Month: November 2012

Quotes to learn from

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Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past week.

J. Paul Getty: “In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy.” via @kanta_sharma

@BetaLeadership – “Most CEOs of the world at some point long ago delegated disciplined practice and learning – and thus became relatively dumb.”

@BetaLeadership – “In the long run, every company has EXACTLY the people it deserves. Period.”

Ivan Illich: “Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting.” via @IvanIllich2

Paulo Freire: “To teach is not to transfer knowledge but to create the possibilities for the production or construction of knowledge.” via @timbuckteeth

Buckminster Fuller: “Wealth is the ability to regenerate life. How many people can you take care of for how many days?” via @finnern

William James: “The deepest human need is the need to be appreciated.” via@dscofield

Joachim Stroh on Google Plus:

The chessboard picture points to another side effect of transparency: things are becoming more visible to anyone in the organization, and consequently, the level of understanding throughout the organization needs to rise as well. It’s one thing to see the individual pieces on the chessboard, and it’s another thing to understand the moves on the board.

Working in the dark

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I discuss transparency a lot on this blog. I see it as one of the three principles for net work. Transparency is a key enabler of shared power and making our organizations more democratic. Alex Bogusky says that, “Transparency isn’t a choice. The only choice is does it happen to you or do you participate in it.” As the external world becomes more transparent, for better or worse, then so must the internal workplace move toward transparency.

However, a dysfunctional company culture does not improve with transparency, it just gets exposed. This is the major obstacle in improving workplace transparency – fear of exposure. As Marshall McLuhan noted several decades ago, we now live in a global village. Our workplaces need to adapt to this reality.

Nick Charney has a good post on the value of openness, an enabler of transparency, in the federal public service. Tools like internal wikis can facilitate this, if they are used.

But first I wanted to set up the discussion by arguing that GCPEDIA (the Government of Canada’s official internal wiki) has the potential to be the single most transformative technology adopted by the Government of Canada since the first computers were issued to civil servants twenty years ago. It is the only technological environment (possibly with the exception of the lesser known GCConnex and GCForums) that allows public servants to share information across the entire enterprise. It has the potential to level geography, silos, and hierarchy and in so doing allows the civil service to tap into its cognitive surplus like no other technology to date has.

 Jessica Stillman describes two of the biggest fears about working transparently:

  • Fear #1: Your company will be a ship without a rudder
  • Fear #2: No carrot, no stick, more slacking

Sigurd Rinde understands the value of transparency in getting work done. He redesigned an advertising agency’s workflow, identifying the main choke points – four “big meetings” where one of the “owners” had to be present – and then made the workflow visible so anybody could see what was happening.

With an average seven weeks from start to end for their projects, where I assumed half a week average delay from instant for each meeting due to “sorry, I’m busy on Thursday”s (that I would argue was very optimistic), we could cut the time from seven to five weeks per project, on average, without losing anything but thumb twiddling. With a 20% profit margin today it would translate to a tripling of their profits.

Of course the clients would think this was a great idea.

Did they go for this no-brainer? Nope, the two owners would not hear of it, their controlling habits and methods where not to be touched, and bah humbug to tripling of profits. Ah well, their prerogative, they did not have outside investors. Maybe I should have had a chat with their spouses over lunch at Harrods?

The clients did not go for this, even with the data staring them in the face they continued in their old ways. This confirms what I noted in my last post. Just having the right information will not get us to change how we work.

Medecins sans frontières [MSF] has embraced transparency as an essential part of its international aid work in the world’s most dangerous areas. MSF knows that learning through constant discussions is critical for all members of the organization. MSF has a culture of debate and exposing the truth and this lets the organization move forward. Transparency can mean life or death for members of MSF, as any organization dealing with complexity and chaos has to understand.

What may be considered a knowledge management problem, finding the right information at the right time, 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. Without transparency being practiced on the web, it would be a useless resource for finding information. Transparency gives the web its power.

A common occurrence inside large organizations is not being able to find information. Finding information can take up to 36% of workers’ time. Transparency is the principle that everything that can be shared, should be. It is achieved by embracing simple standards, like the web uses. It assumes that we never know how information may be used in the future, so we make it easy to find. As natural pattern seekers, if enough of us can see the data and information we all create, then there may be a chance that we can make some sense of it. If not, we will continue to work in the dark.

