by Jon Husband
February 26, 2010 at 1:34 pm · Filed under
FASTforward'09
My colleague Harold Jarche often says … “work is learning, and learning is work”. And my FF blog colleague Rob Patterson is unpacking our current understanding of what a “job” is (Marshall McLuhan long ago signaled that when we began communicating with each other at the speed of light, it would mean the demise of “the job”, and that rather we would get into “playing roles”).
It seems clear that the environment we are all moving into demands serious consideration of such statements, and that Enterprise 2.0 adoption and implementation will make these issues even more important.
Here is a blog post Harold developed recently that synthesizes well some core concepts. It may be useful to those who are considering adoption of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities and what work design issues will come up and how to address them. I am re-publishing it here with his permission.
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A framework for social learning in the enterprise
The social learning revolution has only just begun. Corporations that understand the value of knowledge sharing, teamwork, informal learning and joint problem solving are investing heavily in collaboration technology and are reaping the early rewards.
- Jay Cross
Social learning
Why is social learning important for today’s enterprise?
George Siemens has succinctly explained the importance of social learning in the context of today’s workplace:
There is a growing demand for the ability to connect to others. It is with each other that we can make sense, and this is social. Organizations, in order to function, need to encourage social exchanges and social learning due to faster rates of business and technological changes. Social experience is adaptive by nature and a social learning mindset enables better feedback on environmental changes back to the organization.
The Internet has fundamentally changed how we communicate on a scale as large as the printing press or the advent of written language. Charles Jennings explains why we need to move away from a focus on knowledge transfer and acquisition, an approach rooted in Plato’s academy:
We are moving to the world of the sons of Socrates, where dialogue and guidance are key competencies. It is a world where the capability to find information and turn it into knowledge at the point-of-need provides the key competitive advantage, where knowing the right people to ask the right questions of is more likely to lead to success than any amount of internally-held knowledge and skill.
Our relationship with knowledge is changing as our work becomes more intangible and complex. Notice how most value in today’s marketplace is intangible, with Google’s multi-billion dollar valuation an example of value in non-tangible processes that could be deflated with the development of a better search algorithm. Non-physical assets comprise about 80 percent of the value of Standard & Poor’s 500 US companies in leading industries.
From replaceable human resources to dynamic social groups
The manner in which we prepare people for work is based on the Taylorist perspective that there is only one way to do a job and that the person doing the work needs to conform to job requirements [F.W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911]. Individual training, the core of corporate learning and development, is based on the premise that jobs are constant and those who fill them are interchangeable.
However, when you look at the modern organization, it is moving to a model of constant change, whether through mergers and acquisitions or as quick-start web-enabled networks. For the human resources department, the question becomes one of preparing people for jobs that don’t even exist. For example, the role of online community manager, a fast-growing field today, barely existed five years ago. Individual training for job preparation requires a stable work environment, a luxury no one has any more.
A collective, social learning approach, on the other hand, takes the perspective that learning and work happen as groups and how the group is connected (the network) is more important than any individual node within it.
MIT’s Peter Senge has made some important clarifications on terms we often use in looking at work, job classifications and training to support them.
Knowledge: the capacity for effective action. “Know how” is the only aspect of knowledge that really matters in life.
Practitioner: someone who is accountable for producing results.
Learning may be an individual activity but if it remains within the individual it is of no value whatsoever to the organization. Acting on knowledge, as a practitioner (work performance) is all that matters. So why are organizations in the individual learning (training) business anyway? Individuals should be directing their own learning. Organizations should focus on results.
Individual learning in organizations is basically irrelevant because work is almost never done by one person. All organizational value is created by teams and networks. Furthermore, learning may be generated in teams but even this type of knowledge comes and goes. Learning really spreads through social networks. Social networks are the primary conduit for effective organizational performance. Blocking, or circumventing, social networks slows learning, reduces effectiveness and may in the end kill the organization.
Social learning is how groups work and share knowledge to become better practitioners. Organizations should focus on enabling practitioners to produce results by supporting learning through social networks. The rest is just window dressing. Over a century ago, Charles Darwin helped us understand the importance of adaptation and the concept that those who survive are the ones who most accurately perceive their environment and successfully adapt to it. Cooperating in networks can increase our ability to perceive what is happening.
Making social learning work
Jon Husband’s working definition of “Wirearchy” is “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology”. We are seeing increasing examples of this on the edges of the modern enterprise. World Blu’s annual listing of our most democratic workplaces continues to grow and gain attention. Google’s dedicated time-off for private projects, given to its engineers, promotes non-directed learning and collaboration. Zappos directly engages with its customers on Twitter, fostering higher levels of two-way trust. As customers, suppliers and competitors become more networked, being more wirearchical will be a business imperative.
