Five years ago I looked at a couple of models (Rogers & Gladwell) in the Dummies Guide to Change and came up with a model on how you might be able to effect a change in a population. It wasn’t tested, it was just an idea. One of the core ideas was the law of the few, or the notion that a few key types of people help to speed social communication. As Charlene Croft puts it:

Connectors are individuals who know lots of people and who use those connections to their advantage.  Connectors are people who have invested in social, cultural and identity capital and who can convert those intangible resources into pretty much whatever they decide to.

Mavens are the senders and receivers of information.  They are the people who always have the pulse on the good deals and breaking stories of the day.  Mavens are the trendsetters and the people who you turn to to find out about this thing or that.  Citizen Journalists are types of Mavens, often scooping the mainstream media in reporting “from the ground”

Salesmen are the persuaders of society.  They are the people who dedicate a great deal of their lives to selling people on their ideas.

I figured that if you want to foster large-scale change in an organization or even a network, then you would:

1. connect the right Mavens with the potential Innovators,
2. target the Early Adopters via the Connectors and then
3. find the Salespeople who will influence the Early Majority

I also figured that the Late Majority and the Laggards were not worth the effort, time and resources.

I’ve noticed that this is what has happened with some of the ideas that I’ve worked with in those five ideas. For example, informal learning in the organization was an idea five years ago. Jay Cross (maven) published one of the first business books on the subject in 2006 - Informal Learning. Many connectors, especially educational technology and business bloggers, took the idea and spread it. Then in 2009 we see it being discussed as the core idea of the ASTD opening keynote, and moving into the mainstream by several salespeople (vendors, service providers) looking for business opportunities.

This is just a working model but it may help in looking at how you can get your new ideas into the mainstream.

Management Rewired: Why feedback doesn’t work and other surprising lessons from the latest brain science by Charles Jacobs covers many of the areas discussed here, such as learning, management models and democracy in the workplace. Jacobs covers a variety of studies in science and management but this book is not a dry academic treatise but a good read sprinkled with many of the author’s personal stories. Much as Gary Hamel’s The Future of Management showed the need for new business models, Jacobs shows leaders what actually works when dealing with other people. 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.

Jacobs shows the overwhelming evidence that “reward, punishment and feedback don’t produce the results we intend or produce the opposite” (now there’s a message for the HR department).  Methods that work are creating cognitive dissonance in order to get a shift in thinking that changes behaviour. Changing behaviour is not enough. Transforming an organization means shifting our paradigm and this is best done through stories. The most effective stories are about plans and expectations gone awry. Forget pay and bonuses, or better yet, let workers decide amongst themselves; communication is the only effective tool that leaders have.

Becoming more participative may be easier said than done, as the author shows how most 360-degree reviews have managers consistently ranking themselves as more participative than their employees do. We’re not as open as we think we are.

Management Rewired is a welcome addition to the field and should be read by anyone working in or with organizations. It’s nice to get corroboration, and a good set of reference notes, to reinforce my own work on the new nature of the firm.

Business

A Good Way to Change a Corporate Culture via @johnt

John Hegel’s Shift Happens Redux via @jalam1001

“Just heard of several faculty who left research & teaching because of toxic workplaces” via @ellenfweber (related to my work at Mental Health @ Work)

Learning

100 Incredible Lectures from the World’s Top Scientists via @josiefraser @courosa

Questions on Informal Learning and the Future of Corporate Training via @fdomon

Top 10 Thinking Traps Exposed - How to Foolproof Your Mind, Part 1 via @denniscallahan

Food & Energy

(related to my volunteering with Sackville CSA)

Biggest seedmaker, Monsanto, to prune 900 jobs + does a drop in potash sales = less food? via @folkstone

Longest path between here & the truth is through a McDonalds PR campaign on sustainable agricultural practices. via @rhh

For Twitter in (higher) education, the video and accompanying commentary about a university History course at UT Dallas is the best I’ve found so far. Nicole Melander’s Why I Hate Twitter and Why I Love Twitter posts about a Social Networking and Business class are also of interest to educators.

