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.

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 Nature of the Future – Review

Posted on Wednesday, 24 April 2013 by Harold

What will the future look like? Here are some glimpses.

Genomera: Crowdsourcing clinical trials.
BioCurious: Hackerspace for biotech.
Lending Club: “We replace the high cost and complexity of bank lending.”
ScholarMatch: Connect under-resourced students with resources, schools, and donors to make college possible.
Foresight Engine: How would you reinvent the process of medical discovery?
Open PCR Machine: Do it yourself thermocycler for controlling Polymer Chain Reactions for DNA detection and sequencing.

These are all discussed in the book, The Nature of the Future, by Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future.

We are quickly finding out that when we go from a centralized communications infrastructure to a distributed one, when we connect everything and everyone, the result is not just to make things faster, better, and bigger. The social system itself acquires a fundamentally different quality: it becomes more diversified, more emergent, and often unpredictable.

This book provides probably the best background, and foreground, reading for most of the ideas discussed on this blog: complexity; the changing nature of work; the need to integrate learning into our work; and the primacy of cooperation in networks. Dedicated chapters cover money, education, science, governance, and health, with interesting future scenarios supported by current examples. While automation and robotics may be taking many jobs away, Gorbis identifies unique human skills which will continue to be important. These should be the core of any public education program.

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

As Gorbis writes, and I wholeheartedly agree, “Learning is social”.

We need to learn how to work better with machines, letting machines do what they are good at. Gorbis shows how machines and average people can outperform experts at playing chess. “Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.”

On the future of health care, Gorbis sees a new role for doctors. “In a socialstructed health care system, the doctor is not an omniscient God but a great conversationalist, astute observer, and insightful partner, that is, she is less a robot and more a real human being.” Doctors will be more like nurses, and with increasingly advanced technology, nurses will be more like doctors. I wonder if in the future, their roles will merge?

Gorbis identifies a major disconnect in our economy.

Our technology tools and platforms are highly participatory and social.
Our business models, by contrast, are based on market, i.e., monetary rewards.
conflicts [between these two priorities] are likely to grow simply because the number of such endeavors [Twitter, Facebook, etc] is growing exponentially.

Gorbis concludes that “much new value and innovation will move from commodity-or-market-based production to socialstructed creation.” This reminds me of the T+I+M+N framework. A networked economy is not a mere modification of a market economy, but a form in itself that can address issues beyond the capabilities of markets.

Would I recommend this book? Yes. There are few people who would not benefit from this synthesis of the forces of technological, economic, and societal change coming at us. I will close with some practical advice, applicable to all, but especially for anyone entering the workforce.

In a world where people’s jobs will not be given to them, each individual will need to look deeply and understand what she or he is good at, how she or he can contribute to multiple efforts and navigate multiple roles and identities as a part of different communities.

The Connected Workplace

Posted on Monday, 15 April 2013 by Harold

Today’s digitally connected workplace demands a completely new set of skills. Our increasing interconnectedness is illuminating the complexity of our work environments. More connections create more possibilities, as well as more potential problems.

On the negative side, we are seeing that simple work keeps getting automated, like automatic bank machines. Complicated work, for which standardized processes can be developed, usually gets outsourced to the lowest cost of labor.

On the positive side, complex work can provide unique business advantages and creative work can help to identify new business opportunities. However, complex work is difficult to copy and creative work constantly changes.

But both complex and creative work require greater implicit knowledge. Implicit knowledge, unlike explicit knowledge, is difficult to codify and standardize. It is also difficult to transfer.

Implicit knowledge is best developed through conversations and social relationships. It requires trust before people willingly share their know-how. Social networks can enable better and faster knowledge feedback for people who trust each and share their knowledge. But hierarchies and work control structures constrain conversations. Few people want to share their ignorance with the boss who controls their paycheck. But if we agree that complex and creative work are where long-term business value lies, then learning amongst ourselves is the real work in organizations today. In this emerging network era, social learning is how work gets done.

Becoming a successful social organization will require more than just the implementation of enterprise social technologies. Developing, supporting, and encouraging people to use a range of new social workplace skills will be just as important. Individual skills, in addition to new organizational support structures, are both required.

Personal knowledge management (PKM) skills can help to make sense of, and learn from, the constant stream of information that workers encounter from social channels both inside and outside the organization. Keeping track of digital information flows and separating the signal from the noise is difficult. There is little time to make sense of it all. We may feel like we are just not able to stay current and make informed decisions. PKM gives a framework to develop a network of people and sources of information that one can draw from on a daily basis. PKM is a process of filtering, creating, and discerning, and it also helps manage individual professional development through continuous learning.

