In this case I’m looking at the 4 C’s by work categories.  I see augmenting formal learning as one, providing performance support as a second, social media as a 3rd area, and the unique mobile contribution of context-sensitive support as a 4th area.

I realize there are some problems in this, in that Social and Communicate are hard to discriminate (hence using the catchall phrase social network), and Capture is core to context-sensitivity. Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) don’t have to be social, but can be.  And I hadn’t really thought through what context-sensitive computing and communicating might mean. Certainly you could have a focused directory that knows who knows about this context, and perhaps an app that presents different options for context-sensitive trouble-shooting or repair (e.g. knowing what device you’re liable to be working on), but I could be missing some options.  And I’m not sure I’ve seen socially edited or maintained apps as opposed to content. Anyone?  Anyone?  Bueller?

So, as this is a first shot at this, I welcome feedback. What am I missing?

Talking with my ITA colleague Jay Cross at lunch the other day, it occurred to me that I was seeing the same pattern with social media that I see elsewhere.  When I think through many instances I’ve seen, heard of, or experienced, I see them addressing one issue. “We’ve put in a social media system to use around our formal learning.”  ”We’ll buy a social  media platform to use for our sales force.”  And these aren’t bad decisions, except for the fact that such an initiative has broader ramifications.

What I’m not seeing is folks thinking enough along the lines of “social media is a platform, and we should be looking at how the investment can be leveraged.”  I’m not seeing enough focus on using every tactic as a step on the way to a ‘workscape’ (aka performance ecosystem).  You want to be building the infrastructure for working smarter, and every move should be developing that capability.  You want to be getting closer and closer to workers having tools to hand, the resources they need to get the job done.

To empower workers, you want to have the tools for communication, e.g. video sharing, blogging micro- and macro-, discussion forums, etc as well as the tools for collaboration, e.g. shared documents and expertise finding, arranged around tasks and interests, not around silos.  To free folks up to get the job done, they need to be able to work smarter.

And you want to align what you’re doing with organizational goals, define metrics that will impact key business metrics, provide governance with partners both fundamental and strategic, leverage other organizational initiatives (oh, you’re putting in a CMS?  With just a small additional effort, we can use that to facilitate sharing of information…), etc.  It’s time to start thinking strategically, if you want to really move your organization forward.  There’re a number of steps: advanced ID, performance support, mobile, each taking on another facet, but arguably the biggest benefit will come from bringing together the talent in your organization.  Why not?

Probably the best first step to take is to start using social media in the learning unit, so folks there ‘get it’ (you got to be in it to win it, as they say re: the lottery; guess that’s why I wasn’t one of the 3 winners .  That’s a strategic step that can drive the rest.  And you can take the slow path and figure it out yourself, or accelerate with some assistance, but it’s really time to get going.  So, what’s stopping you?

What occurs to me, however, is that there are two separate places you’ll get to.  If you master formal learning and performance support (and while that’s the only thing many L&D groups do, there’re far fewer that do it well), you’re only going to support execution.  While that used to be ok for a time when we could plan in advance, the increasing turbulence in markets – product cloning happening in weeks, information tsunamis, etc – means that even optimal execution alone isn’t going to be a differentiator.

What’s going to be needed is continual innovation, and that simply won’t, can’t, come from formal learning.  It’s not even going to come from performance support, which while not full courses, is still designed.  What you need to do to get continual innovation going is communication and collaboration. The myth of individual innovation is busted, and it’s talking together, and more importantly working together, that is going to lead to the new ideas, better processes, optimized systems, and more.  Creativity, research, problem-solving are at the core, and those don’t come from formal learning.

You do need to have formal learning, don’t get me wrong, but that’s just the ante.  The real game is going to come from tapping into the power of your people. You’ll have to create the right culture, get a shared vision, and empower your people with the resources to do the job.  It includes the right mindset, skills, and tools.  When things are aligned, you’re going to have the important outcomes: problems solved faster, shorter times to new product and service ideas, better customer relationships, and more.

You can figure it out on your own, but if you want to get there faster, you may want to get some help in accelerating your path to this new way of working, the sustainable path to success.

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

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

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

Flipping Stanford

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jay Cross calls the new performance environment a workscape:

Workscape: A metaphorical construct where learning is embedded in the work and emerges in “pull” mode. It is a fluid, holistic, process. Learning emerges as a result of working smarter. In this environment learning is natural, social, spontaneous, informal, unbounded, adaptive and fun. It involves conversation as the main ingredient.

Workscapes are not new structures but rather holistic ways of looking at and reformulating existing business infrastructure. They use the same networks and social media as the business itself, but technology is never the most important part. Foremost are people, their motivations, emotions, attitudes, roles, their enthusiasm or lack thereof, and their innate desire to excel.

Technology connects people.

Workscapes go far beyond traditional training and instructional services. Jane Hart has developed a comprehensive framework for the support of workplace learning and performance. Note in the centre that “learning needs to be embedded in the workflow“. This is the premise from which all organizational support must flow.

