Wirearchy

Wirearchy

Practice to be best

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We may think we should adopt best practices, but to be really effective and innovative we need to practice to be best.

First, we have to do the hard thinking  about how to do things better. Jay Deragon talks about how important it is to think about what we do and not just emulate others:

Social Doo Doo’s are those that practice and copy, what others do expecting to get the same or better results. Social Doo Doo’s are a dime a dozen and the market seems to think hiring the Doo Doo’s will help their business do something different. Doing something different and getting more than you’ve gotten in the past  requires you to know how to think which isn’t what others are doing.

Gaining  new knowledge or creating new knowledge and knowing what to do with it is more productive than doing what others do. To gain or create new knowledge requires thinking which is a lot deeper than doing.

Another example of advancing practice in a field is provided in The New Yorker’s The Bell Curve: What happens when patients find out how good their doctors really are? In this article, a doctor explains how radically new thinking saved the life of a fire fighter but his mates refused to try something different and they perished.

As Berwick explained, the organization had unravelled. The men had lost their ability to think coherently, to act together, to recognize that a lifesaving idea might be possible. This is what happens to all flawed organizations in a disaster, and, he argued, that’s what is happening in modern health care. To fix medicine, Berwick maintained, we need to do two things: measure ourselves and be more open about what we are doing. This meant routinely comparing the performance of doctors and hospitals, looking at everything from complication rates to how often a drug ordered for a patient is delivered correctly and on time. And, he insisted, hospitals should give patients total access to the information. “ ‘No secrets’ is the new rule in my escape fire,” he said. He argued that openness would drive improvement, if simply through embarrassment. It would make it clear that the well-being and convenience of patients, not doctors, were paramount. It would also serve a fundamental moral good, because people should be able to learn about anything that affects their lives.

Imitating what others do is not the way to make progress, or as Marshall McLuhan said,  “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” Individuals and organizations need to chart their own courses but “Best Practice” thinking is still widespread.  I have found that decision-makers in organizations can be too lazy to extrapolate and figure out how to apply practices in their own context. They want easy, clear answers and hence have the tendency to hire cookie-cutter solutions from big name consultancies. But there are no easy answers. As my colleague Jon Husband says of his wirearchy framework, it enables the mass customization of business, and that is what we need to replace best practices. Individuals and organizations continuously practicing to be best, on a large scale.

No technology or process improvement will save an unraveling industry or organization. What is needed is better thinking and learning while practicing to be the best. This starts with transparency in sharing our knowledge and doing our work.

Knowledge sharing, one at a time

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“Every amateur epistemologist knows that knowledge cannot be managed. Education has always assumed that knowledge can be transferred and that we can carefully control the process through education. That is a grand illusion.” David Jonassen

While knowledge cannot be managed [at an organizational level*], we can work at managing our own knowledge. That’s what PKM is all about. Individually we can manage information flows, make sense of them and share with others, especially people with similar interests or common goals. Enterprise “knowledge management” initiatives have not been proven to work very well and may even be irredeemably corrupted. Dave Pollard’s experience with knowledge management shows how important it is to personalize our sense-making and how futile standardized methods and practices can be:

So my conclusion this time around was that the centralized stuff we spent so much time and money maintaining was simply not very useful to most practitioners. The practitioners I talked to about PPI [Personal Productivity Improvement] said they would love to participate in PPI coaching, provided it was focused on the content on their own desktops and hard drives, and not the stuff in the central repositories.

Luis Suarez prefers the term knowledge sharing to knowledge management. If this helps us move away from central digital information repositories (Knowledge Management, Document Management, Learning Content Management Systems, Content Management Systems, etc.) then I’m all for it.  I’m not advocating tearing down any existing IT infrastructure (yet); but we need to enable a parallel system that can handle the distributed nature of work in addressing complex problems, namely weaker central control and better distributed communications and decision-making.

The best first step in getting work done is to help each worker develop a PKM process, with an emphasis on personal. As each person seeks information, makes sense of it through reflection and articulation, and then shares it through conversation, a distributed knowledge base is created. It’s messier and looser than traditional KM, but it’s also more robust. This is what many of us already do. If you take all the published resources of my colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance you will see a loosely connected knowledge base of thousands of assets. They can be found, sometimes by searching and frequently by asking the person who created them. We each use different systems and connect with the open protocols of the web, like RSS, hyperlinks, OPML, etc.

