One little tweak. That’s all it takes. It is something you didn’t see before but it was the result of someone outside your normal working day giving you one little tip that made you uber productive. And unless you get a new perspective, you will miss it. One of the things I love most about […] The post Get a New Perspective - A VINJONES Discussion appeared first on VINJONES - Kevin D. Jones.

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post. The post Protected: How To Have High Employee Engagement Without Employee Engagement Programs appeared first on VINJONES - Kevin D. Jones.

I’m super excited to announce the VINJONES Podcast! Over the last few weeks I have been interviewing experts in employee engagement and it has been a wonderful experience!  These are top notch, quality people that you will really enjoy.  We have been having some great conversations that I am excited to share with you. Head over to the […] The post Introducing the VINJONES Podcast appeared first on VINJONES - Kevin D. Jones.

Years ago David Wilkins and I started #SLQOTD (Social Learning Question of the Day).  Every day we asked a question and anyone could answer and discuss each others’ answers and learn from each other. Fast forward to today and my focus has changed a bit, but my desire to help others learn, grow, and love […] The post Introducing Employee Engagement Question of the Day (#EEQOTD) appeared first on VINJONES - Kevin D. Jones.

Too many poor presentations are given.  It is time to up your game! Presentations are not only usually boring and largely a huge time suck, but they are much less effective in informing and creating consensus and buy-in. Turn each presentation into a much more effective conversation. In fact, don’t just talk about it, do […] The post From Presentation to Conversation - A VINJONES Discussion appeared first on VINJONES - Kevin D. Jones.

True collaborative networks do not rely so much on teams than on individuals, as B. Nardi, S. Whittaker and H. Schwartz have shown. The main benefits for networked organizations do not lie in the outcome from teams, but in individual knowledge acquisition, in the ability to connect with the right people and to access the right information at the right time. Instead of focusing on teams and communities, we must concentrate our efforts in providing workers with the right resources and knowledge to build their own connections. The basic unit of social business technology is personal knowledge management, not collaborative workspaces. - Thierry de Baillon, The Tainted Narrative of the Workplace Teams are for sports, not knowledge work Teamwork is over-rated. For instance, it can be a cover for office bullies to coerce fellow workers. The economic stick often hangs over the team; "be a team player or lose your job". Empowered individuals working in networks, not teams, will give organizations the flexibility they need to be creative and deal with complexity. Teams seldom take into consideration the uniqueness of individuals. Usually individuals have to fit into the existing team like cogs in a machine. Team members can be replaced. The team, like the gang, rules. People are more complex and multi-faceted than the simplistic view of Homo Economicus. Our lives have psycho-social aspects. We are more than our jobs and we are more than our teams. Teams promote unity of purpose, not diversity, creativity, and passion. The team, as a unit of work, is outdated in the network era. As much as organizations advertise for "team players", what would be better are workers who can truly collaborate and cooperate, inside and outside the organizational walls. There are other ways of organizing work than in teams. Orchestras are not teams; neither are jazz ensembles. There may be teamwork on a theatre production but the cast is not a team. It is more like a social network. Teams are what we get when we use the blunt stick of economic consequences as the prime motivator. In a complex world, unity is counter-productive. Small pieces, loosely joined The mainstream application of knowledge and learning management over the past few decades has had it all wrong. We have over-managed information because it’s easy and we remain enamoured with information technology. The ubiquity of information outside the organization is showing the weakness of centralized enterprise systems. As enterprises begin to understand the Web, the principle of "small pieces loosely joined" is permeating thick industrial walls. More and more workers have their own sources of information and knowledge, often on a mobile device. But they often lack the means or internal support to connect their knowledge with others to get actually get work done. Personal knowledge management frameworks can help knowledge workers capture and make sense of their knowledge. Organizations should support the individual sharing of information and expertise between knowledge workers, on their terms, using PKM methods & tools. Simple standards, like RSS, can facilitate this sharing. Knowledge bases and traditional KM systems should focus on essential information, and what is necessary for inexperienced workers. Experienced workers should not be constrained by work structures like teams but rather be given the flexibility to contribute how and where they think they can best help the organization. We know that formal instruction accounts for less than 10% of workplace learning. The same rule of thumb should apply to knowledge management. Capture and codify the 10% that is essential, especially for new employees. Now use the same principle to get work done. Structure the essential 10% and leave the rest unstructured, but networked, so that workers can group as needed to get work done. Teams are too slow and hierarchical to be useful for the network era. Organizations structured around Loose Hierarchies & Strong Networks, as described in the image below by Verna Allee, are much better for increasingly complex work. Social businesses should leave teams for the sports field, and managing knowledge for each worker.