Another perspective, from Charles Jennings, uses the 70-20-10 framework to prioritize performance support. “If you keep people in the workflow, and provide them with facilities and support for learning, the learning is more effective, faster and efficient.”

A workscape perspective can help management, HR and L&D professionals get away from the trees to see the forest,  because business is a complex, interconnected ecosystem today.

One way to look at workscapes is along a continuum of structured work/learning and the informal and opportunity-driven. Loose external networks are necessary to have access to diverse opinions, while work teams need to share complex knowledge and therefore have to build strong, collaborative relationships. I explained this in more detail in Bridging the Gap; Working Smarter.

What becomes evident is that communities of practice are the bridges between the work being done and diverse social networks, fostering cooperation with minimal hierarchical structure.

Basically, collaboration is necessary to do complicated, but manageable, project tasks; while a looser form of cooperation helps to understand more complex and not yet manageable problems. In the network era, cooperation is moving from a soft skill to a required hard skill.

From this perspective, the best way to develop internal workforce support structures (what used to be called learning & development) would be from the outside in.

One can start with what is being constantly learned in professional social networks and harvest it for insights. Then discuss these ideas cooperatively in communities of practice and further test out ways to enhance collaboration (Probe-Sense-Respond).

Through collaborative work, one can get feedback on where performance support may be required and if training is needed. In this way, the externally focused social business, and everyone in it, drives the development tools and methods to support the work being done. Everyone is involved in what used to be the instructional design process, but now there is a focus on collaboration first, performance support when needed, and training as the last choice.

Another way to look at workscapes would be from a maturity perspective, similar to the community maturity model. In The Learning Workplace, Anne Marie McEwan described “four profiles of learning workplaces according to structure, global reach, knowledge type, workstyle and social complexity”: Traditional, Emergent, Networked & Hyper-networked.

Many, if not most, companies today face the challenge of moving from a Traditional profile to what could be called a “more networked” profile, or somewhere between profiles 2, 3 & 4. This “shift to the right” includes:

Developing work structures that are less hierarchical, allow for more individual autonomy and some level of networked responsibility.

Expanding reach to be more global, as the Internet seeps into all aspects of business.

Incorporating ways of sharing increasingly complex knowledge.

Shifting away from a focus on place of work and number of hours worked toward more virtual and mobile connections with workers.

Enabling complex social interactions to develop trusted relationships across distances.

These shifts are corroborated by much of the current literature on social business. The big question though, is: How do we get there? While an even more pressing question might be: How do we get started?

On inspection, one factor is common across all of these shifts – control.

Recently, I was chatting with a friend who works for a large multinational corporation. His main frustration is the level of control throughout the company. Many days he spends most of his time dealing with one support department or another, which has control across the company. Each time an exception occurs, the control measures are inadequate to deal with it and the central authority lacks any local contextual knowledge. My friend gets frustrated, as this is often at the expense of the client. He also says that these exceptions are steadily becoming the norm.

Here is a potential starting point to move to a more networked profile. An initial audit of control measures that no longer make sense would be a good place to start the voyage from a traditional to a networked workplace.

Step 1: Just ask those who do the work where less control would help get the job done.

What authorizations (budget, vacation, time off, travel, etc.) require more time than they are worth?

How can we make it easier to connect with co-workers who are not at your workplace?

How can we make it easier to share and access know-how?

When and where would you prefer to work to be more productive?

Who do you need to get to know better to enhance your work? (customer, supplier, co-worker, etc.).

Step 2: Now take that information and start doing something about it.

Audits make good snapshots that can drive better conversations and approaches on what needs to change.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More information on scenario planning.

Every professional needs to be open to continuous learning and to make much of it transparent in order to cooperate with others. Nothing remains the same, and the only way to remain relevant in the network era is to stay connected. This is life in perpetual Beta.

An open attitude is increasingly important. The people who blog or connect on social media can get things done quicker, find answers faster, get advice and just be more effective. All of this requires professional networks and these take time to build the necessary trust before one can even ask for help. For instance, strangers usually have to know something about someone before they will help out. Without some persistent point of presence (blog, Twitter, LinkedIn), one is invisible online unless he or she is already famous. Most of us are not.

It is not just an advantage to belong to diverse professional networks but in recent years the situation has tipped so that it is now a significant disadvantage to not actively participate in social learning networks.

With social media, anyone can easily create digital content and collaborate with others without any special programming skills. And the kinds of skills needed for all professionals today are not so much specific social media platforms, but rather changes in attitudes and perspective.

It is getting difficult for anyone to be an expert other than in a very narrow field for a short period of time. Bloggers can quickly get the scoop on professional journalists. As knowledge workers, we are like actors — only as good as our last performance. For a fleeting time, we may be viewed as experts. This erosion in perceived and conferred expertise means that professionals have to become learners themselves and follow the flow of the ever-expanding bodies of knowledge related to their fields. It is a shift away from subject matter experts and toward subject matter networks.

