In the evolving social organization, I included a table with several descriptive terms, which Amanda Fenton suggested needs to be “unpacked”.

I’ve linked the sections to my posts that describe some of these terms in more detail [Feel free to suggest better resources/links for the sections I've missed].

Many organizations today are based on complicated models but they should be developing ways of dealing with a more complex, networked business environment. Simplifying to a basic hierarchy won’t help, though there are many simple solutions sold as answers to our complicated organizations. Remember the wildly popular who moved my cheese series? Well, now you can use carrots instead of cheese. Works for vegans I guess, but simple answers for complex issues don’t work.

Real solutions require people to do some hard work.

Let’s look at Knowledge Acquisition. Formal training is easy to task out or outsource and then assume that everything has been taken care of. The training gets done and the organization can account for it. Managers can say, “my people got their training”. Courts can be assured that workers have been trained, so the company has met its responsibilities.

Even performance support tools can be developed centrally, by external consultants or an internal team. The resulting tools are then sent throughout the organization to be used at work. The organization can say, “they have the tools”. For example, all bank officers can use the same mortgage calculator, so risk is managed fairly easily once the system is in place. The system is under control.

However, social knowledge acquisition in the organization is a different case. It requires a very different approach. First of all, centralized control won’t work. Secondly, individuals will become responsible for their learning and their actions. This requires trust. Control systems become counter-productive. There is no easy way to move an organization into this wirearchical space. It requires some serious thinking about how things get done. It means giving up control. It means organizational life in perpetual Beta, and that can be a scary thought. But I’m convinced that it’s worth doing.

Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week:

QUOTES

via @CharlesHGreen “When you dig yourself into a hole, first, stop digging.” up by your bootstraps

via @HealthCareerPro “I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.” ~ Winston Churchill.

@EskoKilpi “The everyday live interactions we experience do not exist in a meaningful way in any documents.”

*****

via @bduperrin Six Fundamental Shifts in the Way We Work – HBR

Despite long-term increases in labor productivity, the average return on assets (ROA) of US companies has steadily fallen to almost one quarter of what it was in 1965. We’re running faster, but still losing ground. There is no sign of this long-term erosion flattening out, much less turning around.

The conclusion is inescapable: our management practices and corporate institutions are fundamentally broken. The good news, if you can call it that, is that this isn’t sustainable for much longer: the trend line on ROA approaches zero in 2020.

The Power of Power Laws by @jhagel “We’re shifting from a Gaussian world to a Paretian world, with profound implications for business.” followed by a reply to Power Laws by @downes “The thing with this discussion is, the two types of worlds are being described as if they are natural phenomena, as though they are patterns that we just fall into.”

@SteveCase – Studies Show Why Students Study is as Important as What: Education Week

The research suggests two parallel motivations drive student achievement: “learning orientation,” the drive to improve your knowledge and competency; and “performance orientation,” the drive to prove that competency to others. Watkins found the highest-achieving students had a healthy dose of both types of motivation, but students who focused too heavily on performance ironically performed less well academically, thought less critically, and had a harder time overcoming failure.

Two guesses which orientation develops under a U.S.-style assessment accountability system, and the first doesn’t count.

The Working Smarter Fieldbook: A Glimpse & Some Thoughts by @sahana2802

The book is a synthesis of years of collective experience, know-how,  knowledge and deep passion for improving and enabling human performance. As an L&D professional, for me the book is a practical guide to the implementation of a more efficacious “workscape” and even tells me what my elevator pitch should be. However, as I read it, I realized it is also much more. It speaks to me at a personal level showing me how I can push myself to become a more effective professional, find my Element by investing in collaborating, learning, and sharing, by building a network and being part of a network of professionals.

@JudithELS Although I’m not a great fan of slide-only stuff, these speak for themselves > Internet Time Alliance View of Change

Co-author: Thierry deBaillon – @tdebaillon

Simplicity and the Enterprise

Most companies start simple, with a few people gathering together around an idea. For small companies, decision-making, task assignments and direct interaction with clients are rather straightforward.  With growth, the simplicity ends. As every entrepreneur knows, the initial growth of a company is often synonymous with efficiency drops and decreases in profits, since administrative tasks, indirect structural costs and middle-term forecasts add financial and human pressure on early growth.

