How do you flip learning?
Khan Academy is the poster child for flipped learning. Sal Khan has produced more than 3,000 short videos on a variety of topics. Students watch the videos before coming to class. In the classroom, they sort out what they’ve learned and do what used to be called homework. Millions of students are learning this way. Recently, Stanford professors offered a couple of courses in this fashion and were surprised when a third of a million people enrolled.

Flipping makes a ton a sense. The learner can watch the mini-lectures when it’s convenient to do so. The learner controls the pace by pausing, replaying, or fast-forwarding. In all likelihood, the presentation by the enthusiastic Salmaan Khan or a popular Stanford prof is going to be more engaging than your local school teacher or grad student teaching assistant. The video can provide content in small, digestible pieces. Once it’s in the can, the video can be replayed again and again. And of course, video delivered online scales without an increase in cost.

More important for learning outcomes, the time spent in class can be put to more productive use. Learners convene to get answers to questions, discuss examples, put what they’ve learned in context, debate, explore, and extend their knowledge. Instead of passively listening to an instructor, they actively engage the material. Instructors, freed of the need to mouth the words of lessons, focus on helping learners understand things and coaching individuals. These activities can take place online, and people can learn from one another in virtual communities and support groups.

Flipping Stanford

In a Science Times essay, “Death Knell for the Lecture: Technology as a Passport to Personalized Education,” Daphne Koller described how Stanford University has flipped traditional courses:

At Stanford, we recently placed three computer science courses online, using a similar format. Remarkably, in the first four weeks, 300,000 students registered for these courses, with millions of video views and hundreds of thousands of submitted assignments.

What can we learn from these successes? First, we see that video content is engaging to students — many of whom grew up on YouTube — and easy for instructors to produce.

Second, presenting content in short, bite-size chunks, rather than monolithic hourlong lectures, is better suited to students’ attention spans, and provides the flexibility to tailor instruction to individual students. Those with less preparation can dwell longer on background material without feeling uncomfortable about how they might be perceived by classmates or the instructor.

Conversely, students with an aptitude for the topic can move ahead rapidly, avoiding boredom and disengagement. In short, everyone has access to a personalized experience that resembles individual tutoring.

Watching passively is not enough. Engagement through exercises and assessments is a critical component of learning. These exercises are designed not just to evaluate the student’s learning, but also, more important, to enhance understanding by prompting recall and placing ideas in context.

Moreover, testing allows students to move ahead when they master a concept, rather than when they have spent a stipulated amount of time staring at the teacher who is explaining it.

An article in Wired, The Stanford Educational Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever, describes the wildly popular course on artificial intelligence taught by Stanford professors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig:

Does it make any sense that school is generally a place where people come together to sit and listen to the person at the front of the room?  It generally doesn’t make the most sense to get a group of people together to sit and stare.  What if instead, educators spent class time doing and homework time for the watching of lessons/lectures.  The other benefit of this is that these can be viewed and reviewed anytime/anywhere.  The result is a lively bustling classroom where students can spend their time learning, talking, doing.

I fear that flipping learning in corporations may meet the same nasty fate as eLearning.

In the early days, 1999-2000, many of us believed that eLearning was the forefront of a renaissance in learning. Not only could people learn at their own pace, whenever they wanted, they’d also be able to ask questions, learn with peers, join communities, access job aids, contact mentors, and create personal learning paths. Workers could attend virtual classes without leaving the workplace. Software would create personalized learning experiences by assembling custom configurations of learning objects.

The eLearning dream didn’t last long. Companies proved more interested in reducing instructor head-count and facilities costs than in improving learning outcomes.  Training departments put PowerPoint presentations on their intranets and acted as if people could learn from them. Vendors put deadly-dull page-turner courses online and called it eLearning.

When times were tough, training departments slashed budgets by replacing face-to-face instruction with online reading. They failed to follow through with the discussions, practice, social processing, and reinforcement that makes lessons stick. It didn’t work. Most eLearning is ineffective drudgery.

That’s my nightmare about flipping learning in the corporation, that organizations will once again confuse exposure to content with learning. It’s great to replace lectures with video clips — IF you retain the opportunity for people to ask questions, interact with the material, practice what they’ve learned, collaborate with others, and periodically refresh their memories. This takes a sound learning ecosystem, a workscape.

Dan Pink thinks we should flip not only schooling but also publishing, the movie business, human resources, and office space. I agree. Business has changed. There’s hardly any business model left that couldn’t benefit from a flip. Break the processes into pieces and see if there’s not a better way to put them back together.

Most CLOs I talk with are so busy taking care of today’s business that they spend little time preparing for the future. We all know in our hearts that fixating on the short term is foolish in the long run.

Short-term thinking is good for responding to incremental change, but deciding things one step at a time doesn’t prepare you to thrive in a world of systemic, wholesale change. You can’t leap a chasm in small jumps.

To get beyond immediate concerns, you have to make the future tangible. Examining scenarios — stories about alternative futures — makes the future imaginable and potentially real.

Royal Dutch Shell, the fifth largest company in the world and a long-term player (Shell’s more than a hundred years old), has been learning from scenarios for forty years.

At Online Educa Berlin in late 2011, Shell’s Hans de Zwart and Willem Manders led a scenario planning process to address these issues:

1. How do different global and national trends shape the future of corporate learning?
2. What opportunities and challenges does this create for corporate learning organizations?
3. How do those insights also help to make better decisions around current learning challenges the organizations involved in the exercise are facing?

To answer questions like these, you have a escape your current mindset. In Berlin, Willem and Hans led us in an exercise where we came up with these key drivers:

1. Ten years out, how might work be organized? On the one hand, it might be structured, regulated, and managed. On the other, work could be flexible, individual, and enabled.
2. In the same timeframe, how will work be done? Will it be relationship-driven or data-driven?

Putting the drivers in a 2×2 matrix yields four scenarios. We named them as follows:

• Old Boy Network (Structured & relationship-driven)
• In Crowd (Flexible & relationship-driven)
• Big Data (Structured & data-driven)
• Quantified Self (Flexible & data-driven)

“Scenarios are stories about the future, but their purpose is to make better decisions in the present” – Scenarios: an explorer’s guide, Shell

These scenarios are neither forecasts nor projections. They do not predict what’s to come. Rather, they provide alternative views of the future. At Online Educa, some of us used the scenarios to reflect on what we were hearing from speakers and the grapevine. Crafting stories around each scenario is a great way to wring meaning from them.

Think over how you’d prepare for futures like these; I’ll append a few thoughts on each to get you started.

Old Boy Network (Structured & relationship-driven). This is a world of  clear expectations and roles, organizational-driven development, structural talent management, competency mapping, Subject Matter Expert-focused (authoritative knowledge), planned innovation (business cases, calculated risks), planned careers, and large structured curricula.

Many old-school companies think this is where they live. Big plans. Don’t throw away your LMS. Can it work in a increasingly fast-paced world?

In Crowd (Flexible & relationship-driven). Community of practice: hyper connectivity (also physical) inside community – low connectivity outside community, interest/passion driven, many repositories of content, wide variation of roles, development: peer, self directed, personal networks, professional connections, community is curator, personal value aligned (purpose, meaning), Subject Matter Experts emerge from community.

