How complex is our work?

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On my recent post, Emergent practices need practice, I looked at how complexity could not be easily addressed through traditional training methods:

But many of the problems we face today are COMPLEX, and methods to solve simple and complicated problems will not work with complex ones. One of the ways we addressed simple & complicated problems was through training. Training works well when you have clear and measurable objectives. However, there are no clear objectives with complex problems. Learning as we probe the problem, we gain insight and our practices are emergent (emerging from our interaction with the changing environment and the problem). Training looks backwards, at what worked in the past (good & best practices), and creates a controlled environment to develop knowledge and skills.

That got me thinking about what the ‘average’ knowledge worker might be expected to do in the course of a week. I think that there is still a fair amount of our work that is based on our existing skills and knowledge (perhaps 50%) and enables us to deal with complicated issues. This could be writing complicated reports or doing some type of trouble-shooting or problem-solving based on processes and knowledge that we have developed in our professional field. I also think that we all have to deal with routine, simple stuff, but we should off-load as much as possible so that we could concentrate on higher value tasks. It would be best to keep this to a minimum; say no more than 10%. We can also be confronted with total chaos or crises from time to time. Dealing with these requires a lot of energy. Keeping chaos to a minimum would be another objective of the organization; once again, say 10%.

Finally, as we understand the complex nature of our environment or the markets, we would want our workers to be able to address complex challenges. I doubt that all of our work is complex and I’m not sure how much complexity one can handle for extended periods of time. We are constantly trying to make sense and bring some order to our work and that takes effort. I think that 30% may be an appropriate amount of our time.
complex work
Does anyone have experience or data in looking at how our work is divided from simple to complex problems? It seems like a very interesting area for further research.

Work is learning, learning work

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As host of this month’s  Working / Learning Blog Carnival, David Wilkins challenged participants to think about the intersections between working and learning:

  • When does work become learning?
  • When does learning become work?

The integration of work and learning is a key part of my professional practice. Why?

Networks — Our workplaces, economies and societies are becoming highly networked. That means the transmission of ideas can be instantaneous. There is no time to pause, go into the back room and develop something to address our challenges. The problem will have changed by then.

Life in perpetual Beta — Not just rapid change, but continual change, requires practices that evolve as they’re developed. In programming, this has meant a move from waterfall to agile methods. Beta releases are the norm for Web applications and as we do more on the Web, other practices are sure to follow.

Complexity — The Cynefin framework shows that established practices work when the environment or the challenge is simple or complicated. For complex problems there are no established answers and we need to engage the problem and learn by probing. This requires a completely different mindset from training for defined problems and measurable outcomes. The integration of learning and work is not some ideal, it is a necessity in a complex world.

My current interest in Web social media is that these tools and platforms give us a better way to engage in collaborative work and help us integrate learning into our daily practice, such as personal knowledge mastery. There is no excuse that we cannot address the huge amounts of information and the complexity in our workplaces, as we already have the tools and much practice to inform us. All we need is the will.

“Work is learning, learning work” – that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

(apologies to Keats)

• Did you like this post? Check out the perpetual beta series

Nine Shift in Saint John

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I’ve written fairly often about Nine Shift, both the blog and the book, since 2005. Tomorrow evening, Bill Draves, Nine Shift author, will be speaking at the Faces of Fusion networking dinner in Saint John and I have the privilege of attending.

Nine Shift
Nine Shift

The basis of the book is that in the next decade what we do during 75% of our waking day (nine hours) will drastically change. In Chapter One the nine shifts, described several years ago and taking place at this time, are [my comments]:

Shift One. People work at home. [like most of my colleagues]

Shift Two. Intranets replace offices. [and maybe cafés replace offices too]

Shift Three. Networks replace pyramids. [same for the training department or the leaking organizational pyramid]

Shift Four. Trains replace cars. [ I already enjoy train service as often as possible]

Shift Five. Dense neighborhoods replace suburbs. [on the changing suburbs, from The Atlantic March 2009]

Shift Six. New social infrastructures evolve. [new forms of structures are already being developed]

Shift Seven. Cheating becomes collaboration. [collaboration is a required skill for the networked workplace]

Shift Eight. Half of all learning is online. [in spite of New Brunswick’s drastic reduction to its distance learning budget]

Shift Nine. Education becomes web-based. [is there any doubt?]

