changes, however, the faster the value of what you know at any point in time diminishes. In this world, success hinges on the ability to participate in a growing array of knowledge flows in order to rapidly refresh your knowledge stocks. For instance, when an organization tries to improve cycle times in a manufacturing process, it finds far more value in problem solving shaped by the diverse experiences, perspectives, and learning of a tightly knit team (shared through knowledge flows) than in a training manual (knowledge stocks) alone.

How does an organization adapt to become more transparent? Change the organizational framework from a hierarchy to a wirearchy, incorporating two-way flows of power and authority. According to Jay Cross & Jon Husband:

Intangibles travel via networks, and networks are the infrastructure for doing business in the future. An overarching caveat here: Strategist and practitioner Stuart Henshall said trust is critical. “It’s the one qualitative factor all networks depend upon.”

Without trust, human networks don’t work and without networks, businesses won’t succeed.

Even with an understanding of knowledge flows and networks, organizations are slow to discard training as the primary method of personnel development.  Charles Jennings sees a very limited role for formal training. “The evidence has been around for a long time that formal training on detailed task and process-based activities in advance of the need to carry out the task or use the process is essentially useless.”

The alternatives to formal training programs include the integration of collaborative working and learning using online social networks, and Jane Hart is an expert with many of these platforms, have used and tested a wide variety of them.

So that, in my opinion, is how to address the big shift: to be effective in a networked economy, individuals and organizations must integrate working and learning so that there is no longer a distinction between the two. As Jay Cross & Clark Quinn say, “In business, networks supplement, surround and challenge hierarchies. Sound vision and leadership will inspire, not control, workers. Managers, workers, customers and partners will recognise we’re all in this together.”

togetherlearnteam

Associations must think laterally

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I’ve worked with quite a few non-profit associations and been a member of several non-profit associations. I’ve also let many of my memberships expire without renewal. In many cases I’ve felt that I could have better relationships through my own networks, via my blog, Twitter or a free social network, like LearnTrends. Associations put me on their listserv, sent me newsletters or maybe let me engage in an online discussion forum, but for the most part they weren’t focused on my specific professional development needs. After time I had moved beyond the core of the association, much as I found that many association conferences catered more to novices. I became more interested in unconferences, podcamps and meetups. I wanted to connect with other members from whom I could learn, not review what I already knew.

Clay Shirky says that associations need to seriously consider how they reinforce lateral line of communications (peer-peer) and not just information from the centre to the membership. David Wilcox covers Shirky’s interview on associations where he discusses the case of the ACLU and Wilcox uses this diagram to describe where associations need to go – from hierarchy to network.

networks5

I think many associations are facing challenges of declining enrollment and I’ve seen many conferences this year shrink in comparison to past years. However, I’ve also seen increases in local networking, tweetchats, free web conferences and anything else that lets people connect on their terms. The challenge is for associations to drop the hierarchical management model and figure out how to use a network model. It’s the same challenge that corporations and bureaucracies are, or will be, facing; with one key difference. In most associations the members get to vote with their dues every year. As more forms of web social media offer viable networking options, the days of the hierarchical membership association may soon be over. Which model would you rather be a member of?

Mind Map: The Networked Society

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Over the years of writing this blog I’ve reorganized, added tags, categories and the Key Posts & Toolbox pages in order to help make sense of over 1,500 posts. A major theme in my writing has been our shift to a networked society and what that means in how we work and learn. I’m especially interested in the fact that working and learning are merging in many contexts. Learning (often viewed from the limited perspective of training or education) is not a separate activity, removed from work.

This mind map links several concepts and related articles around the theme of the networked society:

Networked Society

Working

Structures

Living

Learning

Relevance in the Network

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In Become a meta L&D Manager (requires free registration), my colleagues Jay Cross & Clark Quinn advise that it’s time to take a broader look at learning in the organization:

“Your charter as head of L&D [learning & development] is to optimise learning throughout the organisation, not just in the pockets that once belonged to HR. This takes a broader perspective than what you deal with day-to-day. You’ve got to rise above the noise to see the underlying patterns and then optimise them.”

In the comments, Martine Parry adds to this topical article, saying that the ” … training role will become responsible for large deployments and for legal and governance issues – only.” This is the root of the change that we are facing in organizations today: relevance in the network. There are many silos of support functions in any large organization, each with their own culture and perspectives on business performance – HR; L&D; IT; KM; Marketing; Communications; et al. And of course there are also the individual business units as well as the key driver of revenue in many companies – Sales. If roles have to merge, who will win out, a business unit or a support function? It’s quite possible that the traditional training function will become marginalized.

History shows that significant changes in how we communicate result in significant changes in how we work. Many silos of support functions will not work in a network-centric organization as there’s too much redundancy, duplication of effort and slowness to react. It’s becoming obvious that only highly networked organizations are going to be successful. As another colleague, Jon Husband, puts it:

“The performance management schemes, grade levels in the organizations and compensation practices have yet to recognize how work gets done in networked environments and increasingly, in a networked world.”

Does it really matter that training or L&D will be marginalized? In the long run, I think not. We are seeing the merging of roles and functions as networks bypass command & control. That means that each departmental silo will lose some of its traditional power. What will emerge will have to be more effective for the networked organization. As a learning or workplace performance professional your choice is clear:

  1. Fight to ensure that your department wins the short-term internal political game of leading organizational learning; or
  2. Park your ego (and that of your tribe) to work with everyone in the organization to make it more effective in the long-term.

It’s obvious which choice I would recommend but #2 will be fraught with problems, such as being ostracized by your departmental colleagues and maybe even working yourself out of a job. However, if your organization doesn’t succeed in the long run, neither will your job.

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Photo by ZoomZoom

Being participative

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Matthew Hodgson asks at The AppGap what participation and engagement really mean and he refers to the IAP2  core values of public participation. These values, based on “the belief that those who are affected by a decision have a right to be involved in the decision-making process” are important for a participative democracy but I think that something is still missing. The values seem to imply that people are involved during the decision-making process only, as in let’s get some public input and set up some round tables, forums and discussion areas; much as the government is doing on copyright in Canada.

Like voting every four years, even the most participatory models offered by our institutions fail to grasp the nature of our networked world. Today, much of the public is always-on and you can find someone talking about the issues. Participation doesn’t stop any more. One shot deals, even those that are open and inclusive, do not recognize this sea change in communications.

Euan Semple discusses how different life and work in a global network are going to be:

I am currently reading Manuel Castells’ fantastic book The Power of Communication. In it he talks of the global network society’s tendency to truncate time and how the industrial society, with its ideas of progress, deferred gratification, Protestant work ethic etc. made becoming more important than being. In his view in the networked society “being cancels becoming”.

As a fellow freelancer, Euan is being rather than becoming. There is no corporate ladder to climb or professional designation to achieve. If everyone felt this way, many of our institutions (schools, universities, certification bodies) would collapse. Perhaps that is why many will in the near future.

The challenge for organizations and institutions in a global networked society will be to incorporate “being” into their management models. Participation becomes a constant and dynamic flow through the organization and outside it. How can you be participative in everything, not just to make the initial decision? How does that change the role of management? What is management in a network? There are probably some answers from those who are already being, accepting life in Beta, as well as those who never embraced the industrial model of becoming. We have to look to the edges of modern society to see the possibilities.

Living on the EdgePhoto: Living on the Edge by Giant Ginkgo