Work environment design for learning

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Catherine Lombardozzi writes, in Time for an Evolution:

To those of you who feel like you just stepped into the middle of a conversation, a learning environment (to my mind) is a collect of resources and activities for learning. The resources may be inanimate or human; the activities may be formal or informal. A well designed learning environment is curated with a specific need in mind. It may be curated by an individual (as in a personal learning environment), by a group (such as a community of practice), or by a designer who is supporting a specific complex need that can’t be met by training or other formal programs alone.

I’ve been promoting learning environment design as a way of thinking about what we used to call blended learning, and as a way of capitalizing on informal learning resources by curating the best materials (in your judgment) and making them easily accessible by your learners.

I have taken her image and added a 70:20:10 overlay. This could serve as a decision support tool for allocating time and resources for organizational learning and development.

70 20 10

Less is more

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If you were to sum up the psychology of learning in three words, it would be ‘less is more’. – Donald Clark

In FrogDesign’s presentation on Design is Hacking How we Learn, slide #27 clearly shows where the emphasis of our learning efforts should be, and where organizations should place the most support and resources: practice.

how we learn

For theory (e.g. classroom), less is more; just as the 70:20:10 framework encourages managers to place less emphasis on formal instruction and more on supporting experiential (on the job) learning. In supporting workplace learning we should take Dan Pink’s advice and find “the one percent that gives life to the other ninety-nine“.

The future for Learning & Development, if it has one at all, is to find the 1%, by thinking like designers do. Remove everything that is extraneous and find the essence of a topic, subject, or field. Society and business are changing. Old businesses are collapsing and new ones are being created, some collapsing even quicker than the old ones did. Why would the training and education world be immune from these changes?

If there’s one lesson L&D needs to take from the failure of HMV [music retailer] and the others it is to fully grasp the speed and nature of the changes that are sweeping through most organisations – increased expectations of speed, relevance, and solutions that are just-in-time and not a minute late. Not only that, but also the increased expectation that L&D departments will deliver high value solutions to organisational challenges and help drive performance and productivity. – Charles Jennings

To deal with complexity, the solution is not to add more complication but to reduce your perspective to the simplest one possible. Like mathematicians dealing with complex math, they look for the elegant solution, as it is usually the most useful and most accurate.

The proof of a mathematical theorem exhibits mathematical elegance if it is surprisingly simple yet effective and constructive; similarly, a computer program or algorithm is elegant if it uses a small amount of code to great effect. – Wikipedia

As the world keeps churning, work today is all about learning

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to sell is humanThe title of this post is what Dan Pink, in his book To Sell is Human, would call a rhyming pitch. He also discusses the question pitch, and I followed his recommendation in the Pitch chapter and developed my own.

Are things more complex now, than they were five years ago?

Your Work? Your Markets? Your Customers? Your Profession?

I also developed a Pixar pitch:

Work used to be fairly straight forward. You had a job, knew what to do, and were paid to do it. Then the Web appeared. Everybody got connected to almost everyone else. All these connections made things more complex.  Some work was automated. Some of it outsourced. Much of it became more complex. Making sense of complexity, and developing ways to keep up, is how I help people and organizations.

Finally I created a one-word pitch: SENSE-MAKING

The Pitch chapter also explains the Twitter pitch (140 characters) and the subject line pitch. These are all excellent exercises to focus on your business or mission, and I will continue to refine mine over time.

Here is Dan’s pitch to continue reading the book, subtitled “the surprising truth about moving others“:

Here we confront a paradox. There are no “natural” salespeople, in part because we are all naturally salespeople. Each of us – because we’re human – has a selling instinct, which means that anyone can master the basics of moving others. The rest of the book will show you how.

I found the book quite compelling and much of what was covered, such as improv skills for business, are areas of interest for me. The chapter on Clarity was directly aligned with my work on personal knowledge mastery . In it, Beth Kanter is quoted using my Seek-Sense-Share framework in her Content Curation Primer and earlier post.Kanter-PKM

In this chapter, Dan also proposes that you seek out the “one percent”.

Don’t get lost in the crabgrass of details, he [Pink’s Law professor, Harold Hongju Koh] urged us. Instead, think about the essence of what you’re exploring – the one percent that gives life to the other ninety-nine. Understanding that one percent, and being able to explain it to others, is the hallmark of strong minds and good attorneys.

This is the essence of sense-making in PKM. It is about seeking information and knowledge and distilling it so that you can make sense of it and then it is ready to be shared. Seek, make-sense and share (then repeat).

