Social business has the potential to change the way we work, but for the most part it has not. The social enterprise is not yet here, though many talk about it, and confuse it with using social tools. For that, we can blame management. As many people, from W. Edwards Deming to Gary Hamel have observed, management is what really differentiates organizations. It was better management that allowed Japanese automobile manufacturers to dominate the North American market, using the same raw materials and work force. Most management practices have changed little since the beginning of the millennium. We still have many vestiges of early 20th century industrial management — hierarchies; work standardization; job specialization; planning; and control. Extrinsic rewards are then dispersed by management based on these principles. The first elephant in the social room is compensation. As Gary Hamel describes: … compensation has to be a correlate of value created wherever you are, rather than how well you fought that political battle, what you did a year or two or three years ago that made you an EVP or whatever." — Leaders Everywhere: A Conversation with Gary Hamel If compensation was really linked to value, then salaries, job models, and other ways of calculating worth would have to be jettisoned. As it stands, in almost all organizations, those higher up the hierarchy get paid more, whether they add more value or not. It is a foregone conclusion that a supervisor has more skills and knowledge than a subordinate. This has also resulted in the requirement for more formal education as one goes up the corporate ladder, whether it’s needed or not. The other elephant in the room is democracy. For management to work in the network era, it needs to embrace democracy, but we are so accustomed to existing structures that many executives would say it is impossible to run a business as a democracy. But hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust, according to Warren Bennis, and trust is what enables networked people to share knowledge and innovate faster. A key benefit of social tools is to share knowledge quicker. Trust is essential for social business but management can easily kill trust. Democracy is the counterweight to hierarchical command and control. As more people work in distributed networks they are beginning to realize how little they actually benefit from standard management practices. In an economy based on trusted knowledge networks of individuals, the organization should revert to merely a supporting role. A hierarchy is nothing more than a centralized branching network. It is inadequate for the complex challenges facing all organizations today. Decentralized networks, based on intrinsic motivation, are a much better vehicle for rewarding work than hierarchies can ever be. Any organization driven by external direction, with social tools or not, cannot innovate as fast as self-motivated and hyper-connected workers can. Democracy in the workplace therefore makes for more resilient companies. A stated commitment to democratic principles is often lacking in descriptions of social business practices. But without compensation for value in an open network, social initiatives likely will be seen in hindsight as just another management buzz-word. "Lipstick on a pig," I believe is the term. So what’s next in social business? A serious look at its foundations is needed. While social business may have changed the way some of us work, it has not changed the way most organizations are managed. As networked, distributed work becomes the norm, trust will only emerge in workplaces that are open, transparent and diverse. In these trusted environments, leadership will be seen for what it is — an emergent property of a network in balance and not some special property available to only the select few. Leadership should be drawn from an aggressively intelligent and engaged workforce, learning with each other. Social business requires social management that marinates in and understands the work culture. This cannot be done while trying to control it. Social business will become reality when management lets go of command and control, makes work transparent so that value is visible to all, and treats workers as adults, engaged in democratic work practices. We are a long way from that until management is reconnected to the work being done. People naturally like to be helpful and get recognition for their work. Leadership in a social enterprise is based on this assumption. Connected leaders need to foster deeper connections with the entire enterprise, often through meaningful conversations. This is an ongoing process, not a "town hall" meeting from time to time. They have to listen to and analyze what is happening in order to help set the work context according to changing conditions, and then work on building consensus. Given the constantly changing conditions in hyper-connected work environments, a much higher tolerance for ambiguity is becoming a critical leadership trait. This article was originally published in CMS Wire

Fridays Finds: "Only in fairy tales are emperors told that they are naked." - Warren Buffett - via @WallyBock "Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again." - Andre Gide - via @RonJeffries The changing nature of work - via @pieriaview Those who bewail the loss of our industrial base, sniff at service industries and think that only "making stuff" is proper work, are living in the past: the future of work lies in social activity and caring for people, not "making stuff" that we can produce for nearly nothing with little human involvement. The job of a lifetime no longer lasts a lifetime - SocialHire.com How had this [being jobless] happened to him?  He had worked hard.  Been successful.  What he hadn’t been was constantly curious.  It had been a long time since he had read anything outside of his direct field.  It had been years since he had pro-actively sought knowledge outside his small range of expertise.  He had become one of the best at a job that few companies were looking for any more.  It will take him a long time to dig himself out of that hole, not the least because, since he had not been trying new things, he has no idea what he might be interested in.  Simply put, he had stopped learning. Pattern recognition, quantified self and big data by @eskokilpi Companies are not managing their employees’ long term careers any more. Workers must be their own HRD-professionals. With opportunity comes new responsibility. It is up to the worker to construct the narrative of work-life, to know what to contribute, when to change course and how to keep engaged - much longer than we have been used to. To do those things well you have to develop a new understanding of yourself and what you are actually up to. Note: These last three quotes give some of the reasons why Jane Hart and I have launched the Connected Knowledge Lab

It’s back to school time and education issues come to the fore with a provincial election in a few weeks. According to a local professor, the New Brunswick education system is too centralized, but it’s not just education. Addressing the problems of centralization is an issue with all established institutions as we shift from an industrial to a networked economy. First we might look at the underlying premises of the current system. According to SFU Professor Kieran Egan, in The Educated Mind, three premises compete for attention in our public education systems: education as socialization education as a quest for truth (Plato) education as the realization of individual potential (Rousseau) Since no one premise can dominate without precluding the others, we continue to have conflict in our education system. When one dominates, then the others get less attention. We see this in initiatives like "no child left behind" or the demise of music and physical education in the Canadian public school systems. There is no clear idea of what our education systems are trying to achieve, and we constantly go through "flavour of the year" initiatives, like the early French immersion programme in New Brunswick. But none of these three approaches is appropriate for a modern society, as Egan explains: Socialization to generally agreed norms and values that we have inherited is no longer straightforwardly viable in modern multicultural societies undergoing rapid technology-driven changes. The Platonic program comes with ideas about reaching a transcendent truth or privileged knowledge that is no longer credible. The conception of individual development we have inherited is based on a belief in some culture-neutral process that is no longer sustainable. Public education has become all things to all people, and this conflict is clear in Egan’s book. You cannot socialize, seek the truth, and realize individual potential all at the same time - within a single, enclosed system. Our public education system was created to give equal access to all (a good thing) and to prepare workers for industrial jobs (a self-serving thing for the industrialists). Public education was embraced by reformers as well as factory owners. I call it a shotgun wedding. The lack of agreement on what our education system should be is muddying the waters in our discussions about learning. When reduced to the basic process, learning is an individual and personal activity. But learning also has significant social aspects and can be helped or hindered in many ways. How we build systems to nurture, support, or coerce it, are the issues that we can address as a community. While the industrialists would have preferred education as socialization and the progressives would have leaned toward education as learning about truth, we are stuck with a standardized curriculum that benefits few. In addition, the education system is in for some new competition. We may soon get invited to another shotgun wedding, this time between techno-utopians, with financial speculators as bridesmaids, and libertarians, who feel the state and teachers have screwed-up education. It will be education as socialization, but socialization to the dominant business paradigm. However, problems with any education system are mostly a result of the governance and economic environment in which it resides. What can New Brunswick do? Decentralize. Allow for experimentation at the local level. Empower teachers in a transparent manner so everyone can see what is happening. Sadly, I think the province will continue to stumble into an increasingly complex future, for which its institutions are poorly prepared.