The way to implement organizational knowledge sharing is already visible on the edges of the workplace. Many bloggers are doing it and have been for years. All it takes is getting everyone to do some form of PKM, on their own terms. Once most everyone is seeking, sensing and especially sharing, it’s a relatively easy task to start harvesting and analyzing our collective knowledge. For instance, take what Tony Karrer has done with eLearningLearning and expand this to include social bookmarks and synthesized micro-sharing, like my weekly Friday’s Finds on Twitter.

The real value of PKM is when enough people in an organization do it and create a critical mass of diverse conversations. PKM is our part of a social learning contract that makes us better off individually and collectively. For workers to be engaged over the long term, PKM must remain personal, and the organization must use a gentle hand at all times.

Using open Web systems ensures that not only will the organization get access to valuable information flows, but workers will be able take their piece of it if they leave. A little give and take will go a long way. Allowing the tools to be portable will ensure commitment and engagement without any coercive action on the part of the organization.

The collective sharing of PKM in the enterprise has the potential to create a dynamic knowledge base for idea management that can drive innovation.

* added to give clarification, in case of any confusion

Managing in Complexity

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Formal training just won’t cut it any more as the primary means by which we prepare and adapt in order to get work done. Training isn’t dead, it’s just not enough, and cannot be the only tool in the box.

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As Jay Cross stated in a recent interview:

Formal learning can be somewhat effective when things don’t change much and the world is predictable …

Today’s world is the opposite in every way imaginable …

Things are changing amazingly fast …

There’s so much to learn …

Today’s work is all about dealing with novel situations …

This image, from Cynthia Kurtz’s post, Confluence, clearly shows the challenge we face in our networked organizations competing and collaborating in complex adaptive systems.

The challenge is getting organizations that are used to dealing with the Known & Knowable to be able to manage in Complex environments and even Chaotic ones from time to time. As can be seen in Kurtz’s graphic, that means weaker central control which is, of course, scary for traditional management. This is not a training problem but rather a management issue. How can you be less directive and enable distributed work, and therefore distributed (and undirected) learning? Actually there are historical examples, including guerrilla groups; religious movements; and social organizations. We need to look back as well as into the future. There are lessons and examples that can help us once we cast off some of our industrial management assumptions.

Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911) inform many of our current practices but there are other models and frameworks available. The first step is seeing that we have a problem and our current models are inadequate. This is a conversation that all business managers and organizational leaders need to have. We should be ready to have many informed conversations about managing in complexity and put forward some plausible options. For further reading:

General framework: Wirearchy

Background & Models: Gary Hamel: Future of Management; Thomas Malone: The Future of Work; Andrew McAfee: Enterprise 2.0

Ideas & Methods: Working Smarter Fieldbook; State of Learning in the Workplace

More conversations: The Smart Work Company; Internet Time Alliance blog;

Working Smarter 2010

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The Working Smarter Fieldbook (June 2010 version) is now out. This is a collaborative effort by all of us at the Internet Time Alliance and was spearheaded by Jay Cross. Our intention is get the conversation focused on what’s important for business, including the training & learning department – working smarter. Learning is just a means and not the end, but this perspective has somehow been lost along the way in many organizations over the past decades.

A toolbox
Years ago, Stewart Brand published The Whole Earth Catalog to provide “access to tools.” It listed all manner of interesting and oddball stuff, from windmill kits to hiking sox to books like Vibration Cooking. The Catalog didn’t tell readers how to live their lives; it merely described things that might help them to do their own thing. Feedback and articles submitted by readers made each edition better than its predecessor.
The Working Smarter Fieldbook follows the tradition of The Whole Earth Catalog. Harold, Jane, Clark, Charles, Jon, and Jay provide access to the tips, tricks, frameworks, and resources that we’ve used to help organizations work smarter. Our goal is to put together an irresistible package of advice.

Role Shift

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The last time I looked at roles in education I was inspired by Anil Mammen to create a table based on his definitions. I think some of the descriptions can be used in a prescriptive way of getting out of our industrial, hierarchical mindset and moving to an enterprise 2.0 or wirearchical culture. In networks, learning is the work, so a critical part of this culture shift is viewing learning as quite different from traditional training. The objective is to become a wirearchy:

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

Though incremental change may not always work, it might be easier for established organizations to move to a transition zone in getting there:

Hierarchical Getting There Wirearchical
Training – Learning & Development – Organizational Development – HR
Representative of the establishment. Guide Peer in learning.
Responsible for imparting approved knowledge. Knows what to teach, when & how. Continuously learn & unlearn.
Omit & modify as necessary.

