Wirearchy

Wirearchy

Critical thinking in the organization

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Even the mainstream training field is realizing that reduced layers of bureaucracy mean decision-making gets pushed down the organization chart. This is the message of the AMA in the promotional video – Critical Thinking: Not just a C-suite skill.  However, wirearchy takes this one important step further by advocating a two-way flow of power and authority. In both cases, the need for critical thinking is evident. Here is Edward Glaser’s definition:

“Critical thinking calls for a persistent effort to examine any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the evidence that supports it and the further conclusions to which it tends. It also generally requires ability to recognize problems, to find workable means for meeting those problems, to gather and marshal pertinent information, to recognize unstated assumptions and values, to comprehend and use language with accuracy, clarity, and discrimination, to interpret data, to appraise evidence and evaluate arguments, to recognize the existence (or non-existence) of logical relationships between propositions, to draw warranted conclusions and generalizations, to put to test the conclusions and generalizations at which one arrives, to reconstruct one’s patterns of beliefs on the basis of wider experience, and to render accurate judgments about specific things and qualities in everyday life.”

A personal knowledge mastery process can help to develop critical thinking skills, where sense-making includes observing, studying, challenging (especially one’s assumptions), and evaluating. Developing these skills takes practice, appropriate feedback and an environment that supports critical thinking.

seek sesne share critical thinking

Several web tools can be used to develop critical thinking skills; the foundation of PKM:

critical thinking tools

Flattening the organization is one way to open communications and delegate responsibility but asking employees to engage in real critical thinking, and accepting the resulting actions, will not work unless there is a two-way flow of power and authority. Critical thinking is not just thinking more deeply but also asking difficult and discomfiting questions. Without power and authority, these become meaningless.

So yes, critical thinking is not just for the C-suite, but unleashing it requires a new framework for getting work done. Wirearchy as the organizational framework, coupled with active personal knowledge management processes, is a step in that direction.

Knowledge artisans choose their tools

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How can you be a knowledge worker if you’re not allowed to pick your own tools?

In the unattained summit of social business, Ton Zylstra writes:

So we talked about how corporate systems might integrate social media tools into sharepoint and ERP-software, but not about the notion that it is quickly becoming ridiculous that IT departments should be prescribing what tools professionals should use at all, and not just stick to managing and securing the data flowing through those tools. We let craftsmen and artisans pick the tools they think fit the task at hand and their personal skills best, but we still don’t allow our professionals in knowledge intensive environments to do so.

I like the term Knowledge Artisan to describe this growing field of economic activity. An artisan is a skilled worker in a particular craft, using specialized tools and machinery. Artisans were the dominant producers of goods before the Industrial era. Knowledge Artisans are retrieving the older artisan model and re-integrating previously separate skills.

Knowledge Artisans not only design the work but they can do the work. It is not passed down the assembly line. Many integrate marketing, sales and customer service with their creations. To ensure that they stay current, they become members of various Guilds, known today as communities of practice or knowledge networks. One of the earliest guilds was the open source community which developed many of the communication tools and processes used by Knowledge Artisans today: distributed work (CSCW); results-oriented work (your code speaks for you); RSS, blogs, wikis, flattened hierarchies, etc.

One problem today is that it’s hard to be a Knowledge Artisan in a hierarchical organization that tells you what to do and which tools to use. No wonder the more experienced and adventurous are leaving and the younger skilled artisans are not joining the Command & Control Industrial Organization.

PKM: a node in the learning network

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Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, or, in other words, digital networks enable multiple connections, so organizational communications are no longer just vertical. Somebody else, outside the hierarchy, is only one click away, and perhaps easier to deal with and a better source of information and knowledge. This is becoming obvious in the business world and frameworks such as Social CRM (customer relationship management) are one attempt to address it.

Too often we think of learning as school, training as something that is delivered, and complex problems as solvable with enough effort and resources. We are wrong on all three counts.

Social learning is about getting things done in networks. It is a constant flow of listening, observing, doing, and sharing. Effective working in networks requires cooperation, meaning there is no plan, structure or direct feedback. This can scare managers and organizational leaders because no one is in change of social learning and there is no end-state or final learning objective. But social learning in networks can help us deal with complexity by providing a platform to test out ideas and learn from and with each other.

Jane Hart has described five types of learning using social media, the lubricant of learning in digital networks. Then she looked at how they relate to formal/informal learning as well as the spectrum of dependent/independent/interdependent learning.

social pkm

I have circled those activities at the bottom of this grid to show what personal knowledge management (PKM) enables. I have described PKM as our part of the social learning contract and the more I look at implementing social learning, social CRM or social business models, the more convinced I am that PKM is a foundational skill-set.

knowledge-management

Keeping knowledge in our heads is not of much use in getting things done, though that is what most of our training and development efforts have focused on for the past century. Individual training, stemming from the military systems approach to training, addressed skills and knowledge acquisition, as directed by those in change. The organization wanted to drive stuff into our heads.

networks-n-nodes


In networks, though, one of our main jobs now is getting stuff out of our heads and sharing with others.