This is social business. Informal learning thrives here. Make your social networks thrive.  Get your mobile learning strategy together.

Big Data (Structured & data-driven). Data-driven organization, outsourcing / franchise models (company = data), high volume, high variety (personalized information), structural competence visualization.

Seems like a throw-back to the time-and-motion studies of the industrial era, but maybe not. It works for Amazon. You have to choose the right data to act on. The customers are creating the data, this set-up can make companies more agile in responding to change. It cuts out a lot of wasted motion, too.

Quantified Self (Flexible & data-driven). Individual in control, competence development through monitoring / automated feedback, high talent mobility, self compliance (data to proof compliance).

Some people predict the end of jobs and corporations as we know them. Might this be where we end up? It could be chaotic. We’ll need more engaging learning resources than ever before to keep people’s attention. Get those learning games online.

This is the tip of the iceberg. There’s more about the Berlin Scenarios and scenario planning at http://www.internettime.com/scenario-planning-for-corporate-learning/

Among other things, this exercise taught me to rip my blinders off. I’ve been such a cheerleader for one of the scenarios (guess which one) that I’d slighted the rest.

An edited version of this article appears in the April 2012 edition of CLO magazine.

More information on scenario planning.

Continuous improvement
Business people face more and more novel situations every day. You have to be learning continuously to deal with the onslaught of unfamiliar, complex problems. There’s no longer time to learn things in advance; you have to learn what you need in real time. Leaving work to go learn something is not an option. This is a game changer.

Learning and work are fusing into a single process. To be successful, a social business’s learning function must break out of the training department and spread throughout the organizational infrastructure. Increasingly, learning is the work and the work is learning. Smart organizations will get good at it.

Installing social network software and encouraging people to exploit their connections is only the beginning. The fabric of the social business must incorporate structures and guidance to help people learn. After all, learning underpins continuous improvement and helping to create a culture of continuous improvement is what this is all about.

What it takes
A sustainable social business provides the means and motivation for workers to learn what they need: the know-how, know-who, and know-what to get things done and get better at doing them. This takes more than access to social networks, blogs, and wikis. Organizations must provide the scaffolding that focuses on discovery, practice, sharing, and reinforcement. Organizations that lack a clear understanding of their learning architectures are doomed to descend into an aimless world of social noise and meaningless chit-chat. Facebook-itus.

Social business is a recent phenomenon. Social media has taken hold in customer relations, marketing communications, limited social networking, and niche silos. The corporate learning function is only now sticking its toe in the enterprise 2.0 water. The Internet Time Alliance is helping L&D and HR professionals hop aboard the social business train before it leaves the station.

New scope of learning
Traditionally, training departments provided workshops and courses. They selected the curriculum that determined what workers were supposed to learn. The focus was on knowledge, not skills, and learner satisfaction counted for more than business impact. Training departments focused on novices and paid scant attention to improving the learning and productivity of experienced workers, those people who generate the profits.

In a social business, L&D (learning and development) professionals nurture learning within the larger organizational infrastructure. Social L&D optimizes learning by making it easy for workers, novices and old hands alike, to find the information they need from FAQs and knowledge bases or from coaches, experts and peers. Instead of tracking butts in seats, they monitor the fow on information in social networks and its impact on key business metrics.

Successful social businesses insure that software and tools are available for such things as bookmarking reference information, collaborating on tasks, searching organizational content, recording knowledge for peer learning, reinforcing key concepts, locating experts, accessing outside information, and connecting with customers and partners. They also play a key role in capturing and curating the expert-generated content that fows through easy-to-use social tools and platforms.

This is an excerpt from an Internet Time Alliance white paper of the same name.

Creating New Leaders for the 21st Century (1)

Creating New Leaders for the 21st Century (2)

Yesterday IBM presented a compelling case for social business excellence at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris. Social networks are so patently good for business that managers are routing around IT to put them in place. The social business captures value through capturing tacit information, fostering collaboration & discovery, filtering information flow & finding patterns, and transforming exception processing & making processes resilient.

David Weinberger’s Too Big To Know convinced me that networks have radically changed the notion of what constitutes knowledge. Lots of our previous concepts about knowledge were due to the limitations of paper, not that there’s some absolute truth out there. On the net, facts don’t stay on the page. There are no isolated ideas; there never were; there are only webs of ideas. We can improve those webs through open access, good filters, metadata, linking everything, and opening up institutions.

David describes leadership as an emergent property of an organizational network. Leadership resides more with the group being led than the purported leader. Strong leadership is simply a means for a group to accomplish its objectives.

Yesterday on Dan Pink’s Office Hours, Gary Hamel described the irrelevance of 100 year old models of management and the growing impatience of disgruntled workers, customers, and shareholders. Hamel has said that the future model of management looks a lot like web 2.0.

So networks underpin leadership, business performance, knowledge, and management.

It’s undeniable that the internet is an unprecedented game changer. People and ideas and knowledge and happenings are connected as never before, and there’s no end in sight. The omnipresent network makes us look at processes instead of events: everything has a precedent and an antecedent. Murphy’s Second Law kicks in: You can never do just one thing. Institutions that block connections, be they schools or close-lipped corporations, are increasingly out of step with the times.

But I have a question about this: Why isn’t anyone talking about learning networks?

Neither McAfee nor IBM nor Weinberger nor Hamel talks about networks for learning. This parallels the situation with informal learning and eLearning. Even after people accepted that informal learning is the primary way people learn to do their jobs, few corporate training organizations lifted a finger to do anything about it. eLearning — the boring, one-way, content slapped on pages for self study variety — was a total flop because learning involves more than exposure to information. Two major opportunities to boost performance were squandered. I don’t intend to stand idly by as business thought leaders repeat the same mistake with learning networks.

Networks were made for learning. And in a ever-changing world, learning is a survival skill.

ENGINEERING THE INDIVIDUAL’S LEARNING NETWORK
Learning originally meant finding the right path. Paths are connectors; people are nodes. The world is constructed of networks. We’re back where we started.

In networks, connections are the only thing that matters. We network with people; we use networks to gather information and to learn things; we have neural networks in our heads.

Learning is optimizing our connections to the networks that matter to us.

This satisfies both the community concept of learning (social networking) and the knowledge aspect (gaining access to information and fitting it into the patterns in one’s head).

To learn is to adapt to fit with one’s ecosystems. We can look at learning as making and maintaining good connections in a network. Cultivators of learning environments can borrow from network engineers, focusing on such things as:

• Improving signal-to-noise ratio

• Installing fat pipes for backbone connections

• Pruning worthless, unproductive branches

• Promoting standards for interoperability

• Balancing the load

• Seeking continuous improvement

This echoes a white paper, Informal Learning – the other 80%, I wrote nine years ago.

We need to think of learning as optimizing our networks. Learning consists of making good connections.

Taking advantage of the double meaning of the word network, “to learn” is to optimize the quality of one’s networks.

Learning is optimizing our connections to the networks that matter to us.

A sustainable social business provides the means and motivation for workers to learn what they need: the know-how, know-who, and know-what to get things done and get better at doing them. This takes more than access to social networks, blogs, and wikis. Organizations must provide the scaffolding that focuses on discovery, practice, sharing, and reinforcement. Organizations that lack a clear understanding of their learning architectures are doomed to descend into an aimless world of social noise and meaningless chit-chat. Facebook-itus.

