Month: November 2010

Talking about Working Smarter

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Working Smarter: What is it? Why do we need to do it?

Working Smarter means integrating learning and working.

We’re networking our society, our economy and our workplaces. This increases complexity because there are more connections between people, places and things. In complex systems, the link between cause and effect cannot be determined. Instead, we need to look for constantly-changing patterns (think weather systems). More work of value is in the complex domain. Industrial-style work is being outsourced and automated.


In complex environments, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Reducing our work using mechanistic models is ineffective. People are not interchangeable parts in these systems. We are not “human resources”. Separating functions like HR, OD, KM, IT, Marketing & Training creates silos of knowledge and encourages tribal-style loyalties.

Working Smarter happens at multiple levels. Individuals need to take responsibility for their own learning and think critically. This threatens traditional command and control organizations. Cooperation via digital networks is changing how people learn and work outside the organization. Seb Paquet calls it, “ridiculously easy group forming”. We need to rethink how we collaborate to get work done. In organizing group work we have to consider each individual as well as the multiple networks that connect us.

Collaborative work, while constantly learning and connecting in networks, must be the foundation of any new organizational model. We still need to work out the details of the next workplace. We can do this by working smarter.

From learning to working technologies

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Here is a graphic of Moore’s technology adoption curve. Inspired by Jane Hart, this is my view of the current state of the learning technologies industry:

The Late Majority and Laggards are focused on meeting their compliance needs. Many of these are in traditional industries. They are purchasing one of their first learning management systems (LMS) and are focused on features & functions, which is usually a large shopping list provided by a variety of constituents.

The Early Majority are focused on learning and particularly course delivery. They are comprised in large part of education and training (E&T) intensive organizations, including schools. Most have existing contracts that bind them to a vendor. Some are considering open source (OS) as an option to their costly systems.

The Innovators & Early Adopters have shifted to a work focus. Many are in newer industries, with little legacy software. Others are in more traditional industries who have seen the urgent need for change. They are focused on supporting social and informal learning and integrating it into the work flow. These companies are retiring their LMS and are outsourcing formal course development that accounts for only 10% of their performance needs.

As an organization, are you waiting for Workscapes to cross the chasm or are you content to use technologies that have jumped the shark?

Learning socially

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Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week:

“We spend a billion dollars globally on training …. and what we get is worth shit.” From training to learning in the new economy (c. 1996)

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.

@hypergogue : “Piracy creates demand” – Wabi-sabi

Japanese lawyers seem to understand that some things are too complex to control or, at least, that attempts to control and simplify may destroy the beauty (ahem, the ‘value’, cough) of the things they’re trying to defend. They show an understanding of obliquity. Wabi-sabi is the opposite of the Pyrrhic Victory – it’s a triumphant surrender? This seems, somehow, too neat an idea, too symmetrical.

@amcunningham : If you are wondering what social learning might look like for health professionals, have a look at TILT (Today I Learnt That)

All Social is Learning ,by @JBordeaux [If all learning is social and work is learning, we need to focus on the social aspects of business]

This weekend, I was struck by a logic stick.  If all learning is social, is all social learning?  We know this is not automatically so, learned that in the intro to Logic, Sets and Numbers (an actual college course I took in the 70’s).  But when we engage in a social setting, online or offline, are we ever not learning?  Let’s add in a third statement: we are constantly learning.  Even while asleep, some research indicates, the brain assembles and makes sense of what it experienced that day.  There isn’t a time when our brains aren’t rewiring themselves based on input from our environment.

Technological Change must always precede economic growth, by @ingenesist

Technological Change must always precede economic growth – economic growth cannot sustainably precede technological change. If you throw money at a problem, you are not guaranteed technological change.  If you throw technological change at a problem, you are guaranteed money.

Harold’s Note: I agree that institutions follow :

We’re now at the stage where we have some new ideas for work (wirearchy, natural enterprises, workplace democracy) and some new technologies (social media, nano-bio-techno-cogno). The next step in this evolution is the new organization. Remember that business schools only followed after the mass production model had been proven. Therefore we cannot expect leadership from our institutions until we have proven a new organizational model. It’s time to get to work.

