One way to make sense of something is to walk around it by looking at it from a different perspective. Time and a different context can give new insights. Chris Mackay gave me this PKM tip on how to make a decision on purchasing books. Chris adds the book’s name & link to OmniFocus and then puts a 30 day reminder on it. One month later he gets an automated notice about the book. What is interesting is that in most cases, Chris decides not to buy the book. Chris admits that he loves buying books and often makes quick purchase decisions. This new discipline helps him save money. He still has a large pile of books on his current reading list though. Think about this tip for other things you are trying to make sense of. Maybe it’s best to save a link (or use the favorite button on twitter) before you share or comment on it. You might only use this action for certain topics, such as politics. Review them the next day or week, and then decide if they are worth sharing. Part of the PKM sense-making process is to set aside enough time for the important things. Automating certain processes may save you this time. During the 40-day PKM online workshop, we discuss all manner of ways to improve our seeking, sense-making, and sharing of knowledge. The objective is to find processes and practices that work for you. Combining a number of small new practices can help develop larger changes in taking control of your professional development.  

Social learning is the process by which groups of people cooperate to learn with and from each other. The network era is creating a historic reversal of education, as discourse replaces institutions, and social learning in knowledge networks obsolesces many aspects of organizational training. It is as if Socrates has come back to put Plato’s academy in its place, but this time the public agora is global. I have learned by facilitating dozens of online workshops that the social aspect is the most important. No matter how much content I design, it is the the discourse amongst participants that is the most powerful accelerator of learning. I run PKM workshops as social cohorts because I realize that I am getting farther removed from novice behaviour. I forget what I was learning myself over 10 years ago. I do not remember how difficult it was to post something online for the first time. Learning with others helps to ensure that it is not just my opinion that informs the other participants. My current online workshops - PKM & Moving to Social - have not grown into large offerings, with me on the stage and everyone else listening. I know this will not work. The social aspect, having an international group of people cooperating in their learning, is the essential element that can often enhance serendipity, such as an impromptu video conference with an author.  No matter how much I design, each cohort goes in a different direction. From each, I learn a little more. The next PKM workshop starts tomorrow, with participants from AU, CA, MM, NL, UK, & US so far. The diversity of the participants is the special sauce that makes these workshops unique. "The more I am out there chatting to clients, the more I realise that your PKM approach is the number one critical skill set.  Any way I look at it, all roads seem to end there.  It is the foundation.  That’s why I thought this is where they need to start - and not just the employees - everyone including the managers." - Helen Blunden, AU

As we enter the network era, we see that leadership is an emergent property of a network in balance and not some special property available to only the select few. Effective knowledge networks require leadership from everyone - an aggressively intelligent and engaged workforce, learning with each other. Positional leadership, by the authority of some hierarchy, is giving way to reputational leadership, as determined by the myriad feedback loops of the network. To lead in a network, is to learn in a network, as relationships and conditions change. Anyone can show leadership, not just managers or those with ‘high potential’. Network leadership assumes human creative potential can be realized in supportive and challenging environments by engaging everyone. In networks, everyone can be a contributor within a transparent environment. Anyone can lead in a network, if there are willing followers. Leadership in networks is developed through the reputation of one’s actions. Those who have the consensus to lead have to actively listen and make sense of what is happening. They are in service to the network, to help keep it resilient through transparency, diversity of ideas, and openness. These servant leaders can help to set the context around them and build consensus around emergent practices. Networked leaders make better decisions by actively listening to networked contributors who are closely in touch with their environment. As everyone is continuously questioning the contexts in which the enterprise is working, appointed servant leaders can look at the big picture, not manage the contributors, who for the most part can manage themselves when everyone’s work is transparent. With an informed perspective, they can propose changes and build consensus around suggested responses. Connected leadership is helping the network make better decisions. Adapting to a networked life in perpetual beta means that people have to learn how to deal with more ambiguity and complexity at work. Automation of routine and standardized work is forcing people to do do more non-routine manual and cognitive work. If the work can be mapped and analyzed, it will be automated. As networked, distributed, non-routine work becomes the norm, trust