Social tools or tools that are social?

Posted on Monday, 20 May 2013 by Harold

They might all be called ‘social networks’, but Facebook is very different from Twitter, which is very different from Instagram, which is very different from Foursquare.

It’s quite likely that we’ll see a rise of niche-specific solutions, because a social intranet for realtors, who don’t spend much time in the office, must be very different from social intranet for software developers. The logic of business simply dictates it. – Dmitry Valyanov (Venture Beat)

Is there a need for a wide variety of enterprise social tools? This is what Valyanov, CEO of a cloud-based social intranet provider, asserts in his guest post on Venture Beat. Adding social (collaboration & cooperation) capabilities to existing productivity tools is a better approach than using a dedicated social platform, Valyanov suggests. If so, then Microsoft’s strategy with Office365, focused on tools first and collaboration second, may be on the right track.

As Aaron Golberg notes, enterprise collaboration platforms can have a tendency to use a lot of IT resources, if not handled appropriately. But even Microsoft is offering a separate collaboration platform, Yammer, in support of Office365. With both sides covered, and a joint sales force, Microsoft may be able to get some solid market data on what enterprise customers really want and buy.

As Microsoft moves its services to the cloud and starts combining SharePoint, Yammer and Office 365, we still don’t really know what this all will look like by the end of 2013. It makes sense all three will be combined in some way, but how much choice customers will be offered is a big unknown. In the cloud, it should be easier for customers to pick and choose which features they want and when, but that’s not always possible from an integration standpoint. - CMS Wire

Microsoft is also using these tools internally, as described by a senior IT staff member.

“Employees that need to collaborate now have two options: a SharePoint Online site (which already number 18,000 and growing) or a Yammer group. Teams that rely primarily on document management features favor SharePoint sites, and those teams that are more focused on the conversations lean toward Yammer groups. Increasingly, we are providing options of embedding Yammer feeds into SharePoint sites for people that want a mixture of the two.” - ZDNet

Sharepoint supports people who are collaborating, focused on specific objectives, and sharing the same documents. As I mentioned in my last post on this subject, Yammer has the capability to not just support collaboration, but also workplace cooperation (freely sharing without any quid pro quo). Platforms like Yammer enable serendipitous connections by making work more transparent. But is a separate collaboration platform necessary, or just an added extra? It will be interesting to see if the triad of Yammer + Sharepoint + Office will dominate in large organizations, over more pure-play enterprise social platforms.

For enterprise decision-makers and budget-holders, it is still best to really understand workplace collaboration requirements before buying new tools and infrastructure. In addition, they should take a serious look at how better cooperation can improve innovation and the sharing of implicit knowledge across the enterprise, and outside it. Tools are only part of the solution. However, being able to look at all tools in a systemic manner should help make better decisions.

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This post was sponsored by Microsoft Office 365 – I retained editorial control and take full responsibility for what is posted. Contract writing is one of the ways I make my living.

Shifting work

Posted on Thursday, 16 May 2013 by Harold

Note: this is a synthesis of several previous posts.

The death of middle class jobs (Associated Press):

As software becomes even more sophisticated, victims are expected to include those who juggle tasks, such as supervisors and managers — workers who thought they were protected by a college degree.

At the beginning of the 20th century, about 50% of of the American workforce was employed in agriculture. Today it is less than 10%. Yet there is still food for consumption and export, notwithstanding the major issues with some industrial agricultural practices. A similar shift is happening now. Jobs in manufacturing, information processing, or other types of routine work are quickly disappearing.

Today, we are seeing that routine producing work keeps getting automated while technical improving work, for which standardized processes can be developed, usually gets outsourced to the lowest cost of labour. This type of work can be supported by formal learning, namely instruction, based on explicit processes and procedures, for which good and best practices can be developed. However, the value of this work is diminishing, because of its fungibility, which is defined as the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are capable of mutual substitution (wikipedia). “Jobs” are based on the inherent premise that one worker can be substituted by another. Software and global digital communications are making this type of tangible work a commodity, where over time, price tends to zero. Anything that can be codified and digitized, will be.