“Creativity is a conversation—a tension—between individuals working on individual problems, and the professional communities they belong to.”~ David Williamson Shaffer

Conversation is an essential part of being a networked professional today. One person cannot know everything, but can add to, as well as benefit from, the knowledge of others by engaging in various online conversations. Social media let anyone join in professional conversations, and conversely, may isolate those who do not.

Professionals immersed in communities of practice, or those continuously pushing their informal learning opportunities, may have a larger zone of proximal development (the gap between a person’s current development level and the potential level of development). They are more open to learning and to expanding their knowledge. Active involvement in informal learning, particularly through web-based communities, is key to remaining professional and creative in any field.

Being a professional in the network era is becoming more about your network than your current knowledge.

Fields of knowledge are expanding, new tools are constantly being introduced, and over a billion people are connected via the Internet. However, blogging still stands out as nearly ubiquitous, especially for professional development. Varieties of blogs include text, video, and audio, but blogs are relatively simple, give individuals voice, and enable conversation to flow. One can think of a blog as a professional journal to record thoughts and ask questions of peers.

Each blog post has a unique identifier (permalink) which can be referenced by others, without permission. This is where blogs still remain superior to many walled information gardens, like Facebook. Blogs enhance serendipity. Blog posts do not need to be perfect essays but can help make sense of the learning process. The comments between blogs help create networks of conversations around issues or topics.

Even once connected with social media, the critical aspect that remains is attitude. Accepting that we will never know everything, but that others may be able to help, is the first step in becoming a networked professional. This is an acceptance of a world in flux, and that knowledge is neither constant nor fixed.

Instead of trying to know everything in the field, we can concentrate on knowing with whom to connect. The network becomes all-important. That means embracing an attitude of openness and collaboration—joining others on a journey of understanding. Giving up control is a first step on this journey.

Having a blog, a permanent presence on the web, becomes the jumping off point for deeper professional discussions. I call it my home base. Producing a blog also opens a person up to criticism, so once again, an open attitude to learning is essential.

Networked professionals can no longer rest on their past accomplishments while their fields of knowledge change and grow. 

Through sharing and exposing their work on the web, networked professionals can connect to communities of practice and get informal peer review. There is no way to stay current all by ourselves. With blogs and other collaboration methods, each of us can become a participatory node in various communities of practice.

The whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts, and knowing who to call becomes more important than having the right answer. But we are all humans and we relate on a human level, which means that we first have to get to know others and develop a level of trust before real sharing can happen. Collaboration is a two-way street.

Finally, critical thinking – the questioning of underlying assumptions, including our own – is becoming all-important as we have to make our own way in the network era. Critical thinking can be looked at as four main activities, which social media can help us achieve:

• Observing and studying our fields
• Participating in professional communities
• Building tentative opinions
• Challenging and evaluating ideas

In the early 21st century, it’s time for all professionals to develop net work skills.

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

Source: http://www.jarche.com/2012/03/net-work-skills/

Narration of Work: This means actually talking about what you are doing. It’s making your tacit knowledge (what you feel) more explicit (what you are doing with that knowledge). Narrating your work is a powerful behaviour changer, as anyone who blogs regularly can attest. Of course, I mean personal or professional blogs, not writing articles just to attract eyeballs and increase advertising revenue.

In an organization, narration can take many forms. It could be a regular blog; sharing day-to-day happenings in activity streams; taking pictures and videos; or just having regular discussions. Developing good narration skills, like adding value to information, takes time and practice, so don’t expect overnight miracles.

Narration of work is the first step in becoming a social enterprise.

Transparency: This is an easy concept to understand but much more difficult to implement in the enterprise. It’s switching the default mode to sharing. This can be enabled by social media but note that social media also make the company culture transparent. A dysfunctional company culture does not improve with transparency, it just gets exposed. Here’s an observation from Ross Mayfield, founder of SocialText, in 2007:

But I’ll also make one argument, about how the change in tools may be deterministic for changing culture and about cultural spillover.  Blogs and Wikis are inherently more transparent than email, where 90% of collaboration occurs.  Users are first gaining exposure to these tools as consumers, within consumer culture.  The default in that culture with these tools is transparency and sharing.  Corporate cultures vary. I can say that we see earlier adoption by corporations with healthy cultures and management practices such as 360 degree reviews, and adoption practices matter.  But it should be noted that consumer culture spills over to corporate culture.  And because this culture shift aids practice building, I’d assert that these tools will trend us towards transparency.

Use social media to promote transparency but be ready to deal with the culture that is exposed. Transparency means real knowledge-sharing. The prime benefit cited for social media in the enterprise is increasing the speed of access to knowledge. This is what transparency enables and it’s necessary to implement the third principle.

