Competitive knowledge

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Knowledge itself is not a great business advantage, and if it were, academic institutions would be running circles around the Fortune 100. It’s what gets done with the knowledge that matters. But there still needs to be a good flow of information and ideas that get tested out in the specific context of the organization, such as its markets and the technology available. Nick Milton describes four types of organizational knowledge: Core, Non-core, New, & Competitive. Moving competitive knowledge into core knowledge is a key part of this flow.

Competitive knowledge. These are areas of new evolving knowledge that the company knows a lot about. This knowledge may well give them a competitive advantage – the first learner advantage. In areas of evolving knowledge, the company that learns the best and learns the fastest, has the potential to outperform its rivals.  The KM focus for competitive knowledge is on the development of best practice. As this knowledge is being applied around the business, there needs to be a continuous capture of knowledge from practice, comparing of knowledge through communities of practice, and development of best practice. Ownership of competitive competence probably lies with the communities and networks.

I have mapped Nick’s Boston Square to the coherent organization to show how communities of practice provide the link between social networks and enterprise work teams to filter new knowledge and find competitive knowledge.

competitive knowledge

One challenge of finding new knowledge is that social networks are comprised mostly of non-core knowledge. There is often more noise than signal. However, given their diversity, social networks are where we can find innovative ideas. This is why curation and PKM skills are so important for organizations today. Testing new knowledge is where communities of practice can be handy. Gaining competitive knowledge is the obvious ROI for fostering internal and external communities of practice.

So here is a clear value proposition. Communities of practice act as filters of new knowledge in order to find competitive knowledge for your organization. People who understand the context of the work teams must participate in communities of practice, as only they can identify what new knowledge could be competitive. That means that those doing the work need time and support to get away from their teams and see the bigger picture. Does your organization provide this time, or is everyone too busy focused on managing core knowledge? The implications of myopic work practices are quite obvious.

Ensuring knowledge flow through narration

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Can the training department, or learning & development, directly contribute to innovation, or are they merely bystanders? Enabling the narration of work is one area where they can help. When it comes down to it, much of learning is conversation. Organizational learning is no longer about courses, which are artifacts of a time when information was scarce and connections were few, because that era is over. Work narration already happens outside the organization, and it’s time to bring it inside.

As with knowledge artisans, many learners now own their knowledge-sharing networks. Today, content capture and creation tools let people tell their own stories and weave these together to share in their networks. Narrating one’s work has been done by coders and programmers for decades, as they “learn out loud.” What started as forums and wikis quickly evolved into more robust networks and communities. Programmers who share their work process and solutions in public are building a resource for other programmers looking to do the same type of work. This makes the whole programming environment smarter. Organizations can do the same.

The public narration of what we do, attempt, and learn on a daily basis not only helps us help others, but also puts us in a position to get help from peers. When your co-workers know what you’re working on and what problems you’ve run into, they can offer their experience. Since few people work in the same room as all their co-workers, they rely on online networks to offer them a common space to find and offer work narration.

Narration helps everyone get smarter. John Stepper says that everyone should work and learn out loud. If you’re confused about what to write, John suggests posting about what you’re working on every day, who you’re meeting with, the research you’re doing, the articles you find relevant, lessons you learned and mistakes you made. These insights are valuable to people trying to train or help co-workers. He also recommends creating short posts that are easy-to-skim; as they make this kind of narration practical for both the author and the audience.

Narration is turning one’s tacit knowledge — what you know — into explicit knowledge — what you can share. Developing good narration skills takes time and practice. Just adding finished reports to a knowledge base does not help others understand how that report was developed. This is where online activity streams and micro-blogging have helped organizational learning. People can see the flow of work in small bits of conversation that, over time, become patterns. Narration of work is the first step in integrating learning into the workflow.

Organizational sense-making can be looked at as either stock or flow. Stock is organized for reference and does not change frequently. Courses are stock. Flow is timely and engaging. Narration of work in social networks is flow. With access to more knowledge flow, via social technologies, highly networked workers can have broader, deeper and richer learning experiences than any instructional designer could ever create in advance.

A worker today can ask questions to a worldwide support network on a platform like Twitter and get an answer in minutes. Deeper questions can be addressed on a service like Quora, where responses get voted on by the community. Many experts worldwide are now narrating their work and making it freely available on the Internet. A new form of distributed cognitive apprenticeship is available, and knowledge workers are taking advantage of this.