Collude with the establishment.

 Knowledgeable on a given subject.

Interpreter of information.

 Provocateur

Connector

Workers – Learners – Employees – Associates
Powerless receiver of knowledge. Empowered to find knowledge. Critical Thinker.

Democratization of knowledge.
Studies out of fear of failure, reprisal, or displacement. Closing of teacher-learner divide.
 Decentralization of authority.
Selfish motive to learn – job, money, fame, power, desire to appear smart. Opportunities for self-directed learners. Seeker of truth.

Engaged professional-amateur.

Arete* [via Stephen Downes]

* Arete in ancient Greek culture was courage and strength in the face of adversity and it was to what all people aspired.

Let’s talk about work

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Work today (and tomorrow) requires more creativity and less formulaic intelligence and it also requires less of “us”. That’s less of our dedicated, full-time attention, with contract work becoming the new normal:

Littler Mendelson, one of the largest employment law firms in the country, predicted in a report last year titled “The Emerging New Workforce” that 50 percent of new jobs that emerge after the recession will be contingent positions, and as a result “as high as 35 percent of the work force will be made up of temporary workers, contractors or other project-based labor.”

Full-time work has not been the ticket to the good life for several decades:

The prolonged period of economic prosperity that Canada has enjoyed resulted in a 72-per-cent increase in economic output between 1975 and 2005, growth that has continued since, it [the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives] noted.

The benefits of the growth, however, have not been reflected in workers’ paycheques, it added. “Canadians’ average real wages, which are wages adjusted for inflation, have not increased in more than 30 years.”

In a networked, knowledge-based economy where initiative, creativity and passion trump intellect, diligence and obedience; being “at” work 8 hours a day makes little sense. The Internet makes “time at work”, an antiquated notion. It also makes many of our traditional management and personnel policies irrelevant. The recession has only amplified this trend.

What can we do?

Most intelligent people know that there is no such thing as a job for life. Corporations have shown that loyalty to the enterprise does not work both ways. Organization should look at how they can structure to take advantage of these workplace changes. The first part is to stop thinking like a hierarchy, with titles and reporting relationships, and start framing the enterprise in terms of networks. Mapping value networks is a start, as is talking about social networks and supporting them through the use of social media. If you look at work differently and talk about it differently, then new conversations and attitudes will result.

Here are some ideas, for starters:

Abolish the organization chart and replace it with a network diagram.

Move away from counting hours, to a results oriented work environment

Encourage outside work that doesn’t directly interfere with paid work, as it will strengthen the network

Provide options for workers to come and go and give them ways to stay connected when they’re not employed. Build an ecosystem, not a monolith.

Formalized informal learning: a blend we don’t need

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Telling people that we can “formalize informal learning” is a not so subtle way of saying, “it’s OK, you don’t have to make any fundamental changes to the way you’ve been been doing training & development for the past half century”.

I asked the question in February’s eCollab Blog Carnival, with tongue very close to my cheek, because I knew it would stimulate discussion on the role of informal learning in workplace performance. I never thought anyone would seriously adopt it, but on viewing Jay Cross’s slides yesterday, it seems many have.

Here is an excerpt from an interview I did with Jay on the subject:

When asked if we should try to formalize informal learning, Jay responded by saying that it’s the wrong question. It would be like asking if we should “informalize” formal training. A key understanding that Jay wants to get across to everyone in the workplace learning arena is that it’s not an either/or proposition, but rather how much informal and how much formal learning should we support and who is determining what’s to be done. All learning is a bit of both. His promotion of informal learning is not to replace formal training but to open up the possibilities of supporting the other 80% of learning that has been ignored for far too long.

Two core themes in supporting informal learning are control and trust. Managers and supervisors need to give up some control and organizations must learn to trust their people, says Jay. Embracing, encouraging and supporting informal learning is part of a greater workplace cultural change.

Aye, there’s the rub – our organizations actually need to change.