Shared Power: Jon Husband describes wirearchy as; “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology.” This is the desired state, but getting there is difficult. Companies that start with this objective have an advantage over existing hierarchical cultures. Examples of shared-power organizations are growing, but not so much that they are the majority.

Start with narration and move toward transparency, with a longer-term objective of shared power. This third principle is essential for social businesses that derive their value from complex and creative work. In these organizations, the higher value work is at the edges and power has to be pushed out to enable exception-handling, the real work in the connected enterprise.

These three simple principles should be enough guidance. The rest depends on the specific context of each organization and the ability to keep things in perpetual Beta.

“You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.”  ~ Pablo Picasso

Thanks to Chris Mackay for the title of this post.

—

Source: http://www.jarche.com/2012/03/making-collaborative-work-work/

“What Sanofi is doing is reducing its own internal research capacity,” he said. “The days when we locked all of our scientists up in a building and put them on a nice tree-lined campus are done. We will do less of our own research. We’re not going to get out of research. We believe we do certain things well in research but we want to work with more outside companies, startup biotechs, with universities.”

Chris Viehbacher, CEO of pharmaceutical company Sanofi recently stated that ” …  big companies, and not just Big Pharma, big companies I believe, are not any good at doing innovation.” It seems Sanofi is moving to a more networked way of doing business. But to be more innovative, companies must first become open and transparent.

That’s the challenge of the networked organization. Trust only emerges if knowledge is shared and diverse points of view are accepted. People who have been working in silos for decades may not immediately embrace a more diverse and complex networked way of doing business.

Part of working smarter is connecting the work being done with the identification of opportunities for future work. Innovative ideas often come from loosely knit external learning networks. These can later get developed in slightly tighter communities of communities of practice. But in order to capitalize on novel ideas, professionals have to be continuously sharing knowledge in their communities and testing new opinions in more dynamic external networks.

As research becomes more networked, researchers will need to be more collaborative. Social learning, or learning from and with their (distributed) peers, will become more important. New practices will emerge from these new relationships and more innovative tools & processes will have to support this complex work. The role of connecting and communicating what is happening in various widespread groups will become critical. This is the job of a CCO, or some similar role: to manage workforce collaboration.

The three principles of net work remain, in my opinion:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creating New Leaders for the 21st Century (1)

Creating New Leaders for the 21st Century (2)

“Is this something that helps an external consultant, like yourself and ITA more so than it does those working inside an organization in a traditional ‘learning’ team?”

This is a great question –  as it allows me now to write a post, about how not only do I think Workforce Collaboration Services are going to be vital in the emerging social business, but how that there are other key services that will be required too.

Based on the work I have done analyzing the use of social media in a professional context and working with organizations who are transitioning to become social businesses, I have developed a Workforce Development Services (WDS) Framework that incorporates 4 key services (as shown in the graphic on the left – note full-size version available in PDF, link below). Here is a very brief explanation of each of them.

1 – Training services –  The need for training services – face-to-face workshops, e-learning, etc will of course remain, but will likely include more social approaches.  However, the opportunities to integrate (and embed) formal training into the workflow as much as possible – through the increased use of social (workplace) systems – intranets and collaborative tools –  will also need to be exploited.

2 – Performance Support Services –  These  services would  focus on supporting access to quick and easy resources by individuals to pull-down whenever they need them to do their job.  This might be achieved through the creation of  (internal) job aids as well as by encouraging the use of external resources (content, tools, networks) on the Social Web.

3 – Workforce Collaboration Services – These services would focus on helping people work collaboratively in teams and groups (as well as more widely across the organization) to encourage and support an ongoing approach to continuous learning and improvement in the workflow. Note, these would not be traditional training services, but would involve the development of a range of collaboration and community skills by “modelling” behaviours.

4 – Performance Consulting Service – These services will focus on identifying the root cause of performance problems and proposing an appropriate solution, which might well be training, but is more likely to be a performance support or workforce collaboration solution. This will be a fundamental service in the WDS Framework as it will serve as the main entry point to the department. In other words, instead of managers coming (to training) with requests for courses, they will (need to) come with requests for help with performance problems.

However, there may well be other entry points directly into other service areas. For example,  Compliance and Regulation might work directly with Training Services, and as businesses transition to social business another entry point might be direct to Workforce Collaboration Services.

Although on the graphic above I showed them as separate services, in reality there will be a high level of overlap in the services provided – particularly between Performance Support and Workforce Collaboration services (as shown in the graphic on the right – note full-size version available in PDF, link below). This also means that although some new service areas will require new skills (social media, community management/leadership, business strategy/processes, etc), not everyone will need to have all the new skills, rather there will remain the opportunity for specalization in the different areas (e.g. for instructional design in the training services area)  but at the same there will be the  ability to make use of new skills to expand/extend the value in each of the distinct areas too.

