NY times reports that there is no evidence of improved educational performance with having computers at home. "Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households. Taking widely varying routes, they are arriving at similar conclusions: little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts."

Dennis Littky writes about a new approach to education in the lastest issue of Interactions magazine. (Subscription required). "The school was broken down into advisories, with a teacher and a group of students who spent four years together. Each adviser, parent, and student developed an individual learning plan. The school had broad goals of reading, writing, applying math, empirical reasoning, communication, and personal qualities. Every student would have his or her own way of reaching those goals with high standards. The teacher—also acting as adviser—would help the student identify his or her interests and then find a mentor and workplace to help make the learning real." Sounds like "Gurukul" to me.

Glad to have worked with some very talented illustrators and animators. Here is a sample of our work at PebbleRoad.

Dennis Littky writes about a new approach to education in the lastest issue of Interactions magazine. (Subscription required). "The school was broken down into advisories, with a teacher and a group of students who spent four years together. Each adviser, parent, and student developed an individual learning plan. The school had broad goals of reading, writing, applying math, empirical reasoning, communication, and personal qualities. Every student would have his or her own way of reaching those goals with high standards. The teacher—also acting as adviser—would help the student identify his or her interests and then find a mentor and workplace to help make the learning real." Sounds like "Gurukul" to me.

Interesting study suggests that interrogative self-talk is actually more motivating than declarative gumption that business leaders profess. "Why is interrogative self-talk more effective? Subsequent experiments by the scientists suggested that the power of the "Will I?" condition resides in its ability to elicit intrinsic motivation. (We are intrinsically motivated when we are doing an activity for ourselves, because we enjoy it. In contrast, extrinsic motivation occurs when we’re doing something for a paycheck or any "extrinsic" reward.) By interrogating ourselves, we set up a well-defined challenge that we can master. And it is this desire for personal fulfillment - being able to tell ourselves that we solved the anagrams - that actually motivates us to keep on trying."

A good article on how to test the content of a website. Angela Colter lists few methods to test the decoding and comprehension of content. Seems like her preferred method is moderated usability testing. To find out whether people understand your content, have them read it and apply their new knowledge. In other words, do a usability test! Here’s how to create task scenarios where participants interpret and use what they read: Identify the issues that are critical to users and the business. Create tasks that test user knowledge of these issues. Tell participants that they’re not being tested; the content is.  

Vinod Khosla on Will we need teachers or algorithms? We have focused so much of our education system on children attending primary school, then middle school, then high school, all with the objective of attending university. This is a progression that still remains unchanged and largely unchallenged. Yet, this system is completely linear and, most tragically, unwaveringly standardized not only through instruction methods, but also through testing. Worse, it is mostly what I call "fixed time, variable learning" (the four-year high school) instead of "fixed learning, variable time" to account for individual students’ capabilities and status. Vinod goes on to discuss decentralization and gamification as two trends to watch out for.

  "We need to work openly, with more transparency." "We need to rethink how we work and make some fundamental shifts." I hear C-level executives say things like this all the time.   They peer into the future and recognize the need to move their workforce into a Future of Work mentality and practices. Yet, when it comes down(...) The post The Future of Work Change Matrix - A Tool for Real Change appeared first on VINJONES - Kevin D. Jones.

Everyone talks about how bad mediocrity is.  About how we shouldn’t tolerate it.  About how it is a cancer to your organization, let alone your life. I agree with them all. I’ve even written about it before. Although I’m with you, I don’t care any more.  Is it a cancer?  Can it destroy your company?(...) The post End the Celebration of Mediocrity appeared first on VINJONES - Kevin D. Jones.

You have three choices. Choice #1 You can throw anything up on the wall and make it work.  Put it together, make it functional.  It may look ugly but you don’t care.  It needs to do one thing and one thing only - work. Done. That’s what I did with my monitor stand.  I put a ream […] The post How To Take Charge of Your Toxic Company Culture - WX appeared first on VINJONES - Kevin D. Jones.

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

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds. "To change with change is the changeless state. - Bruce Lee" via @janhoglund Nick Milton: "Internal competition is like a late frost that kills all your green shoots" @dhinchcliffe: The Underlying Laws of Cloud & Social Count on nearly everything in the ecosystem to eventually drop to effectively zero cost. Do not build your digital business along the commoditization axis. Only the underlying properties, like network effects, are exempted from this rule and this is a potent realization. We will eventually get the cost of nearly all technology to nothing, making replication and competition both easy and rampant. This isn’t where most businesses would like to be. However, network relationships like communities, total aggregate API integrations of partners, total daily users contributing value, these cannot never be copied whole cloth on an increasingly low cost scale. When people are involved, commoditization is not possible, and real, meaningful human relationships then become the strategic coin of the digital realm. @fred_laloux: Why I can’t get myself to write an article on employee well-being I’ve come to see how demeaning - however well intentioned - most engagement programs are. We all feel this intuitively, I think, and that’s why so few of us believe the posters any longer. You can’t buy happiness. Happiness and fulfilment are always the by-product of feeling ‘in the zone’, or feeling that we can bring in all of who we are, in service of something noble and important. @mintzberg141: If you can’t measure it, you better manage it Measuring as a replacement for managing has done enormous damage—undermining the souls of so many of our institutions … Think of how much education has been killed by assuming that we can measure what a child learns in a classroom. (I defy anyone to measure learning. You are reading this…: please measure what you are learning.) Must we always deflect teaching from engaging students to examining them? @simongterry: How to chair a conference A good chair will help create a great experience for the speakers and the participants at the event. Not everything will go to plan. Nothing will go to time. The role of chair to to help smooth the experience and also to help the participants to weave it together into one learning and collaborative experience. Stay in Contact with Everyone: Everyone means everyone: the organisers, the AV team, the next speaker, future speakers and audience members. Check-in at breaks and use what you learn to think ahead. Check everyone’s understanding. Get feedback. Make sure everyone is on the same page as to what is happening next. Over communicate. When I had issues with the experience, it was because I didn’t follow this simple rule. Image: Shannon Tipton @gleonard: Technology vs Humanity:

We are arriving at a break-point with the existing economy, one dominated by markets, as we enter the network era. A creative economy is emerging and our existing institutions and markets cannot deal with it. Tim O’Reilly calls this The WTF Economy, and is bringing people together to understand and deal with it. What is the future when more and more work can be done by intelligent machines instead of people, or only done by people in partnership with those machines? What happens to workers, and what happens to the companies that depend on their purchasing power? What’s the future of business when technology-enabled networks and marketplaces are better at deploying talent than traditional companies? What’s the future of education when on-demand learning outperforms traditional universities in keeping skills up to date? The network era is changing how we think about work, from the technologies we use to the business ideologies behind them, what I call networked unmanagement. Using the media tetrad, explained by Derrick de Kerkchove, co-author of McLuhan for Managers - every technology has four effects. 1. extends a human property (the car extends the foot); 2. obsolesces the previous medium by turning it into a sport or a form of art (the automobile turns horses and carriages into sports); 3. retrieves a much older medium that was obsolesced before (the automobile brings back the shining armour of the knight); 4. flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its limits (automobiles, when there are too many of them, create grid lock) Looking at management in an era of pervasive networks - individual influence is extended, business schools (and the MBA) become obsolete (reserved for the rich), communities, like guilds of old, are retrieved, but fickle networks could result in management being nothing more than theatre in service to big data. This of course, is only one way of looking at the future of management in an age of perpetual beta. More posts on management.

We believe technology is changing culture everywhere in the world, leading to the emergence of a new model of leadership. Employees are now more confident, more mobile, more demanding, more idealistic in some cases, and less willing to be company people. Employees, more than ever, are individualists. Leaders, in response, are learning to be less the visionary, less the sage, less the objective-setter, and more the shaper, the connector, the questioner. And yet at times, they also need to intervene, to insist, to control. It’s a fluid role, its shape not yet clear. What is clear, as leaders forge their own new models, is that the old ways no longer work. CEOs can’t fall back on best practice. They have to be original. Leadership, more than ever, needs creativity. And achieving the impossible needs the most radical kind of creativity. - Wolff Olins Report 2015 Leadership in networks is exercised through reputation, not positional authority. Having influence in multiple networks, not just the organization, makes a leader even more effective. The ability to span networks becomes important as organizational lifespans decrease and worker mobility increases. To remain connected to the changes in their networks, good leaders are curious and promote experimentation, but do not need to control it. Leadership in networks is helping the network make better decisions, and this requires a focus on the best organizational design to meet the changing situations. Strong networks, combined with temporary and negotiated hierarchies to get work done, become the simple building blocks for an organization in a state of perpetual beta. As with management in perpetual beta, leadership can be examined from the perspective of the media tetrad. Looking at leadership in an age of pervasive networks, creativity and design are extended while command and control mechanisms like the executive suite are made obsolete. The art of storytelling as a leadership skill is retrieved from the past. But this form of leadership, when pushed too far, can reverse into cultural purges that attack anyone in disagreement with the cult of the new. Einstein’s wonderful counsel that no problem is ever solved by the same thinking that created it defines what we must do.  We must understand the behavior of networks in this densely interconnected world.  We must understand human motivation and our astonishing capacity to self-organize when we care about something.  We must understand that we lose capacity and in fact create more chaos when we insist on hierarchy, roles, and command and control leadership. - Margaret Wheatley: The Real World More posts on leadership.

Organizations are alive when people can exert their autonomy in ethical practice. This aligns with self-determination theory, which puts forward three basic needs for people: competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Even progressive organizations often miss out on the latter, described by the authors as an, "inherent tendency toward growth development and integrated functioning". It takes more than a simple organizational structure to afford this relatedness. The organization also must be alive. So in what way are human organisations alive? Fritjof [Capra] answers this question by saying that a human organisation is only alive when it contains networks of communication. These informal networks of communication he refers to as communities of practice and in larger organisations there are clusters of communities of practice. Therefore for Fritjof "the aliveness of an organisation resides in its communities of practice, flexibility, creativity and learning potential". - Transition Consciousness Staying focused on work, even if workers are autonomous and competent, is not enough for human, and organizational growth. There must be continuous communication that promotes relatedness. This happens in communities of practice and social networks. Supporting communities of practice should be the primary focus of HR departments, as this is where ‘human capital’ really can develop. In addition, individuals need to connect outside the organizational walls. Even an Enterprise Social Network will not help with this. But if an organization is to be truly alive, it must be connected, through its people, to the ecosystem in which it lives. No organization is an island. No Man is an Island No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. - John Donne, Meditation XVII (modern English)