In knowledge networks, openness enables transparency, which fosters a diversity of ideas, which in turn reinforces the need for openness. This can be implemented through the use of social networks which can improve knowledge-sharing which fosters innovation, the bottom line for any organization in the network age. The narration of work, is basically knowledge sharing on a regular basis. It’s the raw material of knowledge sharing. It’s not content delivery (stock) that training departments should be focused on but the narration of work (flow).

narration

Training departments should put a major emphasis on learning flow. Stories are an excellent example of learning flow. For millennia, we have learned through stories. This is how gamers and hackers, the digital pioneers, have learned how to learn without curriculum, courses, or instructors:

  • They share their stories.
  • They know there is no user manual.
  • They embrace the flow.

Here is how to ensure knowledge flow through enterprise and external social networks:

  • Capture as much as possible and create digital artifacts.
  • Share as much as possible. Make it the default action by offering entrance into social networks to everyone. [e.g. feed readers, social bookmarks, blogs, photos, videos, social networks, activity streams].
  • Keep everything open and transparent [do not create “walled gardens”]; the key to useful information is being able to find it.
  • Support easy-to-make connections; between people, and with digital resources.

To learn more about narration and other open business practices, join my Learning in Social Business workshop, starting on March 1st.

Jobs and work

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Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past two weeks. [Note: It seems that if you look in enough places, certain patterns begin to emerge.]

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers. -Thomas Pynchon.” via @johnsonwhitney

Bert van Lamoen (@transarchitect) “If the old rules are left in place there are no new behaviors and the new model fails and nothing changes.”

Hugh MacLeod (@gapingvoid) – “The rush hour @starbucks crowd has this nice bourgeois desperation about them …”

TechCrunch: America has hit peak jobs – via @sardire

Paul Kedrosky recently wrote a terrific essay about what I call cultural technical debt, i.e. “organizations or technologies that persist, largely for historical reasons, not because they remain the best solution to the problem for which they were created. They are often obstacles to much better solutions.” Well, the notion that ‘jobs are how the rewards of our society are distributed, and every decent human being should have a job’ is becoming cultural technical debt.

If it’s not solved, then in the coming decades you can expect a self-perpetuating privileged elite to accrue more and more of the wealth generated by software and robots, telling themselves that they’re carrying the entire world on their backs, Ayn Rand heroes come to life, while all the lazy jobless “takers” live off the fruits of their labor. Meanwhile, as the unemployed masses grow ever more frustrated and resentful, the Occupy protests will be a mere candle flame next to the conflagrations to come.

Disposable worker syndrome is killing us – by @michelemmartin

In the past, through this blog, I’ve focused on how we as individuals need to keep renewing and recycling ourselves through a process of lifelong learning and adapting to change. I still believe this is true. But I also believe that, through our institutions, we are doing great spiritual and emotional damage to ourselves by consistently communicating to people that they are disposable and that they are on their own in the process of recycling and renewing.

To torture my metaphor, we are treating people like garbage–throwing them into landfills and just letting them waste away there. We are doing nothing to provide them with the structures and resources and emotional supports that would help them go through that renewal process.

NYT: The Rise of the Permanent Temp Economy – via @jerrymichalski

The temp industry’s continued growth even in a boom economy was a testament to its success in helping to forge a new cultural consensus about work and workers. Its model of expendable labor became so entrenched, in fact, that it became “common sense,” leaching into nearly every sector of the economy and allowing the newly renamed “staffing industry” to become sought-after experts on employment and work force development. Outsourcing, insourcing, offshoring and many other hallmarks of the global economy (including the use of “adjuncts” in academia, my own corner of the world) owe no small debt to the ideas developed by the temp industry in the last half-century.

Being paid for a task decreases intrinsic motivation (PDF) – Edward Deci’s original experiment from 1971 – via @dougald

It appears that money – perhaps because of its connotation and use in our culture – may act as a stimulus which leads the subject to a cognitive reevaluation of the activity from one which is intrinsically motivated to one which is motivated primarily by the expectation of financial rewards. In short, money may work to “buy off” one’s intrinsic motivation for an activity. And this decreased motivation appears (from the results of the field experiment) to be more than just a temporary phenomenon.

