Wirearchy

Wirearchy

Being social for learning and performance

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Social learning has been a theme here for some time [my first post on the subject in 2005: from e-learning to s-learning]. Recent research by CMU, MIT & Union College shows that being social is also a key to group performance:

That collective intelligence, the researchers believe, stems from how well the group works together. For instance, groups whose members had higher levels of “social sensitivity” were more collectively intelligent. “Social sensitivity has to do with how well group members perceive each other’s emotions,” says Christopher Chabris, a co-author and assistant professor of psychology at Union College in New York.

“Also, in groups where one person dominated, the group was less collectively intelligent than in groups where the conversational turns were more evenly distributed,” adds Woolley. And teams containing more women demonstrated greater social sensitivity and in turn greater collective intelligence compared to teams containing fewer women.

However, many OD, HR and training departments still focus on individual skill development and the perennial favourite, leadership training. How often do people work in total isolation today? Why are skills taught separately from the workplace and co-workers? As for leadership, how can you decontextualize it from the workplace? Easy cookie-cutter solutions, like MBTI for leadership, are mainstream fare, even though MBTI is about as valid as astrology [I’m a reflector, completer finisher, ENTJ, inspirer – what are you?]

In the evolving social organization, we noted how knowledge workers get things done by conversing with peers, customers and partners, as they solve the problems of the day. Learning from these social interactions is a key to business innovation. To participate in their markets, organizations, customers and suppliers need to understand each other and this too, is social. Social learning is how knowledge is created, internalized and shared. It is how knowledge work gets done.

A serious re-focus is needed for organizations to take advantage of social learning in business and professional networks. Everything from team composition, job titles, performance evaluation and training approaches must be examined through the lens of [social] networks. There is solid research in social network analysis, value network analysis and social learning that can inform this shift. But leaders and managers must first put aside their old mental models, and that’s the real challenge.

With my ITA colleagues, we’re trying to start a shift to working smarter in networks, without some fancy, and unnecessary, software platform to enable it. It’s a cultural challenge to change mental models, not a technological one.

Related post: Let’s talk about work

A framework for the social enterprise

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I have put together two of the major articles on social learning in the enterprise that were posted here this year. A framework for social learning drew on my collaboration with colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance and the evolving social organization was co-authored by Thierry deBaillon.


Please feel free to share this 18 page white paper as I hope it will encourage more conversations on how we can integrate learning and working, a key part of enabling Enterprise 2.0.

Social Enterprise White Paper (PDF)

It’s the Network

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Over the past decade I’ve come to the conclusion that networks are changing everything in our lives. Dealing with networks is the big challenge for leaders, managers and knowledge workers of all types. Because we are all inter-networked, work is learning and learning is the work. We can no longer separate learning and working, and all attempts to do so are fraught with problems. Instructional content developed earlier is quickly out of date. Those who should be attending formal training are too busy working, so they slowly lose their skills and currency and become out of date. This is usually realized just after being downsized and forced to look for new work.

Acceptance of life in perpetual Beta is a necessary attitude to survive and thrive in our networked society. As Jay Cross wrote here several years ago,

No human life goes beyond beta; life is a perpetual experiment and reshaping. Speaking for myself, I recognize that I still have a lot of bugs.

What’s beta and what’s not is a state of mind. Many people try to go into release prematurely: they put defective product on the market. (By productizing people, I mean locking in on attitudes, structure, opinions, etc.: becoming rigid.)

Life as beta is uplifting. You have the opportunity to streamline things, to resond to feedback, to become a killer app.

Lots of alphas are claiming beta status now. They debut on life’s big stage long before they’re prepared to play the part.

As Jay says, Beta is not Alpha. You actually have to do something concrete but you also have to be ready to let it go.

I am seeing a great need for senior managers to get some control over their work in an increasingly complex business environment. Paradoxically, they can gain control by giving up control:

Acceptance of life in perpetual Beta is the first step.

Developing personal strategies for sense-making, such as PKM, is the next step.

Sharing knowledge and participating in professional networks then becomes a necessity for work.

