Month: December 2010

Innovation through network learning

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Innovation

I’ve really appreciated the many posts where Tim Kastelle and I have connected by sharing ideas. Tim says that innovation is the process of idea management, which makes sense to me. Andrew Hargadon expands on this:

In short, innovation is about connecting, not inventing. No idea will make a difference without building around it the networks that will support it as it grows, and the network partners with which it will ultimately flourish. Here Thomas Edison’s real genius can be seen … Shifting the central activity of innovation from ‘having an idea’ to seeing and building the networks shifts the attention from thinking to the actions required to build the network that will realize the idea.

Innovation is not so much about having ideas as it is about connecting and nurturing ideas. As Steven Johnson says, “Chance favours the connected mind.” This requires a network mindset. It also requires an understanding of the greater environment.

In Innovating in the Great Disruption, Scott Anthony suggests three disciplines necessary to foster innovation in our challenging economic times – placing a premium on progress; mastering paradox; and learning to love the low end. He also discusses the importance of learning:

Innovators will need to continue to find creative, cheap ways to bring their ideas forward. Fortunately, they can tap into a plethora of powerful tools to facilitate rapid learning.

Tim Kastelle introduced me to the concept of Aggregate-Filter-Connect for innovation, which I used for personal knowledge management (network learning) and later changed it to Seek-Sense-Share. Innovation is inextricably linked to both networks and learning. That’s why the skills for learning in networks are essential for business today. We need to innovate to stay ahead in a rapidly changing world. The rules are constantly changing. Just as we get used to new business models like Amazon or Google, someone like Alvis Bigis knits together an excellent piece on how American business needs to get social. Discussing Groupon.com, he says; “Never before has a company reached $2 billion in annual revenue in just 2 years time.” Who knows what’s next?

Network Learning

Being an effective network learner is a basic skill for any knowledge worker today, and that’s pretty well anyone who wants to earn more than minimum wage. Network learning is also the foundation of collaboration. We know that collaboration is becoming critical for business, as Deb Lavoy notes:

Our wicked challenges [complex, entangled, multifaceted hairballs] require the diversity and experience of teams, as well as their ability to tap into and integrate new ideas and information. Our solutions will be tried and transient, keeping pace with the challenges they are meant to solve. A team with a bit of sense and technology can consistently outperform one corporate genius or the world’s most powerful computer in working through a wicked(ish) problem.

I now take for granted my network learning processes, using social bookmarking; blogging and tweeting, and these habits make collaboration much easier. However, these habits and practices have taken several years to develop and may not come easily to many workers. One difficult aspect of adopting network learning in an organization is that it’s personal. If not, it doesn’t work. Everybody has to develop their own methods, though there are frameworks and ideas that can help.

Here are some questions that network learning can address:

How do I keep track of all of this information?

How do I make sense of changing conditions and new knowledge?

How can I develop and improve critical thinking skills?

How can we cooperate?

How can I collaborate better?

How can I engage in problem-solving activities at the edge of my expertise?

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My own personal learning journey took several years to transition to a network learner and my article on Network Learning: Working Smarter (2010) summarizes what I’ve learned, so far, on the subject.

Innovation & Learning

The connection between innovation and learning is evident. We can’t be innovative unless we integrate learning into our work. It sounds easy, but it’s a major cultural change. Why? Because it questions our basic, Taylorist, assumptions about work; assumptions like:

A JOB can be described as a series of competencies that can be “filled” by the best qualified person.

Somebody in a classroom, separate from the work environment, can “teach” you about a job requirement.

The higher you are on the “org chart”, the more you know.

Need I list more?

Working Smarter Cracker Barrel

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Next week, at our Working Smarter event hosted by Tulser in Maastricht, NL, we will have a series of short sessions on selected topics. Each Principal of the Internet Time Alliance has three topics of 20 minutes to be discussed in small groups. My topics are listed below and include links to relevant posts as well as a short description of the core ideas behind each topic.

Complexity, perpetual Beta & the need for emergent practices

Networks & Complexity:

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.

The cynefin framework shows that emergent practices are needed in order to manage in complex environments and novel practices are necessary for chaotic ones. Most of what we consider standard work today is being outsourced and automated. We are facing more complexity and chaos in our work because of our interconnectedness.

Network Learning (aka PKM)

Network Learning: Working Smarter

One way (not the only way) to look at network learning is as a continuous process of seeking, sensing and sharing.

Seeking is finding things out and keeping up to date. Building a network of colleagues is helpful in this regard—it not only allows us to “pull” information, but also have it “pushed” to us by trusted sources.

Sensing is how we personalize information and use it. Sense-making includes reflection and putting into practice what we have learned. Often it requires experimentation, as we learn best by doing.

Sharing includes exchanging resources, ideas and experiences with our networks and collaborating with our colleagues.