The Guardian: Payment by Results – via @JohnQShift

Payment by results is a simple idea: people and organisations should only get paid for what they deliver. Who could argue with that? If your job is to get people back to work, then find them a job dammit … and they make people lie …

… This lying takes all sorts of different forms. Some of them are subtle forms of deception: teachers who teach to the test or who only enter pupils for exams they know they are going to pass; employment support that helps only those likely to get a job and ignores those most in need; or hospitals that reclassify trolleys as beds, and keep people waiting in ambulances on the hospital doorstep until they know they can be seen within a target time. In the literature, this is known as gaming the system.

The new artisans of the network era

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Are knowledge workers the new artisans of the network era? If so, can you call yourself a knowledge worker if you are not allowed to choose your own tools? How about managing your own learning?

toolsAn artisan is a skilled worker in a particular craft, using specialized processes, tools, and machinery. Artisans were the dominant producers of goods before the industrial era. Today, knowledge artisans of the network era are using the latest information and social tools in an interconnected economy. Look at a web start-up company and you will see it is filled with knowledge artisans, using their own tools and connecting to outside social networks to get work done. They can be programmers, designers, writers, or any other field requiring complex skills and creativity. One of their distinguishing characteristics is the ability to seek and share information with their networks in order to get work done. Knowledge artisans are connected workers.

Knowledge artisans are amplified versions of their pre-industrial counterparts. Augmented by technology, they rely on their networks and skills to solve complex problems and test new ideas. Small groups of highly productive knowledge artisans are capable of producing goods and services that used to take much larger teams and resources. In addition to redefining how work is done, knowledge artisans are creating new organizational structures and business models, such as virtual companies, crowd-sourced product development, and alternative currencies.

Knowledge artisans not only design the work, they can also do the work. It is not passed down an assembly line. They tolerate few, if any, silos between the product, the work, and the customer. 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 knowledge guilds was the open source community, which developed many of the communication tools and processes used by knowledge artisans today — distributed work, results-only work environments, blogs & wikis for sharing, agile programming, flattened hierarchies, working out loud, and much more.

Companies like Netflix understand that they are best served by people who take control of their own careers. Netflix is constantly looking for the best knowledge artisans in the industry. People who work hard, but produce just good enough results, will get let go. A master artisan strives for perfection. The 2009 presentation on Netflix culture makes their demand for the best workers abundantly clear. It’s the only way to deal with complexity.

netflix economic security

As more organizations engage with connected workers who have seen the new workplace structures, they will need to change some habits, like letting workers choose their own tools. Knowledge artisans are often more contractual, more independent and shorter-term than previous information age employees. Because of their more nomadic nature, artisanal workers will bring their own learning networks. Companies will need to accept this in order to get work done. Also, training departments must be ready to adapt to knowledge artisans by allowing them to  collaborate and connect with their external online networks. When the future of learning is the future of work, then learning support has to adapt to the new reality of an artisanal workforce. But it’s also worth noting that to be a successful knowledge artisan will take a lot more than just being a good employee.

Learning subverts business entropy

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When Harold Jarche says work is learning and learning is the work, I think he’s suggesting that for a business to thrive, it must place learning at the heart of everything it does. Purposeful learning. Learning that is not “training” as we have visioned it up till now. Any training that is disconnected from the people is not sufficient. Learning that is not about the work is not sufficient. Real 21st century learning must change how we think, behave and interact with each other, as well as what we know. It must be relevant to purpose, activity and relationships. Not just one of those: all three. A business, which is a living system, requires relevant learning in order to subvert that thing which happens to all living systems: entropy. —John Wenger: A Matter of Life and Death

Why do I say that work is learning and learning is the work? Because it’s been obvious to me for a long time that learning is THE critical business skill, whether you work for others or yourself. By learning, I do not mean education, or the ability to get good marks in class. Here is an update of my pitch on why I think learning is so integral to working today.

