Post 1   Post 2   Post 3   Post 4   Post 5

Post 1 People learn their jobs by doing their jobs. Effective managers make stretch
assignments and coach their team members. Experience is the teacher, and managers shape their teammembers’ experiences. Knowledge work has evolved into keeping up and taking advantage of connections. We learn to do the job on the job. To stay ahead and create more value, you have to learn faster, better, smarter.

The Coherent Organization. As standalone companies realize that they’re really extended enterprises, co-learning with customers and stakeholders becomes important as everyone faces the future together. Players throughout the corporate ecosystem need to be operating on the same wave-length. This can only happen when we’re adapting to the future, i.e. learning, at the same pace.Internally, everyone needs to stay current.

These posts offer guidance to managers who want to make learning from experience and conversation more effective. Replacing today’s haphazard approaches with systematic, enlightened management accelerates the development of future workers and gets the entireorganization working smarter. The potential is great.

Among the organizations that have adopted the 70:20:10 approach are Nike, Dell, Goldman Sachs, Mars, Maersk, Nokia, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, L’Oréal, Adecco, Banner Health, Bank of America, National Australia Bank, Boston Scientific, American Express, Wrigley, Diageo, BAE Systems, ANZ Bank, Irish Life, HP, Freehills, Caterpillar, Barwon Water, CGU, Coles, Sony Ericsson, Standard Chartered, British Telecom, Westfield, Wal-Mart, Parsons Brinkerhoff, and Coca-Cola.

Charles Jennings made 70:20:10 a guiding philosophy of learning during his eight-year tenure as Chief Learning Officer at Reuters, the world’s largest information company. (Disclosure: Charles and I are colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance. He is the world authority on 70:20:10 and these posts draw heavily on his work.)

Post 2 The 70 percent: learning from experience. People learn by doing. We learn from experience and achieve mastery through practice. Experience is a difficult task master. We learn more from making a mistake than from getting it right the first time. That’s why wise managers throw team members into stretch assignments. It accelerates learning. Being ejected from one’s comfort zone is why some say that the only thing worse than learning from experience is not learning from experience. Matching the most appropriately challenging experience to the developmental stage of the worker is the most powerful lever in the manager’s toolbox.

Charles Jennings reports that performance inevitably improves when managers ask their team members these three simple reflective questions:

1. What are your reflections on what you’ve been doing since we last met.
2. What would you do differently next time?
3. What have you learned since we last met?

Post 3 The 20 percent: learning through others. Learning is social. People learn with and through others.

Conversations are the stem cells of learning. Effective managers encourage their team members to buddy up on projects, to shadow others and to participate in professional social networks. People learn more in an environment that encourages conversation, so make sure you’re fostering an environment where people talk to each other.

A Community of Practice (CoP) is a social network of people who identify with one another professionally (e.g. designers of logic chips) or have mutual interests (e.g. amateur photographers). Members of CoPs develop and share knowledge, values, recommendations and standards. An effective community of practice is like a beehive. It organizes itself, buzzes with activity and produces honey for the markets.

Post 4 Formal learning includes courses, workshops, seminars, online learning and certification training. Unfortunately, a lot of organizations aren’t using online learning to its full potential, and the results at those organizations reflect that. Learning expert Robert Brinkerhoff figures only about 15 percent of formal training lessons change behavior.¹² This is a reflection of both formal learning creation and of the lack of focus on experiential and exposure learning. If what we learn is not reinforced with reflection and application, the lessons never make it into long-term memory.

Formal learning is typically conducted by an instructor. So why do we address it in a paper on managers? Because managers can make or break the success of formal learning programs. Research has found that the most important factor in translating formal learning into improved performance is the expectation set by managers before the training takes place¹³. Understanding the needs of the learners and following up after the event are also essential for formal learning success.

Post 5 You will need to become a champion for the new approach to developing talent. You must convince your sponsor that managers and supervisors are the linchpins to developing new talent. Without them, the company could find itself with nobody on the bench to take on future challenges. For your career, this lead role is high risk/high reward.

Managers have to learn how to develop their people. It doesn’t always come naturally, and managers can get too busy to pay much attention to it. Let them know you don’t expect them to train their people. Rather, they will set examples for their team; they will foster experiential learning by leading their team to tackle new challenges (the 70), by helping them reflect on the lessons of experience and by coaching them at every step (the 20), and by showing them how to get formal learning on the subject (the 10).

The Learning and Development Roundtable of the Corporate Leadership Council pinpointed three management practices that significantly improve performance.

1. Setting clear expectations and explaining how performance will be measured.
2. Providing stretch experiences that help their team members learn and develop.
3. Taking time to reflect and help team members learn from experience.

Managers who set clear objectives and expectations and explain how they measure performance are much more likely to succeed. Their teams outperform their peers by 20%. That’s an extra day every week to get the job done (and engage in deep learning). Managers should make explicit why they’re assigning particular projects, what they expect people to learn and what sort of debrief will occur after the assignment.

The 70-20-10 model depends on L&D teaming up with managers to improve learning across the company, but often managers do not appreciate how vitally important they are in growing their people. This is the absolute, must-do secret to success to improving learning and development. Frontline managers must take this as the very definition of manager: someone who develops others by challenging them with assignments that stretch them to the point of flow¹⁷. This takes a can-do manager who knows how coaching creates mental models and habits, how motivation activates a chain of high-performance activities and what success habits their team members need to adopt.

Charles Jennings says that the role that managers play is far more important than that of Learning and Development or HR. Your role is to help managers learn that:

• People learn from experience.
• Managers shape the experience of the people on their team.
• Experience coupled with reflection sticks lessons in memory.
• Daily mid-course correction is much more powerful than after-the-fact reviews.
• Every project they assign is a potential learning experience for their team members.

#itashare

#itashare

Return to: http://clomedia.com/views/articles/can-this-marriage-be-saved/

If I may summarize 400 pages from a vague memory, the gist was that I acquire tacit knowledge experientially, say baking a brioche. When I’ve mastered the baking, I explain how I did it, thus making the knowledge explicit. The explicit knowledge is shared with others, who in turn internalize it, transmuting it back into tacit knowledge in their heads.

This would be cool if it worked, but it usually doesn’t. You can no more convert tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge without the experiential component than you can convert lead into gold. That’s implicit in the definition of tacit. I gave up on Nonaka and Takeuchi.

Workers master a skill by starting with the basics, the bulk of which is formal and explicit. If it were not explicit, instructors and non-SMEs would not be able to teach it in traditional fashion.

With the foundation of explicit knowledge under their belts, the novices know enough to begin practicing. Enough rubs off that the novices learn experientially. In some fields, the overall journey from novice to expert takes 10,000 hours.

In an ideal world, the expert retires (or graduates) to teaching the incoming generation of novices. This assures that what’s taught mirrors reality. Note, however, that the experienced guide provides only explicit knowledge. (It’s explicit because you can write it down.)

The instructor can accelerate the novice’s acquisition of explicit knowledge by having her undertake stretch assignments. Experience is the crucible where explicit knowledge is learned.

Since line managers are the people who generally counsel their teammates on what assignments to take on, they need to become active in the red portion of my chart.

Explicit knowledge does not become tacit knowledge and vice-versa. Explicit/tacit is either/or. There’s no word for a state between explicit and tacit. In other words, what I understand Nonaka and Takeuchi to say is simply wrong.

Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework provides another way to look at tacit and explicit. Both complex situations and tacit knowledge “can’t be told.” Complicated and simple situations can be written down. This implies:

The faster a worker becomes proficient, the more profitable the firm. Companies that focus on shortening the time employees complete formal, explicit learning are looking at a drop in the bucket. Improving the effective of experiential, tacit learning adds much more to the bottom line. Managers who make apt stretch assignments produces productive workers sooner.

In the last two decades of the 20th century, the make-up of the market value of the combined S+P 500 companies went from 80% tangible assets to 80% intangible assets, a dramatic shift in our economy.

I wonder if the same thing is going on with complexity. Does anyone have any statistics on this? I don’t even know where to look.

#itashare

part 1 of 5

People learn their jobs by doing their jobs. Effective managers make stretch
assignments and coach their team members. Experience is the teacher, and managers shape those experiences.