The right information is not enough

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There is quite a bit of research on the significant value of making the right information available to the right person at the right time – and quite a bit of research shows clearly that Enterprise Search has a direct impact on the success of organizations. So enterprise search platforms must include social capabilities to tap into powerful ways to find the information that employees need more quickly and accurately. This calls for integration into a single platform that continuously evolves as the workplace changes.

This is the conclusion made by Julie Hunt in a comprehensive post on enterprise search. I would like to contrast this with a statement made by Dave Snowden that I noted in negotiating between chaos and project management.

Fallacy: If you give the right information, to the right people, at the right time, they will act accordingly. As “pattern-seekers” we may not even “see” the data when it is presented.

This is a problem with technology-centric solutions to business problems. Business is about people and how they interact. No single technology has ever addressed an entire area of business. No technology will resolve our search issues because we don’t have search issues. Our business issues are more like understanding disparate data; finding information to support or refute what we think we know; and getting information that helps us take appropriate action. There is a danger that a single social search platform could be seen as replacing the need for personal reflection and providing time for individual sense-making and sharing it. It has happened before with knowledge management and learning management systems.

I am a strong proponent of manual, not automatic, sense-making frameworks. Each person is the indivisible unit of knowledge work. If the aim is to improve organizational knowledge, then people have to take time to make sense of it. If not, it remains merely information, whether in a unified search tool or elsewhere.

While Julie Hunt provides a good overview of how social re-connects enterprise search, we should not let search tools, or any other tools, override the social (human) aspects of business. As Jay Cross says, business is VERY personal. Sense-making, or learning while we work, is too important to be managed by a single technology platform.

Coherence in complexity

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Many of our older business models are not working any more. Anecdote reports that John Kotter, leadership guru, is accepting that methods like his 8-step process for leading change may not be effective in the face of complexity.

“The majority of the [HBR Paywall] article is focussed on a ‘new’ concept Kotter calls ‘Strategic Accelerators’. In effect, he is talking about using Communities of Practice/collaborative networks to tap into the power and agility of the informal capabilities of an organisation. The network of strategic accelerators complements the formal systems; it does not replace them. Collaborative networks are not a new concept, but Kotter’s application of them to the arena of strategy is very insightful.”

I have been discussing the potential of communities of practice in fostering innovation for some time here. In my last post I wrote that in an increasingly complex workplace, many of the old models are no longer useful, referring more specifically to workplace learning. The same is happening to our models for management and ‘change management’, as if we could manage change in the first place. Complexity, driven by global networked communications, is the main factor.

High value work today is in addressing complexity, whether it be in the market, society, or the environment. This requires learning, sharing, innovating and engaging. Organizations that promote awareness, transparency and openness through appropriate ways to coordinate, collaborate and cooperate have a better chance of understanding complexity. Joachim Stroh describes this in his fractal image below.
fractal

The coherent organization is our way of creating a framework to look at organizational performance. It is based on the fact that governance, work, and learning models are moving from centralized control to network-centric foundations. For instance, coalition governments are increasing in frequency, businesses are organizing in value networks, and collaborative & connected learning is becoming widespread. A coherent organization framework ensures that collaboration (working for a common objective) and cooperation (sharing freely) flow both ways. Systems, such as enterprise social network tools, can assist ‘net work’ practices like the narration of work and personal knowledge mastery.
communities of practice

So while change cannot be managed, per se, organizations can be structured in ways to be more resilient to change. Kotter suggests a second operating system:

“The existing structures and processes that together form an organization’s operating system need an additional element to address the challenges produced by mounting complexity and rapid change. The solution is a second operating system, devoted to the design and implementation of strategy, that uses an agile, networklike structure and a very different set of processes. The new operating system continually assesses the business, the industry, and the organization, and reacts with greater agility, speed, and creativity than the existing one. It complements rather than overburdens the traditional hierarchy, thus freeing the latter to do what it’s optimized to do. It actually makes enterprises easier to run and accelerates strategic change. This is not an “either or” idea. It’s “both and.” I’m proposing two systems that operate in concert.”

I would strongly suggest instead that organizations need to get the first operating system correct so that they do not need a second one. A coherent organization is structured to take advantage of the complexity and noisiness of social networks, allowing information to flow as freely as possible, and affording workers the space to make sense of it and share their experiences and knowledge. The underlying concept of a coherent organization is that organizations and their people are members of many different types of networks, for example, communities of practice, the company social network, and close-knit collaborative work teams. A coherent organization requires a single unifying framework, not two operating systems.