Learning in public

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In a succinct post on the nature of knowledge management in a knowledge-intensive field, Jasmin Fodil looks at how rocket scientists learn. She shows how workers at the NASA Goddard Space Fight Center reapply their knowledge:

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Goddard is doing a pretty good job of knowledge sharing:

The Knowledge Management life-cycle at Goddard seems solid to me; the focus is on the individual’s learning processes, structures, and needs, rather than content management systems, which is already leaps and bounds ahead of the curve, and there are many practices and resources to facilitate the process. Because of that, the system is unique in that is dovetails nicely with a socialized knowledge management system. People are already used to residing within a learning organization, and social software will enhance the on-the-ground process that are already so robust.

Notice that, “How Can I Learn It?” does not include sharing through information flows, such as blogs, wikis or micro-blogs (social media). As Fodil asks at the end of her article, I also wonder how much more effective the organization would be if most learning was in public, or was a “socialized knowledge management system”. Of course, Goddard may already be doing this. If not, there can be a lot of knowledge loss between discrete events such as the development of case studies or the collection of lessons learned. Workshops and case-based events may not be frequent enough. All of these are knowledge “stock” and I think there is much potential, in most organizations, to improve knowledge flow to connect these events.

PKM is my suggested framework to enhance knowledge flows in the organization by first focusing on the needs and desires of the individual and then making each person’s flow public (Seek-Sense-Share). Network learning requires sense-making in public. But, as Fodil concludes:

Sometimes learning in public is a difficult process, but the feedback, support, and resultant improvements are worth it.

Transparency is the first, and perhaps largest, hurdle in creating new management frameworks for a networked world. Learning in public makes our work transparent and can help us develop critical next practices in our increasingly complex workplaces. We all have to start thinking and working like rocket scientists.

Transparent work

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People are now the engine of change and the fuel is communications, says Jay Deragon in Systemic Impact of Social Technology

System outcomes can be influenced by numerous factors such as:

  1. Competitor innovation that attracts the market away from your business
  2. Cost of goods increases and margins shrink. You cut expenses to survive.
  3. Employee turnover which fuels inconsistency and waste.
  4. Customer leave due to dis-satisfaction
  5. Market shifts that you are unaware of and don’t understand

The #1 influence that is threaded through all five examples above is communications.

I’ve attended various meetings over the past six months; meetings with groups that I haven’t had dealings with before. These were professional associations, networks of researchers and administrators, and others. I would say that all the problems discussed at these meetings were, at root, communications issues.

Communication in a network is not the same as what we may have considered as traditional business communications. Sending out a clear memo (email) may have worked before, but looking for that email or document six months later on some kind of shared intranet drive is another issue completely. Sharing the emails of a previous worker in a certain position may make sense at first, but becomes totally impractical when 20,000 emails arrive, all in folders that make no sense to the incumbent [I speak from personal experience here]. Adding an enterprise resource system (LMS, TMS, HRIS, etc) doesn’t help much either, because the enforced knowledge structure makes little sense to the individual worker.

What may be considered a knowledge problem is really a transparency one. If I want to find general information, I search the Web, and quite often find what I need. For more contextual knowledge, I ask my network via text message, Twitter, blog or forum. The reason I can do this is that either the knowledge or the knowledgeable person is visible on the web.

Visibility is the key for knowledge work inside the organization as well. Jay Cross described it in Informal Learning, with the case study of CGI using an “Internet Inside” tool approach.

Just compare informal learning on the web with what happens inside the firewall. Online, we all benefit from others who openly share. We read free blog posts, comments, tweets and wikipedia articles. We watch descriptive YouTube videos and check out wiki-how or a host of other self-help sites. We may do all of this without even thinking about the millions of people who share in order to make our lives better. Meanwhile, inside the organization, we’re trying to find that document that got filed away on some shared drive, but nobody remembers the date or the title (about all the metadata available) so it is lost to us.

