A guiding goal in much of my work is the democratization of the workplace. Democracy is our best structure for political governance and I believe it should be the basis of our workplaces as well. As work and learning become integrated in a networked society, I see great opportunities to create better employment models.

So is it possible to have Enterprise 2.0 or a Social Business without a democratic foundation? Is the employer/employee relationship the only way we can get work done? In describing Enterprise 2.0, Andy McAfee, who originated the term, says that our work structures will not change:

No, it’s not the death of the hierarchy, of the manager, of the org chart, of the job description, any of that stuff. Some of my colleagues who are interested in this phenomenon, I think take it a bit far, and they become zealots for the manager-free, hierarchy-free, gestalt organization. I don’t think that’s smart, and I don’t think it’s likely, and I don’t think it would be a good idea.

Everything we’re talking about is totally compatible with an official chain of command in a hierarchy. You still need someone to set direction and give marching orders. But the idea of input by many and decisions by few is a pretty powerful idea.

Perhaps hierarchy is a major part of the problem, though. Thomas Malone, in The Future of Work (2004) envisaged four potential organizational models for the network era:

Loose hierarchies
Literal democracy – voting for your boss
Outsourcing through specialized guilds
Markets within organizations

All of these are democratic to some extent. Malone wrote that we need to move away from Command & Control and toward a Coordinate & Cultivate management model. Is that possible without democracy?

Democracy is a work in progress, as we know from history, and the first step is commitment. David Korten in The Great Turning, described America, the Unfinished Project:

Democracy is neither a gift nor a license; it is a possibility realized through practice grounded in a deep commitment to truth and an acceptance of the responsibility to seek justice for all.

Commitment to democratic principles is often lacking in descriptions of Enterprise 2.0 and social business. Without such commitment, I think these initiatives will be seen in hindsight as just another management buzz-word. In 2008, some of the best known management experts were brought together to “lay out an agenda for reinventing management“. Their main premises were that:

1) management models are important social technologies;

2) the current models are out-of-date; and

3) we need to develop more human models for the near future.

There was consensus that our current management systems do not work and several of their 25 recommendations were based on democratic principles:

• Redefine the work of leadership.
• Share the work of setting direction.
• Create a democracy of information.
• Expand the scope of employee autonomy.
• Retool management for an open world.
• Humanize the language and practice of business.

For management to work in the network era, it needs to embrace democracy, but we are so accustomed to existing structures that many executives would say it is impossible to run a business as a democracy. However, there are democratic business models that work today. Just not enough.

Enterprise 2.0 will not fulfill its potential unless its foundation is more than just web technologies or connected businesses. We need to integrate democratic organizing principles into our discussions on Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business. Without a solid architectural organizing principle, I don’t think the Enterprise 2.0 ship will sail very far.

Self-governance not only works, it works better than command & control. In Management Rewired: Why feedback doesn’t work and other surprising lessons from the latest brain science, Charles Jacobs covered learning, management models and democracy in the workplace. A consistent theme is to let people manage themselves, because that works:

Rather than limit decentralization to the top of the hierarchy, why not drive it down into the organization as far as possible? Modern information technology makes such “radical decentralization” much easier now than it was in [Alfred] Sloan’s day.

Such an approach enables people to control their own destinies. From a Darwinian perspective, it’s aligned with the urgings of our selfish genes. From a market perspective, it’s more efficient and effective. From a cultural perspective, virtually every organizational innovation since the Western Electric Hawthorne studies has been aimed at fostering democracy and initiative in the workplace because it’s good for both people and the business. Moving to an entrepreneurial organization is just the next step.

Democracy can be a competitive advantage. At TEDx Belfast, Mark Dowds provided 8 reasons to democratize the workplace:

1. Reduced costs
2. Reduced workforce
3. Increased productivity
4. Getting closer to customers
5. Fewer layers of bureaucracy
6. Shorter time to market
7. Increased employee motivation
8. Increased recognition of employee contributions

Let me close with this note from Gwynne Dyer, who wrote that, “Tyranny was the solution to what was essentially a communications problem“.