Ask not for whom the Reaper comes

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My colleagues and I often get cast as informal learning zealots in pieces written to placate the training industry and maintain the status quo, especially the lucrative compliance training market. Actually, given the tone of some articles and presentations, I am certain many people think of us in even less friendly terms.

So…now you get back to Training and they’re sitting around the fire at the mouth of the Training cave hugging their storyboards to their chests like flotation devices in a water landing. They’re in a trance and chanting ADDIE over and over…rocking back and forth and hugging those storyboard for dear life. And here you come, dragging your new stakeholder relationship and your sparkling new EPSS behind you, or your cheap-as-heck Web services portal, or your SharePoint, or your WordPress site. Your silhouette looks to many of your peers like that of the grim reaper. Several are updating resumes. Others whimper softly, “Please don’t make me change.” – Gary Wise

The Grim Reaper seems an appropriate image. My colleague Charles Jennings looks at workplace learning from the perspective of Experience, Exposure & Education; with the latter accounting for about ten percent of time and effort. The Reaper looks for those who spend 100% of their efforts only supporting the ten percent. The Reaper knows that work is learning and learning is the work. Workplace learning means much more than courses and management systems. I have said many times that courses are artifacts of a time when information was scarce and connections were few. That time has passed. The Reaper is looking for those who insist on living in the past.

While the course purveyors look to “leverage” informal and social learning for their schooling tools, they should note that levers are designed to move things, and it will be the courses that move – into a darker corner. As my colleague Jane Hart shows in this image, there is a lot of room to expand as a learning and performance consultant.

In an increasingly complex workplace, many of the old models are no longer useful. Schooling, the basis of much of corporate training, is one of these. Connections to almost unlimited information show how much more powerful Pull learning is to Push, like self-taught African teens and hole-in-the-wall learning. A generation of self-taught learners outside the western schooling model is becoming the next global workforce, and more importantly, your competition.

Ask not for whom the Reaper comes – he comes for you.

Transparency isn't a choice

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Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past week.

@skap5 – “Be afraid institutions, be very afraid. Self organized networks are getting better at the purposeful part.”

FastCoExist: Watch Alex Bogusky Talk About The Future Of Responsible Companies

Now Bogsuky is working on models for companies to be better citizens, and part of that involves a different take on advertising so that the new information you get about a company isn’t a gimmick, but hard facts about its performance. “Brand is going to change radically from what’s been a fictional story that’s stood between you and the company to real-time, up-to-the-minute truth about your company,” he says. “Can you–through that–convince me to buy?”

As Bogusky says: “Transparency isn’t a choice. The only choice is does it happen to you or do you participate in it.”

Banks are being Disrupted by the Process of the Innovator’s Dilemma – Part 1 – by @robpatrob

What this implies is, that at some point, Money itself will be questioned. For today money is created by bank lending. With a Fractional reserve system, each dollar that a bank lends to you only requires a reserve of 10 cents. The other 90 cents is magic.

What Killed Michael Porter’s Monitor Group? The One Force That Really Matters – by @stevedenning

Monitor wasn’t killed by any of the five forces of competitive rivalry. Ultimately what killed Monitor was the fact that its customers were no longer willing to buy what Monitor was selling. Monitor was crushed by the single dominant force in today’s marketplace: the customer.

@KJatMARS – “My 16 yr old daughter just told me she was the next version of my operating system that comes with all the bugs fixed!”

“Great example of the power of self-directed, experiential learning and innovation.” via @CharlesJennings

A theoretical model for PKM

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My focus on PKM developed after an initial personal need and then increased when I saw how personal knowledge management could help others. Cheong, KF 2011, ‘The roles and values of personal knowledge management‘, DBA thesis, Southern Cross University, Lismore, NSW – now adds some solid research to the field. K.F. (Ricky) Cheong asked the following research questions:

RQ1: What are the roles of PKM in the Knowledge Management Process?

RQ2: What are the values of PKM for individuals and organisations?

RQ3: Is there any correlation between the roles of PKM in Knowledge Management Processes and the values of PKM for individuals and organisations?

RQ4: Is there any correlation between the values of PKM for individuals and the values of PKM for organisations?

Cheong provides this overview of a general definition:

Irrespective of how PKM is defined by different scholars, the key purpose of PKM is to provide a framework for individuals to manage new information, integrate it and enrich each individual knowledge database in an effective manner. Doing this successfully will empower each individual to easily apply their own personal knowledge to deal with new and old problems, to learn from new experience and to create new knowledge. It is a continuous and interactive process which is not independent of other knowledge management processes. (p. 42)

He based the research model and questions on a framework of skills for undergraduates, developed by Susan Avery, Personal Knowledge Management: Framework for Integration and Partnerships, presented in 2001.