When I note how easy it is to find the stuff we need on Google, most people understand and agree. Then I explain that it only works if some people are making the information public. Making the information that results from our daily work visible is a huge step in enhancing communications. The simplest and easiest way is to replicate the tools and processes used on the open Internet – blogs, micro-blogs, social networks, social bookmarks, etc. The problem with enterprise systems is that they don’t act as networks. They were not built with network DNA but rather hierarchical frameworks. Therefore, they cannot scale to complexity the way a much simpler protocol can. Simplicity leads to complexity. Complicated systems just get more complicated.

My advice is to keep the tools simple and replicate the web; it works, and the basic protocols are very simple. Use a DIY approach and let the IT department focus on data security not tools.

Effective networked organizations are those with a sharing culture, embracing a new social learning contract.

Learning, in spite of ourselves

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Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week:

“We spend a billion dollars globally on training …. and what we get is worth shit.” From Training to Learning in the New Economy c.1996

Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation – Oscar Wilde; via @JenniferSertl

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect – Mark Twain; via @micahariel

“My mom has zero buzz, but when she says something, I listen” ~ CEO Zappos; via @blindgaenger

The internet forces us to deliver value to our customers before our customers pay for anything. ~Bob Pike; via @splove1

Coevolution of brain and hand in development of higher-level cognition: toolmaking a key; via @hreingold

“Making a hand axe appears to require higher-order cognition in a part of the brain commonly known as Broca’s area,” said Emory anthropologist Dietrich Stout, co-author of the study. It’s an area associated with hierarchical planning and language processing, he noted, further suggesting links between tool-making and language evolution.

Learning, when your organization isn’t into it: Why PKM/PLN/PLE (networked learning) is critical in today’s workplace – You’re on your own, folks! by @michelemmartin

I know from experience that while there are many companies and organzations (usually the larger ones) that take learning pretty seriously, reality is that most workers cannot count on their employer as the primary avenue for improving their skills. They may get some training to learn how to use proprietary systems or processes, but the kinds of skill-building that make people effective and marketable are just not going to happen.

formal, informal & social learning: aiding & abetting organizational evolution; by @dpontefract

When technology companies begin talking collaboration, social ‘whatever’ or Enterprise 2.0 … I can’t help but think they’re missing the chips and malt vinegar of the order. C’mon chefs, organizations are changing from a behavioral perspective (as society evolves too) and thus we need those tools and technologies to help drive the new organizational behaviors right across the org. It cannot be simply the technology; we need the organizational evolution and new behavior model in the mix. (aided and abetted by formal, informal and social learning constructs – malt vinegar)

Richard Branson on what they don’t teach you in business school: shift from quarterly sales targets to longer term goals and focus on “creativity, intuition & empathy”; via @raesma

PLENK 2010

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I was not able to attend any of the sessions at PLENK (Personal Learning Environments & Networked Knowledge)  2010, a Massively Open Online Course (MOOC), other than the one I facilitated on personal knowledge management.  PLENK 2010 was conducted by Stephen Downes, George [Clooney] Siemens & Dave Cormier, three fellow Canadians and two who live pretty close by. However, Zaid Ali Alsagoff provides a comprehensive overview of the most awesome course on planet earth, offered via the intergalactic gaga network.

Partnerships and the organization

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This is the third part of my response. See Part 1: Corporate Learning’s Focus & Part 2: Integrating learning into the business.

Inspired by Jay Cross, Amanda Fenton asks how her Corporate Learning department could better meet the needs of employees. I think these are excellent questions and the answers form the basis of addressing how to integrate work and learning in the enterprise.

Q7) How can we help support learning environments (resources and tools, relationships and networks, training and education, supervisor and company support) in a way that is highly efficient and scalable across the country? What are the programs and services that are supported centrally and what do we support through consulting? Through self-serve resources? What capacity needs to be developed in the organization to support all these areas? How can we better advocate the use of social software to enable high performance?

