Over the years I have worked with many different companies of all shapes, sizes, and styles.  And I’ve seen many types of managers… Those that can create a highly effective and engaged team / company. Those that try, but never seem to get their team to where they want to be. Those that stopped trying […] The post What Holds Everyone Back from Creating an Engaged Workforce appeared first on VINJONES - Kevin D. Jones.

Sometimes all it takes is a sentence to tweak the way you perceive what you have always been looking at. This happened when I interviewed Marcia Conner for my podcast.  She’s a long time friend and someone I look up to in the world of making work awesome. "Some people are actually being paid to not […] The post Discovering Your Unique Superpower with Marcia Conner appeared first on VINJONES - Kevin D. Jones.

How do you really engage your employees? How do you get rid of apathy, mediocrity, and a disempowered mind set? How do you help your employees take initiative, become more innovative and productive and help them love their work? After years of working with companies and learning what it takes, I created this series of 11 […] The post A New Video Series: 11 Secrets of Engaged Employees appeared first on VINJONES - Kevin D. Jones.

How do you really engage your employees? How do you get rid of apathy, mediocrity, and a disempowered mind set? How do you help your employees take initiative, become more innovative and productive and help them love their work? After years of working with companies and learning what it takes, I created this series of […] The post A New Video Series: 11 Secrets of Engaged Employees appeared first on VINJONES - Kevin D. Jones.

I’m on the hunt for the best culture & employee engagement tools. What tools do you absolutely love?  The ones you can’t live without?  You know, those that make your job so much easier as an employee or when managing employees. Here are some ideas of what these tools might focus on… Collaboration Culture alignment Talent management […] The post I’m on a Search: Best Culture & Employee Engagement Tools appeared first on VINJONES - Kevin D. Jones.

If you were to sum up the psychology of learning in three words, it would be ‘less is more’. - Donald Clark In FrogDesign’s presentation on Design is Hacking How we Learn, slide #27 clearly shows where the emphasis of our learning efforts should be, and where organizations should place the most support and resources: practice. For theory (e.g. classroom), less is more; just as the 70:20:10 framework encourages managers to place less emphasis on formal instruction and more on supporting experiential (on the job) learning. In supporting workplace learning we should take Dan Pink’s advice and find "the one percent that gives life to the other ninety-nine". The future for Learning & Development, if it has one at all, is to find the 1%, by thinking like designers do. Remove everything that is extraneous and find the essence of a topic, subject, or field. Society and business are changing. Old businesses are collapsing and new ones are being created, some collapsing even quicker than the old ones did. Why would the training and education world be immune from these changes? If there’s one lesson L&D needs to take from the failure of HMV [music retailer] and the others it is to fully grasp the speed and nature of the changes that are sweeping through most organisations - increased expectations of speed, relevance, and solutions that are just-in-time and not a minute late. Not only that, but also the increased expectation that L&D departments will deliver high value solutions to organisational challenges and help drive performance and productivity. - Charles Jennings To deal with complexity, the solution is not to add more complication but to reduce your perspective to the simplest one possible. Like mathematicians dealing with complex math, they look for the elegant solution, as it is usually the most useful and most accurate. The proof of a mathematical theorem exhibits mathematical elegance if it is surprisingly simple yet effective and constructive; similarly, a computer program or algorithm is elegant if it uses a small amount of code to great effect. - Wikipedia

Every fortnight I collate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds. "Abundance of books makes men less studious" - Hieronimo Squarciafico c. 1481. [Technology changes but people don’t] Henry Mintzberg said, "It is the conceit of every generation to believe things are chaos in their world, while the past was linear & calm." @tom_peters "All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth." - Friedrich Nietzsche via @surreallyno "Comparisons to the industrial revolution are correct. The problem is when people don’t realise we are the horse this time." @fraserspeirs We all live in multiple on-line communities. - @Orgnet Growing a community is not just adding new members. It requires adding both people and relationships — nodes and links. Node counts are important in social networks, but it’s the relationships — and the patterns they create — that are key! A community thrives by its connections, not by its collections! It’s the relationships, and the prospect of future relationships, that keep members active and excited. Saintly or sinful? Appreciation of luxury goes in circles - @TheEconomist Thorstein Veblen, the economist who gave his name to the sort of goods that become more desirable as their price rises, had political grounds for sneering. Luxury is a form of waste that arose to confer status on an essentially useless class, he argued in "The Theory of the Leisure Class", published in 1899. "Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure." Both Veblen’s and Hume’s ideas remain potent. How to learn efficiently - @lemire  [seek difficult problems > reflect > seek multiple sources] Some students blame the instructors when they feel confused. They are insistent that a course should be structured in such a way that it is always easy, so that they rarely make mistakes. The opposite is true: a good course is one where you always feel that you will barely make it. It might not be a pleasant course, but it is one where you are learning. It is by struggling that we learn. On this note, Learning Style theory is junk: while it is true that some students have an easier time doing things a certain way, having it easier is not the goal.

"Those of us who work in organizational development and change management need to move to the edge, and quickly. You have been warned." - Helen Bevan Five Seismic Shifts are changing the world of work: Disruptive change is becoming the norm Digital connection is revolutionizing communications Work complexity is increasing Hierarchical power is diminishing Change is coming from the edges of the organization Helen Bevan, Chief Transformation Officer, Horizons Group, at the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), spoke at the Quality Forum 2015 in British Columbia, Canada. Helen describes practical ways to guide transformation in the emerging network era: Power today comes from connections, not a position in the hierarchy. We can’t do transformation in our organizations in a discrete way any more. Relationships, not transactions, bind us in our work. We need to curate knowledge from our networks,  to drive organizational improvement. The guiding sense-making framework for change at the NHS is my Seek > Sense > Share PKM model. The kind of knowledge where the ‘magic’ happens is tacit knowledge. We need to make tacit more explicit in order to share it. The best way to spread tacit knowledge is through social connections, which is 14 times more effective than best practice case studies & tool kits. Every person needs to be a knowledge curator. If the knowledge you share does not have meaning, people will not connect with it emotionally. Watch Helen describe how they implement the seek > sense > share framework, or view the complete video below.

