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.

Social Media are New Languages

Social media can have a strong influence on the individual, very much in a McLuhanesque tetrad of media effects way. Those who come to social media for the first time are like adults learning a new language. They cannot start with the same advanced mental models and metaphors they may have in a primary language. Furthermore, once they get to an advanced level in this new language, its idioms, metaphors and culture may have changed how they think in that language. This is the real change process enabled by social business; people will start thinking differently.

Social media change the way we communicate. Write a blog for a year or more and your writing will change. Use Twitter for some time and get a sense of being connected to many people and understanding them on a different level. Patterns emerge over time. Even the ubiquitous Facebook changes how we react to being apart from friends. Social media change the way we think.

Each time we adopt a new social medium we start at the bottom, or at the single node level. We have to make connections with what will become our network, either by connecting to existing relationships or doing something that helps to create new relationships, like creating content for sharing. Starting over, in each medium, can be daunting, especially for someone in a position of authority who is concerned about image or influence.

But we need to actually use social media to understand what it’s like to be a node in a social network. There is little in the industrial workplace or public school system to prepare us for this. Therefore we won’t even know what we’re talking about until we learn the new language of social media and online networks, and the only way to learn a new language is through practice.

The Transparent Workplace

While people may say it’s not about the technology, that’s where a large share of the budget goes in any major change initiative. The bigger change to manage is getting people to work transparently. Transparency is a necessity for cooperation and collaboration in networks. A major benefit of using social media is increasing speed of access to knowledge. However, if the information is not shared by people, it will not be found.

In this newly transparent workplace, there is no place to hide, or as Mark Britz wrote, “Social Media spreads your culture quickly … for better or worse.” This change alone can be enough to cause massive organizational upheaval. It must be addressed by modelling good “Net Work” behaviours. Working smarter is not just about using technologies but changing our routines and procedures. With greater transparency, information now flows horizontally as well as vertically. New patterns and dynamics emerge from interconnected people and interlinked information flows, and these will bypass established structures and services.

With the democratization of information, user-generated content is ubiquitous. Search engines give each worker more information and knowledge than any CEO had 10 years ago. Pervasive connectivity changes organizational power structures, though the full effects of this take time to be visible. From this transparent environment new leaders and experts will emerge.  It will take different leadership, or leadership for networks, to support collaboration and social learning in the workplace.

Agile organizations need people who can work in concert on solving problems. People need to change how they work and all the knowledge and courses won’t help. Management must ask – “How can we help you work in this new transparent environment?” – and take action, not once, but continuously.

Setting the Example

In social networks we often learn from each other; modelling behaviours, telling stories, and sharing what we know. While not highly efficient, this can be very effective learning. There is a need to model the new behaviours of being transparent and narrating one’s work. There is also a need to share power, for how long will workers collaborate and share if they cannot take action with this new knowledge? Modelling the new behaviours will take time and trust.

Since all these social technologies cannot model the new work behaviours themselves, who will? The organization will, by fostering communities of practice. These can be bridges between work teams and open social networks, with narration of work an enabler of knowledge-sharing. One determinant of effective professional communities is whether they actually change practices. Only then will we know if the social business initiative has been successful.

Organizations adopting social business need to find people who can model the behaviours, not just talk about them. They should identify people who already narrate their work, share transparently and create user-generated content. Organizations should get advice from people who share power and do most of their work in networks. If there is nobody to model “Net Work” behaviours in the organization, how will people learn? From Facebook?

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?

Let me propose some things managers and knowledge workers can do without a Learning & Development department.

Observe how people are learning to do their work already. Find these natural pathways and reinforce them.

Connect any “how-to” learning to the actual task. Show and tell only works if it can be put into practice. The forgetting curve is steep when there is no practice.

Make it everyone’s job to share what they learn. Have you ever noticed how easy it is to find “how-to” videos and explanations on the Web? That’s because someone has taken the time to post them. Everyone in the organization should do this, whether it’s a short text, a photo, a post, an article, a presentation with notes, or a full-blown video.

Make space to talk about things and capture what is passed on. Get these conversations in the open where they can be shared. Provide time and space for reflection and reading. There is more knowledge outside any organization than inside.

Break down barriers. Establish transparency as the default mode, so that anyone can know what others are doing. Unblock communication bottlenecks, like supervisors who control information flow. If supervisors can’t handle an open environment, get rid of them, because they are impeding organizational learning and it’s now mission critical.

If you do have an L&D department, share what you are doing and perhaps they will help you become more self-sufficient for your organizational learning. If they don’t, ignore them, as they will be going away anyway.

 Source: http://www.jarche.com/2012/02/when-learning-is-the-work/

Abstract
The increasing structuring of work and organizational processes by forming project involves new challenges to the handling of knowledge work and expands the scope to generate innovations. The classic project management alone is less and less able to manage complex, uncertain, knowledge-based processes. Through alternative approaches social, actor-oriented topics of management will be adressed.

If all you want to read is my short article, then let me save you the $189.00 list price for this book.

—

Managing in Complexity

In New Forms of Project Organisation and Project Management – Dynamic and Opena key theme discussed is the lack of flexibility of traditional project management methods in dealing with complexity.

With increasing requirements for complex and creative work we need new models to get things done. Many of our practices are still premised on work being simple or complicated. Simple systems are easily knowable, whereas complicated systems, while not not simple, are still knowable through analysis. These can be easily managed. However, complex systems are not fully knowable though they can be partially understood through interaction with them. This is antithetical to many of the control protocols of traditional project management.

In the developed world, simple work is constantly getting automated (e.g. automatic bank tellers) while complicated work is outsourced to the cheapest labour market (e.g. off-shore call centres). If companies want to remain competitive in the global market, they need to focus on complex and creative work. Much of complex work is in exception-handling and when exceptions are the rule, rigid rules must become the exception.

We have to understand complex adaptive systems and develop work structures that let us focus our efforts on learning as we work in order to continuously develop next practices. In a knowledge-intensive and creative workplace the role of leadership becomes supportive and inspirational rather than directive. Artificial boundaries that limit collaboration and communication only serve to drag projects (and companies) down and create opportunities for more agile competitors.

While agile methods for project management are discussed in New Forms of Project Organisation and Project Management, an overall agile mindset is also required. This can be fostered in a culture of perpetual Beta. Perpetual Beta means we never get to the final release of our work and that our learning will never stop. Agile organisations realize they will never reach some future point where everything stabilizes and they don’t need to learn or do anything new.

In additional to a mindset of agility, workers need a skillset of autonomy. However, we are trained early in life to look to authority for direction in learning and work. The idea that there is a right answer or an expert with the right answer begins in our schools. Too often, the message from the workplace continues to be that good employees wait for their supervisor to tell them what to do. This is counter-productive in dealing with complexity and working in perpetual Beta. It destroys creativity.

When we move away from a “design it first, then build it” mindset, we can then engage everyone in critical and systems thinking. Workers in agile workplaces must be passionate, adaptive, innovative, and collaborative. Autonomy is the beginning.

Fostering autonomy and agility means that we talk about work differently. For example, dropping the notion of being paid for time is one way to start this change. An hourly wage implies that people are interchangeable, but no two minds are the same. Being paid for time fosters neither autonomy nor agility. There are many other human resource practices should be questioned and dropped, such as job competencies.

The new networked workplace requires collaboration and cooperation. Complex problems cannot be solved alone. Tacit knowledge flows in networks through social learning. Learner autonomy is a foundation for effective social learning. It is the lubricant for an agile organisation. Agility becomes a necessity as we deal with increasing complexity. In order to develop the necessary emergent practices to deal with complexity we therefore need to cultivate the diversity and autonomy of each worker. We also must foster richer and deeper connections which can be built through meaningful conversations. This is social learning in the workplace.

Even in project management, learning is the work.

One example of encouraging social learning is the government of British Columbia, Canada which developed an interactive intranet in order to foster collaboration and communication.

The success of a social intranet ultimately has less to do with technology than with planning, governing and managing change. Walsh [B.C.’s Manager of Creative Strategies] had these lessons to share.

Ditch perfectionism [perpetual Beta]

Communicate! Communicate! Communicate! [social learning]

Trust your team [Autonomy]

Not your government’s voice

As traditional core activities get automated or outsourced, almost all high value work will be done at the outer edge of organisations. At the fuzzy edge of the organisation life is complex and even chaotic. On this periphery, where things are less homogenous, there is more diversity and more opportunities for innovation. Individuals, project teams and organisations have to move operations to the edge to continue learning and developing. In agile organisations, a greater percentage of workers will be on the edge. The core will be managed by very few internal staff. What does this mean for project management? No matter what model one prefers, it will have to be more open, networked and cooperative.

Change and complexity are becoming the norm in our work. We already see this with increasing numbers of freelancers and contractors. Any work where complexity is not the norm will be of diminishing value.

Embracing complexity and chaos is where the future of work lies.

* Content from jarche.com is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License

Source: http://www.jarche.com/2012/02/enabling-innovation-book/

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

When we updated the Internet Time Alliance website last month, a major component that Paul designed was the integration of our best articles into a single database, called Insights. Every page now dynamically generates recommended readings and we keep adding articles, so that we now have over one hundred.