Wirearchies inherently require trust, and trusted relationships are powerful allies in getting things done in organizations. Trust is also an essential component of social learning. Just because we have the technical networks does not mean that learning will automatically happen. Communications without trust are just noise, not accepted and never internalized by the recipients.
Here are some ways to make social learning work in the enterprise:
Think and act at a macro level (what to do) and leave the micro (how to do it) to each worker or team. The little stuff is changing too fast.
Engage with Web media and understand how they work. The Web is too important to be left to the information technology department, communications staff or outside vendors.
Use social media to make work easier or more effective. Use them to solve problems for work teams and groups.
Make traditional management obsolete. Teach people how to fish and move on to the next challenge. If the organization is maintaining a steady state then it has failed to evolve with the environment.
Analyzing social learning
Most 20th century workplaces had two types of learning: formal learning through training and informal learning (about 80% according to research) which just happened by accident or the result of observation, conversation and time in the job. This focus on formal training, for skills and knowledge, missed out on our social nature. Business has always been social, especially at the higher levels of management and with ubiquitous access to networks, this is once again part of everyone’s work. In the global village, we are all interconnected.
Jane Hart has shown how social media can be used for workplace learning and that instead of just training, there are five types of learning that should be supported by the organization:
IOL – Intra-Organizational Learning – keeping the organization up to date and up to speed on strategic and other internal initiatives and activities
GDL – Group Directed Learning – groups of individuals working in teams, projects, study groups, etc Even two people working together in a coaching and mentoring capacity
PDL – Personal Directed Learning – individuals organizing and managing their own personal or professional learning
ASL – Accidental & Serendipitous Learning – individuals learning without consciously realizing it (aka incidental or random learning)
FSL – Formal Structured Learning – formal education and training like classes, courses, workshops, etc (both synchronous and asynchronous)
Notice that traditional training (FSL) is only one of the five types. Three of these (IOL, GDL, PDF) require self-direction, and that is the essence of social learning: becoming self-directed learners and workers, all within a two-way flow of power and authority. Social and informal learning are not just feel-good notions, but have a real impact on an increasingly intangible business environment.
Jay Cross has looked at the ways that social learning is becoming real and developed this table to highlight some of the workplace changes he is observing:
Implementing social learning
The changes in becoming a networked workplace can be further analyzed using Jane Hart’s five ways of using social media for learning in the organization.
ASL – Accidental & Serendipitous Learning: from Stocks to Flow
Learning is conversation and online conversations are an essential component of online learning. Online communication can be divided into Stocks (information that is archived and organized for reference and retrieval) and Flows (timely and engaging conversations between people, including voice or written communications). Blogs allow flow and micro-blogs, like Twitter, enable great flow due to the constraint of 140 characters
The web enables connections, or constant flow, as well as instant access to information, or infinite stock. Stock on the Internet is everywhere and the challenge is to make sense of it through flows of conversation. It is no longer enough to have the book, manual or information, but one must be able to use it in changing contexts. Because of this connectivity, the Web is an environment more suited to just-in-time learning than the outdated course model. ASL is shifting from looking at knowledge as the collection of bits and engaging in the learning flows around us, without any conscious plan. We are working and learning in networks and the only thing a network can do is share.
PDL – Personal Directed Learning: from Clockwork & Predictable to Complexity & Surprising
Complexity, or maybe our appreciation of it, has rendered the world unpredictable, so the orientation of learning is shifting from past (efficiency, best practice) to future (creative response, innovation). Organizing our own learning is necessary for creative work. Workplace learning is morphing from blocks of training followed by working to a merger of work and learning: they are becoming the same thing. Change is continuous, so learning must be continuous. Developing emergent practices, a necessity when there are no best practices in our changing work environments, requires constant personal directed learning.
In complex environments it no longer works to sit back and see what will happen. By the time we realize what’s happening, it will be too late to take action. Accepting surprise is similar to the delight an artist may have on completion of a work and only then see an emergent quality not consciously understood during the process of its creation.
GDL – Group Directed Learning: from Worker Centric to Team Centric
As mentioned earlier, the real work in organizations is done by groups. This means that sending individuals on a training course and then re-integrating to their work group is relatively useless. With work and learning merging in the network, groups need to find ways that support each member’s learning, while engaged in tasks and projects. Tools that can capture activities and keep group members focused should be used to reinforce group learning.