I think that Twitter used only inside a course is quite constrained. My experience has shown that the “course” is not a good model for the Internet, and is best-suited for the classroom, from which it came. Without walls, courses and curriculum become rather messy. That may make Twitter, like blogs, best suited for personal learning environments (PLE) in academia, so that learners can use it for several courses and connect to their non-academic networks as well. As educators experiment with Twitter, it will probably be at the course level, but that should not be the final limit.

One of the greatest aspects of Twitter I’ve noticed is its asymmetry, or the fact that I don’t have to follow people who follow me. This lets me tune my network to get better signal and less noise. If you find Twitter boring or useless, then you’re following the wrong people. Blogs allow this asymmetry but social networks like Facebook don’t. Dave Emmett shows on this graphic the difference between what Seth Godin describes as tightening & broadening networks. Twitter & blogs foster broadening networks.

My own focus is using Twitter as another tool/process in personal knowledge management. Twitter can be  used as a collaboration tool, performance support or knowledge management application. I’ve integrated Twitter into my sense-making process with Friday’s Finds. This helps me synthesize the various threads over a week and addresses one of Twitter’s weaknesses; long-term archiving. In addition, synchronous events like #lrnchat, held each Thursday, may take a little to get used to but are fun, informative and help build community.

The mechanics of micro-blogging, like blogging, are rather simple. Of course Twitter is now being hyped, much as blogs were a while back. But what’s the bigger picture?

Charlene Croft provides a sociological perspective on Twitter:

Twitter is a social networking site predominantly used by individuals who are high-level communicators and organizations/businesses who want to reach those communicators.   Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point is a good lens through which to view Twitter users.  He talks about the Connectors, the Mavens and the Salesmen as being the three types of individuals which start and spread what he calls “social epidemics.”

One conclusion you can draw from Charlene’s post is that Twitter, like blogging, is not for everyone, especially if you’re not a Maven, Connector or Salesman in your work. That doesn’t mean that you can’t be a passive participant (lurker) or use Twitter as a search engine or information gathering tool.

I will leave the final and most important words from Howard Rheingold, who says that Twitter, like most social media, requires a certain level of skill and literacy in order to be understood and used [my emphasis]:

Nielsen, the same people who do TV ratings, recently noted that more than 60% of new Twitter users fail to return the following month. To me, this represents a perfect example of a media literacy issue: Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively. Sure, Twitter is banal and trivial, full of self-promotion and outright spam. So is the Internet. The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it - on knowing how to look at it.

Image by Matt Hamm

I’m giving a presentation on Twitter for Faculty in collaboration with the Learning Resources Network (LERN) on Wednesday 24 June at 3:00 PM EST (cost $35):

Discover new Twitter tips for faculty in research, networking, and professional development. Whether you are on Twitter or not, you’ll discover new ways of communicating with implications for the classroom and your work.

My presentation will focus on folks new to Twitter, so it’s introductory, and I will leave time for comments and discussion. Most of my resources have been tagged and are already published on my Delicious account and I’ll post the final presentation on SlideShare.

The big news this week was the Iranian election and almost all of the news was via social media, as the broadcast media were shown to be powerless against the Iranian state, but not the people:

“This feels like Tiananmen. They fight for democracy, we watch, they die, we change the channel;” via @rhh

Rob Paterson picked up on this theme and asked “Is empowerment a point of view avoided by mainstream media? ;” I added, “and is empowerment a point of view that is embraced by social media?” via @robpatrob

“This is change of media: German main news show uses YouTube and Twitter for their report of Iran election.” via @hnauheimer

“University’s security & personnel evacuated by police, there are only us students in here right now” [frightening post from a student in Iran] via @Change_for_Iran

and of course many of us turned our avatars green in support of free elections in Iran

The Real ROI of Social Media: “But maybe we’re looking at the wrong ROI to start with – instead of return on investment, perhaps we should be more worried about the Risk of Ignoring.” via @fdomon

Skepticism about the whole “Net Generation” concept via @jclarey and a link to @markbullen and his Net Gen Skeptic blog

“Is it time to get rid of the Foreign Service designation?” This is a classic example of Tribal versus Network culture, and I’d wager that our foreign service needs a network culture in order to be effective today.

A Twitter-like policy on Twitter: “Our Twitter policy: Be professional, kind, discreet, authentic. Represent us well. Remember that you can’t control it once you hit “update.”“, via @kanter

I said that I’ve noticed Twitter is replacing comments and thus opening my blog posts up to a wider audience. “Is Twitter replacing blog comments? Possibly, says @judymartin8 and Twitter is driving my traffic up & more people are connecting inter-personally, not on blog.”