Modern democracy first appeared in the West only because the West was the first part of the world to develop mass communications. It was a technological advantage, not a cultural one – and as literacy and the technology of mass communications have spread around the world, all the other mass societies have begun to reclaim their heritage too.

We finally have the technology, so that even business no longer needs to be run as a tyranny.

—

Image: Bank of Canada

Here are some lessons I’ve learned about online learning communities that are developed in support of training and education:

• A loose-knit online learning community can scale to many participants and remain effective.
• Only a small percentage, ~ 10%, of members, will be active.
• If facilitators can seed good topics and provide feedback, then conversations can flourish.
• If you use a very gentle hand in controlling members/learners, some will become highly participative.
• Design for after the formal course, using tools like social bookmarks, so that artifacts can be used for reference or performance support.
• Create the role of “synthesizer” (could be the community manager or someone else) from the onset, who will summarize the previous week’s activities.
• Keep the structure loose enough so that it can grow or change according to the needs of the community.

This site was offline from sunrise to sunset today [yes, I missed you, too], in support of the anti-SOPA/PIPA protests. One factor that influenced my decision was this article (and several others) by Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet Law:

Some of the Internet’s leading websites, including Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla, WordPress, and BoingBoing, will go dark today to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). The U.S. bills have generated massive public protest over proposed provisions that could cause enormous harm to the Internet and freedom of speech. My blog will join the protest by going dark tomorrow. While there is little that Canadians can do to influence U.S. legislation, there are many reasons why I think it is important for Canadians to participate.

Here is the Wikipedia article on SOPA/PIPA, the only page available on that site today:

What are SOPA and PIPA?

SOPA and PIPA represent two bills in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate respectively. SOPA is short for the “Stop Online Piracy Act,” and PIPA is an acronym for the “Protect IP Act.” (“IP” stands for “intellectual property.”) In short, these bills are efforts to stop copyright infringement committed by foreign web sites, but, in our opinion, they do so in a way that actually infringes free expression while harming the Internet. Detailed information about these bills can be found in the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act articles on Wikipedia, which are available during the blackout. GovTrack lets you follow both bills through the legislative process : SOPA on this page, and PIPA on this one. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to advocating for the public interest in the digital realm, has summarized why these bills are simply unacceptable in a world that values an open, secure, and free Internet.

I see three major principles for working smarter in networked organizations:

1. Transparency
2. Narration of Work
3. Distribution of Power

I spoke about the distribution of power in my last post on the democratization of the workplace. The narration of one’s work is an essential practice that enables this. Hans de Zwart discusses a narrating-your-work experiment that had a 17 member team use Yammer to share daily experiences with colleagues. He talks about the barriers to narration as well as the perceived benefits of this two-month experiment.

His conclusions and recommendations:

• Don’t formalize narrating your work and don’t make it mandatory. Many people commented that this is one aspect that they didn’t like about the experiment.
• Focus on helping each other to turn narrating your work into a habit. I think it is important to set behavioural expectations about the amount of narrating that somebody does. I imagine a future in which it is considered out of the norm if you don’t share what you are up to. The formal documentation and stream of private emails that is the current output of most knowledge workers in virtual teams is not going to cut it going forward. We need to think about how we can move towards that culture.
• We should have both a private group for the intimate team (in which we can be ourselves as much as possible) as well as have a set of open topic based groups that we can share our work in. So if I want to post about an interesting meeting I had with some learning technology provider with a new product I should post that in a group about “Learning Innovation”. If have worked on a further rationalization of our learning portfolio I should post this in a group about the “Learning Application Portfolio” and so on.