These posts offer guidance to managers who want to make learning from experience and conversation more effective. Replacing today’s haphazard approaches with systematic, enlightened management accelerates the development of future workers and gets the entire organization working smarter. The potential is great.

Convergence of work and learning

The world of business is undergoing a phase change. Work and learning have merged. Earth-shattering forces snuck up on us when we weren’t looking, shifting major responsibilities from the institution to the individual.

Knowledge work has evolved into keeping up and taking advantage of connections. We learn on the job to do the job. In a time of increased business speed, learning is vital. To stay ahead and create more value, you have to learn faster, better, smarter.

The Coherent Organization

As standalone companies realize that they’re really extended enterprises, co-learning with customers and stakeholders becomes important as everyone faces the future together. Players throughout the corporate ecosystem need to be operating on the same wave-length. This can only happen when we’re adapting to the future, i.e. learning, at the same pace.Internally, everyone needs to stay current.

Workers need to know what one another are doing. No matter what silo we inhabit, we all need to be singing from the same hymnal. We may sing different songs (diversity builds strength) but we need be aligned to achieve a common purpose. We call harmonious companies Coherent Organizations.

In the old days, work was mechanical; workers learned the skills and knowledge to do their jobs from training sessions and then performed their job function. They did what they were told. Achieving coherence was easy. Twenty-first century employees do complex, unpredictable work. Their primary job is dealing with situations that are not written in any job description. It’s up to them to figure out what to do. They have to learn on the fly. Often the best way to accomplish the goal is to collaborate with other people.

Social networks, both in-person and online, are democratizing the workplace, and workers have an increasing amount of say in what they learn and how they learn it. Millennials entering the workplace expect to be in charge of their own development. They are used to having information at their fingertips. In high school and college, they did their homework in collaboration with friends, and now they expect to work in collaboration with colleagues.

Traditionally, training departments were designed for mechanical work processes. Instructional designers created curriculum around tried-and-true best practices. Training identified knowledge gaps and delivered courses to close them.

Today most of the information that workers need to know is unstructured and constantly changing. The Internet has switched our company hours to 24/7, and that often means making quick business decisions on a public stage. Hard-copy training material cannot train you to handle unique situations. Traditional training approaches are no longer enough.

Workers and managers have to shoulder responsibility for their own learning.

Does this imply that training departments are obsolete? Quite the contrary. In the coming years, learning and development professionals will have more impact than ever before. Many of them will leave the human resources silo to tackle challenges in a new integrated way across the company. By taking their expertise in learning directly into the organization and working more closely with team leaders, learning and development staff will increase the impact of their learning programs.The advice that follows comes from practitioners, not academics. As chief learning officer at Thomson Reuters, Charles Jennings¹ implemented the 70-20-10 model for the firm’s 55,000 employees. Heather Rutherford founded Blended, the Australia-based performance learning company that is the leading distributor of the Harvard ManageMentor program. Charles and Heather are the source of many of the suggestions and stories that follow.Let’s examine the 70-20-10 model, where it came from, how to take advantage of it and the opportunities it presents for learning and development professionals.

Origin of the 70-20-10 model

At its heart, 70-20-10 is all about re-thinking and re-aligning learning and development focus and effort. Morgan McCall, Robert Eichinger and Michael Lombardo originated the 70-20-10 framework at the Center for Creative Leadership in North Carolina. Their 1996 book, The Career Architect², stated that lessons learned by successful managers came roughly:

• 70 percent from real life and on-the-job experiences, tasks and problem solving

• 20 percent from feedback and working with and observing role models

• 10 percent from courses and reading

As Charles Handy says, “Real learning is not what most of us grew up thinking it was.”This simple formulation has gone viral.

You hear about it at every major training conference and read about it in all the learning journals. When I recently shared the 70-20-10 model with a senior group of instructional designers and educational planners, they experienced an “ah-ha” moment.

They realized that they’d been expending their energy in the formal realm, and that the formal accounts for only a small fraction of how people learn. You shouldn’t take this to mean that the 10 percent – formal learning – is going away. Rather, by starting to focus on experiential and collaborative learning too, you can improve your overall learning and development program.³

Without dealing with whether a given situation is 80:15:5 or 60:25:15, this group of instructional designers got the message that leadership development is overwhelmingly experiential. Experiential learning reinforces and boosts the results of formal learning. The 70 and the 20 increase the results from the traditional 10.

The simplicity of the 70-20-10 formulation makes it memorable. The message is that in business, we learn most by doing.70-20-10 is not without its critics. The model is based on observation. It is not a precise formulation like water boiling at 100 degrees Celsius/212 degrees Fahrenheit. Academics and purists complain that there’s no empirical evidence to back up 70-20-10. I counter that my colleagues and I have talked with thousands of managers about 70-20-10 and they agree that the proportions sound about right.

Among the organizations that have adopted the 70:20:10 approach are Nike, Dell, Goldman Sachs, Mars, Maersk, Nokia, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, L’Oréal, Adecco, Banner Health, Bank of America, National Australia Bank, Boston Scientific, American Express, Wrigley, Diageo, BAE Systems, ANZ Bank, Irish Life, HP, Freehills, Caterpillar, Barwon Water, CGU, Coles, Sony Ericsson, Standard Chartered, British Telecom, Westfield, Wal-Mart, Parsons Brinkerhoff, and Coca-Cola.

Charles Jennings made 70:20:10 a guiding philosophy of learning during his eight-year tenure as Chief Learning Officer at Reuters, the world’s largest information company. (Disclosure: Charles and I are colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance. He is the world authority on 70:20:10 and this paper draws heavily on his work.)

Is 70-20-10 good or bad news for trainers?

Imagine that a top executive from your company read an article about 70-20-10 in a Harvard Business Review blog and wondered whether your company should do something with it.

Should you be worried or elated?You have been investing most of your energy in formal learning. That’s what management asked you to do. It’s important; the company cannot live without it. You understand it upside down and backwards. You have probably implemented classes, workshops, online learning, a measurement system and learning events. You believe in these components.

On the other hand, the experiential and exposure parts of the spectrum are virgin territory for you. But the upside of investing in the support of experiential learning, assuming you are successful, is job enrichment, more responsibility, recognition from senior management and career advancement.

Next

My next post will deal with the 70%: Learning from experience.

Acknowledgements

This paper draws heavily on the work of Charles Jennings, a leading thinker and practitioner in human development, change management, performance improvement and learning. Charles is senior director of the Internet Time Alliance. He has deep experience in both the business and learning practitioner sides of learning and performance. He knows what works in the world of strategic talent and effective performance and productivity approaches.

Charles is the Founder of The 70:20:10 Forum, a global membership portal helping professionals implement the 70:20:10 framework to maximize performance and productivity. The Forum offers a vast repository of practical information and connects members with a vibrant global community of fellow practitioners. As part of its social responsibility, the Forum supports projects at Sreepur Village, a refuge in rural Bangladesh for destitute women as well as trafficked or abandoned children.

Another source of inspiration is Heather Rutherford, founder of Blended, an organizational learning solutions company. With a philosophy centered on the 70-20-10 framework, Blended supports clients in implementing a simple and powerful architecture supported by best-practice tools and resources to increase engagement, improve productivity, efficiency and performance.

About the Internet Time Alliance

The Internet Time Alliance helps clients understand and embrace complexity and adopt new ways of working and learning. We ask the tough questions and explore the underlying assumptions of how they do business. Then we work with them to develop strategies and plans for transformation and improvement. Email me for information on working with the Alliance.

About GoToTraining

Online Training Made Easy™Citrix GoToTraining is an easy-to-use online training service that allows you to move your entire training program online for more efficient customer and employee training. Hold unlimited online training sessions with up to 200 attendees from around the world right from your Mac or PC. Reach more trainees, collect real-time feedback, record and store your training sessions and more – all while slashing travel costs. To learn more, visit www.gototraining.com.

Citrix sponsored the research and writing of much of the material in this set of posts. Please visit CitrixOnline to see the original paper in its entirety.

About the author

Jay Cross is an author, advocate and raconteur who writes about workplace learning, leadership, organizational change, innovation, technology and the future. His educational white papers, articles and research reports persuade people to take action.