We have also just curated a number of our thoughts into a single presentation that shows our perspectives on workplace transformation. It’s like an extended business card from all of us.

1. Transparency
2. Narration of Work
3. Distribution of Power

I spoke about the distribution of power in my last post on the democratization of the workplace. The narration of one’s work is an essential practice that enables this. Hans de Zwart discusses a narrating-your-work experiment that had a 17 member team use Yammer to share daily experiences with colleagues. He talks about the barriers to narration as well as the perceived benefits of this two-month experiment.

His conclusions and recommendations:

• Don’t formalize narrating your work and don’t make it mandatory. Many people commented that this is one aspect that they didn’t like about the experiment.
• Focus on helping each other to turn narrating your work into a habit. I think it is important to set behavioural expectations about the amount of narrating that somebody does. I imagine a future in which it is considered out of the norm if you don’t share what you are up to. The formal documentation and stream of private emails that is the current output of most knowledge workers in virtual teams is not going to cut it going forward. We need to think about how we can move towards that culture.
• We should have both a private group for the intimate team (in which we can be ourselves as much as possible) as well as have a set of open topic based groups that we can share our work in. So if I want to post about an interesting meeting I had with some learning technology provider with a new product I should post that in a group about “Learning Innovation”. If have worked on a further rationalization of our learning portfolio I should post this in a group about the “Learning Application Portfolio” and so on.

The recommendation of both private and public narration components aligns with the need to support both strong and weak social ties. Covering the public/private spectrum can promote social learning, increase collaboration, and nurture an environment for cross-disciplinary innovation – and bridge the gap to working smarter.

Original Article: http://www.jarche.com/2012/01/narration-of-work/

In wither the learning organization, I linked to a paper on Why aren’t we all working for Learning Organisations? [PDF]. The authors, John Seddon and Brendan O’Donovan, open with a reference to W. Edwards Deming’s commentary on Peter Senge’s book,The Fifth Discipline (1990).

“Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers – a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars – and on up through the university.

On the job people, teams, and divisions are ranked, reward for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by Objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable.”

After explaining how double-loop learning gets managers to focus on the system and away from controlling people, the authors conclude:

Our argument is that Deming’s statements in his 1990 review of Senge’s work continue to hold true: it is the dominance of the command and control management thinking which, 20 years on, still prevails and prevents the development of more generative learning. It is only by studying an organisation as a system and creating double-loop learning that we might finally see Senge’s ‘learning organizations’ stop being the exceptional and instead become the norm.

Double-loop learning requires an understanding, and a constant questioning, of the governing variables and of course this is where learning abruptly comes up against command & control. Flattening the organization is one way to open communications and delegate responsibility, but asking employees to engage in real critical thinking[double-loop learning], and accepting the resulting actions, will not work unless there is a multi-way flow of power and authority. Critical thinking is not just thinking more deeply but also asking difficult and discomfiting questions. Without power and authority, these become meaningless.

The BetaCodex Network advocates first reducing hierarchy, and then making work independent of the formal structure, in order to increase the value creation structure. This makes sense, but who other than an enlightened CEO is going to make these changes? People like Semler are still outliers in the business world – “On his first day as CEO, Ricardo Semler fired sixty percent of all top managers.”

Image: mimiandeunice.com

According to Charles Green this is how large-scale change happens:

Ideas lead technology. Technology leads organizations. Organizations lead institutions. Then ideology brings up the rear, lagging all the rest—that’s when things really get set in concrete.

We have the ideas (and some examples) on the great work that needs to be done at the beginning of this century – create new organizational models that reflect (and actually capitalize on) our humanity. We also have technologies that enable and support collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and connecting on a human level. The major obstacles seem to be that there are not enough good examples and that these organizations are not influential enough to change the dominant business ideologies.

To spread these ideas may require more than just mavens, connectors and salespeople to reach a tipping point. We may also need to identify the “Doer”s inside more organizations and find ways to help them become double-loop learners. We should engage the trustworthy, those people with strong intimacy skills who get things done.

Perhaps we have been focused at the wrong level. I know that my most successful consulting engagements have not been at the very top, but with people who are doing the work. If we can create a mid-level groundswell, without giving up on finding enlightened executives, we may get somewhere.

Unless the dominant command & control management ideology is replaced, then most organizational change initiatives will just be tinkering at the edges. I can see why some people could become jaded over time with every successive new management system that still does not produce real change. The democratization of the workplace has been my guiding mission for the past decade. Democracy is the foundation upon which the likes of  Enterprise 2.0 or the Social Business need to build, in order to foster double-loop learning organizations that can thrive in complexity.

* Content from jarche.com is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License

Gwynn Dyer explained that historically, hierarchies were the result of a communications problem, in Why the Arabs can handle democracy.

A mass society, thousands, then millions strong, confers immense advantages on its members. Within a few thousand years, the little hunting-and-gathering groups were pushed out of the good lands everywhere. By the time the first anthropologists appeared to study them, they were on their last legs, and none now survive in their original form. But we know why the societies that replaced them were all tyrannies.

The mass societies had many more decisions to make, and no way of making them in the old, egalitarian way. Their huge numbers made any attempt at discussing the question as equals impossible, so the only ones that survived and flourished were the ones that became brutal hierarchies. Tyranny was the solution to what was essentially a communications problem.

We have been able to communicate with each other better and better for the past half century, and now with mobile communications we need even fewer intermediaries to get work done. Many bosses don’t have a clue what is actually happening at the front-end, as is clear in the BBC documentary, and as I wrote in network walking.

Bob Marshall alerted me, via Twitter, to this documentary that shows just how difficult it can be to change attitudes and beliefs about work. In this case, the obvious place to start a boss-purge was at the vehicle service bay, with nine skilled mechanics “supported by” eight managers. The workers wound up keeping one manager, but on their terms. Other departments were more difficult.

Could you imagine if workers were allowed to vote their bosses in and out? Well they can now in Blaenau Gwent, Wales; as they have been able to do at Semco SA for decades. Listen to Ricardo Semler explain how Semco organizes work and “staff determine when they need a leader, and then choose their own bosses in a process akin to courtship”.

Yes, there is a different, and better, way to get work done, with fewer managers. If all you have are general management and supervision skills, your work days may be numbered.

Further reading: Real organizational transformation is structural

* Content from jarche.com is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License

http://www.jarche.com/2012/01/a-world-without-bosses/

Since the latter half of the 20th century, we have gone through a period where training departments have been directed to control organizational learning. It was part of the Taylorist, industrial model that also compartmentalized work and ensured that only managers were allowed to make decisions. In this context, only training professionals were allowed to talk about learning. But formal training, usually in the guise of courses, is like a hammer that sees all problems as nails. Unfortunately, these nails only account for 5% of organizational learning.

A significant percentage of workplace learning professionals are solidly grounded in that 5% of workplace learning that is formal training. They know the systems approach to training (SAT), instructional systems design (ISD) and the ADDIE model (analysis, design, development, implementation, evaluation), among some less useful things like learning styles and Bloom’s taxonomy. There are plenty of hammer-wielders in corporate training departments, supported by an entire industry, including institutions and professional associations, all addressing that 5 percent.

Supporting informal learning at work is not as clear-cut as something like ISD. It requires tools, processes and methodologies from a variety of disciplines. There are methods from knowledge management, organizational development and human performance technology, for example, that are quite useful in supporting informal learning. The modern workplace is a complex adaptive system. There is no single approach that can be used all the time.

We  should not constrain our approach with a single methodological lens when looking at organizational performance. While all models are flawed, some may be useful, and any analysis requires an understanding of the situational context and then the selection of the most useful models. Today there is no agreed-upon informal learning design methodology. I doubt that a single one would be useful anyway.

An industrial age mindset would require a unified approach for informal learning, but the network age demands an acceptance of perpetual Beta. We have many methods and frameworks that can better inform us how to design work systems. When learning is the work, the support systems have to enable both. Integrating the best of what we know from multiple disciplines, in an evidence-based fashion, is the way to proceed and support complex, creative, collaborative work. Several of these next practices have been discussed here or amongst my colleagues.

To create real learning organizations, there is a choice. We can keep bolting on bits of informal learning to the formal training structure, or we can take a systemic approach and figure out how learning can be integrated into the workflow – 95% of the time.

* Content from jarche.com is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License

http://www.jarche.com/2012/01/informal-learning-the-95-solution/

The big shift for me in the past decade has been in weaving a network that brings me diversity of opinions and depth of knowledge. I am constantly following/unfollowing on Twitter in an attempt at optimal filtering, which is an impossible but worthwhile goal. I look for experts who share their knowledge or act as human-powered content aggregators, selecting quality information and discarding the crap. I look for people who have mastered Crap Detection 101.

Aron Solomon has noted that:

2012 will be a year where the value of information finally seeps into the public consciousness. The conversation will become about not only what we know but how we know that what we know is meaningful. We will shift from an orientation of quantity to one of quality. It’s not that we won’t use the Internet, it’s not that Google will disappear – of course not.