Being willing to create and test emergent practices is next.

Finally, we need to build new structures, like wirearchy, for how we work and learn together.

Networks and complexity

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[Dilbert cartoon removed]

Jane Hart alerted me to this cartoon, which is already being spread throughout the Net.

My first thoughts on reading this, after I laughed, are that social media are not about the latest web technologies and that they are of importance to more than just the marketing department. A cultural change is required in the way we organize our work because of two related factors: Networks & Complexity.

Wirearchy may be a neologism, but I’ve found it to be a most descriptive term for discussing what happens when you connect everyone via electronic networks. To paraphrase Jon Husband:

It is generally accepted that we live and work in an increasingly ‘wired’ world.

There are emerging patterns and dynamics related to interconnected people and interlinked information flows, which are bypassing established traditional structures and services.

The cynefin model shows that emergent practices are needed in order to manage in complex environments and novel practices are necessary for chaotic ones. Most of what we consider standard work today is being outsourced and automated. We are facing more complexity and chaos in our work because of our interconnectedness.

Living and working in non-hierarchical networks is our challenge this century. The effective use of social media, to learn from and with others, is essential for individuals and organizations to be productive in this networked age. That is why social learning is of great interest to me as a workplace learning professional and I’ve come to the realization that work is learning and learning is the work.  Social learning is getting things done in networks.

There is little doubt that industrial management and all that it has created (chain of command, human resources, line & staff, production, etc.) are the wrong models for the emerging, networked workplace. This is a workplace with increasing numbers of free-agents and permanent employees who don’t have a job for life, especially as the average lifespan of corporations decreases while those of workers increases. Many workers, including white collar ones, can’t afford to retire. Existing management models and support functions were developed to keep things stable and ensure that people conformed to corporate culture. There is much less time to do that as workplace culture evolves with society, markets and technology.

Mark Federman called this world, ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate, and that was five years ago.

JOB is a four-letter word

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A while back I wrote on the age of dissonance and how our way of structuring work, particularly the job, was inadequate for the networked, creative economy:

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.

I’ve been thinking about jobs a bit more recently as I’ve taken a term position at a university and my job is knowledge transfer or more specifically, the commercialization of research. I’m responsible for certain projects: communications on research issues, partnership opportunities with industry, commercialization of research, patents, intellectual property protection, and technology disclosures.

But, like most people, I am more than my job description. As most readers know, I am fairly well-versed in organizational development, knowledge management, and educational technologies, which should be areas of interest in a university. However, I can’t get involved in activities related to these areas because that’s not my job.

Here’s the organizational common wisdom: I’m not faculty, therefore I can’t be involved in teaching. I don’t work in computing services therefore I can’t touch IT. I’m not in HR so I can’t help with organizational development. Stick to your knitting, is the implied message of departmental responsibilities and hierarchies. If I see an opportunity outside my job description there are few things I can do about it. I can initiate some collegial conversations, if I have the opportunity, but I’m not invited to the table.

This is not a ‘woe is me’ story. I accepted this contract already knowing the organization and what I would be able to do. I have learned something of course.

My ongoing recommendations on how the workplace must change, as written on this blog, have just been augmented by another, more personal, question: What happens to a person’s entrepreneurial and creative spirit after they repeatedly see that they can’t do anything with it? If you’re told often enough that it’s not your job, you will start saying, sorry, but that’s not my job.

I think that the construct of the job, with its defined skills, effort, responsibilities, and working conditions, is a key limiting organizational factor for the creative economy, including Enterprise 2.0. Jon Husband has written extensively on work redesign and how the Taylorist assumptions of division of labour and packaging of tasks are just plain wrong:

Just as important is the underlying assumption of these methods about the fundamental nature of knowledge. It assumes knowledge and its acquisition, development and use proceeds slowly and carefully and is based on the official taxonomy of knowledge, a vertical arrangement of information and skills that are derived from the official institutions of our society (Jane Jacobs has a fair bit to say about this in Chapter 3 titled Credentialing vs. Educating in her last book Dark Age Ahead, as do others like John Taylor Gatto and Alfie Kohn, and as does David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous – the power of digital disorder).