Jay has challenged conventional wisdom about how adults learn since designing the first business degree program offered by the University of Phoenix. A champion of informal learning and systems thinking, Jay’s calling is to create happier, more productive workplaces. He was the first person to use the term eLearning on the web. He literally wrote the book on Informal Learning. He is currently researching the correlation of psychological well-being and performance on the job.

Jay works from the Internet Time Lab in Berkeley, California, high in the hills a dozen miles east of the Golden Gate Bridge and a mile and a half from UC Berkeley. People visit the Lab to spark innovation and think fresh thoughts.He is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Business School.

Does your company need substantive white papers and webinars like this? Get in touch.

One year ago, twenty management thinkers and agile software gurus met on a mountain top in Stoos, Switzerland, to assess and find alternatives to obsolete leadership practices. We concluded with this communiqué:

Reflecting on leadership in organizations today, we find ourselves in a bit of a mess. We see reliance on linear, mechanistic thinking, companies focusing more on stock price than delighting customers, and knowledge workers whose voices are ignored by the bosses who direct them. All these factors are reflected in the current economic crisis, increased inequity, bankruptcies and widespread disillusionment.

There has to be a better way.

We believe that we uncovered some of the common characteristics of that better way. For example, that organizations can become learning networks of individuals creating value and that the role of leaders should include the stewardship of the living rather than the management of the machine.

In celebration of World Stoos Day on January 25, the Stoos Satellite Netherlands has organized a TEDx-like event in Amsterdam. Join us. It’s free. Stoos Connect schedule. Live stream of Stoos Day.

During this sizzling day, we will offer lightning talks from a wide spectrum of well respected thought leaders such as Steve Denning, Jurgen Appelo, Niels Pflaeging, Franz Röösli and Dawna Jones. They will make you think, inspire you and tantalize you. If you’re involved in (or impacted by) management in any way, you should attend. Open your mind and be inspired!

Our Goodreads bookshelf.

Find us on LinkedIn.

If this is all new to you, here’s my summary of the first Stoos Gathering

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.

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.

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.

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.

#itashare

Coursea, Udacity, edX, Kahn Academy. Balanced report. Where are the peers? Meeting on their own in a local bar.

The reporter says getting colleges to accept online learning for credit is a big problem. I disagree. Once employers and regulators accept online portfolios of learning experiences, degrees will cease to be important outside of academia.

#ITAshare

Thirty years ago my boss gave me an assignment I’ll never forget.

“I’ve rented a Santa Claus costume for tonight’s Christmas party,” he said.

“Great!” I replied.

“And you are going to wear it,” he told me.

That evening I changed into the red suit and beard in the parking lot San Francisco’s Pier 39.

We were holding the company party at the restaurant at the far north end of the Pier.

As I walked the length of the Pier, children came running to tell me what they wanted for Christmas. Imagine the luck — bumping into Santa Claus just walking along the dock like a normal citizen. They beamed. I felt like a god.

Last night a group of folks from NextNow and Natural Logic came together for a Seasons Party at the NextNow Collaboratory in Berkeley. Once again I donned the Santa suit. (I do it every year now.)

Santa wished everyone a very, very happy 2013. Then I shared my new calling: I am out to make people happy. Millions of them. Mainly people trapped in the rat race of organizations.

We’re each in control of our own happiness. Lots of it has to do with how we look at the world. We can literally rewire our brains by shifting what we pay attention to and how we interpret the past. It’s not that difficult. I aspire to be the Pied Piper Santa who leads people to more fulfilling work and contented lives. Don’t we all deserve lives worth living?

Picasso wisely said, “I do things I don’t know how to do in order to learn how to do them.” Me too. I don’t know how I am going to play Santa year round. I may write a book or an ebook, or show companies how happiness boosts the bottom line, or lead workshops, or all these and more. I’m certain to be discussing the topic here. I’m open to your suggestions. Life is for learning.

Will you join my on this journey?  As Aristotle said, “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”

#itashare

Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century by Cathy N. Davison, a polymath professor at Duke. 2011. 292 pages. $11.68 (paperback) on Amazon.

Her blog.

I finished reading Cathy Davidson’s Now You See It yesterday afternoon. It is brilliant. Extremely well-written. Nearly impossible to put down. I love the way this woman thinks. This is a beautiful book.

Have you ever watched the television series Eureka? The characters get trapped in a virtual reality environment and when the force field gets hosed, the picture jiggles and sometimes what you thought was the real world begins to pixelate and morph into little cubes. Your eyes are pried open by the reality shift. That’s what I experienced reading Now You See It. The world’s not quite what I thought.

We all suffer inattention blindness. Humans have low bandwidth. When we pay attention to one thing, we don’t register lots of concurrent alternatives.

Our culture is leaving the industrial era. It’s not accidental that we began to imagine our brains were linear, machine-like, inflexible, and subject to decay a hundred years ago; we came up with the assembly line and time clock at the same time. We’ve got to see that for what it is and then cultivate the distraction to take another perspective. Oh yeah, those aren’t chickens; they’re ducks. Classrooms discourage learning. Grades and multiple choice and standardization are obsolete.

“We need to be thinking of interconnected, not discrete, twenty-first-century skills. Instead of testing for the best answer to discrete questions, we need to measure the ability to make connections, to synthesize, collaborate, network manage projects, solve problems  and respond to constantly changing technologies  interfaces  and eventually  in the workplace, new arrangements of labor and new economies. For schools this means that in addition to the three Rs of reading, writing and arithmetic, kids should be learning critical thinking, innovation, creativity, and problem solving, all of the skills one can build upon and mesh with the skills of others.”

She gets there, in the words of a reviewer for The Times Educational Supplement by

“…taking us on a tour through a welter of psychological theories and principles as she explains how learning happens. Along the way, she considers the Hebbian principle of neuronal pathways (“neurons that fire together, wire together”), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and Asperger’s syndrome, Alzheimer’s disease, Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory, Stanford-Binet intelligence testing, Freudian psychodynamics and a galaxy of other psychological theories and themes in order to illustrate and hammer home her point that education, as it is currently conducted, is preparing young people for the past, not the future. She critiques many of our tried and tested assessment methods as obsolete and in need of replacement, and argues that formalized learning environments fail to model new modes of working, many of which are ambient and untethered, arriving at the conclusion that we need to “question whether the form of learning and knowledge making we are instilling in our children is useful for their future”.

I recall someone at IBM’s Almaden Lab once lamenting that “We look at the world through industrial-age goggles.”

“Whether applied to life on the assembly line or inside the new skyscrapers, efficiency was a harsh taskmaster. It required that humans be as uniform as possible, despite their individual circumstances, talents, or predispositions. Working regular hours, each person was assigned aplace an a function; doing what one was told an not question the efficacy of the process were both part of the twentieth=century work. But a problem increasingly reports  in the modern offericce was self-motivation. With os much control exerted by others, there wasn’t much reason for the office worker to think for himself, to exceed expectation ro to innovate. Regularity and regulation do not inspire self-movitated workers.”

The first time I read Frederick Taylor in the original, I was outraged. How could he think so little of his fellow man? What gumption it must take to tell someone, “You’re not paid to think.” As I reflected on the value created in industrial age and the comforts it showered upon us, I tempered my feelings. Taylor wanted to increase production so there would be more for all to share. However, at the end of the day, whatever you think of Taylor and his one best way, he’s dead and those days are over.

We need a new set of tricks. Davidson asks,

“Given the new options in our digital world, why exactly, would we want to do thing the way we did them before? Why would we choose to measure the new possibilities of the digital age against a standard invented to count productivity in the old industrial regime? Given the newly interconnecte world we all now live, learn, and work in, given the new ways of connecting that our world affords, why would we not want to use our options? They question isn’t which is better, the past or the present. The question is, given the current possibilities, how can we imagine and work toward a better future?”

Ceci n’est-pas une pipe!

What confuses the brain delights the brain. I love this” “The mind always wanders off task because the mind’s task is to wander.”

“We currently have a national education policy based on a style of learning — the standardized, machine-readable multiple-choice test — that reinforces a type of thinking and form of attention well suited to the industrial worker — a role that increasingly fewer of our kids will ever fill,” she writes. Thanks mainly to the Internet, “their world is different from the one into which we were born, therefore they start shearing and shaping different neural pathways from the outset. We may not even be able to see their unique gifts and efficiencies.”