Knowledge in a networked society is different from what many of us grew up with in the pre-Internet days. While books and journal articles are useful in codifying what we have learnt, knowledge is becoming a negotiated  agreement amongst connected people. It’s also better shared than kept to ourselves, where it may wither and die. Like electricity, knowledge is both particles and current, or stock and flow.

The increasing importance of fluid knowledge requires a different perspective on how we think of it and use it. If change is constant, then the half-life of codified knowledge (stock) decreases. We see this with the increasingly combative debates on intellectual property (IP) expressed as copyright. Both vestiges of an economy dominated by knowledge as stock. The digital world is harshly bumping against the analog world and we are caught in-between.

I think the only way to navigate this change is collaboratively. No one has the right answer, but together we can explore new models of sense-making and knowledge-sharing. We each need to find others who are sharing their knowledge flow and in turn contribute our own.This is the foundation of personal knowledge management. It’s not about being a better digital librarian, it’s about becoming a participating member of a networked society.

* Content from jarche.com is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License

http://www.jarche.com/2011/12/collective-sense-making/

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

One major challenge in helping organizations improve collaboration and knowledge-sharing is getting people to see themselves as nodes in various networks, with different types of relationships between them. Network thinking can fundamentally change our view of hierarchical relationships. For example, using value network analysis, I helped a steering group see their community of practice in a new light, mapped as a network. They immediately realized that they were pushing solutions to their community, instead of listening to what was happening. Thinking in terms of networks, networks, networks lets us see with new eyes.

1. Adaptability instead of Control. Here are some recommendations for moving to a new social contract for creative work:

• Abolish the organization chart and replace it with a network diagram (some new tech companies have done this).
• Move away from counting hours, to a results only work environment (with distributed work, this is becoming more common).
• Encourage outside work that doesn’t directly interfere with paid work, as it will strengthen the network (such as Google’s 20% time for engineers).
• Provide options for workers to come and go and give them ways to stay connected when they’re not employed (like Ericsson’s Stay Connected Facebook group). Build an ecosystem, not a monolith.

2. Emergence instead of predictability. As we learn in digital networks, stock (content) loses significance, while flow (conversation) becomes more important – the challenge becomes how to continuously weave the many bits of information and knowledge that pass by us each day. Conversations help us make sense. But we need diversity in our conversations or we become insular. We cannot predict what will emerge from continuous learning, co-creating & sharing at the individual, organizational and market level but we do know it will make for more resilient organizations.

3. Resilience and redundancy. A professional learning network, with its redundant connections, repetition of information and indirect communications, is a much more resilient system than any designed development program can be. Redundancy is also a good principal for supporting social learning diffusion. There is always more than one way to communicate or find something and just because something was blogged, tweeted or posted does not mean it will be understood and eventually internalized as actionable knowledge. The more complex or novel the idea, the more time it will take to be understood.

4. Contributions before credentials. Programmers might call this, “you are only as good as your code”. Credentials and certifications often act as blinders and stop us from recognizing the complexity of a situation. As Henry Mencken wrote, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

5. Diversity and Divergence. My approach to working smarter starts by organizing to embrace diversity and manage complexity.  Diversity is a key factor in innovation and I’ve yet to find an organization that does not want to improve innovation.

* Content from jarche.com is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License

http://www.jarche.com/2011/12/network-thinking/

The slide presentation is designed to be self-explanatory and may help convince management of the need to integrate working and learning. As Nigel says, and I agree, being an effective team player is just one aspect of the 21st century workplace. We must also share our expertise across the organization while encouraging people to develop external networks. That’s what this model tries to explain. Communities of practice are bridges between the work being done and the diversity of social networks.

A key role for any learning and development department today, and for the near future, is to enable and support communities of practice that integrate learning and working.

Inspired by Jay Cross, Amanda Fenton asks how her Corporate Learning department could better meet the needs of employees. I think these are excellent questions and the answers form the basis of addressing how to integrate work and learning in the enterprise.

Questions on the role of managers and integrating learning into the business:

Q5) How can we facilitate the line managers’ ability to identify the root cause of a performance problem, own it, and know what to do about it (e.g. managing performance problems)?

The situation has gone beyond the case of  helping managers develop a few new skills for their professional toolbox. Transformational, not incremental, changes are needed.

The basic premises of most current management and organizational models no longer apply. These frameworks are based upon work that is being automated and outsourced every day. There is little time to prepare people for this change. Any scenario that I consider – peak oil, global warming; globalization; Asian dominance – still requires that the developed world’s workforce deals with more complexity and even chaos. We need to skill-up for emergent and novel practices and that means a completely different mindset toward work and the “supervision” of work. Knowledge artisans don’t need supervision as much as the reduction of barriers to communication and connection. That’s the role of the “supervisor”.

Here are two other examples.

Ev Williams, co-founder of Twitter, is doing everything he can to keep the company BELOW 150 people. He understands both the old (primates & Dunbar’s numbers) as well as the new (agility & networks). For the past century, the key has been to grow companies. It’s celebrated and rewarded by markets and pundits. Not any more. This company is not growing and not hiring more managers and supervisors. In the new organization, everybody is an independent contributor because there is no need for layers of command and control. Everyone talks to everyone else in this hyperlinked world.

This is one the fastest growing occupations today – community manager. The skills needed here are completely different from traditional command and control supervision. Soft skills are now the hard skills. Supervision is not needed when all work is transparent.

Q6) What if we closed the training department and became mentors, coaches and facilitators, where our focus was on improving core business processes, supporting communication and collaboration to help people perform better, faster, cheaper? Where we worked with managers to fund and develop appropriate tools and processes for employees? How could this be successful?

I would reword this question to: when the training department closes, what do we do? That’s what most people in the business of organizational training should be asking. This will happen with or without the training department. Thefuture of the training department is to stop delivering content and focus onconversations and collaboration. Here’s an example of one of the best “training” programs developed by people who are not instructional designers:CommonCraft “In plain English” videos. There are thousands like this on the Net (e.g. Wiki-How). Add in just-in-time answers to questions on Twitter or Facebook and you have a learning ecosystem. Many workers no longer need the training department to learn. In fact, the training department is often a barrier to learning.

Trainers had better become mentors, coaches and facilitators very soon, or they will become irrelevant in an age of ubiquitous access to content and expertise.

* Content from jarche.com is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License

http://www.jarche.com/2010/11/integrating-learning-into-the-business/

Looking just at the key differences in the info-graphic, I’d like to dig into “Why” these differences are necessary:

Greater acceptance of risks & failures: This is how complex problems are addressed, and all businesses are dealing with more complexity. As I mentioned in leadership emerges from network culture, a Probe-Sense-Respond approach is necessary. Dave Snowden underlines the fact that over half of your probes will fail and hence the need to have a culture where failure is an option. It’s what Dave calls “safe-fail”: “We conduct safe-fail experiments. We don’t do fail-safe design. If an experiment succeeds, we amplify it. If an experiment fails, we dampen it.” Failure is not just an option, it’s a common occurrence.

Clear guidelines allow everyone to speak openly on behalf of the company. That’s because hyperlinks have subverted hierarchy. Everyone is connected. In hierarchical organizations, workers are more connected when they go home than when they’re at work.  the inside. This is a sure sign of the obsolescence of many management control systems.  The Internet has changed everything.

Democratization of information: User-generated content is is ubiquitous and much of it is very useful. Search engines give each worker more information and knowledge than any CEO had 10 years ago. Pervasive connectivity will change traditional power structures, though the full effects of this are not yet visible.

Leaders and experts can easily emerge: It takes different leadership, or leadership for networks, to do the important work in complex work environments, which is to increase collaboration and support social learning in the workplace. If the main point of the internet is to remove “barriers to socializing”, then shouldn’t leadership in a networked, social business strive for a similar objective?

Team-oriented, much flatter, exists beyond the org chart: This is another result of a networked society but I’m not sure if team is the best term for social business and I would use collaboration instead. This is the objective of Wirearchy: a dynamic multi-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology.

Greater business visibility, info flows vertically and horizontally: There are emerging patterns and dynamics related to interconnected people and interlinked information flows, which are bypassing established traditional structures and services. It’s part of wired work.

Comfortable with outward facing communication: Most of the action in business is moving to the edge and a greater percentage of the workforce will be customer-facing.

* Content from jarche.com is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License

http://www.jarche.com/2011/10/why-do-we-need-social-business/

The Net, especially working and learning in networks, subverts many of the hierarchies we have developed over hundreds of years. Formal education is one example, as shown in this excellent article by Cathy Davidson:

Grading, in a curious way, exemplifies our deepest convictions about excellence and authority, and specifically about the right of those with authority to define what constitutes excellence. If we crowdsource grading, we are suggesting that young people without credentials are fit to judge quality and value. Welcome to the Internet, where everyone’s a critic and anyone can express a view about the new iPhone, restaurant, or quarterback. That democratizing of who can pass judgment is digital thinking. As I found out, it is quite unsettling to people stuck in top-down models of formal education and authority.

Thanks to Johnnie Moore for pointing out this article, but then that’s how much of my learning happens today. It’s social and comes via my online networks, in this case, Twitter.