Overcoming these obstacles is one of the main burdens of start-ups and young businesses. Innovation abounds in the early stages and knowledge capitalization is aided by a common vision of the business. Further growth equates to sustainable efficiencies and market share increases. For decades, organizational growth has been viewed as a positive development, but it has come at a cost.

Complication: the industrial disease

As organizations grow, the original simplicity gets harder to maintain. Current management wisdom – based on Robin Dunbar’s research; the size of military units through history; and the work of management experts such as Tom Peters – considers the ideal size of an organization to be around 150 people. Beyond this size, knowing everybody in person becomes impossible. Intermediate layers of power and delegation begin to develop above 150 people and companies then enter the realm of complication.

Most of today’s larger companies have a complicated structure. To enable growth and efficiencies, more processes are put in place. This is what management schools have been doing for over half a century.  To ensure reliable operations and risk mitigation, the core competencies of decision-making and innovation are moved to the periphery. The company’s vision, if there is one, is now supported at the board level but not the individual level. New layers of control and supervision continue to appear, silos are created, and knowledge acquisition is formalized in an attempt to gain efficiency through specialization.

As companies get even bigger, internal growth and innovation reach a tipping point, and companies rely on mergers and acquisitions to maintain the illusion of  growth. At some stage of complication, companies do not even create jobs anymore. In France, a study from INSEE showed that large organizations have a tendency to destroy internal jobs: by transferring jobs to subsidiaries, contractors and subcontractors. Large firms barely participate in job creation. Similar studies conducted in other countries show the same results. However, knowledge, and the acquisition of new knowledge, are still key factors for innovation and effectiveness. To compensate for its complicated processes, the enterprise attempts to shift to another paradigm, and tries to become a learning organization, putting significant effort into training.

Complexity and the new Enterprise

Today’s large, complicated organizations are now facing increasingly complex business environments that require agility in simultaneously learning and working. Typical strategies of optimizing existing business processes or cost reductions only marginally influence the organization’s effectiveness. Faster evolving markets challenge the organization’s ability to react to customer demand. Decision-making becomes paralyzed by process-based operations and chains of command and control; thereby decreasing agility. Training, as “the” solution to workplace learning needs, fails to deliver and then gets marginalized, often being the first department to have its budget cut.

Many organizations today are also facing significant demographic challenges. Baby boomers, once the lifeblood of business, are retiring, while Generation Y wants to communicate and interact in a completely different manner. There may be four generations in the modern workplace and each has its unique traits and demands. There is growing complexity both inside and outside the organization.

Organizations need to understand complexity, instead of simply increasing complication. This lack of understanding, as well as some existing, but minor, efficiency improvements in tweaking the old system, are the major barriers to adopting Enterprise 2.0 concepts and practices. Companies need to get a clearer view of the competitive advantages of Enterprise 2.0 before an organizational framework like wirearchy can co-exist with hierarchical structures and thinking.

Wirearchy: a dynamic two-flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results enabled by people and technology.

Here are some key organizational changes during the journey from simplicity to complexity:

Let’s look at how social learning can support emergent practices in the enterprise:

Implementing Social Learning

Knowledge workers get things done by conversing with peers, customers and partners, as they solve the problems of the day. Learning from these social interactions is a key to business innovation. In a globally networked economy, based increasingly on intangible goods and services, constant innovation is necessary to stand out. Markets such as software, financial services, consulting and consumer goods have to continuously adapt their offers to keep up with changing demands and advances in technology.

Hyper-linked knowledge flows have made organizational walls permeable. Official channels are competing with an expanding number of informal communications. A collaborative enterprise is becoming  the optimal organization for such a networked economy, capitalizing on these expanding knowledge flows. To innovate, organizations need to collaborate internally and this is social. To participate in their markets, organizations, customers and suppliers need to understand each other and this too, is social. Social learning is how knowledge is created, internalized and shared. It is how knowledge work gets done.

In complex environments, learning is much more than just a matter of structured knowledge acquisition. However, that is all that training enables. Corporate training methods often consist of delivering content and perhaps providing drill and practice sometime prior to doing the task. There is often a gap between training and doing. Training alone cannot address the wide variety of informal learning needs of workers. Nor can it help to transfer the tacit knowledge on which many of us depend to do our jobs.