One thing I don’t get yet is the IBM-in-Second Life thing. The big section on Chuck Hamilton and his avatar pals got me to skipping pages. Maybe I’m an old fuddie duddie. (Or need a corporate sponsor to fund my technology needs.)

The Wall Street Journal Review neatly summarizes that the “….central argument of the book: that since every individual is bound to miss something, by working together people can cover one another’s blind spots and collectively see the big picture.”

In a review for The New York Times Book Review, Christopher Chabris trashes Davidson’s thesis by saying there’s no proof of what she proposes. “No hard evidence.” The reviewer also studies inattention blindness. In fact, he corrects Davidson for calling the phenomenon attention blindness. The “Now You See It” of Davidson’s title gives away the theme of the reviewer’s book, which is about the famous gorilla-sighting video. Sour grapes?

“No hard evidence”

The Times reviewer’s putdown reminds me of a run-in I had with an American academic at a conference in India earlier this year. He had opined that 70-20-10 was hogwash — spurious figures somehow derived from a misinterpretation of Archimedes. I flipped out and challenged him to a debate at the conference. He said he wouldn’t dignify this totally make-believe myth because it had never been verified and reported in a peer-reviewed journal. Specifically, he told me six PhD students who combed the past 50 years of peer-reviewed articles couldn’t find any empirical research to back it up. He said the numbers were therefore meaningless and the issue was not debatable.

This is the sort of nonsense Cathy Davidson warned us about” using yesterday’s yardstick (50 years!) in an attempt to measure today’s reality. It’s not apples and oranges. It’s apples and black holes. Nothing to compare.

And guess what? When you’re on the cutting edge, there isn’t any proof yet. Maybe there’s an emerging pattern, but there’s no “hard evidence.” That goes with the territory. Otherwise, you’re not on the edge. Given that the entire world is getting edgier (you can quote me on that), you better get used to it.

The book reviewer finds Davidson overly optimistic. I share her pronoia — the feeling that the world is conspiring to make our lives better. Davidson’s stories will inspire you to think highly of the future of learning and work. You got a problem with that?

I’m an advocate of common sense. Davidson gives us lots of ponder.

#eyeopener

#justsayin

#wakeupcall

#dreamland

#itashare

Kevin Wheeler pulls insights out of the group that we didn’t know were there. Yes, I am biased but it’s not because I’m on the faculty. I don’t make any money from our Retreat; neither does Kevin.

My topic this year was bringing emotion into the workplace. Giving a presentation forced me to distill five months of findings down to essence. I’m still learning about what makes for lasting happiness, but here’s the overall prescription.

Do these things and I assure you, you’ll be more content with your life. It works for me. Soon I’ll be sharing practices for you to get there.

• Happiness = Hedonic pleasure, an emotion
  
  • pleasure (Seligman)
  • pleasure (fleeting) and passion (flow) (Hseih)
  • having frequent positive feelings as well as having infrequent and less intense negative feelings (Gaffney)

• Eudaimonia = Living well, psychological well being

• Eudaimonia is Greek for ”human flourishing.”
• doing well and living well (Aristotle)
• reflective psychological well-being characterized by virtue and reason.
• the joy we feel striving after our potential (Achor)
• a deep sense of flourishing that arises from an exceptionally healthy mind…not a mere pleasurable feeling, a fleeting emotion, or a mood, but an optimal state of being (Matthieu)

Thriving. Our term for flourishing at work.

Beneficial behaviors of people flourishing:

higher morale, lower turnover, spend more time in flow (the zone) fully immersed in work, intrinsically motivated, healthier — fewer sick days, better with customers, increased sales, more resilient to stress, perform better in leadership positions, receive higher performance ratings, energetic, emotionally intelligent, forgiving, less likely to be depressed or anxious, more socially connected, enjoy better quality sleep, experience fewer headaches, stay more engaged in the face of difficulty, rise above obstacles more easily, better at their jobs, report more job satisfaction, experience positive emotions such as joy, interest and pride, greater likelihood of working actively toward new goals, more likely to succeed, more likely to recommend their organization to others, spend double the time at work focused on what they are paid to do, feel better about themselves, and enjoy life.

Blips is Internet Time Lab’s mobile app that captures an individual’s self-report of thriving and displays it on the web in aggregate form.

Positive emotions: joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love. They reinforce one another. More is better.

Subjective well-being: Ed Diener’s term for judging life positively and feeling good. A person has high SWB if she or he experiences life satisfaction and frequent joy. Diener chose it because studying happiness sounded frivolous.

Hedonic adaptation. Habituation. After a while, anything seems ordinary. Also known as the Hedonic treadmill.

Explanatory style: how we explain the nature of past events. People with an optimistic explanatory style interpret adversity as being local and temporary while those with a pessimistic explanatory style see those events as more global and permanent.

Losada line: 2.9013 = the ratio of positive to negative interactions necessary to make a corporate team successful. This means it takes about three positive comments to find off one negative one.

The Pygmalion Effect: when our belief in another person’s potential brings that potential to life.

Mindfulness

• opposite of mindlessness
• result of meditation.
• paying attentional in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally (Kabat-Zinn)
• “keeping one’s consciousness alive to the present reality” (Thich Nhat Hanh)

VIA Signature Strengths = character strengths: talents you enjoy using, things you’re good and feel good using. Generally, the skills you’re using when you enter Flow. Find them and assess yours at Authentic Happiness.

What have I missed or misinterpreted?

#itashare

Use networks to create services and share collective intelligence

Your company will install an in-house social network. The only question is how soon. Wise Chief Learning Officers are thinking about how social networks will augment learning & development.

Imagine that a Senior Executive in your company returns from Thanksgiving weekend having read white papers from IBM that say social business is the next step in the overall evolution of business. Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Fast Company had already told him that brainpower has become the engine of innovation. It’s inevitable that businesses will construct networks that connect everyone in their ecosystems to co-create and deliver services that delight customers and share collective intelligence. Social business is the flavor of the day in the C-suites of the Fortune 500.

The allure of social business is captivating. McKinsey, MIT and others report that companies that embrace social business models:

• reduce time to market
• increase the level of innovation
• speed up access to knowledge
• reduce operating costs
• make in-house expertise easier to tap
• increase employee satisfaction

The social business juggernaut has arrived and the time to get on board is now. Front-running companies are installing social networks like Chatter, Jive, Connections, Socialcast, Yammer, Socialtext, Sharepoint, Ideo, and HootSuite like there’s no tomorrow.

The exec secured a mandate from the executive committee to experiment with social networking in three areas of the company, international sales, manufacturing resource forecasting, and learning & development.

You’re Chief Learning Officer. You’ve been doing your own research on “Enterprise 2.0” and learning networks. You appreciate that social business — connecting everyone in the organization in networks makes sense. You’ve also sensed a groundswell in the learning and development community favoring social, self-directed, “pull” learning.

You recently read a compelling argument that people in knowledge organizations learn three to four times as much from experience as from interaction with bosses, coaches, and mentors. And they learn about twice as much from those conversations with others from in classrooms and formal learning programs.

Social business is the flavor of the day
in the C-suites of the Fortune 500.

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You could deliver a much bigger bang for your training buck by greasing the skids to make experiential learning more systematic, coached, and attractive.

The senior exec called you to his office and explained, “We’re going to experiment to find out how in-house social networks might strengthen our L&D and a few other areas in the company. Several vendors of social network suites have offered us incredibly deep discounts if we make up our minds in the next two days. I know it’s a sales gimmick and they don’t think we can do it. I need you to give me a one-page list of the capabilties you require from social software to make the most of social learning and carry out your vision of what we need to do. It’s an outrageously short fuse request but do your best.”

Let’s test your skills and ability. What functions would appear on your list?

Close the magazine, take out a sheet of paper, and jot down your requirements. What features would you need and why?

Here’s an example

Mobile access – Half of America’s workforce sometimes works away from the office. Smart phones have surpassed PCs for connecting to networks. More people Tweet from their phones than from their computers. If we don’t have mobile capabilities, we’ll lose more than half of our audience.

Jot down what you need. Turn to page ____ to check your list against the nine features on our wish list.

EDITOR.* This answers section goes on a page further back in the book.