I’m looking forward to finally meeting Bill and hope to have more to add to this theme.

NB advanced learning technologies sector

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If you read the Telegraph-Journal you’ll find my comments in today’s story, Technology solution must be industry led:

Harold Jarche … who has long worked in the sector, authored two previous reports for government on advanced learning technologies and now consults largely outside New Brunswick, took issue with that suggestion.

“What we really need is start-ups,” Jarche said, pointing to industry’s close connection with several government funding institutions.

“We should be planting lots and lots of seeds,” Jarche said.

“Waiting for some saviour to come in and give us jobs, I think that’s the wrong focus.”

Back in 2004 I suggested more of a focus on European markets in Going Euro:

There is some focus on the European market but this is miniscule compared to our single-minded fixation with that marketplace to our South. I’m not saying that we should avoid US markets, but that we are not taking advantage of our “middle power” position.

In 2005 I recommended that we focus less on large companies and more on individuals to grow Our local learning industry:

I believe that the sustainability of the regional industry will depend on the knowledge workers and entrepreneurs who remain here to weather the next economic downturn. This could be difficult without a larger and more diverse group of small and nimble companies, developed during the good years.

My quotes in the Telegraph-Journal article are pretty close to what I said but I wrote a longer observation on the NB Learning Industry last November, with this conclusion:

Finally, I think that a non-profit chaordic organisation (PDF), as recommended by Rob Paterson on the Fast Forward Blog, might be a better structure than the some of the models tried already. I hope that the asset map that is being developed will be published and that it will be made freely available for open discussion and even for remix.

In this report, of which I have only read what is available in the executive summary, the call centre industry has been lumped in with learning technologies, which is a bit of a stretch. Therefore, this is not the same industry that I examined in 1999 and 2004, but some of the same problem areas are cited – R&D and effective marketing. In addition, there is a recommendation for a – leader or ‘champion’ – to represent the industry. I would suggest that there is already a group of people in this province who have been having serious conversations about industry and/or learning technologies for several years. They include:

Stephen Downes

David Campbell

Jacques Cool

John Gunn at MonctonITA

Jeff Roach at PropelICT

Please add more in the comments

Maybe it’s time the C-suites visited the e-suites and joined in the conversation.

Twitter potpourri

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I’m still figuring out how best to integrate Twitter to my personal knowledge management processes. I post some things I find directly to Delicious and others I mark as favourites. Here are some of my recent favourites, a follow-on from a related post last month [I’ve added some letters and words to make it more coherent]:

@davecormier RT @arvind: @davecormier Hard core social network research: danah boyd

@c4lptnews Leveraging Human Networks to accelerate learning | CLO magazine

How to opt out of cookie sniffing and trading – painless – via Seth Godin

Shai Agassi: A bold plan for mass adoption of electric cars (TED) Inspiring, Hopeful, Fantastic!

The movement from a public service that is opaque by 21st Century standards to one that is transparent is going to be gut-wrenching – David Eaves

RCMP and Vatican: The downfall of the hierarchical and opaque organization – David Eaves

Via @neternity Try 2-3 low-cost approaches instead of one big (expensive) project – that way you can afford to fail #learntrends

Via @neternity The biggest cultural change was breaking down organizational walls. This is an emerging “wirearchy” says @jonhusband #learntrends

@KathySierra Cut a few prime-time ads, use the money to hire fabulous usability & instructional design team to craft/implement a spectacular user learning “strategy”.

Composing Twitter messages using only brainwaves #learntrends – The Future?