Five years ago I wrote that a shift of focus (and development effort) away from the management aspects of learning and more on the social aspects of learning can only be positive for the learner. We need to better understand the social, network aspects of work and learning and build structures that support these. As we become more networked, status hierarchies are being replaced by task hierarchies [thanks to Esko Kilpi for these terms]. In both work and learning, our status in our networks is constantly changing and being renegotiated. We focus on tasks, and in doing these, our status changes. It’s no longer about who we are, but what we do. Isn’t this how our social networks function as well? Social learning, a key part of any community, is a dance with changing partners, each interpreting the music in their own way but influenced by every partner.

Social learning is the lubricant of networked, collaborative work. Therefore we need to redesign work structures that foster self-organized (social) groups for learning and working. If work is learning, and learning is the work, then shouldn’t the workplace be structured as a learning environment? And shouldn’t educational institutions foster this kind of integrated, collaborative, social learning? This is revolutionary. Peter Isackson describes the subversive nature of social learning in the Hole-in-the-Wall (HiW) learning experiments:

It seems to me that the fundamental key to the success of HiW is the notion of “self-organized groups” who learn on their own. If education is to become truly non-invasive, as Jay suggests, it must refrain from defining both the goals and the means to reach them, entrusting the groups with this task. If educational gurus (authorities) notice that a group is neglecting what is considered “essential” in the curriculum (for whatever reason, whether it’s basic security, survival or inculcating an existing set of values), the group could be challenged to account for why they may be neglecting a certain topic or reminded of the interest in pursuing it. Respecting the self-organizing group and its decision-making capacity is the sine qua non of success. It also happens to be the absolute opposite of the organizational principles of traditional education and training.

One current theme in the workplace and education circles is to “blend” social with the formal and structured. But social learning is not a bolted-on component of our formal educational and training programs. It is a sea change. It will disrupt institutions built upon the technology of  the printing press – all communication enterprises, including education. Yes, we have always learned and worked socially, but we have never had the power of ridiculously easy group-forming or almost zero-cost duplication of our words and images.

The network effect of the Web is explained in detail in Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks. Benkler describes the changes that a networked society can have on our governance, economic and cultural structures [bold added]:

The networked information economy improves the practical capacities of individuals along three dimensions: (1) it improves their capacity to do more for and by themselves; (2) it enhances their capacity to do more in loose commonality with others, without being constrained to organize their relationship through a price system or in traditional hierarchical models of social and economic organization; and (3) it improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate outside the market sphere. This enhanced autonomy is at the core of all the other improvements I describe. Individuals are using their newly expanded practical freedom to act and cooperate with others in ways that improve the practiced experience of democracy, justice and development, a critical culture, and community.

One final note for all those managers, directors and others in status hierarchies: social learning is about giving up control.

Mimi & Eunice cartoons by Nina Paley.

* Content from jarche.com is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License

http://www.jarche.com/2011/08/social-learning-the-freedom-to-act-and-cooperate-with-others/

Karen Jeannette (@kjeannette) noted that her challenge is to “foster movement between the bubbles” and I responded that my own experience and with my clients has been that negotiating these boundaries is an art form and is highly contextual and quite fluid. To which Karen responded, “which is why I’m glad I had dance lessons when I was young …. always dancing, negotiating the next step”. This is an important metaphor. Supporting communities of practice is a lot like dancing, there’s constant give and take.

Another useful metaphor is to think of social media as languages. Learning to use one is like learning a new language, and as anyone who works with adults learning new languages has observed, most grown-ups do not want to look stupid, so they are inhibited in embracing the new language and making mistakes as they go along. Younger children don’t have this aversion.

So here we are, speaking new languages, where some people are fluent and others less so and then put on the dance floor learning new routines, while in fleeting but pervasive contact with partners of varying skills, abilities and mannerisms.

Instead of trying to find the perfect recipe for supporting communities of practice in the organization, think more like a social convener of a community dance hall. Many people have come, some will dance well, some poorly with gusto, and others will watch. Your aim is not to make it perfect for everyone but to make sure that people come to the next dance. That means changing the tempo of the music or perhaps introducing new dance partners or maybe taking a break. It takes keen observation, pattern recognition and a suite of subtle tools (a gentle hand) to help guide the flow.

The community hall is where those who work together can be more social while meeting some new folks from out of town. It’s a constantly negotiated space, dependent on who shows up, who plays, and who dances.  It depends on getting introduced to interesting people; some to dance with and others to talk to.

* Content from jarche.com is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License

http://www.jarche.com/2011/07/the-community-dance-hall/

Network learning, at the individual level, includes:

• Personal directed learning – how individuals can use social media for their own (self-directed) personal or professional learning; and
• Accidental and serendipitous learning – how individuals, by using social media, can learn without consciously realizing it (e.g., incidental or random learning).

At its core, network learning is a way to deal with an ever-increasing amount of digital information. It requires an open attitude toward learning and finding new things. Each worker needs to develop individualized processes of filing, classifying and annotating information for later retrieval.

Standard document management methods have been shown to fail over the years, as most workers do not personally adopt them. Developing good network learning skills, on the other hand, can aid in observing, thinking and using information and knowledge. Learning in networks also prepares the mind to be open to new ideas and can result in “enhanced serendipity.” As Louis Pasteur said, chance favours the prepared mind [Stevin Berlin Johnson says that chance favours the connected mind].

One way to look at network learning is as a continuous process of seeking, sensing and sharing.

• Seeking is finding things out and keeping up to date. Building a network of colleagues is helpful in this regard—it not only allows us to “pull” information, but also have it “pushed” to us by trusted sources.
• Sensing is how we personalize information and use it. Sensing includes reflection and putting into practice what we have learned. Often it requires experimentation, as we learn best by doing.
• Sharing includes exchanging resources, ideas and experiences with our networks and collaborating with our colleagues.

Read complete article – Network Learning: Working Smarter

PKM Overview

Here are four main processes that can be used in developing critical thinking skills using web tools (click image to enlarge).

Using a Seek-Sense-Share framework (à la personal knowledge management), pick one or more web platforms on which to practise critical thinking.

—

In my opinion, the core of PKM is 2) sensing, though 1) active observation is necessary to feed sense-making processes and 3) sharing with others creates better feedback loops. The diversity of both what one seeks and who one shares with have a significant impact on the quality of sense-making processes.

—

Notes from my workshop on PKM at the University of Toronto’s iSchool Institute(next one-day workshop scheduled for Spring 2012).

—

Finding the Time for PKM

A survey of small and medium sized businesses (SMB) showed workers spend about half their day on unproductive tasks:

Knowledge Workers are among the largest staff component in a typical SMB

SMB Knowledge Workers spend an estimated 36 percent of their time trying to

• Contact customers, partners or colleagues
• Find information
• Schedule a meeting

Approximately 14 percent of SMB Knowledge Workers’ time is spent:

• Duplicating information (e.g. forwarding e-mails or phone calls to confirm if fax/e-mail/text message was received
• Managing unwanted communications (e.g. spam e-mails or unsolicited time-wasting phone calls)

Note: I registered for access to the complete report but it does not go into survey methodology or indicate the sample size, so I would not consider this scientific, but it’s an interesting data point.

These activities are important but obviously they take too much time. Finding the right information faster can be addressed individually through frameworks like networked learning (PKM). Finding information, plus the remaining four activities can be made more effective and efficient through social networks. For example, the largest stated benefit of organizations using social media is increasing speed of access to knowledge (McKinsey 2010). Simple tools like Doodle can make scheduling a breeze. Social networks like Twitter or LinkedIn let you find the right people faster.

Therefore, the ROI for social media in business is pretty obvious: reducing wasted time.

In addition, there is a huge performance benefit. Not only is there less wasted time but that time can go into learning.

Since 90% of our learning is not supported by formal instruction, the opportunities for using social media at work are evident – more time for personal learning as well as a medium for networked learning.

—

Sense-making

The term personal knowledge management (PKM) isn’t about management in a business sense but rather how we can manage to make sense of information and experience in our electronic surround.

Personal – according to one’s abilities, interests & motivation (not directed by external forces).

Knowledge – connecting information to experience (know what, know who, know how).

Management – getting things done.

PKM is an individually created process. Tim Kastelle has discussed how important it is to Filter, in the process of Aggregate-Filter-Connect. I use Seek-Sense-Share to describe PKM.

The critical part of PKM is in personalizing information and experience, or to use a business term, adding value. Ross Dawson shows five ways to add value to information (my examples/descriptions follow):

1. Filtering (separating signal from noise, based on some criteria)
2. Validation (ensuring that information is reliable, current or supported by research)
3. Synthesis (describing patterns, trends or flows in large amounts of information)
4. Presentation (making information understandable through visualization or logical presentation)
5. Customization (describing information in context)

Terms such as Filter or Sense don’t adequately describe the sense-making process in PKM. Looking at it from an outside perspective though, as Ross Dawson has done, gives another way to describe some of what is happening in our minds. We are adding value (and context) to information so that we can later retrieve it and perhaps use it. Whatever we make transparent is value-added information for others, especially if we do it consciously and well.

The image below shows an expanded description of sense-making in the context of PKM.