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Requirements for in-house social learning network

Profiles – for locating and contacting people with the right skills and background. Profile should contain photo, position, location, email address, expertise (tagged so it’s searchable). IBM’s Blue Pages profiles include how to reach you (noting whether you’re online now), reporting chain (boss, boss’s boss, etc.), link to your blog and bookmarks, people in your network, links to documents you frequently share, members of your network.

Activity stream – for monitoring the organizational pulse in real time, sharing what you’re doing, being referred to useful information, asking for help, accelerating the flow of news and information, and keeping up with change.

Wikis – for writing collaboratively, eliminating multiple versions of documents and email, keeping information out in the open, eliminating unnecessary email, and sharing responsibility for updates and error correction.

Virtual meetings – to make it easy to meet online. Minimum feature set: shared screen, shared white board, text chat, video of participants, ability to record. Bonus features: persistent meeting room (your office online), avatars.

Blogs – for narrating work, maintaining your digital reputation, recording accomplishments, documenting expert knowledge, showing people what you’re up to so they can help out.

Bookmarks – to facilitate searching for links to information, discovering what sources other people are following, tracking down experts.

Mobile access – Half of America’s workforce sometimes works away from the office. Smart phones have surpassed PCs for connecting to networks. Phones post most Tweets than computers. Google designs its apps for mobile before porting them to PCs.

Social network – for online conversation, connecting with people, and all of the above functions.

Search - for locating needles in haystacks.

* Note: This is the version of the article I submitted to CLO under the title H0w Will You Take Advantage of Your In-House Social Network? The article that appears in the magazine was edited by CLO editors. The edited version is always close but rarely the same as what I send in.

#itashare

(The American Heritage Dictionary)

This post continues an ongoing conversation about The Coherent Organization. While I’ll focus on interchanges among Harold Jarche, Clark Quinn, and myself, as with everything at the Internet Time Alliance, the discussion bears the fingerprints of Charles Jennings, Jane Hart, and Paul Simbeck-Hampson as well.

The lead article in the current issue of Chief Learning Officer is Building a Performance Ecosystem by Clark Quinn.  The article describes The Coherent Organization, the Internet Time Alliance‘s shorthand for a company where individuals are aligned with the organizational mission and information flows from outside in and back again in ways that accelerate work.

The underlying concept is that organizations and their people are members of many different types of networks, for example, communities of practice, the company social network, and close-knit collaborative work teams. You need to optimize participation in all of them. Harold Jarche and I hit on this in the midst of a social learning implementation project for a big financial services firm last year.

There’s nothing new under the sun. Harold’s schema drew on and expanded the work of our friend Lilia Efimova:

Harold applied Lilia’s concepts to a corporate network environment:

As Clark pointed out, “The benefits are clear: when folks have maximal information about what they’re expected to do, and minimal barriers to achieve their goals, the organization succeeds.”

At midyear, Harold, Clark, and I built on one another’s thoughts in public. Harold made a key addition: Work teams collaborate; learning networks cooperate; communities of practice do both.

The three of us believe that learning is work and work is learning. In his next post, Harold wrote that “All three of these structures are united by networked and social learning. These are necessary to not only do the work but to prepare for the work to be done: emergent practices.”

Yesterday Clark wrote about detailing the Coherent Organization. He’d populated our network clouds:

Clark then brought like items together and classified them by activity to produce this matrix:

Expanding on the model

Instead of talking about an organization, shouldn’t we really be talking about the Coherent Extended Enterprise? Everyone in the organization’s ecosystem needs to be on the same wavelength. The only way to do that in a world of constant change is through co-learning. Work and learning are converging, as we’ve said, but the workforce now includes lots of people who are not employees. They’re partners, distributors, suppliers, contractors, etc. This is the group we should focus on:

The concept of the value chain taught us that value and costs generated by suppliers and distributors are passed along to customers. Since learning improves performance, it’s in your interest to help everyone in the chain learn to work smarter. Most chief learning officers will tell you “This is not my department.” Pity.

Secret sauce

Businesses have been trying to promote passion in the workplace while keeping other emotions at bay. Denying people their emotions is de-humanizing. We have to start treating people like people. Emotion-driven business is the new frontier. That is why I want to shoehorn another network into Clark’s matrix for The Coherent Organization: the Personal Network.

More and more of my work involves making introductions. Sometimes a project consists of completing the dots and making the connections. For me, work/life balance is a fiction. Without my personal network, I’d cease to function.

Your personal network is where you shape your aspirations, validate what’s important to you, and let your emotions play out.

This will put a lot more boxes on Clark’s matrix but that’s a topic for next time.

Please add your two cents worth.

#itashare

CLO, October 2012

“When I was 5 years old my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy.’ They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.”  John Lennon

Humans are driven by their emotions. We make most decisions subconsciously, in the emotional brain. That’s the massive parallel processor that has evolved over millions of years and fills most of our skulls. The prefrontal cortex, the more recently developed logic processor, puts things into words and puts a positive spin on our gut feelings.

“If you threw a rock skyward,” says neuropsychologist Michael Gazzaniga, “and embrued it with consciousness at the top of its flight, its prefrontal cortex would have an explanation for why it fell back to earth before it hit the ground.” We deceive ourselves into thinking we’re rational.

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics for inventing Behavioral Economics. Kahneman pointed out that the so-called rational economic man had no clothes. Classical economics was based on a mythical creature who was all logic and no feelings. Such people do not exist.

Business tradition asks workers to leave their emotions at home. “This is business,” said the Godfather, meaning that feelings have nothing to do with it. This is absurd, a denial of our humanity. Managers wring their hands that half of the American workforce is not engaged. Is this not an emotional issue? Why should workers leave their feelings behind when they arrive at the office? Don’t we want them to be passionate about their work?

Sigmund Freud started a tradition that haunts the field of psychology to this day. He focused on making deranged people well. The Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, the shrinks’ basic text, has thousands of lines on anxiety depression and not a single line about compassion, forgiveness, or love.

Immanent psychiatrist George Vailliant says, “As a psychoanalyst, I’m paid to help you focus on your resentments and help you to find fault with your parents. And secondly, to get you to focus on your ‘poor-me’s’ and to use up Kleenex as fast as possible.”

The University of Pennsylvania’s Marty Seligman started turning the situation around in 1998. As president of the American Psychological Association, he urged psychologists to “turn toward understanding and building the human strengths to complement our emphasis on healing damage.” In other words, instead of making sick people okay, let’s help okay people feel great.

Money can’t buy happiness. Happiness results from how you feel about things, not how things really are. Harvard’s Daniel Gilbert asks you imagine two people. One wins $58 million in the lottery; the other loses the loss of his legs in a car accident. A year later, they’re just as happy or sad as before their big events.

A meta-study of 225 studies on the effect of happiness in the workplace found that happy employees are 31% more productive, sell 37% more, and are three times as creative as their run-of-the-mill peers. Happiness is a bottom line issue. Don’t believe it? Look at the January issue of Harvard Business Review. Aside from hiring happy people, what can you do to take advantage of this?

Our brains are plastic. No, not polystyrene. You can rewire your brain.

A researcher asked harried office workers to do at least one of five brief exercises over the course of three weeks. Four months later, these workers remained more happy, optimistic, and satisfied with their lives. Happiness had become a habit.

I have been following all five of the routines for the past month. My outlook’s more positive. I am certainly happier. I smile more.

A sample of one doesn’t prove anything, but you may want to give this a shot. Here is my daily routine:

• Jot down 3 things I am grateful for.
• Email a positive message to someone.
• Meditate for 2 minutes.
• Exercise for 10 minutes.
• Take 2 minutes to describe my most meaningful experience of the past 24 hours.

Give it a shot. What have you got to lose?

If it works for you, spread the gospel. Happiness is contagious. What’s more, you’ll never find an easier way to boost productivity by 31%.

Want to know more? Google your way over to Authentic Happiness. That’s Marty Seligman’s site. It’s a great place to begin your journey to happiness.

Related:
My curated feed of articles on happiness and well-being
Well-being in Business

#itashare

Fourth post in a series. In case you missed them, here are the first, second, and third posts.

Is your organization ready?

How ready are you to tackle Big L Learning? Where does your organization fit on the progression from Hierarchical Organization to Collaborative Organization?