Social learning requires a certain amount of effort to maintain regular contact and association with our colleagues. Developing social learning practices, like keeping a work journal, may be an effort at first but later it’s just part of the work process. Bloggers have learned how powerful a learning medium they have only after blogging for an extended period. With the increased use of distributed work groups, it is even more important to foster social learning and web media are the current tools at hand.
IOL – Intra-Organizational Learning: from Subject Matter Experts to Subject Matter Networks
Mark Oehlert recently coined the term Subject Matter Networks as a new way of finding organizational knowledge. Instead of looking for subject matter experts from which to design training, we should extend knowledge gathering to the entire network of subject-matter expertise. Once again, the emphasis is no longer on the individual node but on the network. Good networks make for effective organizations.
Networked communities are better structures in dealing with complexity, when emerging practices need to be continuously developed and loose ties can help facilitate fast feedback loops without hierarchical intervention. Collaborative groups are better at making decisions and getting things done. The constraints of the group help to achieve defined goals.
Building capabilities from serendipitous to personally-directed and then group-directed learning help to create strong networks for intra-organizational learning. This is exceptionally important because the emerging knowledge-intensive and creative workplace has these attributes:
• Simple work will be automated.
• Complicated work will go to the lowest bidder, as processes & procedures become more defined and job aids more powerful (e.g. mortgage applications).
• Complex work requires creativity and is where the value of the post-industrial organization lies.
• Dealing with Chaos sometimes has be confronted and this requires creativity as well as a sense of adventure to try novel approaches.
FSL – Formal Structured Learning: from Curriculum to Competency
There remains a need for training in the networked workplace but it must move away from a content delivery approach. The content will be out of date before the training is “delivered” (another outdated term). Work competencies will still need to be developed through practice and appropriate feedback (what training does well) but that practice will have to be directly relevant to the individual or group (group training is an area of immense potential growth). Jointly defining work competence with input from individuals, groups and subject matter networks should become the new analysis process, enabled by social media. Think of it as social ADDIE (analysis, design, development, implementation, evaluation) for the complex workplace.
Summary
Our workplaces are becoming interconnected because technology has enabled communication networks on a worldwide scale. This means that systemic changes are sensed almost immediately. Reaction times and feedback loops have to get faster and more effective. We need to know who to ask for advice right now but that requires a level of trust and trusted relationships take time to nurture. Our default action is to turn to our friends and trusted colleagues; those people with whom we’ve shared experiences. Therefore, we need to share more of our work experiences in order to grow those trusted networks. This is social learning and it is critical for networked organizational effectiveness.
Our current models for managing people, training and knowledge-sharing are insufficient for a workplace that demands emergent practices just to keep up. Formal training has only ever addressed 20% of workplace learning and this was acceptable when the work environment was merely complicated. Knowledge workers today need to connect with others to co-solve problems. Sharing tacit knowledge through conversations is an essential component of knowledge work. Social media enable adaptation, and the development of emergent practices, through conversations.
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by Rob Paterson
February 26, 2010 at 1:04 pm · Filed under
Innovator's Dilemma
Many look forward to the day when technology will enable their organization to become a real 2.0 place that draws on the full energy and knowledge of all who work there. Don’t hold your breath! There is a process that is in the way that all ignore. But it is the central implementation barrier.
Many years ago after the post war election that brought in the Labour Government in England, a new Labour MP was in a bar at the house of Commons with Nye Bevan, a very experienced Labour MP and Minister. The newbie noticed that several Labour Members were drinking with several Tories and both were having a good time. Shocked, he said “The’re fraternizing with the enemy!”. Bevan smiled and said, ‘The’re not the enemy. The’re the Opposition. You sit next to the enemy.”
We all go on and on in organizational life about the “competition”. But we all know really that the real enemy are those bastards in the other department or division.
Let’s get straight here. Here is the fractal. The sole purpose institutions is to get bigger and to accrue more financial resources in its direct control. The sole purpose of its subsidiary departments and divisions is to do the same. To imagine any other purpose is to be recklessly naive. Institutions do not exist to serve any external purpose. They exist to look after their own interests. The same is true for their parts.
All is reduced to money. So the only game in town is the budget.
At the centre of all job grading for executives, is the budget. The man with the biggest budget (I use the term man deliberately) gets the most points and is the King of the game. All executives know this. It matters not that the work that you do may have a bigger impact, budget trumps all.