We know that informal learning happens all of the time but often the best answers or experts are not connected to the person with the problem. Social learning networks can address that issue by giving each worker a much larger group of people to help get work done.  Regularly publishing to our networks is how we can stay connected. Here is an approach to embed social learning into organization work flows. This is an iterative process that can be adapted to fit the context.

Listen & Create: Being open to self-education is the foundation of individual learning. Part of this is the development of habits of continuous sense-making by recording what we hear, read and observe; e.g. personal learning environments (PLE) & personal knowledge management (PKM).

Converse: Sharing is an act of learning and can be considered an individual’s responsibility for the greater social learning contract. Without sharing, there is no social learning. Through ongoing trusted conversations we can share tacit knowledge, even across organizational boundaries; e.g. social learning.

Co-create: Group performance enables the creation of new knowledge and is a source of innovation; e.g. collaborative work, customer experience.

Formalize & Share: Some informal knowledge can be made explicit and consolidated through the formalization and creation of new structured knowledge; e.g. taxonomies, document management, storytelling.

Enterprise social learning

Social learning consultant Jane Hart[1] has created a comprehensive, and growing, list of social learning examples in the workplace. Companies listed here include British Telecom, Sun Microsystems, NASA, Nationwide Insurance, and SFR. The SFR case study, reported by Sue Weakes[2], shows how a younger workforce is demanding better access to social media.

French mobile phone company SFR implemented ActiveNetworker from Jobpartners to support its new social network. My SFR comprises a company blog, a central space for discussion, and the ability to build profiles that allow employees to share information on career progress, learning and development and aspirations. They can also join groups of interest … ActiveNetworker has been well received and SFR is averaging 80,000 visits per week from the 10,000 employees that are using it.

Dave Wilkins[3] at Learn.com, describes the case at ACE Hardware in which the company set up a web-based social learning platform for its 4,600 independent hardware dealers to share and seek advice. They were able to look for new sales leads, find rarely used items through the community and share merchandising display strategies. This social learning community strategy resulted in a 500% return on investment in just six months.

Cristóbal Conde, CEO of SunGard, a software and IT services company, was recently interviewed in the New York Times[4]. He discussed how he has flattened the company’s hierarchy as a way of dealing with the globalization of the company. One important social communication tool at SunGard is Yammer, a micro-blogging platform similar to Twitter but used internally. NYT: “What kind of things do you write on Yammer?”

I try to see a client every day, and because of my title I get to see more senior people. And so then they’ll tell me things — you know, what are their biggest problems, what are their biggest issues, what are their biggest bets. All this information is incredibly valuable. Now, what could I do with that? I’m not going to send that out in a broadcast voice mail to every employee. I’m not even going to write a long e-mail about it to every employee, because even that is almost too formal. But I can write five lines on Yammer, which is about all it takes.

A free flow of information is an incredible tool because I can tell people, “Look, this is one of our largest clients, and the C.E.O. just told me his top three priorities are X, Y and Z. Think about them.”

The Ford Motor Company[5] has used social media for learning, beginning with SyncMyRide[6], and now integrating it as a way to connect customers and the company.

Ford’s intention is to consider how social media can inform the company as a whole, rather than judging its efforts by the criteria of one department and those “holistic” lessons filter up and down through the company, says Monty [head of social media]y. That includes the company’s executive board and goes as far as putting up senior execs for online Q&As through Twitter and on the corporate Facebook page. “There is a healthy respect for [social media] and how we participate in it. Two-way dialogue is healthy for a company like Ford, and we’ve grown as a result of having participated in it,” says Farley [Chief Communications Officer]. At some point, as executives grow in seniority, they tend to become “isolated from reality,” adds Monty. Making the Ford board aware of and engaged with social conversations counters that isolation. “When [CEO Alan Mulally] says we are making the cars people want, well, how do we know unless we are listening?” asks Monty.

A business imperative

Deloitte’s Shift Index[7] of 2009 highlights the challenges facing several industries today, that of declining return on assets and the need for innovation. One recommendation is to enable knowledge flows, a key benefit of social learning:

Given the growing importance of knowledge flows, perhaps the most powerful form of innovation in this context may be institutional innovation –re-thinking roles and relationships across institutions to better enable them to create and participate in knowledge flows.