will emerge only in those work environments that are open, transparent, and diverse. Trust is necessary to ensure that implicit knowledge flows, which contributes to organizational longevity. Organizations need to learn as fast as their environments. Constant experimentation must be the order of each day. Therefore, those in leadership and management positions today must find ways to nurture creativity and critical thinking. Management must set the initial example of transparency and working out loud. In addition, self-management is required at all levels. When there is no one to defer work to, everyone sets an example through their actions. In this environment everyone is learning and everyone is teaching by example. As a result, work gets done very quickly. From this foundation, today’s organizations can prepare for a new world of work. Machines will continue to replace jobs but people can create new work roles that are creative and social, beyond the reach of automation. seeking perpetual beta

Every one of the major challenges facing us is complex. But our organizations are not designed for complexity. Our workplace training does not factor in complexity. While not all of our problems are complex, the simpler issues are being dealt with, especially through software and automation. Understanding complexity means working in it together and using our collective intelligence. One example of using the collective wisdom of an organization is to map a path forward. Robert Paterson worked with US public radio, NPR, in 2005 to help determine how to adapt to the industry-wide changes wrought by social media. Six years later, Rob noted this report from The New York Times, "Amid all that creative destruction, there was a one large traditional news organization that added audience, reporters and revenue. That unlikely juggernaut was NPR." Part of the secret was to prepare the existing culture by embracing pathfinders from the new culture. "So if you want to be successful, please think of hiring someone who knows the other native people out there and the new culture. Who is a native of the world that you aspire to go to. Who is less of a guide than a trusted friend. Who you can talk to quietly in the evening around the fire and have her hear you out. Someone who risks as much as you do on the journey - or even more than you. Someone who is safe and who helps you feel safe as you take risks." - Robert Paterson Organizations cannot learn how to learn faster by continuing with their traditional methods. They need to get people to marinate in complex systems. It takes more than a course, a report, a retreat, or white paper. It takes time, and space. This space must be created, and guarded against intrusions from the existing system. Xerox created its famous PARC ‘skunk works’ in order to foster innovation. It was separate from the main company. ‘PARC, or Palo Alto Research Center, Inc., was founded in 1971 as a research arm of the Xerox Corporation. Its critical contributions to computer science included development of the laser printer, the Ethernet, a variation of ARPANET (a predecessor of the Internet); various email delivery systems; the nucleus of the modern personal computer - featuring a monitor with graphical user interface, or GUI (pronounced "gooey"), and the first modern version of Stanford Research Institute’s Douglas Engelbart’s invention: the computer "mouse".’ - HighTechHistory Diversity of opinions and ideas gives any organization more resilience to deal with change and more potential for innovation. An organization’s networked creative surplus can be enabled by blocking the noise of every day ‘busyness’. While this may not be available to everyone, there needs to be a diverse group that has the time and space to try new things, have deep conversations, reflect, and learn by doing. Organizations of any size today need to become a Xerox-PARC, or have access to one. Of course, management will still have to pay some attention to what may sound like crazy ideas emanating from this new edge. Innovation comes from the edge, almost never from the centre. It is time to start creating the edge of the organization now. As organizations become more technologically networked, they also face skilled, motivated and intelligent workers who can now see systemic dysfunctions. But those who talk about these problems are often branded as rebels. Pitting rebels against the incumbent power-holders is detrimental to organizational learning. Instead, rebels should be allowed to move to the edge. With some additional help from native pathfinders, organizations can then learn to solve their own problems. Change management then has to be seen as a way of working, not a separate process, and not an event. On the edges the answers will not be clear, but they will be less obscured than in the centre. A new partnership is needed, between current management on the inside, workers on the edges, and others living beyond the organizational edges. This can start by creating a trusted space away from the centre, funding it, and letting people start to work and learn anew. It’s like giving birth to a child, and will take time and a lot of nurturing. It’s also a bit of a leap of faith. Image: @gapingvoid