Next week I’ll release a white paper on the Internet Time Alliance site on how to develop an enterprise learning network.

Today, the expectations of learners are much different than they were only a few years ago. Much of what is currently rolled up monolithic, one-size-fits-all courses must give way to small but relevant content updated and delivered continuously to learners based on their individual profiles or needs. In other words, learning needs to go Agile.

What’s in it for us?

Agile Development is an approach where vendors deliver very fast, iterative product development through close collaboration with its user base (i.e. training organizations).

Dawn describes the basic Agile Development process and promises to come back with implications in a subsequent post.

Dawn references Josh Bersin’s insightful post last fall which goes beyond the training function to examine the benefits of agile in HR.

The Agile Model comes to Management, Learning, and Human Resources

Over the last five years the business of software development has been totally transformed by the concepts of agile development.  So is the business of Management and Human Resources.

Josh lists the benefits of embracing agile:

• Traditional annual performance appraisals use an older “waterfall” method – continuous feedback and recognition is an “agile” approach.
• Traditional formal training and certification is a “waterfall” model –  rapid e-learning and informal learning is an “agile” approach.
• Top down cascading goals are a “waterfall” approach – rapidly updated “objectives and key results” (sometimes called OKR – widely used at Google) is an “agile” model.
• Traditional annual rewards and bonuses are a “waterfall” model – continuous recognition and social recognition systems are an “agile” model.
• The annual employee engagement survey is a “waterfall” model – continuous online idea factories and open blogs are an “agile” model for employee engagement.
• The annual development planning process is a “waterfall” model – an ongoing coaching relationship is an “agile” model for leadership.
• The traditional recruiting process is a “waterfall” model – this is being replaced by a continuous process of social recruiting and referral-based recruiting which can be rolled out in a few hours.

Social Business is becoming the new normal
2012 is the year of Social Business. My Internet Time Alliance colleague Jane Hart aptly describes the coming environment:

Predictions for an upcoming new year are inevitably based on the “flow” from the current year, so if you have taken a look at my Top 100 articles of 2011 (or even my complete 2011 Reading List), you will not be surprised to hear that many predict that 2012 will be the “Year of Social Business“.

Up to now, for many organisations, Social Business has been about social media marketing and engaging customers, but as IBM explains …

“A Social Business isn’t just a company that has a Facebook page and a Twitter account. A Social Business is one that embraces and cultivates a spirit of collaboration and community throughout its organization—both internally and externally.”

And as Amin points out in Thriving as an HR professional in a social business era,

“With a 10-year delay, the social media revolution is finally entering the workplace and its influence is going to be comparable to the consumer social media revolution.”

As many others explain, social business will change the way we do everything, as organisations move from being traditional hierarchical businesses to networked organisations.”Social” will not just be something that is bolted-on to traditional processes but will underpin a fundamental new approach to working – and learning. 

Paul Adams summed this up nicely in Stop talking about “social”.

“Social is not a feature. Social is not an application. Social is a deep human motivation that drives our behavior almost every second that we’re awake … The leading businesses are recognizing that the web is moving away from being centered around content, to being centered around people.That is the biggest social thunderstorm, and all of us are going to have to understand it to succeed. So stop talking about social as a distinct entity. Assume it in everything you do.“

Leveraging Learning in Social Business
Installing social network software and encouraging people to exploit their connections is not enough. The fabric of a social business, its workscape, must incorporate structures and guidance to help people learn. After all, learning underpins continuous improvement and that’s what this is all about.

A sustainable workscape must provide the means and motivation for corporate citizens to learn what they need: the know-how, know-who, and know-what to get things done and get better at doing them. This takes more than access to social networking tools, blogs, and wikis. Self-organization helps but L&D professionals need to supplement social systems with scaffolding that focuses on learning. Without that, many organizations will descend into an aimless world of social noise and meaningless chit-chat.

I take Chief Learning Officers’ abysmal track record with informal learning to-date as a warning shot. In today’s fast-paced world, people who do not learn continuously, on the job, rapidly fall behind. Yet CLOs continue to focus on formal classes, as if they’re running schools instead of creating business value. Formal classes and workshops are necessary, but they constitute a tiny slice of the overall learning pie.

Several years ago, L&D professionals began to accept the fact that learning by experience and informally, with others, has many times the impact of traditional training.

What did CLOs do with the insight that informal learning matters? Next to nothing. They left informal learning to chance. Even now, with the cost-effectiveness and responsiveness of informal learning pushing it to the top of CLO’s priority lists, most are taking baby steps if any steps at all. This is extremely disappointing. We who understand how people learn need to be at the vanguard of establishing social networks, expertise location, online communities, information streams, agile instructional design, help desks, federated content management, continuing reinforcement, peer development, and so on.

CLOs who do not make it easier for social business people to learn are toast.
Making the transition from command-and-control training operations to vibrant social learning workscapes is where I think Internet Time Alliance is going to make a major contribution. I envision us providing hand-holding, models, and advice to help Chief Learning Officers and HR executives make the journey from pushing curriculum and instructor-led events to nurturing systems for co-creating knowledge and competence with workers. Time will tell.

It would be irresponsible for Chief Learning Officers and HR executives to leave learning to happenstance.

Working Smarter
Agile Development is but a piece of the practice of making social business work. The entire environment is morphing into something new and different. As I wrote in my reflections on the Stoos Gathering,

These days it’s more productive to think of organizations as organisms. Managers become stewards of the living. Their role is to energize people, empower teams, foster continuous improvement, develop competence, leverage collective knowledge, coach workers, encourage collaboration, remove barriers to progress, and get rid of obsolete practices.
Living systems thrive on values that go far beyond the machine era’s dogged pursuit of efficiency through control. Living systems are networks. Optimal networks run on such values as respect for people, trust, continuous learning, transparency, openness, engagement, integrity, and meaning.

When an enterprise commits to becoming an organic, value-creating network of diverse individuals, the training department has to join the fray.

New Seasons exemplifies taking a non-training alternative to workplace learning.

That New Seasons is a people-oriented business echoes in their approach to learning.

• New hires receive a brief orientation and are then let loose to learn by walking around and asking questions.
• The HR director explains “New employees are given time to look around and get to know the products, ask questions, go online, read literature and shadow experienced employees. From a training perspective, we’ve created an environment where an employee’s learning style is accommodated because they learn their own way, at their own pace and in an order that makes sense to them.”
• New Seasons executives host a Disorientation to go over values and what it takes to be successful a month after people come on board. It makes so much sense to conduct this after new hires understand what makes the organization tick.
• People keep up to speed by attending short two-way sessions with a dozen or fewer colleagues on the job floor.

New Seasons trusts its employees to do their best — and the employees return the favor by doing it.

