So you’re now a social business?

You are engaging with social media for marketing and customer support. You have also put in place a social intranet, with activity streams for sharing information, collaboration tools for work teams and document management systems that include social tags and easy sharing. Now the hard work begins. However, this usually occurs just after the software vendors have provided the initial training and you are now on your own as an organization. You’re ready to be a social business; everyone is connected, but few know what to do. Read more →

What if your organization got rid of the Learning & Development function? What would the average manager or department head do? What would workers do?

I’ve been thinking about this for a while. When work is learning, and learning is the work, training that is pushed from outside has less relevance. The L&D department is supposed to ensure that training is appropriate for the job, but with jobs constantly morphing into something else, a major disconnect is developing between the doers and the trainers. How many people take courses that are not relevant to their current work or are provided at the wrong time? Read more →

I had the pleasure of writing an article for the book,Enabling Innovation: Innovative Capability – German and International Views as a follow-up to some work I did with the EU’s International Monitoring Organisation. An interesting aspect of this book is that major articles are written by German researchers and then shorter comments or additions are presented from an international perspective. My article was in response to a weighty paper by Sibylle Peters, entitled, New Forms of Project Organisation and Project Management – Dynamic and Open. Read more →

We can learn a lot from open conversations with trusted colleagues who want to improve their professional expertise. My colleagues have these conversations regularly and I have learned a lot over the past two years that we’ve been together.

A professional is anyone who does work that cannot be standardized easily and who continuously welcomes challenges at the cutting edge of his or her expertise. ~ David Shaffer Read more →

I see three major principles for working smarter in networked organizations:

1. Transparency
2. Narration of Work
3. Distribution of Power Read more →

There was a most interesting thread on Twitter today. Bert van Lamoen (@transarchitect) in a series of tweets, said [paraphrasing several]: “Senge’s five disciplines provided instant utility for learning to organizations in 1990, yet learning organizations remain rare to this day. Hierarchy kills all learning. Our social systems are not designed to cope with complexity. Organizational learning is fundamental change. Today’s organization is not fit for organizational learning. Therefore, we need total redesign. Social and transformational architecture encompasses complexity and emergent change.” Read more →

Can your organization work without bosses? In the documentary, Ban the Boss (one hour BBC video) Paul Thomas shows that most organizations can run just fine without bosses, or at least without traditional, hierarchical bosses who tell workers what to do. Read more →

Informal learning is not better than formal training; there is just a whole lot more of it. It’s 95% of workplace learning, according to the research behind this graphic, by Gary Wise. Read more →

More of my online sense-making is in connecting to people, not accessing information sources. For instance, I read a few journals but I have dropped several, knowing that other people in my network will find the interesting articles and let me know. I used to read many of the technology blogs, like TechCrunch and Read/Write Web but have dropped them from my feed reader and instead read posts that have been referred via Twitter, Google Plus or blog posts. Read more →

Curtis Ogden at The Interaction Institute for Social Change provides a very good summary of the differences between network-centric and hierarchy-centric thinking, called Network Thinking:

1. Adaptability instead of control
2. Emergence instead of predictability
3. Resilience and redundancy instead of rock stardom
4. Contributions before credentials
5. Diversity and divergence Read more →