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.

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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

In an article in Macrumors (obviously, an Apple info site), they detail part of Adam Lashinsky’s new Inside Apple book that reports on Apple executive development program.  Steve Jobs hired a couple of biz school heavyweights to develop the program, and apparently “Wherever possible the cases shine a light on mishaps…”.  They use examples from other companies, and importantly, Apple’s own missteps.

Companies that can’t learn from mistakes, their own and others’, are doomed to repeat them.  In organizations where it’s not safe to share failures, where anything you say can and will be held against you, the same mistakes will keep getting made.  I’ve worked with firms that have very smart people, but their culture is so aggressive that they can’t admit errors.  As a consequence, the company continues to make them, and gets in it’s own way.  However, you don’t want to celebrate failure, but you do want to tolerate it. What can you do?

I’ve heard a great solution.  Many years ago now, at the event that led to Conner’s & Clawson’s Creating a Learning Culture, one small company shared their approach: they ring a bell not when the mistake is made, but when the lesson’s learned.  They’re celebrating – and, importantly,  sharing – the learning from the event.  This is a beautiful idea, and a powerful opportunity to use social media when the message goes beyond a proximal group.

There’s a lot that goes on behind this, particularly in terms of having a culture where it’s safe to make mistakes  Culture eats strategy for breakfast, as the saying goes..  What is a problem is making the same mistake, or dumb mistakes.  How do you prevent the latter?  By sharing your thinking, or thinking out loud, as you develop your planned steps.

Now, just getting people sharing isn’t necessarily sufficient.  Just yesterday (as I write), Jane Bozarth pointed me towards an article in the New Yorker (at least the abstract thereof) that argues why brainstorming doesn’t work.  I’ve said many times that the old adage “the room is smarter than the smartest person in the room” needs a caveat: if you manage the process right.  There are empirical results that guide what works from what doesn’t, such as: having everyone think on their own first; then share; focus initially on divergence before convergence; make a culture where it’s safe, even encouraged, to have a diversity of viewpoints; etc.

No one says getting a collaborating community is easy, but like anything else, there are ways to do it, and do it right.  And here too, you can learn from the mistakes of others…

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.

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

What’s in it for us?

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

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

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

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

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

Josh lists the benefits of embracing agile:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Stoos Gathering

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

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

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

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

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

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

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/

The general idea is that there are several levels at which you can evaluate interventions:

1. whether the recipient considered the intervention appropriate or not
2.  whether the recipient can demonstrate new ability after the intervention
3. whether the intervention is being applied in the workplace, and
4. whether the intervention is impacting desired outcomes.

That this is my interpretation became abundantly clear.  But let’s start with what’s wrong in practice.

In practice, first, folks seem to think that just doing level 1 (‘smile sheets’) is enough. Far fewer people take the next logical step and assess level 2. When they do, it’s too often a knowledge test.  Both of these fail to understand the intention: Kirkpatrick (rightly) said you have to start at level 4. You have to care about a business outcome you’re trying to achieve, and then work backwards: what performance change in the workplace would lead to the desired outcome. Then, you can design a program to equip people to perform appropriately and determine whether they can, and finally see if they like it.  And, frankly, level 1 is useless until you finally have had the desired impact, and then care to ensure a desirable user experience.  As a standalone metric, it ranks right up there with measuring learning effectiveness by the pound of learners served.

Now, one of the things my colleagues pointed out to me, beyond the failure in implementation, is that Kirkpatrick assumes that it has to be a course.  If it’s just misused, I can’t lay blame, but my colleagues proceeded to quote chapter and verse from the Kirkpatrick site to document that the Kirkpatricks do think courses are the solution. Consequently, any mention of Kirkpatrick only reinforces the notion that courses are the salve to all ills.

Which I agree is a mindset all too prevalent, and so we have to be careful of any support that could lead a regression to the status quo.  Courses are fine when you’ve determined that a skill gap is the problem.  And then, applying Kirkpatrick starting with Level 4 is appropriate.  However, that’s more like 15% of the time, not 100%.

So where did I go wrong?  As usual, when I look at models, I abstract to a useful level (my PhD focused on this, and Felice Ohrlich did an interesting study that pointed out how the right level of abstraction is critical).  So, I didn’t see it tied to courses, but that it could in principal be used for performance support as well (at least, levels 3 and 4).  I think also at least for some social learning interventions.

Moreover, I was hoping that by starting at level 4, you’d look to the outcome you need, and be more likely to look at other solutions as well as courses.  But I had neglected to note the pragmatic issue that the Kirkpatrick’s imply courses are the only workplace intervention to move the needles, and that’s not good.  So, from now on I’ll have to be careful in my reference to Kirkpatrick.