There is still valued work to be done, though. Complex work, like craft & building, can provide unique business advantages, is difficult for competitors to replicate, and cannot easily be digitized. Innovative & thinking work can identify new business opportunities and create real competitive advantage. But craft work takes time to develop, and innovative thinking has to continuously evolve and adapt to the changing environment. However, it is obvious that the valued work in any enterprise is increasing in variety and decreasing in standardization. Valued work, in an economy increasingly based on intangible value, is moving to the right, as shown in the figure below.

Supporting informal learning and helping connect implicit knowledge amongst workers are becoming business imperatives. These will also drive the creation of intangible value. But intangible value cannot be easily measured even though it produces most of our economic value today. For instance, the Standard & Poors stock index is comprised of more than 80% intangible value.

Craft & building work combined with innovative & thinking work (not jobs), is where long-term business value lies. Therefore, learning amongst ourselves and sharing implicit knowledge to create intangible value, is the real work in organizations today. This is social learning, and it is an essential part of work in a creative economy. It is a major shift away from most of our industrial practices, especially HR.

The challenge for organizations, institutions and governments is to help as many people as as possible make this shift, and to support those who cannot. The New York Times (May 2010) reported: “For the last two years, the weak economy has provided an opportunity for employers to do what they would have done anyway: dismiss millions of people — like file clerks, ticket agents and autoworkers — who were displaced by technological advances and international trade.” But jettisoning workers is not a viable long-term strategy. As Andy McAfee remarked when United Technologies laid off workers, even though its stock was at an all time high and sales had increased by 35% – “I simply want to point out that if this example is part of any larger trend, then we cannot rely on economic growth to fix our current problems of unemployment or underemployment.”

As early as 2003, a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, showed that we are moving to an economy that values emotional intelligence, imagination and creativity. How we get there will depend on what we do now in preparing people for an economy of intangibles. It could be a future described by TechCrunch – “America is well on the way towards having a small, highly skilled and/or highly fortunate elite, with lucrative jobs; a vast underclass with casual, occasional, minimum-wage service work, if they’re lucky; and very little in between.”

But it can be a much better future if organizations, institutions, governments, and especially individuals start to focus on thinking and building skills, as well as being innovative and honing their craft skills. This means helping all people develop their talents to do work based on initiative, creativity, and passion. Our work structures need to support informal learning so people can share implicit knowledge while creating intangible value.

Realizing that the era of “jobs” is over, would be a good start.

Acknowledging that our existing education and training institutions are mostly ill-suited for this challenge would be another step.

Finally, we have to create better mechanisms to account for value and redistribute wealth in an intangible economy.

#itashare

London Summer Picnic

Posted on Tuesday, 14 May 2013 by Harold

For the past 18 months, Jane Hart has been hosting the Social Learning Centre, offering a wide variety of resources, coaching, and workshops. I have run several workshops as well, some alone, and others jointly with Jane. We have learned much in supporting social learning with hundreds of participants from around the globe. Last year, we decided to offer a workshop series, which will be ending with our second Summer Camp in June. The series consisted of workshops on:

Personal Knowledge Management
Social Media for Professional Development
Social Learning in the Workplace
From Training to Performance Support
Online Communities
Enterprise Community Management
Social Learning in Business

For our Summer Camp, we are planning on doing something different. It will be a chance to reflect on what we have learned together. The focus will be on synthesizing all the conversations from our workshops over the past year and more. We will curate the conversations and observations and present them to Summer Campers. We will then work collaboratively on weaving these threads together into a narrative that makes sense. Jane and I will do the initial curation but then each person will be able to add to it, in view of the other participants, working cooperatively as desired. Each person will be able to create a mind-map, or other form of sense-making to make a cognitive toolbox.

In addition to these online activities, we will start the Summer Camp with a “picnic” in London, on the afternoon of Thursday 20 June 2013. Jane and I will present our initial findings and observations in a semi-formal way. Weather permitting, this will start in a park, if not, we will find a suitable pub. This will be followed by us all “walking the talk” where we will go for a casual stroll through an interesting part of London, conversing as we walk.

After the walk, we will weave our conversations back together. Jane and I will be ready with a few other short presentations on topics of interest, kind of like a fast-paced Ignite! format. We will also be available for one-on-one chats or more open discussions. This will be an informal Summer camp, but Jane & I will bring a basket full of social goodies. Much of this will be recorded and curated, and shared with the other online participants. We will try to live-cast this as well, but it will depend on our connectivity. We will stay in London and we invite anyone who wishes to get together for an evening meal to join us.