One of the great things about web social media is that they are for the most part free. Experimentation does not require an enterprise-wide software deployment strategy at the onset. As Seth Godin[8], marketing and branding expert, says:

You guessed it: new media is largely free. So why teach it in school as if it were a scary theory? Why encourage people to be afraid? Just do it. Build your own platform. Appear in the places that seem productive or interesting or challenging or fun. Experiment quietly, figure out what works, do it more. No need to be a dilettante, and certainly you shouldn’t spread yourself too thin or quit at the first sign of failure… but… quit waiting for the right answer.

Our social networks have a greater influence on us than we think. Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler explain the latest research in great detail in the book, Connected: The surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives (Little-Brown, 2009). Robin Hanson[9] shows that we seldom change our behaviour based solely on getting new information. “People don’t believe something works until they’ve seen it work in something pretty close to their situation. A media story about something far away just doesn’t say much.” Again, social learning is about getting things done in networks.

Getting started

According to Rebecca Ferguson[10] at The Open University, social learning can take place when people:

• clarify their intention – learning rather than browsing
• ground their learning – by defining their question or problem
• engage in focused conversations – increasing their understanding of the available resources.

Following the process explained earlier:

Listen: The first step in social learning is paying attention and watching what others are doing. Finding trusted sources of information is very important. Hearing what others are doing and connecting to them with social media such as Twitter or blogs increases the chances of accidental and serendipitous learning. For example, one can follow conversations on Twitter by searching for “hashtags”. Typing “#PKM” shows current conversations on personal knowledge management.

Converse: By engaging in conversations and providing valuable information to others one becomes part of professional networks. Many experts are willing to help those new to the field but newcomers first must say what they don’t know.

Co-create: Over time one can engage more in co-operative activities, such as adding comments to a blog post or extending the thought in an article or discussion thread. For many people used to traditional work, working transparently in the open takes some time to get to used to.

Formalize & Share: Writing professional journals or lessons learnt can ingrain the important process of formalizing aspects of social learning. Sharing with others, internally or externally, over time becomes part of a normal daily work flow.

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. Workers have many more connections, to information and people, than ever before. But the ability to deal with complexity lies in our minds, not our artificial organizational structures. In order to free our minds for complex work, we need to simplify our organizational structures. According to the authors of Getting to Maybe, in complex environments:

• Rigid protocols are counter-productive
• There is an uncertainty of outcomes in much of our work
• We cannot separate parts from the whole
• Success is not a fixed address

This is the basis of the evolving social organization.

Some additional thoughts on social learning

Learning Executives Discuss Social Learning at ASTD 2009 (video[11]):

Mike McDermott (T Rowe Price): “I think the impact of social learning will dramatically increase in the future, in a number of ways, both internally with our associates and externally with our clients.”

Karie Willyerd (Sun Microsystems): “we see the death of newspapers … the same thing is going to happen with learning functions and training materials … if we don’t learn how to publish with social media … through social learning.”

Walt McFarland (Booz Allen Hamilton): “The environment is going to demand it [social learning]. The problems are just tougher and they’re too big for any one consultant or any consulting team”

Dave Pollard[12] on bridging generational differences in the workplace:

Our job, as people who appreciate the value and perspective of both generations, and value diversity, is what Nancy White calls “building bridges” — translating Gen Y’s ideas and requests into language “the man” can understand (value creation and ROI), and translating the boss’ and IT’s restrictions into language that Gen Y’ers can understand (the risk of catastrophic financial loss, loss of business reputation, and insolvency). The best way to build these bridges is by telling stories — of history, of unexpected and astonishing success, and of unintended consequences.

Tony Karrer [13] on measurement:

What’s interesting to me is that with eLearning 2.0 or social learning or more specifically with using social tools to do things like have interesting conversations – what I want to measure is really not at all what is learned. I want to measure whether the results produced are better. I am not sure I know what they should have learned at all.

