The IBM study shows that CEOs and the companies they manage must constantly evolve to stay competitive. Partners, suppliers, employees and customers want CEOs to communicate with them on a personal level to build trust and to help align them to the organizations strategy. There is a lot at stake here. ~ Mark Fidelman in Forbes
This report confirms what many of us have been observing, writing about, and trying to put into practice for a decade or more. For example,”They [CEO's] simply expect unpredictability. For them, there is no new normal. This is why perpetual Beta is a constant theme here. It is a necessary perspective in dealing with increasing complexity.
“As CEOs ratchet up the level of openness within their organisations, they are developing collaborative environments where employees are encouraged to speak up, exercise personal initiative, connect with fellow collaborators, and innovate.” An essential part of enabling such an open organization is nurturing net work skills; the abilities needed for individual knowledge creators who are simultaneously collaborative workers.
“Across industries and geographies, CEOs consistently highlight four personal characteristics most critical for employees future success: being collaborative, communicative, creative and flexible.” Foundational skills that can foster these characteristics can be developed through personal knowledge management practices supported by social learning structures and emergent work environments.
“As CEOs, we need new ways of running the organisation or more accurately, we need novel ways of letting the organisation run. ~ Shaun Coffey, Industrial Research Ltd.” Dealing with complexity means a focus on emergent practices, not looking back at best practices, which are already out of date. The “novel way” to run organizations is letting go of command and control and embracing change from both sides.
All CEO’s should have this cartoon by Nina Paley on their office walls.
There are lots of “learning specialists” in organizations and they work for variously named departments. As learning specialists, I assume they are supporting workplace learning, so let me ask:
If I’m sitting at my desk with a work-related problem, can I call the Training Department to quickly get me up to speed?
If I want to learn about a new market sector, will the Learning & Development specialist help me?
If I need some coaching to prepare me for a meeting with a new client, can I call Human Resources to connect me with the right person who is available?
If I’m stuck on trouble-shooting an unfamiliar piece of software, can I get someone from Training to walk me through it?
If I’m looking for great examples of collaboration and social learning, do the folks in Training & Development model them?
If I want to become a better networked learner, can I call a Training specialist to get me started and coach me?
Learning & working are interconnected in the network era. If learning support is not connected to work, it’s rather useless. Learning is the new black – it’s everywhere; and that’s exactly where learning specialists should be. Net workers need more than advice (training), they need ongoing, real-time, constantly-changing, collaborative, support.
When I was writing my Master’s thesis on Learning in the New Brunswick Information Technology Workplace (completed in 1998) I based a part of it on a framework developed in 1991. The SPATIAL model looks at how the physical and non-physical attributes of the work environment influence learning. I had used the book available in the university’s education library as my source material and then forgot about it. In 2008 I wrote a blog postabout SPATIAL as I had found a digital copy of the article. Rodney Fulton, the author, even commented on my post.
This past week, Cindy Jennings asked about educational ergonomicson Twitter. I wasn’t quite sure what she was looking for, but I passed on the link to my 2008 post. Cindy sent me an email later and said, “this model is ideal for our purposes and I am thrilled to learn of it.”
This is the real value of narrating our work in public. If I had not written a blog post on the SPATIAL model, I would not have been able to easily retrieve it. If Cindy had asked the same question, I may have said to myself, “darn, I wrote about that during grad studies”. However, I put it in my outboard brain and I was able to help Cindy. Yes, folks, the network is more powerful than the node - share!
My next Personal Knowledge Management online workshop is scheduled for 11-22 June 2012.PKM is also one of the topics for our social learning Summer Camp during July/August 2012. Here is a 10 minute video that covers PKM and gives an introduction to the workshop. It should help in deciding if this workshop is for you. Feel free to ask any questions. The last two workshops fostered some good conversations and I look forward to this next one.
I will never stop learning. I wont just work on things that are assigned to me. I know theres no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and Ill remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible, because its the oxygen of a distributed company. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem thats insurmountable.
When it comes to sharing information, banks are conflicted. They aim to enforce need to know policies and only use bank devices for work policies. Yet they also want to break down the silos and discover more cross-selling opportunities.
Which is it? Well, its all of the above. Yet, the combination of old tools combined with restrictive policies leads to a set of incoherent, inconsistent, and ineffective controls.
The U.S. government is currently facing a dual problem in the intelligence community:
improve accuracy — WMD in Iraq?
improve agility — stop terror attacks
One of the solutions being discussed is adding a new formal position to the intelligence community. This new box would be an ‘intelligence czar’ to which all other intelligence leaders and their agencies would report. The thinking behind this proposed solution is for there to be one aggregation point for all intelligence. Node 017 in Figure 2 represents this new position.
The best practice then seems simple. Paste a link directly into a native Twitter application to share it. If a blog site has a Tweet button that goes directly to Twitter with no additional link shortening/tracking (like the one immediately below), thats essentially the same. At a minimum, post only a full link using your app or link shortener of choice.