The 21st Century Training Department

Information is no longer scarce and our connections are now many. The role of the training department must shift from content delivery to enabling people to connect more easily and communicate more effectively. Connecting & Communicating are central roles for organizational leaders whose workplaces are becoming more complex, either in terms of evolving practices, changing markets or advances in technology. Enabling the integration of collaborative learning with work is a more flexible model than designing courses that are outdated as soon as they’re published.

Here are some guidelines for what informal learning development could look like:

  1. Spend less time on design and more on ongoing evaluation to allow emergent practices to be developed.
  2. Build learning resources so that they can be easily changed or modified by anyone (allow for a hacker mentality)
  3. Allow everything to be connected, so that the work environment is the learning environment (but look for safe places to fail)
  4. There is no clearly defined start or finish so enable connections from multiple access points.

Getting to Working Smarter

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I started my military career as an infantry officer and then I worked as a health care administrator and finally as a training specialist. The move to the training field coincided with the creation of  the Web. I was also responsible for some fairly technical training as well as flight simulation. My immersion in technology had begun.

However, almost all of my focus was on individual training, or getting people to an operational level to either fly or fix an aircraft. As I’ve explained before, “individual training” is seen as a separate field from “collective training”. The graduates of our formal training programs would go on to do informal, collective training. The military has learned over time that a bunch of even highly-trained individuals do not make a cohesive unit. Each unit has to learn how to work together, hence the emphasis on collective training and especially pre-deployment training. Collective training is a good way to add all the context to formal training that has been stripped away by the school [yes, we called them schools].

The Training Development branch was also keen on performance improvement and much of our own professional development reflected the practices of human performance technology. HPT is a good framework, and is an excellent addition to instructional systems design (ISD), but over time I have found it to be inadequate to deal with a more complex workplace and address the social aspects of work. Collective and collaborative learning seems to be missing from HPT. For example, even the Army understands the value of story-telling.

My new focus, which is not a directional change but a progression based on experience, is Working Smarter. This takes the best from ISD, HPT and social learning and also incorporates knowledge management, organizational development, network and management theory to look at how we can develop the next practices that will inform networked organizations. As we say at the Internet Time Alliance, work and learning have become one and the same. Networks rule. Nothing is certain. Simply doing things better no longer guarantees prosperity or even survival.

Here is a slide presentation explaining how I came to focus on working smarter. It is a theme I will be discussing in several venues and countries over the next few months. This is my personal learning journey, and it’s not over yet.

Getting to working smarter

Managing the unmentionable

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

@JayCross : “You can’t manage things that you can’t mention.”

“A person grows as a person in connection with another person, and in no other way” — Teilhard de Chardin; via @technoshaman

“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.” — Hannah Arendt; via @jennifersertl

@hypergogue : “The future of workplace learning (or, saying goodbye to all that rhizome nonsense)”

As an example, if you speak to informed Training & Development strategy people they will all say that we’re seeing a trend towards ‘performance support’ and away from learning. Actually, though, trainers have always worked in ‘performance support’. Trainers have always known they’re there to ‘help people learn’. But many of them failed to spot the hidden end of that sentence – trainers help people to learn how to use performance support systems. ‘Teachers’, by the way, are no different in this respect.

Skype learning – 7 great benefits; by @donaldclark

You can always spot a fabulous technology when it can be used as a verb, like email, text, tweet. I’ll ‘Skype’ you, is one of those wonderful verbs. Over the last two years I’ve been doing voluntary Maths and Science tuition for kids that find these subjects difficult. It’s been a mix of face-to-face and Skype. So what follows is a short comparison between these two techniques.

From facts to data to commons; by @dweinberger

In a world too big to know™, our basic strategy has been to filter, reduce, and fragment knowledge. This was true all the way through the Information Age. Our fear of information overload now seems antiquated. Not only is there “no such thing as information overload, only filter failure” Clay Shirky, natch, in the digital age, the nature of filters change. On the Net, we do not filter out. We filter forward. That is, on the Net, a filter merely shortens the number of clicks it takes to get to an object; all the other objects remain accessible.

“analogy making is at the core of all cognition” Eide Neurolearning

Hofstadter believes that analogy making is at the core of all cognition, and what is especially interesting is how frequently analogies seem to occur in everyday experiences and how complex the parallels can be when suddenly we have a flash of insight, “That’s just like…(something else)”.

Henry Mintzberg on coaching ourselves & learning at HR 2010 World Congress; via @jonhusband

Highlights from these excellent videos:

  • “The Inflated Sense of the CEO” – hero worship is horrible for organizations
  • All MBA grads [without previous experience] should be stamped on the forehead with a skull & crossbones warning: “Not Prepared to Manage”
  • The role of Human Resources (HR) is to be a fifth column in the organization
  • The first thing HR can do is to get rid of the “R” [people are not resources]