If you wish to participate, please sign up for the Summer Camp, for £99

If you wish to attend our Summer Picnic, the cost is £49 for the afternoon or £119 including the online Summer Camp.

Sense-making in practice

Posted on Sunday, 12 May 2013 by Harold

Maria Popova at BrainPickings.org does an excellent review of the 1936 book, You Can Do Anything by James Mangan. She covers in detail the section on 14 Ways to Acquire Knowledge. These align nicely with the Seek : Sense : Share of personal knowledge management as shown below.

I placed Write & Reason into the Share category, but they can also fit into Sense-making. Sense-making is the necessary value-add of PKM. Without it, there is no knowledge to share, only others’ work to be re-broadcasted. Looking at PKM as pre-curation shows how important a personal sense-making process is in order to be of service to one’s networks, whether personal or professional. PKM is each person’s part of the social learning contract. Mangan’s 14 ways to acquire knowledge provide another set of possibilities on how to develop a unique PKM process. There are no best practices in PKM, only principles and examples to draw inspiration from.

For another perspective on this theme, Chris Brogan advises people to, Read, then Act.

I recently purchased a bunch of different fitness magazines. The experience was interesting. I pulled the following actionable information from what I learned:

* If there was a long article with someone, it was useful. If it was a “tidbits” kind of article, it was rarely useful (usually the questions were fluff).

* If there was a “recipe,” as I like to call them, the articles were useful. If it was just “informative,” I couldn’t actually remember the lesson.

* If the article suggested other resources, the information suggested was always helpful in deepening my understanding.

* Articles that prompted an action instead of a thought process got me to take the action more often. Articles that wanted me to think a certain way were easy to forget.

Sense-making is acting on one’s knowledge. In my own work, if I did not have client projects to test out some of the ideas I have developed, my knowledge would have stagnated. In the case of PKM, it was an interesting idea that I personally put into practice at first. However, it was in explaining this concept to others, then running workshops and coaching people, that I really understood PKM well and learned much more.

“To be is to do.” – Socrates

The new enclosure movement

Posted on Thursday, 9 May 2013 by Harold

ENCLOSURE: In English social and economic history, enclosure or inclosure is the process which ends traditional rights such as mowing meadows for hay, or grazing livestock on common land formerly held in the open field system. Once enclosed, these uses of the land become restricted to the owner, and it ceases to be land for commons. - Wikipedia

Do we no longer own common culture?

People everywhere are seeing and feeling the loss of parts of their lives to the ‘enclosure’ of privatization and the diminishment of the commons (the public spaces where certain types of common services and goods are made available to the public). - Jon Husband

Even the newest ventures are quickly getting enclosed.

What was a promise for free-range, connected, open-ended learning online, MOOCs are becoming something else altogether. Locked-down. DRM’d. Publisher and profit friendly. Offered via a closed portal, not via the open Web. – Audrey Watters

Government is also culpable.

In the absence of that [a culture of open government], though, we could paradoxically find ourselves living in a world where technology makes it easier to share information — via the government’s open data portal or its online access to information request system — while our government’s culture makes it harder to talk to the people who can give that information meaning and context. - David Eaves (Toronto Star)

But what is the price of enclosure? We will lose our ability to innovate. For a society, a country, or an organization, this is the end of evolution and the beginning of stagnation.

This is my work

Posted on Tuesday, 7 May 2013 by Harold

The ability to learn is the only lasting competitive advantage for any organization. Hyper-connected work environments require people with better sense-making, collaboration, and cooperation skills. Social learning plays a significant role in this. Democratic workplaces that foster trust can share knowledge better and faster. To this end, I am a keen subversive of many of the last century’s management and education practices.

Collaborative Work

Social Learning

Connected Leadership

Personal Knowledge Management

Adapting to perpetual Beta

Enterprise Social Tools

Communities of Practice

The new work

Posted on Sunday, 5 May 2013 by Harold

All work today can be reduced to just four basic types of jobs, according to Lou Adler. His company identified four prototypical jobs after developing thousands of job descriptions over the years.