[1] http://c4lpt.co.uk/handbook/corporate.html

[2] http://www.personneltoday.com/articles/2008/11/18/48393/social-networking-e-learning-on-the-social.html

[3] http://www.slideshare.net/dwilkinsnh/embracing-social-learning-across-the-enterprise-860823

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/business/17corner.html

[5] http://socialmediainfluence.com/2010/01/20/fords-fiesta-of-social-media/

[6] http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/supporting/syncmyride.html

[7] http://www.deloitte.com/us/shiftindex

[8] http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/09/if-tv-ads-were-free.html

[9] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/01/diffusion-by-learning.html

[10] http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/sociallearn/2010/01/13/what-is-social-learning-and-why-does-it-matter/

[11] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3JWvuthhDo

[12] http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2009/05/29.html

[13] http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2009/04/social-learning-measurement.html

George Siemens calls it information management (what I describe as PKM).

I specifically use the term information instead of knowledge. Our encounter with information is one of sensemaking and wayfinding. We encounter a continual flow of information – most of it will never become “knowledge”.

From my perspective, the knowledge aspect of PKM is an emergent property of the activities conducted, many of which are merely information management. A more appropriate term would be Personal Information Management for Sense-making (PIMS?), but PKM is the term I’m sticking with for now. For sure, merely tagging an article does not create knowledge. The process of seeking out information sources, making sense of them through some actions and then sharing with others to confirm or accelerate our knowledge are those activities from which we can build our knowledge. Managing and sharing information, especially through conversations, are fundamental processes for sense-making, as we get inundated with increasing amounts of information.

George describes some key activities and decision points (especially in Selection & Use) in the figure below. These five actions pretty much mirror my own PKM processes.

George says that, “Too many aspects of my sensemaking system are manual”, but I think this is a strength of PKM and other sense-making practices. By keeping them as manual activities we are forced to do something. For me, the act of writing a blog post or a tweet or an annotation on a social bookmark all force me to think a bit more than clicking once and filing or having it served up from an automated system. The weekly routine of reviewing my Twitter favourites and creating Friday’s Finds is another manual routine that I find helps to reinforce my learning and (hopefully) add to my knowledge.

Like George, I’m sure we can get better systems to help us, but for now I find the manual nature of my sense-making is an essential part of it. But then, I’m probably not as busy as George

I’m offering a one-day course at the iSchool Institute (University of Toronto).

“In the period ahead of us, more important than advances in computer design will be the advances we can make in our understanding of human information processing – of thinking, problem solving, and decision making…”
Herbert Simon, Economics Nobel-prize winner (1968)

PKM is an individual, disciplined process by which we make sense of information, observations and ideas. In the past it may have been keeping a journal, writing letters or having conversations. These are still valid, but with digital media we can add context by categorizing, commenting or even remixing it. We can also store digital media for easy retrieval.

The Web has given us more ways to connect with others in our learning but many people only see the information overload aspect of our digital society. Engaging others can actually make it easier to learn and not become overwhelmed. Effective networked learning is the difference between surfing the waves or being drowned by them.

Learning Objectives:

At the end of the course, students will be able to:

* Understand the concepts and models underlying PKM
* Select Web tools for critical thinking
* Determine PKM methods and processes that will work in their own context
* Begin to use some of the web tools that support PKM

PKM includes:

Personal Directed Learning – how individuals can use social media for their own (self-directed) personal or professional learning; and
Accidental & Serendipitous Learning – how individuals, by using social media, can learn without consciously realising it (aka incidental or random learning).

Prerequisite:
A current e-mail account
Basic understanding of how the Web works

Target Audience:
Knowledge workers, or anyone who wants to improve their learning skills using Web tools

PLC3033-10F1
Sat. 13 Nov 2010
1 day (6 hours) – 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM
Instructor: Harold Jarche
Fee: $250.00 ($250.00 U.S.)

Register

Here are some of the things I learned on Twitter this past week.

QUOTES

“Anything you think is either unoriginal, wrong or both”

@courosa Look at a single Twitter page. Think about prior knowledge / literacies needed to decode that page. RTs. links. voice. events. #MediaLiteracy

@Dave_Ferguson My comment to @rnantel : fixing most performance problems with training is like fixing a leaky faucet by painting the kitchen.