Furthermore, this framework (unlike the 70:20:10 framework) does not recommend the amount of effort that should be spent in each service area. However, with a Performance Consulting Service in place, it is anticipated that the amount of training organised will likely reduce over time, as other services/solutions are shown to be more effective.

But one important point to reiterate is that Performance Support and Workplace Collaboration services are not “training services” but rather “learning support” services. There is a big difference. So these service areas won’t be about creating and delivering training topeople, but helping them extract and value the learning from their daily work activities themselves.

Although some L&D departments are already thinking more about providing “performance support” services, some  might not want to  include Workforce Collaboration services in their repertoire, These will then have to be provided by other parts of the business – IT, or Business Operations, for example. But as there is quite a big overlap with the other areas, it would make sense for them to be included, although, once again, to reiterate, they will require a different approach than training.

Early commentators of the Framework think that it helps to “legitimize” informal learning in the organization, and at the same time shows a way to incorporate new (non-training) approaches into a wider Workforce Development Services Department – where the focus is on helping people to do their jobs – or do them better – and not just on training.

If you want to read more about this Framework, then I’ve updated The Social Learning Revolution article with this new content. I’ve also produced a PDF version of the whole article which includes full-size versions of the two charts on the Appendix (and which is available as one of a series of new Internet Time Alliance whitepapers we are producing).

I’ll also be writing more about Workforce Collaboration Services in blog posts in the future.

Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, and networks subvert standardization.

In the industrial era we saw the rise of specialized departments and specialized jobs. Any job could be generically designed and then filled by the most suitable applicant. People became interchangeable pieces for the mechanistic model of work. As jobs are to departments, roles are to networks. Eric Mcluhan states that in the new [network] era; “jobs disappear under electric conditions and they are replaced by roles. Roles mean audiences and participation.”

Roles are based on relationships. Without relationships, there are no roles. In the 21st century workplace, roles are emergent properties of value networks, not pre-defined by HR.

All of the support functions that grew during the late 20th century are like the blind monks examining the elephant in the room – the network. Everyone is struggling to understand the network era, but no one is budging from their observation position. And so they remain blind.

One of the biggest challenges I see on a regular basis is getting people to think in terms of networks, then in terms of relationships. From a learning perspective, this is what connectivism is about: knowledge exists within systems which are accessed through people participating in activities. It is by doing our work that we co-create our roles in our networks. Roles emerge from the activities involved in working with others toward some common purpose. This is social. Social media are merely a conduit for collaboration.

Social learning is an enabler. In the network era, systemic changes are sensed almost immediately so that organizational reaction times and feedback loops have to be faster. One obstacle to this is that we are more inclined to ask for advice only from those we trust, but trust takes time to nurture. By sharing experiences (learning socially), trust emerges. A trusting workplace is a learning workplace and one that can adapt faster to change.

A workplace that encourages social learning can more easily become a social business. Social business emerges from social learning that itself emerges from collaborative work. All of this happens within networks. Existing departments need to become contributing nodes in their respective networks or face obsolescence. As workers become more collaborative and networked, they will bypass non-contributing nodes. If a department is not part of the networked workflow, or tries to block it, it is part of the problem.

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it – Gilmore’s Law

Those specialized departments of the 20th century need to engage in social learning, by modelling behaviour and continuously developing next practices to adapt to changing conditions. This is the challenge to remain relevant in the 21st century workplace. Learn or die.

This isn’t the Information Age, it’s the Learning Age; and the quicker people get their heads around that, the better – Prof Stephen Heppell

Look at how F.W. Taylor in Principles of Scientific Management (1911), described the role of management for the industrial era:

It is only through enforced standardization of methods,enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.

In the network era, social learning must be supported, roles emerge from networks, work has more variety and less standardization, and businesses must be social in order to deal with increasing complexity. I have suggested something more like this:

It is only through innovative and contextual methods, the self-selection of the most appropriate tools and work conditions and willingcooperation that more productive work can be assured. The duty of being transparent in our work and sharing our knowledge rests with all workers.

It boils down to the fact that in the network era, value is derived from workforce collaboration, where you are either contributing to the network, or you are no longer required.

Managing Collaboration

Jane Hart asks who should be your Chief Collaboration Officer (CCO)? It’s a good question, given the growing importance of working collaboratively in the 21st century workplace. Collaboration is a key part of creative work. Hugh Macleod pretty well sums up the core of the networked enterprise:

We live in a most interesting time in history.  With the Internet, never before has it been so easy to collaborate, yet within many organizations it’s often more difficult. A CCO could be a role that helps with the transition to a more collaborative workplace, but do we really need more managers? Two comments on Jane’s post raise this question as well:

Jay Cross: “Companies have to make a profit but they don’t have Chief Profit Officers. Workers must be motivated but there aren’t any Chief Motivation Officers.”