A basic tool I’ve described for PKM is social bookmarking to file information. It’s simple but doesn’t add a lot of value, just a few text comments. A tweet is also simple and cannot add much value with a 140 character limit. A blog post can be much more informative especially if one takes time to research, link and compose. A collaborative document that aggregates information and shows it from a different perspective could also be valuable. Developing a slide presentation with carefully selected graphics could be seen as higher value information. More difficult to produce and perhaps adding more value to basic information, could be a narration with the slideshow. I have noticed that the process of developing higher-value information helps to sharpen one’s own thinking.

Once again, I want to point out that people with better PKM skills, an ability to create higher value information, and a willingness to share it, will become more valued members (nodes) in their professional networks.

—

Using our Knowledge

“Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful.” Margaret J. Wheatley.

All the information and knowledge in the world will not help us unless we take time to reflect upon what we have learned and also do something with it. When I discuss personal knowledge management [a term that really needs to be changed and I welcome suggestions] I emphasize reflection through doing. In my case, this happens most often on my blog. Blogs are powerful tools for reflection.

• Blogs act as the glue between our interactions with others, whether they be projects, meetings or conferences
• Blogs are ways of mapping our personal learning journey
• Every blog is unique and, over time, gives a whole-person view
• Blogs encourage dialogue and help us relate to a wider audience and be more professional
• Blogs provide peer feedback
• Blogs can also be emotional and playful, to show and share our humanity

Reflecting by writing is a start, but then we need to integrate new ways of thinking and doing into our lives. This is the tough part, of course. It’s difficult to change old habits, but I think that by posting our vision on our blogs we raise the stakes. We are telling the world what we stand for. We are setting higher expectations. And this is a good beginning: reflection, followed by making our thoughts explicit and public. As I mentioned in a previous post, we’re often too busy to reflect. The discipline of writing is one way to begin our journey to wisdom. Then we need to act on our words.

The social learning revolution has only just begun. Corporations that understand the value of knowledge sharing, teamwork, informal learning and joint problem solving are investing heavily in collaboration technology and are reaping the early rewards. ~ Jay Cross

Social learning

Note: This is a re-post and update of a previous article, originally published as a White Paper (PDF). This web page should enable easier linking.

Why is social learning important for today’s enterprise?

George Siemens, educational technologist and researcher at Athabasca University, has succinctly explained the importance of social learning in the context of today’s workplace:

There is a growing demand for the ability to connect to others. It is with each other that we can make sense, and this is social. Organizations, in order to function, need to encourage social exchanges and social learning due to faster rates of business and technological changes. Social experience is adaptive by nature and a social learning mindset enables better feedback on environmental changes back to the organization.

The Internet has fundamentally changed how we communicate on a scale as large as the printing press or the advent of written language. Charles Jennings, of Duntroon Associates, explains why we need to move away from a focus on knowledge transfer and acquisition, an approach rooted in Plato’s academy:

We are moving to the world of the sons of Socrates, where dialogue and guidance are key competencies. It is a world where the capability to find information and turn it into knowledge at the point-of-need provides the key competitive advantage, where knowing the right people to ask the right questions of is more likely to lead to success than any amount of internally-held knowledge and skill.

Our relationship with knowledge is changing as our work becomes more intangible and complex. Notice how most value in today’s marketplace is intangible, with Google’s multi- billion dollar valuation an example of value in non-tangible processes that could be deflated with the development of a better search algorithm. Non-physical assets comprise about 80 percent of the value of Standard & Poor’s 500 US companies in leading industries.

From replaceable human resources to dynamic social groups

The manner in which we prepare people for work is based on the Taylorist perspective that there is only one way to do a job and that the person doing the work needs to conform to job requirements [F.W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911]. Individual training, the core of corporate learning and development, is based on the premise that jobs are constant and those who fill them are interchangeable.

However, when you look at the modern organization, it is moving to a model of constant change, whether through mergers and acquisitions or as quick-start web-enabled networks. For the human resources department, the question becomes one of preparing people for jobs that don’t even exist. For example, the role of online community manager, a fast-growing field today, barely existed five years ago. Individual training for job preparation requires a stable work environment, a luxury no one has any more.

A collective, social learning approach, on the other hand, takes the perspective that learning and work happen as groups and how the group is connected (the network) is more important than any individual node within it.

MIT’s Peter Senge has made some important clarifications on terms we often use in looking at work, job classifications and training to support them.

Knowledge: the capacity for effective action. “Know how” is the only aspect of knowledge that really matters in life.

Practitioner: someone who is accountable for producing results.

Learning may be an individual activity but if it remains within the individual it is of no value whatsoever to the organization. Acting on knowledge, as a practitioner (work performance) is all that matters. So why are organizations in the individual learning (training) business anyway? Individuals should be directing their own learning. Organizations should focus on results.

Individual learning in organizations is basically irrelevant because work is almost never done by one person. All organizational value is created by teams and networks. Furthermore, learning may be generated in teams but even this type of knowledge comes and goes. Learning really spreads through social networks. Social networks are the primary conduit for effective organizational performance. Blocking, or circumventing, social networks slows learning, reduces effectiveness and may in the end kill the organization.

Social learning is how groups work and share knowledge to become better practitioners. Organizations should focus on enabling practitioners to produce results by supporting learning through social networks. The rest is just window dressing. Over a century ago, Charles Darwin helped us understand the importance of adaptation and the concept that those who survive are the ones who most accurately perceive their environment and successfully adapt to it. Cooperating in networks can increase our ability to perceive what is happening.

Making social learning work

Jon Husband’s working definition of Wirearchy is “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology”. We are seeing increasing examples of this on the edges of the modern enterprise. WorldBlu.com’s annual listing of our most democratic workplaces continues to grow and gain attention. Google’s dedicated time-off for private projects, given to its engineers, promotes non-directed learning and collaboration. Zapposdirectly engages with its customers on Twitter, fostering higher levels of two-way trust. As customers, suppliers and competitors become more networked, being more wirearchical will be a business imperative.

Wirearchies inherently require trust, and trusted relationships are powerful allies in getting things done in organizations. Trust is also an essential component of social learning. Just because we have the technical networks does not mean that learning will automatically happen. Communications without trust are just noise, not accepted and never internalized by the recipients.

Here are some ways to make social learning work in the enterprise:

• Think and act at a macro level (what to do) and leave the micro (how to do it) to each worker or team. The little stuff is changing too fast.
• Engage with Web media and understand how they work. The Web is too important to be left to the information technology department, communications staff or outside vendors.
• Use social media to make work easier or more effective. Use them to solve problems for work teams and groups.
• Make traditional management obsolete. Teach people how to fish or better yet, teach them how to learn to fish themselves. If the organization is maintaining a steady state then it has failed to evolve with the environment.

Analyzing social learning

Most 20th century workplaces had two types of learning: formal learning through training and informal learning (about 80% according to available research) which just happened by accident or the result of observation, conversation and time in the job. This focus on formal training, for skills and knowledge, missed out on our social nature. Business has always been social, especially at the higher levels of management and with ubiquitous access to networks, this is once again part of everyone’s work. In the global village, we are all interconnected.

Jane Hart, social learning consultant, has shown how social media can be used for workplace learning and that instead of just training, there are five types of learning that should be supported by the organization.

IOL – Intra-Organizational Learning – keeping the organization up to date and up to speed on strategic and other internal initiatives and activities
GDL – Group Directed Learning – groups of individuals working in teams, projects, study groups, etc Even two people working together in a coaching and mentoring capacity
PDL – Personal Directed Learning – individuals organizing and managing their own personal or professional learning
ASL – Accidental & Serendipitous Learning – individuals learning without consciously realizing it (aka incidental or random learning)
FSL – Formal Structured Learning – formal education and training like classes, courses, workshops, etc (both synchronous and asynchronous)

Notice that traditional training (FSL) is only one of the five types. Three of these (IOL, GDL, PDF) require self-direction, and that is the essence of social learning: becoming self-directed learners and workers, all within a two-way flow of power and authority. Social and informal learning are not just feel-good notions, but have a real impact on an increasingly intangible business environment.

Jay Cross has looked at the ways that social learning is becoming real and developed this table to highlight some of the workplace changes he is observing:

Implementing social learning

—

Five Types of Workplace Learning

The changes in becoming a networked workplace can be further analyzed using Jane Hart’s five ways of using social media for learning in the organization.

ASL – Accidental & Serendipitous Learning: from Stocks to Flow

Learning is conversation and online conversations are an essential component of online learning. Online communication can be divided into Stocks (information that is archived and organized for reference and retrieval) and Flows (timely and engaging conversations between people, including voice or written communications). Blogs allow flow and micro-blogs, like Twitter, enable great flow due to the constraint of 140 characters.

The web enables connections, or constant flow, as well as instant access to information, or infinite stock. Stock on the Internet is everywhere and the challenge is to make sense of it through flows of conversation. It is no longer enough to have the book, manual or information, but one must be able to use it in changing contexts. Because of this connectivity, the Web is an environment more suited to just-in-time learning than the outdated course model. ASL is shifting from looking at knowledge as the collection of bits and engaging in the learning flows around us, without any conscious plan. We are working and learning in networks and the only thing a network can do is share.