Prepare for the future of work

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Ross Dawson says that people who have “learnt how to learn” will be better prepared for jobs of the future. “We’re finding people who have learnt how to learn know how to engage with a community and tap into others for support.” This is what personal knowledge mastery (PKM) is all about. It starts by seeking people and knowledge sources and the Seek > Sense > Share cycle finishes by sharing with communities and social networks. My recent workshops, both online and in person, indicate a need for PKM skills in all types of organizations and for people at all levels, from freelancers, researchers, managers, executives and more. The benefits are not just for individuals, preparing for their next job, but the organization gains from employees who take control of their learning and freely share their knowledge. PKM makes for more resilient individuals and companies.

Much of PKM is about finding balance. In seeking knowledge sources, we have to balance aggregation, or getting as much information as possibile, with filtering, or ensuring that we have more signal than noise. Our networks need to be diverse and varied in order to be exposed to new ideas, but we cannot keep track of everything, so we have to be judicious with our time.  We need to constantly lump things together, such as with a feed reader, while filtering out the good stuff so we can find it again, such as with social bookmarks. It’s like breathing information in and out, while making sense of only a small portion at a time, sometimes built by many grains before trying to express our knowledge in order to make sense of it.

These processes are not taught in schools or training programes. There is no right answer in PKM. There are only processes that work. The test of PKM is whether it works for you. My experience is that a person’s PKM changes over time, and the most important aspect is being aware of how we seek sources of information, make sense of our own knowledge, and then share it at work, in communities or through networks.

As Helen Blunden has noted about her PKM, it’s about continuous learning.

It’s opened up a whole new world and it’s just made me eager to know more.  It’s also made me realise that our learning will never stop – and we should get comfortable with that idea.  (I believe the creativity is now coming from the “Seek” part of the model because information is not one-sided anymore; you get a variety of opinions, perspectives and angles and from a wider expanded network of people from all walks of life – different industries, different skillsets – my curiosity in life also helps me out here).

PKM practices can help make sense of the current environment, whether it be your profession, your job, or your areas of interest. A resilient learning network, that can develop from practising PKM, creates a more resilient framework from which to make decisions about the future. The more you give to your networks, the more you will receive. PKM provides a way to do this in a more structured, but personal, manner. The result is enhanced serendipity, always an advantage in a changing world.

PKM for future jobsMore info:

PKM Workshops

#itashare

You are not the only bee in the hive

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Joachim Stroh adds some perspective to my post on tools and competencies for the social enterprise: “It’s about you, but you’re not the only bee in the hive; the further you expand the more you grow.”

honeycomb stroh

I think this image gives a good view of the various facets people have in the workplace: My Content, My Presence, My Networks, My Tasks, My Reputation, My Goals. It also shows that workers are not mere human resources that fill job positions. They are all multi-faceted and each of these facets touches the facets of others. It is social and it is complex.

In the digitally connected workplace, systemic changes are sensed almost immediately. Therefore reaction times and feedback loops have to get faster and be more effective. We need to know who to ask for advice right now, and this requires a level of trust. But trusted relationships take time to nurture. This is evident from Joachim’s image, showing many facets that each take time to develop. Since our default action at work is usually to turn to our friends and known colleagues for help, we need to share more of our experiences with others in order to grow our trusted networks. The more colleagues we can depend upon, the better we can get work done. The time to start is now.

“We learned that individual expertise did not distinguish people as high performers. What distinguished high performers were larger and more diversified personal networks.” – Rob Cross, The Hidden Power of Social Networks

Social learning is critical for organizational effectiveness today. Workers need to connect with others in order to co-solve problems. Sharing tacit knowledge through conversations is an essential component of knowledge work. Social media enable adaptation, and the development of emergent practices, through conversations. Ensuring our facets are interconnected is one way to become a more social business. For example:

  • Am I creating content that can easily be curated and shared?
  • Am I connecting my physical and virtual presences optimally?
  • Am I finding learning opportunities through my networks?

I create these tools and presentations in order to ask better questions while trying to solve client problems. If these provide some new insight, then they are useful. I am glad that others, like Joachim, share what they are doing so we can work on these together, without ever meeting (yet).