Tim Hickernell: “Chief Collaboration Officer? The hierarchy is the problem, not the solution. Collaboration Strategy, yes; CCO; no.“

It’s that darn hierarchy thing. As you soon as you try to address a problem, it gets more complicated, because that’s what conventional management does. It adds an extra layer of taxation. But information technology has made management [not leadership] redundant, as Sigurd Rinde explains in Let the Managers Go:

Outside the corporate world, in places with fewer habits and assumed truths, IT has shown way more promise: we can communicate and collaborate with people all over the world in a gazillion ways, we have the “cloud”, we have tablets and smartphones, we have all kinds of technological power. But in the corporate world we still run workflows using doughnuts and stern looks. That’s silly. And amazingly ineffective.

Do you need a Chief Collaboration Officer? Yes, if the CCO is focused on putting the position out of business and is seen as a temporary and transitionary role. The CCO can be the person who has a high profile and can model the new collaborative behaviours. This can take some time but, like raising children, should not take forever. So get a CCO, set up a dance hall, throw some parties, mix things up, and see what happens. Keep your CCO in perpetual Beta.

What you should not do is get a CCO with the primary task of implementing some costly  enterprise collaboration software system. That is definitely putting the cart before the horse – but there are many who will counsel this approach. Caveat emptor!

—

Sources: http://www.jarche.com/2012/02/managing-collaboration/ & http://www.jarche.com/2012/02/workforce-collaboration-in-the-network-era/

That may sound trivial, but it’s actually a real issue in terms of freeing up the organization. In one instance, it had been the R&D organization that undertook the cost.  In another case, the cost was attributed to the overhead incurred in dealing with a merger.  These are expedient, but wrong.

It’s increasingly obvious that it’s more than just a ‘nice to have’.  As I’ve mentioned previously, innovation is the only true differentiator.  If that’s the case, then social media is critical. Why?  Because the myth of individual innovation is busted, as clearly told by folks like Keith Sawyer and Steven Berlin Johnson.  So, if it’s not individual, it’s social, and that means we need to facilitate conversations.

If we want people to be able to work together to create new innovations, we don’t want to leave it to chance.  In addition to useful architectural efforts that facilitate in person interactions, we want to put in place the mechanisms to interact without barriers of time or distance.  Which means, we need a social media system.

It’s pretty clear that if you align things appropriately: culture, vision, tools, that you get better outcomes.  And, of course, culture isn’t a line item, and vision’s a leadership mandate.  But tools, well, they are a product/service, and need resources.

Which brings us to the initial point: where does this responsibility lie?  Despite my desire for folks who are most likely to understand facilitating learning (though that’s sadly unlikely in too many L& D departments), it could be IT, operations, or as mentioned above, R&D.  The point is, this is arguably one of the most important investments in the organization, and typically not one of the most expensive (making it the best deal going!). Yet there’s not a unified obvious home!

There are worries if it’s IT. They are, or should be, great at maintaining network uptime, but don’t really understand learning. Nor do the other groups, and yet facilitating the discussion in the network is the most important external role.  But who funds it?

Let’s be real; no one wants to have to own the cost when there’re other things they’re already doing. But I’d argue that it’s the best investment an L&D organization could make, as it will likely have the biggest impact on the organization. Well, if you really are looking to move needles on key business metrics.  So, where do you think it could, and should reside?

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 working with a number of organisations recently as they’ve been making the move “into social”, and one thing was clear, that “helping” their people with this didn’t require old-school training.  Of course, helping them how to use the technology could be partly approached in this way – but even that wasn’t quite the same. And Maria Ogneva agrees in her blog post, This is not your parents’ software training, when she talks about how organisations should approach Yammer “training”.

But as for the new social and collaboration skills that workers require, well you simply can’t train people to be social! What was required was getting down and dirty and helping people understand what it actually meant to work collaboratively in the new social workplace, and the value that this would bring to them.  My Internet Time Alliance colleague, Harold Jarche,  refers to this as modelling, not shaping.

It also involved helping teams understand what it actually meant to set up and sustain a project group or community of practice; and again it wasn’t simply about using the technology, but included offering tips and techniques to encourage and value participation of the members, as well as keep the group or community alive. In other words, when supporting groups with this, it was not about telling them how to do it, but showing them how to do it – modelling, not shaping.

Yesterday, I read an article that offered some lessons for a big rollout of social and collaborative tools for Virgin Media, and their experience was the same.

“One size doesn’t fit all “We couldn’t just deliver a simple technical training course and people would naturally adopt the technology all at the same rate. We had to create a unique and individual set of adoption processes that included everything from one-to-one training to self-help with videos through how-to communities. One of the big successes during the pilot, which I was hoping for but surprised me nonetheless, was the amount of people who started to self-help and help others.”

Helping people to work collaboratively and become a valued member of a community takes skill; and just like the use of social media it’s not something you talk about –  it’s something you have to do yourself.  Are you ready to help “model” these new behaviours in your organisation?

http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/blog/2012/02/14/collaboration-and-community-skills-are-the-new-workplace-skills/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Improving signal-to-noise ratio

• Installing fat pipes for backbone connections

• Pruning worthless, unproductive branches

• Promoting standards for interoperability

• Balancing the load

• Seeking continuous improvement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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/

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” says the White Queen to Alice.