You can take this survey online. We’ll report the aggregate results in a couple of weeks.

Our employees can access the entire Internet from their desktops.  ☐ yes  ☐ no

Our people are learning and growing fast enough to keep up with the future.  ☐ yes  ☐ no

Anyone can set up an online meeting at our company.  ☐ yes  ☐ no

We take time to reflect on our experience.  ☐ yes  ☐ no

We distribute information through podcasts, blogs, or videos.  ☐ yes  ☐ no

It’s easy to contribute to a blog or wiki.  ☐ yes  ☐ no

My team talks about the trends that drive our business.  ☐ yes  ☐ no

Relationships between departments are collaborative and effective.  ☐ yes  ☐ no

We learn something from every interaction with a customer.  ☐ yes  ☐ no

If you checked fewer than five ”yes” boxes, your organization is trailing the mainstream.

Benefits 

Assessing the cost/benefit of experiential learning is like asking for a cost/benefit of your telephone connections. You can’t live without it. As one pundit put it, “The ROI of social networking is being in business a few years from now.”

Among the potential benefits of providing a world-class learning function to workers and throughout the extended enterprise are:

• Better, more knowledgable customer service
• Faster response time
• Higher morale
• Reduced turnover
• More flexibility
• More effective supply chain
• Bottom-up innovation
• Collective intelligence
• Build upon one another’s expertise
• Recruit superior candidates

Your CFO will point out that these are intangibles. She’s right. But most of the value of companies is intangible. In the two decades of the 20th century, the value of the S&P 500 companies flipped from 80% tangibles to 80% intangibles.

Stock price reflects the value investors put on know-how, brand, track record, and the likelihood that the company will continue to create value in the future. All of these depend on the quality of the workforce and its relationships, and those in turn depend on people’s ability to learn and grow.

SUMMARY

To keep things simple, we began by dividing the world into two types of businesses. We call industrial-age (old school) companies
Hierarchical and network-era (2012) companies Collaborative.

1. Control in Hierarchical companies resides at the top. Orders and instructions are pushed down through the organization.
Hierarchical organizations train employees. Hierarchical organizations micromanage: they tell people what to learn.
2. Control in Collaborative companies is distributed throughout the organization. Workers and supervisors have a large say
in what they do. Collaborative organizations help everyone in the extended enterprise learn: contractors, temps, partners, consultants — and customers.

Collaborative organizations give managers and workers the freedom to choose how they learn to do the work. This experiential learning is deeper and more long-lasting than classes.

What if our company has shifted from Hierarchical to Collaborative? Learning would become everyone’s business. We looked at likely changes. We asked what would give us the biggest bang in a Collaborative Organization if we didn’t even have a training department.

A good way to assess the adequacy of the technology you’re going to rely on is to look at capabilities on the consumer web. Facebook
has taught hundreds of millions of people about social networking. Ask net-savvy younger workers how they would like to learn new
skills, and they bring will up the features they enjoy outside of work.

It’s not just about the technology, so we examined also some of the human aspects of implementation, including the rationale for different sorts of social networks.

That concludes this series of posts. Here are the four posts:

White paper      |      Slideshare

Hats off to Citrix for sponsoring this research.

#itashare

Some people think their credit card information and Amazon preferences are stored a mile overhead in a cumulus cloud. It’s not that mysterious.

Just think of the cloud as a humongous computer that is connected to endless warehouses of rack-mounted servers spread around the globe. Is it safe? Like walking across the street in Manhattan, it’s perfectly safe if you know what you are doing. You don’t need to see inside the cloud. All that’s required is faith when you put things in, they will emerge where and how you want them to.

Four years ago at the Expo 2.0 conference, I was among those asked “What is cloud computing?”

“At the Web 2.0 Expo, we asked Tim O’Reilly, Dan Farber, Matt Mullenweg, Jay Cross, Brian Solis, Kevin Marks, Steve Gillmor, Jeremy Tanner, Maggie Fox, Tom McGovern, Sam Lawrence, Stowe Boyd, David Tebbutt, Dave McClure, Chris Carfi, Vamshi Krishna and Rod Boothby the same question: What is Cloud Computing?“

Looking back, things haven’t changed. Millions of words later, the cloud is what it always was.

To my amazement, 332,156 people have watched the video.

My broadest exposure on the net is a minute-long comment I made four years ago.

#itashare

Ironically, Newton borrowed that phrase from 12th century theologian John of Salisbury who wrote, in 1159:

“We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants. We see more, and things that are more distant, than they did, not because our sight is superior or because we are taller than they, but because they raise us up, and by their great stature add to ours.”

John of Salisbury may gotten the thought from the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes:

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun

That’s the way culture advances. We build on the ideas of people who came before us. Restricting the flow of ideas stifles innovation.

Personally, I take it as a compliment when someone applauds or extends one of my ideas.

But there are limits. Some people seem to think that anything posted on the internet is theirs for the taking without acknowledgement, sometimes even claiming authorship. This is akin to assuming it’s okay to take a bicycle if it’s not locked. Either way, it’s theft.

Wikipedia: Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the “wrongful appropriation,” “close imitation,” or “purloining and publication” of another author’s “language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions,” and the representation of them as one’s own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous boundaries.

Nebulous? You bet. Wikipedia again: Playwright Wilson Mizner said “If you copy from one author, it’s plagiarism. If you copy from two, it’s research.”^[69]

This morning I looked at a presentation on SlideShare by the head of learning of an Irish insurance company. Eight of the 33 slides were copied from a colleague’s presentation deck without attribution. Another slide credits me but gets the numbers wrong and attributes the idea to Time Magazine instead of Internet Time Group.

One slide re-labels Charles Jenning’s examples of 70:20:10 as 50:20:30 — I guess the presenter couldn’t believe that formal learning had such little impact. Another slide quotes a Nobel Laureate but fails to acknowledge that the quote was borrowed from Charles’ presentation. The Irish presentation had been rekeyed. Hint: keying someone’s material into your presentation doesn’t make it yours.

It gets worse. Clark Quinn and I found an entire white paper we’d co-authored on an international university’s site. It reappeared word for word — except for our names, which were nowhere to be found. It looked as if the university had written it. When we called them on it, their first defense was that they had found it on the web and couldn’t remember where. I demanded an apology; the university said it was not at fault. I gave them a choice: I would out them as brazen intellectual property thieves or they would take down the article immediately. They chose the latter.

Last month an LMS vendor borrowed 200 words from my site without attribution. They told me it was a mistake. The post now acknowledges *research authored and compiled by Jay Cross at:http://www.informl.com/where-did-the-80-come-from/. I once found a book, not a very good one, that had printed 30 pages from my site without permission! These are not isolated instances.

Everything I write online is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License. That means you’re welcome to take it but must tell people where it came from and if you plan to make money on it, let’s figure out how much you’re going to share with me.

More than sixty people have asked permission to reuse things I’ve written, very polite of them, and I have yet to say no.

Plagiarism is like obscenity: you know it when you see it.

I have generally let this petty-thievery slide. Moaning about it is not worth the trouble. Furthermore, I don’t want reward some petty scofflaw’s site with more traffic.

When a plagiarist does get under my skin in the future, I’m going to send them a copy of this post.  If they choose not to pay an honorarium for profiting from my work, I will make their transgressions public, pointing to my original work and their copy.  I don’t mean to threaten.

It’s like Dirty Harry* said:

I know what you’re thinking. “Did he fire six shots or only five?” Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?

#itashare

_____________________

*Dirty Harry, Columbia Pictures, 1971

Third post in a series. In case you missed it, here are the first and second.

INFRASTRUCTURE
Technological infrastructure for social learning

Work and learning are converging, and as this change happens, the infrastructure of the old corporate learning must go – things like traditional one-size-fit-all in-person training seminars. In its place enters social and informal learning hubs like on-demand content, live online discussions, wikis and forums, and searchable content archives. The great news is that social and informal learning don’t require new systems because learning can take place on the same “platform” as the existing social network, if a company already has one.

The primary thing to bear in mind, says MIT’s Andy McAfee (McAfee), is INATT. That’s short for a phrase that kept coming up in conversation when he was writing Enterprise 2.0. It’s short for “It’s Not About The Technology.” People come first.