PKM is focused on accidental, serendipitous, personal-directed, informal, independent learning.

PKM enables group-directed, intra-organizational, interdependent learning.

PKM enriches formal, structured learning and helps learners be less dependent.

PKM is taking control of our learning, as well as making much of it transparent. It makes us a valuable node in our various networks. We share our learning riches without diminishing them. If more people start seeking, sensing & sharing then we’re on the social learning path. Notice how I did not mention that you need some special “social learning” technology platform to do this?

Learning is what we will do for a living

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Some of the interesting things I learned on Twitter this week:

Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century via @crazyquote

Innovation via @timkastelle

Innovation = learning x diverse connections
I disagree with the argument that innovation is the child of desperation. I wish it was so, because if it was, we would be on a planet devoid of incredible amounts of preventable child deaths, failed economies, and the rest of what would otherwise be tragedies that could be prevented by innovations of all kinds. The pragmatic reality is that innovation happens at the intersection of learning and cultivating diverse connections. When you have diverse connections in a network, learning almost cannot not happen. Networks literally become learning disabled if the connections become too homophilous and without learning, no innovation is possible.

whistle – but don’t tweet – while you work 54% of companies prohibit access to social networking sites for any reason via @charlesjennings

The No. 1 benefit of Enterprise 2.0 is Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)

… most E2.0 vendors are doing it wrong. If the #1 benefit is personal knowledge management, why are all the big players selling to the CEO, CIO, and IT departments? Where are the tools targeting individual knowledge workers?

How to Decentralize Traditional Employee Structures via @WorldBlu

Touchstone uses a democratic “Bubble” structure, which means that any person at any level of the organization can lead a group of staff – not just managers or senior-level people. The leader of the team can ask for and receive whatever level of talent they need to achieve the mission of the project. One result is that senior staff sometimes ends up working under a less-senior staff person who is managing a given project. The reasoning is that the leader is in charge of the deliverable, and has the freedom to develop and implement the project as they fit with the team they need to get the job done well.

Seek Sense Share

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Note: my blog is where I hammer out ideas, so you may be finding some of these posts a bit repetitive. Sorry about that ;)

My working definition of personal knowledge management:

PKM: a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world, work more effectively and contribute to society.

PKM is also an enabling process for wirearchy: ” a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results enabled by interconnected people and technology”

Some Observations:

PKM is part of the social learning contract.
PKM works best when knowledge is shared.
Organizational Knowledge Management (KM) is dependent on effective PKM processes.
Standardizing PKM destroys it.

Explaining PKM:

I have looked at the PKM process as:

Sort-Categorize-Make Explicit-Retrieve
Connect-Contribute-Exchange
Aggregate-Filter-Connect.

Currently I use:

Seek > Sense > Share

Social computing in knowledge-intensive workplaces

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Ross Dawson discusses a Gartner report on social software, looking at some particular forecasts for the next three to five years out:

20% of businesses using social media instead of e-mail by 2014

50% of businesses using activity streams, such as micro-blogging, by 2012

20% of businesses will use social network analysis by 2015

70-95% of IT dominated driven social media initiatives will fail through to 2012

I’ve highlighted the last point because it’s time to look at social media as a connecting force in the enterprise. Here are some notes from a Twitter conversation with Treena Gravatt and Dennis Callahan yesterday:

Harold: RT @ecollab The Real Secret to Social Learning Success in 2010 by @LearningPutty

Treena: @hjarche That post made so much sense – I hadn’t seen it framed so clearly before but it makes utter sense & I agree with you. So many parallels

Harold: @tgrevatt I think the training department of the future will be part of marketing (already is at Intuit)

Harold: @tgrevatt I’ve been watching marketing & training moving closer, just as work & learning get integrated in the networked workplace

Dennis: @hjarche – re: marketing & training moving closer. Interesting – what’s the connection? I haven’t seen this trend.

Harold: @denniscallahan when you learn with & from your customers, learning & marketing are the same

Treena: <- nicely put Harold!

Dennis: <good connection>

The lines are blurring between marketing and training just as they are between learning and working. The connectivity enabled by social computing gives us an opportunity to identify overlapping areas and redundancies in organizational human performance support.  A unified support function, focused on really serving workers and helping them grow, could significantly reduce the 77% of CLO Magazine survey respondents who feel that people in their organization are not growing fast enough to keep up with the business.

Every department in the enterprise is part of the problem:

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

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

Training: for separating learning from work.

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

It’s time for all departments to become part of the solution.