In the previous two articles I addressed some of the challenges learning professionals face in the changing world of work and how they are responding. I also looked at some of the approaches an increasing number of organisations are using to exploit the fact that most learning happens in the workplace rather than in the classroom or through structured eLearning courses – especially the adoption of the 70:20:10 Framework.

This final article in the series addressed the challenge with which many L&D and HR departments struggle. This is how to enrol managers in the practice of people development, how to engage with them, and how to ensure learning activities are aligned with their priorities.

Manager support and active participation is vital to develop and support a culture of continuous learning. Arguably the role that managers play is far more important than that of either L&D or HR. The research supports this. It also supports the fact that the ‘whole is greater than the sum of the parts’ when leaders, line managers, HR, and learning professionals align their efforts and each takes accountability for part of a combined workforce capability development strategy.

A Lessons for Managers from the Mad Hatter

The Mad Hatter’s tea party provides the first lesson.

When Alice sat down at the tea party with the Hatter,  the March Hare and the Dormouse, the Hatter (who, in fact, Carroll never referred to as ‘mad’) poses a riddle for Alice:

“Why is a raven like a writing desk?”

Alice and the Hatter then enter a dialogue that culminates in Alice giving up trying to guess the answer to the riddle, and the Hatter admitting he doesn’t have an answer himself anyway. Alice says wearily to the Hatter “I think you might do something better with the time than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers”. To which the Hatter replies; “If you knew Time as well as I do, you wouldn’t talk about wasting it”.

So, what’s the relation to managers and learning?

Well, sometimes people feel that their managers are posing riddles just like this for them to try to resolve – expecting them to perform without providing any guidance or feedback, and without appearing to have an answer as to what they expect themselves.

Many managers simply don’t set clear objectives and explain their expectations, and don’t follow up and help to embed learning. This has a significant impact on performance.

In fact, research carried out by the Corporate Leadership Council/Learning & Development Roundtable showed that Managers who set clear objectives, explain their expectations, and clearly set out how they plan to measure performance have teams that outperform others by almost 20%.

That’s the equivalent of obtaining an extra day’s work from every team member every week – at no extra cost to organisation or employee! (see Fig 1.)

Fig.1: 15 manager-Led Activities That Improve Performance
Source: Corporate Leadership Council / Learning and Development Roundtable

As you can see from the table, the three activities that impact performance significantly more than any others are:

• Managers setting clear expectations and explaining how performance will be measured.
• Managers providing stretch experiences that help their team members learn and develop.
• Managers setting aside time to discuss and reflect and help their team members learn from development experiences.

The impact of each of these actions on worker performance is almost 300% greater than through building or teaching necessary knowledge and skills – the core role of the L&D department!

Working Closely with Managers

This data tells us that the L&D department needs to work very closely with managers if it is to help build capability and provide real benefits. Focusing on building knowledge and skills is simply not enough.

It also tells us that experiential learning through ‘work that stretches’ is the most powerful tool we have in the box, and that managers have the greatest influence in providing those experiences. However, even more can be achieved if the L&D department and managers work together.

It’s all about providing an integrative environment to encourage development.

Here we can learn a little more from Lewis Carroll.

The Importance of Work That Stretches

It’s thought that the Hatter’s character in ‘Alice’ was inspired by a man named Theophilus Carter. Carter was a servitor at Christ Church College at Oxford University, where Dodgson taught mathematics. After attending university Carter became an eccentric furniture dealer and inventor in the city and became known as “the Mad Hatter” partly from his habit of standing in the door of his shop wearing a top hat, but also from some of his inventions (which included an alarm clock bed – exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851 – that tipped sleepers into a tub of cold water to wake them up (his Oxford education had some value!)

Clearly innovation, experience and work that stretched all were important to the ‘Hatter’ as they are everyone, mad or not.

Integrating Learning with Work

There are many theories of learning, but I think we can boil the sum of adult learning down into four key areas:

1. Experiences: learning through exposure to new and challenging experiences.
2. Practice: learning through having the opportunity to practice and improve.
3. Conversation: learning through our interaction with others – informal coaching and mentoring, and building social networks inside and outside work.
4. Reflection: learning through having the opportunity to reflect on all of the above and plan further activities that will improve performance further.

There is no doubt that experiential learning in the context of work is vital. In the second article in this series I talked about the work of Morgan McCall and his colleagues at the Centre for Creative Leadership. They identified the fact that ‘the lessons learned by successful and effective managers are roughly 70% from tough jobs; 20% from people (mostly the boss); 10% from courses and reading’. In other words, experiential workplace learning represents about 90% of all adult learning.