The recommendation of both private and public narration components aligns with the need to support both strong and weak social ties. Covering the public/private spectrum can promote social learning, increase collaboration, and nurture an environment for cross-disciplinary innovation – and bridge the gap to working smarter.

I have offered to give a course on understanding social media at the Tantramar Seniors College, consisting of four two-hour weekly sessions. This will not be a traditional course where I decide what curriculum is important and then deliver it to participants. Instead, I am providing opportunities to connect information, knowledge and people. This afternoon is the sign up session and instead of providing an outline, I will solicit needs – “What do you want to do?”

Here are some potential topic areas:

Social bookmarks – here are mine on social media.

Blogging

Introduction to social networking (see also social media in plain English video)

Using social media for personal learning.

Social media in business and privacy issues.

My intention is to spend class time showing how I use social media and how my network lets me learn faster. I will connect with my online networks to find answers to any questions that arise. I would also like to engage the class in co-developing resources, guidelines and other materials that will help them after the classes are over.

I will narrate on this blog what transpires over the next month, as the main reason I volunteered to give this course was to learn.

This cartoon, by Hugh Macleod of GapingVoid, pretty well sums up my last few years.

The Internet has allowed me to self-publish at will and get connected to a growing network of people, several of whom I have had opportunities to collaborate with. There are no more hierarchies between creation and collaboration.

We live in a most interesting time in history. Never before has it been so easy to collaborate. Thanks, Vint Cerf, Sir Tim and everyone else who helped make the network era possible.

More of my online sense-making is in connecting to people, not accessing information sources. For instance, I read a few journals but I have dropped several, knowing that other people in my network will find the interesting articles and let me know. I used to read many of the technology blogs, like TechCrunch and Read/Write Web but have dropped them from my feed reader and instead read posts that have been referred via Twitter, Google Plus or blog posts.

The big shift for me in the past decade has been in weaving a network that brings me diversity of opinions and depth of knowledge. I am constantly following/unfollowing on Twitter in an attempt at optimal filtering, which is an impossible but worthwhile goal. I look for experts who share their knowledge or act as human-powered content aggregators, selecting quality information and discarding the crap. I look for people who have mastered Crap Detection 101.

Aron Solomon has noted that:

2012 will be a year where the value of information finally seeps into the public consciousness. The conversation will become about not only what we know but how we know that what we know is meaningful. We will shift from an orientation of quantity to one of quality. It’s not that we won’t use the Internet, it’s not that Google will disappear – of course not.

Knowledge in a networked society is different from what many of us grew up with in the pre-Internet days. While books and journal articles are useful in codifying what we have learnt, knowledge is becoming a negotiated  agreement amongst connected people. It’s also better shared than kept to ourselves, where it may wither and die. Like electricity, knowledge is both particles and current, or stock and flow.

The increasing importance of fluid knowledge requires a different perspective on how we think of it and use it. If change is constant, then the half-life of codified knowledge (stock) decreases. We see this with the increasingly combative debates on intellectual property (IP) expressed as copyright. Both vestiges of an economy dominated by knowledge as stock. The digital world is harshly bumping against the analog world and we are caught in-between.

I think the only way to navigate this change is collaboratively. No one has the right answer, but together we can explore new models of sense-making and knowledge-sharing. We each need to find others who are sharing their knowledge flow and in turn contribute our own.This is the foundation of personal knowledge management. It’s not about being a better digital librarian, it’s about becoming a participating member of a networked society.

Instead of comments, many people are using other media to indicate what they think about a web page or blog post, as Doc Searls discusses in Comments vs. Likes, Tweets, Shares and +1s. The online conversation keeps moving and in some cases it’s no longer a conversation, just a signal, like a nod or wink.

I’ve looked at my posts this year from the perspective of how often they were mentioned on Twitter.

Here are the top eight (this blog is in its 8th year).

Social Learning, Complexity and the Enterprise (April) One of my longest posts. As our work environments become more complex due to the speed of information transmission via ubiquitous networks, we need to adopt more flexible and less mechanistic processes to get work done.