Greater task variety means no more standardized work

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The resurrection of American manufacturing will require more than simply bringing back production to America. Global manufacturing is at the cusp of a massive transformation as the new economics of energy and labor plays out and a set of new technologies—robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, and nanotechnology—are advancing rapidly. Together these developments will spark a radical transformation of manufacturing around the world over the next decade. The winners in the rapidly changing world of manufacturing will be those firms that have mastered the agility needed to generate rapid and continuous customer-based innovation. – Steve Denning

I have often said that anything that is simple enough to be automated will be, and that any work that is merely complicated will be outsourced to the lowest cost of labour. But a funny thing is happening with manufacturing in the 21st century. It is becoming complex. Manufacturing today requires interdependent workers with initiative, creativity and passion. The new manufacturing workplace has higher task variety, which is based on a greater percentage of tacit knowledge and requires more informal and social learning. This is not Ford’s assembly line, nor is it based on F.W. Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management.
standardized work
The new manufacturing, like new businesses everywhere, will have fewer people. Computers and software are replacing people, especially information processing jobs. This is the new reality. There will be more work variety (for what used to be called jobs) because there will be more task variety. That means there will be fewer plug-and-play jobs. We will have to create our roles in the 21st century workplace. They will not be created for us. This is liberating but scary for generations who have tried to fit in to the existing job structure. Younger people seem to get it. Generations caught in the middle may find it difficult.

Community and organizational leaders will need to figure out how to adapt to the transition period, which will continue to see high employment while conversely witnessing instant millionaires who create the next mobile app. Times are changing, and we will need new methods to manage and organize work. Even those who understand this cannot see how much things will change. We are like the early generations that witnessed the power of the printing press, without understanding that it would lead to years of religious wars.

As Steve Denning concludes in his Forbes article:

Success in this new world of manufacturing will require a radically different kind of management from the hierarchical bureaucracy focused on shareholder value that is now prevalent in large firms. It will require a different goal (delighting the customer), a different role for managers (enabling self-organizing teams), a different way of coordinating work (dynamic linking), different values (continuous improvement and radical transparency) and different communications (horizontal conversations). Merely shifting the locus of production is not enough. Companies need systemic change—a new management paradigm.

It will require even more.

Start the new year hacking

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

Christian Wiman: “At some point you have to believe that the inadequacies of words you use will be transcended by the faith with which you use them.” – via @JohnnieMoore

The Icarus Deception: “if you blame your lack of job prospects on the tepid demand for hardworking, competent, but replaceable workers, you haven’t told us anything we didn’t already know.” via @RichardMerrick

Stupid Management Tools, by Niels Pflaeging @BetaLeaders

#787 – Standardized job titles and salary ranges – produce pseudo-objectivity & transfer power to HR bureaucrats

#788 – Competence and Development Planning – unavoidably lead to behavioral control, another HR folly

#789 – Development Programs – If personal growth isn’t fostered, your organizational model is broken. HR plans don’t fix that

#790 – Employee Ranking and Classifying, e.g. ABC-style: it’s reductionist, context-free, unfair, self-fulfilling

Given tablets but no teachers, Ethiopian children teach themselves – #hacking – via @zecool

Elaborating later on Negroponte’s hacking comment, Ed McNierney, OLPC’s chief technology officer, said that the kids had gotten around OLPC’s effort to freeze desktop settings. “The kids had completely customized the desktop—so every kids’ tablet looked different.  We had installed software to prevent them from doing that,” McNierney said. “And the fact they worked around it was clearly the kind of creativity, the kind of inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think is essential to learning.”

Design Is Hacking How We Learn – learning in action in a very different way – via @C4LPT & @CharlesJennings

The Power of Pull and PKM

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The Power of Pull by John Hagel, John Seely Brown & Lang Davison looks at how digital networks and the need for long-term relationships that support the flow of tacit knowledge are radically changing the nature of the enterprise as we know it. It is also an excellent reference book for understanding many facets of personal knowledge mastery. I have had this book on my reading list for quite some time and luckily Jay Cross gave me a copy which I read on the flight back from the west coast this week.

PKM helps people stay focused on the edges of their knowledge and look for innovation and opportunity. I have written, in embrace chaos, that I think the edge will be where almost all high value work gets done in organizations. Core activities will be increasingly automated or outsourced. Value is moving to the edge. The core is being managed by fewer internal staff and any work where complexity is not the norm will be of diminishing value. PKM enables tacit knowledge flows from the edge to the core and back.

emergent value

“Edge Participants also often reach out to participants in the core in an effort to build relationships and enhance knowledge flows. But these efforts are often frustrated – or at best marginalized – because core participants are too busy concentrating on defensive strategies within the core, trying to protect their profits and position, to understand the true growth opportunities represented by relevant edges.” – The Power of Pull, p. 54

PKM is a process of moving knowledge from the edge (social networks) to the core (work teams) and back out to the edges. It is the way that Pull can be done on a daily basis. Connecting the edge (emergent & cooperative) to the core (controlled & automated) is a major challenge for organizations. Part of the solution is more open management frameworks but another part is edge-like individual skills and aptitudes. PKM covers the latter.