This is a synopsis of my opening keynote for the workplace learning & VET stream at EduTECH15 in Brisbane today. We cannot look at the 2020 workplace merely from the perspective of what will be different from today, as if these five years will pass in splendid isolation. How we think of work has changed over the millennia and one major factor has been our communications technologies. When communication changes, work does too, as well as our understanding of what is knowledge, and what it means to be knowledgeable. When our various civilizations shifted from a predominantly oral society to the rule of the written word, we saw the rise of kingdoms and institutions. The age in which Socrates was able to guide discourse in the open agora was slowly replaced by structured academies, in the spirit of Plato. But Socrates felt that men who relied on written words would be a burden to their fellow men, as these artifacts would give them the ‘conceit of wisdom’. Despite Socrates’ reported concerns, the written word dominated for over 2,000 years. When the written word was usurped by the printed page, the sharing of knowledge exploded. Bibles printed in the vernacular showed the common people that often their priests had hidden much of the text from them. This questioning helped to give impetus to the Protestant reformation and the age of enlightenment, which revived the classic Greek science and philosophy texts that could now be easily shared in print. The accessibility of books enabled more universities to be built, and printing helped to create better bookkeeping systems, so that global markets could flourish. The printed word continued to dominate, even as it was initially obsolesced by the electric impulse, first with the telegraph (dashes & dots) in 1844, followed slowly by radio and television (electrical signals), and only recently gathering speed with the Internet and the Web (zeros & ones). The next five years will be an acceleration of a phenomenon that began in the mid-nineteenth century: the electrification of knowledge. Each time that our mode of communication changed, so too did our dominant organizational structures. We went from Tribes, to Institutions, to Markets, and now to Networks. This is David Ronfeldt’s TIMN model, which aligns with historical changes in communication technologies. In Tribes, power was often controlled through the bonds of kinship. People frequently did things for the betterment of their family. Members of a tribal group would cooperate with each other, as this was best for the longevity of the tribe. In institutions, power was controlled through the hierarchy, so individuals held their power by the virtue of their position. Work was done collaboratively, directed by those in control. As markets dominated, work continued to be collaborative but more competitive. The aim was to dominate the market. But as we move into a network society, for which we have no precedent, it appears that the cooperative behaviours of tribes may be the best way to work together, as our reputation in the network becomes visible to all. Cooperation, giving freely with no expectation of direct reciprocity, makes sense in family groups, and is the optimal behaviour in knowledge networks as well. Cooperative behaviour enhances one’s reputation and creates more links in a network. Those with more connections can exert greater influence, but this is usually indirect. The current speed of change from markets to networks is evident in the automation of human work. Automated tellers are an obvious example. Even higher level work is getting automated, such as legal discovery, once done by armies of lawyers and now replaced by software. Since the beginning of the century, routine work, both cognitive and manual, has decreased, while non-routine work has increased. This is a direct result of automation in all fields of work, whether it be self-serve kiosks, software replacing accountants, or driverless cars. As one recent article stated, "Self-Driving Trucks Are Going to Hit Us Like a Human-Driven Truck". Automation is eating jobs. Any work that is routine will be automated. Jobs that only do routine work will disappear. Valued work, enhanced by our increased connectivity, will be based more on creativity than intelligence. The future of human work will require tacit knowledge and informal learning, and will create intangible value that cannot easily be turned into commodities. The future of work will be complex and this will be even more obvious in the next five years, as robots and software keep doing more complicated work. Just as people had to become literate to work in the 20th century workplace, now they will have to be creative, empathetic, and human: doing what machines cannot do. To deal with this work shift, people need to engage with professional communities in order to share tacit knowledge through conversations with trusted colleagues. Work silos are barriers to knowledge-sharing, as are education silos. Marshall McLuhan gave us "the global village" as well as the aphorism that "the medium is message". Even the typographical error in the book’s title, "The Medium is the Massage", reinforced his point that communications media have strong influences on society. McLuhan’s Laws of Media can help us see what influence technology has on us. The media tetrad, explained by Derrick de Kerkchove, co-author of McLuhan for Managers, is that every technology has four effects. 