How work gets done in the network era:

  1. our increasing interconnectedness illuminates the complexity of our work environments
  2. simple work keeps getting automated
  3. complicated work usually gets outsourced
  4. complex work gives unique business advantages, while creative work finds new opportunities
  5. complex work is difficult to copy & creative work constantly changes:
    both require greater tacit knowledge
  6. tacit knowledge is best developed through conversations and social relationships
  7. social learning networks enable better and faster knowledge feedback loops
  8. but hierarchies constrain social interactions … so traditional management models must change
  9. learning amongst ourselves is the real work in business today … so management’s job is to support social learning
  10. social learning is how work gets done in the network era

The future of learning is the future of work

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Where skills and qualifications have been acquired through formal education, many find themselves unable to secure work that makes use of these; where skills are acquired informally, the challenge is to represent these effectively to potential employers. – The Regeneration of Meaning

This image, from a series on the Future of Learning by Gerd Leonhard summarizes how technology is changing our concepts of learning, training, and education.

SoLoMo by Gerd Leonhard

The role that institutions played as gatekeepers is changing, and the support systems that many of us depended upon, like jobs, are disappearing. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, for good and not so good.

hyperlinks hierarchy

The answer, I believe, is to use nearly unlimited information, self-publishing, and ridiculously easy group-forming to our advantage. Thierry de Baillon, co-author of the most popular post on this blog, writes about “a new set of managerial and operational paradigms” in My Social Business Predictions, namely: no boundaries; trusted exchanges; a culture of experimentation; and emergent and adaptive structures.

Returning to the initial quote on this post, the author, Dougald, shows some concrete examples of new operational paradigms: Centers for New Work; Access Space; West Norwood Feast; the rise of house concerts; and unMonasteries. I know of many more examples, and organizations like Shareable are highlighting these new models and experiments.

So it’s important to note that it’s not really the future of learning we should be concerned with, because it is merely a symptom of the future of work. It is becoming obvious that individuals need to take control of their learning in a world where they are simultaneously connected, mobile, and global; while conversely contractual, part-time, and local. Watch how work is changing and you will see how education and training will change.

changing nature of work

Cooperating in the open

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I’ve been thinking about collaboration and cooperation a lot lately. I see PKM as mostly comprising cooperative behaviours, as well as being self-serving (in the good sense). With cooperation, there is often no direct feedback on behaviour. Feedback emerges from the network through time. The image below is based on a previous post on tools & competencies for the social enterprise.

Cooperation is for the long term, while collaboration is usually bound by time, such as one’s career, a job, or a project. This difference is perhaps why I have been avoiding many online community invitations. These communities are often nothing more than a bounded social network. Google Plus communities are an example. If I want to cooperate, then the most porous and least bounded social network is the best for me. This is what my blog (open to anyone) or Twitter (public stream as default) help me do. If I wish to be bounded through membership in a community then I need a reason to do so. A project is a good reason. I belong to several collaborative online project-based communities, as well as few private communities.

This brings me to a simple way to decide if I want to join an online community. If it does not have a stated expiration date, objective, or end point, then I won’t join. I will keep my cooperation open, not within a walled garden. If I want to collaborate to get something done, then a walled garden, with some end in sight, makes sense.

I think one of the problems today is that many online social networks are trying to be communities of practice. But to be a community of practice, there has to be something to practice. One social network, mine, is enough for me. How I manage the connections is also up to me. In some cases I will follow a blogger, in others I will connect via LinkedIn or Twitter, but from my perspective it is one network, with varying types of connections. Jumping into someone else’s bounded social network/community only makes sense if I have an objective. If not, I’ll keep cooperating out in the open.

PKM in 2013

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“The basic unit of social business technology is personal knowledge management, not collaborative workspaces.” —Thierry de Baillon

Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world and work more effectively. But what we loosely call knowledge, using terms like knowledge-sharing or knowledge capture, is often just an approximation. As knowledge management expert Dave Snowden says, we are not very good at articulating our knowledge; “We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down.” [see comment by Cynefin co-author, Cynthia Kurtz]

Knowledge

When we use our knowledge to describe some data, such as what we remember from an experience or our summary of a book, we convey this knowledge by creating information, even though writing it down is not perfect. This does not mean that we shouldn’t even try, because the cumulative pieces of information, or knowledge artifacts, that we share can help us have better conversations and increase our understanding of things that cannot easily be codified. Our individual sense-making can be shared, and from it can emerge better organizational knowledge. This is not a linear process, as in from information we get knowledge, which over time becomes wisdom. Gaining knowledge is much messier than that.

