Wirearchy

Wirearchy

New organisational DNA

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I’m going to take some time off work and writing over the holidays, with perhaps a post if the mood strikes me. What really interests me at this time is how The Great Disruption may be opening up possibilities for change that did not exist even six months ago. I have come to the realisation that for training, education, learning and development initiatives to work we need real organisational change, meaning a change in the way we create and run our organisations. I have some opportunities to write on the subject as well as ideas that may develop into projects. These may be difficult times but they can also be exciting times.

Jon Husband sums up the real work to be done in developing the post-industrial workplace:

If I am not mistaken, the issue of centralised control remains one of the core issues in play … when it comes to considering whether and how to engage with or commit to a path towards Enterprise 2.0 architecture, applications and dynamics.

How can we have effective businesses without centralized control? Wirearchy is one potential framework but we need to seriously discuss this because our environment is far too complex for mechanistic models. Instead of tweaking the existing ineffective organisational models that many labour under I want to focus on the root causes of our challenges. Workers feel disconnected and disempowered especially when layoffs are the first corporate reaction in any economic downturn. We need more resilient organisations that can in turn foster a more resilient economy. There is much inspiration from the natural sciences:

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed – Charles Darwin

Need for collaboration continues to grow

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We’re starting to see some interest in our TogetherLearn initiative and one of the main drivers seems to be cost-reduction. I came across this future-looking ZDNet article via Bertrand Duperrin and it sums up the situation nicely:

However, for business-driven internal enterprise Web 2.0 collaboration projects, I see growth. Why?  Because the business will find their collaboration needs to grow in 2009, while they see IT providing them with fewer services. Collaboration needs grow as a result of layoffs, mergers, and deepening external partnerships (requiring new infrastructure to collaborate outside the firewall with trusted, external partners).  And this happens while IT’s services shrink as a result of layoffs, a focus on streamlining operational costs, while not taking on new projects.

The need for online collaboration is growing as organisations make cost-cutting decisions in travel and training. The recession is just the catalyst that shows the redundancies of industrial, command and control systems in the hyperlinked economy. The need for online collaboration and the integration of work and learning will continue as long as we have the Internet.

Our value proposition for TogetherLearn is fairly simple. We set up a collaborative space outside the firewall and work with clients in their particular business context. We provide support, coaching and access to a network of resources. Clients pay for what they need and no more. The aim is to help online community managers learn and practice their role. We use open source technologies so clients can decide how and where they grow their communities, with no strings attached. Everything is transparent and senior consultants are involved in every step of the process.

Last year at this time I noticed that Big Consulting Firms are Jumping on Bandwagon 2.0. “As I’ve said before, Free-agents and natural enterprises are better. The upstart independents and small consultancies have Clayton Christensen’s disruptive Sword & Shield which the incumbents (large consultants) don’t have. With early motivation to enter this emerging field (Shield) and now with with years of experience and skills (Sword), we the “upstarts” should be able to hold our own.”

The current economic situation has just made the business case for a nimble, low overhead, web-enabled consultancy that much easier.

Invert the Pyramid

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In Advice for the Training Department I recommended that those in the training function should concentrate on Communicating & Connecting. Later I suggested that the training department should wake up and smell the coffee or be rendered obsolete. All of this is premised on the fact that our organisational structures need to change in order to deal with complexity and one framework we can start with is wirearchy.

However, the training department can at best manage incremental change unless the organisation itself changes. In It’s Time to Invert the Management Pyramid, Vineet Nayer says:

It is not a stationary relic I’m talking about. I’m talking about the brand new dinosaur on the block – the classical management pyramid. Time has come to dismantle it and adapt to a new evolutionary and unstructured model that leverages the team effect to ensure that companies can lead change rather play catch up or be left behind.

The training department and the CLO can help in this effort, but inverting the pyramid is the big work that needs to be done by the entire organisation.

I believe that structural change is coming sooner than many expect, with the WorldBlu list as an example of the hunger for change. The inability of our prominent command and control organisations to deal with growing complexity highlights our structural problems. The largest military force in the world cannot defeat a loosely knit group of terrorists; the US/Cdn automotive sector has been incapable of changing its business model and our elect & forget political representatives are increasingly hamstrung by an electorate that no longer provides majorities or landslides.

It is time to invert the pyramid and integrate learning into all that we do. Are you ready?

Learning Together

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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

The Age of Dissonance

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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