Jane Hart posted a tongue-in-cheek video on 10 reasons to ban social media with the caveat, “Be careful who you show this video to – they might actually believe it  ”. One comment to her blog post really struck me:

In PKM in a Nutshell, I linked my various posts on personal knowledge management to make the framework more coherent. My ITA colleague, Jane Hart has just released an extensive resource that correlates nicely with the PKM framework. It is called A WORKING SMARTER RESOURCE: A Practical Guide to using Social Media in Your Job and includes seven sections (my annotations on how they connect to PKM):

1. Finding things out on the Web (SEEK)
2. Keeping up to date with new Web content (SEEK)
3. Building a trusted network of colleagues (SEEK & SHARE)
4. Communicating with your colleagues (SHARE)
5. Sharing resources, ideas and experiences with your colleagues (SHARE)
6. Collaborating with your colleagues (SHARE & USE)
7. Improving your personal productivity (SENSE & USE)

Here’s the a description and rationale for adopting PKM, individually and within organizations:

• PKM is a way to deal with ever-increasing amounts of digital information.
• It requires an open attitude toward learning and finding new things (I Seek).
• PKM methods can help to develop processes of filing, classifying and annotating for later retrieval.
• PKM leverages  open web-based systems that facilitate sharing.
• A PKM mindset aids in observing, thinking and using information & knowledge better (I Sense).
• Transparent PKM helps to share ideas with others (We Share).
• After a while, you begin to realize you’re in a community of practice when your practice changes (We Use).
• PKM prepares the mind to be open to new ideas (enhanced serendipity, or chance favours the prepared mind).

Formal training just won’t cut it any more as the primary means by which we prepare and adapt in order to get work done. Training isn’t dead, it’s just not enough, and cannot be the only tool in the box.

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As Jay Cross stated in a recent interview:

Formal learning can be somewhat effective when things don’t change much and the world is predictable …

Today’s world is the opposite in every way imaginable …

Things are changing amazingly fast …

There’s so much to learn …

Today’s work is all about dealing with novel situations …

This image, from Cynthia Kurtz’s post, Confluence, clearly shows the challenge we face in our networked organizations competing and collaborating in complex adaptive systems.

The challenge is getting organizations that are used to dealing with the Known & Knowable to be able to manage in Complex environments and even Chaotic ones from time to time. As can be seen in Kurtz’s graphic, that means weaker central control which is, of course, scary for traditional management. This is not a training problem but rather a management issue. How can you be less directive and enable distributed work, and therefore distributed (and undirected) learning? Actually there are historical examples, including guerrilla groups; religious movements; and social organizations. We need to look back as well as into the future. There are lessons and examples that can help us once we cast off some of our industrial management assumptions.

Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911) inform many of our current practices but there are other models and frameworks available. The first step is seeing that we have a problem and our current models are inadequate. This is a conversation that all business managers and organizational leaders need to have. We should be ready to have many informed conversations about managing in complexity and put forward some plausible options. For further reading:

General framework: Wirearchy

Background & Models: Gary Hamel: Future of Management; Thomas Malone: The Future of Work; Andrew McAfee: Enterprise 2.0

Ideas & Methods: Working Smarter Fieldbook; State of Learning in the Workplace

More conversations: The Smart Work Company; Internet Time Alliance blog;

The Working Smarter Fieldbook (June 2010 version) is now out. This is a collaborative effort by all of us at the Internet Time Alliance and was spearheaded by Jay Cross. Our intention is get the conversation focused on what’s important for business, including the training & learning department – working smarter. Learning is just a means and not the end, but this perspective has somehow been lost along the way in many organizations over the past decades.

A toolbox
Years ago, Stewart Brand published The Whole Earth Catalog to provide “access to tools.” It listed all manner of interesting and oddball stuff, from windmill kits to hiking sox to books like Vibration Cooking. The Catalog didn’t tell readers how to live their lives; it merely described things that might help them to do their own thing. Feedback and articles submitted by readers made each edition better than its predecessor.
The Working Smarter Fieldbook follows the tradition of The Whole Earth Catalog. Harold, Jane, Clark, Charles, Jon, and Jay provide access to the tips, tricks, frameworks, and resources that we’ve used to help organizations work smarter. Our goal is to put together an irresistible package of advice.

As a result of economic changes, some workers are getting left behind, reports the New York Times:

For the last two years, the weak economy has provided an opportunity for employers to do what they would have done anyway: dismiss millions of people — like file clerks, ticket agents and autoworkers — who were displaced by technological advances and international trade.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I don’t believe that it’s any longer a question of whether standardized work will be outsourced or automated, but when. How much time do we have to prepare people for the new revolution? Any scenario that I consider – peak oil, global warming; globalization; Asian dominance – still requires that the developed world’s workforce deals with more complexity and even chaos. We need to skill-up for emergent and novel practices and that means a completely different mindset toward work.

But our schooling and training systems are backward-looking systems, based on what has worked in the past, and don’t help to develop the new skills necessary for the networked workplace.