Becoming knowledgeable can be thought of as bits of knowledge partially shared and experienced over time. It is laborious, hence the reason why masters through the ages could only have a limited number of apprentices. But when writing, and later books, came along, we had a new technology that could more widely distribute information created by the wise, and also the not so wise. Whether being mentored by a master or reading a book, knowledge does not actually get transferred, but shared observations and information can be helpful to those who have a desire to learn and do something with their learning.

Merely being well read is not enough to be knowledgeable, as possibly first noted by Socrates. Plato wrote in Phaedrus that Socrates felt the written language would result in “men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, who will be a burden to their fellows“. Socrates saw a core truth in learning from artifacts like books. Even today, we cannot become complacent with knowledge and just store it away. It has a shelf life and needs to be used, tested and experienced. It should be shared amongst people who understand that they are only seeing a fragment of others’ knowledge. Because it is so difficult to represent our knowledge to others, we have to make every effort to continuously share it. Once is not enough, as most parents know. Knowledge shared in flows over time can help us create better mental pictures than a single piece of knowledge stock, like a book, can ever do.

Seek : Sense : Share

Capturing knowledge, as crudely as we do, is just a first step. The PKM framework I have developed over the past eight years suggests two more steps: sense-making and sharing. PKM, or learning in networks, is a continuous process of seeking, sensing, and sharing.

Seeking is finding things out and keeping up to date. Building a network of colleagues is helpful in this regard. It not only allows us to “pull” information, but also have it “pushed” to us by trusted sources.

Sensing is how we personalize information and use it. Sensing includes reflection and putting into practice what we have learned. Often it requires experimentation, as we learn best by doing.

Sharing includes exchanging resources, ideas, and experiences with our networks as well as collaborating with our colleagues. As Tim Kastelle notes:

Yes, when we send our ideas out into the world, they change the people with whom they interact.

But sending these ideas out, and seeing how they interact with people changes us as well.

PKM 2013

Innovation

Scott Anthony, author of The Little Black Book of Innovation, identifies four skills exhibited by innovators: Observing; Questioning; Experimenting; Networking. These directly align with the PKM framework of Seek, Sense, Share. It is quite likely that innovation in organizations can be improved with individuals practising PKM. It could even be a major value proposition for Learning & Development departments everywhere, something to seriously think about.

Seeking includes observation through effective filters and diverse sources of information. Sense-making starts with questioning our observations and includes experimenting, or probing. Sharing through our networks helps to develop better feedback loops. In an organization where everyone is practising PKM, the chances for more connections increases.

PKM may be an individual activity but it is also social. It is the process by which we can connect what we learn outside the organization with what need to do inside. Research shows that work teams that need to share complex knowledge need tighter social bonds. Work teams often share a unique language or vocabulary. However, they can become myopic and may lack a diversity of opinions. Social networks, on the other hand, encourage diversity and can sow the seeds of innovation. However, it is almost impossible to get work done in social networks due to their lack of structure. PKM is the active process of connecting the innovative ideas that can arise in our social networks with the deadline-driven work inside organizations.

PKM is beneficial on both a personal and organizational level, but its real value is in increasing innovation. Without innovation, organizations cannot evolve.

Social Learning

Both collaborative behaviours (working together for a common goal) and cooperative behaviours (sharing freely without any quid pro quo) are needed in the network era. Most organizations focus on shorter term collaborative behaviours, but networks thrive on cooperative behaviours, where people share without any direct benefit. PKM helps to add cooperation to workplace collaboration.

social ties collaboration cooperation

In addition to seeking, sensing and sharing, we need to become adept at filtering information as well as discerning when and with whom to share. Like any skill, these require practice and feedback. Much of this feedback can be provided in communities of practice, a half-way space between work teams and social networks, where trusted relationships can form that enable to share more openly.?

Connecting social networks, communities of practice and work teams, becomes an important framework for integrating learning and working in the network era. We seek new ideas from our social networks and then filter them through more focused conversations with our communities of practice, where we have trusted relationships. We make sense of these embryonic ideas by doing new things, either ourselves, or with our work teams. We later share our creations, first with our teams and perhaps later with our communities of practice or even our networks. We use our understanding of our communities and networks to discern with whom and when to share our knowledge.?