Excellent Friday viewing, YouTube video on educational reform, “Goodbye Butts in Chairs” via @jaycross

Most of us who work with social media already know that e-mail can be replaced by more appropriate tools such as wikis, instant messaging, blogs or micro-blogs for a number of tasks. Also, we free-agents know only too well how much time we’ve saved by being outside an organization and not having to attend useless meetings [I would say that by avoiding meetings & commuting, I gain 2-3 hours of productivity per day].

Some highlights from Why Businesses Don’t Collaborate (PDF):

The comments indicate that people consider email a significant time management issue, and the important information often gets lost in the volume of email.

… people … recognize that trying to conduct group collaboration and revision by email is not optimal.

75% of respondents … know that a wiki can be used for documents that require group input …

Only 6% regularly request changes to a meeting agenda.

A simple strategy to give workers some time back would be to require that all meetings have agendas (on a wiki) with accompanying minutes. Then take one task that is currently done by e-mail (request for input) and replace it with a wiki, blog or other more suitable medium. These are just two small steps that could save a lot of time and frustration.

1. Understand the job
2. Link Learning to business process
3. Build a performance support system

Of Tom’s 10 suggestions, not one is related to creating a course. That shows how relevant training is to the integration of working & learning and something to consider at the dawn of the learning age.

Look at “understand the job” and see how much of a challenge that could be in today’s workplace. What do you do when everyone’s job is unique? The learning professional must be in constant contact with the realities of the everyone’s work. Interventions and support will likely be incremental, addressing changing circumstances, but using multipurpose platforms for information and knowledge-sharing. Understanding work needs good two-way communications.

As jobs become more unique (I think the notion of the job may disappear over time), training either becomes a very expensive option or must be focused on specific skills that are used by several people. The result in the latter case is increasingly smaller units of training, which merges training into performance support, making training in the traditional sense less relevant.

In a complex or changing workplace (yours perhaps?), with shifting roles and responsibilities, Tom’s other seven strategies make even more sense:

4. Build a community of practice
5. Use social media to facilitate informal learning
6. Implement a continuous improvement framework
7. Use action learning
8. Organizational learning tools
9. Design Jobs for natural learning
10. Bring the job to the learning

I would say that these ten strategies would be excellent preparation for the networked workplace.

@ellenfweber “Since brains integrate knowledge naturally, while humans falsely separate facts artificially, integration is central to great learning.”

via @1ernesto1 - 50 Ways to Use Twitter in the College Classroom

“all our HR and org design theory is based on nothing but dogma“; which is why we badly need new organizational & management models

RT @zecool - NB Community College Fredericton relocates to the University of New Brunswick; expect more physical mergers in higher education as costs increase

via @charlesjennings - “When it’s just so obvious NOT to train it’s painful to watch it happen”

via @Pistachio How to be Happy in Business (Venn diagram) - Reminded me of another Venn diagram (your purpose) by @DavePollard

College/university education at the undergraduate level is now merely credential farming

10 simple things (SlideShare) we can do to change our food system

via @gbrettmiller Theoria cum Praxi » Cynefin, concept work, and the role of deliberate practice

In chaos we are forced to develop novel practices, therefore we need chaos for innovation; then from  @nickcharney My favourite Nietzsche quote: “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star”.

Open Educator as DJ Wiki

OE as DJ on Prezi (cool)

Metamedia Links & Comments

I like Scott’s diagram that looks at the flow of being an open educator. Flow is the operative term, because like digital media, everything is in Beta, constantly changing.

As hyper-connectivity breaks down the walls between institutions and specialists, like universities and professional teachers, so too are the lines blurring between teaching and learning online. The components of Flow for Open Educators are not all that different from what I’ve described as the flow of personal knowledge management for individuals:

As learning and working get integrated in our networked lives, we not only become lifelong learners but lifelong educators. Teaching and learning are part of the same continuum. Previously separate fields like knowledge management and learning design are being put into one great online digital blender. As Mark Pesce says during his presentation on The Power of Sharing, the only thing that a network can do is share (and it’s happening in ALL directions).