The model of assessing the change needed and working backward is worthwhile, as is doing so systematically.  Consequently, at an appropriate level of abstraction, the model’s useful.  However, in it’s current incarnation it carries too much baggage to be recommended without a large amount of qualification.

So I’ll stick to talking about impacting the business, and determining how we might accomplish that, rather than talk about levels, unless I fully qualify it.

http://blog.learnlets.com/?p=2390

The problem is that it goes far beyond just a more enlightened instructional design, which of course we need.  We need to think of content architectures, blends between formal and informal, contextual awareness, cross-platform delivery, and more.  It involves technology systems, design processes, organizational change, and more.  We also need to focus on the bigger picture.

Yet the vision driving this is, to me, truly inspiring: augmenting our performance in the moment and developing us over time in a seamless way, not in an idiosyncratic and unaligned way.  And it is strategic, but I’m wondering if architecture doesn’t better capture the need for systems and processes as well as revised design.

This got triggered by an exercise I’m engaging in, thinking how to convey this.  It’s something along the lines of:

The curriculum’s wrong:

• it’s not knowledge objectives, it’s skills
• it’s not current needs, it’s adapting to change
• it’s not about being smart, it’s about being wise

The pedagogy’s wrong:

• it’s not a flood, but a drip
• it’s not knowledge dump, it’s decision-making
• it’s not expert-mandated, instead it’s learner-engaging
• it’s not ‘away from work’, it’s in context

The performance model is wrong:

• it’s not all in the head, it’s distributed across tools and systems.
• it’s not all facts and skill, it’s motivation and confidence
• it’s not independent, it’s socially developed
• it’s not about doing things right, it’s about doing the right thing

The evaluation is wrong:

• it’s not seat time, it’s business outcomes
• it’s not efficiency, at least until it’s effective
• it’s not about normative-reference, it’s about criteria

So what does this look like in practice?   I think it’s about a support system organized so that it recognizes what you’re trying to do, and provides possible help.  On top of that, it’s about showing where the advice comes from, developing understanding as an additional light layer.  Finally, on top of that, it’s about making performance visible and looking at the performance across the previous level, facilitating learning to learn. And, the underlying values are also made clear.

It doesn’t have to get all that right away.  It can start with just better formal learning design, and a bit of content granularity. It certainly starts with social media involvement.  And adapting the culture in the org to start developing meta-learning.  But you want to have a vision of where you’re going.

And what does it take to get here?  It needs a new design that starts from the performance gap and looks at root causes. The design process then onsiders what sort of experience would both achieve the end goal and the gaps in the performer equation (including both technology aids and knowledge and skill upgrades), and consider how that develops over time recognizing the capabilities of both humans and technology, with a value set that emphasis letting humans do the interesting work.  It’ll also take models of content, users, context, and goals, with a content architecture and a flexible delivery model with rich pictures of what a learning experience might look like and what learning resources could be.  And an implementation process that is agile, iterative, and reflective, with contextualized evaluation.  At least, that sounds right to me.

Now, what sounds right to you: learning experience design strategy, performance system design, performance architecture, <your choice here>?

http://blog.learnlets.com/?p=2375

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/

What that’s saying is that at least half of the money you invest in new things could be conceived of as being wasted.  You might be considered a very ineffective manager if 50% of your investments don’t yield returns!  Now, first of all, I’m sure you recognize that failed experiments aren’t a complete waste, as long as you learning something (“when you lose, don’t lose the lesson” as the saying goes).  Still, 50%  might still seem like a high failure rate.  But is low risk really good?

I remember hearing a talk by a Canadian AI researcher (who’s name escapes me after all these years) who had studied the optimal ratio of success to failures in helping a system learn. Now this was particular to the learning algorithm he’d chosen, but his result was roughly that you learned fastest if you failed two-thirds of the time, or around 67% failure.  Now that’d be pretty disheartening, but if you could take emotion out of the equation, e.g. made it safe to fail, would learning faster be a big enough argument to support bigger failure?

It depends on a lot: on how well you discern the lessons from failure, how well you tolerate failure, how much social scrutiny and how tolerant that public viewpoint is, but it’s interesting to contemplate what might be an optimal context for failure, and given that, what would be the fastest way to learn, and capitalize on that learning.  You want your experiments to be designed in the first place to yield maximum information, but if they do, what would a valuable success rate be?

I do believe that they who adapt fastest will be the survivors.  That adaptation may be subconscious, but I think conscious reflection is a valuable component.  Certainly for sharing the learning, so no one else has to make the same mistakes.  So are you learning just as fast as you can?

http://blog.learnlets.com/?p=2371

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/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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