Much worse (and more frustrating) are the easy problems which the government also cant solve, not because the answer isnt clear (again, these are the easy problems) but because the incumbents are so effective at blocking the answer that makes more sense so as to preserve the answer that makes them more dollars. Think about the copyright wars practically every sane soul is now focused on a resolution of that war that is almost precisely what the disinterested souls were arguing a dozen years ago (editors note: abolishingDRM). Yet the short-termism of the industry wouldnt allow those answers a dozen years ago, so we have had an completely useless war which has benefited no one (save the lawyers-as-soldiers in that war). Weve lost a decade of competitive innovation in ways to spur and spread content in ways that would ultimately benefit creators, because the dinosaurs owned the lobbyists.
Stephen Hart has a good series of quotes on informal and social learning on his website. Sometimes the right quote gets the message across faster than a long explanatory paragraph.
For several years, there has been a rule-of-thumb, called “90-9-1″, that 90% of online participation in groups/communities consists of “lurkers” or more politely, “passive participants”, and only 1% are active creators. Jacob Nielsen’s 2006 post on Participation Inequality provides a good overview of this phenomenon.
All large-scale, multi-user communities and online social networks that rely on users to contribute content or build services share one property:most users don’t participatevery much. Often, they simplylurkin the background.
In contrast, a tiny minority of users usually accounts for a disproportionately large amount of the content and other system activity.
A recent BBC survey of 7,500 people shows significantly different results.
Here we see that passive lurkers make up only 23% of participants; active (intense) participants have increased to 17%; and there is now an “Easy” group in the middle who, “ …respond largely to the activity of others. This includes replying, liking and rating, all activities where theres little effort, exposure or risk.”
Perhaps the most interesting finding is that many early adopters, those who used to be active online, are dropping out and are classified as “passive”. I’m not sure if they are actually dropping out or have just moved on to other media and communities.
One conclusion I would make is that in 2012 it is now easier to get people engaged in online participation, whether for work or pleasure. This is the Facebook effect, which I have noticed since the service became mainstream. With a concrete model of what a social network looks like, people can more easily understand online communities. Of course, there comes a saturation point which many of us have faced as we add social networks to our lives. The YASNS effect ["Yet Another Social Networking Service" ~ Clay Shirky] is also becoming ubiquitous.
If nothing else, this report indicates that social media are making people more social online. The medium is the message, or so it seems.
The five informal learning methods described in yesterday’s post on Learning in the Workplace have one thing in common. They are all relatively simple.
Most of todays larger companies have a complicated structure. Over time, to enable growth and efficiencies, more processes have been put in place. 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 bigger, internal growth and innovation reach a tipping point, and companies rely on mergers and acquisitions to maintain the illusion of growth.
But 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. Unfortunately, training is often not the right solution.
Todays 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 organizations effectiveness. Faster evolving markets challenge the organizations 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.
Organizations (and training departments) need to understand complexity, instead of simply increasing complication. This lack of understanding is a major barrier to adopting social business concepts and practices. We should always take into consideration that people can handle complexity much better than our constructed systems can.
We need to think of organizations as parts of Value Networks.
We need to move away from shareholder value and become client-focused
We need to base growth on cultivating ecosystems, not the illusion of mergers and acquisitions.
We need to think of knowledge acquisition and sharing as social.
All of these changes can be started by doing a few simple things. As with Lego bricks, using a single unifier (the pin size) we can create an infinite variety of solutions. The examples of how to support informal learning do not require expensive technology or detailed needs analyses. They can be implemented quickly and modified over time. For too long our organizations have suffered from the disease of complication. It’s time to simplify.
Jane Hart asked readers “how regularly are you learning in the workplace?” Here are the top five ways that people learn, with my comments below on how this can be facilitated in the organization, either by management or the learning support group. Notice that these are all informal. The more formal methods, like courses, ranked much lower on the survey results.
Email (keeping up to date inside the organization)
Since email is the number one method of keeping up to date, find ways to make it easier or replace it with a world without email. Using internal blogs for any multi-recipient email is a start. That way it’s visible, in one permanent place, with all the comments attached.
In-person conversations (keeping up to date inside the organization)
Create space for people to talk. Regular company coffee breaks can be supplemented with white boards or flip charts to encourage knowledge sharing. Take pictures of what’s going on and post them. Photos can encourage conversation. Small nooks with comfortable seating invite conversations. Changing office layout can change behaviours and even encourage inter-departmental conversations.
At Pixar, east of San Francisco, [Steve] Jobs oversaw the design of the new building. Because the software jockeys worked in one area and the marketing folks worked in another and so forth, he decided to put the bathrooms in a central atrium. That way, employees had to run into each other each day.
Read blog posts/online articles (keeping up to date outside the organization)
Point out good reading resources.Aggregate learning resources and get input on the best sources, as we have done with Working Smarter Daily. Use socialbookmarks to share what you’re reading.
Search the Social Web using search engines(solve problems)
Put together resources on how to search. You may be surprised how few people know how to search effectively. For example: Compfight for images;