But you can’t do without the technology either. Social networks are the ideal platform for the new corporate learning, so let’s briefly examine how they support corporate learning.

Social computing

Early personal computing was based on corporate computing. Conventions like ASCII, programming languages, Internet protocol, and encryption were developed for corporate mainframe computers and only later adopted for personal computers. That situation has flip-flopped. Innovations in applications and user-interface design are born on the consumer side and migrate to the enterprise.

Forbes named Salesforce.com the world’s most innovative company. Where did that innovation come from? Salesforce.com says cloud-based Customer Relationship Management application borrowed heavily from Amazon. Salesforce.com’s social network application was inspired by Facebook. Salesforce.com’s Chatter began its life as in-house Twitter. As the web turns social, Salesforce.com has changed its mission to “leading the shift to the Social Enterprise,” and that’s where it’s proving its forward-thinking nature.

So how do you find the right social platform to enhance your corporate training program? When an organization is improving its workscape, looking at consumer applications is a good way to think about what’s required in the corporate space. Ask net-savvy younger workers how they would like to learn new skills, and they bring up the features they enjoy outside of work:

• A personal profile so I can share information with my connections
• A personalized experience and recommendations, like Amazon
• Connections to friends and colleagues, like Facebook and LinkedIn
• Activity streams, like Twitter, so I know what’s going on and what people are talking about
• Face-to-face interaction and desktop sharing through video conferencing
• Multiple access options, like a bank that offers access by ATM, the Web, phone, or human tellers
• A diverse learning library, made up of videos, FAQs and links to relevant information
• Single sign-on access, like using my LinkedIn profile to access other programs
• Choosing and subscribing to streams of information I’m interested in
• Provide a single, simple, all-in-one interface, like that provided by Google
• Make it easy to share photos and video, as on Flickr and YouTube
• Leverage “the wisdom of crowds,” by allowing me to pose a question to my connections
• Enable users to rate content that they liked the most or found the most helpful

Minimum viable workscape

What we’re talking about is a social work hub where every employee and external partner can come to collaborate, share information, get information and provide updates and ask questions. When it comes time to build your new collaborative and social learning center, some of those consumer applications are simple to replicate in-house. Others are not. You probably can’t afford, and definitely don’t need, to create your own Facebook or Google behind your firewall. There are lots of applications you can implement at reasonable cost. Be skeptical if your collaborative infrastructure doesn’t include these minimal functions:

Profiles – so each employee can personally connect to the network. Profile should contain photo, position, location, email address, expertise (tagged so it’s searchable). Nice-to-haves include how to reach you (noting whether you’re online now), reporting chain (boss, boss’s boss, etc.), link to your blog and bookmarks, people in your network, links to documents you frequently share, members of your network.

Workspaces – to break up the organization’s activity into relevant, digestible feeds for each individual and feeds. Workspaces are networks within the organization that are created by employees to gather a team or group in a specific area. For example, new hires that are brought on at the same time, may create a workspace where they can ask each other questions and share information that they find out.

Activity stream – for monitoring the organization pulse in real time, sharing what you’re doing, being referred to useful information, asking for help, accelerating the flow of news and information, and keeping up with change. Activity streams should be available for the company at large and for workspaces.

Wikis or notes – for writing collaboratively, eliminating multiple versions of documents, sharing information with a relevant group, eliminating unnecessary email, and sharing responsibility for updates and error correction.

Integrated virtual meetings – to make it easy to meet online, because there needs to be room in your learning program for group discussion and application. Minimum feature set: shared screen, text chat, video conferencing streams.

Mobile access – Half of America’s workforce works away from the office at least sometimes. Smart phones are surpassing PCs for connecting to networks for access and participation. People post more Tweets via phone than via computers. Google designs its apps for mobile before porting them to PCs. What does all of this mean? Your new social workscape needs to be mobile so people can collaborate from anywhere.

Putting a learning platform in place

When it’s time to put a learning platform in place, it’s a good idea to make a company wide commitment to your new philosophy on learning. Here’s an example from a company I recently worked with:

• We are open and transparent
• We narrate our work. Need to share.
• We offer live and on-demand training content as a part of continuous learning
• We value conversation as a learning vehicle
• We make our work accessible to others
• We are a vanguard of change within the company
• Our bottom line is business success
• We know learning is work; work is learning
• We are a learning organization
• We value time for self-development and reflection
• We recognize that reflection is a key to learning

Changing behavior requires continual reinforcement, so be ready to tackle the concern and resistance that some people may have toward becoming a more collaborative organization.

A great way to embrace your new collaborative nature while helping people adapt to it, is to host all-hands virtual meetings to share your process toward becoming a collaborative organization. Make your employees a part of the evolution; keep them in the loop.

Learning Networks

Networks are not only the environment of learning; they’re also the place where problems are solved, discoveries are made, and new knowledge is created.

This way of looking at learning platforms builds on
the work of Harold Jarche and the Internet Time Alliance.

Workers are members of multiple, interconnected networks.

Everyone has personal face-to-face networks: the friends, neighbors, colleagues, and acquaintances we talk with. Most people have electronic personal networks, too: Facebook, discussions groups, and a variety of followers and followed comrades. We rely on our networks to help us learn what’s going on in our worlds. The collaborative organization may replicate those personal connections through social work platforms with customizable workspaces. Each workspace is for a group of connected people – teams, departments, project contributors, and so on.

Communities are networks of people who share common interests and identify themselves as cohorts. A community may be a group of professionals (e.g. chefs or chip designers) or people with shared passions (e.g. model railroaders and cyclists) or co-workers from different work teams (e.g. the United Way Committee or neighborhood watch). Communities share knowledge (“Here’s a great recipe for crayfish with foie gras”), help one another (“There’s an opening for a sous-chef at the Fish Trap in Key West”), validate best practices (“Use coddled eggs in Caesar salad to avoid salmonella”), and develop apprentices into professionals (“My salad chef is ready to become a pastry chef”). Communities can exist internally (the United Way Committee) or externally (the chefs). Innovation in Silicon Valley is enhanced when competitors share trade secrets because allegiance to their professional community (“We’re chip designers”) is strong than to their employer (“I work for AMD.”)

Many companies enable workers to establish a personal node in the company’s social platform. This is where your individual profile enables people to find you, know what your good at, and share things you may be interested in. Many workers narrate their work on individual blogs. Transparency builds trust.

Most information work is carried out by project teams. When team members are unable to meet in the same physical space, they rely on networks to collaborate on getting projects done. Team members who work together, learn together. In time, team members develop strong social ties, trust emerges, and they co-create new knowledge and innovation. Experience is the best teacher and work teams are where it happens.

Project Teams have a job to do; communities come together to cooperate and share for the good of the group. Project teams inevitably need to acquire knowledge from outside their small circle. Their individual members are often members of several communities, which they tap for knowledge and guidance. A smart organization supports its internal teams and encourages its people to take part in external teams.

Many progressive companies have set up social work platforms that connect all employees to an activity feed that lists activities and pointers from all over the company. Social workspaces are the ultimate silo busters, enabling everyone to be on the same page, accelerating the organization’s cycle time, and letting “the company know what the company knows.”

A Note About Internet Access

Many companies signal their lack of trust in their employees by denying them access to the greatest assembly of knowledge in the history of humanity, the Internet. To be consistent, they should probably take away their telephones (They might make long distance calls to China!) and pencils (They might waste time playing tic-tac-toe). Bad apples are going to do bad things with or without the Internet, but by hoarding access to the web, you’re not only punishing your good apples, but also hindering their ability to learn.

For many people today, working without the net is equivalent to working blindfolded. When companies deny access to the net, employees route around them with smartphones and tablets that bypass corporate IT. The price of criminalizing access to the net is lower morale, the message that it’s okay to break rules (wink, wink), and to give up on hiring the best and the brightest (who will work somewhere they are trusted to act like responsible citizens). Companies should encourage workers to connect to the outside world, for that’s where the customers are.

The Internet is an essential library of information for today’s workforce. David Weinberger points out that the web has changed the nature of knowledge itself. Knowledge that was once limited to what you could print on a page is now connected to all manner of evidence, counter-claims, elaboration, and interpretations.