I can relate to Jon’s description of a typical organization here:

“Any of us familiar with medium to large sized organizations can begin to see, I believe, that the fundamental Taylorist assumption that knowledge is structured vertically and put to use in siloed pyramidic structures and cascaded down to the execution level must be straining at the seams in the increasingly highly-connected social networks in which many people work today.”

Our article on the evolving social organization addresses some methods to promote creativity through social learning and my post on organizational change, unpacked gives more details.  However, the corMucha-job-cigarette papers-1898e assumption of the job, that can be ‘filled’ [just like the minds of learners], is what needs to change. This is the constraining concept. It presumes common skills and the mechanistic view that workers can be replaced without disruption.

But who could replace Van Gogh, Picasso, or even Steve Jobs? As complex work requires more creativity, confining our complex individual creativity within the bounds of a mere job description is debilitating. Structured jobs can suck individual creativity and create an organizational framework that discourages entrepreneurial zeal. It’s time for a serious redesign of how we structure work.

 

Organizational change, unpacked

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In the evolving social organization, I included a table with several descriptive terms, which Amanda Fenton suggested needs to be “unpacked”.

Simplicity

basic hierarchy

 Complication

bureaucracy

 Complexity

wirearchy
Organizational Theory
 Knowledge-Based View Learning Organization Value Networks
Attractors
 Stakeholders (vision) Shareholders (wealth) Clients (service)
Growth Model
 Internal Mergers & Acquisitions Ecosystem
Knowledge Acquisition
 Formal Training Performance Support Social
Knowledge Capitalization
 Best Practices Good Practices Emergent Practices

I’ve linked the sections to my posts that describe some of these terms in more detail [Feel free to suggest better resources/links for the sections I’ve missed].

Many organizations today are based on complicated models but they should be developing ways of dealing with a more complex, networked business environment. Simplifying to a basic hierarchy won’t help, though there are many simple solutions sold as answers to our complicated organizations. Remember the wildly popular who moved my cheese series? Well, now you can use carrots instead of cheese. Works for vegans I guess, but simple answers for complex issues don’t work.

Real solutions require people to do some hard work.

Let’s look at Knowledge Acquisition. Formal training is easy to task out or outsource and then assume that everything has been taken care of. The training gets done and the organization can account for it. Managers can say, “my people got their training”. Courts can be assured that workers have been trained, so the company has met its responsibilities.

Even performance support tools can be developed centrally, by external consultants or an internal team. The resulting tools are then sent throughout the organization to be used at work. The organization can say, “they have the tools”. For example, all bank officers can use the same mortgage calculator, so risk is managed fairly easily once the system is in place. The system is under control.

However, social knowledge acquisition in the organization is a different case. It requires a very different approach. First of all, centralized control won’t work. Secondly, individuals will become responsible for their learning and their actions. This requires trust. Control systems become counter-productive. There is no easy way to move an organization into this wirearchical space. It requires some serious thinking about how things get done. It means giving up control. It means organizational life in perpetual Beta, and that can be a scary thought. But I’m convinced that it’s worth doing.

Image by Cynthia Kurtz

The Evolving Social Organization

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Co-author: Thierry deBaillon – @tdebaillon

Simplicity and the Enterprise

Most companies start simple, with a few people gathering together around an idea. For small companies, decision-making, task assignments and direct interaction with clients are rather straightforward.  With growth, the simplicity ends. As every entrepreneur knows, the initial growth of a company is often synonymous with efficiency drops and decreases in profits, since administrative tasks, indirect structural costs and middle-term forecasts add financial and human pressure on early growth.

Overcoming these obstacles is one of the main burdens of start-ups and young businesses. Innovation abounds in the early stages and knowledge capitalization is aided by a common vision of the business. Further growth equates to sustainable efficiencies and market share increases. For decades, organizational growth has been viewed as a positive development, but it has come at a cost.