Here is a review of the five most popular posts here this past year, with a short synopsis of each. One year, distilled into a few paragraphs. Informal Learning: The 95% Solution Informal learning is not better than formal training; there is just a whole lot more of it. It’s 95% of workplace learning, according to the research reviewed by Gary Wise. 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. You simply cannot train people to be social Effective organizational collaboration comes about when workers regularly narrate their work within a structure that encourages transparency and shares power & decision-making. Creating a supportive social environment is management’s responsibility. My experience is that changing to more collaborative, networked ways of work requires coordinated change activities from both the top and the bottom. It has to be a two-pronged approach and it will take some time and effort. Three Principles for Net Work Narration of Work - Transparency - Shared Power The high-value work today is in facing complexity, not in addressing problems that have already been solved and for which a formulaic or standardized response has been developed. One challenge for organizations is getting people to realize that what they already know has increasingly diminishing value. How to learn and solve problems together is becoming the real business advantage. The Learning Organization Learning is not something to "get". The only knowledge that can be managed is our own. Learning in the workplace is much more than formal training. When we remove artificial barriers, we enable innovation. Learning and working are interconnected. Cooperation trumps Collaboration In networks, cooperation trumps collaboration. Collaboration happens around some kind of plan or structure, while cooperation presumes the freedom of individuals to join and participate. Cooperation is a driver of creativity. Shifting our emphasis from collaboration, which still is required to get some work done, to cooperation, in order to thrive in a networked enterprise, means reassessing some of our assumptions and work practices. Collaboration is only part of working in networks. Cooperation is also necessary, but it’s much less controllable than our institutions, hierarchies and HR practices would like to admit.

A number of people have requested that I run another Personal Knowledge Management workshop, so the next online PKM workshop is now scheduled for 21 Jan - 15 Feb 2013 through the Social Learning Centre. This will be the last workshop in the current format. In the Spring I will look at what has been learned to date and redesign the resources and activities. In 2012, we conducted three online workshops and I also ran some on-site sessions for clients. What is becoming obvious is that the skills addressed in PKM are seen as important to many managers, knowledge workers, and practitioners in a wide array of disciplines. PKM combines aspects of traditional knowledge management, as well as digital curation, social learning, and critical thinking. I have shown how it is directly related to innovation and I believe it is an essential aspect of what are becoming known as digital competencies. The Seek-Sense-Share framework I developed for PKM almost three years ago has helped many people establish their own sense-making processes. A common remark from workshop participants is how difficult sense-making can be, "I entered this workshop feeling I could seek and share quite effectively, it was the sensing I needed to work on." Another participant described PKM as a way of "cleaning out my crap filters so the right information can come through so I don’t feel overwhelmed with information"; a very good description. The main concept behind the workshops is to create a bounded space of active learners who can share their thoughts around a selection of resources and activities. The only rule is that all communication is within the discussion area, available for all participants to read and comment on. As facilitators, we use these discussions as starting points for deeper inquiry. Without the participants narrating their learning, the value of the experience would diminish. Each workshop is a shared, cooperative experience. Many participants have made connections and friendships that have continued afterwards. My objective is to provide just enough structure for people to focus, but not too much to constrain personal reflection and social learning. It is very dependent on the positive intentions of everyone. Usually, we have enough active participants to get some deep conversations. What one gets out of each workshop is very dependent on what one puts in. From me, you get my undivided attention for a month and I look at ways to make better connections for participants, based on what they share. The structure is not for everyone, and people looking to be guided through a more linear process, such as a typical self-paced course, can be disappointed.

This past year I have worked on several projects that have extended my thinking on how we can use social media to promote cooperation and collaboration within and outside the enterprise. I explained some of this in a previous post on enterprise social network dimensions, which is based on the work of several others. Ian McCarthy’s honeycomb of social media was an initial inspiration, showing how one could quickly and graphically portray differences between social media platforms. The Altimeter Group’s recent report on making the business case for enterprise social networks provided more detail on what happens inside organizations. Finally, Oscar Berg’s digital workplace concretized gave a good picture of what people-centric, service-oriented businesses should look like. I would like to expand on this, highlighting some additions to that previous post in November. It seems that the seven facets identified by Oscar Berg align with some general digital competencies that are necessary for connected knowledge workers everywhere. These also align with the PKM framework that can support the flow of cooperative and collaborative work in a coherent organization. I have also shown examples of how one can look at various enterprise social network tools, such as the ubiquitous Sharepoint. I am not a Sharepoint fan, but almost all large organizations have it and it is usually a key part of their social network framework. Finally, I provide a few words of advice that I have learned from many projects. This presentation is a visual summary of a significant part of my work in 2012. I hope it is useful and I always appreciate discussions on how it can be improved. Social enterprise tools and competencies from Harold Jarche

Jaron Lanier in You Are Not a Gadget, wrote: The people who are perhaps the most screwed by open culture are the middle classes of intellectual and cultural creation.  The freelance studio musician, the stringer selling reports to newspapers from warzones are both crucial contributors to culture. Each pays dues and devotes years to honing a craft. They used to live off the trickle down effects of the old system, and like the middle class at large, they are precious. They get nothing from the new system. In Heads You Win … (2010) I asked; if you are not one of the recognized leaders in your field, can you make a living online or are you just part of the long tail, valuable only to aggregators and their advertising revenues? As a content creator are you providing the fodder that lets Google, Facebook and YouTube earn huge market valuations? Will there be a middle class in the networked economy, or only heads & tails? I think it will be possible to make a living in this digital economy and have what used to be a middle class life style but it will not be like the old middle class. First of all, it will be jobless, as described by Rob Paterson, in You don’t need a Job. It will also have to be creative, in that you will have to create your own way of making a living. There will be few jobs to fill, instead there will be opportunities you will have to see. Finally, we will realize that the only way to survive will be by working together in communities of practice and interest, and understanding networks. "We" can take on the faceless "them", if we work together and share. We are seeing experiments in new forms of work all over the place. These range from co-working spaces, to shareable communities, to our non-traditional consultancy, Internet Time Alliance, which is still a work in progress. The trickle-down effects, that Lanier mentions, no longer share enough wealth for a viable middle class. We need to create our own network effects, but (this is important) it has to be within our own networks, not inside someone else’s walled garden. Google Ads or Facebook likes will not help you take control of your work destiny. We have to do it together, using new frameworks and models for the network era. The BIG kicker, is that there is no template or rule book. We have to embrace life in perpetual Beta and get started. The good news is that there are many others like us. Let’s write the new rules together.