Everything starts with an idea. This is the first of the four jobs – the Thinkers. Builders convert these ideas into reality. This the second job. Improvers make this reality better. This is the third job. Producers do the work over and over again, delivering quality goods and services to the company’s customers in a repeatable manner. This is the fourth job. And then the process begins again with new ideas and new ways of doing business being developed as the old ones become stale.

While I am not a fan of job competencies, I think this article can tell us something about the future of work in general. For instance, Gary Hamel identified obedience, diligence, and intellect as industrial/information economy competencies. Today, initiative, creativity, and passion are essential skills for what Hamel describes as the Creative Economy. I view this new creative economy as a property of the Network Era which is bringing about the rise of knowledge artisans. So I began to map Hamel’s essential work competencies against Adler’s job types.

Another factor in the changing nature of work is the changing perception of value. In the creative economy, more value is coming from intangible assets than tangible ones. For example, the S&P stock index in 2009 was 81% intangible assets, up from 17% in 1975. I recently discussed intangibles and organizational dynamics with Jay Deragon, as part of the Smarter Companies initiative. As the Smarter Companies website explains:

Despite its enormous importance today, most businesspeople lack the basic knowledge and tools needed to optimize intangible capital. This leads to blocked learning, suboptimal performance, stifled innovation and stagnant growth.

Learning to better deal with intangibles is the next challenge for today’s organizations and workers. I developed the following graphic to describe the four job types in relation to 1) work competencies and 2) economic value. It appears that an economy that creates more intangible value will require a greater percentage of Thinkers and Builders.

As we move into a post-job economy, the difference between labour and talent will become more distinct. Producers and Improvers will continue to get automated, at the speed of Moore’s law. Those lacking enough ‘Talent’ competencies may get marginalized. I think there will be increasing pressure to become ‘Thinkers + Builders’, similar to what Cory Doctorow describes as Makers in his fictional book about the near future.

What is relatively certain is that ‘Labour’ competencies, which most education and training still focuses on, will have diminishing value. How individuals can improve their Thinking and Building competence should be the focus of anyone’s professional development plan. How organizations can support Thinking and Building should be the focus of Organizational Development and Human Resources departments. While Producing and Improving will not go away, they are not where most economic value will be generated in the Network Era.

As with all models, this one simplifies reality, but it may be useful for thinking about the future of work.

Innovators, imitators and idiots

Posted on Friday, 3 May 2013 by Harold

Friday’s Finds:

“first come the innovators, then the imitators, then the idiots … you can set your watch to it.” – @littleidea

“Sad. So many education questions now start with, “Do you know any apps for … ?” and nearly none with, ‘What outdoor games do you know … ?’” – @surreallyno

“Ninety percent of what we call ‘management’ consists of making it difficult for people to get things done.” – Peter Drucker – via @davidgurteen

serendipity: let’s talk numbers – via @jhagel

For example, my research found that, on average, people made up one third of the participants (the nodes illustrated by person thumbnails in the networks illustrated above) of a serendipity story, where the remaining participants were deemed to be either information or physical objects. This is practical information of potential value to a designer of a serendipity system: if, say, ten participants are somehow simulated, engineered or factored into a system, then it might be a useful starting point, although by no means any guarantee for serendipity—remember that control is too simplistic a concept—to allow or arrange for around three of these participants to be people.

Social enterprise tools: an industry in denial? via @sheynkman

Teens have problems like pregnancy, truancy, drug use, low grades. They also use Facebook. If I were to suggest that I can solve these problems by creating a Facebook page, I’d be rightfully laughed at.

Yet this is often the sales tactics in my industry: five bucks a month per employee and all or most of those pesky problems with productivity and barriers to collaboration magically go away. It may increase sales, but this strategy all but guarantees a blowback in the future.

From “unemployed” to unworking – via @tiacarr

“Jobs” are a product of industrial society, those typified by economic growth. However, as economic growth becomes untenable and businesses continually streamline their processes through automation, society is left with deep structural unemployment and wealth inequality. More people find themselves with less disposable income and so they consume less and have lower social mobility.

“Networked minds” require a fundamentally new kind of economics – via @eprenen

Networked minds create a cooperative human species

“This has fundamental implications for the way, economic theories should look like,” underlines Professor Helbing. Most of today’s economic knowledge is for the “homo economicus”, but people wonder whether that theory really applies. A comparable body of work for the “homo socialis” still needs to be written.