—

KM tools for small business: an array by @jackvinson

But wait a minute.  Why go with these additional systems?  Why not just help people in the business do a better job with what they have?  Why not teach and encourage advanced Personal Knowledge Management skills, possibly using some of the online services?  That’s not a bad idea, actually.  If everyone can use the same tools and those tools can share information amongst colleagues, that may be a good starting point.

via @sebpaquet What life lessons are unintuitive or go against common sense / wisdom? Quora.com

Focus on spending this money in ways that improve your happiness and reduce your stress levels, and be cautious about using it to buy things that other people say you “should” buy.

Designing for complexity by giving up control: a traffic example via @johnniemoore

Recommended viewing for contemplating the power of self-organisation and the hidden costs of top-down control. The best line in the commentary was this: “Road capacity might be limited but empathy is boundless.”

A Man with a PhD: Sounding strident & desperate for a reason by @RBGayle

We sound desperate and strident because dealing with this level of managed ignorance puts tremendously unnecessary stress on our ability to solve complex problems.

@NatashaChart did a lack of print copyright law jump start Germany’s industrial development and popular literacy? Spiegel Online International

Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law? A German historian argues that the massive proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the country’s industrial might.

[snip]

Indeed, only 1,000 new works appeared annually in England at that time — 10 times fewer than in Germany — and this was not without consequences. Höffner believes it was the chronically weak book market that caused England, the colonial power, to fritter away its head start within the span of a century, while the underdeveloped agrarian state of Germany caught up rapidly, becoming an equally developed industrial nation by 1900.

I’ve often said that learning and working are becoming the same thing in our hyper-connected workplaces. As a free-agent there are great opportunities to integrate work and learning and that is by thinking of marketing as education, both for you and your clients. Since a one-person business doesn’t have separate marketing and training departments, there’s no need to worry about any turf wars. Marketing is the same as Learning & Development.

Marketing and education have certain similarities – gaining attention; getting your message across; and changing behaviour. Much of our learning is through conversations with others, as is marketing, or as the Cluetrain Manifesto states in Thesis #1 – Markets are conversation.

Without conversation (oral, written, graphical, physical) there are no social transactions. This has been the key aspect of the un-marketing approach for my own consulting business. Learning and working are mostly conversation as well. To market yourself as a free-agent online, start by giving. That means be a valued contributor to conversations with your professional community. Helping to educate potential clients is an excellent path to develop relationships

The Cluetrain’s Thesis #6 is that the Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media. I started blogging here in 2004, and my blog is my pervasive presence on the Web. This is where you can find me as well as links to other things I may be doing. It has now become my knowledge base and provides fodder for articles and presentations. My blog enables me to have conversations with other professionals about things that matter to us. I’ve said many times that my blog doesn’t get me clients but, using a baseball metaphor, it gets me from 1st base onward. It’s also my business card that tells more about what I think than any interview ever could.

Cluetrain Thesis #7 is that hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. The advantage of being a free-agent today is that you can use the Internet to get around most hierarchies. Information on almost any field is available for free. Tools like Twitter let you “follow” people in fields that interest you; making it excellent for competitive intelligence. Checking out “crowd-sourced” tags on Delicious lets you see what others find important. You can connect with people on Facebook or on Linked-In, with its discussion groups. Personally, I use Linked-In for business and Facebook for friends & colleagues. Both networks, as well as Twitter, have connected me to paid work.

Cluetrain Thesis #9 says that networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge. It still requires hard work, perseverance, skill and knowledge but you can get recognized for your expertise. Kathy Sierra has an excellent graph showing the work required, but the tools to disseminate your expertise are here now:

Posting questions on blogs, Twitter or social networks usually results in a lot of good advice. I revamped my website in 2007 after asking advice from readers, which increased traffic to my consulting section. Once you go online, you are no longer alone, for better or worse.

We now have many tools to engage in conversation and to create some wealth along the way, without giving up our rights in indentured servitude as salaried workers.

Cluetrain Thesis #10 concludes that markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. I have found that participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally. This is supported by Jeff Jarvis:

To make the money I don’t make teaching, I consult and speak for various media companies and brands. The only reason I get those gigs is because companies read the ideas I discuss at Buzzmachine and ask me to come and repeat them in PowerPoint form and explore them with their staff. I’ve also been asked to teach executives how to blog (a class that should, by rights, take about two minutes). That work and the teaching get me to a nice income in six figures. So I’m not looking quite as idiotic now, I hope.