Here are some observations and insights that were shared on social media this past fortnight. I call these Friday’s Finds. "We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow. - Oscar Wilde" - via @BestOscarWilde @ShawnCallahan - "The stories we find, and especially the ones we retell, change who we become." @edmorrison - "Our challenge is not to banish hierarchies, but to balance them with open systems, properly guided." Last taboo: Secrecy About Salaries May Be on the Wane. Will that make for a happier or more miserable workplace? - via @LucyMarcus As is human nature, those who made more than their co-workers were not noticeably happier, he said, but those below the average were much unhappier. NYT: IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things - via @downes The future will be run by companies like IFTTT: "The way we see the Internet of Things playing out, there’s going to be a need for an operating system that’s detached from any specific device," Linden Tibbets said. "What we’re doing now is the foundation for that." Happy Labor Day - @the realbanksy (fan account):

Listening to a story about exploitation in the ivory tower on CBC Sunday Edition this morning made me realize how much we are prisoners of our current reality. The poorly paid contract teaching staff saw no way out of their plight and the professor-turned-administrator went from questioning the current system to promoting its inequalities as the only viable way to keep universities afloat. It seems that as soon as you identify with a system, whether it is good for you or not, then it becomes the only frame of reference. There was no discussion on what systemic changes could humanize the life of sessional instructors. Everyone sounded so powerless. The situation of universities in this country, with high fixed costs and deep bureaucracies, is not that different from any other institution, including the private corporation. People on all sides inside the organization can only imagine how to tinker with the existing system. But the system is the problem. The radio program noted that one university has over 50% contract staff, who earn about 1/3 what tenured faculty do, and have almost no hope of permanent employment. Something as simple as only hiring new tenure-track positions from the pool of sessionals could flip this situation. It is a small, simple change that at least one university could experiment with. But it seems that administrators are not hired for their ability to experiment, and neither are faculty, outside the lab anyway. A fundamental shift in organizational design is needed, beginning with organizational leadership. Those in positions of power need to understand complexity, the default state of  most situations they face, and will be dealing with for the foreseeable future. They need to work on the system, not in the system. This is social leadership, a requirement for success in the network era. Social leadership needs network thinking, which is as difficult as learning a new language for adults. The inability to understand complexity is the problem facing almost all large organizations. It is next to impossible to have a deep and meaningful conversation about complexity, and the new world of work in a networked society, inside the traditional workplace. It requires a common language, some shared experiences, and a willingness to think critically and abandon some very comfortable assumptions that inform our understanding of ourselves and our work. It is very tough to do this in one hour briefings, powerpoint decks, or elevator rides. There is too much to digest. I noted that time for reflection is missing in most workplaces today. Even more rare is time for sense-making, and sense-making takes a LOT of time, for example: 2009 sense-making-with-pkm 2010 sense-making 2011 sense-making-through-conversation 2012 manual-not-automatic-for-sense-making 2013 sense-making-for-success 2014 sense-making-and-sharing If networks really are the new companies, and I believe they are, then there is a lot of sense-making required to build the new value structures for the networked economy. Creating the time and space for continuous sense-making is a cornerstone to building the organizations and management structures for our collective future. Now would be a good time to start.

The simple structure of the company, with its solidly embedded organizational chart restricting knowledge flow, cannot deal with the complexity of the networked economy. It takes too long to make decisions or try new things out. Looser hierarchies and stronger networks are required, but how do you go about this? Working and learning out loud are essential practices that can change the nature of work. They help make transparent what is happening in the organization and democratize knowledge creation. First of all, everyone must be engaged in observing their environment. Then groups of people can work on problems together and learn as they work. The results of working and learning out loud can then be codified as network knowledge, which is always open for modification, as knowledge flow becomes knowledge stock. PKM - Seek > Sense > Share - is a core part of enabling knowledge to flow, unrestricted by hierarchies. Imagine a community of explorers in a new land. There are many cooks who try out new recipes, testing to see what tastes good or goes well together. As they cook in groups to feed their families or part of the community, they talk and share their latest work. The cooks have a friendly competition to see who can come up with the most interesting meal. They have to prepare three meals a day, but each day is different, as the situation changes and new foods are discovered. Some of the recipes are popular, or especially good during certain seasons, so recipes are informally published. These are shared throughout the community and with travelers passing through, who also have their own recipes and bring new spices. In such a complex adaptive environment, working and learning together just makes sense. Imagine if this community instead had a single chef and a team of food preparation specialists that reported directly to him. He would decide what to cook for the community kitchen. Weekly reports from community leaders would be collated by the chef’s staff, reviewed by the chef, and would inform the next week’s menu planning. Certain recipes would be published annually in the official community cookbook, certified for general use. Imagine how long it would take, and how much knowledge would be missed, with such a structure. Imagine how many wonderful recipes would not be created. The community members would be merely passive consumers of food, disconnected from the environment that nourishes them. Well, this is what happens with knowledge in most organizations today.

There’s a common saying that entrepreneurs should work on the business, and not in the business. It makes sense to stay above the day-to-day details in order to help steer the business. Perhaps it’s time to think of all businesses as networks of entrepreneurs. Everyone should be working on the business. As Peter Drucker said, "Nothing is less productive than doing what should not be done at all". Being efficient at something that is not effective is a waste of time, and a cause for workers to mentally disconnect from the company. Efficiency for its own sake makes job a four-letter word. How do you get an entrepreneurial mindset in a hierarchical, just-follow-the-rules, organization? Start by looking at what motivates people. Dan Pink popularized three key motivators in his book, Drive (2011): Autonomy, Mastery, Sense of Purpose. The basis of this is self-determination theory, which I think provides a clearer understanding of motivation at work, and from which the following image comes from. Source: Wikipedia Not only does an entrepreneurial mindset require autonomy and competence, but relatedness as well. People have to feel they are part of something. Relatedness "is the universal want to interact, be connected to, and experience caring for others". This is what the military, organized religions, and many NGO’s clearly understand. Working out loud is one way to foster relatedness, by seeing what is happening throughout the enterprise and being connected to the work flow. Autonomy can be promoted by encouraging experimentation from which new insights can be gained and shared. Increased confidence results from having the freedom to try things out within a sharing and caring work environment. This foundation of self-determination aligns with the general structure of Teal Organizations, as described in Frédéric Laloux’s book, Reinventing Organizations. The book covers in detail how Teal organizations, based on self-managing teams, can work. Examples include AES, Buurtzorg, FAVI, Morning Star, RHD, Sun Hydraulics, and Patagonia. These companies have changed the traditional industrial era structure of work and enabled self-determination on an organizational level. But the bottom line is autonomous workers relating to others in an organizational space protected by the leadership. This is the future of work when facing rapid technological change, shifting demographics, resource and climate crises, and economic volatility. The answer is to simplify our work structures, not make things more complicated. Entrepreneurship is economic self-determination. What motivates entrepreneurs can also drive a company.