Jane Hart, in the state of learning in the workplace, sums up a more efficient & scalable approach; do-it yourself (DIY):

With the easy availability of tools, people are now “doing their own thing”. This is not just the case for those who are designing and/or delivering training or education for formal learners, but also by many to address their own learning and performance needs. There is a huge amount of evidence that shows that individuals (and teams) are using these tools for their own personal, informal learning. Instead of going to the LMS to find answers to their questions or solve problems, they are using tools like Google, Wikipedia or YouTube, or simply posting questions to their networks on Twitter or Facebook in order to get immediate, up-to-date and relevant answers. It is interesting to note that the success of their “learning” is measured in how well it helps them to address the learning or performance issue in hand, not in course completion data in the LMS. In very many cases, individuals are therefore now directing and managing their own learning primarily though the use of these new tools.

All these factors are influencing the look of learning in the workplace …

As Charles Jennings shows in this very articulate presentation, 8 reasons to focus on informal & social learning, that learning happens as a process, not a series of events. Studies have shown that up to 90% of workplace learning happens outside of formal training. This is what needs to be supported, but not controlled, by the organization. Informal learning is generally more effective, less expensive and better received than formal training. Informal is more scalable than formal. Central control is only necessary for about 10% of workplace learning and this is the portion of resources that should be allocated to it. The graphic below (slide 32) clearly shows how ineffective typical formal training can be:

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The data and research are available. Advocating for a better balance of learning options inside the enterprise depends on how well the training department understands its own organization.

Q8) What would an integrated OD, HR, IT, KM, Marketing/Communications and L&D partnership look like? How would our roles, responsibilities and structure change? Who does the manager or employee call when they run into a performance problem? What big organizational beliefs do we need to let go of to support these changes?

Euan Semple has tarred HR, Communications and IT with the same brush. Euan says that:

  • HR are “maintainers of order, rather than enablers of staff”;
  • Communications manages rather than enables communication;
  • IT controls risk instead of enabling the business.

These are generalizations, but expose the weaknesses of our current management systems.

The same workplace issues are being faced by HR, IT, OD, KM, Marketing/Communications and T&D departments. Similar complaints and parallel strategies are being developed in isolation in each of these areas. We really need to get away from our self-imposed tribes and adopt network thinking and practices. All levels of complexity exist in our world but more of our work (especially knowledge-intensive work) deals with complex problems, whether they be social, environmental or technological. Complex environments and problems are best addressed when we organize as networks; our work evolves around developing emergent practices; and we collaborate to achieve our goals.

With hyper-linked information and access to expertise, not only are all internal support departments of less value, they can actually subvert the organization’s future by not responding quickly and appropriately. We need to look to business models on the fringes that foster a sense of community and focus on agility and autonomy. No single, sure-fire, cookie-cutter approach can be implemented in a top-down or consultant-driven manner to create a networked workplace performance model that works. There are no best practices, only next practices.

We can start by recombining organizational DNA, breaking down silos and inverting the organizational pyramid.

Integrating learning into the business

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This is the second part of my response. See Part 1: Corporate Learning’s Focus.

Inspired by Jay Cross, Amanda Fenton asks how her Corporate Learning department could better meet the needs of employees. I think these are excellent questions and the answers form the basis of addressing how to integrate work and learning in the enterprise.

Questions on the role of managers and integrating learning into the business:

Q5) How can we facilitate the line managers’ ability to identify the root cause of a performance problem, own it, and know what to do about it (e.g. managing performance problems)?

The situation has gone beyond the case of  helping managers develop a few new skills for their professional toolbox. Transformational, not incremental, changes are needed.

The basic premises of most current management and organizational models no longer apply. These frameworks are based upon work that is being automated and outsourced every day. There is little time to prepare people for this change. Any scenario that I consider – peak oil, global warming; globalization; Asian dominance – still requires that the developed world’s workforce deals with more complexity and even chaos. We need to skill-up for emergent and novel practices and that means a completely different mindset toward work and the “supervision” of work. Knowledge artisans don’t need supervision as much as the reduction of barriers to communication and connection. That’s the role of the “supervisor”.