Oscar Berg has further developed his digital collaboration canvas that describes nine capabilities required for collaborative knowledge work. He includes a handy CC-licensed worksheet to go with it. Oscar’s original work on this subject was part of my inspiration while working on a way to describe the required facets on an enterprise social network (ESN). I described how I developed the framework, based on the work of Oscar and others, in a presentation at the Learning Technologies conference in 2014. A recording of my presentation is available as well. 9 Digital Collaboration Capabilities: Oscar Berg In looking at Oscar’s expanded canvas I see that digital transformation - the ability to work in a networked ecosystem - requires three interdependent skill-sets. The foundation for these skills is a democratic organization based on loose hierarchies and strong networks. Less control, and more democracy, is required in order to foster the trusted relationships necessary for knowledge workers to both cooperate and collaborate. Collaboration is working together for a common objective, while cooperation is openly sharing, without any quid pro quo. Collaboration is required to accomplish a task, but cooperation is how we contribute to our knowledge networks from which we can draw inspiration. Both are necessary. In addition, each person requires the discipline of seeking out knowledge, making sense of it on an ongoing basis, and sharing with others at the appropriate times. This is personal knowledge mastery. PKM is each individual’s duty in any social learning contract. In social networks, those who do not contribute have fewer connections that they can access when they need help. If you do not give to your network, you will not get back in return. Consider an organization that wants to work on a digital transformation. It has been decided that social learning is important for the training department. Staff draw upon what has been shared in external social networks and use it for their own purposes. Internally they share it. But they are not allowed to contribute to the external networks outside the firewall. In the long run, they will miss out on many opportunities, as they will be seen as takers and not givers. In my own case, I get many request for advice or help via social media. If it is my first contact with that person, and I have not seen anything that has been contributed before, I will ignore the request. On the other hand, Oscar, who freely shares much of his work, can call me up and I will gladly share what I can. People like Oscar have built up enough credit to ask their networks for assistance. This is the long term value of cooperation. What ties cooperation and collaboration together is the engaged individual with the freedom to act. Organizations can ignore this, and impose a structure that inhibits seeking, sense-making, and sharing. If so, collaboration and collaboration will not be effective. The knowledge network will lack sufficient diversity to provide insights for innovation or creativity. Digital transformation requires a workforce with the ability to master all three complementary skill-sets.

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds. Innovation vs. (social) copying [without innovators to copy, none of us can learn socially] Another attribute of the most successful strategies is that they are parasitic. This is the essence of social learning - somebody has to do the hard graft to find out how to do things before other people can copy them, so it only pays to learn socially when there are some innovators around. Indeed, in contests where (the winning) agents were able to invade the entire population, they actually ended up with a lower average pay-off than they did in contests where the conditions allowed some agents with more innovative strategies to survive, so providing new behaviours to copy - New Scientist @shackletonjones - Gamification can kill the ‘why’ Gamification provides an artificial ‘why’ - activity which was meaningless becomes significant by virtue of a system of tokens and reinforcements that links it to things that do mean something to you: like money, or prizes, or status. This is rats & levers - this is operant conditioning. @DonaldClark - Deficit model in education: a dangerous conceit? The conceit of education is that the answer to bad schooling is always more schooling … When education is seen as a cure and cognitive deficiency a disease, we need to worry. Reflections on Working without Managers at Buffer - via @timkastelle [life in perpetual beta] Another emotion I picked up in myself and in others is what feels like we’re floating in space a bit. Since the change is so fundamental and a lot of things aren’t figured out, it’s quite hard to navigate yourself within Buffer currently, since nothing feels "fixed" and ever changing these last few months. Nasdaq to introduce blockchain for private equities -  via @dermotcasey Nasdaq’s use of the blockchain represents what many industry observers see as the biggest legacy of Bitcoin - not so much the currency itself, but instead the digital blockchain concept behind it. As Z/Yen put it earlier this year: "For many people the big story is not Bitcoin, rather it’s the blockchain technology that makes tens of crypto currencies work. Working since 2009, forged in a global furnace of libertarian money, trade, avarice, criminality, espionage and law enforcement, Bitcoin and other crypto currency experiments provide increasing confidence that blockchains are robust in harsh environments and have a bright future." Wired: Why the Blockchain Matters In the end, it’s the possibilities of pervasive, global, high-volume cryptocapitalism, not Bitcoin’s current market valuation, that makes it so interesting. Soon, a technology like Bitcoin will be creating value that may exceed what the internet has created to date. Of course, pioneers often disappear. Sometimes that idea that has venture capitalists reaching for their wallets and others taking a pass ends up being AltaVista. Sometimes, it ends up being Google. The Irony of Happiness at Work in the Age of Automation - via @jajbelshaw Accept the inevitability of absolute automation.  If it’s unrealistic to think companies around the world will reject the philosophy of growth-at-all-costs, assume automation is inevitable.  Deep Learning and AI are not being designed to only replace certain societal roles.  It’s being designed to fully replicate humanity.  This choice has been made.  Fight it or accept the fact you’re letting it happen. NPR: The most common jobs in every US state [why self-driving vehicles will change the economy] Image: NPR