Here are some observations and insights that were shared on social media this past fortnight. I call these Friday’s Finds. A Digital Declaration - by Shoshana Zuboff In the shadow and gloom of today’s institutional facts, it has become fashionable to mourn the passing of the democratic era. I say that democracy is the best our species has created so far, and woe to us if we abandon it now. The real road to serfdom is to be persuaded that the declarations of democracy we have inherited are no longer relevant to a digital future. These have been inscribed in our souls, and if we leave them behind— we abandon the best part of ourselves. If you doubt me, try living without them, as I have done. That is the real wasteland, and we should fear it. "MT @glovink: Stop talking about Uber as ‘sharing economy’ says German net guru Sascha Lobo. I like his concept: ‘platform capitalism'" - @martinlessard @edmorrison - "Our challenge is not to banish hierarchies, but to balance them with open systems, properly guided." Competition is for losers, build a monopoly by @peterthiel - @indy_johar: "shocking piece; 1st they killed democracy now free markets" Harold’s comment: My focus is the democratization of work. Democracy is messy & has redundancies, which is why it’s perfect for a complex society & economy.

Every organization today is trying to address the changing nature of work, driven by rapid technological change, and made more complex by global changes in economics, politics, and resources. Simultaneously we are seeing rapid advances in all the sciences and their intersections. But what about our structures that organize how people work together? Providing better tools and developing individual skills only address part of the needs of the digital workplace. There is also a need for cognitive skills that enhance creativity and initiative. For example, working and learning out loud in online social networks significantly change the flow of knowledge and influence power structures. Pattern sensing becomes all important. Even leadership has to be exercised in a different way from the hierarchical organization, understanding the dynamics of networks. Personal knowledge mastery is a foundational discipline needed to work in digital communities and networks so that personal know-how continuously feeds organizational knowledge. The PKM framework is currently used by Domino’s Pizza, Bangor University, and the UK’s National Health Services amongst others. It has been adopted by hundreds of professionals around the world who have participated in PKM workshops. PKM gives a structure to develop a network of people and sources of information that can be drawn upon daily. It a process of seeking knowledge, active sense-making, and discerning when and with whom to share knowledge. Initially, with good PKM practices, less time is spent on answering email or finding information, and more time focused on being a better knowledge worker. As mastery is developed, professional learning networks become more diverse and resilient, so that serendipitous finds of new knowledge and people become commonplace. Only providing digital tools and teaching people how to use them is not enough. A new language of working in digital networks and communities must be mastered. Practices like network weaving have to become natural. So does the idea of sharing ideas before they are fully formulated. One challenge is to understand the difference between Alpha and Beta ideas, and with whom to share each. Another challenge is to think critically, questioning assumptions and using the network to help surface the best knowledge. Workers are no longer employees but knowledge artisans, whose relationship with knowledge is entrepreneurial, driven by self-determination. Organizations structured on flattened hierarchies and self-managed teams are more attractive to these artisans, who will drive the emerging creative economy. Most organizations are playing with all these new digital technologies and not putting in place structures to support knowledge artisans. But all these levels of hierarchy and control processes, based on a systemic lack of trust, will be overwhelmed by the resulting complexity of a hyper-connected economy. Overarching knowledge work principles have to be first established. An adult-to-adult relationship model like wirearchy is one example; "a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology." Complex environments are the new normal. Relationship building is needed in order to share complex knowledge. Implicit knowledge takes time to share, so time has to be set aside for sense-making, reflecting, and conversing. These are significant workplace changes, but can be mastered with a stable foundation of PKM practiced by interdependent and autonomous knowledge artisans. When everybody is engaged in sense-making, then any organization can better sense where it needs to go. Related Posts: New Artisans of the Network Era A Swiss Army Knife for the Network Era Reflecting on Reflection Self-determination at Work

A valuable practice advocated by the authors of Everything Connects is the art and craft of blueprinting, centred on the practice of decision mapping. As you map decision after decision - and perhaps finding yourself making mistake after mistake - you’ll begin to recognize the elements of your identity, your various strategies, and the assets you’re drawing upon for a given decision. Being mindful of our actions, like any discipline, takes time to master. This personal discipline can then become the foundation for organizational asset mapping, building something beyond ourselves, to include: people; insights; capital; infrastructure; and ecosystem. The ‘people’ element is the foundation of our lives, including our work lives, and the authors go into a lot of detail on the power of relationships. "We as humans are fundamentally intra- and interpersonal, and so the depth of understanding that we have of ourselves and others will be the asset that we use most throughout our working lives." This should be fairly obvious to anyone who thinks about it, but can be forgotten in the complicated nature of our workplaces. This book is a good reminder about what is important in life and provides some new ways of putting things in perspective. What the authors call "dating ideas" is very much like seeking, in the PKM Seek > Sense > Share framework. They suggest dating new ideas from three main sources, of which the second is the most important in my opinion. The media you consume. The people you see. The events you attend. From a state of mindfulness, or listening with an intent to hear, insights may become more visible. These insights can then be shared through practices such as working out loud, openly questioning assumptions, and trying things out together. All of these take practice. The authors state that "an entrepreneur is someone who takes responsibility for his or her economic well-being". In a connected world, we must all become entrepreneurs because our knowledge and know how will determine our economic well-being. This book is a good addition to management books that discuss how to change our current impasse between structuring organizations and giving meaning to each each person’s work life. The authors promote organizing work around implementation clusters, increasing diversity; enabling autonomy; and most importantly, focusing on long-term value. While it gives many examples, this is not a much of a how-to book but would go well with The Connected Company or Reinventing Organizations.