Todd Hudson describes the New Seasons experience on his Maverick Institute blog. I fully agree with his takeaways:

1. How you deliver training should reinforce your values and business model. Is customer service key to your success? Face-to-face methods like mentoring might be best. Yes, everyone’s jumping on the e-learning bandwagon today, but before you do, ask yourself ‘How does sitting at a computer taking in information align with the value our employees deliver?’ There are plenty of situations where e-learning is the right choice. Just make sure it’s your situation.
2. Training should align with the environment. Learning by walking around at a grocery store is great. But at a copper mine? Not on your life! Too dangerous; more structure would be needed. Walking around ‘virtually’ in a simulation would be a great alternative. Whenever possible, let the work environment organically teach employees as much as it can and at their pace.
3. Training and learning should be a part of the natural rhythm of your company’s work day. Don’t let training stick out like a sore thumb and disturb your business. If you have night shifts, train at night. If your company’s work pace is irregular, then training should fit into these periods of inactivity. Here’s a simple rule: If people are complaining about training, you’re doing it wrong.

Todd’s white paper on Lean Knowledge Transfer is worth a read. I’m going to bring this to the attention of the Stoos Network; we’re on the lookout for examples of enlightened next practices. If you share my interest in mashing up agile development and corporate learning, you may want to check out Unmanagement.net.

On the flight over, I watched the film Inside Job, a documentary about the shenanigans that led to the financial meltdown fueled by the subprime mortgage bubble. The movie’s incendiary. There are lots of bad apples out there: self-serving financial engineers, ratings agencies, regulators, bankers, and more. Guilty, guilty, guilty.

As a graduate of the “West Point of Capitalism,” I’d been reluctant to condemn the system but Inside Job pushed me over the edge. Business is broken. Right before watching the movie, I read a series of Harvard Business Review articles by Roger Martin about the wrong-headedness of maximizing shareholder value. This slippery slope leads to short-term thinking, cooking the books, and screwing everyone up and down the chain except grossly overpaid CEOs. Chasing shareholder value is like trying to make your car go faster by rigging the speedometer.

Dissatisfied workers, pissed-off customers, and lousy returns on investment are the outcomes of a broken system. The current business environment is a breeding ground for Murphy’s Law. Nobody’s happy and rebellion is in the air.

Stoos is a tiny village atop a mountain about an hour south of Zurich. It’s a beautiful spot for getting away from it all. Four people — a Swiss professor, a Dutch entrepreneur and author, an American agile development coach living in Switzerland, and an American management author — realized that lots of us were talking about the same malaise with management independently. They invited us to convene on the mountain to find common ground — and a better framework for doing business.

After the two-day session in Stoos, I took the train south to Lugano, a perennially sunny town that couples Swiss efficiency and Italian verve  (Mangiare!) on the shore of an Alpine lake. Fragments of the mountain top conversations rolled around in my head. My thoughts are still coming together.

Foremost is that the business world must shift its focus from things to people. Living things trump machines. Moreover, people are inherently social. We cannot thrive — or even survive — in isolation. Connections are vital to creating value. And how is that value created? By adapting to change — and that requires learning. Bottom-line: businesses are networks of learning individuals.

Financial success not the ultimate target. Chasing money for its own sake is wrong-headed and demoralizing. Drucker had it right: the purpose of business is to create and satisfy customers. People in sustainable organizations focus on doing this better and better, forever delivering more value to their customers. Do this right and the money will follow.

Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Newcomens_Dampfmaschine_aus_Meyers_1890.png

For several hundred years, the machine has been the metaphor for the organization. Management’s role was to make the machine work efficiently. People were cogs; managers controlled human resources as if they were interchangeable parts. Bosses did the thinking; workers were told to get the job done. It was as if workers lacked intelligence, emotion, and initiative. Shut up and do your job.

Machines work well when you need to do the same thing over and over. They’re not so hot when doing different things is required. Denser interconnections have transformed the world into one vast complex system. The past is no longer a guide to the future. Small things have enormous consequences. Logic breaks down. Shit happens. Everything’s different.

Organism, a living system. Source:http://tolweb.org/tree/learn/concepts/whatisphylogeny.html

These days it’s more productive to think of organizations as organisms. Managers become stewards of the living. Their role is to energize people, empower teams, foster continuous improvement, develop competence, leverage collective knowledge, coach workers, encourage collaboration, remove barriers to progress, and get rid of obsolete practices.

Living systems thrive on values that go far beyond the machine era’s dogged pursuit of efficiency through control. Living systems are networks. Optimal networks run on such values as respect for people, trust, continuous learning, transparency, openness, engagement, integrity, and meaning.

On the flight back to San Francisco, I watched Werner Herzog’s fabulous filmabout the 32,000 year old Chauvet Caves in Southern France. Herzog says the Caves are the place “where the modern human soul was awakened.” A reviewnoted that the paintings “are exceptional not only for their age or their historical importance, but for their beauty and grace, the strange window they offer into the development of man’s ways of looking at the world through art.” The Stoos Gathering resonates the same chord. It’s all about the creativity of people.

Those of us who took part in the Stoos Gathering are sorting through what we came up with. The punchline is “learning networks of (diverse) people creating value,” but I imagine that will be refined. You can track where we’re at and join the conversation on our website and LinkedIn group.

Next I’m going to explore the implications for professional learning and working smarter.

http://www.internettime.com/2012/01/the-stoos-gathering-working-smarter/

Business is changing, and the learning function must change along with it.

Rigid, industrial-age corporations are not keeping up with the pace of change. Customer Spring, Shareholder Spring, and Worker Spring may break out any day. Everyone’s mad as hell. They won’t take it any more.

How bad is it? The lifespan of corporations is at an all-time low. The majority of workers are frustrated, unhappy, and disengaged. Shareholders are receiving a lower return on investment than ever before. Customers are fed up with mediocre service. Return on assets has declined every year for the last forty. The only class of people making money are CEOs, and there’s general agreement that their rewards are obscene and inappropriate. We can’t go on like this.

Now what?
Many people have suggested what business needs to do differently.

Social business, Enterprise 2.0, Radical Management, the Connected Company, Living Networks, Management 3.0, and Working Smarter suggest such techniques as putting the customer in charge, harvesting collective intelligence, self-organizing teams, speedy cycle times, collaboration, transparency, openness, agility, trusting one another, responding to feedback, bottom-up organization, peer learning, web 2.0 culture, and optimizing networks. Until now, most of the people working to bring this about were acting independently.

The Stoos Gathering

Last weekend a group of twenty-one people joined forces on a mountain top in Switzerland to collaborate on coming up with ways out of this mess. Our website tells the story.

Our evolving view is that successful future organizations will become learning networksof individuals creating value. They will become stewards of the living. This is a major break from the past — and an opportunity for L&D professionals to become essential contributors to their organizations.

Learning is no longer optional
Continuous improvement and delighting customers require a culture of pervasive learning. We’re not talking classes and workshops here. Creating a new order of business requires learning ecologies — what we’ve been calling Workscapes — that make it simple and enjoyable for people to learn what they need to get the job done. Companies that fail to learn will wither and die.

As all business becomes social business, L&D professionals face a momentous choice. They can remain Chief Training Officers and instructors who get novices up to speed, deliver events required by compliance, and run in-house schools. These folks will be increasingly out of step with the times.

Or they can become business leaders who shape learning cultures, social networks, collaborative practices, information flows, federated content management, just-in-time performance support, customer feedback mechanisms, and structures for continuous improvement.

http://www.internettime.com/2012/01/no-more-business-as-usual/

1. We’re witnessing a dizzying rate of change. Business people are being overwhelmed by the pace of progress and the explosion of knowledge.