PDL – Personal Directed Learning: from Clockwork & Predictable to Complexity & Surprising

Complexity, or maybe our appreciation of it, has rendered the world unpredictable, so the orientation of learning is shifting from past (efficiency, best practice) to future (creative response, innovation). Organizing our own learning is necessary for creative work. Workplace learning is morphing from blocks of training followed by working to a merger of work and learning: they are becoming the same thing. Change is continuous, so learning must be continuous. Developing emergent practices, a necessity when there are no best practices in our changing work environments, requires constant personal directed learning.

In complex environments it no longer works to sit back and see what will happen. By the time we realize what’s happening, it will be too late to take action. Accepting surprise is similar to the delight an artist may have on completion of a work and only then see an emergent quality not consciously understood during the process of its creation.

GDL – Group Directed Learning: from Worker Centric to Team Centric

As mentioned earlier, the real work in organizations is done by groups. This means that sending individuals on a training course and then re-integrating to their work group is relatively useless. With work and learning merging in the network, groups need to find ways that support each member’s learning, while engaged in tasks and projects. Tools that can capture activities and keep group members focused should be used to reinforce group learning.

Social learning requires a certain amount of effort to maintain regular contact and association with our colleagues. Developing social learning practices, like keeping a work journal, may be an effort at first but later it’s just part of the work process. Bloggers have learned how powerful a learning medium they have only after blogging for an extended period. With the increased use of distributed work groups, it is even more important to foster social learning and web media are the current tools at hand.

IOL – Intra-Organizational Learning: from Subject Matter Experts to Subject Matter Networks

Mark Oehlert, anthropologist, historian and technologist, recently coined the termSubject Matter Networks as a new way of finding organizational knowledge. Instead of looking for subject matter experts from which to design training, we should extend knowledge gathering to the entire network of subject-matter expertise. Once again, the emphasis is no longer on the individual node but on the network. Good networks make for effective organizations.

Networked communities are better structures in dealing with complexity, when emerging practices need to be continuously developed and loose ties can help facilitate fast feedback loops without hierarchical intervention. Collaborative groups are better at making decisions and getting things done. The constraints of the group help to achieve defined goals.

Building capabilities from serendipitous to personally-directed and then group-directed learning help to create strong networks for intra-organizational learning. This is exceptionally important because the emerging knowledge-intensive and creative workplace has these attributes:

• Simple work will be automated.
• Complicated work will go to the lowest bidder, as processes & procedures become more defined and job aids more powerful (e.g. mortgage applications).
• Complex work requires creativity and is where the value of the post-industrial organization lies.
• Dealing with Chaos sometimes has be confronted and this requires creativity as well as a sense of adventure to try novel approaches.

FSL – Formal Structured Learning: from Curriculum to Competency

There remains a need for training in the networked workplace but it must move away from a content delivery approach. The content will be out of date before the training is “delivered” (another outdated term). Work competencies will still need to be developed through practice and appropriate feedback (what training does well) but that practice will have to be directly relevant to the individual or group (group training is an area of immense potential growth). Jointly defining work competence with input from individuals, groups and subject matter networks should become the new analysis process, enabled by social media. Think of it as social ADDIE (analysis, design, development, implementation, evaluation) for the complex workplace.

Complexity: the new normal

Our workplaces are becoming interconnected because technology has enabled communication networks on a worldwide scale. This means that systemic changes are sensed almost immediately. Reaction times and feedback loops have to get faster and more effective. We need to know who to ask for advice right now but that requires a level of trust and trusted relationships take time to nurture. Our default action is to turn to our friends and trusted colleagues; those people with whom we’ve shared experiences. Therefore, we need to share more of our work experiences in order to grow those trusted networks. This is social learning and it is critical for networked organizational effectiveness.

Our current models for managing people, training and knowledge-sharing are insufficient for a workplace that demands emergent practices just to keep up. Formal training has only ever addressed 20% of workplace learning and this was acceptable when the work environment was merely complicated. Knowledge workers today need to connect with others to co-solve problems. Sharing tacit knowledge through conversations is an essential component of knowledge work. Social media enable adaptation, and the development of emergent practices, through conversations.

How organizations have evolved

Most companies start simple, with a few people gathering together around an idea. For small companies, decision-making, task assignments and direct interaction with clients are rather straightforward. With growth, the simplicity ends. As every entrepreneur knows, the initial growth of a company is often synonymous with efficiency drops and decreases in profits, since administrative tasks, indirect structural costs and middle-term forecasts add financial and human pressure on early growth.

Overcoming these obstacles is one of the main burdens of start-ups and young businesses. Innovation abounds in the early stages and knowledge capitalization is aided by a common vision of the business. Further growth equates to sustainable efficiencies and market share increases. For decades, organizational growth has been viewed as a positive development, but it has come at a cost.

Complication: the industrial disease

As organizations grow, the original simplicity gets harder to maintain. Current management wisdom – based on Robin Dunbar’s research; the size of military units through history; and the work of management experts such as Tom Peters – considers the ideal size of an organization to be around 150 people. Beyond this size, knowing everybody in person becomes impossible. Intermediate layers of power and delegation begin to develop above 150 people and companies then enter the realm of complication.

Most of today’s larger companies have a complicated structure. To enable growth and efficiencies, more processes are put in place. This is what management schools have been doing for over half a century. To ensure reliable operations and risk mitigation, the core competencies of decision-making and innovation are moved to the periphery. The company’s vision, if there is one, is now supported at the board level but not the individual level. New layers of control and supervision continue to appear, silos are created, and knowledge acquisition is formalized in an attempt to gain efficiency through specialization.

As companies get even bigger, internal growth and innovation reach a tipping point, and companies rely on mergers and acquisitions to maintain the illusion of growth. At some stage of complication, companies do not even create jobs anymore. In France, a study (PDF) from INSEE showed that large organizations have a tendency to destroy internal jobs: by transferring jobs to subsidiaries, contractors and subcontractors. Large firms barely participate in job creation. Similar studies conducted in other countries show the same results. However, knowledge, and the acquisition of new knowledge, are still key factors for innovation and effectiveness. To compensate for its complicated processes, the enterprise attempts to shift to another paradigm, and tries to become a learning organization, putting significant effort into training.

Complexity and the new Enterprise

Today’s large, complicated organizations are now facing increasingly complex business environments that require agility in simultaneously learning and working. Typical strategies of optimizing existing business processes or cost reductions only marginally influence the organization’s effectiveness. Faster evolving markets challenge the organization’s ability to react to customer demand. Decision-making becomes paralyzed by process-based operations and chains of command and control; thereby decreasing agility. Training, as “the” solution to workplace learning needs, fails to deliver and then gets marginalized, often being the first department to have its budget cut.

Many organizations today are also facing significant demographic challenges. Baby boomers, once the lifeblood of business, are retiring, while Generation Y wants to communicate and interact in a completely different manner. There may be four generations in the modern workplace and each has its unique traits and demands. There is growing complexity both inside and outside the organization.

Organizations need to understand complexity, instead of simply increasing complication. This lack of understanding, as well as some existing, but minor, efficiency improvements in tweaking the old system, are the major barriers to adopting Enterprise 2.0 concepts and practices.

Companies need to get a clearer view of the competitive advantages of Enterprise 2.0 before an organizational framework like wirearchy can co-exist with hierarchical structures and thinking.

Here are some key organizational changes during the journey from simplicity to complexity:

Let’s look at Knowledge Acquisition. Formal training is easy to task out or outsource and then assume that everything has been taken care of. The training gets done and the organization can account for it. Managers can say, “my people got their training”. Courts can be assured that workers have been trained, so the company has met its responsibilities.

Even performance support tools can be developed centrally, by external consultants or an internal team. The resulting tools are then sent throughout the organization to be used at work. The organization can say, “they have the tools”. For example, all bank officers can use the same mortgage calculator, so risk is managed fairly easily once the system is in place. The system is under control.

However, social knowledge acquisition in the organization is a different case. It requires a very different approach. First of all, centralized control won’t work. Secondly, individuals will become responsible for their learning and their actions. This requires trust. Control systems become counter-productive. There is no easy way to move an organization into this wirearchical space. It requires some serious thinking about how things get done. It means giving up control. It means organizational life in perpetual Beta, and that can be a scary thought.

Let’s look at how social learning can support emergent practices in the enterprise.

Implementing Social Learning

Knowledge workers get things done by conversing with peers, customers and partners, as they solve the problems of the day. Learning from these social interactions is a key to business innovation. In a globally networked economy, based increasingly on intangible goods and services, constant innovation is necessary to stand out. Markets such as software, financial services, consulting and consumer goods have to continuously adapt their offers to keep up with changing demands and advances in technology.

Hyper-linked knowledge flows have made organizational walls permeable. Official channels are competing with an expanding number of informal communications. A collaborative enterprise is becoming the optimal organization for such a networked economy, capitalizing on these expanding knowledge flows. To innovate, organizations need to collaborate internally and this is social. To participate in their markets, organizations, customers and suppliers need to understand each other and this too, is social. Social learning is how knowledge is created, internalized and shared. It is how knowledge work gets done.