The Power of Pull by John Hagel. John Seely Brown & Lang Davison looks at how digital networks and the need for long-term relationships that support the flow of tacit knowledge are radically changing the nature of the enterprise as we know it. It is also an excellent reference book for understanding many facets of personal knowledge management. I have had this book on my reading list for quite some time and luckily Jay Cross gave me a copy which I read on the flight back from the west coast this week. PKM helps people stay focused on the edges of their knowledge and look for innovation and opportunity. I have written, in embrace chaos, that I think the edge will be where almost all high value work gets done in organizations. Core activities will be increasingly automated or outsourced. Value is moving to the edge. The core is being managed by fewer internal staff and any work where complexity is not the norm will be of diminishing value. PKM enables tacit knowledge flows from the edge to the core and back. Edge Participants also often reach out to participants in the core in an effort to build relationships and enhance knowledge flows. But these efforts are often frustrated - or at best marginalized - because core participants are too busy concentrating on defensive strategies within the core, trying to protect their profits and position, to understand the true growth opportunities represented by relevant edges. - The Power of Pull, p. 54 PKM is a process of moving knowledge from the edge (social networks) to the core (work teams) and back out to the edges. It is the way that Pull can be done on a daily basis. Connecting the edge (emergent & cooperative) to the core (controlled & automated) is a major challenge for organizations. Part of the solution is more open management frameworks but another part is "edge-like" individual skills and aptitudes. PKM covers the latter. PKM is a continual process of seeking from the edge (networks), filtering through communities of practice (CoP) and sense-making at the core (work teams) and also sharing back out to our communities and networks. Once habituated, it’s like breathing. As stated in the book, "Pull platforms tend to allow us to performa the following activities with a blurring of the boundaries between creation and use:", showing four components that map directly to Seek:Sense:Share. Find (Seek) Connect (Seek) Innovate (Sense) Reflect (Share) As the authors write, "Pull is not a spectator sport." Neither is PKM. I would highly recommend The Power of Pull as a reference book that looks at how organizations need to change and how individuals need to redefine the nature of work. The choices each of us makes about the environments we participate in and the practices and behaviors we choose to pursue once we’re there will make a crucial difference in what we experience and the extent to which we can shape these experiences or simply let random experiences shape us. - The Power of Pull, p. 99 "Chance favors the connected mind." - Steven B. Johnson.

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past week or two. Christian Wiman: "At some point you have to believe that the inadequacies of words you use will be transcended by the faith with which you use them." - via @JohnnieMoore The Icarus Deception: "if you blame your lack of job prospects on the tepid demand for hardworking, competent, but replaceable workers, you haven’t told us anything we didn’t already know." via @RichardMerrick Stupid Management Tools, by Niels Pflaeging @BetaLeaders #787 - Standardized job titles and salary ranges - produce pseudo-objectivity & transfer power to HR bureaucrats #788 - Competence and Development Planning - unavoidably lead to behavioral control, another HR folly #789 - Development Programs - If personal growth isn’t fostered, your organizational model is broken. HR plans don’t fix that #790 - Employee Ranking and Classifying, e.g. ABC-style: it’s reductionist, context-free, unfair, self-fulfilling Given tablets but no teachers, Ethiopian children teach themselves - #hacking - via @zecool Elaborating later on Negroponte’s hacking comment, Ed McNierney, OLPC’s chief technology officer, said that the kids had gotten around OLPC’s effort to freeze desktop settings. "The kids had completely customized the desktop—so every kids’ tablet looked different.  We had installed software to prevent them from doing that," McNierney said. "And the fact they worked around it was clearly the kind of creativity, the kind of inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think is essential to learning." Design Is Hacking How We Learn - learning in action in a very different way - via @C4LPT & @CharlesJennings Design Is Hacking How We Learn from frog