2. There are denser and denser interconnections afoot. Everything is getting hooked up to everything else. This increases complexity and makes business unpredictable

3. Intangibles are becoming the prime source of value. Social capital and know-how have replaced plant and equipment as economic value creators.

Companies that fail to take these things into account are headed for the scrap heap. Don’t believe me? Ask somebody in the newspaper business — The New York Times and USA Today are doing better than their peers — they lost only 80 percent of their value in the past decade. Or look at the music business — remember record stores?

Change rips people out of their comfort zones, and the inertia that often follows is huge. Maintaining control was the bedrock of 20th century thinking — avoiding surprises, keeping things in line, being efficient, reducing exceptions, doing the same thing over and over, planning your work and working your plan — but these are yesterday’s practices. When we put new practices in place, we need to be explicit about what obsolete practices they are replacing so employees can unlearn them.

Today’s prime directive is sharing control among all stakeholders — discern the underlying pattern and take action. Act responsibly. Do what’s right. Follow your heart. I found an artifact from the 20th century on the walkway outside my cottage recently: a time card. It had a single entry: eight hours for the first day of the week. Probably some 21st century guy recognized it for the 20th century relic it was and refused to go along, hence it was discarded.

Time cards were once a mainstay of industrial life. You clocked in; you clocked out. When work was physical, time was a reliable measure of production. The fastest manual laborer was maybe 20 percent faster than the average. It’s different with concept work. The top concept worker creates new business models, wins patents, brings in major clients and cuts the deals that make the enterprise. A manager who monitors who is at her desk early and which cars are last to leave the parking lot must unlearn clock-watching and look at time through a new lens.

A quarter century ago, Stan Davis wrote in Future Perfect that the fundamentals of the universe, and therefore business, are time, space and matter. The derivatives of time, space and matter are the universal variables that impact all business: speed, connectivity and intangibles.

Leaders talk about speed but they don’t take advantage of it. Take revenue. It’s expressed as revenue per quarter. Shouldn’t they flip the fraction upside down and talk about decreasing the time it takes to bring the revenue in? Time-to-completion is the appropriate metric. Value network analysis quantifies the value created through better linkages. Relationships like supply chain are the tip of the iceberg.

Businesses must also focus on increasing the value of relationships with customers and partners. Improving network effectiveness improves business. And as for intangibles, it’s high time to replace 20th century scorecards and surveys that assess capabilities, competencies and intangibles. The narrow focus on what’s easy to count stifles business creativity. What we can’t see has become more important than what we can.

Choosing the right feedback to listen to and responding to it is the key to optimizing speed, connections and intangibles. Honest, rigorous feedback can identify dead wood that has outlived its usefulness. When a practice is not producing results, it’s time to unlearn it.

Once upon a time, feedback from the boss was sufficient: “That’s what I’m paid to do.”

Twenty-first century leaders must shoulder responsibility for delighting customers and making the organization better. In a business world characterized by speed, connections and intangibles, that means paying attention to the right signals. Is that on your corporate learning agenda?

http://clomedia.com/articles/view/learning-in-the-21st-century-means-adapting-to-change

Business organizations are lagging reality. The 21st century is radically different from what came before and yet most businesses act as if nothing has changed.

Half of the adult population of the United States uses social media, up from 5% a scant six years. 750 million people converse on Facebook. A couple of hundred of us were blogging a dozen years ago; today 160 million people blog. Yet most corporations are  reluctant to “take the risk” on social media.

Consumers are sharing photographs and videos of their grandkids in real time. Most corporations are buried in email.

Managers and professionals do daily battle with rigid systems that don’t flex with the times, strain under mountains of trivia, and rely on obsolete practices that serve neither the customer or the company.

Our research suggests that business in general may be facing a “Customer Spring.” Like the Arab Spring, customers who are weary of being dominated by unresponsive corporate regimes will rise in protest and topple the old order.

Perhaps it won’t get to that point. Companies that cling to vestigial ways doing business as usual and don’t open themselves to serve their constituents may simply die of old age. Average corporate life expectancy is about half that of a human being and is already at an all-time low. It won’t take long.

Business is at a crossroads. It’s do or die.

The Network Era

When the economy went to hell in a hand basket a couple of years back, my gut told me this was not a downturn. Rather, the network era had taken the wind out of the sails of the industrial age. The economy was not going to “bounce back.” We were entering a new era. This was a total game changer. A new normal.

At the turn of the last century, we entered an age of unparalleled volatility, uncertainty, and accelerating speed where ideas had become more valuable than physical things. Financial markets sensed this and shifted investments from what’s on the balance sheet to bets on what would be on future income statements. Intangibles — know-how, know-who, ideas, and the tacit lessons of experience — have limitless potential; plant and equipment can be millstones that hold you back.

Relationships are the glue that holds networks together. Enlightened businesses would shuck off the factory mentality that treats workers as interchangeable parts in a machine. Rigid command and control systems would give way to a spirit of “we’re all in this together.” Barriers that wall off customers from suppliers would come tumbling down. Collaboration would crowd out giving orders. We’d end up enjoying one another’s company.

A new CEO with a grand vision of social networks, openness, innovation, experimentation, and continuous improvement is not enough to turn a large organization around because she’s anchored to a legacy culture.

Managers and professionals who have grown up taking and giving orders simply don’t know how to adapt. The CEO and her team flip the switch but the lights don’t go on below because they’re wired differently down there.

What’s required is a wholesale shift to a new way of doing things. The knowing/doing gap surrounding the advent of the network era is humongous.

The core problem was that while the landscape of business has radically changed, managers are conducting business with the obsolete tools. A manager could execute from the 20th century playbook flawlessly but still fall behind because the nature of the game had changed.

Internet Time Alliance resolved to identify the beliefs and practices that can make organizations successful in the 21st century workplace. We start by focusing on front-line managers and professionals, those closest to the customer.

Stay tuned….

http://www.unmanagement.net/2011/10/22/why-now/

• Take stock, take charge
• Delight customers
• Collaborate, team-work
• De-stress, make people happy
• Inspire performance
• Take the pulse
• Sprint
• Decide wisely
• Coach
• Nurture serendipity
• Net-work
• Conduct, don’t control

Q| How did you first get interested in e-learning?

In 1998, I’d been in the training business and adult education for more than 20 years, and when the Web came along. I was blown away; I fell in love. Learning and the Web were made for one another, and I wouldn’t let go of it. I was a man obsessed.

The Web didn’t figure into the plans of the company I was with, so I left and began working on my own, talking with visionaries and writing about it. The CEO of the company that practically invented computer-based training, CBT Systems, shared the same vision. The company paid me to develop a marketing approach, write white papers, and legitimize eLearning. In this role, I became the head of the eLearning Forum.

Q| How about informal learning?

I remember exactly when I was introduced to informal learning–November 2000. I heard a presentation from the late Peter Henschel, who ran the Institute for Research on Learning. The institute had sent anthropologists to companies to look at how people learn to do their work. They found that most of learning was on the job: you learn from just trying things out or from asking the person sitting next to you. Essentially, you learn more in the coffee room than you do in the classroom. In that case, they found that 80 percent of the learning was on the job, not in training.