If you want to destroy the entrepreneurial nature of work, then make management part of the hierarchy. Removing management from the hierarchy is probably the simplest thing that could be done to improve innovation and increase the motivation of those who really create business value. Management at Asana is seen as service role, rather than the next step in the pyramid on the org chart. The usual model, where exceptional work leads inevitably to the management track is a mistake, Rosenstein argues. "The effect of that is that individual work is looked down on," he says. "That is so caustic."  - What managers do at a company that’s trying to replace them with software Knowledge artisans don’t need managers, they need support to get work done. A lot of management, like performance reviews, is quite boring and repetitive. Much of management will be automated, along with anything else for which a flowchart can be created. In a networked workplace, management is just a service that needs to be provided, like electricity. There is little reason to connect such a basic service as management to the decision-making structure. A flattened hierarchy requires less command and control. Self-managed teams require fewer external directives. Transparency eliminates the need for most control mechanisms. A world without bosses is possible. For us, we’ve found that transparency is another great way to build trust in a team. If all the information about everything that’s going on is freely available, that helps everyone to feel completely on board with decisions. - Joel Gascoigne, CEO, Buffer When organizations adopt practices such as working out loud, there is even less need for management. In a transparent organization, with self-directed teams working out loud, the shifting of management to a service will serve another purpose - power sharing. This can energize the entire workforce to be more entrepreneurial. Companies are doing this and are seeing great results, reinventing their organizations. It’s amazing that so many executives are not making more significant changes to basic management structures. Perhaps they are listening too much to their managers? Phoenix Rising from a Collapsed Hierarchy - by Joachim Stroh #ITASHARE

Here are some observations and insights that were shared on social media this past fortnight. I call these Friday’s Finds. @ayeletb: "I want to live in a world of possibilities and experiments; not a cookie cutter world, unless I am baking." "If you want to do something new, you have to stop doing something old. - Peter Drucker" - HT @reuvengorsht @alanwbrown: "The cluetrain changed my life … seriously! So very interesting reading RT @johngoode: Is IoT waiting for Cluetrain?" Cluetrain states: The Market is the Conversation. Could that be reversed? The Conversation is the Market? If so, Cluetrain is what IoT is waiting for: 1. Individuals, Cities, Infrastructure and local authorities produce (and later, sell) IoT data. 2. Google, Amazon, Intel or similar builds a Meaning Engine: an IoT ingest warehouse. It publishes API’s for consuming data (for which it pays) and produces insight (which it sells). I have no doubt the lawyers will do quite well from privacy, safeguarding and ownership matters. Abstracts of Three Meta-Analysis Studies of Serious Games by Karl Kapp - via @downes The most interesting result of this survey of meta-studies of serious games: "Learners learned less from simulation games than comparison instructional methods when the instruction the comparison group received as a substitute for the game actively engaged them in the learning experience (so activity, not game elements seems to increase the learning)." Which accords with what we know about learning. @Forbes - American companies spend almost $14 billion annually on leadership development training. Studies have found that adult learners in a lecture setting forget nearly 50% of what they learn within two weeks. And consider that the most highly trained leaders - CEOs - are often not able to translate their knowledge into experience. The Center for Creative Leadership found that 38% of new chief executives fail in their first 18 months on the job. Learning lessons from successful KM projects. I found myself reflecting last night, as I flew back to the UK, that perhaps the difference between the winners and those in second and third place lies not in structure nor in process, but in far more intangible areas, and that when collecting lessons from winners we need to look more at the softer aspects.[trust, relationships, rigour & control] @plevey: "Intéressante expo Duchamp à Beaubourg [Paris]. Le "Nu descendant l’escalier" a *choqué*… les cubistes, en leur temps!"

The Zeitgeist (spirit of the age or spirit of the time) is the intellectual fashion or dominant school of thought that typifies and influences the culture of a particular period in time. At any conference or professional gathering today, someone will stand up and say that things are not working, and about two-thirds in attendance will nod in agreement. I hear that relationships with customers are broken. Some talk about generational differences in the workplace that disconnect senior management from young workers. Others see a need for better digital competencies. Many are challenging the hierarchical nature of the organization in an emerging networked economy. I attended several presentations on the future of Human Resources (even the word reflects the hierarchical nature of the workplace) in Paris last week. Every session highlighted the fact that things are not working. Recruiting, talent management, professional development, and every other area of HR is trying to deal with a post-industrial workplace. The zeitgeist is the need for organizational change. All the executives and managers I speak with today agree there is a need for change. They see that the Internet is changing their business. They understand that automation is a force to be reckoned with. However, many do not have a clue where or how to start. The zeitgeist may be obvious, but the old ways of thinking are still firmly entrenched. We cannot deal with the new era in the same way we managed the old one. I usually suggest that it does not matter what you do, just do something. Let people safely experiment. I suggested to a school board that they give $100 to every teacher to invest in whatever they wanted, without any direction. Teachers could buy something for their classrooms, or perhaps a number of them could pool their money and make a larger impact. The cost would be low. The impact would be wide. The possibilities would be greater than any central committee could plan. Real experimentation is not about quick wins, which are so appealing to management, as Tim Kastelle clearly shows: "We need to find some quick wins to get this going, so we’ll look for the low-hanging fruit." Here’s the thing: there is no low-hanging fruit. If there were, we’d have picked it already. I mean, we’re not stupid, right? Businesses often want to see the ROI of something before committing to it. This is just a defence mechanism to ensure the status quo. If we keep the investment low enough, we don’t need to worry about the return on it. This allows for wide experimentation; not quick wins but quick losses. We have communication technologies now to know what is happening across any organization. All large companies are also listening attentively to social media. Given all this information, it is easy to let people experiment as long as they share what they are doing. The solution to the problems inherent in organizations are inside the organization itself. But will management be able to give up control? This is the challenge today. The good news is that the nature of the problems are massively evident in the current zeitgeist.

I attended the Community Forests International planning session yesterday. This organization, located in our small town of Sackville, is working on two continents and recently received €1.2 million from the European Union for its work on the island of Pemba in Tanzania. The day included participation from many community groups, such as Renaissance Sackville, which I represented. It finished with a wine & cheese at Cranewood (a must-see for any visitor to town) which drew even more people from the community. I’d like to highlight what Jeff Schnurr, the founder had to say, as it reflects the advice I give to many organizations (my paraphrasing here). There is no difference between our organization, our community, and individual people. All of our relationships are personal. We conduct pilots all the time. We do several in different conditions to see what happens. All of our learning is through pilot projects. We need to find ways to learn quicker [note that CFI has a new staff position, an internal journalist, who focuses on explicit knowledge capture and sharing through stories]. The way that CFI, and its greater mission, will scale for growth will be by telling its story. Read about CFI and the amazing work that has been done to date. This organization started on nothing, just an idea, and has grown to an international operation, with a for-profit arm as well as demonstration farm here in New Brunswick. My discussions with Jeff over several years provide me with an excellent example of how organizations can deal with complexity and manage to grow and be sustainable. At yesterday’s sessions, one of the suggestions was to ‘open source’ all of CFI’s practices and processes so they can be shared with others. This will become a valuable resource over time, for both non-profits as well as any other organization that wants to succeed in this era of climate change, economic volatility, resource scarcity, and inter-connectedness. A safe-to-fail approach enables continuous learning in complex environments  