The resurrection of American manufacturing will require more than simply bringing back production to America. Global manufacturing is at the cusp of a massive transformation as the new economics of energy and labor plays out and a set of new technologies—robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, and nanotechnology—are advancing rapidly. Together these developments will spark a radical transformation of manufacturing around the world over the next decade. The winners in the rapidly changing world of manufacturing will be those firms that have mastered the agility needed to generate rapid and continuous customer-based innovation. - Steve Denning I have often said that anything that is simple enough to be automated will be, and that any work that is merely complicated will be outsourced to the lowest cost of labour. But a funny thing is happening with manufacturing in the 21st century. It is becoming complex. Manufacturing today requires interdependent workers with initiative, creativity and passion. The new manufacturing workplace has higher task variety, which is based on a greater percentage of tacit knowledge and requires more informal and social learning. This is not Ford’s assembly line, nor is it based on F.W. Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management. The new manufacturing, like new businesses everywhere, will have fewer people. Computers and software are replacing people, especially information processing jobs. This is the new reality. There will be more work variety (for what used to be called jobs) because there will be more task variety. That means there will be fewer plug-and-play jobs. We will have to create our roles in the 21st century workplace. They will not be created for us. This is liberating but scary for generations who have tried to fit in to the existing job structure. Younger people seem to get it. Generations caught in the middle may find it difficult. Community and organizational leaders will need to figure out how to adapt to the transition period, which will continue to see high employment while conversely witnessing instant millionaires who create the next mobile app. Times are changing, and we will need new methods to manage and organize work. Even those who understand this cannot see how much things will change. We are like the early generations that witnessed the power of the printing press, without understanding that it would lead to years of religious wars. As Steve Denning concludes in his Forbes article: Success in this new world of manufacturing will require a radically different kind of management from the hierarchical bureaucracy focused on shareholder value that is now prevalent in large firms. It will require a different goal (delighting the customer), a different role for managers (enabling self-organizing teams), a different way of coordinating work (dynamic linking), different values (continuous improvement and radical transparency) and different communications (horizontal conversations). Merely shifting the locus of production is not enough. Companies need systemic change—a new management paradigm. It will require even more.

Joachim Stroh adds some perspective to my post on tools and competencies for the social enterprise: "It’s about you, but you’re not the only bee in the hive; the further you expand the more you grow." I think this image gives a good view of the various facets people have in the workplace: My Content; My Presence; My Networks; My Tasks; My Reputation; My Goals. It also shows that workers are not mere human resources that fill job positions. They are all multi-faceted and each of these facets touches the facets of others. It is social and it is complex. In the digitally connected workplace, systemic changes are sensed almost immediately. Therefore reaction times and feedback loops have to get faster and be more effective. We need to know who to ask for advice right now, but this requires a level of trust. But trusted relationships take time to nurture. This is evident from Joachim’s image, showing many facets that each take time to develop. Since our default action at work is usually to turn to our friends and known colleagues for help, we need to share more of our experiences with others in order to grow our trusted networks. The more colleagues we can depend upon, the better we can get work done. The time to start is now. "We learned that individual expertise did not distinguish people as high performers. What distinguished high performers were larger and more diversified personal networks." - Rob Cross, The Hidden Power of Social Networks Social learning is critical for organizational effectiveness today. Workers need to connect with others in order to co-solve problems. Sharing tacit knowledge through conversations is an essential component of knowledge work. Social media enable adaptation, and the development of emergent practices, through conversations. Ensuring our facets are interconnected is one way to become a more social business. For example: Am I creating content that can easily be curated and shared? Am I connecting my physical and virtual presences optimally? Am I finding learning opportunities through my networks? I create these tools and presentations in order to ask better questions while trying to solve client problems. If these provide some new insight, then they are useful. I am glad that others, like Joachim, share what they are doing so we can work on these together, without ever meeting (yet).

Ross Dawson says that people who have "learnt how to learn" will be better prepared for jobs of the future. "We’re finding people who have learnt how to learn know how to engage with a community and tap into others for support." This is what personal knowledge management is all about. It starts by seeking people and knowledge sources and the Seek-Sense-Share cycle finishes by sharing with communities and social networks. My recent workshops, both online and in person, indicate a need for PKM skills in all types of organizations and for people at all levels, from freelancers, researchers, managers, executives and more. The benefits are not just for individuals, preparing for their next job, but the organization gains from employees who take control of their learning and freely share their knowledge. PKM makes for more resilient individuals and companies. Much of PKM is about finding balance. In seeking knowledge sources, we have to balance aggregation, or getting as much information as possibile, with filtering, or ensuring that we have more signal than noise. Our networks need to be diverse and varied in order to be exposed to new ideas, but we cannot keep track of everything, so we have to be judicious with our time.  We need to constantly lump things together, such as with a feed reader, while filtering out the good stuff so we can find it again, such as with social bookmarks. It’s like breathing information in and out, while making sense of only a small portion at a time, sometimes built by many grains before trying to express our knowledge in order to make sense of it. These processes are not taught in schools or training programes. There is no right answer in PKM. There are only processes that work. The test of PKM is whether it works for you. My experience is that a person’s PKM changes over time, and the most important aspect is being aware of how we seek sources of information, make sense of our own knowledge, and then share it at work, in communities or through networks. As Helen Blunden has noted about her PKM, it’s about continuous learning. It’s opened up a whole new world and it’s just made me eager to know more.  It’s also made me realise that our learning will never stop - and we should get comfortable with that idea.  (I believe the creativity is now coming from the "Seek" part of the model because information is not one-sided anymore; you get a variety of opinions, perspectives and angles and from a wider expanded network of people from all walks of life - different industries, different skillsets - my curiosity in life also helps me out here). PKM practices can help make sense of the current environment, whether it be your profession, your job, or your areas of interest. A resilient learning network, that can develop from practising PKM, creates a more resilient framework from which to make decisions about the future. The more you give to your networks, the more you will receive. PKM provides a way to do this in a more structured, but personal, manner. The result is enhanced serendipity, always an advantage in a changing world.  The next online PKM workshop starts this Monday. #itashare