The literature review in chapter 2 stated that Avery et al. (2001) defined PKM as an overall structured process for intentionally managing information and turning it into useful knowledge. There were seven PKM skills in the proposed PKM framework, namely (1) Retrieving information; (2) Evaluating information; (3) Organising information; (4) Collaborating around information; (5) Analysing information; (6) Presenting information; and (7) Securing information. (p. 233)

Cheong concluded, as I have, that PKM is beneficial on both a personal and organizational level. I am quoted in the thesis, but it is my earlier work, and not the more developed Seek > Sense > Share framework I now use, that shows how important knowledge – sharing is for individuals, organizations, and networks.

In summary, the research findings concluded that PKM has important roles in KM processes (section 5.2.1). The values of PKM were found to have significant contribution (section 5.2.2) in both individual competences and organisational competences. Positive correlations were found between the roles of PKM and their values in contributing to individual competences and organisation competences (section 5.2.3), and also between the values of PKM for individual competences and the values of PKM for organisation competences (section 5.2.4). (p. 259)

Cheong suggests that organizations incorporate PKM into knowledge management, and I  generally agree, though I have concerns with (3) as it might make PKM less personal and therefore not habitually used by knowledge workers.

The following is a general framework to guide an organisation in its task of implementing their organisational PKM strategy. (p. 264)

(1) Treat PKM Skills as an asset for organisation.
(2) Develop a PKM Skills inventory as part of Human Capital Management.
(3) PKM Skills are part of the performance measurement and reward system.
(4) Develop an individual learning plan to acquire and improve PKM skills.
(5) Leverage on IT based PKM tools to embed individual learning processes into the organisational learning process.

For most PKM practitioners, this is likely too much information, but Cheong does a good job of a fairly extensive literature review and corroborates what many practitioners already know. This work could be useful in getting PKM accepted as a more standard organizational practice, and for that, I thank Ricky K.F. Cheong.

Image: PKM Roles & Values by K.F. Cheong

Social business for organizational survival

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The potential of social business is organizational survival, because enterprises must be able to share knowledge quicker than before.  Why? As everyone and everything gets connected to the Net, feedback loops, both positive and negative, accelerate. A video can go viral and generate fame and revenue almost overnight. A racist act can be recorded and distributed around the world in minutes, even years after the event, forcing the perpetrators to leave politics. Customers can quickly force companies to change their policies, taking advantage of social media’s capability for “ridiculously easy group-forming” [Seb Paquet].  Self-publishing makes everyone a broadcaster.

Social business requires a major shift in how we do work, moving from hierarchies to networks. What does this really mean? It is understanding that business is not something separate from being human, and that humans are social creatures. Business is personal and has always been. We just thought we could mechanize everything by applying the principles of scientific management and other industrial age crap that have only got us into a bigger mess than when we started a century ago. As Jay Cross explains:

“People are emotional beings. We take everything personally.

Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, business has tried to cover this up. Management by spreadsheet is easier if workers are interchangeable parts. No messy emotions to get in the way.”

We are beginning to realize that the highest value work today is the more complex stuff, or the type of work that cannot be automated or outsourced. It’s work that requires creativity and passion. Doing complex work in networks means that information, knowledge and power no longer flow up and down but in all directions. Social business is giving up centralized control and harnessing the power of networks.

Knowledge networks are based on openness, transparency and diversity, from which trust emerges. Effective enterprise networks ensure that when knowledge is gained, some of it can be captured and then easily shared. Trust is essential for sharing implicit knowledge. This is the core of social learning – sharing implicit knowledge through conversations, observations and modelled behaviour.  Social learning is how organizational knowledge gets distributed. A social business learns quicker through social learning. Social media are merely enablers, if used adeptly.

A business that is more connected to its people, its customers, and its partners will be more resilient than one that is reliant on rules, regulations, and mechanistic frameworks. Many people talk about the need for resilience in facing climate change, population growth and environmental degradation.

Resilience is also an “… ineffable quality that allows some people to be knocked down by life and come back stronger than ever …” Social businesses are more resilient because they rely on people, not processes. The latter are developed only to handle the work that is not complex or creative, freeing workers to deal more with exception handling. Social business is how an organization can survive by using a more resilient, organic framework. Isn’t it time to exorcise Frederick Winslow Taylor’s ghost from our organizations?