1. extends a human property (the car extends the foot); 2. obsolesces the previous medium by turning it into a sport or a form of art (the automobile turns horses and carriages into sports); 3. retrieves a much older medium that was obsolesced before (the automobile brings back the shining armour of the knight); 4. flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its limits (automobiles, when there are too many of them, create grid lock) Let’s look at pervasive digital networks, currently known as "the cloud". All of this open knowledge extends democratic and open structures, with growing experiments such as blockchain for finance or open source software. This shift to one big computer obsolesces the personal computer, with most computation now taking place beyond the individual’s control. As a result, off-grid computing and even the use of typewriters to avoid the Internet are now the realm of the rich and powerful. This pervasive digital network is retrieving the communal cooperation of the tribal era, with crowd-sourced fundraising and shared common goods, facilitated by trusted connections. However, the cloud can easily reverse into a panopticon of deception, as is already manifested through wide-ranging government surveillance and growing cyber crimes. What can the tetrad tell us about learning? Networked learning extends individual control over personal and professional development, as articulated in personal knowledge mastery or personal learning networks. It obsolesces the hierarchy of the academy, opening education to more people, but makes private schooling an in-demand luxury. Social media retrieve the discourse of the age of Socrates, providing a public agora for all to engage. However, when pushed to its limits, networked learning may become nothing more than massively open online courses pushing a corporate agenda. The retrieval of Socrates and the fuzziness of discourse reflects the complexity of the network era. Work is too complex for the structured academy. Training and education systems, run by a central authority (the academy) are effective when developing instruction to deal with complicated phenomena, where all the components are understandable and can be analyzed and mapped. Best practices and good practices can align easily with a curriculum. But in complex environments, emergent practices need to be developed while simultaneously engaging the problem. Social learning is the process by which groups of people cooperate to learn with and from each other. As discourse replaces the academy, social learning in knowledge networks replaces training and education. If you are involved in workplace learning or education, consider these changes in how we communicate, organize, and work. How important is developing new content, as opposed to helping make connections? How can we help people get better at creating new practices, and not just replicate old ones? How can our organizations promote better and deeper conversations? How can we help to build trust so that people freely share their knowledge? We know that the machines will continue to improve. Barring the collapse of civilization, digital networks are here to stay. In the network era, work is learning and learning is the work. Our job, as learning professionals, is to make humanity the killer app for our organizations. While 2020 will not be that different from 2015, it will be further along the progression into the network era and a shifting world of work and learning, away from routine jobs and toward unique and creative work. This has to be supported through widespread opportunities for informal learning and ways to share tacit knowledge. This is the challenge for workplace learning as well as higher education.

This is a summary of my closing keynote for the workplace learning & VET stream at EduTECH15 in Brisbane on 3 June 2015. The intelligent enterprise [l’entreprise intelligente] has to be founded first and foremost on intelligent communication, which in the network era is much more than just passing information. It is actively engaging in conversations to continuously make sense of the changing environment. As it was necessary to be literate in order to work in the industrial era, it is now a basic work requirement to be able to communicate effectively. This means adding value to knowledge, in various mediated forms (video, audio, written, oral). Being able to read and write is not enough. Intelligent communication requires seeking out knowledge in social networks, making sense by creating new communications, and being cognizant of the appropriate times and ways to share that knowledge. The intelligent organization is based on a simple structure that has the flexibility to deal with complex situations. This is enabled by individuals learning as they work, making decisions without explicit permission, solving problems together, and trying out new things. The human brain is the best interface for complexity. Organizations have to be designed to promote creative and non-routine work, and leave the machines to handle the boring stuff. Complexity requires simple, adaptive organizational structures. Human cognition can fill in the gaps. Without intelligent communication (PKM), it would be impossible to have self-governance. Intelligent organizations are built on self-managed teams that require fewer external directives. Power sharing can energize the entire workforce to be more entrepreneurial. Without intelligent communication, managers would not have the basic skills to be networked leaders. The transparency of intelligent communication eliminates the need for most traditional management control mechanisms. Intelligent management focuses on making the whole network smarter. Without intelligent communication, it would be difficult to adapt to perpetual beta through continuous experimentation. Culture is built upon daily actions. Trust is an emergent property of an intelligent organization, stemming from a healthy workplace culture. PKM is one way to expand our literacy beyond the passage of information and toward co-creating knowledge and actively engaging in sense-making at work and beyond. Reading and writing are not enough in an era when connections are many and information is abundant. Literacy today requires an aggressively engaged citizenry. It starts with intelligent communication.  

