Month: November 2011

A new social contract for creative work

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In the TechCrunch article, What if this is no accident?, Jon Evans looks at the current boom in software engineering jobs in comparison to the lack of jobs elsewhere. He wonders if this is how the new economy will look for a while.

It’s beginning to look like we might have entered a two-track economy, in which a small minority reaps most of the benefits of technology that destroys more jobs than it creates. As my friend Simon Law says, “First we automated menial jobs, now we’re automating middle-class jobs. Unfortunately, we still demand that people have a job soon after becoming adults. This trend is going to be a big problem…”

I’ve been saying for a while that simple and merely complicated work will continue to get automated and outsourced (read this post if you don’t believe it or look at this example of legal work getting automated). To keep a job in the creative economy (with core skills of Initiative, Creativity & Passion) one  must become an indispensable linchpin in the organization.

I think more opportunities are being created than destroyed, but our institutions and our cultural mindset still are not ready for this change. Politicians continue to think in terms of jobs. Universities still have job fairs, hinting that such a thing as a career will exist in a hyper-networked world. Parents push their children into undergraduate programs that cost more than graduates can ever repay. Laws are structured so that corporations create wealth in return for indentured servitude, where employees own none of the intellectual property they generate. In such an environment, why would workers try to innovate? The indicators that the underlying nature of work and wealth generation have changed are everywhere.

I’ve questioned the rationale of continuing practices such as:

  • Mass training with standard performance objectives for everyone. What two people really have the same job any more?
  • Limited  options for part-time work at the control of the worker.
  • Standard HR policies that drain the initiative out of people.
  • Banning access to online social networks at work and disconnecting workers from their social safety nets and innovation sources.
So why aren’t we all working for learning organizations, in this day and age? The work that we will be paid for in the foreseeable future is the difficult, innovative, one-of-a-kind, creative stuff. Educational institutions need to help get people ready for this, and standardized tests or common curriculum are of little use in the networked workplace. A core part of this change, in my opinion, is integrating learning and work, because change is continuous, not some special initiative to implement and then get back to normal. I’ve recommended some changes that I now see taking hold in a few places:

  • Abolish the organization chart and replace it with a network diagram (some new tech companies have done this).
  • Move away from counting hours, to a results only work environment (with distributed work, this is becoming more common).
  • Encourage outside work that doesn’t directly interfere with paid work, as it will strengthen the network (such as Google’s 20% time for engineers).
  • Provide options for workers to come and go and give them ways to stay connected when they’re not employed (like Ericsson’s Stay Connected Facebook group). Build an ecosystem, not a monolith.

Our challenge is not saving those jobs that will be automated and outsourced anyway, but focusing on creating more opportunities for creative work. For institutions, employers, educators and workers, that means giving up control and co-creating a new social contract for the creative, networked economy.

I wouldn’t wait if I was in charge of an organization. I would get these changes going as soon as possible. Successfully implemented, this organization would not have a talent acquisition or retention problem for a long time.

Quotes, fraud and wealth destruction

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Here are some insights and observations shared via Twitter this past week.

Name a “working” institution. Just one. Better yet, define a “working” institution. See the problem? –  @umairh

I think collaboration is the next IT investment of the decade. ~ Sheila Jordan (@CiscoSheila) – via @marciamarcia

Don’t tell your execs you want “Social Media” access, tell them employees will work longer hours on their own time for free. – @techherding

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead. ~ Thomas Paine – via @snowded

Failure is only useful if we learn from it – by @TimKastelle

  • Failure is only useful if we learn from it: we often talk about the need to fail in innovation, however, there is only value in failure if it helps us learn.
  • Try to fail as cheaply as possible: the main problem with the Edsel isn’t that it failed – it’s that it failed so expensively. There is a hierarchy of failure, and we need to figure out how to fail as early in the process as possible. One way of doing this is through prototyping.

Real scientists never report fraud – by @DanielLemire

But what is critical is that traditional peer review does not protect against fraud. It is merely a check that the work appears superficially correct and interesting. A reviewer who would go out of his way to check whether a paper reports truthful results should not expect accolades. That is not how the game is played.

It’s not change management [it’s adapting to life in perpetual Beta, IMO] – by @JackVinson

Rather than going down some old familiar paths in a discussion about change and change management, he [Dave Gray] suggests that the whole field needs to rethink what it does. Change management as a means to get you from State A to State B becomes much less important when you are already at State Y and seeing new States coming by every other week.

Dave suggests that rather than one “change” to manage it is an entire portfolio of moves that the organization is trying. And it is that portfolio that should be managed.

The Guardian: The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen – via @CharlesJennings

What has happened over the past 30 years is the capture of the world’s common treasury by a handful of people, assisted by neoliberal policies which were first imposed on rich nations by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. I am now going to bombard you with figures. I’m sorry about that, but these numbers need to be tattooed on our minds. Between 1947 and 1979, productivity in the US rose by 119%, while the income of the bottom fifth of the population rose by 122%. But from 1979 to 2009, productivity rose by 80%, while the income of the bottom fifth fell by 4%. In roughly the same period, the income of the top 1% rose by 270%.

engaging the trustworthy

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In my post on spreading social capitalism I concluded that Mavens (experts) exhibit the greatest intellectual capital, Connectors have the most diverse (creative) networks, and Salespeople get things done (action).