We cannot leave these people behind. As the need for creativity in the workplace increases, organizations must give  serious thought to what work needs to get done and how we can prepare people for it. As Gary Hamel described at the Spigit Customer Summit, traditional (industrial) employee traits of Intellect, Diligence & Obedience are becoming commodities (going to the lowest bidder). The networked, creative economy requires independent and interdependent workers (more like theatre productions) with the following traits that cannot be commoditized:

• Initiative
• Creativity
• Passion

This brings into question the rationale for practices such as:

• Mass training with standard performance objectives for everyone.
• Predominantly full-time, salaried employment (few options for part-time work at the control of the worker).
• Standard HR policies.
• Banning access to online social networks at work.

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We need to adapt to working life in perpetual Beta and we need to do so right away. My colleagues and I have been examining these trends and testing new practices for over a decade. We can help [yes, this is a pitch for our services].

You are sailing along on bright, clear water, with the morning sun off the port bow. All is calm.

Up ahead, just through the fog, you can’t quite make out the way ahead.

Rapids?

“Are you going to disappear into the fog?”, asks Jane Hart.

Clark Quinn describes the need:

What seems to me to be the need is to have a unified performer-facing environment.  It should provide access to courses when those are relevant, resources/job aids, and eCommunity tools too.  That’s what a full technology support environment should contain.  And it should be performer- and performance-centric, so I come in and find my tools ‘to hand’.  And I ‘get’ the need for compliance, and the role of courses.

Jane Hart shows a model that could work:

Collaboration model

Here it is the social and collaboration aspects that are the focus for the learning – not the content – the content is co-created by the learners [workers] – so that the learner [worker] fully participates and is active in the learning.

This model is used where a problem-based or inquiry-based learning approach is used, and here the tutor [co-worker] is an equal member of the learning group “the guide on the side” rather than the “sage on the stage”.

Time to Get on the Cluetrain

As much as we may think it’s all about learning, it’s not. In the 21st century workplace, getting things done, solving problems and being creative & innovative are the orders of the day.

Thesis #8: In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.

Training professionals had it easy for the past century. Run the course and send them off to work. Now that we are all connected by networks, much of our work is becoming more transparent.

Thesis #12: There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.

There’s no hiding in the global village. That means you can longer head off to a classroom removed from the work and do something disconnected from the realities and needs of workers. They’ll flame you on the back-channel and the whole world will find out pretty quickly. Just accelerate this tendency each year with new arrivals in the workforce and watch what happens.

Thesis #13: What’s happening to markets is also happening among employees. A metaphysical construct called “The Company” is the only thing standing between the two.

If training departments don’t get integrated with the work, they will become irrelevant.

Thesis #20: Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.

Would you rather go to a doctor who is in the band-aid business or the healing business? Prescribing training for all organizational learning is like handing out band-aids without a diagnosis. Training is often a solution in search of a problem.

This becomes evident when ~80% of learning on the job is informal and less than 10% of the knowledge needed for work is in our heads. But how much organizational effort is put into training, above all else? If it’s more than 20% of the learning support budget then it’s probably being misspent. For instance, Peter Senge’s comprehensive research showed that the average life expectancy of large companies is about 30 years, but some are over 200 years old. What is the reason for this? Organizational learning. Basically, individual learning in organizations is irrelevant. Work is almost never done by one person alone. Almost all value is created by teams and networks of people.

Enterprise training and its ADDIE framework are designed to develop individual skills, where the objective is always, “the learner will be able to …” not, “the organization will be able to …”. The basic premise is that any trained human cog will be able to fit into the organizational machine. But knowledge-intensive and creative enterprises don’t work that way. Every node in the networked enterprise is unique but the network itself is even more important. Social learning is how we get things done in networks. This is how nature and complex adaptive systems work – social learning is the best strategy.

We need to understand, encourage and support social learning in the enterprise.

Recently, Jane Hart & Jay Cross created this graphic that shows the five stages of workplace learning.

One limitation of this representation is that the first four stages look bigger than the fifth stage and could be perceived as being more important. Here’s a different perspective on the same theme.

My recent post on the value of the LMS stems from the perspective that the networked enterprise is a new organizational form that needs different support mechanisms.  Siloed support functions are becoming redundant, as are siloed technologies. Unless a platform like an LMS is actually used to get work done, it will become redundant as well. When learning is the work then it has to be integrated with working. That means stand-alone L&D departments (and the stand-alone LMS) are peripheral to 90% of the learning that is happening. The new focus of the training department in the networked enterprise must be on communicating, connecting and collaborating, and that means integrating with the work being done, not using parallel processes and technologies.

This is a follow-up from yesterday’s post that the LMS is no longer the centre of the universe and Jane Hart’s post today on A Transition Path to the Future. According to Jane, Step One in this transition is:

There are, of course, a number of steps on the transition path to a post-LMS future, and one of the first inevitably involves taking a good hard look at how your LMS is performing.  It may be that you want to retain it in some cut-down form, or it may be that it is providing no real value at all, and it is a barrier to “learning” .  I’m not suggesting that in every case, you should junk your LMS completely – in fact that would probably involve throwing the baby out with the bathwater! – but you certainly need to take an honest look at whether it is delivering what you need in the workplace today.

