Wirearchy

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.

I had the opportunity/chance/pain of being on a social media panel for our Third Tuesday Meetup, so I couldn’t resist a post called Ten Questions Not To Ask A Social Media Panel. It’s a humourous post with much truth between the lines. I’ve found that just about everybody today is a social media consultant and I’m glad that I never used that descriptor for my professional services.

As much as I enjoyed Berkowitz’s main topic, there is one comment that answers several of the questions that I get asked about this “Web thing”. It’s by Janet Johnson who provides the specifics that most people want from panels but don’t often get:

I’ve personally observed ROI (expenditure = time) mostly in the following areas:

1) Improving collaboration for virtual teams scattered around cities, countries and such – Twitter is especially great for that.

2) Lead generation for consultants – especially in the areas of RSS, infrastructure and social media (big duh, but it’s true).

3) Awareness and thought leadership – especially for those whose markets serve early adopters/18-35 year olds today, although the baby boomers are adopting to, and using the social web quite quickly.

Bill Brantley responded to my post on work literacy:

In fact, as the rise of social network-based learning has demonstrated, employees no longer need the company to develop their knowledge, skills, and abilities.

This is the conundrum for those of us who would like to help organisations [and get paid] in enabling their employees to become work literate. It may be that knowledge workers need to become more autonomous to be effective and that this would be good for the organisation in the long run. However, one result will be that workers will need less supervision and direction. A do-it-ourselves approach to learning and development also means that there is less of a need for training, HR and several other organisational functions. I doubt that any training department will fund its own demise.

So how do you get employers to spend money unlocking  their employees from the indentured servitude model of salaried employment? This is the client/customer challenge. The workers may be the customers who need the skills, but the employers are the paying clients. Why would employers help employees become more independent and maybe even leave the organisation?

I’ve suggested that work literacy may be best left to professional associations or communities of practice. Higher education may take up the challenge, but I won’t hold my breath. I’m quite certain that pitching real worker empowerment to hierarchical organisations is going to be a hard sell.

Yes, there is a work literacy gap.

My experience shows that in North America, where I have done most of my work, a significant portion of the workforce has not been able to develop the skills to learn for themselves. This does not mean that they lack basic learning skills. What they lack are tools, methods and practices to learn and to take action. They also face significant barriers to being autonomous learners on the job. Richard Florida has noted that one of our great challenges will be to enable everyone to become part of the creative class, including the millions of currently low-paid workers in service industries.

We are trained early in life to look to authority for direction in learning and work. The idea that there is a right answer or an expert with the right answer begins in our schools. John Taylor Gatto describes this in the seven-lesson schoolteacher.

The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. The expert makes all the important choices; only I, the teacher, can determine what you must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions which I then enforce. If I’m told that evolution is a fact instead of a theory, I transmit that as ordered, punishing deviants who resist what I have been told to tell them to think. This power to control what children will think lets me separate successful students from failures very easily.

Good employees wait for their supervisor to tell them what to do. The industrial workplace is not much different from the military – “you’re not paid to think”.

The Internet has changed the way we communicate and has given each of us with a computer and Net access more power than the Press barons. However, our organisations (schools, businesses, bureaucracies) have not changed yet.

The basic problem is that workers need to be adaptive, innovative, and collaborative but most work in organisations that have tremendous barriers to critical thinking. Does the following describe any organisation that you have worked in?

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

Yes, individuals need to take control of their learning and skill development (AKA “work literacy”) but organisations have to give up some control. Michele Martin commented on my post on the dysfunctional workplace:

What strikes me is the fundamental sense of disempowerment in the workplace that suggests that people are essentially at the mercy of the companies they work for. While obviously there’s some truth to this, especially in an economic downturn, I still believe that people have far more control over these issues than they believe. One of my main goals in working with people on integrating social media and professional development is to point out how empowering it is to take control of your own learning by starting a blog and pursuing DIY professional development. If the will is there, the means certainly exist.

Developing practical methods, like PKM and Skills 2.0 (PDF) can help, but at the same time we need to work on creating and supporting new models of work that are more democratic and human. This means that we need to think about and talk about work differently. For myself, I have found that not being a salaried employee has freed my mind in many ways. I know that this is not the answer for everyone, but it’s time to make slogans like, “our business is our people’, a reality.

So yes, there are skills, especially critical thinking, that are necessary for real knowledge work, but without changes to the structure of the workplace, these skills will not be enough.

Photo by dykstranet

More of us are working in a networked economy, driven by the enormous, ubiquitous Internet. Working in a network appears to be most effective for chaotic and complex environments, where the Cynefin model prescribes:

• Complex, 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.
• Chaotic, in which there is no relationship between cause and effect at systems level, the approach is to Act – Sense – Respond and we can discover novel practice.

Being outside the corporate/bureaucratic hierarchy I see how easy it is for networks to form and act-sense-respond on perceived opportunities and challenges, especially when there is trust between the nodes. But organisations, no matter how modern, are not networks. They are constrained by rules, governance, proprietary secrets and other control systems. Can “slow nodes” work effectively in a fast moving edge economy?

Searls and Weinberger called the Web a World of Ends, with no centre at all:

When Craig Burton describes the Net’s stupid architecture as a hollow sphere comprised entirely of ends³, he’s painting a picture that gets at what’s most remarkable about the Internet’s architecture: Take the value out of the center and you enable an insane flowering of value among the connected end points. Because, of course, when every end is connected, each to each and each to all, the ends aren’t endpoints at all.

So the question is, what happens to an organisation that tries to emulate the most efficient network we have and becomes completely hollowed out?

Is it still an organisation?

Do the rules remain the same?

Do those on the edge need the middle any more?

The challenge that I see is to create the new organisational model for an edge economy. We have wirearchy as one governing principle and efforts like work literacy for individuals, but no new organisational models for groups that create value.

McLuhan’s laws of media could provide some insight. Possible effects of a world of ends on the industrial organisational model:

1. Extends the influence of each worker.
2. Obsolesces control systems.
3. Retrieves personal relationships.
4. Could flip into personality cults.

Over the past century we have played with other models (cooperatives, partnerships, sole proprietorships) but the incorporated company is still dominant. Henry Ford took advantage of F.W. Taylor’s new management theories and created a new world of work. Will we be seeing something similar in the next decade?

This is one of the greatest opportunities around but innovations on the old model still get all the press. Other than some tweaking of the existing corporate model, is anyone seeing anything really new happening? It will likely be outside of the “developed” world.