The Tribal form of society was premised on kinship, which added the Institutional form based on hierarchical position, and later the Market form based on competitive advantage. The current Market form of society is a myopic creature, extracting short-term value from the entire ecosystem and redistributing it to a priesthood of investors. Every quarter companies must pay tribute to the gods of the market. Even our governments are run like markets, with slightly longer payback periods. The US House of Representatives gets market feedback every two years, the Australian government every three years, Canadian parliamentarians every four years, and lucky US Senators every six years. The focus on short-term results is the hallmark of the market era. TIMN What will the network era bring? Longer term thinking or actions based on micro-feedback? Both are likely. If reputation is the source of power and influence in the network era, then long-term strategies are necessary to build it and keep it. But if big data tells us everything that is happening in the moment, we may be seduced into continuously shifting with the spirit of the times. This tension is the great challenge in building new organizational models. How can we balance the short and long term? It is tempting to focus on the short term, as we see with data analytics for everything, including learning, which is definitely a long-term endeavour. Developing ways to ensure a long term view will be necessary to counter the urge to do everything at twitch speed. Our markets have shown themselves susceptible to this in the way currency markets work. We still see the excesses of the market era in sweat shops around the world. We need to start now on creating new forms of long-term governance structures, political as well as commercial, to control the potential excesses of the network era. One way is to focus our training and education programs on long term thinking, not mere job preparation or 21st century skills. As with those educational visionaries who built our public education systems, there is again an opportunity for learning and development to lead the way.

Work is learning, and learning is the work. I have repeated this hundreds of times over the past six years and I know some people may think it is a trite statement. But the fact that learning is usually supported by an organizational department that has less influence than sales, marketing, operations, or information technology, shows that learning is not a priority in most enterprises. It’s often bolted on after the major decisions have been made. Several times on consulting engagements I have been perceived as ‘the learning guy’ dealing with a minor aspect of the ‘real’ project. As I have noted before, as standardized work keeps getting automated, the only work left for people will be complex and creative. This type of work requires a culture of continuous learning. Imagine going to work where people cannot speak, read, or write. It would be impossible to run an organization if this were the case. We are moving into an era where it will be impossible to run a company where everyone is not constantly learning. This does not mean everyone will be on a training course. The network era workplace will require constant independent and interdependent learning by doing. In the very near future, those who cannot learn will miss out on employment opportunities and will be ineffective in self-employment. The good news is that everyone can learn. The bad news is that many have forgotten how. Learning is the key requirement in dealing with complexity, because you first have to try something new, and then learn from the experiment. Emergent practices have to be developed, as it is too late to find out what has already worked for other companies (best practices), and your context will not be the same anyway. The writing is on the wall, as this report on how innovation happens today shows, with examples from: Adobe -  "the challenge of creating a culture that supports experimentation" Etsy - "Innovation is a process of continuous learning and improvement." WonderSpark - "While founders have a tolerance for failure, most employees don’t." Intercom - "one of the biggest challenges to innovating is simply getting started" Comcast - "connect the dots between established processes and new opportunities" "The untold story behind today’s most innovative brands, however, is what happens behind the scenes. While success stories are plentiful, what most people don’t see is the amount of trial, error, and learning that goes into setting up workflows, empowering employees, and figuring out initiatives to prioritize. Regardless of whether you’re a part of an established company or two-person startup, the task of bringing new ideas to market is hard." - The Next Web Developing a do-it-yourself learning discipline is the core of personal knowledge mastery. Organizations that do not actively support something like the PKM framework are seriously limiting new insights that feed innovation. Larger organizations, with training departments, have to move their focus to social learning. They cannot keep up with rapid change by waiting to do a training needs analysis. Learning is the literacy of the 21st century.

