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)

With a little help from my friends

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Here are some of the interesting things I learned on Twitter. This week I’m featuring my colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance.

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I remarked earlier in the week that “crowds don’t need wise contributors, but diverse & independent ones; it’s like evolution: simple mechanisms create complexity.”

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We learn through idle chatter, so it seems (via @shareski):

idle_chatter_shareski

@charlesjennings

“if it’s social & engaged there is no us & them, only we”

“It’s not the channel that empowers or dis-empowers the learner. It’s the presence or absence of the ‘course and curriculum’ chains”

“True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing” – Socrates

@c4lpt (Jane Hart)

The Changing Face of Learning & Development

Leapfrog to the Future

@jaycross

“I think of crowd sourcing as tapping the wisdom of the crowd, not getting one idea by asking a large group.”

Go straight to the finish line

Jay’s book on working/learning smarter in the cloud

@Quinnovator (Clark Quinn)

Innovation’s Long Gestation

“lesson from Twitter (for web, mobile design), you don’t *need* full sentences, you DO need to communicate”

“as my colleague @hjarche says, “increasingly, work is learning and learning is work” [yes, I already knew that]

@jonhusband

The HR Problem: the traditional organization is a machine and we are human

The Problem with the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Hierarchy

The temporary and flexible hierarchies of Fishnet Organizations

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and I also learned that “eMail Is Where Knowledge Goes to Die” via @elsua

Aggregate Understand Connect

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I’ve changed one word, but doesn’t it make more sense like this?

As I talk about PKM here or with this graphic and discussion, “understand” is more descriptive of the human sense-making activities than “filter” is. Perhaps I should go back and change these posts to reflect what we are actually doing – understanding as part of the sense-making process.

This is inspired  partially by The Problem with DIKW as well as comments by Stephen Downes, but I still want to keep the PKM concept as simple as possible, for business reasons, not academic ones.

Aggregate Understand Connect

Create you own blog – review

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CreateYourOwnBlog

I have to admit that I enjoyed reading through Create your own blog by Tris Hussey. The subtitle, 6 easy projects to start blogging like a pro, did not attract me initially but the book is well written, covers a lot of ground and is quite helpful. The first three chapters cover the basics and then there are sections on personal blogs, business blogs, blogs for artists, etc. If you’re 18 years old and a digital native, you don’t need this book and neither do you if you’ve already been blogging for several years. However, there is still a good segment of the population who may be interested in this book.

Create your own blog is quite different from Social Media for Dummies which I reviewed a while back. The introduction says it all, “It’s all about storytelling”. This book is well-researched, based on experience (it seems that Tris started blogging about the same time I began this blog) and includes lots of anecdotes – more learning through storytelling.

There are also details on podcast blogs, video blogs and fairly up to date information on Twitter and Facebook. It’s the kind of book you give your boss, your colleague thinking about blogging, or someone who is looking at a second career as a free-agent. I have several clients for whom this book would be perfect and the list price is very reasonable. On top of that, Tris lives in Canada!

Would I recommend this book to someone starting out blogging? If you’re over 30, definitely yes, because you probably won’t dig through all the online forums to find out what you really need.

You can check out the book’s website for more information sixbloggingprojects.com.

From the Summary:

One of the hallmarks of blogging has been its culture of transparency and openness, which means that it is expected that you will disclose affiliate links and other similar things (like when I receive a free product for review that I get to keep). Not disclosing this information can get you in hot water. It’s happened to even prominent bloggers (who should know better), so don’t feel alone, but it’s best to just avoid the whole issue and let people know.

[Disclosure: The publisher, Pearson Canada,  sent me a complimentary copy of this book and I am an Amazon.com affiliate. If you click through the book link and order a book, I will receive a small commission. Over the past few years I have only used these commissions to purchase more books and write reviews on them. I have given most of these books away – to clients, friends and conference attendees.]

Learning to work anew

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My Net Work Learning presentation on Slideshare has garnered a fair number of views in the past two weeks and I’m assuming there’s an interest in the themes presented. Slides alone are rather limited in getting a message across, so I’ve created a slide show with audio that covers most of the first part of the larger presentation. I will make more of these if there is any demand.

I like the audio & slide format because I don’t need video editing skills and the pictures/words seem to work well together. I used Jing Pro to make this.

Click image or link to launch MP4 (4 minutes):

Net Work Learning Screenshot

Net Work Learning

Presentation available on Slideshare (slightly modified)

Learning is (still) conversation

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The folks at Scotland’s GoodPractice for leaders & managers have a white paper on How Managers Learn, with some interesting, but not surprising, results. They conducted a survey to find out more about informal learning in the workplace, inspired by Jay Cross, who has shown that “informal learning plays an important part in the learning and performance landscape“.

Respondents reported that the  most-used as well as the most effective informal learning method was: informal chats with colleagues. Other top-rated methods include the use of (external) search engines; trial & error; informal on-the-job instruction; and professional reading. Without looking at any other ways to encourage informal learning among leaders (everyone is a leader in a knowledge-intensive workplace) – just promoting informal conversations would be beneficial. That’s one small step for each person; one giant leap for the organization.

Yes, learning is conversation (2005).

informl_member.jpg

Here’s a quote from Jay’s book on Informal Learning:

Conversations

“Conversation is the most powerful learning technology ever invented. Conversations carry news, create meaning, foster cooperation, and spark innovation. Encouraging open, honest conversation through work space design, setting ground rules for conversing productively, and baking conversation into the corporate culture spread intellectual capital, improve cooperation, and strengthen personal relationships.”

There are many great tools and technologies to facilitate conversation, which I’ve discussed here and used with clients and partners, but the key is having a culture of conversation. Part of it is just being interested in what’s happening in the enterprise. It’s likely easier for managers to be interested in what is happening because they are empowered to do something. The challenge for organizations is to get everyone involved in conversations. With complex problems, we need as many and as diverse conversations as possible, and there are a variety of ways to get started.

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.

From training to learning

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Informal Learning Conversations
Image: Jay Cross

I came across the article From Training to Learning by Brigitte Jordan via two sources yesterday. It was written c. 1997 based on ” … a common discourse, carried on for the last several years at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) and the Institute for Research on Learning (IRL).”

“In a fundamental way, all work is about learning: it is about learning to fit in and to collaborate, about learning to take initiative when appropriate, it is about really understanding customers, about acquiring intimate knowledge of the products and services the company sells and how they can fit into customers’ lives. Acknowledged as such or not, learning has to be an integral part of work. But, somehow, integrated [work+learning] activities have become split into the separate spheres of [work] and [training] which have come to be dominated by quite different interests.”

This article synthesizes my own work practice and is a hot internal topic at the Internet Time Alliance. It covers:

  • Why Conventional Training Doesn’t Work Anymore
  • Shifting the Paradigm from Training to Learning
  • Learning is fundamentally social
  • Informal learning is crucial in the workplace

This makes the argument for change a bit easier, in that informal and social learning in the workplace is not that new of an idea and actually we’re a bit behind the times.

From Training to Learning is a highly recommended read.