The title of this post is what Dan Pink, in his book To Sell is Human, would call a rhyming pitch. He also discusses the question pitch, and I followed his recommendation in the Pitch chapter and developed my own. Are things more complex now, than they were five years ago? Your Work? Your Markets? Your Customers? Your Profession? I also developed a Pixar pitch: Work used to be fairly straight forward. You had a job, knew what to do, and were paid to do it. Then the Web appeared. Everybody got connected to almost everyone else. All these connections made things more complex.  Some work was automated. Some of it outsourced. Much of it became more complex. Making sense of complexity, and developing ways to keep up, is how I help people and organizations. Finally I created a one-word pitch: SENSE-MAKING The Pitch chapter also explains the Twitter pitch (140 characters) and the subject line pitch. These are all excellent exercises to focus on your business or mission, and I will continue to refine mine over time. Here is Dan’s pitch to continue reading the book, subtitled "the surprising truth about moving others": Here we confront a paradox. There are no "natural" salespeople, in part because we are all naturally salespeople. Each of us - because we’re human - has a selling instinct, which means that anyone can master the basics of moving others. The rest of the book will show you how. I found the book quite compelling and much of what was covered, such as improv skills for business, are areas of interest for me. The chapter on Clarity was directly aligned with my work on personal knowledge management. In it, Beth Kanter is quoted using my Seek-Sense-Share framework in her Content Curation Primer and earlier post. In this chapter, Dan also proposes that you seek out the "one percent". Don’t get lost in the crabgrass of details, he [Pink's Law professor, Harold Hongju Koh] urged us. Instead, think about the essence of what you’re exploring - the one percent that gives life to the other ninety-nine. Understanding that one percent, and being able to explain it to others, is the hallmark of strong minds and good attorneys. This is the essence of sense-making in PKM. It is about seeking information and knowledge and distilling it so that you can make sense of it and then it is ready to be shared. Seek, make-sense and share (then repeat).

Catherine Lombardozzi writes, in Time for an Evolution: To those of you who feel like you just stepped into the middle of a conversation, a learning environment (to my mind) is a collect of resources and activities for learning. The resources may be inanimate or human; the activities may be formal or informal. A well designed learning environment is curated with a specific need in mind. It may be curated by an individual (as in a personal learning environment), by a group (such as a community of practice), or by a designer who is supporting a specific complex need that can’t be met by training or other formal programs alone. I’ve been promoting learning environment design as a way of thinking about what we used to call blended learning, and as a way of capitalizing on informal learning resources by curating the best materials (in your judgment) and making them easily accessible by your learners. I have taken her image and added a 70:20:10 overlay. This could serve as a decision support tool for allocating time and resources for organizational learning and development.

As our markets and technologies get more complex, we need new models to get work done. For instance, we know that creative work can yield more innovation, yet our workplaces usually stifle creativity. Many of our practices are still premised on work being simple or complicated. Simple systems are easily knowable, whereas complicated systems, while 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 workplace control protocols. Every day, jobs and work are getting automated and outsourced. 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. A new mindset toward work is required. Frameworks like hyper-connected pattern-seeking or networked unmanagement can promote new perspectives on what valued work really should be. This can be fostered in a culture of perpetual Beta. Perpetual Beta means we accept never getting to the final release of our work, and that our learning will never stop. Organizations need to 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 new mindset, workers need autonomy. But many are not ready for it. 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 managers to tell them what to do. This is counter-productive in dealing with complexity and working in perpetual Beta. It also destroys creativity. When we move away from a linear "design it first, then build it" mindset, we can then engage everyone in critical and systems thinking. Workers must be passionate, adaptive, innovative, and collaborative. Autonomy is the just beginning. Fostering autonomy starts by looking at 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, or one-size-fits all training programs. The new networked workplace requires both 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 a more agile organization. Agility becomes a necessity as we deal with increasing complexity. In order to develop the necessary emergent practices to handle 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. 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 even chaos, is where the future of work lies. As traditional core activities get automated or outsourced, almost all high value work will be done at the outer edge of organizations. At the fuzzy edge of the organization 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 organizations have to move operations to the edge to continue learning and developing. In this century a greater percentage of workers will be moving to the edge. The core will be managed by very few internal staff. What does this mean for management? No matter what model one prefers, it will have to be more open, networked and cooperative. Are you ready to move to the edge?

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past week or two. @paulbogush : "Needing to motivate a student is equivalent to jump starting a car. If you have to do it every day, something is wrong." via @surreallyno The Atlantic: The End of Labor: How to protect workers from the rise of robots - via @RichardFlorida The big question is: What do we do if and when our old mechanisms for coping with inequality break down? If the "endowment of human capital" with which people are born gets less and less valuable, we’ll get closer and closer to that Econ 101 example of a world in which the capital owners get everything. A society with cheap robot labor would be an incredibly prosperous one, but we will need to find some way for the vast majority of human beings to share in that prosperity, or we risk the kinds of dystopian outcomes that now exist only in science fiction. Hacker in Residence - by @robpatrob A tiny Trojan Mouse, such as Andy Carvin at NPR, Euan Semple or Peter Rukavina, can make a huge difference and move the entire organization.  Tiny new things that contain the seeds of change. If I was a CEO and wanted to create value from Big Data or from Social Media, I would set up a small office that reported to me and look for my own hacker in residence to be the agent and chief hacker. I would let them have a lot of space and time to discover things and I would give them access to everyone and to everything. If I was the CEO of a big data firm or a firm that offered Enterprise Social Media, I would have a stable of such hackers and I would lend them out on yearly terms to my clients. @DonaldClark : Failure led, spaced practice is better than training Over nine months, 500 people in Booz Allen were initially given three types of training: 1.       Placebo 2.       Page-turning 3.       Interactive All three groups were then given surprise: Three simulated phishing emails with remedial help if they failed i.e. spaced practice, learn through failure exercises. >Based on actual simulated attacks, they discovered no significant difference between training and no training! Pursuit of Everything: Question everything. Be deliberate. Sojourn beyond the boundaries. - via @boydjane "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element of democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country…’We are governed. Our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of’." - Edward Bernays (1928)

