Tag Archives: InternetTime

Media, Messages & Mobility

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Anthropologist Michael Wesch, noted for his studies of YouTube and video sharing states, “when media change, then human relationships change”.

Today, at the DevLearn2010 social media camp, I will be conducting a discussion with my Internet Time Alliance colleagues on mobile learning, but I would like to focus on how the mobile medium changes our relationships with sharing knowledge, connecting with others and getting things done.

For example, what does mobile technology do to how we seek knowledge, make sense of it and share with others?

Video [created and shared via mobile devices] is becoming an important medium of personal communication, evidenced by John Seely Brown’s example of a surfing community of practice as well as Chris Anderson’s examination of how web video powers innovation.

The big question is NOT how to blend mobile learning into our suite of existing tools, but rather what effect does this significant shift in the power of knowledge creation and sharing have on our understanding of workplace learning?

A curved path to social learning

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When I was introduced to Charles Jennings’ C-Curve for learning & development (L&D) I wrote about it in the transition to networked accountability.

Charles’ C-Curve is a model in practice, based on his experience as CLO of Reuters. I see a parallel between this migration of the L&D department and the social order necessary to do certain types of group work [Refs: Cynefin - TIMN]

  1. L&D Autonomous = taking action as a Tribe of its own
  2. L&D Aligned with organization = coordinated with the Institution
  3. L&D with governance & guidelines = able to work in a collaborative Market
  4. L&D strategically aligned = a co-operative member of (a) Network(s)

I wondered if tribal organizations may be able to thrive in networks because they are already used to more freedom. I have noticed that it is difficult to convince organizations steeped in the institutional models that the networked model may be better to deal with growing complexity. Also, those who already have to respond to markets may understand the value of networks much better than institutions. Hence the advantage of the private sector in adapting new work models before the public sector.

In organizations and complexity, I discussed three archetypal organizational models and some of their defining characteristics.

Simplicity Complication Complexity
Organizational Theory Knowledge-Based View Learning Organization Value Networks
Attractors Stakeholders (vision) Shareholders (wealth) Clients (service)
Growth Model Internal Mergers & Acquisitions Ecosystem
Knowledge Acquisition Formal Training Performance Support Social
Knowledge Capitalization Best Practices Good Practices Emergent Practices

I’ve combined the C-Curve [X=Autonomy, Y= Strategic Alignment] with the knowledge acquisition models from these three organizational types in the figure below. The question that I ask here is whether it is necessary to follow the curve or if one can leap from Stage 1 to 4.  If not, that means that organizations need to understand and implement something like a human performance technology model for L&D before they can move on to social learning. Perhaps this is why social learning is being resisted or put into a formal training box in many organizations. They have not made the move to Stage 3 (Performance Support) yet. It’s too much of a leap for organizations in Stage 2. On the other hand, social learning is only a short leap for more tribal start-ups that have not developed any structure at all for L&D as they are quite comfortable with autonomy and messy networks. Stage 2 seems like the worst place to be.

Join Internet Time Alliance for a Day in SFO

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The day following DevLearn, Saturday, November 6th, the five members of the Internet Time Alliance are holding a retreat to share insights and plan for the forthcoming year. We’re meeting at the Internet Time Lab, across the Bay from San Francisco in Berkeley.

We originally intended for this to be a private session for challenging one another’s views on what’s important in social learning, enterprise learning governance, working smarter, the impact of mobile learning, taking advantage of personal knowledge environments, breakthroughs in brain science, revised views of motivation, growing awareness of emergence, the shift from push to pull models, rethinking the role of the LMS, and breaking down barriers to change. We’d swap our views on recent thoughts emanating from Altimeter, IBM, Dan Pink, JSB, and others we listen to.

Then we spotted a potential pitfall: the echo-chamber effect. When it’s just us, there’s an ever-present danger that we’ll fall into griping about how most corporations simply don’t have a clue, leave gobs of money on the table, and look for salvation in all the wrong places. Name-calling isn’t going to help us make progress.

We decided to invite half a dozen outsiders to take part in our one-day retreat. It will keep us honest.

Our ground rules:

No competitors. If Fiat attends, Volkswagen can’t. Our choice.
Small group. This session will be intimate and participatory. No more than six outsiders can attend. Again, our choice.
No consultants. We’re the consultants (ugh). You’re the practitioners.
Big payback. Bring a problem to solve; you’ll receive individualized advice from thought leaders.

Everyone will share in the day’s activities, which will probably include:

Lunch at the Cafe at Chez Panisse
Walk in the redwoods in the Berkeley Hills
Books such as The Working Smarter Fieldbook, Informal Learning, & Engaging Learning
Video records of the proceedings

Fee for the day is $1,200. Two from a single organization, $1,000 each. (Yes, you are essentially funding our plane tickets and picking up the tab for meals.)

Interested?