The basic idea is that the properties of knowledge that we’ve taken for granted at least in the West for, oh, 2,500 years are not actually properties of knowledge. They’re properties of knowledge when its medium is paper. And when you remove the paper and put things online, it takes on the properties of its new medium—of the Internet. Importantly, knowledge in a network includes differences and disagreements in a way that traditional knowledge is uncomfortable with. Everything is unsettled, everything is argued about, and very few things are ever totally resolved on the Net.

There’s a word for companies that deny workers access to the riches of the Internet. That word is stupid.

The next post in this series will address readiness for and benefits of collaborative learning.

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It’s all to0 easy to mistakenly think of formal learning as the antiquated, primitive way of doing things, something an organization shucks off as it becomes enlightened and gives its people the autonomy to work on their own. The notion of stages suggests that a corporation hops from one stage to the next, abandoning past approaches as it advances.

What really happens is that one innovation is built on top of what’s gone before. Just as bicycles did not eliminate walking and cars did not do away with automobiles, informal learning doesn’t snuff out formal learning. That’s why models like 80/20 and 70:20:10 retain the 20 and the 10.

Think of it this way. Most organizations begin life with classroom learning and experiential learning:

As organizations mature, they take advantage of other methods of formal delivery, for example eLearning. Often this gives the worker more say-so about when to attend and sometimes whether to take part at all. They also improve the effectiveness of experiential learning by enlisting managers as coaches who give stretch assignments to develop their people and by developing practices that nurture self-directed learning.

Take a core sample of overall learning and you still find classroom training for newbies, compliance, and technical subjects. As the organization progresses, it adds more layers to the mix of learning going on. The newer approaches often diminish the importance of the lower layers but does not eliminate them.

Bear in mind that all learning is part informal/part formal and part social/part solo. These diagrams are conceptual, not derived from actual measurements.

The ultimate stage is the convergence of work and learning. As Jane points out, you don’t get this far just unless the organization has become a social business. Check her list of learning practices (the right column). Jane describes both the way people learn and the way the business functions; the two are inseparable.

Be careful not to confuse the progression of learning for the organization with the progression of learning for the individual:

Typically, the individual does phase out of most formal learning over time. Been there, done that, moving on.

Bonus question: Where would you place your organization in the progression to the convergence of work and learning?

PEOPLE
Who’s going to be involved?
Every Kind of Employee – Temps Included

In the Hierarchical organization, employees were the only people who received corporate training. Aside from compliance training and new product introductions, most training focused on novices – either newhires who needed orientation or workers mastering a new skill or subject.

It’s not that seasoned and elder employees weren’t learning; we all learn all the time. Rather, they weren’t learning as well as they might. HR and training departments overlooked experienced employees because they learn experientially, from stretch assignments and mentors rather than from courses and workshops. Learning by experienced employees was left to chance.

Two out of three Chief Learning Officers neglect experienced employees, but these are the very people who make money for the company. New hires and novices aren’t very productive. Raise their proficiency by 20 percent and next to nothing hits the bottom line. Raising the proficiency of top performers by 20 percent can double the bottom line. A wise Collaborative organization focuses its efforts where they’ll have the most impact.

Pre-employees and alumni

Talent managers advocate pre-employment training and internships. As an example, they encourage college students with an interest in banking to participate in bank training and perhaps work at the bank during summer break to see if they enjoy it. The bank gains a leg up in recruiting and knows more about job candidates before making an offer. On the other hand, many former employees remain loyal to their firms, and sometimes even provide leads for new business. Andersen Consulting, IBM, and Goldman Sachs pay attention to so called “offboarding” as well as onboarding. They have set up social networks for alumni and help them keep up with new developments. Many alumni are future customers.

The Extended Enterprise

We need to start thinking of businesses as extended enterprises, especially when it comes to learning, because really, each business includes distributors, suppliers, temps, partners, contractors, and, importantly, customers as well, all in addition to employees.

Michael Porter’s concept of the value chain taught us that the values and costs generated by your suppliers and distributors are passed along to your customers. Since learning improves performance, it’s in your interest to help these people learn to do better work. Customers and prospects

“An educated customer is the best customer,” said retailer Sy Sims. Colearning with customers may be learning’s new frontier. Google is teaching people to use more of its services in online courses. Google could have produced a slick, buttoned-down, tech-oriented training program, like they did for Google Wave, but this time around, Google chose a friendly, avuncular fellow to lead you through the ondemand session. He’s not a salesperson; he’s a research scientist, a true-blue Googler! He gives encouragement: you’re on the path to being a Power Searcher! He’s casual, very approachable and looks like he’s talking to you from his living room. He stumbles occasionally. He comes across as authentic, the type of guy you’d enjoy talking to at a bar.

By doing this, Google is building customer loyalty. Co-learning builds trust. As other companies realize the potential of learning as a marketing tool, we’re going to see a lot more programs like this.

Help your customers become better at serving their own needs. Beyond that, learning with one another forges of trust and goodwill. Co-learning – adapting to the future – with customers is an unexploited marketing strategy.

Who should control learning?

People are at their best when they’re doing things for themselves, when they “pull” what they need rather than have things “pushed” on them.

Hierarchies work well when the future is predictable and things aren’t prone to change. The objective in a stable situation is to get better at what you’re currently doing. Organizations develop programs, training among them, that promote conformity.

Collaborative organizations outpace hierarchies when the future is unpredictable and change is rampant. The objective in a dynamic situation is to get better at whatever comes along. Wise organizations develop platforms with standard interfaces to maintain flexibility and spark innovation. These organizations give workers a say in what they learn and how they learn it. They provide a variety of means of for workers to get the information they need. Instead of rigid training sessions, the organization supplies a platform that nurtures self-directed learning.

Companies accomplish the transition from Hierarchy to Collaborative by handing over more control to those that are closest to the customer. This may seem radical, and change can be unsettling, but this is a key to becoming a Collaborative organization.

How self-directed learners learn

When given the choice most workers prefer to learn from experience. Experiential learning takes place in the course of trying to accomplish something, often by mimicking what other people do, by trial and error, and by asking colleagues and experts; this means experiential learning is often informal learning, done outside of the classroom. Mentors and coaches give assignments that provide new challenges and therefore require learning.

Conversation is the most important learning technology ever invented. People love to talk with each other. Conversations have magic to them. Look at a written transcript of a conversation and it sounds incoherent; true conversation is a mix of empathy, emotion, body language, shared understanding, nuance, and cultural norms. Conversations are the stem cells of learning. Improve the availability and quality of conversation, and you automatically improve the amount of learning taking place.

A survey last year asked managers how they learned their jobs. Informal chats with colleagues ranked #1, followed by Internet search, and trial and error. Workers value social learning (collaboration, networking, and conversations) and informal learning (community membership, Internet search, blogs, curated content, and self-study). Both social and informal are deemed more important by employees than company documents and training.

Jane Hart offers great advice on how to design a learning ecology to match the way contemporary workers learn. It’s no longer about delivering courses in training rooms.

Here are some tips from Jane on this subject.

• Think activities, not courses.
• Think learning space/places, not training rooms.
• Think lightweight design, not instructional design.
• Think continuous flow of activities, not just respond to need.
• Think social technologies, not training technologies.

Generations

Digital Natives are the generation that grew up glued to computer screens. For them, networks and technology are second nature. Stanford psychologist Phil Zimbardo says that by the time the average boy reaches the age of 21, he has spent at least 10,000 hours playing video games. This alternative reality rewires their brains. They’re accustomed to living in a highly stimulating environment where they are in control. Their world is made up of decision making, researching and collaborating all at the click of a button, anytime, anywhere, so they won’t put up with traditional training which says what they will learn and when. If Digital Natives aren’t allowed to act, they will refuse to play the game.

Digital Immigrants are those who grew up before interactive computing took hold. Some are in denial, trying to get by without going digital; they will become fossils. Elders who do want to join the Network Era have an opportunity to barter with the Digital Natives, something called reversementoring. Immigrants swap their organizational savvy and deep smarts for the Natives’ help in using technology.

The learnscape, that overall platform on which learning takes place, must accommodate both Natives and Immigrants. It must be easy to access and understand. It must let people take control of their learning and participate actively.

The next post in this series will address how to build an infrastructure to optimize collaborative learning.

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