Complication: the industrial disease

As organizations grow, the original simplicity gets harder to maintain. Current management wisdom – based on Robin Dunbar’s research; the size of military units through history; and the work of management experts such as Tom Peters – considers the ideal size of an organization to be around 150 people. Beyond this size, knowing everybody in person becomes impossible. Intermediate layers of power and delegation begin to develop above 150 people and companies then enter the realm of complication.

Most of today’s larger companies have a complicated structure. To enable growth and efficiencies, more processes are put in place. This is what management schools have been doing for over half a century.  To ensure reliable operations and risk mitigation, the core competencies of decision-making and innovation are moved to the periphery. The company’s vision, if there is one, is now supported at the board level but not the individual level. New layers of control and supervision continue to appear, silos are created, and knowledge acquisition is formalized in an attempt to gain efficiency through specialization.

As companies get even bigger, internal growth and innovation reach a tipping point, and companies rely on mergers and acquisitions to maintain the illusion of  growth. At some stage of complication, companies do not even create jobs anymore. In France, a study from INSEE showed that large organizations have a tendency to destroy internal jobs: by transferring jobs to subsidiaries, contractors and subcontractors. Large firms barely participate in job creation. Similar studies conducted in other countries show the same results. However, knowledge, and the acquisition of new knowledge, are still key factors for innovation and effectiveness. To compensate for its complicated processes, the enterprise attempts to shift to another paradigm, and tries to become a learning organization, putting significant effort into training.

Complexity and the new Enterprise

Today’s large, complicated organizations are now facing increasingly complex business environments that require agility in simultaneously learning and working. Typical strategies of optimizing existing business processes or cost reductions only marginally influence the organization’s effectiveness. Faster evolving markets challenge the organization’s ability to react to customer demand. Decision-making becomes paralyzed by process-based operations and chains of command and control; thereby decreasing agility. Training, as “the” solution to workplace learning needs, fails to deliver and then gets marginalized, often being the first department to have its budget cut.

Many organizations today are also facing significant demographic challenges. Baby boomers, once the lifeblood of business, are retiring, while Generation Y wants to communicate and interact in a completely different manner. There may be four generations in the modern workplace and each has its unique traits and demands. There is growing complexity both inside and outside the organization.

Organizations need to understand complexity, instead of simply increasing complication. This lack of understanding, as well as some existing, but minor, efficiency improvements in tweaking the old system, are the major barriers to adopting Enterprise 2.0 concepts and practices. Companies need to get a clearer view of the competitive advantages of Enterprise 2.0 before an organizational framework like wirearchy can co-exist with hierarchical structures and thinking.

Wirearchy: a dynamic two-flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results enabled by people and technology.

Here are some key organizational changes during the journey from simplicity to complexity:

Simplicity
 Complication
 Complexity
Organizational Theory
 Knowledge-Based View Learning Organization Value Networks
Attractors
 Stakeholders (vision) Shareholders (wealth) Clients (service)
Growth Model
 Internal Mergers & Acquisitions Ecosystem
Knowledge Acquisition
 Formal Training Performance Support Social
Knowledge Capitalization
 Best Practices Good Practices Emergent Practices

Let’s look at how social learning can support emergent practices in the enterprise:

Implementing Social Learning

Knowledge workers get things done by conversing with peers, customers and partners, as they solve the problems of the day. Learning from these social interactions is a key to business innovation. In a globally networked economy, based increasingly on intangible goods and services, constant innovation is necessary to stand out. Markets such as software, financial services, consulting and consumer goods have to continuously adapt their offers to keep up with changing demands and advances in technology.

Hyper-linked knowledge flows have made organizational walls permeable. Official channels are competing with an expanding number of informal communications. A collaborative enterprise is becoming  the optimal organization for such a networked economy, capitalizing on these expanding knowledge flows. To innovate, organizations need to collaborate internally and this is social. To participate in their markets, organizations, customers and suppliers need to understand each other and this too, is social. Social learning is how knowledge is created, internalized and shared. It is how knowledge work gets done.