Two late 19th century theorists still firmly inform management thinking. Henri Fayol’s functions of management pretty well sum up how many managers see their responsibilities today. To forecast and plan To organize To command or direct To coordinate F.W. Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management viewed management as the necessary controlling layer in order to systematize work and make it efficient. If labourers could not adapt to managers’ directions, then they should be let go. Much of management thinking is still overly focused on managers. It is premised on a parent-child relationship, with managers requiring special training and increased rewards in order to look after their ‘direct-reports’. But today, a lot of management can be done with machines. You don’t need a manager to find information. Managers don’t always have the right answers. As managers lose control over information flow, their usefulness is decreasing. Labour today is not made up of predominantly bricklayers and iron workers, which Taylor’s studies were based on. In a new company, like game-maker Valve Corp., owner Gabe Newell says that "management is a skill, it’s not a career path", and explains how management is removed from the hierarchy. Everybody is a mixture of individual and group contribution. There’s a set of tasks related to project organization and keeping things going. And usually, people refuse to do it twice in a row, on back-to-back projects, because it’s very much a service job. "My job is to entirely define myself in terms of the productivity that I enable in other people. That’s a very stressful job and it’s hard to measure your own productivity. People say, hey, Jay, you should do it again, and Jay says ‘screw you guys!’." So we look for some younger sucker to give the job to, who thinks it’s authority within a hierarchy related to decision-making, and then finds out that it’s, oh, working really really hard to make other people more productive. - Reflections of a Video Game Maker I think the major reason that these ideas have not been put into the dustbin of history is they are too convenient. Thinking of management as a science makes it special. Giving power to managers ensures the status quo. Who wants to rock the boat and say they are adding little value as a manager? If you want to know what is ailing your organization, maybe lack of innovation or over-bureaucratization, then look no further than management. Of course few managers think they are part of the problem. But self-management is possible, if not inevitable.

When was the last course you took? How about e-learning? When was it designed? Was it current? Did it reflect your current reality? Was it useful? One of the limitations of instructional design is the assumption that a program can be designed and built based on the initial  specifications. Assuming you know everything at the start of a complex development project is rather arrogant. Arrogance is believing that the perfect system can be engineered on the first try. Instead, the principles of communicating, focusing on simplicity, releasing often, and testing often are all applicable to developing good instructional programs. A culture of perpetual Beta is critical. Perpetual Beta means we never get to the final release and that our learning will never stop. Connected organizations realize they will never reach some future point where everything stabilizes and they don’t need to learn or do anything new. While good instruction from the organization is important, fostering autonomous learners is the more important side of the organizational learning relationship. A significant portion of the workforce has not been able to develop the skills to learn for themselves or are blocked from doing so inside their organizations. What many lack are tools, methods, and practices to learn and to take action. In addition, autonomous learners face many barriers on the job, particularly the pervasive attitude that you must look busy or you’re not working. 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 and continues into many organizations. When we move away from a "design it first, then build it" mindset, we can then engage everyone in critical and systems thinking. Workers in connected workplaces must be passionate, adaptive, innovative, and collaborative. The way to begin is to first become autonomous learners. Developing practical methods, like PKM, is a start on the path to autonomy. A major premise of PKM is that it is personal and there are many ways to practice it.  We need to think and talk about work differently. For example, dropping the notion of being paid for time is one way to start this change.  An hourly wage implies that people are interchangeable, but no two minds are the same. Many of our human resource practices should be questioned and dropped. Here are some ways that HR or L&D can support autonomous workers: Think and act at a macro level (what to do) and leave the micro (how to do it) to each worker or team. The little stuff is changing too fast. Engage with social media and understand how they work. Knowledge networks are too important to be left to IT, communications, or outside vendors. Use tools like enterprise social networks to make work easier or more effective. Let the network solve problems for you. Make yourself and your function redundant and prepare for the next challenge. If your work can be standardized, it will be automated. Teach people how to fish and move on to the next challenge. If you’re maintaining a steady state then you’ve failed to evolve with the organization and the environment. According to anthropologist Michael Wesch, "when media change, then human relationships change". People of all ages are now digital content creators, no longer satisfied with being supplied with learning programs but creating tutorials, job aids, and explanatory videos for each other. Access to much of the world’s information, coupled with online professional social communities has turned us into grazers and foragers, no longer content to feed our intellect only at the corporate trough. This empowerment outside the organization is changing how workers value and perceive professional development inside. Autonomous learners have a new set of needs. HR and L&D have to evolve to support these. Arrogance is assuming you know the answers.

Here are some observations and insights that were shared on social media this past fortnight. I call these Friday’s Finds. @morgenpaul - "Psst … Your people are not your greatest asset; they’re not yours and they’re not assets. Let’s treat them like people." Will robots make our lives better or worse? - via @gideonro So the question is not whether robots and computers will make human labour in the goods, high-tech services, and information-producing sectors infinitely more productive. They will. What really matters is whether the jobs outside of the robot-computer economy - jobs involving people’s mouths, smiles, and minds - remain valuable and in high demand. With regard to Ebola, Helmuth von Moltke the Elder said it best: General principles and  specific rule-based systems have no value for creating a winning strategy. You can try and develop one before battle starts and hope you have it all figured out, but you must also have in place a way to change as battle changes the table.. All you can do is create an organization that can quickly adapt and respond to the changing conditions. The winners of any battle seen today are those that can most rapidly adjust. @madelynblair - Pulling the chocks out I personally find it impossible to dig really deep to find my assumptions by myself. I need someone who questions me in a way that demands I look deeper. It’s usually a friend or colleague that I respect who can do this best for me. That’s why I have said that a Practice Partner is an essential crew member of any journey where you are seeking new knowledge or insight - or innovation. NYT: When Uber and Airbnb Meet the Real World Why have these companies run into so many problems? Part of the reason is that they think of themselves as online companies — yet they mostly operate in the offline world. They subscribe to three core business principles that have become a religion in Silicon Valley: Serve as a middleman, employ as few people as possible and automate everything. Those tenets have worked wonders on the web at companies like Google and Twitter. But as the new, on-demand companies are learning, they are not necessarily compatible with the real world. GMOs Expose Dangerous Science Disconnect in Agriculture via @shauncoffey A huge gulf exists in farmer attitudes toward science. Growers clearly accept the scientific evidence that modified food is safe while rejecting the scientific evidence that climate change is real and caused by human activity. And this chasm is driven by simple economics. One finding makes farmers money, but the other doesn’t — yet. "@karen_goudie: What a great way to give info to patients families … who will care for them today @NHSBorders " via @ribtickler1:

For an organization to be agile and adaptive, the people in it need to be aware of what is happening around them, have alternative pathways to gather information and knowledge, and must be allowed to act to meet/solve both local and global goals/problems.  They need to both work in their hierarchy and in a self-organizing network simultaneously! - Valdis Krebs, Orgnet How can an organization build awareness, investigate alternatives, and act on complex problems? The organization needs to connect the outside with the inside. This is not a technology challenge but rather a structural one. Organizations need to help knowledge flow and this only happens when people are connected. Technology is a facilitator, but people are the key. This is too often overlooked, as in most enterprise social network implementations, where mere training is bolted on at the end of the technology build. Awareness, alternatives, and action can each be supported within a unified organizational framework. Wirearchy: a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology. - Jon Husband To let knowledge flow, people first have to become responsible for their own sense-making. This reverses the existing practice of corporate training that is designed centrally and distributed through the hierarchy. Personal knowledge mastery (PKM) is a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world and work more effectively. People can learn more and connect to diverse knowledge networks outside the organizational walls. To remain relevant, organizations have to become less hierarchical and more networked. The first step is connecting to external knowledge networks, a key part of PKM. Increasing connections, developing meaning, and improving autonomy are necessary skills in the network era. PKM ties these into an easy to understand framework: Seek > Sense > Share. With every worker actively practicing PKM, seeking new knowledge and making sense through experimentation, then communities of practice can form to promote knowledge-sharing. Professional communities of practice connect the work being done with the ever-changing external world. They are an essential safe place to fail. Organizations need to support and reinforce existing communities, not build these as if they were project teams. People only share complex knowledge with others whom they trust. This takes time. Finally, the way work is done needs to change to reflect a wirearchy. Hierarchies can be temporary agreements to get work done, but the general organization structure has to be much more flexible, enabling self-directed work teams. Loose hierarchies and strong networks can help build a functioning wirearchy. The AAA organization is an evolving work in progress, adaptable to a changing environment but first each worker needs to master sense-making and then workers have to organize in communities to make sense together. One challenge for traditional organizations is that a core aspect of PKM is critical thinking, or questioning assumptions, which may be threatening to command & control management systems. But as Valdis states, "Awareness and alternatives are useless without the ability to take action on them." Giving up control so that people can take action is the essence of the AAA Organization.

The 70:20:10 (Experience, Exposure, Education) Framework is focused on learning at work, not in a classroom, and not in a lab. Charles Jennings has described workplace learning as based on four key activities: Exposure to new and rich experiences. The opportunity to practice. Engaging in conversation and exchanges with each other. Making time to reflect on new observations, information, experiences, etc. Studies show that informal learning accounts for between 70 and 95% of workplace learning  [USBLS: 70%; Raybould: 95%; EDC: 70%; CapitalWorks: 75%; OISE: 70%; eLG: 70%; Allen Tough: 80%]. Gary Wise extrapolated Josh Bersin’s data from 2009 and found that as much as 95% of workplace learning is informal. Offering only sanctioned courses as professional development is completely inadequate in a complex work environment. It is arrogant to think that we can know in advance what people need to learn on the job today. Everyone needs to experiment, learn from experience, and share with colleagues,  as part of their work. PKM is a framework to make sense of the 70%. It helps connect our experiences. It is also a very inexpensive way to promote learning and development. Perhaps that is why PKM and similar practices are not the norm in many workplaces. Nobody will get a big budget to manage them. PKM is personally managed. People just need time, space, some coaching, and organizational support. Tools help, but there are a lot of inexpensive ones available. But quite often the only tools available at work are at cross-purposes with PKM. They are not personal and they do not help people to seek > sense > share. Smaller companies and young companies appear to be quite open to PKM-like practices. It may just be a matter of time before they become the norm. Most free-agents understand the importance of taking control of their professional development. For the employed, the realization often comes on news of unemployment. People quickly see that their professional network is primarily business contacts from their previous company. Cast aside, they have no support network. Building one takes time. The foundation of PKM (seek) is participating in professional knowledge networks. From these social networks, one can find the right crew for more focused journeys of sense-making.  This is 21st century networking, not the stuff of cocktail parties and passing out business cards of the previous half-century. Creating a diverse network of loose and strong ties takes time. Nurturing these connections takes more time.  Part of the 70% of workplace learning should be focused on connecting with others, inside and outside the organization. How much time do you spend? How much time would your organization let you spend? If you are in a position of authority, how much time do you let others spend on participating in professional knowledge networks? Getting started with PKM is probably the cheapest professional development program that any company can initiate. It requires no special technology or proprietary system. My own objective in promoting PKM is not to sell it, or even teach others how to do it. My objective is to enable people to learn and teach it for themselves. If I can guide people to take the first step, then that is usually all it takes. PKM in 40 Days is one way I try to provide a starting point. I will work on other ways in the coming year. Jay Cross likened informal learning to riding a bicycle. Maybe that’s a good way to look at PKM. It’s a bike to get out and explore all those paths and places you do not find on the main motorways. Seek > Sense > Share the Journey

Nesta, a UK-based innovation charity, recently looked at jobs and automation, in the article, Creativity versus Robots. I have summarized some of their findings, and added my own perspective, with an image showing how standardized work is decreasing while creative work is increasing in the job market. Overall, we are seeing an increasing percentage of creative jobs in the workforce. But this is not a zero-sum game, as many jobs are getting automated and disappearing. If nothing is done, there will be severe societal repercussions. Nesta cites US and UK data on jobs, indicating a near future of more automation, as well as uncertainty for about a third of current jobs. It is no longer a question of whether standardized work will be automated, but when. In an era of increasingly complex challenges, such as climate change, today’s workforce has to deal with more complexity and even chaos. We need to skill-up jobs for emergent and novel practices which requires a completely different mindset about work. Those workers whose jobs are getting automated need not just skills, but opportunities to do more creative work. In addition, we cannot leave behind the one-third of workers in no-man’s land. In the USA today, 79% of the labour force needs to shift to highly creative work. Jobs, as currently defined, are not the answer. We need to develop structures that encourage and value creative work, from our education establishments, unions, employers, and politicians. No society can afford to leave over three quarters of the workforce behind as it shifts to a creative economy.  Gary Hamel has described traditional (industrial) employee traits of Intellect, Diligence & Obedience as commodities (ripe for automation). A creative economy requires independent and interdependent workers (more like theatre productions) with traits that cannot be commoditized: Initiative, Creativity, Passion. The job is nothing more than a social construct. I think it’s outlived its usefulness. The construct of the job, with its defined skills, effort, responsibilities, and working conditions, is a key limiting organizational factor for a creative economy. To realize the creative potential of individuals we have to cast off old notions of how work gets done. There is no such thing as a generic  job description into which we just drop some "qualified" candidate. Job competencies are a myth. People are individuals. The role of an effective HR department would be to know each person individually. Everyone can be creative, including janitors. We need to understand this as automation replaces people, but may leave nobody in place to do the creative human aspects of work. And yet, when some psychologists interviewed hospital janitors to get a sense of what they thought their jobs were like, they encountered Mike, who told them about how he stopped mopping the floor because Mr. Jones was out of his bed getting a little exercise, trying to build up his strength, walking slowly up and down the hall. And Charlene told them about how she ignored her supervisor’s admonition and didn’t vacuum the visitor’s lounge because there were some family members who were there all day, every day who, at this moment, happened to be taking a nap. And then there was Luke, who washed the floor in a comatose young man’s room twice because the man’s father, who had been keeping a vigil for six months, didn’t see Luke do it the first time, and his father was angry. And behavior like this from janitors, from technicians, from nurses and, if we’re lucky now and then, from doctors, doesn’t just make people feel a little better, it actually improves the quality of patient care and enables hospitals to run well. - Barry Schwartz Understanding and incorporating humanity back into our workplaces will liberate us from the scientific management models that inform too many of our organizations. One small change, that could have a major impact, would be to look at everyone’s work from the perspective of standardized versus creative work. Every person in the company, with the help of some data and peer feedback, should be able to determine what percentage of their time is spent on standardized work. If the percentage is over a certain threshold, say 50%, then it becomes a management task to change that person’s job and add more creative work. The company should be constantly looking at ways to automate any standardized work, in order to stay ahead of technology, the market, and the competition. While automation may be inevitable, it does not have to destroy the workforce. Looking at the overall company balance between standardized and creative work should be an indicator of its potential to succeed. By visualizing the split, people in the company can make plans and take action. In this environment, jobs will have to become more flexible and open to change. Jobs of the 21st century may look nothing like the structured one-size-fits-all jobs of the 20th century. Building ways to constantly change roles will be one way to get rid of the standardized job, which has no place in a creative economy. This small change could have a major impact on any organization. It requires a new way of looking at work, and then collecting good data, engaging workers in the process, and being transparent. Most of all, a creative workplace requires managers who really care about creative talent development.