Become your own upstart

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Upstarts & Incumbents

In Clayton Christensen’s book, Seeing What’s Next the authors discuss how new business entrants (upstarts) can target non-core customers of industry incumbents. These come in three categories (overshot, undershot and non-customers) and by targeting these customers, entrants can avoid direct confrontation, while developing skills and expertise in areas outside the core business of the incumbents. Once the entrants have grown “under the radar”, they can grow to directly confront the incumbents. They can develop “asymmetrical skills” based on “asymmetrical motivations”. Basically, they are motivated to do new things that do not have the revenue streams of the existing products and services of incumbents.

According to this model, new entrants to a market should identify potential customers based upon the markets of established incumbent(s):

  1. Undershot – willing to pay more for more functions/services
  2. Overshot – find current offering more than adequate
  3. Non-consumers – lack ability or the wealth for current service / products

For a new entrant, the best market is the non-consumer (also the least demanding) who is under the radar of the incumbents. The second best target group is the Overshot Customer (specialist displacement for mainstream) who is willing to accept a more specialized product/service than the broader offering of the incumbent, or one who is looking for something cheaper and “good enough” (low end).

In business, there are always upstarts with different motivations and new skills looking for new opportunities and disruptive innovations. Some of the key questions to ask when looking for signals of change in any industry or market are:

  • What jobs are customers trying to get done?
  • Are customers not served, undershot or overshot by current offerings?
  • Where are new business models emerging?
  • What role do regulatory agencies play?
  • Has a recent technology changed how work gets done?

Internal Upstarts

You could look at your current organization as an incumbent and yourself as an upstart and ask similar questions to those above. What is the organization focused on and who are the overshot and undershot customers? Who are the non-consumers? You can do this individually, as a team, or even a department. Perhaps you realize that your organization is not dealing well with networked customers and has poor knowledge-sharing and collaboration skills. With asymmetrical motivation, you can start learning and developing these yourself. Over time this will give you asymmetrical skills, like online community management or mastery of social media tools. None of this would be at odds with the organization or your current work.

If you think that your organization may not survive the next onslaught from an external upstart, then perhaps it’s time to realize that with the right motivation, you and your colleagues could develop the skills needed to take the upstarts on when the time comes. So start doing something the organization does not want to do and few have the skills to do. If you think that successful organizations in the near future will practice networked unmanagement, then you can start developing asymmetrical skills for the networked workplace now by:

Organizational, institutional, technological, and market changes are certainly coming as the network era gets into full swing. Watch for the signals of change as existing industries fall to the upstarts and be ready yourself.

Friday's Smorgasbord

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Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past week [as I prepare for a long flight home, with too many stops on the way].

@RalphMercer – “pilot projects are designed to delay good ideas until they are out of date”

Manuel Castells on the rise of alternative economic cultures – via @jonhusband

“We live in a culture of not virtual reality, but real virtuality because our virtuality – meaning the internet networks – are a fundamental part of our reality.

“All the studies on the internet show that people who are more social on the internet are also more social face-to-face.”

@HansdeZwart – Brewster Kahle on “Universal Access to All Knowledge”

They are convinced that it is feasible to store all the world’s knowledge. Texts are being digitized (i.e. scanned) for representation on the screen (see Open Library for examples) and are openly available. The Internet Archive have made their own scanners pushing the costs per scanned page (mostly labour) down to about 10 cents per page. Their scanning centers now have 3,000,000 free ebooks available online (incl. 500,000 for the blind/dyslexic and 250,000 modern books available for lending) and they have about 8 million more to go. They have made a book mobile that can download and print a book for about one dollar.

@Ignatia – European Environment Agency Keynote [my presentation summarized by Inge de Waard]

Moving from local to global
We live in a less barriered world: self-publication, group forming across the world, unlimited information. In the past we linked up with people with similar interests locally, due to simply physical realities… now we can link up with people from around the world. So from a learning perspective our learning group grows (personal addition: this also means that the group that lives inside the personal zone of proximal development grows, as more people can potentially be in this). Groupforming is now becoming networks. This has an effect on mentorship: per mentor you can only have so many learners, but with the growing group more mentors can stand up and the learners themselves can become mentors.

I saw more bicycles in Copenhagen in 2 days than I see at home in 2 months. They are everywhere. Here are some in front of the central department store, Magasin du Nord.