Collaboration skills can help workers to share knowledge so that people work and learn cooperatively in teams, communities of practice, and social networks. In order to support collaborative working and learning in the organization, it is important to experience what it means to work and learn collaboratively, and understand the new community and collaboration skills that are involved. “You can’t train someone to be social, only show them how to be social.” Practice is necessary.

The power of social networks, like electricity, will inevitably change almost every existing business model. Leaders need to understand the importance of organizational architecture. Working smarter in the future workplace starts by organizing to embrace networks, manage complexity, and build trust. The 21st century connected enterprise is a new world of work and learning.

For example, traditional training structures, based on institutions, programs, courses and classes, are changing. Probably the biggest change we are seeing is that the content delivery model is being replaced by more social and collaborative frameworks. This is due to almost universal Internet connectivity, especially with mobile devices, as well as a growing familiarity with online social networks.

Work is changing and so organizational learning must change. There is an urgent need for organizational support functions (HR, OD, KM, Training) to move beyond offering training services and toward supporting learning as it is happening in the digitally connected workplace. The connected workplace will not wait for the training department to catch up.

#itashare

From hierarchies to wirearchies

Posted on Sunday, 17 March 2013 by Harold

Work in the network era needs to be both cooperative and collaborative, meaning that organizations have to support both types of activities. This may not be an easy transition for companies based almost uniquely on command and control leadership. But in this emerging network era, cooperative innovation trumps collaborative innovation, writes Stowe Boyd.

My experience is that communities of practice can help make the transition from hierarchies to networks, or as Jon Husband describes the resulting structure; wirearchy. Communities of practice, both internal and external; can be safe places between highly focused work and potentially chaotic social networking. The Community Roundtable has a Community Maturity Model that describes this transition, in four stages. The model makes it relatively easy to see where your organization stands and where it should go.

The CMM aligns with my own way of looking at the need to balance structured work and the sharing of complex knowledge, with the concurrent requirement for unstructured social networking which can increase innovation through a diversity of ideas. I have added in the four CMM stages to the image below. Communities of practice can link collaboration and cooperation, and help weave the organization and its people into a wirearchy.

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.” - Jon Husband

Getting there may not be easy, but the evidence is showing that it is necessary. For example, here is how Yammer builds its products, according to Kris Gale, VP of Engineering:

Yammer’s biggest rule of thumb is 2 to 10 people, 2 to 10 weeks – which means they generally don’t do projects that are larger or more complicated. There is a non-linear relationship between the complexity of a project and the wrap-up integration phase at the end. If you go anywhere beyond ten weeks, the percentage of time in the wrap-up phase becomes disproportionate. - First Round Capital

This sounds like it’s aligned with the general rules of dealing with complexity, developed by Dave Snowden. Each project at Yammer is a probe. It’s also small enough so that the potential ROI does not drive the company off the rails. A small project failure is much easier to deal with than a large one. Yammer understands that working in a hyper-connected economy makes formal and complex work less predictable, so project cycles are kept short. As Gale goes on to explain:

I don’t think you should be building a product. I think you should be building an organization that builds a product.

Be very wary of only trusting managers with engineering decisions; in fact, you should delegate these all the way down to individual contributors. If managers are the only ones making decisions as you grow past thirty to forty people, this should be a red flag. - First Round Capital

Becoming a wirearchy requires new organizational structures that incorporate communities and networks. In addition, they require new ways of doing work, like thinking in terms of perpetual Beta and doing manageable probes to test complex problems. It’s a new way of doing work, within a new work structure. Both are required.

Note: At the Connected Worker, we offer frameworks and coaching to develop these skills for your organization.

#itashare

Perpetual Beta is the new reality

Posted on Friday, 1 March 2013 by Harold

When I discuss life in perpetual Beta, it is often from the perspective of the individual. My interest in personal knowledge management (PKM) started with my own need to stay up to date in my field. It has since become a core part of my professional services. Sometimes it seems it’s the workers who are always spinning around, trying to find or keep work, while organizations move at a glacial pace, or even seemingly backwards.

A recent article in Businessweek shows that companies are facing life in perpetual Beta as well.