In complex environments, learning is much more than just a matter of structured knowledge acquisition. However, that is all that training enables. Corporate training methods often consist of delivering content and perhaps providing drill and practice sometime prior to doing the task. There is often a gap between training and doing. Training alone cannot address the wide variety of informal learning needs of workers. Nor can it help to transfer the tacit knowledge on which many of us depend to do our jobs.

We know that informal learning happens all of the time but often the best answers or experts are not connected to the person with the problem. Social learning networks can address that issue by giving each worker a much larger group of people to help get work done.  Regularly publishing to our networks is how we can stay connected. Here is an approach to embed social learning into organization work flows. This is an iterative process that can be adapted to fit the context.

Listen & Create: Being open to self-education is the foundation of individual learning. Part of this is the development of habits of continuous sense-making by recording what we hear, read and observe; e.g. personal learning environments (PLE) & personal knowledge management (PKM).

Converse: Sharing is an act of learning and can be considered an individual’s responsibility for the greater social learning contract. Without sharing, there is no social learning. Through ongoing trusted conversations we can share tacit knowledge, even across organizational boundaries; e.g. social learning.

Co-create: Group performance enables the creation of new knowledge and is a source of innovation; e.g. collaborative work, customer experience.

Formalize & Share: Some informal knowledge can be made explicit and consolidated through the formalization and creation of new structured knowledge; e.g. taxonomies, document management, storytelling.

Enterprise social learning

Social learning consultant Jane Hart has created a comprehensive, and growing, list of social learning examples in the workplace. Companies listed here include British Telecom, Sun Microsystems, NASA, Nationwide Insurance, and SFR. The SFR case study, reported by Sue Weakes, shows how a younger workforce is demanding better access to social media.

French mobile phone company SFR implemented ActiveNetworker from Jobpartners to support its new social network. My SFR comprises a company blog, a central space for discussion, and the ability to build profiles that allow employees to share information on career progress, learning and development and aspirations. They can also join groups of interest … ActiveNetworker has been well received and SFR is averaging 80,000 visits per week from the 10,000 employees that are using it.

Dave Wilkins at Learn.com, describes the case at ACE Hardware in which the company set up a web-based social learning platform for its 4,600 independent hardware dealers to share and seek advice. They were able to look for new sales leads, find rarely used items through the community and share merchandising display strategies. This social learning community strategy resulted in a 500% return on investment in just six months.

Cristóbal Conde, CEO of SunGard, a software and IT services company, was recently interviewed in the New York Times. He discussed how he has flattened the company’s hierarchy as a way of dealing with the globalization of the company. One important social communication tool at SunGard is Yammer, a micro-blogging platform similar to Twitter but used internally. NYT: “What kind of things do you write on Yammer?”

I try to see a client every day, and because of my title I get to see more senior people. And so then they’ll tell me things — you know, what are their biggest problems, what are their biggest issues, what are their biggest bets. All this information is incredibly valuable. Now, what could I do with that? I’m not going to send that out in a broadcast voice mail to every employee. I’m not even going to write a long e-mail about it to every employee, because even that is almost too formal. But I can write five lines on Yammer, which is about all it takes.

A free flow of information is an incredible tool because I can tell people, “Look, this is one of our largest clients, and the C.E.O. just told me his top three priorities are X, Y and Z. Think about them.”

The Ford Motor Company has used social media for learning, beginning with SyncMyRide, and now integrating it as a way to connect customers and the company.

Ford’s intention is to consider how social media can inform the company as a whole, rather than judging its efforts by the criteria of one department and those “holistic” lessons filter up and down through the company, says Monty [head of social media]y. That includes the company’s executive board and goes as far as putting up senior execs for online Q&As through Twitter and on the corporate Facebook page. “There is a healthy respect for [social media] and how we participate in it. Two-way dialogue is healthy for a company like Ford, and we’ve grown as a result of having participated in it,” says Farley [Chief Communications Officer]. At some point, as executives grow in seniority, they tend to become “isolated from reality,” adds Monty. Making the Ford board aware of and engaged with social conversations counters that isolation. “When [CEO Alan Mulally] says we are making the cars people want, well, how do we know unless we are listening?” asks Monty.