Working out loud is a way to ensure others know what you are doing and to be conscious of your own work. It is being mindful of your work and how it may influence others. But working out loud is nothing if there is no time taken for reflection. Learning out loud takes you to a different level; one that may seem even more precarious. It’s sharing your half-baked ideas with the world. But these ideas, combined with others over time, can build a resilient web of innovation. Working out loud connect us as professionals and humans. It is a highly social activity. It also exposes us, so it requires trust. While we may get interesting ideas from our informal networks, such as on social media, we still need trusted spaces to test things out. A place to test new ideas is often the missing link between doing work and leisure time. We may see something interesting while engaging on social media at night, but when it comes time to go to work, there is no easy way to make the connection. At work we need to stay focused. We might have a chance for a quick chat over lunch, but for the most part we focus on getting things done. While there is some current impetus behind working out loud at work, the concept falls apart if it does not connect outside the workplace. If not, WoL is just an echo chamber. When there is no place to test ideas in a trusted space, how can an individual’s ideas translate into new ways of doing things? We need others to help us. We have to test ideas together, but not under the constraints of deadline-driven projects. Helping make space, such as communities of practice, is an essential first step in enabling working out loud, and most importantly, reaping its benefits. Working and learning out loud are integral parts of personal knowledge mastery. In our social networks they help us to seek new opinions and share our own with a diverse group of people. We can seek new connections without permission. Trusted spaces, like communities of practice, give us a place to take half-baked ideas and test them out, with minimal risk. Meanwhile, we can sharpen these ideas and share them in our workplaces when we discern the time is appropriate. All of this is an art, requiring ongoing practice, and countless negotiated conversations and relationships. I have likened it before to a dance hall. Working out loud is definitely part of PKM but it is a varying practice, depending on the place and time. Without learning out loud it is just noise. Without experimentation it is merely whimsy. But when complex work, the driver of the creative economy, gets a stream of new ideas that have been developed in trusted communities of practice, which are informed by even broader social networks, then you have the foundation for a connected enterprise. Companies can deal with complexity by becoming learning organizations, engaging in continuous seeking, sense-making, and sharing of knowledge.  

In business, attention is paid to innovative individuals, especially those who go on to become captains of industry. But of more importance is the ability of the network (society, organization, company) to stay connected to its collective knowledge in order to keep innovating. Just think how quickly an organization would its lose collective knowledge if people did not share their knowledge. What about an entire society? You start out with two genetically well-intermixed peoples. Tasmania’s actually connected to mainland Australia so it’s just a peninsula. Then about 10,000 years ago, the environment changes, it gets warmer and the Bass Strait floods, so this cuts off Tasmania from the rest of Australia, and it’s at that point that they begin to have this technological downturn. You can show that this is the kind of thing you’d expect if societies are like brains in the sense that they store information as a group and that when someone learns, they’re learning from the most successful member, and that information is being passed from different communities, and the larger the population, the more different minds you have working on the problem. If your number of minds working on the problem gets small enough, you can actually begin to lose information. There’s a steady state level of information that depends on the size of your population and the interconnectedness. It also depends on the innovativeness of your individuals, but that has a relatively small effect compared to the effect of being well interconnected and having a large population. - How Culture Drove Human Evolution Is your organization more like an isolated island or part of a connected and diverse continent? Are your knowledge networks large and diverse enough to ensure that collective knowledge does not get lost? These are serious questions to ask at another time of rising sea levels. Innovation is not brilliant flashes of individual insight but collective learning through social networks. No networks, no learning. In an effort to understand what drives the accumulation of cultural information, his colleague Hannah Lewis developed a mathematical model that can simulate how new cultural traits - technological inventions, traditions, or knowledge - arise and disappear over generations. With this model, [Kevin] Laland and Lewis plugged in various forms of innovation (inventing something outright, or modifying or combining existing inventions), as well as trait loss - losing knowledge through inaccurate transmission of information. They ran these simulations through 5,000 cycles, looking to see which factor had the biggest impact on the final richness and diversity of traits. Accurate transmission of information had a massive impact on the outcome: with this model, increasing the fidelity of cultural transmission just a bit yielded huge increases in the amount and variety of culture. ‘It doesn’t matter how much novel invention or refinement is going on: if you don’t have accurate transmission you simply cannot build up culture,’ says Laland. ‘It was a real insight.’ - Imitation is what makes us human & creative Imitation is how we learn as a species. This is social learning, best explained by Albert Bandura, recognized as the most eminent psychologist of the modern era. "Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action." - Albert Bandura If we want to innovate we need to work on the structures and systems that promote imitation - open access to information, wide distribution of knowledge, and easy copying. The focus of innovation has to be on we, not me. If we can make our knowledge-sharing networks stronger, then human nature can take care of the rest.