One of the greatest issues that will face Canada, and many developed countries in the next decade will be wealth distribution. While it does not currently appear to be a major problem, the disparity between rich and poor will increase. The main reason will be the emergence of a post-job economy. The ‘job’ was the way we redistributed wealth, making capitalists pay for the means of production and in return creating a middle class that could pay for mass produced goods. That period is almost over. From self-driving vehicles to algorithms replacing knowledge workers, employment is not keeping up with production. Value in the network era is accruing to the owners of the platforms, with companies such as Instagram reaching $1 billion valuations with only 13 employees. We have connected the world so that data and information can flow in the  blink of an eye. There are fewer information asymmetries, as companies like Amazon bust down one industry after another. Interconnectedness and increasing computational power will continue to automate work and outsource any job that can be standardized. New businesses are employing fewer employees, while manufacturing is moving to an increased use of robots. We are entering the platform capital economy, where a common internet exchange medium (the platform) can enable easier commercial transactions. Buyers of services get convenience, while sellers get a larger market. The spoils go to the owner of the platform, receiving a percentage of revenues. Most of these platforms are created when regulations and oligopolies make these transactions difficult by traditional means. Platform capitalism initially disrupts a sector that is poorly served. PayPal is an example of facilitating small financial transactions between parties in different countries because the banks were terrible at it. PayPal facilitates small businesses to engage in  e-commerce. Uber is disrupting taxi monopolies. Uber enables car owners to make some extra money and eases payment for passengers. AirBNB is taking on the hotel industry and its practices. Airbnb provides an easy way to rent out extra space in your home by connecting you to a global market. At some point, network effects kick in. This is the hope of the investors in these platform companies. Once they dominate a sector, it is almost impossible for a competitor to compete directly. Facebook has achieved this for social networking; Amazon is getting there for online retail sales; and Google controls online advertising. The wealth that is created for the users pales in comparison to the value for the platform owners. Once the platform capitalists achieve dominance, they act like any old-fashioned monopolist. The emerging economy of platform capitalism includes companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple. These giants combined do not employ as many people as General Motors did.  But the money accrued by them is enormous and remains in a few hands. The rest of the labour market has to find ways to cobble together a living income. Hence we see many people willing to drive for a company like Uber in order to increase cash-flow. But drivers for Uber have no career track. The platform owners get richer, but the drivers are limited by finite time. They can only drive so many hours per day, and without benefits. At the same time, those self-driving cars are poised to replace all Uber drivers in the near future. Standardized work, like driving a vehicle, has little future in a world of nano-bio-cogno-techno progress. For the past century, the job was the way we redistributed wealth and protected workers from the negative aspects of early capitalism. As the knowledge economy disappears, we need to re-think our concepts of work, income, employment, and most importantly education. If we do not find ways to help citizens lead productive lives, our society will face increasing destabilization. This is a challenge for government, as our institutions are premised on many assumptions that are no longer valid. Changing the worldview of politicians, public servants, and citizens will be a key part of addressing the issue of wealth redistribution. Old mental models will not help us much. Consider that almost all of our institutions and many of our laws are based on the notion of the job as the normal mode of working life. Schools prepare us for jobs. Politicians campaign on job creation. Labour laws are based on the employer-employee relationship. What happens when having a job is not the norm? In the USA today, half of all jobs are at a high risk of automation. But no society can afford to leave half of the workforce behind as it shifts to a creative economy. We have not had to deal with a problem of this scale before. For example, when farm hands left their fields at the turn of the last century, replaced by tractors, they found better paying jobs in the factories clustered around cities. Later, as manufacturing moved offshore or became automated, those without work might find jobs in information processing in the knowledge economy. But as we move into the network era, there is no visible sector that will employ millions of people whose jobs are getting automated by software and robots. These people include lawyers and other white collar workers. The job is a social construct that has outlived its usefulness. Freelancing may be a replacement but often lacks a safety net, and many of the self-employed become the pawns of the platform capitalists. In the next five years, many professionals will have to change not only who they work for, but what they do. Are they prepared? We are entering a post-job economy. Our careers will be shorter as our lives get longer. Companies and institutions are no longer the stable source of employment they once were. The structures we create now to shift society to a post-job economy will determine how much turmoil the transition will create. Now is the time to construct better ways to distribute the wealth of the network era. Note: This is an update of a previous post.