A business imperative

Deloitte’s Shift Index of 2009 highlights the challenges facing several industries today, that of declining return on assets and the need for innovation. One recommendation is to enable knowledge flows, a key benefit of social learning:

Given the growing importance of knowledge flows, perhaps the most powerful form of innovation in this context may be institutional innovation –re-thinking roles and relationships across institutions to better enable them to create and participate in knowledge flows.

One of the great things about web social media is that they are for the most part free. Experimentation does not require an enterprise-wide software deployment strategy at the onset. As Seth Godin, marketing and branding expert, says:

You guessed it: new media is largely free. So why teach it in school as if it were a scary theory? Why encourage people to be afraid? Just do it. Build your own platform. Appear in the places that seem productive or interesting or challenging or fun. Experiment quietly, figure out what works, do it more. No need to be a dilettante, and certainly you shouldn’t spread yourself too thin or quit at the first sign of failure… but… quit waiting for the right answer.

Our social networks have a greater influence on us than we think. Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler explain the latest research in great detail in the book, Connected: The surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives (Little-Brown, 2009). Robin Hanson shows that we seldom change our behaviour based solely on getting new information. “People don’t believe something works until they’ve seen it work in something pretty close to their situation. A media story about something far away just doesn’t say much.” Again, social learning is about getting things done in networks.

Getting started

According to Rebecca Ferguson at The Open University, social learning can take place when people:

  • clarify their intention – learning rather than browsing
  • ground their learning – by defining their question or problem
  • engage in focused conversations – increasing their understanding of the available resources.

Following the process explained earlier:

Listen: The first step in social learning is paying attention and watching what others are doing. Finding trusted sources of information is very important. Hearing what others are doing and connecting to them with social media such as Twitter or blogs increases the chances of accidental and serendipitous learning. For example, one can follow conversations on Twitter by searching for “hashtags”. Typing “#PKM” shows current conversations on personal knowledge management.

Converse: By engaging in conversations and providing valuable information to others one becomes part of professional networks. Many experts are willing to help those new to the field but newcomers first must say what they don’t know.

Co-create: Over time one can engage more in co-operative activities, such as adding comments to a blog post or extending the thought in an article or discussion thread. For many people used to traditional work, working transparently in the open takes some time to get to used to.

Formalize & Share: Writing professional journals or lessons learnt can ingrain the important process of formalizing aspects of social learning. Sharing with others, internally or externally, over time becomes part of a normal daily work flow.

As our work environments become more complex due to the speed of information transmission via ubiquitous networks, we need to adopt more flexible and less mechanistic processes to get work done. Workers have many more connections, to information and people, than ever before. But the ability to deal with complexity lies in our minds, not our artificial organizational structures. In order to free our minds for complex work, we need to simplify our organizational structures. According to the authors of Getting to Maybe, in complex environments:

  • Rigid protocols are counter-productive
  • There is an uncertainty of outcomes in much of our work
  • We cannot separate parts from the whole
  • Success is not a fixed address

This is the basis of the evolving social organization.

Some additional thoughts on social learning

Learning Executives Discuss Social Learning at ASTD 2009 (video):

Mike McDermott (T Rowe Price): “I think the impact of social learning will dramatically increase in the future, in a number of ways, both internally with our associates and externally with our clients.”

Karie Willyerd (Sun Microsystems): “we see the death of newspapers … the same thing is going to happen with learning functions and training materials … if we don’t learn how to publish with social media … through social learning.”

Walt McFarland (Booz Allen Hamilton): “The environment is going to demand it [social learning]. The problems are just tougher and they’re too big for any one consultant or any consulting team”

Dave Pollard on bridging generational differences in the workplace:

Our job, as people who appreciate the value and perspective of both generations, and value diversity, is what Nancy White calls “building bridges” — translating Gen Y’s ideas and requests into language “the man” can understand (value creation and ROI), and translating the boss’ and IT’s restrictions into language that Gen Y’ers can understand (the risk of catastrophic financial loss, loss of business reputation, and insolvency). The best way to build these bridges is by telling stories — of history, of unexpected and astonishing success, and of unintended consequences.