"The basic unit of social business technology is personal knowledge management, not collaborative workspaces." - Thierry de Baillon Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world and work more effectively. But what we loosely call knowledge, using terms like knowledge-sharing or knowledge capture, is often just an approximation. As knowledge management expert Dave Snowden says, we are not very good at articulating our knowledge; "We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down." Knowledge When we use our knowledge to describe some data, such as what we remember from an experience or our summary of a book, we convey this knowledge by creating information, even though writing it down is not perfect. This does not mean that we shouldn’t even try, because the cumulative pieces of information, or knowledge artifacts, that we share can help us have better conversations and increase our understanding of things that cannot easily be codified. Our individual sense-making can be shared, and from it can emerge better organizational knowledge. This is not a linear process, as in from information we get knowledge, which over time becomes wisdom. Gaining knowledge is much messier than that. Becoming knowledgeable can be thought of as bits of knowledge partially shared and experienced over time. It is laborious, hence the reason why masters through the ages could only have a limited number of apprentices. But when writing, and later books, came along, we had a new technology that could more widely distribute information created by the wise, and also the not so wise. Whether being mentored by a master or reading a book, knowledge does not actually get transferred, but shared observations and information can be helpful to those who have a desire to learn and do something with their learning. Merely being well read is not enough to be knowledgeable, as possibly first noted by Socrates. Plato wrote in Phaedrus that Socrates felt the written language would result in "men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, who will be a burden to their fellows". Socrates saw a core truth in learning from artifacts like books. Even today, we cannot become complacent with knowledge and just store it away. It has a shelf life and needs to be used, tested and experienced. It should be shared amongst people who understand that they are only seeing a fragment of others’ knowledge. Because it is so difficult to represent our knowledge to others, we have to make every effort to continuously share it. Once is not enough, as most parents know. Knowledge shared in flows over time can help us create better mental pictures than a single piece of knowledge stock, like a book, can ever do. Seek : Sense : Share Capturing knowledge, as crudely as we do, is just a first step. The PKM framework I have developed over the past eight years suggests two more steps: sense-making and sharing. PKM, or learning in networks, is a continuous process of seeking, sensing, and sharing. Seeking is finding things out and keeping up to date. Building a network of colleagues is helpful in this regard. It not only allows us to "pull" information, but also have it "pushed" to us by trusted sources. Sensing is how we personalize information and use it. Sensing includes reflection and putting into practice what we have learned. Often it requires experimentation, as we learn best by doing. Sharing includes exchanging resources, ideas, and experiences with our networks as well as collaborating with our colleagues. As Tim Kastelle notes: Yes, when we send our ideas out into the world, they change the people with whom they interact. But sending these ideas out, and seeing how they interact with people changes us as well. Innovation Scott Anthony, author of The Little Black Book of Innovation, identifies four skills exhibited by innovators: Observing; Questioning; Experimenting; Networking. These directly align with the PKM framework of Seek, Sense, Share. It is quite likely that innovation in organizations can be improved with individuals practising PKM. It could even be a major value proposition for Learning & Development departments everywhere, something to seriously think about. Seeking includes observation through effective filters and diverse sources of information. Sense-making starts with questioning our observations and includes experimenting, or probing. Sharing through our networks helps to develop better feedback loops. In an organization where everyone is practising PKM, the chances for more connections increases. PKM may be an individual activity but it is also social. It is the process by which we can connect what we learn outside the organization with what need to do inside. Research shows that work teams that need to share complex knowledge need tighter social bonds. Work teams often share a unique language or vocabulary. However, they can become myopic and may lack a diversity of opinions. Social networks, on the other hand, encourage diversity and can sow the seeds of innovation. However, it is almost impossible to get work done in social networks due to their lack of structure. PKM is the active process of connecting the innovative ideas that can arise in our social networks with the deadline-driven work inside organizations. PKM is beneficial on both a personal and organizational level, but its real value is in increasing innovation. Without innovation, organizations cannot evolve. Social Learning Both collaborative behaviours (working together for a common goal) and cooperative behaviours (sharing freely without any quid pro quo) are needed in the network era. Most organizations focus on shorter term collaborative behaviours, but networks thrive on cooperative behaviours, where people share without any direct benefit. PKM helps to add cooperation to workplace collaboration. In addition to seeking, sensing and sharing, we need to become adept at filtering information as well as discerning when and with whom to share. Like any skill, these require practice and feedback. Much of this feedback can be provided in communities of practice, a half-way space between work teams and social networks, where trusted relationships can form that enable to share more openly.? Connecting social networks, communities of practice and work teams, becomes an important framework for integrating learning and working in the network era. We seek new ideas from our social networks and then filter them through more focused conversations with our communities of practice, where we have trusted relationships. We make sense of these embryonic ideas by doing new things, either ourselves, or with our work teams. We later share our creations, first with our teams and perhaps later with our communities of practice or even our networks. We use our understanding of our communities and networks to discern with whom and when to share our knowledge.? Narration Narrating one’s work does not get knowledge transferred, but it provides a better medium to gain more understanding. Working out loud is a concept that is very easy to understand, but not quite so easy to do. Most people are too busy managing in their information age workplaces and have little spare time to try to learn how to work in the network age. The most important step in learning a new skill is the first one. This same step has to be repeated many times before it becomes a habit.I have learned that the first step of starting to work out loud, as part of personal knowledge management, has to be as simple as possible. Here are three simple steps I recommend to begin a regular PKM practice with. 1) Free Your Bookmarks: This is a very simple shift that only requires a slight deviation from a common practice: saving bookmarks/favourites on your browser. Using tools like Diigo, or Delicious moves them off a single device, makes them more searchable, and (later) makes them shareable. Being able to share is usually not a prime reason why people start using social bookmarks but it becomes more important over time. 2) Aggregate: Driving as many information sources as possible through a feed reader such as Google Reader or Feedly, saves time and helps stay organized. It is amazing how many people still do not understand RSS or how to grab a feed and save it. Aggregation makes information flows much easier to deal with. 3) Connect: How does one get started micro-blogging on a platform like Twitter? I suggest beginning with an aim in mind, such as professional development or staying current in a specific field. The search function can help find people who post about a specific topics. To start, one should follow no less than 20 and no more than 30 interesting people. Once set up, beginners should dip into their stream once or twice a day and read through any posts of interest. Over time, as they follow links, they may add or delete feeds. Within a week or two, anyone should be able to sense some patterns and then modify their streams to provide more signal and less noise. Sometimes we get all caught up in the latest social media tools. Getting started working out loud is not complicated and should not involve a steep learning curve on a complicated system. It is best to start with simple tools and frameworks. Small pieces, loosely joined The mainstream application of knowledge management and learning management over the past few decades has had it all wrong. We over-managed information, knowledge and learning because it was easy. Our organizations remain enamoured with the next wave of enterprise software systems. But the ubiquity of information outside the organization is showing the weakness of centralized enterprise systems. As organizations begin to understand the Web, the principle of "small pieces loosely joined" is permeating some thick industrial age walls. More workers have their own sources of information and knowledge, often on mobile devices, but they often lack the means or internal support to connect their knowledge with others to actually get work done. Supporting PKM, especially internal sharing, can help information flow more freely. Personal knowledge management frameworks can help knowledge workers capture and make sense of their knowledge. Organizations should support the individual sharing of information and expertise between knowledge workers, on their terms, using PKM methods and tools. Simple standards like RSS can facilitate this sharing. Knowledge bases and traditional KM systems should focus on essential information, and what is necessary for inexperienced workers. Experienced workers should not be constrained by too much structure but rather be given the flexibility to contribute how and where they think they can best help the organization. We know that formal instruction accounts for less than 10% of workplace learning. The same rule of thumb should apply to knowledge management. Capture and codify the 10% that is essential, especially for new employees. Now use the same principle to get work done. Structure the essential 10% and leave the rest unstructured, but networked, so that workers can group as needed to get work done. Teams are too slow and hierarchical to be useful for the network era. Organizations structured around looser hierarchies and stronger networks are much more effective for increasingly complex work. Conclusion PKM is a framework for individuals to take control of their professional development while working in organizations or across networks. Disciplined personal knowledge management brings focus to the information sea we swim in. The multiple pieces of information that we capture and share can increase the frequency of serendipitous connections, especially across disciplines and outside organizations. As Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From says; "chance favors the connected mind".