In complex environments, learning is much more than just a matter of structured knowledge acquisition. However, that is all that training enables. Corporate training methods often consist of delivering content and perhaps providing drill and practice sometime prior to doing the task. There is often a gap between training and doing. Training alone cannot address the wide variety of informal learning needs of workers. Nor can it help to transfer the tacit knowledge on which many of us depend to do our jobs.

We know that informal learning happens all of the time but often the best answers or experts are not connected to the person with the problem. Social learning networks can address that issue by giving each worker a much larger group of people to help get work done. Regularly publishing to our networks is how we can stay connected. Here is an approach to embed social learning into organization work flows. This is an iterative process that can be adapted to fit the context.

Listen & Create: Being open to self-education is the foundation of individual learning. Part of this is the development of habits of continuous sense-making by recording what we hear, read and observe; e.g. personal learning environments (PLE) & personal knowledge management (PKM).

Converse: Sharing is an act of learning and can be considered an individual’s responsibility for the greater social learning contract. Without sharing, there is no social learning. Through ongoing trusted conversations we can share tacit knowledge, even across organizational boundaries; e.g. social learning.

Co-create: Group performance enables the creation of new knowledge and is a source of innovation; e.g. collaborative work, customer experience.

Formalize & Share: Some informal knowledge can be made explicit and consolidated through the formalization and creation of new structured knowledge; e.g. taxonomies, document management, storytelling.

Enterprise social learning

Jane Hart has created a comprehensive, and growing, list of social learning examples in the workplace. Companies listed here include British Telecom, Sun Microsystems, NASA, Nationwide Insurance, and SFR. The SFR case study, reported by Sue Weakes, shows how a younger workforce is demanding better access to social media.

French mobile phone company SFR implemented ActiveNetworker from Jobpartners to support its new social network. My SFR comprises a company blog, a central space for discussion, and the ability to build profiles that allow employees to share information on career progress, learning and development and aspirations. They can also join groups of interest … ActiveNetworker has been well received and SFR is averaging 80,000 visits per week from the 10,000 employees that are using it.

Dave Wilkins at Learn.com, describes the case at ACE Hardware in which the company set up a web-based social learning platform for its 4,600 independent hardware dealers to share and seek advice. They were able to look for new sales leads, find rarely used items through the community and share merchandising display strategies. This social learning community strategy resulted in a 500% return on investment in just six months.

Cristóbal Conde, CEO of SunGard, a software and IT services company, was recently interviewed in the New York Times. He discussed how he has flattened the company’s hierarchy as a way of dealing with the globalization of the company. One important social communication tool at SunGard is Yammer, a micro-blogging platform similar to Twitter but used internally. NYT: “What kind of things do you write on Yammer?”

I try to see a client every day, and because of my title I get to see more senior people. And so then they’ll tell me things — you know, what are their biggest problems, what are their biggest issues, what are their biggest bets. All this information is incredibly valuable. Now, what could I do with that? I’m not going to send that out in a broadcast voice mail to everyemployee. I’m not even going to write a long e-mail about it to every employee, because even that is almost too formal. But I can write five lines on Yammer, which is about all it takes.
A free flow of information is an incredible tool because I can tell people, “Look, this is one of our largest clients, and the C.E.O. just told me his top three priorities are X, Y and Z. Think about them.”

The Ford Motor Company has used social media for learning, beginning withSyncMyRide, and now integrating it as a way to connect customers and the company.

Ford’s intention is to consider how social media can inform the company as a whole, rather than judging its efforts by the criteria of one department and those “holistic” lessons filter up and down through the company, says Monty [head of social media]y. That includes the company’s executive board and goes as far as putting up senior execs for online Q&As through Twitter and on the corporate Facebook page. “There is a healthy respect for [social media] and how we participate in it. Two-way dialogue is healthy for a company like Ford, and we’ve grown as a result of having participated in it,” says Farley [Chief Communications Officer]. At some point, as executives grow in seniority, they tend to become “isolated from reality,” adds Monty. Making the Ford board aware of and engaged with social conversations counters that isolation. “When [CEO Alan Mulally] says we are making the cars people want, well, how do we know unless we are listening?” asks Monty.

A business imperative

Deloitte’s Shift Index of 2010 highlights the challenges facing several industries today, that of declining return on assets and the need for innovation. One recommendation is to enable knowledge flows, a key benefit of social learning:

Knowledge flows – which occur in any social, fluid environment where learning and collaboration can take place – are quickly becoming one of the most crucial sources of value creation. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media foster them, as do virtual communities and online discussion forums and companies situated near one another, working on similar problems.

One of the great things about web social media is that they are for the most part free. Experimentation does not require an enterprise-wide software deployment strategy at the onset. As Seth Godin, marketing and branding expert, says:

You guessed it: new media is largely free. So why teach it in school as if it were a scary theory? Why encourage people to be afraid? Just do it. Build your own platform. Appear in the places that seem productive or interesting or challenging or fun. Experiment quietly, figure out what works, do it more. No need to be a dilettante, and certainly you shouldn’t spread yourself too thin or quit at the first sign of failure… but… quit waiting for the right answer.

Our social networks have a greater influence on us than we think. Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler explain the latest research in great detail in the book, Connected: The surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives. Robin Hanson, of OvercomingBias.com, shows that we seldom change our behaviour based solely on getting new information. “People don’t believe something works until they’ve seen it work in something pretty close to their situation. A media story about something far away just doesn’t say much.” Again, social learning is about getting things done in networks.

Getting started

According to Rebecca Ferguson at The Open University in the UK, social learning can take place when people:

• clarify their intention–learning rather than browsing
• ground their learning – by defining their question or problem
• engage in focused conversations – increasing their understanding of the available resources.

Following the process explained earlier:

Listen: The first step in social learning is paying attention and watching what others are doing. Finding trusted sources of information is very important. Hearing what others are doing and connecting to them with social media such as Twitter or blogs increases the chances of accidental and serendipitous learning. For example, one can follow conversations on Twitter by searching for “hashtags”. Typing “#PKM” may show current conversations on personal knowledge management.

Converse: By engaging in conversations and providing valuable information to others one becomes part of professional networks. Many experts are willing to help those new to the field but newcomers first must say what they don’t know.

Co-create: Over time one can engage more in co-operative activities, such as adding comments to a blog post or extending the thought in an article or discussion thread. For many people used to traditional work, working transparently in the open takes some time to get to used to.

Formalize & Share: Writing professional journals or lessons learnt can ingrain the important process of formalizing aspects of social learning. Sharing with others, internally or externally, over time becomes part of a normal daily work flow.

As our work environments become more complex due to the speed of information transmission via ubiquitous networks, we need to adopt more flexible and less mechanistic processes to get work done. Workers have many more connections, to information and people, than ever before. But the ability to deal with complexity lies in our minds, not our artificial organizational structures. In order to free our minds for complex work, we need to simplify our organizational structures.

According to the authors of the book Getting to Maybe, in complex environments:

Rigid protocols are counter-productive

There is an uncertainty of outcomes in much of our work

We cannot separate parts from the whole

Success is not a fixed address

This is the next evolution of social enterprise.

—

Acknowledgements

Many of the thoughts here were developed collaboratively with my colleagues as we shared ideas through our blogs and other online media:

Jay Cross JayCross.com
Jane Hart C4LPT.com
Jon Husband Wirearchy.com
Charles Jennings Duntroon.com
Clark Quinn Quinnovation.com

The latter half of this article was written collaboratively with: Thierry deBaillondeBaillon.com

1. Filtering (separating signal from noise, based on some criteria)
2. Validation (ensuring that information is reliable, current or supported by research)
3. Synthesis (describing patterns, trends or flows in large amounts of information)
4. Presentation (making information understandable through visualization or logical presentation)
5. Customization (describing information in context)

This blog and the various presentations I do are attempts to add value (and context) to information so that I can later retrieve it and use it. By making this transparent I not only create value-added information for others but I clarify my own thinking.

Networked learning, or PKM, was a main topic of discussion this week, as many people asked how I had the time to do all of this reading, annotating and content creation. For me, it’s part of my work flow and it creates extremely valuable knowledge artifacts that I can re-use.

Here’s my latest version of putting together my thoughts on social learning in the enterprise. The storyline behind these slides goes like this:

Work is changing as we get more networked and people are not happy with the old structures, as 84% of workers in the US plan to change their jobs in 2011. We are seeing mass, decentralized and social movements that confront existing hierarchies, politically and in the workplace. Social media are the flagship of an inter-connected society, but every industrial discipline views them through their own filters, like blind monks examining an elephant. In this hyperlinked economy more of our work demands collaboration and we are seeing that work is learning. The need for social learning increases as higher-valued complex work requires passion, creativity and initiative. These skills are not taught in some training program, but shared socially through modelled behaviour and over many conversations. We need to understand complex adaptive systems and develop work structures that let us  focus our efforts on learning as we work in order to continuously develop next practices. The role of leadership becomes supportive rather than directive in this new knowledge-intensive and creative workplace. Artificial boundaries that limit collaboration and communication only serve to drag companies down and create opportunities for more agile competitors.