We’ve been discussing the blurring of lines between traditional organizational departments at the Internet Time Alliance and the general consensus is that any organizational change, especially using social computing, needs to look at the whole of the organization and not just the parts. Organizational culture, or its DNA, is an emergent property of the various components working, hopefully, in concert. Enabling only one department to initiate the change to a more cooperative and networked organization, may be a recipe for failure (70-95% of the time).

Wired Work

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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.

This presentation covers my interpretation of wirearchy and is a continuation of my presentation on Net Work: learning to work anew. Once again, it is in MP4 format and runs less than 5 minutes.

Wired Work: complexity, the web and business:

2 way flow

wired work (MP4)

Blind Monks 2.0

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David Guillocheau at Talent[Power]Management describes what I would call human resources in a wired world [enough of this 2.0 appendage]. He discusses (in French)  the various aspects of networked-enabled HR.

Recruiting: social networks; online events; serious games.

Integrating new workers: online mentoring; internal blogs.

Evaluation: online employee profiles; internal markets or currency.

Training: communities of practice; learning communities.

Internal communication: manager blogs; internal social networks, micro-blogs, chat.

Social interactions: private collaborative work space; blogs, internal polling.

HR management: communities of practice; project management space; blogs.

In the comments, Frédéric Williquet adds a definition of this new approach to human resources, which I’ve loosely translated: Human Resources is a community agent that ensures an environment where employees have the opportunity to collaborate, innovate and excel. It provides a framework to inspire employees to work collaboratively according to their interests and abilities.

This definition sounds very much like wirearchy, especially the notion of a two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility. The above examples of networked HR are wirearchy type work: based on knowledge, trust, credibility AND a focus on results – enabled by interconnected people and technology.

Enterprise 2.0, Learning 2.0, HR 2.0 or Social Business Design are all the same thing seen from different angles. They are the proverbial blind monks examining an elephant.

Blind_monks_examining_an_elephant

We are all examining how best to get work done in a networked economy, because the Internet has changed everything. This is most evident today in publishing and journalism, but ever more so in how we manage work without geographical boundaries. We are all learning how to work anew. It’s time for the blind monks to start working together.

Building common ground

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The focus of this blog is on learning and working on the web and how work and learning are becoming one in a digitally interconnected world. I believe there is a critical need for new organizational frameworks, such as wirearchy, and a shift from learning as training & schooling to a more agile approach. Evidence that the old management models are no longer effective abound – see The Future of Management or The Future of Work.

Lilia Efimova is looking into Agile software programming teams, where work is geographically distributed and has observed the challenges of communicating without “common ground:

From what we have seen, the communication in distributed teams often shrinks to purely functional and, compared to face-to-face settings, there is much less unstructured informal interactions – this works for getting the work done (at some level), but seriously limits the opportunities to build awareness of the bigger picture and relationships. Most of the solutions in respect to building the common ground in distributed Agile teams still rely on making sure that there are opportunities to visit each other, while there is a lot of space for a technology-mediated ways to do so next to the f2f.

commonground_lilia_efimova

Building common ground at work takes time and many informal interactions, such as those afforded in a shared physical space. For distributed teams to work well, they need to develop common ground through social grooming. My experience in working with distributed groups is that the more effective teams are those who know each other. I will be more forgiving with someone I know through several years of blogging than some new business acquaintance who has just joined the team. After several thousand tweets I have some understanding of people’s sense of humour, and perhaps they understand mine as well.These casual interactions make the leap to collaborative work much easier, as I am experiencing with my Internet Time Alliance colleagues.

For distributed teams, informal social learning has to take place with digitally mediated communications. Allowing, and indeed promoting, casual social media use may actually be good for work and business. Blocking these channels may inhibit the development of common ground.  This is something to consider as more work becomes distributed – break down those firewalls and let workers be people.

Net Work Learning article

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Net Work LearningThe New Security Learning  Foundation held its conference just prior to Online Educa last year in Berlin. I wrote an article, called Net Work Learning, for the journal that is distributed to members and conference attendees. Parts of it have appeared on this site but here is the complete unabridged version as a PDF:

Net Work Learning 2009

I just received a few copies of the print version in the mail this week. Believe it or not, what I really like about print publishing is that an editor makes changes and also decides what to highlight or what works best as a call-out. It’s very good feedback on my writing.

Here are the call-outs from the journal article:

Individuals can act both locally and globally without the aid of formal organizations. That means that the traditional command and control organizational pyramid is getting much more porous.

Change begins when ideas meet new technology.

Command and control matters less and less on the business fringes. Look to business models that understand the importance of community as we become a global village.

If training departments want to remain relevant in this kind of environment, they will need to reconsider their role. In order to help organizations evolve in a networked environment they have to move away from training delivery and focus on connecting and communicating.

No single, sure-fire, cookie-cutter approach can be implemented in a top-down or consultant-driven manner to create a networked workplace performance model that works. No single method will work.

With hyper-linked information and access to expertise, not only are internal departments of less value, they can subvert the organization’s future by not responding quickly and appropriately.