They might all be called ‘social networks’, but Facebook is very different from Twitter, which is very different from Instagram, which is very different from Foursquare. It’s quite likely that we’ll see a rise of niche-specific solutions, because a social intranet for realtors, who don’t spend much time in the office, must be very different from social intranet for software developers. The logic of business simply dictates it. - Dmitry Valyanov (Venture Beat) Is there a need for a wide variety of enterprise social tools? This is what Valyanov, CEO of a cloud-based social intranet provider, asserts in his guest post on Venture Beat. Adding social (collaboration & cooperation) capabilities to existing productivity tools is a better approach than using a dedicated social platform, Valyanov suggests. If so, then Microsoft’s strategy with Office365, focused on tools first and collaboration second, may be on the right track. As Aaron Golberg notes, enterprise collaboration platforms can have a tendency to use a lot of IT resources, if not handled appropriately. But even Microsoft is offering a separate collaboration platform, Yammer, in support of Office365. With both sides covered, and a joint sales force, Microsoft may be able to get some solid market data on what enterprise customers really want and buy. As Microsoft moves its services to the cloud and starts combining SharePoint, Yammer and Office 365, we still don’t really know what this all will look like by the end of 2013. It makes sense all three will be combined in some way, but how much choice customers will be offered is a big unknown. In the cloud, it should be easier for customers to pick and choose which features they want and when, but that’s not always possible from an integration standpoint. - CMS Wire Microsoft is also using these tools internally, as described by a senior IT staff member. "Employees that need to collaborate now have two options: a SharePoint Online site (which already number 18,000 and growing) or a Yammer group. Teams that rely primarily on document management features favor SharePoint sites, and those teams that are more focused on the conversations lean toward Yammer groups. Increasingly, we are providing options of embedding Yammer feeds into SharePoint sites for people that want a mixture of the two." - ZDNet Sharepoint supports people who are collaborating, focused on specific objectives, and sharing the same documents. As I mentioned in my last post on this subject, Yammer has the capability to not just support collaboration, but also workplace cooperation (freely sharing without any quid pro quo). Platforms like Yammer enable serendipitous connections by making work more transparent. But is a separate collaboration platform necessary, or just an added extra? It will be interesting to see if the triad of Yammer + Sharepoint + Office will dominate in large organizations, over more pure-play enterprise social platforms. For enterprise decision-makers and budget-holders, it is still best to really understand workplace collaboration requirements before buying new tools and infrastructure. In addition, they should take a serious look at how better cooperation can improve innovation and the sharing of implicit knowledge across the enterprise, and outside it. Tools are only part of the solution. However, being able to look at all tools in a systemic manner should help make better decisions. — This post was sponsored by Microsoft Office 365 - I retained editorial control and take full responsibility for what is posted. Contract writing is one of the ways I make my living.