PKM is a continual process of seeking from the edge (networks), filtering through communities of practice (CoP) and sense-making at the core (work teams) and also sharing back out to our communities and networks. Once habituated, it’s like breathing.

PKM flow

As stated in the book, “Pull platforms tend to allow us to perform the following activities with a blurring of the boundaries between creation and use“, showing four components that map directly to Seek > Sense > Share.

  • Find (Seek)
  • Connect (Seek)
  • Innovate (Sense)
  • Reflect (Share)

As the authors write, “Pull is not a spectator sport.” Neither is PKM. I would highly recommend The Power of Pull as a reference book that looks at how organizations need to change and how individuals need to redefine the nature of work.

“The choices each of us makes about the environments we participate in and the practices and behaviors we choose to pursue once we’re there will make a crucial difference in what we experience and the extent to which we can shape these experiences or simply let random experiences shape us.” – The Power of Pull, p. 99

“Chance favors the connected mind.” – Steven B. Johnson.

PKM 2013

the next middle class

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Jaron Lanier in You Are Not a Gadget, wrote:

“The people who are perhaps the most screwed by open culture are the middle classes of intellectual and cultural creation.  The freelance studio musician, the stringer selling reports to newspapers from warzones are both crucial contributors to culture. Each pays dues and devotes years to honing a craft. They used to live off the trickle down effects of the old system, and like the middle class at large, they are precious. They get nothing from the new system.”

In Heads You Win … (2010) I asked; if you are not one of the recognized leaders in your field, can you make a living online or are you just part of the long tail, valuable only to aggregators and their advertising revenues? As a content creator are you providing the fodder that lets Google, Facebook and YouTube earn huge market valuations? Will there be a middle class in the network creative economy, or only heads & tails?

I think it will be possible to make a living in this digital economy and have what used to be a middle class life style but it will not be like the old middle class. First of all, it will be jobless, as described by Rob Paterson, in You don’t need a Job. It will also have to be creative, in that you will have to create your own way of making a living. There will be few jobs to fill, instead there will be opportunities you will have to see. Finally, we will realize that the only way to survive will be by working together in communities of practice and interest, and understanding networks. “We” can take on the faceless “them”, if we work together and share.

We are seeing experiments in new forms of work all over the place. These range from co-working spaces, to shareable communities, to our non-traditional consultancy, Internet Time Alliance, which is still a work in progress. The trickle-down effects, that Lanier mentions, no longer share enough wealth for a viable middle class. We need to create our own network effects, but (this is important) it has to be within our own networks, not inside someone else’s walled garden. Google Ads or Facebook likes will not help you take control of your work destiny. We have to do it together, using new frameworks and models for the network era. The BIG kicker, is that there is no template or rule book. We have to embrace life in perpetual Beta and get started. The good news is that there are many others like us. Let’s write the new rules together.

network-era-economy

Tools and competencies for the social enterprise

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This past year I have worked on several projects that have extended my thinking on how we can use social media to promote cooperation and collaboration within and outside the enterprise. I explained some of this in a previous post on enterprise social network dimensions, which is based on the work of several others.

Ian McCarthy’s honeycomb of social media was an initial inspiration, showing how one could quickly and graphically portray differences between social media platforms. The Altimeter Group’s recent report on making the business case for enterprise social networks provided more detail on what happens inside organizations. Finally, Oscar Berg’s digital workplace concretized gave a good picture of what people-centric, service-oriented businesses should look like.

I would like to expand on this, highlighting some additions to that previous post in November. It seems that the seven facets identified by Oscar Berg align with some general digital competencies that are necessary for connected knowledge workers everywhere. These also align with the PKM framework that can support the flow of cooperative and collaborative work in a coherent organization. I have also shown examples of how one can look at various enterprise social network tools, such as the ubiquitous Sharepoint. I am not a Sharepoint fan, but almost all large organizations have it and it is usually a key part of their social network framework. Finally, I provide a few words of advice that I have learned from many projects. This presentation is a visual summary of a significant part of my work in 2012. I hope it is useful and I always appreciate discussions on how it can be improved.

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