On calculating ROI for human activities (economics, learning, marketing, etc.)  from a Nobel laureate

@nickcharney 17 Things we Used to Do (before Twitter): Andrew McAfee

Learning products

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Heike Philp recently made this comment in response to Media & Messages:

What I am sorely missing right now are ‘learning products’. To me a product has product specifications (specs) just as much as a computer has a list of specs or software has a list of features.

The fascination of Pecha Kucha for me is, that this simple idea could be patented and that it is a ‘product’, it has specs, the specs are ‘20 slides auto advancing 20 sec’.

In the light of lots of IM software out there, a Tweet is a ‘product’ because it has 140 characters.

So, where right now in the vast ocean of fuzzy connectivism and informal learning experiences are the products?

We are always talking about tools. Is this because these seem to be “the products” out there right now?

I use my personal knowledge mastery (PKM) process for some of my own sense-making, involving several internally (sort, categorize, make explicit, retrieve) and externally (connect, exchange, contribute) focused activities:

Here’s a first look at some of the learning “products” that can be created:

Sort & Categorize: lists; taxonomies; topic maps; mind maps

Make Explicit: constrained note-taking; written observations; graphical representations; audio recordings; video recordings

Retrieve: problem-solving; pattern-sensing

Each of these can be made more explicit; such as creating specific lists for a project. The resulting products can all be aggregated as part of a personal learning environment.

Individuals can also Connect – Exchange – Contribute with others through their learning “products”. For example:

  • Bookmarks (and any comments or tags) become a way of connecting to other lists & topics when they are put on the Web and made social.
  • Moving from reading and viewing content to making comments is a way of exchanging information, instead of just consuming it.
  • Developing new ideas and posting these on the Web as blog posts, slide shows, or recordings contributes to the ongoing conversation that may become part of a field of interest or even a discipline.

Looking at this from the perspective of a learning professional, I would suggest combining the use of tools with an understanding of the higher processes shown in the diagram above. That means that you don’t really have to decide upon particular tools and can leave that to individual preferences. For instance, if you want to use blogs for teaching, you can specify the “learning products” you are looking for, but it does not matter what blog platforms are used. I can see a large number and wide variety of learning products that can be developed around these PKM processes.

Emergent practices need practice

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“I think that one of the larger problems of our time, is that we we don’t even know how to think about many of today’s problems. We think that our reason or our effort will be enough to solve them. When in fact, these problems are of a different nature to the ones that we used to have. They are different because, we are so much more interconnected today that there can be no simple cause and effect.”

From Why we are lost? – How we can find ourselves, Rob Paterson explains the Cynefin framework, with a link to a concise explanatory video from Anecdote,  and goes on to show the problem in our workplaces:

“In short — some problems are Simple and are subject to simple cause and effect. I do this and that always happens. Some problems are Complicated and I need to know a lot to find the answer, say design a jet engine or put on a TV show, but once I have the body of knowledge again results are going to be there. The laws of Newtonian Physics apply.”

But many of the problems we face today are COMPLEX, and methods to solve simple and complicated problems will not work with complex ones. One of the ways we addressed simple & complicated problems was through training. Training works well when you have clear and measurable objectives. However, there are no clear objectives with complex problems. Learning as we probe the problem, we gain insight and our practices are emergent (emerging from our interaction with the changing environment and the problem). Training looks backwards, at what worked in the past (good & best practices), and creates a controlled environment to develop knowledge and skills.

To deal with increasing complexity, organizations need to support emergent work practices, in addition to their training efforts. They must support collaboration, communication, synthesis, pattern recognition and creative tension, all within a trusting environment in order to be effective. One method of supporting emergent work is the fostering of communities of practice (CoP).

I read today that communication does not equal collaboration, and that is a challenge in “building” communities of practice. Just because the communication tools are in place does not mean that people will automatically collaborate.  You can’t really build a CoP, it has to emerge through practice, but you can put in systems and processes to support CoP’s.  As I learned this week — you know you’re in a real community of practice when it changes your practice.

So if you wonder what all the hype over web social media is about, in my mind it’s the potential to support emergent work practices. Twitter, blogs, wikis and social networks are tools for communities of practice. They can be used effectively or not. How these tools get used is itself an emergent practice, but if you don’t practice, nothing will emerge.