I attended the annual meeting of the Canadian francophone distance education network, REFAD, this week, opening the conference, attending most events and finally participating in a panel discussion. The hospitality by the folks in Edmundston was fantastic and as a speaker I could not have asked for better support. The conference was focused on the future of distance education and I spoke about some of the external influences on educational institutions. My presentation slides, in French, are available on Slideshare. During the conference, Daniel Peraya explained that in his studies with both entry level university students and more advanced graduate students, both groups avoided the tools and platforms provided by the institution and instead preferred tools that were easy to find, free, flexible, and open. I noted afterwards that this happens in enterprises as well, where workers prefer to bring their own device or create hacks around their learning management systems. Stephen Downes discussed MOOC’s (English transcript - en français), saying that they are like languages and require practice and time to master. This is similar to all social media. A question arose whether educators need to be deep subject matter experts or instead more focused on facilitating learning. I brought up the work of Marina Gorbis in The Nature of the Future, where she discusses the changing nature of the medical field. Gorbis sees a new role for doctors. "In a socialstructed health care system, the doctor is not an omniscient God but a great conversationalist, astute observer, and insightful partner, that is, she is less a robot and more a real human being." If doctors are becoming more generalized - with specialist work like surgery getting automated or robotized - then will the same forces affect professors? If the most knowledgeable person on a subject is available via a mouse-click, will each institution need its own local specialist? I closed with a quote from Marina Gorbis, which I think clearly paints a possible future for the focus of public education. In a world where people’s jobs will not be given to them, each individual will need to look deeply and understand what she or he is good at, how she or he can contribute to multiple efforts and navigate multiple roles and identities as a part of different communities. Jacques Cool, whose photo of the Edmundston campus appears above, kindly translated this into French for me. Dans un monde où les emplois ne leur seront pas offerts directement, les individus ont besoin d’examiner en profondeur et dégager une meilleure compréhension de ce qu’ils ou elles peuvent faire, comment peuvent-ils contribuer aux différentes communautés dont ils font partie, ainsi que d’assumer de multiples rôles dans ces communautés.

Richard Gayle discusses an observation made by Kurt Vonnegut on the three types of specialists it takes to start a revolution, none of whom can succeed in isolation. First type - a true genius: "a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in general circulation." By themselves they are just lunatics. Second type - a thought leader: "a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad." By themselves they are unsatisfied. Third type - the integrator: "a person who can explain everything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people." By themselves they are ignored. This has a striking similarity to what Malcolm Gladwell popularized in his book, The Tipping Point, with Mavens equating to Geniuses; Connectors to Thought Leaders; and Integrators to Salespeople. I discussed this in more detail on my post: the work of many. Innovation and revolution are both focused on change. Diversity of talents seems to be necessary for both. While I don’t think a group of three specialists can automatically become the magic combination for change, it is worthwhile looking at the composition of groups and seeing if there is sufficient diversity of talents. This triad of skills can also inform free agents, who may feel they are perceived as lunatics for their ideas, may be unsatisfied, or just ignored. In those cases, they should look at finding two others to complement their unique talents. While career coaches have a certain popularity, for people who fall into one of these specialties, perhaps it’s better to work on building a talent triangle.

What will happen if the average lifespan of companies gets down to just a few years? As this photo by Jay Cross shows, there seems to be a trend for shorter-lived companies, staffed by longer-living employees. What will happen to employee loyalty, pension plans, or other company benefits? I think many people know, because they are already living this reality. Add to this another statistic from the Standard & Poors (S&P) stock index - today, most economic value comes from intangible assets - over 80%. There is little "real stuff" being traded any more. Smarter Companies classes intangible assets as a combination of Relationship; Strategic; Structural; and Human capital. So not only are companies lasting for shorter periods of time, but most of what is created is not concrete. Intangible assets do not have to be shipped and stored like real assets do. This increases the volatility of the marketplace, with larger and more frequent fluctuations over perceived value. So what? Here’s what I think: Networks will likely replace companies for worker loyalty. The era of "jobs" is almost over. New skills will be needed to thrive in connected workplaces. Hugh MacLeod sums it up best: It’s all about thriving in markets that are smarter and faster than you are. It’s all about being utterly screwed if you don’t know what I’m talking about. The same goes for both workers and companies.