Tony Karrer on measurement:

What’s interesting to me is that with eLearning 2.0 or social learning or more specifically with using social tools to do things like have interesting conversations – what I want to measure is really not at all what is learned. I want to measure whether the results produced are better. I am not sure I know what they should have learned at all.

PKM Workshop – Toronto 13 November 2010

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Update: This course was cancelled and is re-scheduled for 1 April 2011. If interested, please contact the iSchool and let them know. I am also available for private workshops.

I’m offering a one-day course at the iSchool Institute (University of Toronto).

“In the period ahead of us, more important than advances in computer design will be the advances we can make in our understanding of human information processing – of thinking, problem solving, and decision making…”
Herbert Simon, Economics Nobel-prize winner (1968)

PKM is an individual, disciplined process by which we make sense of information, observations and ideas. In the past it may have been keeping a journal, writing letters or having conversations. These are still valid, but with digital media we can add context by categorizing, commenting or even remixing it. We can also store digital media for easy retrieval.

The Web has given us more ways to connect with others in our learning but many people only see the information overload aspect of our digital society. Engaging others can actually make it easier to learn and not become overwhelmed. Effective networked learning is the difference between surfing the waves or being drowned by them.

Learning Objectives:

At the end of the course, students will be able to:

* Understand the concepts and models underlying PKM
* Select Web tools for critical thinking
* Determine PKM methods and processes that will work in their own context
* Begin to use some of the web tools that support PKM

PKM includes:

Personal Directed Learning – how individuals can use social media for their own (self-directed) personal or professional learning; and
Accidental & Serendipitous Learning – how individuals, by using social media, can learn without consciously realising it (aka incidental or random learning).

Prerequisite:
A current e-mail account
Basic understanding of how the Web works

Target Audience:
Knowledge workers, or anyone who wants to improve their learning skills using Web tools

PLC3033-10F1
Sat. 13 Nov 2010
1 day (6 hours) – 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM
Instructor: Harold Jarche
Fee: $250.00 ($250.00 U.S.)

Register

Trust

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A while back, Charles Green responded to my post about the knowledge economy being a trust economy:

Your title captures an important insight; the knowledge economy allows significant distribution of nodes of knowledge, means of production, etc. To get the value of that, resources have to be distributed. If people can’t figure out how to trust other people, all that value goes unachieved. Or, more likely, it accrues to other organizations or networks who HAVE figured out how to trust each other.

I’ve referred several times to articles at the Trusted Advisor because trust is such an important factor in knowledge work as knowledge and innovation cannot be effectively coerced from workers.

Here’s Charles on Measuring and Managing:

If you can measure it, you can manage it; if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it; if you can’t manage it, it’s because you can’t measure it; and if you managed it, it’s because you measured it.

Every one of those statements is wrong. But business eats it up. And it’s easy to see why …

The ubiquity of measurement inexorably leads people to mistake the measures themselves for the things they were intended to measure.

And a post on measuring ROI for soft skills training [because we don’t trust workers] and the perversion of individual measurement:

Most soft skills deal with our relationships to others. The drive to individually behavioralize, then metricize, has the effect of killing relationships—an ironic outcome for relationship-targeting training.

In the learning & development business there is much focus on compliance training, especially since regulatory compliance accounts for a significant amount of learning content development and learning management technology sales. However, there are few sales pitches that say, go ahead, let your employees decide what’s best for them. Trust, it seems, doesn’t sell stuff. If you trust workers to manage their learning, you don’t need an LMS. If you trust them to get things done, you don’t need a tracking system. If you trust them to learn you don’t need as much pre-programmed training because they will find what’s best. If you trust them to be self-directed or group-directed learners they would have a say in their own training budget and I doubt they would vote to buy an LMS.