Media and Messages

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To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, every message has its medium and every medium has its message. That sums up my impression of our LearnTrends web conference which finished yesterday. Selecting the appropriate messages and media is becoming an essential part of facilitating learning. The other component is building or connecting to networks, social or otherwise. The major trend in workplace learning that I see is the merging of Learning & Working. The main driver is our ubiquitous access to networks. Our global 24 hour conversation was in fact a global village, still composed mostly of innovators and early adopters, but the tip of a connected iceberg.

Personally, I enjoyed the sessions but of course this medium is only good for a certain type of interaction. It could not be all things to all people. For instance, there were several media involved:

Synchronous Sessions (Elluminate) – good to get acquainted, hear some new ideas and feel like part of a larger movement. The text chat enables more people to have input without interrupting the current speaker, but it can get off topic. The session by Heike Philp on Pecha Kucha showed another way to make this medium more interesting, and fun, by adding constraints for the presenters.

Twitter – gets the word out about upcoming sessions and allows wider publishing of impressions. Using Twitterfall, or search, one can see the collected observations from many people and from this see some patterns. These are some of my observations I passed on via Twitter:

“I knew I was in a community of practice when my practice had changed,” heard in a discussion.

“If you shut down the training department, would it be missed?” a general question

“Try 2-3 low-cost approaches instead of one big (expensive) project- that way you can afford to fail,” from a presenter.

“Twitter is for surfing an ocean of information, not trying to understand fluid dynamics,” my own observation.

Blogs – like this post, blogs provide a more permanent record of what happened and more thought-out individual impressions, plus the option to connect or comment.

Social Networks – the LearnTrends community site provides a place to add a profile which is a handy way to put a face to a name. The main limitation of using Ning is the lack of wiki, and obvious weakness when  creating a schedule on the fly with people in multiple time zones.

I’ve been attending, presenting and coordinating web conferences for over a decade now and each time I learn, or re-learn something. Whenever I go live on the Web I also realize that this active learning is necessary to really understand the medium. Looking back and observing is not enough to understand how networked learning can be facilitated. We learn through our practice.

Conversations about learning in organizations

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We’re nine hours into our global (free) 24-hour online conversation about learning in the workplace. Ross Button is currently giving a great presentation on CGI: Bringing the internet inside for informal learning & transformation. He’s discussing all the details of bringing social software into a large multinational organization covering the social, data and technology dimensions. Ross suggests that when initiating these kinds of initiatives, it’s better to try 2 to 3 low-cost approaches instead of one big and expensive project. In this way you can afford to fail a few times. He also says that the biggest cultural change was breaking down departmental and organizational walls because social software ignores the chain of command. Jon Husband commented that this is an emerging wirearchy. Finally, Ross says that these kinds of projects take time, support and patience.

We started this morning (Pacific Time) with a good mix of people, though mostly from North America, and we have been averaging about 100 participants at any time.

There have been a lot of great conversations so far and more scheduled for the next +12 hours.

Marketing for Consultants

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In the article So You Want to Be an E-learning Consultant… I discussed the pros and cons of consultancy as well as the various areas of practice in our field. One area I did not discuss was attracting and retaining clients. As the saying goes, when you’re working, you’re not finding new clients and when you’re looking for clients, you’re not working. I decided to look at a number (32) of my past projects and see how my clients had come to find me. I broke this down into three main categories, with the number of projects shown in brackets:

  1. Direct reference (20) from a member of my business community, defined as someone I know or have met or may have worked for or with previously. This includes follow-on projects.
  2. Indirect reference (9) through one of my professional networks, also known in social media as a “friend of a friend”.
  3. Client found me on the Web (3) via some form of search.

Obviously my closest connections are my best sources of client referrals. I haven’t calculated the revenues from all of these projects but I can say that the third category, while only three projects, generated a significant amount, so passive Web marketing should not be discounted.