At the time, I thought, “Somebody’s got to get this story out,” because essentially all this learning is going on, but it’s under the radar. There are ways to make it better, but nobody is doing anything because it’s invisible and nobody’s responsible. I’ve been preaching that message ever since.

Q| How best can L+D professionals harness it for an organization’s benefit?

Chief learning officers who continue to let informal learning happen by accident are leaving money on the table. There’s plenty they can do to make it better. For example, they can make expertise more accessible through profiles and social networks. They can replace lots of classroom training (frequently forgotten before it has a chance to be applied) with on-demand learning. They can replace wordy courses with intuitive graphics. They can replace cumbersome workshops with coaching sessions.

If people are going to learn on their own, you’ve got to give them time to talk. Conversation is the most important learning technology the world has ever seen. Conversations are the stem-cells of knowledge. Some organizations still box people up in cubicles and tell them not to spend too much time talking. Well, they are shooting themselves in the foot because that’s the way people learn.

In the big Silicon Valley companies I visit, conference rooms are in such short supply that you’ve got to sign up days in advance to reserve one. They’d probably be better off with all conference rooms and no offices. When people are together, they learn.

Q| With all the talk about informal learning, in your opinion, where do formal learning programs fit in?

Informal learning and formal learning aren’t two different things. They are points on a continuum of all learning, and the degree of formality can be more or less.

When people need to understand an entirely new framework or master a new field of study, the more formal approaches work best. You’re not going to learn algebra or electrical engineering by hanging out at the water cooler. Later on, when you’re up to speed and know the lay of the land, you just need to know what you need to know, to fill in the gaps. That’s where more informal methods are preferable.

Q| How did you initially get involved with creating University of Phoenix’s first business curriculum?

The founders of the University of Phoenix were a group of academics led by a renegade professor in San Jose. They started out to providing degree programs in public safety to police officers in California. Many police officers had two-year degrees, had taken a lot of certification courses, and only needed a few more courses to qualify for a four-year degree.

It was tough for a working adult to attend college in those days. Night classes were rare. College bookstores closed at 5:00 pm. Giving credit for experiential learning was rare. The Phoenix approach was radically different.

Where should they turn to expand on the success with police officers? Perhaps business. I had a background in market research, so they hired me to talk with the big tech companies in Silicon Valley and major banks in San Francisco. I reported back that a business degree program for working adults would sell like hotcakes. The tech companies and banks felt they were squandering much of their tuition reimbursement funds. Our programs would focus on pragmatic business topics; we would bring the university to the company and hold classes on site.

The professors said, “That’s very interesting. You’re a business guy (I was a new Harvard MBA at that time), why don’t you develop the program?” Why not? I was young and confident.

I enlisted the help of working professionals in various business areas– so if we were covering finance, I worked with finance professionals. If we’re covering accounting, I worked with accountants. We built the curriculum using adult learning principles. There were a lot of small group exercises, and it was very hands on. Less theory and more practical throughout.

The group eventually moved to Phoenix; I wanted to stay in San Francisco. I probably left a hundred million dollars on the table by not becoming the director of marketing for this program that became The University of Phoenix, the largest university in the world. They have done quite well without me.

Q| What is one thing you’d like to see changed about the approach to workplace learning?

Work and learning are converging. Both have to be more participatory, less top down; we need to recognize learners as full participants.

We have copied too much from schooling. Schools assume students don’t know much. That’s a totally arrogant attitude in the workplace. This is one reason people resent trainers. Somebody comes in with, “Well, I’m going to show you how to do this,” as if you’re stupid or something. Well, no. It ought to be “Let’s figure out how you can learn this in the most effective way possible.” We need more facilitators and fewer instructors.

People who regard themselves as just trainers are cutting themselves off from the future. More and more learning is migrating to social networks. Training folks who are not really taking advantage of networks are abdicating their responsibility for facilitating organizational learning.

When people ask me what I do, I don’t bring up training and learning. I say I’m in the business of helping people work smarter. I haven’t met anybody who says, “Oh no, we don’t want to do that.” Of course, learning is an integral part of working smarter.

Q| Any new books or projects you’d like to tell us about?

I’m really, really excited about a new project called 21C Leadership.

I believe that the 21st century is an entirely new ballgame. People who are waiting for the economy to bounce back will be waiting forever. The global economy is going through a sea change. The Network Era is replacing the Industrial Age. The management processes we used in the Industrial Age are in large measure obsolete. There’s this tremendous level of frustration because people are trying to deal with all these new challenges, but they are trying to deal with them with old mindsets, and that doesn’t work.

21C Leadership is discovering the next practices. The new ways of doing things we’re finding are more participatory, democratic, collaborative, and open.

Coming up with those practices is the easy part of the equation. Changing the behavior of hands-on managers and professionals is the tough part. We’re creating books, apps, performance support tools, and more.

I intend to replace vestigial management practices. We’re going to need places to test this out. If anyone’s interested, I encourage them to get in touch.

Q| What do you like to do for relaxation or for fun?

I really enjoy taking pictures. I’m not a great photographer, but I can sort of sense when it’s the right moment to push the button. I understand a little bit about composition, but I don’t have $2,000 cameras and professional equipment. Still, I find great joy in capturing images. Going back over those images refreshes experience and knowledge; I get to enjoy things more than once. This drives me to see more of the world than I would have if I weren’t always looking for the next shot.

ASTD - http://goo.gl/S2N9r

Work Is Changing

• Work is no longer just doing just what is in your job description.
• In 1986, 75% of the knowledge that a worker needed was stored in their heads.
• By 2006, that number was estimated to be 9%. The needed information is no longer in the worker’s mind but it is “out there” in the minds of others.
• The need for personal, informal networks – to be able to find information — has never been greater.

Conceptual Age

• We are moving from the information age (knowledge workers) to the conceptual age (conceptual workers).
• Historically, most managers didn’t make time for employees to learn, grow, and develop. Now work and learning are converging into a new type of work known as conceptual work.
• Innovation has to be baked into corporate of culture.
• Conceptual work involves gaining experience, learning, developing new thoughts and new ideas, and even developing new lines of business.
  • In this new era of work, the potential value that a worker can create is 200 times greater than average, because they no longer have physical limits.

…and why most corporations spend most of their money where the least learning takes place.

Informal learning

• Informal learning does not mean haphazard learning. It opens up possibilities and resources –  the sky’s the limit
  • Research in many countries has found that 80% of the learning required for workers to do their jobs was acquired by watching someone else do the work and other informal means.
  • Learning is not formal or informal: it’s always a mix of both.
  • Novices – those new at a job – often learn more effectively and quickly in a formal learning environment. Experienced workers prefer to acquire needed information through informal channels. You need to provide a framework for informal learning, but experienced workers don’t want to go to “courses.”
  • In informal learning situations, when someone is struggling, others step in to help in “real time.”
  • Spending/learning paradox: The majority of the training budget in most organizations is spent on formal learning – the place where it actually has the least impact on performance.
  • Training departments know how to produce formal learning because it is like school.
  • Management has to have faith that there is productive work going on and that informal learning is enabling workers to get the information that they need to do their jobs.
  • If you have high expectations of people, they will live up to them; have low expectations, and they will live down to them.