Here are some observations and insights that were shared on social media this past fortnight. I call these Friday’s Finds. "Power always thinks it has a great soul & vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak. - John Adams" via @JusticeWillett You Are Not the Product: The Coming Revolution in Social Networks - by @gideonro This idea that we are just products for advertisers pops up in lots of online conversations, a reflection of the current state of our advertising-driven social networks. These networks were built on TV’s old business model of "I sell your eyeballs and give you interesting stuff to watch in exchange." They’ve just modified that model a bit so that now, in addition to attention, we also surrender our personal data. Oh, and now we’re the ones supplying most of that "interesting stuff" to watch. That’s why I’ve gotten excited over a flurry of recent announcements painting an alternative vision for social networks: Reddit announced its intention to take a portion of its $50 million in recently raised venture capital and give it back to the community of people who built in the first place. Ello, a brand new social network, just committed to never selling ads, never selling your data and never selling out to another company that would. Tsu, another new social network, rolled out an aggressive, revenue-sharing model for end users. Synereo announced plans for a fully distributed social network built on Bitcoin technology that will also compensate end users for their contributions. The Surprising Truth About Where New Jobs Come From - by @stevedenning "Both on average and for all but seven years between 1977 and 2005, existing firms are net job destroyers," write Wiens and Jackson, "losing 1 million jobs net combined per year. By contrast, in their first year, new firms add an average of 3 million jobs." "New businesses account for nearly all net new job creation and almost 20 percent of gross job creation, whereas small businesses do not have a significant impact on job growth when age is accounted for." - Kauffman Foundation Why it matters that networks in organizations and social systems are shifting to power-law distributions - by @rossdawson * Networks are fundamental not just to our communications but to many aspects of our lives. * There are many network topologies. One of the most important is ‘scale-free’ networks, in which the structure is identical irrespective of its size. * The internet has maintained the same scale-free structure throughout its growth over the last 21 years. * Scale-free networks develop through ‘preferential attachment‘, in which better-connected nodes tend to get more connections, in a version of ‘the rich get richer’. Engineering serendipity - via @chumulu [sounds like PKM] So, I’m staking my own claim: Serendipity is the process through which we discover unknown unknowns. Understanding it as an emergent property of social networks, instead of sheer luck, enables us to treat it as a viable strategy for organizing people and sharing ideas, rather than writing it off as magic. And that, in turn, has potentially huge ramifications for everything from how we work to how we learn to where we live by leading to a shift away from efficiency — doing the same thing over and over, only a little bit better — toward novelty and discovery. "The difference between freedom and slavery is one thin line." - @thereaIbanksy

"The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades" - Timbuk3 Complication Many of today’s larger companies have overly complicated, hierarchical structures. As they grew to their current size, control processes were put in place to create efficiencies. To ensure reliable operations and avoid risk, work became standardized. New layers of supervision appeared, more silos were created, and knowledge acquisition was formalized, all in an attempt to gain efficiency through specialization. Support departments, like human resources, were added to manage the resulting complicated structure. Complexity These organizations are now facing increasingly complex business environments that require continuous learning while working. Typical strategies of optimizing current business processes or reducing costs only marginally influence the organization’s overall performance. Faster  market feedback challenges the organization’s ability to act. Decision-making becomes paralyzed by process-based operations and the formal chain of command. Hierarchies assume that management knows best and that the higher up the hierarchy, the more competent and knowledgeable that person is. But hierarchies are just centralized networks. They work well when information flows mostly in one direction: down. Hierarchies are good for command and control. They are handy to get things done in small groups. But hierarchies are rather useless to create, innovate, or change. Hierarchies are ineffective when things get complex. In an interconnected world, systemic changes are sensed almost immediately. Therefore reaction times and feedback loops have to get faster. In addition, workers are dealing with increasingly complex situations, as software takes over routine work. Workers need more trusted relationships to share complex knowledge. But these take time to develop. Sharing knowledge in trusted networks does not happen over night. Complex problems cannot be solved alone. They require the sharing of tacit knowledge, which cannot easily be put into a manual. Tacit knowledge flows best in trusted networks. This trust also promotes individual autonomy and can become a foundation for organizational learning, as knowledge is freely shared. Without trust, few people are willing to share their knowledge. Learning and Work Guild Sign: Master Painter For thousands of years people developed work skills through apprenticeship. This worked for small numbers and developed into the highly structured guild system in Europe. Industrialization marked the fall of the guild system. The industrial economy adopted a new management frameworks, which included something called ‘human resources’. But the industrial economy no longer drives the developed world. We are shifting to a creative economy. In this new economy we have to change how we think about learning and work. The most significant change is in how we deal with information and knowledge. We no longer have to go to the library to get a book and we have access to a growing network of expertise from people, like bloggers, who are willing to share their knowledge for free. Expertise is becoming ubiquitous through the Internet and professional social networks. One’s position in the hierarchy is no longer an indicator of one’s influence or knowledge. As a result, many are challenging the hierarchical nature of the organization in a creative economy. Human Resources Recruiting, talent management, professional development, and every other area of HR is trying to deal with the post-industrial workplace. Most business leaders see that the Internet is changing their business. They understand that automation is a force to be reckoned with. However, many do not have a clue where or how to start. The old ways of thinking are still firmly entrenched but we cannot deal with the new era in the same way we managed the old one. Leaders need to understand what they are dealing with and use the appropriate methods. First they need to understand the difference between chaotic, complex, and complicated situations. Chaotic situations require action; complex problems demand cooperation; and complicated projects need collaboration. Cooperation differs from collaboration, in that cooperation means freely sharing with no expectation of direct benefit. Cooperation is not team work. It is helping the entire organization, and this requires people who are not just doing their job, but involved in the whole system. Most of our current human resources practices assume the system is complicated and understandable, given enough time to analyze it. But more of our problems are complex and cannot be completely understood except in hindsight. Complex situations require small probing actions that are safe to fail. We can only understand complexity through active experiments, accepting that perhaps half of these will fail. Encouraging failure, and learning from it, must be encouraged in complex environments. This should be the focus of human resources in a creative economy. How can an organization build awareness, investigate alternatives, and act on complex problems? The organization needs to connect the outside with the inside. This is not a technology challenge but rather a structural one. Organizations need to help knowledge flow and this only happens when people are connected. Technology is a facilitator, but people are the key. This is too often overlooked, as in most enterprise social network implementations, where training is bolted on at the end of the technology build. Encouraging awareness, experimenting with alternatives, and taking action can each be supported within a unified organizational framework. Human resources can play an active role in such a framework. New Work Structures We have communication technologies to know what is happening across any organization. Most companies are also listening attentively to external social media. Given all this information, it is easier to let people experiment as long as they share what they are doing. Practices such as working out loud help build trust. In an age when information is no longer scarce and connections are many, organizations must let all workers actively share their knowledge. To succeed in the creative economy, organizations require a combination of actively engaged knowledge workers, using optimal communications tools, all within a supportive work structure. We are at the beginning of another management revolution, similar to the one that created modern business schools and their scientific methods. There are many examples today of companies testing out new management models such as the social enterprise, democracy in the workplace, self-organizing work teams, and networked free-agents. While there are no clear answers, it is fairly certain that standing still will lead to failure. Giving up control is the great challenge for human resources management. Organizations have to become knowledge networks. An effective knowledge network cultivates the diversity and autonomy of each worker. Networked leaders foster deeper connections, developed through ongoing and meaningful conversations. They understand the importance of tacit knowledge in solving complex problems. Networked leaders know they are just nodes in the knowledge network and not a special position in a hierarchy. The new focus of human resources has to be on supporting human networks.