Hence the silos. Hence the fact that every organization in the world will tell you that communications is their biggest challenge. They will tell you how they hope for more cooperation. But the truth is that because all are locked in a life and death struggle to get more from the budget, cooperation is impossible. For the foolish and naive executive to play the game any differently, I plead guilty here, means only that you lose and so do your people.
So to share resources is to dilute your budget. To reduce waste is to dilute your budget. To be more effective is to dilute your budget. To be more innovative is to dilute your budget. See!
True innovation becomes impossible too. Why? Because of the ROI issue. You are the ex big winner of the Trucks Division at say GM. You have a huge budget and you still are making out like a bandit back in the day. The discussion at the board is like this. Bright Board Member “Surely we all agree that soon gas prices will rise and our truck line will be vulnerable?” Senior Board Member “Yes but look at the ROI we have on this our largest investment. If we start to shift into smaller vehicles, our ROI will go down. We will not be able to bear the drop in ROI (under his breath – you idiot)”
Why did companies like BP or Shell not make the shift into renewables? Lots of talk. But when push came to shove all this was window dressing. Why? Because they cannot make the returns in the new that they make in a mature business like oil. It’s all about the budget lock in effect. The big shuts out the small, so the new cannot grow in a mature organization. If by any chance it does, the big will do its best to close it down. The Innovator’s Dilemma! The people at the top are not stupid – they are locked in by the budget.
So what does this mean?
- No executive who wants to climb will change the job grading system – who wants to be accountable for impact when a much simpler task of getting more budget is the alternative
- All the talk of innovation attacks the power holders of the mature parts that have the largest budgets – so rest assured it’s all bullshit
- All the talk of cooperation attacks the power holders ……
- All the talk of customer service being #1 attacks the main power holders….
- All the talk of beating the competition attacks the main power holders….
So what do big organizations do then to keep power if they don’t in fact do any of the things that we are all taught at school that we are meant to do and that is the public discourse inside the organizations?
They seek to get bigger. Size matters. And when they are really big, such as banks that are too big to fail, they use budget to rig the larger playing field.
So the main work of very large organizations for profit and non profit, is to influence their field. So for schools, it’s not about the kids, it’s about the teachers. In health it is not about our health it is about big pharma. In defense it is not about our men and women in harms way, it is about big defense.
It is the same game all the way up – it is “Turtles” all the way up.
- In your department, you game the system to get and to keep more budget – your adversary is the other department in the division
- In your division…
- In your SBU…
- In your organization…
- In your sector….
So, where are we? I think that we are living a lie.
We thought that jobs were good and that our organizations were designed to compete. I certainly thought that and I was a SVP HR for a very large bank.
But we can now look behind the green curtain and see the reality. We have seen that the purpose of a job is to deskill people. We can see that all the core business process that business school teaches us to pay attention to, are subsidiary to the budget.
What this means is that nearly all the ideas that are baked into HR help make organizations grow into unresponsive dinosaurs. You get GM as a result.
So can GM be reformed? Or must we look at a new model?
Next post
by Rob Paterson
February 25, 2010 at 10:01 am · Filed under
Change, Management Theory
We all worry about getting or losing a job. When we meet people, they ask us what we do and we give them a job description. When we apply for jobs, we get all fussed about the “skills” we need. When we have a job, we have to be managed and so have bosses. Politicians all talk about getting more jobs. School is all about getting jobs.
But the “Job” as we know it is a 19th century idea. In America very few people as a percentage of the population had job before 1905.
Here is a core idea, especially as we all fuss about skills etc. The whole purpose of a Job is to DESKILL people. What do I mean?
This picture is the key. Before Henry Ford, making a car was an artisanal activity. Really skilled people created each car. With the production line, tools and algorithms were used to enable the owner to use unskilled people. Yes each person could get good at assembly but that is like saying that because I am good at putting Ikea furniture together that I am a cabinet maker. The men who made the Stanley Steamer could make anything. They had the metal working and engineering skills to be artisans.
This process of DESKILLING has taken place in all parts of ur lives.
Today we can all offer our friends and family an excellent meal. Many of us are Foodies. But in reality, most people today cannot cook. They can assemble but not cook. They have no deeper skills.
Yes it takes a certain amount of skill to do this. Chances are if the tractor breaks, it has to go to the shop. But think of the skill behind this!
The plowing is only a fraction of the skill. Farmers in the day knew what was really going on. Today agribusiness is no different from a production line. It’s all external process and algorithms. It’s Ikea.
It’s the same with white collar work. Sales people are all scripted. All core processes are scripted. There is no room to think or create outside the very narrow range allowed in the Chicken Box each of us live in. We are all working at Highland Park.