Education vs. Engagement

• Learning is more than just education.
• Learning should include real, meaningful tasks, not knowledge recitation, but application.
• Learning needs to be about the problems that a worker really cares about.
• Learning:  Natural, social, spontaneous, informal, unbounded, adaptive, fun.
• Learning engages the heart and mind.
• Meaningful conversation is the strongest learning tool!

Classroom vs. Workscape

• The traditional classroom environment is apart from work – it is where training is delivered via “push” mode. It is packaged inside of a program and is delivered piecemeal. It includes events, is generally static and the end result is that the learner comes away knowing things.
• In a workscape, learning is embedded in the work, learning emerges in pull mode. It is a fluid, holistic, process. It emerges as a result of working smarter.
• In this environment learning is natural, social, spontaneous, informal, unbounded, adaptive and FUN. It involves conversation as the main ingredient.

Social Networks

• Happy people learn more effectively and do more work.
• Study by Nicholas A Christakis & James H. Fowler
  • Social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people. A person’s happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends.
  • Happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people.
  • What are you doing and how happy are you?
  • What makes people happy?  In this order: sex, conversation music, walking, eating, cooking, shopping, children, reading, commuting, work is on the bottom.
  • Work should be increasingly about conversations. Conceptual work – conversations that are paid for.
  • Examples of the power of social networks relating to weight and smoking – if you have friends who are obese or smoke (or they have friends who are obese or smoke), you are more likely to be obese or smoke.

New Paradigm: Working Smarter

• Dirty words:  training, learner eLearning, informal, social, school, learning.  Don’t use these words in an elevator with an executive!   Now call it working smarter.

Beta: Not ready for final release. Still buggy. Life is perpetual beta.

Blink: Rapid cognition, or gut feeling. Making snap judgments, often valid, on the basis of a few data points. Popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in a book of the same name.

Blog: Great way to narrate your work to enable others to learn from your example.

Boiling the ocean: Trying to cure all problems at once, often with a single tool. Don’t even try.

Brain rules: Don’t design learning experiences that defy human nature. John Medina’s book lists 10 basic truths about how people learn.

Complexity: It’s a nonlinear, interconnected world, and you will never figure it out.

Course: Rigid unit of learning, generally expressed in hours or days and “led” by an instructor. Opposite: “Just enough.”

Doggie treats: Incentives, targets, measurements and other directional signals. These drive organizational behavior. Coined by Art Kleiner in Who Really Matters.

Entropy: Disorder. Closed systems decay over time. Margaret Wheatley has proposed that this is why scientific managers are so hung up on control.

Flow: Why you cannot step in the same river twice. Nothing is permanent; everything flows. Also, the euphoria that accompanies flowing in sync with your reality.

Free-range learner: Someone who learns as he or she chooses. Often discovery learning.

Frog boiling: Apocryphal science experiment. Drop a frog in a pot of boiling water; he jumps right out. Put a frog in a pan of cool water and slowly heat it on the stove; the frog never senses a big change in temperature and stays in the water until poached.

Grades: Random numbers used by academics to exert social control over students.

Hospicing: From Nancy White, “We are hospicing things we no longer need/should do. Sometimes that means turning them over to others to care for until they die.”

Internet cloud: Like a black box. Stuff goes in and stuff comes out; whether it bounced across continents and satellites doesn’t make any difference.

Job: Increasingly obsolete way of packaging work.

Learning: Work.

Metadata: Information about information. Often, metatags that describe what’s inside a chunk of learning. Generally machine-readable. Analogous to a barcode on an incoming shipment.

Mindful: Opposite of mindless. Take a deep breath. Pay attention.

Next practices: Guidelines for building a sustainable future. Best practices look backward, providing advice that worked in the past; next practices focus on what to do in the time ahead.

Opportunity cost: The cost of not doing something — e.g., the sales the rep didn’t make because he or she was away at a seminar. Often the largest cost associated with training programs.

Presence awareness: If the urinal in the airport bathroom knows when I’m there and when I’m not, should we expect anything less from our computer networks?

Social learning: What e-learning was supposed to be.

Synchronous: (pretentious) Live event.

Technophilia: The belief that technology will solve all ills. Especially prevalent during the dot-com delusion, fostered by Wired magazine.

Tweet: 140-character fragment of a global conversation.

Unlearning: Making way for the new by throwing out the old.

WikiLeaks: Warning shot to all secretive organizations. There are no secrets. Might as well go transparent.

Work: Learning.

Working smarter: Executives rail against informal learning; I’ve yet to find one who is not interested in having people work smarter.

Workscape: Performance ecosystem. Metaphorical environment where work and learning converge. Covers the entire ecology and could include the water cooler, the break room, the Friday beer bust, the conversation nook at the office, Wi-Fi in the cafeteria, the enterprise.

YMMV: “Your mileage may vary.” Recognition that your results may not be the same as mine. Other things are never equal.

http://clomedia.com/articles/view/working-smarter-glossary/print

Working Smarter is a holistic approach to doing business.

An article by Jonah Lehrer in today’s Wall Street Journal describes the impact of the color of workplace walls on performance. People in red-walled rooms were “much better at skills that required accuracy and attention to detail, such as catching spelling mistakes or keeping random numbers in short-term memory.” People in blue rooms “did far better on tasks requiring some imagination, such as coming up with creative uses for a brick or designing a children’s toy.” I’ve noted before that people who work in yellow-walled rooms are more optimistic and happy — and therefore more productive.

Does this mean interior design could be a factor in working smarter? Sure.

Jack Welch has said, “Getting the right people in the right jobs is a lot more important than developing a strategy.” People are most productive when they’re creating lots of value doing things they like and are good at. Is slotting people into the best jobs for them working smarter? Sure.

Business organizations are undergoing a grand convergence. Work and learning are becoming one and the same. Smart companies don’t send workers away for training; they enable them to learn in the course of work. Learning well is working smarter.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe,” wrote John Muir. He was writing about nature, but the same holds true for the human side of enterprise. The “people disciplines” of organization development, talent management, training, and management development are all interlinked. You can’t do one without impacting the others. Who cares? It’s all just working smarter.

I don’t talk much about training or learning these days.

Just because you train people doesn’t mean they learn.

Learning is higher ground than training, but learning is not enough to make sure the job gets done.

The goal is achieving the outcomes you seek. How you get there is immaterial. Sometimes it’s easier to add smarts to the workflow (performance support) than to stuff things into people’s heads. Moreover, people often fail to put what they learn into practice.

I have reframed how I help organizations get things done. It may or may not involve learning. I call it working smarter.

Impatient? Go here. If you like what you see, come back for an explanation.

Working smarter begins with a holistic view of performance. The bottom line is getting more done and doing it faster.

Working smarter involves trusting individuals to do what’s right and giving them the latitude to do it. Empowering people to take action rests on clearing obstacles out of the way and incorporating next practices into workflow. Motivation, respect, and aspirations play a role. It’s about cultivating a healthy learning ecology.

Everyone agrees that working smarter is a good thing. Next time the economy nose dives, can you imagine an executive calling for people to work dumber?

Working smarter is the key to sustainability and continuous improvement. The accelerating rate of change forces everyone in every organization to make a choice: learn while you work or become obsolete. Work and learning are two sides of the same coin. Imbed what we know about learning theory into how people work, and working smarter results.