Narration

Narrating one’s work does not get knowledge transferred, but it provides a better medium to gain more understanding. Working out loud is a concept that is very easy to understand, but not quite so easy to do. Most people are too busy managing in their information age workplaces and have little spare time to try to learn how to work in the network age. The most important step in learning a new skill is the first one. This same step has to be repeated many times before it becomes a habit.I have learned that the first step of starting to work out loud, as part of personal knowledge management, has to be as simple as possible. Here are three simple steps I recommend to begin a regular PKM practice with.

1) Free Your Bookmarks: This is a very simple shift that only requires a slight deviation from a common practice: saving bookmarks/favourites on your browser. Using tools like Diigo, or Delicious moves them off a single device, makes them more searchable, and (later) makes them shareable. Being able to share is usually not a prime reason why people start using social bookmarks but it becomes more important over time.

2) Aggregate: Driving as many information sources as possible through a feed reader such as Google Reader or Feedly, saves time and helps stay organized. It is amazing how many people still do not understand RSS or how to grab a feed and save it. Aggregation makes information flows much easier to deal with.

3) Connect: How does one get started micro-blogging on a platform like Twitter? I suggest beginning with an aim in mind, such as professional development or staying current in a specific field. The search function can help find people who post about a specific topics. To start, one should follow no less than 20 and no more than 30 interesting people. Once set up, beginners should dip into their stream once or twice a day and read through any posts of interest. Over time, as they follow links, they may add or delete feeds. Within a week or two, anyone should be able to sense some patterns and then modify their streams to provide more signal and less noise.

Sometimes we get all caught up in the latest social media tools. Getting started working out loud is not complicated and should not involve a steep learning curve on a complicated system. It is best to start with simple tools and frameworks.

Small pieces, loosely joined

The mainstream application of knowledge management and learning management over the past few decades has had it all wrong. We over-managed information, knowledge and learning because it was easy. Our organizations remain enamoured with the next wave of enterprise software systems. But the ubiquity of information outside the organization is showing the weakness of centralized enterprise systems. As organizations begin to understand the Web, the principle of “small pieces loosely joined” is permeating some thick industrial age walls. More workers have their own sources of information and knowledge, often on mobile devices, but they often lack the means or internal support to connect their knowledge with others to actually get work done. Supporting PKM, especially internal sharing, can help information flow more freely.

Personal knowledge management frameworks can help knowledge workers capture and make sense of their knowledge. Organizations should support the individual sharing of information and expertise between knowledge workers, on their terms, using PKM methods and tools. Simple standards like RSS can facilitate this sharing. Knowledge bases and traditional KM systems should focus on essential information, and what is necessary for inexperienced workers. Experienced workers should not be constrained by too much structure but rather be given the flexibility to contribute how and where they think they can best help the organization.

We know that formal instruction accounts for less than 10% of workplace learning. The same rule of thumb should apply to knowledge management. Capture and codify the 10% that is essential, especially for new employees. Now use the same principle to get work done. Structure the essential 10% and leave the rest unstructured, but networked, so that workers can group as needed to get work done. Teams are too slow and hierarchical to be useful for the network era. Organizations structured around looser hierarchies and stronger networks are much more effective for increasingly complex work.

Conclusion

PKM is a framework for individuals to take control of their professional development while working in organizations or across networks. Disciplined personal knowledge management brings focus to the information sea we swim in. The multiple pieces of information that we capture and share can increase the frequency of serendipitous connections, especially across disciplines and outside organizations. As Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From says; “chance favors the connected mind“.

Question everything

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Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past week or two.

@paulbogush : “Needing to motivate a student is equivalent to jump starting a car. If you have to do it every day, something is wrong.” via @surreallyno

The Atlantic: The End of Labor: How to protect workers from the rise of robots – via @RichardFlorida

The big question is: What do we do if and when our old mechanisms for coping with inequality break down? If the “endowment of human capital” with which people are born gets less and less valuable, we’ll get closer and closer to that Econ 101 example of a world in which the capital owners get everything. A society with cheap robot labor would be an incredibly prosperous one, but we will need to find some way for the vast majority of human beings to share in that prosperity, or we risk the kinds of dystopian outcomes that now exist only in science fiction.

Hacker in Residence – by @robpatrob

A tiny Trojan Mouse, such as Andy Carvin at NPR, Euan Semple or Peter Rukavina, can make a huge difference and move the entire organization.  Tiny new things that contain the seeds of change.