So all the skill aspects of the “job” are in effect about knowing how to follow Ikea instructions. They are “assembly” and obedience skills.
What is not wanted are people who really are engineers, or farmers or cooks. The assembly line has no room for thinking outside the proscribed process.
This is why when so many people lose their jobs, they are lost. They are lost because they have no real skills. Anyone can put an Ikea desk together which is why your job can be outsourced or replaced with a machine. Your only chance is to find another “assembly” line that still needs what you can do.
Today that will never happen.
This too is why the Manager is a dying breed too. Managers are in reality factory assembly line foremen who job it is to meet the quota and the rules of the process. Theirs is not the job to think of new ways of doing things. Their job is to keep it all moving and the sheep from straying. But with fewer sheep, who needs the manager?
Again the biggest farce of all are all the managerial skills that are in demand. All those managers that are truly innovative get asked to leave. What is demanded is to be able to keep control.
The skill that managers need to rise, is not to have results, but to be expert politicians. Anyone who has been an outstanding manager who has constantly delivered results knows that this means little compared with others who climb over them.
This system was OK when it really was Highland Park. Then all of this was in the open and accepted as such. People also got paid well. Now all of this is obscured behind a touchy feely facade. On the surface we are all one big happy family. We need your ideas. Innovation is what it is all about. We are all going to cooperate. We are all leaders. This will be bottom up.
And worst of all, it doesn’t work anymore. Highland Park revolutionized how things were done in the world. This process worked very well for a long time. But it doesn’t work for any one now, not even the owners.
Later in the series I will talk about leaving the idea of the job behind. Of what true skills mean and how they protect us. Of how to look for work instead of a job.
Bu in my next piece I will talk about the central business process for the traditional organization. The process that any executive has to master. The key to success for you if you wish to climb what is left of the greasy pole. The main barrier against all forms of cooperation and why 2.0 will fail in most organizations. The Budget!
by Joe McKendrick
February 24, 2010 at 11:29 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, FASTforward'09, Social Computing, Social Media, User Revolution, Web 2.0
A new survey of the Global 100 companies finds that eight out of ten are immersing themselves in popular social media sites, and are quite active in these environments. A recent Burson-Marsteller study of the world’s largest companies found that 79% are using at least one of the most popular social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or corporate blogs.
Twitter is the social media platform of choice — 65% have active accounts on the micro-blogging site. A majority, 54%, have a Facebook page, while 50% have a YouTube channel. Interestingly, only a third, 33%, have corporate blogs. About 20% use all four platforms.
It also appears that some companies are getting more comfortable using social media as they are interacting and engaging more and not just broadcasting corporate messages. Companies using Twitter are following an average of 731 people each and 38% of companies are responding to people’s tweets. Thirty-two percent have also “re-tweeted” or reposted comments user comments during the previous week.
Burson calls this rush to social media to better engage customers and markets “communications anarchy,” which it calls “the new norm.” “Social media has shifted control of the corporate message away from the organization and towards consumers and other stakeholders, and running away and hiding is no longer the safe option.”
There are wide variations in adoption across global regions. For example, more Asian companies have active blogs (50% vs. 34% in the U.S. and 25% in Europe) but much less activity on Twitter and Facebook. Asian companies currently appear to be more comfortable communicating with stakeholders via corporate blogs.
The study also notes that while companies are relatively less active on their corporate blogs than on the social media channels, there is a lot of commenting from stakeholders on active corporate blogs. For example, only 11% of U.S. corporate blogs had
posts in the past month, but 90% of the blogs with posts had comments from stakeholders. “While some corporate blogs have fallen into attrition, corporate blogs that are active and have a strong purpose and following provide a useful two-way dialogue for organizations and their stakeholders.”
The study also observes that “renegade” social media accounts are also prevalent — contributing to the “communications anarchy” the study’s authors allude to. Of the companies that are engaged on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, most have multiple accounts. For example, each active company has 4.2 Twitter accounts, 2.1 Facebook pages, and 1.6 YouTube channels. Organizations with blogs also had multiple blogs — an average of 4.2 — but those blogs were often maintained on the corporate site in a cohesive way.
For companies with multiple Twitter accounts, most often one was a primary corporate account, the study found. The other accounts were started and managed by a local market office, represented a research or special-interest division at the company or was related to a corporate sponsorship event the company was engaged in. “Often it took a few views to determine which Twitter account was the primary corporate account — if there was one — and it was not always possible to affirmatively determine if there was a primary corporate account.”