A study by economists Diego Comin and Thomas Philippon showed that in 1980 a U.S. company in the top fifth of its industry had only a 10 percent risk of falling out of that tier in five years; two decades later, that likelihood had risen to 25 percent. In finance, banks are losing power and influence to nimbler hedge funds: In the second half of 2010, in the midst of a sharp economic downturn, the top 10 hedge funds—most of them unknown to the general public—earned more than the world’s six largest banks combined. Multinationals are also more likely to suffer brand disasters that clobber their reputations, revenues, and valuations, as companies from BP (BP) to Nike (NKE) to News Corp. (NWS) can all attest. One study found that the five-year risk of such a disaster for companies owning the most prestigious global brands has risen in the past two decades from 20 percent to 82 percent.

Disaster may be just around the corner, it seems.

PKM, through seeking, sensing & sharing, can help networked individuals deal with the complexity of the network age. We’re finding that this is not a nice-to-have, optional set of skills but core to business survival. BP, Nike & News Corp. could have handled things better if people were actively and openly sharing their knowledge.

Soft skills, like collaboration and cooperation, are now more important than traditional hard skills. While cooperation is not the same as collaboration, they are complementary. Collaboration requires a common goal, while cooperation is sharing without any specific objectives. Teams, groups and companies traditionally collaborate. Online social networks and communities of practice cooperate. Working cooperatively requires a different mindset than merely collaborating on a defined project. Being cooperative means being open to others outside your group. It also requires the casting-off of business metaphors based on military models (target markets, chain of command, strategic plans, line & staff).

Cooperation, sharing with no direct benefit, is needed at work so that we can continuously develop emergent practices demanded by increased complexity. Collaborating on specific tasks is not enough. We have to be prepared for perpetual Beta. What worked yesterday may not work today. No one has the definitive answer any more but we can use the intelligence of our networks to make sense together and see how we can influence desired results.

Work in networks requires different skills than in directed hierarchies. Cooperation is a foundational behaviour for effectively working in networks, and it’s in networks where most of us will be working. Cooperation presumes the freedom of individuals to join and participate so that people in the network cannot be told what to do, only influenced. If they don’t like you, they won’t connect. In a hierarchy you only have to please your boss. In a network you have to be seen as having some value, though not the same value, by many others.

As we transition from a market to a network economy, complexity will increase due to our hyper-connectedness. Managing in complex adaptive systems means influencing possibilities rather than striving for predictability (good or best practices). No one has the definitive answer any more but we can use the intelligence of our networks to make sense together and see how we can influence desired results. This is life in perpetual Beta. Get used to it. Preparing for this will require time, social learning, and management support.

Find out more about the skills needed for The Connected Worker.

It’s the worldview, stupid

Posted on Tuesday, 19 February 2013 by Harold

I have written on various topics on this blog over the years. For example, I believe that it is only by working (and learning) interdependently, retaining our autonomy, co-developing our mastery and feeling a shared sense of purpose that we will be truly motivated. Imagine my surprise when I watched the movie, Crossroads: Labor pains of a new worldview, when it began with interdependence and then went on to discuss recent mass, decentralized, social world events; the need for cooperation; the Stanford Prison Experiment; and how our social networks influence our behaviour.

This documentary clearly shows that if we change our worldview, we can change the future, for good. However, institutional, business, and political leaders are too committed to the status quo. Meanwhile, the global poor are too busy surviving. That leaves those in the middle, and I would surmise that would be most of the people reading this blog. It’s up to us. As noted in the video, research shows that it only takes 10% of a population to spread an idea. If you understand that we are all connected and that only together will we get ourselves out of the messes we have created, then this video is for you.

Watching this movie was like seeing many of my thoughts put together in a single narrative. I have seen several future-looking videos in recent years but this one really covers the complexities of our current situation. It is worth the one hour of your time. I strongly recommend it. If you are planning on taking my March workshop on social learning in business, it will be required viewing. Changing our worldview will be a process of social learning.

Competitive knowledge

Posted on Monday, 11 February 2013 by Harold

Knowledge itself is not a great business advantage, and if it were, academic institutions would be running circles around the Fortune 100. It’s what gets done with the knowledge that matters. But there still needs to be a good flow of information and ideas that get tested out in the specific context of the organization, such as its markets and the technology available. Nick Milton describes four types of organizational knowledge: Core, Non-core, New, & Competitive. Moving competitive knowledge into core knowledge is a key part of this flow.

Competitive knowledge. These are areas of new evolving knowledge that the company knows a lot about. This knowledge may well give them a competitive advantage – the first learner advantage. In areas of evolving knowledge, the company that learns the best and learns the fastest, has the potential to outperform its rivals. The KM focus for competitive knowledge is on the development of best practice. As this knowledge is being applied around the business, there needs to be a continuous capture of knowledge from practice, comparing of knowledge through communities of practice, and development of best practice. Ownership of competitive competence probably lies with the communities and networks.