Rob Paterson explains how important blogging is for his work:

NPR, all my work in New Media, Blackwater, Education – all my paying gigs have come through this medium [blogging].

Some Quick Start Tips to market yourself online:

1. Get your own domain name
2. Free your Bookmarks and start sharing what you do
3. Read blogs & make comments and don’t forget to Aggregate before you’re swamped
4. Establish a consistent presence on Linked-In, Facebook, etc.
5. Start your blog (WordPress, Typepad) without any fanfare
6. Check out other social media like Twitter or what others are talking about
7. Watch for patterns and see what makes sense for you

These Small Business Blogs may give some inspiration.

After several years of blogging and engaging in educational (un-marketing) conversations online, here are some of the tangible benefits to my business. Many of these practices are interwoven with my personal knowledge management processes as well.

• Using a feed reader (via RSS), saves a lot of time and bookmarking.
• The information I get from blogs and Twitter is usually weeks ahead of the mainstream press. This is competitive intelligence.
• By blogging and tweeting I have raised my profile on the web, which is cheap, but time-consuming, marketing.
• I use my knowledge base of blogs posts when preparing reports, proposals and presentations. WordPress is an excellent tool and has become much easier to use with version 3.0.
• Blogging forces me to think and reflect in order to write, so that what was just an idea in my mind becomes more concrete. I am better prepared when asked questions by potential clients.
• Through blogging and Twitter I have met a number of business partners.
• Online writing keeps me in touch with a lot of interesting people and expands my view of the world, providing new ideas for my business.
• When I have a problem, especially a technical one, I post it on Twitter and usually get an informed answer within 24 hours. It’s like a large performance support system.
• My web presence allows people to get to know my opinions before they engage me as a consultant; saving time and potential frustrations.

Robert Kelley, in How to be a Star at Work, describes how tacit, or implicit, knowledge has come to dominate the knowledge economy:

What percentage of the knowledge you need to do your job is stored in your own mind? Or put another way: What percentage of your time do you spend reaching out to someone or something else for knowledge that is essential for you to get your job done? Do you know how much you don’t know?

In 1986, the average answer from responses to surveys or hands in the air at group seminars was that most people had about 75 percent in their heads. In recent years [late 1990's], the percentage has dropped  15 to 20 points, and in the case of one company I worked with recently, it has fallen as low as 10 percent!

We could extrapolate that this trend has continued since the book was published in 1999 and that a decade later the percentage of knowledge required that is stored in our minds is closer to 10% in many companies. We can also induce that workers today need  to regularly reach out to someone or something in order to access the tacit knowledge they need. They need to be social. Social learning is how we get things done in the increasingly complex modern workplace.

The figure above shows how documentation (explicit knowledge) may be suitable in less complex environments, but we need to exchange tacit knowledge through conversations in more complex environments. In order to apply tacit knowledge, we need to develop emergent practices for rapidly changing (and non-repeatable) tasks. Collaborative work is fueled though ongoing social learning, making the integration of learning and working essential in any organization.

The current challenge is that we have tools and processes for storing explicit knowledge (content management systems – CMS) and for managing training (learning management systems – LMS) as well as platforms for enabling distributed conversations (social media). What we really need are systems and processes for collaborative work (enterprise 2.0). However, the solution is not to enhance a CMS or an LMS, based on assumptions of simplicity and repeatability,  but to develop ways to enhance complex webs of conversations to get work done.

Existing enterprise software systems, and the thinking behind them, are not be able to do this. With up to 90% of our work requiring tacit knowledge, the role of enterprise content management is just a minor contribution in how we get work done. Investment needs to done in processes that support conversations and collaborative work as well as tools that support them. Platforms such as Thingamy are an indication of how future work systems can be developed.

If 90% of the knowledge needed to get work done is not supported by enterprise software or organizational learning departments, then there is a significant imbalance in most organizations today. Any time you wonder why things aren’t working in your organization, it’s because you’re in a system optimized for only one tenth of what you need to get done.

Thanks to my ITA colleague Clark Quinn for inspiring me to write this post.

Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week.