L&D professionals should hold up every away-from-work learning intervention they design and build – whether it’s a workshop, a course, or a programme – and ask ‘how much will this support each of the four elements of learning above – experience, practice, conversation, reflection – once the participants are back in the workplace?’ If the answer is ‘it won’t’ or ‘maybe only some’ and if the away-from-work learning is simply focused on updating information and so-called ‘knowledge transfer’ then it may be better to save your effort, write the information down and distribute it through the best channels available – online, email, paper or parchment.

A huge amount of L&D time, money and effort is spent on separating learning from work and expecting magic to occur once people are back in the workplace. My advice is to make every effort not to contribute to that.

Learning and work are merging even more now that change is the norm and the rate of change is relentlessly increasing in almost every aspect of life.

Learning and work have always been intertwined, but the development of the ‘curriculum’ and set subjects as a model for education in 18th Century Prussia and it’s uptake across the world (the USA was an early adopter) separated them and we’ve been locked into the idea that education and learning consists of a series of formal events ever since. We’re now breaking out of that mind-set and seeing the power of networks, of information sharing, of immersive scenario-based simulations and, of course, the power of learning in context.

And we need development solutions that are focused on workplace learning and that integrate learning with work.

Managers and Their Role in Formal Development

Managers also have a major role to play with formal learning. If they abrogate their responsibilities for people development and expect the L&D department to achieve performance improvement they are simply hoping for ‘magic’ to happen.

Mary Broad and her colleagues carried out research in the early 1990s that found the role of the manager and the integration of learning with work were essential to assure performance improvement, even with formal training and development (Broad’s work is well documented in her ‘Transfer of Training’ book).

The lesson is that the L&D department can’t do it alone, not even with support from HR colleagues.

Broad’s research demonstrated that the single most important factor in assuring performance improvement following off-the-job development activity (a training and development course) was what the manager of the delegates attending a formal learning intervention did before the delegate attended the course or programme. She also showed that what the manager did following the off-the-job development activity was almost as important.

So, what does this tell us?

Broad’s research highlighted the fact that the manager’s aspirations and needs in terms of the performance of her reports should closely align with the objectives and design of any formal learning course. Otherwise the course will be of little (or no) use.

And this doesn’t mean that the L&D department simply needs to carry out a training needs analysis.

It means that the manager should have a detailed understanding of any formal development activities designed by L&D professionals, and have thought about how she can build on these through stretch activities, new assignments and challenges, and providing opportunities to practice once the delegate returns to the workplace. Of course, she may also need to carry out some preparatory work with her reports before they attend any off-the-job development as well. There is no point agreeing for the wrong people to attend the right course.

Managers and Their Role in Workplace Learning

This tight-coupling of the manager to away-from-work learning activities pales into insignificance when we turn our focus to workplace learning. Here, the manager’s role is absolute. She’s flying solo.

Jack Welch, the oft-quoted, admired, and sometimes disliked former CEO of GE understood the role of the manager in development. He saw his prime job as leader being the development of the company’s senior talent and his role as coach and mentor to his senior team. He also understood the role of continuous learning, saying:

“An organization’s ability to learn and translate that learning into action rapidly is the ultimate competitive advantage.”

In order to maximise learning through work managers need to continually look for opportunities to stretch and challenge their reports, both individually and as a team. Typical approaches might include:

• Providing opportunities to apply new knowledge and skills in real situations.
• Assigning stretch assignments focused on new initiatives.
• Providing cross-divisional and cross-regional experiences.
• Arranging co-ordinated swaps and secondments.
• Creating challenges through assigning greater responsibility.
• Providing opportunities for team members to reflect and learn from work activities.

A Simple Technique to Support Manager-Led Development

“Alice looked back once or twice, half hoping they would call after her: the last time she saw them they were trying to put the Dormouse into the teapot”

Many L&D people struggle with the challenge of engaging and enrolling business managers in employee development. Trying to wedge them into a place they don’t really want to be.

Yet we know that managers who are focused and effective at developing their people have teams that out-perform those that are not by around 25%[1]. So it’s worth thinking about the best approaches to get managers actively involved in learning and development activities in the workplace.

There’s one simple technique I’ve often employed to overcome reluctance and make it easy for leaders and managers to support practical workplace learning. It’s straightforward and managers really appreciate having it to hand. It involves the following simple advice:

Some managers ask their reports to keep an ‘experiential learning log’ to record the sessions. Others simply find it a useful way to focus on experiential learning and reflection and, at the same time help identify opportunities for further development. It also helps managers themselves develop their coaching skills.

The approach you take is not important. What is important is the fact that, without active support of managers at all levels in your organisation you will struggle to achieve any significant level of success in the area where most learning happens – the workplace.

[1] Source: Corporate Leadership Council / Learning and Development Roundtable Employee Development Survey

Original Article: http://charles-jennings.blogspot.com/2012/01/managers-and-mad-hatters-work-that.html