I recently came across a post on The Trusted Advisor that adds another twist to how we connect to each other. On the info-graphic (below) How trustworthy are you? Charles Green shows that Experts (Mavens) are not as trusted, in comparison to several other roles in a network. They lack the intimacy skills of Doers, Connectors and Catalysts (Salespeople).

This makes sense on face value, given that many experts are very deep into their field and less interested in the general public. Consider that people who popularize research — like Malcolm Gladwell who writes in a less academic style — are often much more successful than those whose research their books are based on.

Read more

So you (still) want to be an elearning consultant?

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Last week I commented that many people in the ‘learning’ field are too absorbed in their own interests and not the businesses they are supporting. Working smarter in the 21st century requires the integration of learning into the workflow. This has become a necessity due to the increased complexity facing today’s networked business. Ericsson’s video, On the Brink, provides a good overview of this emerging networked society.

Learning is the work in a constantly changing landscape, and as mentioned in the video, the next 10 years will see more change than the past 15 years, since the creation of the Web.

Prior to the Web, the learning professions were focused on either delivering courses or some specific sub-set of learning. In the late 20th century we saw the rise of personality tests, learning styles, and dubious applications of Bloom’s taxonomy or NLP, among other practices not aligned with the business. With the Web, we went from training to e-learning course delivery, with an emphasis on technology, especially learning management systems (LMS) and rapid authoring. Today, businesses are beginning to realize that LMS are not really helping their organizations and most courses are disconnected from the real work. I have seen companies completely outsource all course design/delivery in order for internal staff to focus on informal and social learning to support collaboration. This makes business sense.

For those in the learning professions (KM, OD, Training, Instruction, Education) there will be a sea change in how they work over the next decade. They will have to become part of the business (or organization, or network) or be completely marginalized. In my article, So you want to be an e-learning consultant? (2007) I showed the different types of work, and associated remuneration, available in the field.

elearning-remuneration

Note how business and technology-oriented work pay much more than pure pedagogical work. This trend has not changed since 2007 and will continue.

I have met many people in learning professions over the years who have the technological savvy but lack business skills. People with expertise in all three areas are few. The L&D folks often do not get a seat at the table because they don’t have a direct impact on the business. My advice to anyone in a learning-oriented field is to get up to speed on networked technologies but also understand the business you are supporting. There’s no more hiding in the shadows, as the network exposes everything and everyone. Narrating work and being transparent are great opportunities in the networked era, but that means there’s no place to hide. It’s a global village and everyone is interconnected. The opportunities are at the intersection.

Thoughtful filtering

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Here are some of the ideas and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week, just to show that what happens in Vegas, gets posted to the Web ;)

Steve Rosenbaum: We need thoughtful filters with humans replacing algorithms so it becomes more about ideas than data – via @Smartinx

“if learning happens all around us, and we strive to create “learning organisations” how can we justify the LMS as a content management tool?” – by @mollybob

Brenda Sugrue: “When a client asks you to consider Learning Styles or Bloom’s Taxonomy it should be a BIG instructional design red flag” #DevLearn – via @rec54

Innovation is Not ‘Best Practice’ – via @hyponastic

  • Innovations start out as best practices, but best practices all become uninnovative.
  • Best practices can blind us to more things than we might realize at first.
  • Innovation is not about agreeing on things.
  • Best practices are too complicated.
  • Everything works some of the time, nothing works all of the time.

Anything that does not contribute to learning is waste – by @eskokilpi via @davidgurteen

Management theory needs to leave behind the industrial, mechanistic model of reality and the belief in the linear, if – then, causality. The sciences of complexity, non-linear dynamics, uncertainty and creative learning are the foundations of modern, human-centric management.

The task of managers is not reduction of uncertainty but to develop capacity to operate creatively within it. Ilya Prigogine wrote in his book “The End of Certainty” that the future is not given, but under perpetual construction:

“Life is about unpredictable novelty where the possible is always richer than the real.”

It’s the network …

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I presented on Managing in a Networked World at DevLearn 2011 today in Las Vegas.

How do you manage a workforce that is both nomadic and collaborative? In a 24/7 always-on- and-interconnected world, do we need to rethink the industrial-workplace social contract that’s based on hours worked and being on-the-job ? Join Harold Jarche to discuss how these and other trends mean a shift to perpetual Beta, where learning is the work.

A total of four people attended, as compared to about 50 for a session this morning on some new learning technology tool. Many of my conversations with training/learning professionals have shown a general lack of interest in management, leadership or business issues. Too many learning folks are interested in the tools of THEIR trade and not the businesses they are supposed to serve.

Thinking like a node in a network and not as a position in a hierarchy is the first mental shift that’s required to move to a collaborative enterprise. Nurturing Creativity is now a management responsibility. The old traits of the industrial/information worker were Intellect, Diligence, and Obedience. The new traits of the collaborative worker are Passion, Creativity, and Initiative. These cannot be commoditized. People cannot be creative on demand. The collaborative enterprise requires looser hierarchies and stronger networks. What does that mean for learning & development?

The learning delivery model is being obsolesced by ubiquitous connectivity and diverse social networks. If learning professionals do not participate in the emergent leadership of the networked enterprise, they will be outsourced and sooner than later, automated. There is no room for those who just do their job within their job description (these were industrial-age constructs). The automation of physicians and lawyers was discussed during this morning’s keynote. What makes instructional designers et al, think they are any different? The 21st century workplace is all about understanding networks, modelling networked learning, supporting and strengthening networks.