Here are two other examples.

Ev Williams, co-founder of Twitter, is doing everything he can to keep the company BELOW 150 people. He understands both the old (primates & Dunbar’s numbers) as well as the new (agility & networks). For the past century, the key has been to grow companies. It’s celebrated and rewarded by markets and pundits. Not any more. This company is not growing and not hiring more managers and supervisors. In the new organization, everybody is an independent contributor because there is no need for layers of command and control. Everyone talks to everyone else in this hyperlinked world.

This is one the fastest growing occupations today – community manager. The skills needed here are completely different from traditional command and control supervision. Soft skills are now the hard skills. Supervision is not needed when all work is transparent.

Q6) What if we closed the training department and became mentors, coaches and facilitators, where our focus was on improving core business processes, supporting communication and collaboration to help people perform better, faster, cheaper? Where we worked with managers to fund and develop appropriate tools and processes for employees? How could this be successful?

I would reword this question to: when the training department closes, what do we do? That’s what most people in the business of organizational training should be asking. This will happen with or without the training department. The future of the training department is to stop delivering content and focus on conversations and collaboration. Here’s an example of one of the best “training” programs developed by people who are not instructional designers: CommonCraft “In plain English” videos. There are thousands like this on the Net (e.g. Wiki-How). Add in just-in-time answers to questions on Twitter or Facebook and you have a learning ecosystem. Many workers no longer need the training department to learn. In fact, the training department is often a barrier to learning.

Trainers had better become mentors, coaches and facilitators very soon, or they will become irrelevant in an age of ubiquitous access to content and expertise.

Normal isn't normal anymore

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Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week.

My piece “teamwork, real work and the wicked enterprise” on @cmswire – via @deb_lavoy

Some problems are such complex, entangled, multifaceted hairballs that we cannot approach them alone. They change and morph as quickly as our ability to understand them. They are known to academics as “wicked problems.”

In modern enterprises, we need a new way to talk about these wicked problems, as well as new approaches to address them. Normal isn’t normal anymore. Change is the norm.

Trends in Knowledge Management – “a short synthesis & worth a read”:

Traditionally, KM was more often than not a top-down driven approach. For example, document taxonomies and knowledge sharing procedures were defined; identified experts shared their knowledge in defined communities.

Today, we can identify six strong trends that lead into new concepts of knowledge sharing and collaboration:

The obsession with purely technology driven solutions to wicked problems is dangerous. via @snowded

My takeaway was simple: Just as a previous generation confused correlation with causation we are now confusing simulation with prediction. We need to realise that the obsession with purely technology driven solutions to wicked (or as I prefer intractable) problems is dangerous and we need to see technology as augmenting human cognition, triggering extended human sensor networks into states of anticipatory awareness; rather than trying to anticipate the inherently unpredictable.

Free as in Freedom: The State of Learning in the Workplace Today. via @sumeet_moghe

I’ve just scrambled into Jane Hart’s session about the state of learning in the workplace today. This is a guide in soundbites and images and is a way to summarise the excellent guide on Jane’s website that a lot of us have already seen. I’m a self-confessed fan of the incredible thinking that the Internet Time Alliance put out, so I am sitting through the session even though I already comprehend the material.

The traditional approach to workplace learning has been about managing and controlling the learning experience, keeping it really top down. There are 10 factors that are shaping the new era of workplace learning.

@hjarche thinking that you may find this interesting from a #pkm [personal knowledge management] perspective. via @mikey3982 & @doctorblogs

My conclusion is the information problem is now so big, that we need to do things radically differently, instead of doing more of the same. So perhaps in the future we’ll see wiki-Cochrane reviews or clinical trials on YouTube. Otherwise, the only remaining solution may be for doctors and researchers to set up an Information-Users Anonymous support group. We could start each meeting by solemnly declaring the first of the twelve steps: “We are powerless over information – and our lives have become unmanageable”. I hope it doesn’t come to this.