I have mapped Nick’s Boston Square to the coherent organization to show how communities of practice provide the link between social networks and enterprise work teams to filter new knowledge and find competitive knowledge.

One challenge of finding new knowledge is that social networks are comprised mostly of non-core knowledge. There is often more noise than signal. However, given their diversity, social networks are where we can find innovative ideas. This is why curation and PKM skills are so important for organizations today. Testing new knowledge is where communities of practice can be handy. Gaining competitive knowledge is the obvious ROI for fostering internal and external communities of practice.

So here is a clear value proposition. Communities of practice act as filters of new knowledge in order to find competitive knowledge for your organization. People who understand the context of the work teams must participate in communities of practice, as only they can identify what new knowledge could be competitive. That means that those doing the work need time and support to get away from their teams and see the bigger picture. Does your organization provide this time, or is everyone too busy focused on managing core knowledge? The implications of myopic work practices are quite obvious.

Cooperating in the open

Posted on Tuesday, 29 January 2013 by Harold

I’ve been thinking about collaboration and cooperation a lot lately. I see PKM as mostly comprising cooperative behaviours, as well as being self-serving (in the good sense). With cooperation, there is often no direct feedback on behaviour. Feedback emerges from the network through time. The image below is based on a previous post on tools & competencies for the social enterprise.

Cooperation is for the long term, while collaboration is usually bound by time, such as one’s career, a job, or a project. This difference is perhaps why I have been avoiding many online community invitations. These communities are often nothing more than a bounded social network. Google Plus communities are an example. If I want to cooperate, then the most porous and least bounded social network is the best for me. This is what my blog (open to anyone) or Twitter (public stream as default) help me do. If I wish to to be bounded through membership in a community then I need a reason to do so. A project is a good reason. I belong to several collaborative online project-based communities.

This brings me to a simple way to decide if I want to join an online community. If it does not have a stated expiration date, objective, or end point, then I won’t join. I will keep my cooperation open, not within a walled garden. If I wish to collaborate to get something done, then a walled garden, with some end in sight, makes sense.

I think one of the problems today is that many online social networks are trying to be communities of practice. But to be a community of practice, there has to be something to practice. One social network, mine, is enough for me. How I manage the connections is also up to me. In some cases I will follow a blogger, in others I will connect via Google Plus or Twitter, but from my perspective it is one network, with varying types of connections. Jumping into someone else’s bounded social network/community only makes sense if I have an objective. If not, I’ll keep cooperating out in the open.

The next middle class

Posted on Monday, 7 January 2013 by Harold

Jaron Lanier in You Are Not a Gadget, wrote:

The people who are perhaps the most screwed by open culture are the middle classes of intellectual and cultural creation. The freelance studio musician, the stringer selling reports to newspapers from warzones are both crucial contributors to culture. Each pays dues and devotes years to honing a craft. They used to live off the trickle down effects of the old system, and like the middle class at large, they are precious. They get nothing from the new system.

In Heads You Win … (2010) I asked; if you are not one of the recognized leaders in your field, can you make a living online or are you just part of the long tail, valuable only to aggregators and their advertising revenues? As a content creator are you providing the fodder that lets Google, Facebook and YouTube earn huge market valuations? Will there be a middle class in the networked economy, or only heads & tails?

I think it will be possible to make a living in this digital economy and have what used to be a middle class life style but it will not be like the old middle class. First of all, it will be jobless, as described by Rob Paterson, in You don’t need a Job. It will also have to be creative, in that you will have to create your own way of making a living. There will be few jobs to fill, instead there will be opportunities you will have to see. Finally, we will realize that the only way to survive will be by working together in communities of practice and interest, and understanding networks. “We” can take on the faceless “them”, if we work together and share.

We are seeing experiments in new forms of work all over the place. These range from co-working spaces, to shareable communities, to our non-traditional consultancy, Internet Time Alliance, which is still a work in progress. The trickle-down effects, that Lanier mentions, no longer share enough wealth for a viable middle class. We need to create our own network effects, but (this is important) it has to be within our own networks, not inside someone else’s walled garden. Google Ads or Facebook likes will not help you take control of your work destiny. We have to do it together, using new frameworks and models for the network era. The BIG kicker, is that there is no template or rule book. We have to embrace life in perpetual Beta and get started. The good news is that there are many others like us. Let’s write the new rules together.

Harold Jarche

sense-making for the connected workplace

Category Archives: Communities