Quote of the Week: @hrheingold “Free, open, multimedia university of tomorrow is here now, technically. Knowing how to self-organize learning with others is another matter”

via @nancyrubin Collaboration – If it Were That Easy We Would all Do It – Well

Five Models of Collaboration:

• Communities of Practice/Interest
• Content Collaboration
• Process Collaboration
• Project Collaboration
• Goal-based Collaboration

@davecormier “next time someone makes fun of twitter …  tell them about you guys finding the name of the berry that Posey ate for poison control [baneberry]”

we took the kids into the woods, on a little trail on the back of Dave’s ancestral lands. and we spun our heads back, three of us at once to see Posey in her tutu and her grandmother’s fake plastic pearls chomping heartily away on…something.

three parental mouths opened in unison to say what’s she eating? and then Dave crossed the three steps between him and her in only one and he pried the berry from her mouth. ew, she said.

he grabbed the culprit to ask the internet, once we were back at the house.

Photo & The Culprit

via @helinur the best goal is no goal :

So what does a life without goals look like? In practice, it’s very different than one with goals.

You don’t set a goal for the year, nor for the month, nor for the week or day. You don’t obsess about tracking, or actionable steps. You don’t even need a to-do list, though it doesn’t hurt to write down reminders if you like.

What do you do, then? Lay around on the couch all day, sleeping and watching TV and eating Ho-Hos? No, you simply do. You find something you’re passionate about, and do it. Just because you don’t have goals doesn’t mean you do nothing — you can create, you can produce, you can follow your passion.

via @markwfoden Case study on using micro-blogging to support informal learning [PDF] at Pitney Bowes:

• Better Employee Learning: Yammer facilitates and augments the highly valuable “casual learning” that happens every day within Pitney Bowes.
• Easily Searchable Knowledge Base: Each discussion is archived and accessible to all within the organization for future access.
• Better Knowledge Flow: Knowledge isn’t siloed into specific regions or departments.

via @elsua Starting another day with this required reading: Am I Crazy? Or Is It The Whole Firm Where I Work? by @stevedenning

A century hence, when historians come to write the history of the current age (assuming our species survives so long), they will, I believe, be puzzled as to why so many people managed—and so many more people allowed themselves to be managed—in ways that were known to be unproductive, crimped the spirits of those doing the work, and frustrated those for whom the work was being done. Why, they will wonder, did this continue for so long on such a wide scale?

A while back, Charles Green responded to my post about the knowledge economy being a trust economy:

Your title captures an important insight; the knowledge economy allows significant distribution of nodes of knowledge, means of production, etc. To get the value of that, resources have to be distributed. If people can’t figure out how to trust other people, all that value goes unachieved. Or, more likely, it accrues to other organizations or networks who HAVE figured out how to trust each other.

I’ve referred several times to articles at the Trusted Advisor because trust is such an important factor in knowledge work as knowledge and innovation cannot be effectively coerced from workers.

Here’s Charles on Measuring and Managing:

If you can measure it, you can manage it; if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it; if you can’t manage it, it’s because you can’t measure it; and if you managed it, it’s because you measured it.

Every one of those statements is wrong. But business eats it up. And it’s easy to see why …

The ubiquity of measurement inexorably leads people to mistake the measures themselves for the things they were intended to measure.

And a post on measuring ROI for soft skills training [because we don't trust workers] and the perversion of individual measurement:

Most soft skills deal with our relationships to others. The drive to individually behavioralize, then metricize, has the effect of killing relationships—an ironic outcome for relationship-targeting training.

In the learning & development business there is much focus on compliance training, especially since regulatory compliance accounts for a significant amount of learning content development and learning management technology sales. However, there are few sales pitches that say, go ahead, let your employees decide what’s best for them. Trust, it seems, doesn’t sell stuff. If you trust workers to manage their learning, you don’t need an LMS. If you trust them to get things done, you don’t need a tracking system. If you trust them to learn you don’t as much pre-programmed training because they will find what’s best. If you trust them to be self-directed or group-directed learners they would have a say in their own training budget and I doubt they would vote to buy an LMS.

There is little doubt that organizational structures need to change and that management models need to adapt to deal with increasing complexity. Shifting from a hierarchy to a wirearchy requires a foundation of shared information, knowledge, power and trust. Trust shifts not only how an organization works but also many of traditional relationships with customers and suppliers. If all businesses trusted employees, how many training companies would go out of business?