DevLearn2010

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Join me and my colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance at DevLearn in San Francisco next month. We all plan to be there.

Jane Hart provides a snapshot of the State of Learning in the Workplace Today on at 10:45 am on Wednesday, November 3.

At 4:00 pm on Wednesday, we all will be engaged in a conversation entitled Work Smarter: Learning is the Real Work.

We expect to pop up at a few other places as well. (Surprise!)

A framework for the social enterprise

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I have put together two of the major articles on social learning in the enterprise that were posted here this year. A framework for social learning drew on my collaboration with colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance and the evolving social organization was co-authored by Thierry deBaillon.


Please feel free to share this 18 page white paper as I hope it will encourage more conversations on how we can integrate learning and working, a key part of enabling Enterprise 2.0.

Social Enterprise White Paper (PDF)

It’s the Network

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Over the past decade I’ve come to the conclusion that networks are changing everything in our lives. Dealing with networks is the big challenge for leaders, managers and knowledge workers of all types. Because we are all inter-networked, work is learning and learning is the work. We can no longer separate learning and working, and all attempts to do so are fraught with problems. Instructional content developed earlier is quickly out of date. Those who should be attending formal training are too busy working, so they slowly lose their skills and currency and become out of date. This is usually realized just after being downsized and forced to look for new work.

Acceptance of life in perpetual Beta is a necessary attitude to survive and thrive in our networked society. As Jay Cross wrote here several years ago,

No human life goes beyond beta; life is a perpetual experiment and reshaping. Speaking for myself, I recognize that I still have a lot of bugs.

What’s beta and what’s not is a state of mind. Many people try to go into release prematurely: they put defective product on the market. (By productizing people, I mean locking in on attitudes, structure, opinions, etc.: becoming rigid.)

Life as beta is uplifting. You have the opportunity to streamline things, to resond to feedback, to become a killer app.

Lots of alphas are claiming beta status now. They debut on life’s big stage long before they’re prepared to play the part.

As Jay says, Beta is not Alpha. You actually have to do something concrete but you also have to be ready to let it go.

I am seeing a great need for senior managers to get some control over their work in an increasingly complex business environment. Paradoxically, they can gain control by giving up control:

Acceptance of life in perpetual Beta is the first step.

Developing personal strategies for sense-making, such as PKM, is the next step.

Sharing knowledge and participating in professional networks then becomes a necessity for work.

Being willing to create and test emergent practices is next.

Finally, we need to build new structures, like wirearchy, for how we work and learn together.

Ten reasons

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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:

Strange thing is that I wasn’t laughing as he is far too near the truth – the senior management and IT departments that I know DO think like this. What is now needed is a rebuttal of this video. Not just saying that’s not the case but giving good cogent business arguments to each of the 10 (or indeed 11) points. How for instance would you answer this one. “What sort of learning process takes place in the minds of learners when using Twitter?” Just saying communication, keeping up to date, exchanging information is not enough for these doubters. It may seem ludicrous to suggest it but how do we link social learning with the bottom line? We had to do that for e-learning….

I must say that “good cogent business arguments” abound, but first they must be read and then understood and then put into contextual practice. Many people, including my partners at the Internet Time Alliance, have been discussing and using social media for business and publishing frequently on how increasing networks and complexity are influencing workplace design and human performance. Here is just a sampling of what’s already been discussed, much of it via social media.

10. Social media is a fad. Social media are an extension of the Internet and the Web, and are becoming embedded in our work and leisure time. If the Net is a fad, then so are social media – place your bets.

9. It’s about controlling the message. Networks, the new organizational model, mean giving up control and our hierarchical work models are no longer effective nor efficient.

8. Employees will goof off. What looks like goofing off, such as Twitter, may actually be knowledge work.

7. Social Media is a time waster. Not if you use some methods and processes (like PKM) to make sense of all those networks [that's how I'm able to write this post so quickly].

6. Social media has no business purpose … other than to foster innovation and collaboration.

5. Employees can’t be trusted. The knowledge economy is the trust economy, so you either have to hire new employees or change your business model. More resources at The Trusted Advisor.

4. Don’t cave into the demands of the millennials. The whole idea of digital natives is dying – the changing workplace affects everybody.

3. Your teams already share knowledge effectively. Really? Homeland Security: information sharing is still not where it should be. How about BP?

2. You’ll get viruses. Not if you use a Mac ;) Dave Snowden: “Since I’ve left IBM I’ve had fewer virus attacks working in an open Web environment than I did in a secure corporate environment.”

1. Your competition isn’t using it, so why should you? Unless your competition is one of the thousands of start-ups coming to market, or incumbents like Cisco or IBM. Even dairy farmers use social media. You can be sure your markets are using social media to talk about your products and services.

PKM: Working Smarter

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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).

Managing in Complexity

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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.

—

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;

Working Smarter 2010

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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.