“While the “homo economicus” optimizes its utility independently, the “homo socialis” puts himself or herself into the shoes of others to consider their interests as well,” explains Grund, and Helbing adds: “This establishes something like “networked minds”. Everyone’s decisions depend on the preferences of others.” This becomes even more important in our networked world.

Have you mapped your network? Here’s some methods and tools – by @kanter

The subject of education

Posted on Wednesday, 1 May 2013 by Harold

I mostly focus on workplace learning here, but I want to put together some of my previous thoughts on public education. My opinions are based on watching our two boys go through a public education system, now complete, plus a fair bit of reading, in addition to many conversations with educators over the years. If we change how we think about public education, we may also be able to improve how we support workplace learning.

We do not live our lives based on academic subjects, and no workplace is subject-based, but almost all of our curricula are stuffed into subject silos. Education systems should focus on facilitating learning and critical thinking. When students are ready to enter the workforce they will then have the learning skills to blast through whatever job training interests them. Getting the education system out of the job training business will likely make for happier learners, teachers and and maybe even parents.

What would a curriculum look like if you eliminated any specific content and any reference to particular technologies and instead focused on universal cognitive processes? Many varieties of this “curriculum” could be created, using various content areas or communication technologies. I imagine a curriculum that is open to teachers’ expertise and students’ needs, based on processes like those suggested by Marina Gorbis in The Nature of the Future:

Sensemaking
Social and emotional intelligence
Novel and adaptive thinking
Moral and ethical reasoning

What would be different about this more basic curriculum is that students would be able to choose how they would learn these process skills and how they would show mastery. Self-expression could be shown through writing, blogging, art, drama, mechanics, etc. This approach would also free up a whole bunch of teachers in administrative curriculum development positions. Without a subject-centric curriculum, teachers could choose the appropriate subject matter for their particular class and the school system could concentrate on ensuing that students have mastered the important processes.

All fields of knowledge are expanding and artificial boundaries between disciplines are disintegrating. Our education systems need to drop the whole notion of subjects and content mastery and move to process-oriented learning. The subject matter should be something of interest to the learner or something a teacher, with passion, is motivated to teach. The subject does not matter, it’s just grist for the cognitive mill.

Discussing what subjects we should teach is the 21st Century equivalent of determining how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The answer is infinite. The real debate in education is whether we need subject-based curriculum at all.

Connected leadership

Posted on Sunday, 28 April 2013 by Harold

How is leadership in a hyper-connected workplace different? It’s been an ongoing conversation here, as this comment by Stephen Downes, on leadership as an emergent property, provides a counterpoint to certain popular leadership literature, especially “great man” theories.

‘Leadership’ is the trait people who have been successful ascribe as the reason for their success.
It is one of those properties that appears to be empirically unverifiable and is probably fictional.

In preparing for our connected worker program, I reviewed my previous posts on leadership and created a short synthesis of the key points. With life in perpetual Beta as a guiding perspective, networked organizations have to learn how to deal with ambiguity and complexity. Those in leadership and management positions must find ways to nurture creativity and critical thinking. Too often there are organizational barriers that prevent this. The 21st century workplace is all about understanding networks, modelling network learning, and strengthening networks. Anyone can show leadership in these areas.

Another guiding principle for modern organizational design is for loose hierarchies and strong networks. This is succinctly explained in the definition of wirearchy: a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology”. As networked, distributed work becomes the norm, trust will emerge from environments that are open, transparent, and diverse. Supporting social networks ensures that knowledge is shared and contributes to organizational longevity. Organizations need to learn as fast as their environments.

As a result of improved trust in the workplace, leadership will be seen for what it is – an emergent property of a network in balance and not some special property available to only the select few. This requires leadership from everyone – an aggressively intelligent and engaged workforce, learning with each other. In today’s workplace, it is a significant disadvantage to not actively participate in social learning networks.

Leadership in networks does not come from above, as there is no top. To know the culture of the workplace, one must be the culture. Marinate in it and understand it. This cannot be done while trying to control the culture. Organizational resilience is strengthened when those in leadership roles let go of control.

Related posts:

The Connected Leader

From Hierarchies to Wirearchies

Connected leadership from Harold Jarche