We need to change from this:

To this:

This kind of change is not just adding another “blend” to the training bar-mix. It is a fundamental change required to move from a command & control pyramid to a network. It means a very different training department, if it’s even called that any more, as well as a new framework for informal, social learning in the enterprise. The required role for supporting workers is connecting, communicating & collaborating.

Jim McGee summed up the difference in yesterday’s conversation on a world without KM, the “best argument for Social Networks over Knowledge Management is shift in perspective from static content to dynamic interaction“.

It’s the same for training. Informal learning is dynamic and social (on the fly, just-in-time, self-directed, group-directed, serendipitous) while formal training is static (designed, directed, evaluated). What about a world without ISD (instructional systems design)? The best argument favouring informal learning over formal training is a shift in perspective from static content to dynamic interaction. It also means a loss of control for training departments everywhere. Tough.

Don’t try to formalize informal learning. Just help people do their jobs.

Here’s some final advice from @mneff during yesterday’s KM conversation: “Focus on connection & collaboration. The management of assets is mostly obsolete by the time it is stored.”

The collapse of complicated business models

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Clay Shirky, in the collapse of complex business models, notes:

Bureaucracies temporarily reverse the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.

The premise of his article is that successful organizations and industries become more complex over time and are unable to embrace new ways of doing things, which at the onset are much simpler. He discusses the complex television industry and how it cannot produce simple, and low cost, fare for the web.

I’m not sure if complexity is the issue. I see it more as complication. Companies and industries start out as relatively simple operations and then become more complicated. Complicated systems can be analyzed, and we can tell how things work. Modern organizations are not complex, they are merely complicated. A complex organization could not be managed.

The real problem is on the outside, not the inside, of the typical complicated organization. The outside environment has become complex and the complicated organization lacks the ability to deal with it. Systems like the Neilson ratings don’t give us the kind of information we need to make decisions on programming. The media landscape is too fragmented to completely analyze.

The Cynefin framework describes the complicated & complex domains as:

  • Complicated, in which the relationship between cause and effect requires analysis or some other form of investigation and/or the application of expert knowledge, the approach is to Sense – Analyze – Respond and we can apply good practice.
  • 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.

The typical large modern organization tends to thoroughly assess a situation before acting, assuming it can be analyzed. This does not work in complex environments where we need to first do something and then see what happens. We see this with Beta releases of web services, which adapt as they are used by more people. many web companies understand this.

I don’t see simplicity as the solution to dealing with complex environments. A new organizational structure is required that is 1) based on simple units but is 2) connected as a network that is much more complex than any hierarchical organization could ever be. This type of organization will be too complex to manage directly. It will self-manage and adapt. The best work structures to deal with complexity will be complex networks, and likely some mix of wirearchical, chaordic, democratic, etc.

Knowledge work revisited

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In knowledge work (2004) I commented on how Lilia Efimova described the main uses of blogs for knowledge work: personal knowledge repositories, learning journals, or networking instruments.

Another point in Lilia’s paper is that knowledge work is “discretionary behavior”, in that knowledge workers have to be motivated to do knowledge work. Many companies are tryng to find ways to motivate their knowledge workers. This makes me wonder about Peter Drucker’s comment that the corporation as we know it won’t be around in the next 25 years (Managing in the Next Society, 2002). Perhaps the actual structure of work, especially the Corporation itself, is an obstacle to knowledge work. Instead of tweaking the mechanisms of the corporation, through job redesign or cultural initiatives, we should be re-examining the basic structure of the corporation. It is an industrial age creation, designed to maximize physical capital and may not be optimal for maximizing “knowledge capital”.

Yesterday, Jack Vinson asked, Is the term Knowledge Worker no longer useful?:

When Drucker coined the term and others borrowed it, I don’t think the idea was differentiation so much as identification.  Traditional “work” was the physical labor variety.  As management ideas grew into the information age, they wanted ways to categorize (and measure) other workers within the organization.  Knowledge work seemed a good way to describe what a larger and larger portion of the working population were doing.

The challenge for our society, our economy and all organizations will be to ensure that most, if not all, workers are knowledge workers. If not, we may not have a functioning society because simple, mechanical work will continue to be automated and merely complicated work will be outsourced to the cheapest labour market. The only work of value that is left in the developed world is complex work that requires passion, creativity and initiative.

As long as there remains a difference between workers and knowledge workers, the latter term is useful in reminding us how far we have yet to go.