There is little doubt that organizational structures need to change and that management models need to adapt to deal with increasing complexity. Shifting from a hierarchy to a wirearchy requires a foundation of shared information, knowledge, power and trust. Trust shifts not only how an organization works but also many of traditional relationships with customers and suppliers. If all businesses trusted employees, how many training companies would go out of business?

The Learning Layer – Review

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learning layer cover

The Learning Layer : Building the next level of intellect in your organization, begins with some solid insights on how learning is the key to performing in the networked workplace. Learning has been the traditional realm of HR while most systems are supported by IT. This means that HR supports the people who produce the tacit knowledge while IT supports the systems that store the explicit knowledge. Steve Flinn, the author, uses the analogy of knowledge as stock and learning as flow. An organization’s intellectual capital is a factor of both, which “makes it really clear just how inseparable the management of a business’s knowledge is from the learning processes”.

The proliferation of current web technologies now presents us with two major opportunities:

“The knowledge and insights within the heads of people can be leveraged without overtly taking actions to make it so. And that systems can actually learn, and more specifically, learn from latent intellectual capital.”

Previous legacy IT systems used hierarchical structures, making them unsuitable for real learning applications, so “if we want an integrated organization of people and systems that effectively learns, we should start with a focus on a network-based architecture that has the capacity to reshape itself over time and that is layered over what came before, because that’s how the brain works.”

Flinn goes on to explain that Web 2.0 technologies have created “socially aware” systems that can identify some behaviour patterns between systems and users, giving us various levels of adaptation. Amazon.com is the best known commercial application of this, with its product recommendations. Very soon, adaptive recommendations in work systems will become ubiquitous, providing some extent of contextual and personalized learning on demand. The learning layer is an amalgamation of socially aware, adaptive systems with social networks [uniting KM and SoMe]. The social network is the larger network of connected people with smaller workflow processes inside:

“Because the workflow is woven right into the learning layer itself, it also offers the opportunity for ‘recombinant’ processes, where process sections can be cleaved off and recombined to form new, synthetic processes. This is the ultimate in flexibility and efficiency, and can serve to make the benefits of processes realizable in even the most complex and fluid of work settings. Think of it as basically the mass customization of business processes.”

Flinn also shows how learning value is created, can be measured and then assessed against project value, providing a clearer picture of the value of intellectual capital. He further recommends changes in how we develop ideas for innovation and suggests reversing the traditional idea funnel. Then Flinn takes these ideas and compares them against the three business archetypes: Product Innovator, Relationship Owner & Supply Network Architect.

The first three parts of the book are full of good ideas, insight, and analysis, but Part 4 is a bit of a letdown. Implementing the Learning Layer, a mere six pages, doesn’t tell you much. However, there is a lot in the previous sections for guidance if you already understand processes and technologies from IT, HR, OD and  social media. If not, you could engage ManyWorlds for consulting and then implement on their Epiture platform.

In looking at the specifications for Epiture (aka “the learning layer”) the company describes it as a Web 3.0 system that includes enterprise level web site management; document management;  social networking and tagging & ontologies. Even without a full product comparison, I would say that several other platforms, including open source, like Drupal can do much of this.

The key difficulty I see in the implementation of a learning layer is getting people to use it. As a layer, it is not integrated into the work tools. Even if socially aware systems collect and analyze data and feed these into the learning layer, the layer has to be used by people. Perhaps it can be effective if only a portion of the work force is involved in the active sharing of tacit knowledge through social networking. While I agree in principle with the learning layer, I’d have to see it in action and understand how the organization got there. I have little doubt in the potential of the learning layer but I’m not sure if it will revolutionize organizational learning.

In spite of my comments in the paragraph above, I would strongly recommend this book. Just the analysis on learning in networks is worth it. Much of what is recommended here reinforces 1) the wirearchy framework and 2) PKM development. Some form of learning layer could become the means by which wirearchies work and also use the cumulative results of individuals and their personal – knowledge/learning – management/sharing – systems/environments.

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