1. The increasing complexity of our work is a result of our global interconnectedness.
2. Today, simple work is being automated (e.g. bank tellers).
3. Complicated work (e.g. accounting) is getting outsourced.
4. Complex and creative work is what gives companies unique business advantages.
5. Complex and creative work is difficult to replicate, constantly changes and requires greater tacit knowledge.
6. Tacit knowledge is best developed through conversations and social relationships.
7. Training courses are artifacts of a time when information was scarce and connections were few; that time has passed.
8. Social learning networks enable better and faster knowledge feedback loops.
9. Hierarchies constrain social interactions so traditional management models must change.
10. Learning amongst ourselves is the real work in social businesses and management’s role is to support social learning.

—

“In the period ahead of us, more important than advances in computer design will be the advances we can make in our understanding of human information processing – of thinking, problem solving, and decision making…” ~ Herbert Simon, Economics Nobel-prize winner (1968)

The World Wide Web is changing how many of us do our work as we become more connected to information and each other. In California, Ray Prock, Jr. (2010) uses a Web-based note system to store messages, manage his financial risk and stay on top of the multiple factors necessary to run a successful dairy farm. He is constantly learning as he works and has found a method to keep up, thanks to the Internet.

For many, however, keeping up isn’t easy. The amount of information flowing through the Internet today is measured in exabytes, or billions of gigabytes. We now create as much data in days as it took us centuries to create in the past.

This information overload has a direct impact on workplace learning. Workers have access to more information than ever before, but often don’t know if it’s the right information or if it’s current. In the industrial workplace, our training programs could prepare us for years of work, but much of what we learn today will be outdated in months or even weeks.

We need to re-think workplace learning for a networked society. Our organizational structures are becoming more decentralized, with individual access to almost unlimited information, distributed work teams, and digital media that can be copied and manipulated infinitely. In the interconnected workplace, who we know and how we find information are becoming more important than what we know.

As the Internet Time Alliance’s Jay Cross says, formal learning can be somewhat effective when things don’t change much and are predictable, but today’s world is the opposite in every way imaginable. Things are changing amazingly fast, and there’s so much to learn. Today’s work is all about dealing with novel situations (Cross 2010a).

Jane Hart, another colleague at the Internet Time Alliance, has examined social media and learning in the context of the workplace and has noted that much of it is informal (Hart 2010). Formal, structured learning plays only a small role in getting things done in the networked workplace. Research shows that about 80 percent of workplace learning is informal (Cross 2010b) and that less than 10 percent of what knowledge workers need to know for their jobs is in their heads (Kelley 1999).

Informal learning is nothing new, but it is of growing importance in the modern, digitally connected workplace. Making sense of information, both personally and in networks, is becoming a key part of work. Teams and organizations that can share information faster and make better sense of it are more productive. Social learning is about getting things done in networks. More attention must be paid to how we can support and encourage informal learning in the workplace. A “workscape” focus is  broader than the traditional training and development approach.

Network Learning

Network learning is an individual, disciplined process by which we make sense of information, observations and ideas. In the past, self-directed learning may have involved keeping a journal, writing letters or having conversations. These are still valid, but with digital media we can add context by categorizing, commenting on, or even remixing information. We can also store information for easy retrieval as we need it.

Network learning, at the individual level, includes:

Personal directed learning – how individuals can use social media for their own (self-directed) personal or professional learning; and

Accidental and serendipitous learning – how individuals, by using social media, can learn without consciously realizing it (e.g., incidental or random learning).

At its core, network learning is a way to deal with an ever-increasing amount of digital information. It requires an open attitude toward learning and finding new things. Each worker needs to develop individualized processes of filing, classifying and annotating information for later retrieval.

Standard document management methods have been shown to fail over the years, as most workers do not personally adopt them. Developing good network learning skills, on the other hand, can aid in observing, thinking and using information and knowledge. Learning in networks also prepares the mind to be open to new ideas and can result in “enhanced serendipity.” As Louis Pasteur said, chance favors the prepared mind.

One way to look at network learning is as a continuous process of seeking, sensing and sharing.

Seeking is finding things out and keeping up to date. Building a network of colleagues is helpful in this regard—it not only allows us to “pull” information, but also have it “pushed” to us by trusted sources.

Sensing is how we personalize information and use it. Sensing includes reflection and putting into practice what we have learned. Often it requires experimentation, as we learn best by doing.

Sharing includes exchanging resources, ideas and experiences with our networks and collaborating with our colleagues.

Seeking: Using Filters

In seeking, we need to develop effective filters so we are not overwhelmed by too much information. A high signal-to-noise ratio is desirable.

We can use human filters, such as asking a close colleague for a good source of information on a subject. This often happens in open work environments, where someone asks the group, “Hey, does anybody know how to … ?” This is a naïve filter, in that the recommendations provided are not necessarily reliable. The closest people are not always the best sources of knowledge.

Another option is to find a known expert in a field and ask him or her for advice. It’s a better approach, but dependent on the expert.

The best option is to connect with a network of expertise and corroborate advice from a variety of experts. Twitter is an example of a platform that enables this. We can follow many people in a discipline and fine-tune the network by adding or subtracting from it until we have an optimal signal-to-noise ratio.

There are also tools that use mechanical filters, such as search engines or analytical engines that show trending topics. Using both human and mechanical filters can ensure a good flow of information without being overwhelmed. Keyword alerts can be set up with a variety of online systems, or regular searches can be conducted on social media platforms. With practice, we can find what we need when we need it (and sometimes before we need it).

Sensing: Validating, Synthesizing, Presenting, and Customizing

We make sense of data by using our existing knowledge to create more information. This is what writers do—they take various data and write a coherent narrative that becomes information for someone else. While this is an efficient way of transmitting information from one to many, it does not transfer knowledge, as a recipe book does not a chef make. Each person makes sense and builds expertise on his or her own terms.

As mentioned, filtering information is an easy way to start to make sense of digital information flows. Social bookmarking services, such as Delicious, enable us to categorize and annotate Web pages. Social bookmarks are searchable and can be shared within a group or made public. They are a good initial step toward moving information to the cloud. Making information public helps to validate it, as we can check references, analyze logic and compare sources.

Another level of value can be added by synthesizing information. This synthesized information can then be presented in various digital formats to facilitate understanding. For example, a good graphic may make more sense than several pages of text. A slide show with voice-over can help convey complex ideas. Information presentations can be further customized for specific contexts, such as an analysis of global trends and how they may affect a specific business.

These are examples of taking information and adding value to it for the individual, the group, the organization and the network. By treating information as grist for our cognitive mills, we can build knowledge bases that will help us get work done. Thus, a blog can become a place for small, coherent thoughts that, when aggregated, become a discussion document or a policy paper.

Without the ongoing process of sense making, we can fall into the trap of grabbing the easiest information that is available at the time.

Some Web tools for sense making include:

Note taking (e.g., EverNote)
Social bookmarks (e.g., Delicious)
Micro-sharing (e.g., Twitter)
Blogs (e.g., WordPress)
Presentations (e.g., Slideshare)
Videos (e.g., Vimeo)

Not everyone will use all of these tools, and there are many others, but it is important to develop methods of sense making that work on a day-to-day basis.

Sharing: Joining a Community

Network learning practices are part of a social learning contract for better organizational learning. Sharing is an essential part of network learning. Without it, we become islands of knowledge that cannot take collective action.

The use of online media enables sharing and can result in exponential network effects. Because knowledge has no known limits, the potential return on investment in knowledge co-creation can be many orders of magnitude greater than traditional process improvement methods.

The most wonderful aspect of Web-based social media is that they are designed for sharing. We can start our sense-making journey in a completely selfish way, but by using Web tools we can easily share whenever we wish. This is network learning. For example, blogs can start as private journals, but after a while we may want to share our posts. As the blog is already online, it can be made public, and all of the information it contains is available for distribution. No extra programming is necessary.

By sharing information and engaging in online conversations, we become part of a community. We will discover that we are truly in a community of practice when it changes our practice.

By seeking, sensing and sharing on an individual basis, we create the building blocks for a dynamic community of knowledge workers, continuously pushing at the edges of our disciplines. Network learning lays the foundation for the ongoing process of idea management, a necessity in complex work environments that require continuous adaptation. This sharing and using of ideas is at the core of business innovation.

REFERENCES

Cross, Jay. 2010a. How to Support Informal Learning Informal Learning Blog.

Cross, Jay. 2010b. Where Did the 80% Come From? Informal Learning Blog

Hart, Jane. 2010. The State of Learning in the Workplace Today. Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies.

Kelley, Robert E. 1999. How to be a Star at Work. New York: Crown Publishing Group.

Prock, Ray, Jr. 2010. Ray-Lin Dairy: A Progressive California Dairy Farm Blog.

Note:

This article was published, with minor changes, as Personal Knowledge Management: Working and Learning Smarter, in Information Outlook, The Magazine of the Special Libraries Association, Sept 2010

I am moving away from the term personal knowledge management (PKM) and using “network learning” instead, as I believe it is a more accurate term for online sense-making.

* Content from jarche.com is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License

http://www.jarche.com/2010/10/network-learning-working-smarter/