If I was a CEO and wanted to create value from Big Data or from Social Media, I would set up a small office that reported to me and look for my own hacker in residence to be the agent and chief hacker. I would let them have a lot of space and time to discover things and I would give them access to everyone and to everything.

If I was the CEO of a big data firm or a firm that offered Enterprise Social Media, I would have a stable of such hackers and I would lend them out on yearly terms to my clients.

@DonaldClark : Failure led, spaced practice is better than training

Over nine months, 500 people in Booz Allen were initially given three types of training:

1.       Placebo
2.       Page-turning
3.       Interactive

All three groups were then given surprise:
Three simulated phishing emails with remedial help if they failed i.e. spaced practice, learn through failure exercises.
>Based on actual simulated attacks, they discovered no significant difference between training and no training!

Pursuit of Everything: Question everything. Be deliberate. Sojourn beyond the boundaries. – via @boydjane

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element of democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country…’We are governed. Our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of’.” – Edward Bernays (1928)

Managing in Complexity

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As our markets and technologies get more complex, we need new models to get work done. For instance, we know that creative work can yield more innovation, yet our workplaces usually stifle creativity. Many of our practices are still premised on work being simple or complicated. Simple systems are easily knowable, whereas complicated systems, while not simple, are still knowable through analysis. These can be easily managed. However, complex systems are not fully knowable, though they can be partially understood through interaction with them. This is antithetical to many workplace control protocols.

Every day, jobs and work are getting automated and outsourced. If companies want to remain competitive in the global market, they need to focus on complex and creative work. Much of complex work is in exception-handling and when exceptions are the rule, rigid rules must become the exception.

We have to understand complex adaptive systems and develop work structures that let us focus our efforts on learning as we work in order to continuously develop next practices. In a knowledge-intensive and creative workplace the role of leadership becomes supportive and inspirational rather than directive. Artificial boundaries that limit collaboration and communication only serve to drag projects, and companies, down and create opportunities for more agile competitors.

A new mindset toward work is required. Frameworks like hyper-connected pattern-seeking or networked unmanagement can promote new perspectives on what valued work really should be. This can be fostered in a culture of perpetual Beta. Perpetual Beta means we accept never getting to the final release of our work, and that our learning will never stop. Organizations need to realize they will never reach some future point where everything stabilizes and they don’t need to learn or do anything new.

In additional to a new mindset, workers need autonomy. But many are not ready for it. 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. Too often, the message from the workplace continues to be that good employees wait for their managers to tell them what to do. This is counter-productive in dealing with complexity and working in perpetual Beta. It also destroys creativity. When we move away from a linear “design it first, then build it” mindset, we can then engage everyone in critical and systems thinking. Workers must be passionate, adaptive, innovative, and collaborative. Autonomy is the just beginning.

Fostering autonomy starts by looking at work differently. For example, dropping the notion of being paid for time is one way to start this change. An hourly wage implies that people are interchangeable. But no two minds are the same. Being paid for time fosters neither autonomy nor agility. There are many other human resource practices should be questioned and dropped, such as job competencies, or one-size-fits all training programs.

The new networked workplace requires both collaboration and cooperation. Complex problems cannot be solved alone. Tacit knowledge flows in networks through social learning. Learner autonomy is a foundation for effective social learning. It is the lubricant for a more agile organization. Agility becomes a necessity as we deal with increasing complexity. In order to develop the necessary emergent practices to handle complexity we therefore need to cultivate the diversity and autonomy of each worker. We also must foster richer and deeper connections which can be built through meaningful conversations. This is social learning in the workplace.

Change and complexity are becoming the norm in our work. We already see this with increasing numbers of freelancers and contractors. Any work where complexity is not the norm will be of diminishing value. Embracing complexity, and even chaos, is where the future of work lies.

As traditional core activities get automated or outsourced, almost all high value work will be done at the outer edge of organizations. At the fuzzy edge of the organization life is complex and even chaotic. On this periphery, where things are less homogenous, there is more diversity and more opportunities for innovation. Individuals, project teams and organizations have to move operations to the edge to continue learning and developing. In this century a greater percentage of workers will be moving to the edge. The core will be managed by very few internal staff. What does this mean for management? No matter what model one prefers, it will have to be more open, networked and cooperative. Are you ready to move to the edge?

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