Multi-disciplinary. In spades

Working smarter draws ideas from design thinking, network optimization, brain science, user experience design, learning theory, organizational development, social business, technology, collaboration, web 2.0 patterns, social psychology, value network analysis, anthropology, complexity theory, and more. Working smarter embraces the spirit of agile software, action learning, social networks, and parallel developments in many disciplines.

Keeping up with developments in all of these fields is daunting. New developments are spread all over the place. There’s no one-stop shop for news about working smarter. Important discoveries fall through the cracks. Most organizations take a piecemeal approach.

We all have our favorite sources on the web for keeping up. My must-reads include David Snowden on complexity, George Siemens on network learning, Jonah Lehrer on neuroscience, Steven Denning on management practice, Nancy White on building communities, Dan Pontefract on collaborative culture, and Ross Dawson on living networks. Of course, I also read the posts of Jane Hart, Harold Jarche, Clark Quinn, and Charles Jennings; we five are always building upon one another’s thinking.

Less is more

My feed reader (I use Google Reader) tracks 160 blogs. That’s unwieldy. I broke them into groups. It was still like drinking from the fire hose. I whittled my essential reading down to three dozen sources. Keeping up with only those proved difficult.

When pressed for time, all I want to read are the most important posts. How to separate the wheat from the chaff? Social signals. Just show me what’s attracting the most attention. At long last, there’s now a way to find the most important, essential writing about working smarter.

Working Smarter Daily

Working Smarter Daily presents me with the crème de la crème every day. It pulls the best stuff to the top of the page. If I can only find time to read the essence of what interests me, this is where I go to get it.

Go to http://workingsmarterdaily.com. Bookmark it. Take a look around.

Jay the Curator

Working Smarter Daily displays the most relevant and interesting content from sites I choose.

That’s right: there’s no democracy at work in selecting the sources that feed the site. Jay decides. But everyone has a hand in selecting the content that is automagically drawn from those sources. That’s determined by social factors.

Jay the dictatorial curator favors:

• individuals, not institutions.
• depth, not breadth.
• original ideas, not the 2.0 echo chamber.
• inspirational thinking that I can build on.
• most of the time, people I’ve met

Tony Karrer (more on Tony coming up) wondered if the “mostly people I’ve met” filter was too exclusionary. I don’t see it that way. I make a point of meeting the people who matter to me. Know someone who’s making a difference in working smarter? Introduce me. (And I don’t know four or five people in the curent bunch.) I’m open to your suggestions for whom should be heard here, whether I know them F2F or not.

Under the hood

Play around with the site.

• Clicking on a name in the right column brings up that person’s greatest hits. Example: Andy McAfee
• Clicking on a topic or tool brings up the most popular articles on it. Example:collaboration
• Use the search to see what this crowd has said about a topic. Example:sharepoint
• Click Change Edition up top and see what was hot last year or the year before. Example: 2006

This is both a smart aggregator for what’s hot in working smarter and also a research tool.

Working Smarter Daily in practice

Among the top four pointers in last Thursday’s edition was a post from Jane Hartabout Twitter as a learning tool for surgeons. It pointed to this over-the-top clipYouTube clip from Gray’s Anatomy. Just what I needed to explain the potential of microblogs to a client. In eight minutes.

Yesterday I came upon a post from Ross Dawson that pointed me to just what I was looking for about implementing enterprise 2.0 networks in-house.

This evening I came upon Donald Clark’s wonderful diatribe about why teaching Latin in schools is so ridiculous. Good for reflection and a belly laugh.

Unlike my experience looking at general sources, I find an item or two every time I look at Working Smarter Daily. If we’re kindred spirits, maybe you will, too.

Have it your way

My friend Tony Karrer has been developing smart aggregators for some time now. You may be familiar with eLearning Learning and Nancy White’s Communities & Networks Connection. Last year, Tony and I used this technology to create a site called Informal Learning Flow. The software has evolved. Tony recently set up a company, Aggregage, to make the technology publicly available. I am encouraging companies to consider using private versions behind their firewalls for dynamic knowledge management.  This kind of curation + social signals has the potential to become a primary means for professionals to filter content in their specialties.

Supporters

Xyleme is sponsoring this experiment. Xyleme enables companies to free legacy information for distribution on mobile devices and modern information systems. Their philosophy of simplifying our complex world fits with what I’m trying to do with Working Smarter Daily. They generously chipped in enough money to get us going.

My colleagues at Internet Time Alliance helped write the Working Smarter Fieldbook with me. We talk working smarter every day.  They turned me on to many of my favorite sources.

When chefs travel, they meet with other chefs. They eat together. They share techniques. Were it not for this sharing, we would not enjoy the broad, international array of food on our tables. When a top chef wants to move to a new job in a particular location, he tells a few chefs, the grapevine spreads the word, and within a week he has several job offers.

In his book, Bourdain describes how he started out as a dishwasher in a restaurant on Cape Cod. Then he lands a job as a fry cook. From that point on, the chef running the kitchen he’s working in is looking out for young Anthony. When will the kitchen worker be prepared to advance from washing lettuce to making salads? What does he need to know to advance to pastry chef? How can the chef help the dessert chef advance to sous-chef? Good chefs take developing their staff very seriously. They see that their apprentices learn to create satisfying yet economical food.

Anthony Bourdain decided he needed to accelerate his development, so he attended the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) for formal training. This enabled him to understand the intertwined relationships of ingredients, cooking and customers. The curriculum at the CIA taught him frameworks for various cuisines; he learned practices that would have taken years to learn on the job. And indeed, when Bourdain went back to cooking, he rapidly advanced up the ladder to become a chef.

Chefs are a community of like-minded individuals who identify with one another, advance the practice of their profession and help new entrants join the industry. They are proud of their work. They work extremely hard, and they are proud of that, too.

Ten years ago, the common wisdom was that you could not establish a community of practice. If you found one that was working, the best you could do was to nurture it. In essence, they were like truffles: They grow in the wild, so if you want them, you put a pig or a well-trained dog on a leash and encourage it to dig around the roots of oak trees in southern France or northern Italy.

Authorities were wrong on both counts. Half the world’s truffles are cultivated on truffle plantations in Spain. Thousands of corporations have established thriving communities of practice that advance both the careers of their members and their shared body of knowledge.

The cook becomes a chef when she feels she’s a chef. Likewise, professional firefighters, insurance salespeople, plumbers, accountants and architects don’t just master subject matter — they become members of their profession. They learn to be.

Beyond acquiring know-how, a professional hangs out with other professionals, builds relationships with others in the profession and contributes to the collective wisdom of the industry. Most important, the professional knows deep inside that she has joined the profession. Experience is the best teacher. You can’t become a chef without working and learning in a kitchen.

Any group of professionals who identify with one another is a potential community of practice. Professionals learn from one another; through experimentation; and by following the advice of mentors. In time, they pay back the community by shifting from “what’s known” to “what’s next.”

Are communities of practice part of your learning and development program? Don’t you wish your organization had dedicated communities of practice that nurtured newbies, helped everyone get up to speed and advanced the professional knowledge of the field? Have you assessed who might form natural communities?