The New Knowledge Worker (October) How do we get to a state of enlightened organizations in a transparent environment providing meaningful ways for people to contribute to society?

Social Learning for Business (January) An elevator pitch, in 10 sentences, for social learning, which is what really makes social business work.

Social Learning for Collaborative Work (May) We collaborate because we have a reason to do so (such as in the workplace). We learn socially because we are wired to do so.

Network Thinking (December) Network thinking can fundamentally change our view of hierarchical relationships.

Working Smarter through Social Learning (February) Artificial boundaries that limit collaboration and communication only serve to drag companies down and create opportunities for more agile competitors.

Social Learning: The freedom to act and cooperate with others (August) One current theme in workplace and education circles is to “blend” social with the formal and structured. But social learning is not a bolted-on component of our formal educational and training programs.

Training Departments Will Shrink (July) We are in a management revolution, testing out new models such as the social enterprise, democracy in the workplace, chaordic organizations and networked free-agents.

Obviously social learning was a theme that received a lot of attention. It was also interesting to note that one of my longest posts was the most tweeted, though I wonder how many people actually read all of it.

I learn a lot via Twitter, which I share on my Friday’s Finds, and my network has incredibly expanded thanks to Twitter. It seems that some of what we have lost in direct feedback, we have gained in network diversity. There are still people who take the time to comment here or write their own blog post in reaction to one of mine. Thanks to all of those conversations this past year and thanks for all the tweets, folks

Ewen Le Borgne has an entertaining post on Communication, KM, monitoring, learning – The happy families of engagement. This humourous look at the various parties that try to support engagement in the organization is well worth the read. He discusses the three main branches of the family: Communication, Knowledge Management, and Monitoring & Evaluation. There’s even good old PKM:

The little brother PKM (personal knowledge management) was not taken seriously for a long time but he is really a whiz kid and has given a lot of people confidence that perhaps his branch of the family is better off betting on him, at least partly. He says that everyone of us can do much to improve the way we keep our expertise sharp and connect with akin spirits. To persuade his peeps, PKM often calls upon on his friends from social media and social networks (though these fellas are in demand by most family members mentioned above).

What all of these family members (disciplines) have in common is they are focused on some aspect of communicating, connecting and collaborating and they all think they have a unique perspective. But they share another commonality. They are all blind, as in the story of the blind men and the elephant.

“In various versions of the tale, a group of blind men (or men in the dark) touch an elephant to learn what it is like. Each one feels a different part, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then compare notes and learn that they are in complete disagreement.”

You see, the [real] elephant in the room is the Network. We are all examining how best to get work done in a networked economy, because the Internet has changed everything. This is most evident today in publishing and increasingly so in how we manage work without geographical boundaries. We are all learning how to work anew.

In a lot of cases, knowledge workers now own what these specialties used to provide. Individuals are becoming their own information curators and sharing widely, self-managed communities constantly spring up, and social media are breaking marketing channels. Perhaps the age of specialization is over in the Network Era.  As I’ve said before: Knowledge workers of the world, Collaborate, You have nothing to lose but your Managers! With efficient networks and powerful cognitive support tools, the Engagement Family may have to rethink its structure and hierarchy. You cannot manage engagement if no one needs to be managed.

Nigel Paine recently produced a very good ten-minute video on The Learning Explosion. Nigel used one of my diagrams in his presentation and this motivated me to explain it in a bit more detail.

The slide presentation is designed to be self-explanatory and may help convince management of the need to integrate working and learning. As Nigel says, and I agree, being an effective team player is just one aspect of the 21st century workplace. We must also share our expertise across the organization while encouraging people to develop external networks. That’s what this model tries to explain. Communities of practice are bridges between the work being done and the diversity of social networks.

A key role for any learning and development department today, and for the near future, is to enable and support communities of practice that integrate learning and working.