Step Two, or a concurrent step, would be to look at how to enhance collaboration.

First of all, collaborative work tools must be simple to be effective. The real complexity should come out of the emergent work, not the software. A collaboration platform that is over-engineered would be counterproductive. The key aspect of a collaboration platform is that should make work more transparent and rewards sharing. Does your LMS do this? Does it simplify work and make it more transparent for everyone in the network? Does it enhance serendipitous learning?

The options then become:

• Open the LMS so it can be used in the daily workflow
• Connect the LMS to a collaborative work platform
• Migrate learning to a collaboration platform and minimize use of the LMS

Given the nature of many LMS, the last option is the most likely. Once again, it’s about getting work done. If learning is embedded in the work tools, then there is little need to go to a separate place (LMS) to “do some learning”. Here are some examples:

• Use blogs to replace group e-mails so that information can be updated on a given subject/topic. This makes the work transparent and encourages learning.
• Use wikis for all documentation. This reinforces the notion of work in perpetual Beta and encourages business improvement.
• Adopt presence tools (IM, micro-blogging) so you know who is doing what in the organization. Tools like Twitter/Yammer/Laconica also become excellent places to jot down notes in public, which encourages serendipitous learning.

The key challenge is merging work and learning, especially in the minds of workers. I’ve noted before that the main objective of the modern training department should be to enable knowledge to flow in the organization. The primary function of learning professionals within such a collaborative work model is to connect and communicate, based on three core processes:

1. Facilitate collaborative work and learning amongst workers, especially as peers.
2. Sense patterns and help develop emergent work and learning practices.
3. Work with management to fund and develop better tools and processes for workers.

If your LMS is not helping you with these processes then it’s time to find a better platform.  I recently described one such platform – Elgg: it’s a community effort:

Another platform that I have used since its early days is Elgg, an open source social networking platform that attracted me because of its unique underlying model. We started using Elgg for an online medical community of practice in 2004 after going through dozens of platforms. The key differentiator of Elgg is that the individual [worker] is the centre of all the action. A course is just a node that an individual connects to [does not disrupt work flow]. You don’t “enter” a course, you just connect to it, as you would to a colleague or friend. This is real user control. We liked Elgg so much that we paid to develop a calendar function and then gave the code to the community.

In 2005 I described Elgg as a Content/Community/Collaboration Management System that allows you to develop, invent and construct knowledge [knowledge management & social learning]. That sure beats any LMS, in my opinion. Elgg is used for commercial applications like Emerald Publishing as well as the foundation for the Eduspaces community.

The Elgg platform has matured in the past six years and has a strong community and a solid product (v. 1.7). My colleague Jane Hart provides Elgg services for education & business. Soon, Elgg.com will launch with services for those who want a hosted community platform. One major advantage of Elgg will be the ability to take your data and have it hosted elsewhere. Avoiding vendor lock-in is a wise business decision. The Elgg community blog has more information.

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* Here is Jane Hart’s follow-up post on Elgg as a collaboration platform.

I used this chart, developed a few years ago, to explain in a simplified way the differences between Learning Interventions and Instructional Interventions.

It shows that training & education (in the workplace) should concentrate on addressing a clear lack of knowledge and skills by using appropriate instructional interventions, well-established over the years.

Non-instructional learning interventions are those that provide tools and resources in order to do something we don’t know (or have forgotten) how to do. This is typically the area of performance support but also communities of practice, personal knowledge management, personal learning environments, etc. Informal learning would be another name for non-instructional. Instructional Systems Development (ISD) does not address non-instructional (informal) learning requirements and even the literature on performance support lacks clear design guidelines. Informal learning (or whatever you want to call it) is a major opportunity for improving work performance.

Informal learning needs will continue to grow as more work requires access to contextual knowledge, as Robert Kelley showed over a 20 year study of knowledge workers:

“What percentage of the knowledge you need to do your job is stored in your own mind?”

1986 ~ 75%.
1997 ~ 20%
2006 ~ 10%

We cannot train individuals for that 90% but we can support access to knowledge and expertise across the enterprise. This is an opportunity.  There is much experience available in the fields of knowledge management, organizational design, human-computer interaction and information design that is valid and can be put to good use.

However, practitioners don’t always talk to each other or use the same frameworks and terminology. This is where I see Jay Cross’ concept of workscapes (PDF) going – a way to integrate these fields and use what we already know.

Working smarter is the key to sustainability and perpetual improvement. Knowledge work and learning to work smarter are becoming indistinguishable. The accelerating rate of change in business forces everyone in every organization to make a choice: learn while you work or become obsolete.

The infrastructure for working smarter is called a workscape. It’s not a separate function so much as another way of looking at how we organize work. Workscaping helps people grow so that their organizations may prosper. Workscapes are pervasive. They are certainly not lodged in a training department. In fact, they make the training department obsolete.

Working smarter also means working together but first we have to get out of our disciplinary silos.