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds. @willrich45 - Engagement: "Not a metric for learning. A prerequisite." @trishgreenhalgh - "2nd big message on NHS [National Health Service]  IT [information technology]:"ruthless standardisation" held back progress. We need local innovation, customisation, ad hoc solutions if needed" Peter Senge on learning - via @nickknoco All learning occurs in a social context. In any learning process you can be 100% sure that you will fail Learning is a process of disciplined mistake-making An environment of safety is crucial to learning @RossDawson - The Transformation of Business: 6 New Drivers of Success "Social networks lie at the intersection of two very human behaviors."- via @sacke & @ldduval11

I will be speaking this Wednesday in Issy-les-Moulineaux, France at a conference on ‘The Smart City, the Cloud, and Citizens’ (link in French).  My presentation will be short and focused. Here are the main points, in English. The French version may be webcast, so watch my Twitter feed for updates. We are connecting our cities to the cloud via the internet of everything, so that objects share data with each other. With these data, governments, organizations, and companies can sense patterns and make decisions - from traffic control to geographically specific advertising. But this is merely the tip of the iceberg of the real potential of smart cities and digital networks. A major challenge for society will be to enable an intelligent and aggressively engaged citizenry to build upon the potential of these growing digital interconnections. For the past century we have compartmentalized the life of the citizen. At work, the citizen is an ‘employee’. Outside the office he may be a ‘consumer’. Sometimes she is referred to as a ‘taxpayer’. All of these are constraining labels, ignoring the full spectrum of citizenship. As the network era connects people and things, society needs to reconnect with the multifaceted citizen. This is the primary role the smart city can play. The last century’s division of work and personal life are still evident in many organizations where employees are cut off from their online social networks. Workers are often expected to put their personal lives aside and concentrate on the work at hand for eight or more hours per day. But as we have connected computers and devices, we have made standardized work obsolete. In the emerging workplace, where complex and creative tasks become the norm, work cannot remain isolated from the rest of the world. Complex work requires multiple perspectives and non-linear processes. While teams still need time and space to get things done, they also have to stay connected to the quickly-changing external environment. This week’s events in Greece and Europe show the volatility of interconnected political-financial systems. The challenge for the modern workplace is to connect external social systems with internal projects, and still remain capable of getting deadline-driven work done. This balance requires organizational systems that enable knowledge to flow, but more importantly it requires workers who are also engaged citizens. Alexis de Tocqueville, in his book ‘Democracy in America’ based on his travels in 1831, identified ‘associations’ of citizens to be a driving force in the new democracy. These associations could also be described as communities of practice - self-forming groups of engaged citizens. John McKnight, in The Careless Society, described these groups as having three key capabilities: "the power to decide there was a problem, the power to decide how to solve the problem - that is, the expert’s power - and then the power to solve the problem". The association of engaged and connected citizens that enabled a functioning democracy in early America is now necessary in the early network era. As de Tocqueville saw how a society could function without an aristocracy, we now must see how companies can function without a managerial elite, and cities can operate without bureaucratic overlords. Today, the connected citizen must concurrently be the connected worker, as well as the connected taxpayer and the connected consumer, among many other roles. Cities can play an important part in this transition. They are the logical place for citizens to act out their roles on a daily basis. For example, co-working spaces are one way to enable the necessary cross-pollination of ideas and action. Public transportation infrastructure can enable more serendipitous encounters between citizens. Public spaces and walkable communities can encourage citizens to connect. Smart technologies should be designed to enable more connections between citizens. The smart citizen is connected: to communities of practice, extended social networks, the community, and society. Helping citizens engage intelligently is another role that smart cities can play. In addition to creating space, opportunities to develop skills and abilities should be supported. Cities should be encouraging citizens to seek new connections and knowledge, make sense of these in a disciplined manner, and share their knowledge. Smart cities need smart citizens.

As networks become the dominant organizational form, disciplines like personal knowledge mastery will be essential for all knowledge workers. "By creating millions of networked people, financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away, info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being." - End of Capitalism Being educated is not enough. Effective citizens in a post-job, creative economy will also have to be connected. As objects get connected, the platform owners will aggregate more power and control.  Smart cities without smart citizens will result in the tyranny of the platform capitalists. "In truth, competing visions of the smart city are proxies for competing visions of society, and in particular about who holds power in society. ‘In the end, the smart city will destroy democracy,’ Hollis warns. ‘Like Google, they’ll have enough data not to have to ask you what you want.’" - Smart Cities Destroy Democracy Power in networks is based on reputation which is developed through relationships. For citizens to exert power in the network era, they must be connected. Elected representatives have been the standard medium that citizens have used to exert their democratic power. But as everything gets connected, complexity will increase, and reaction times decrease. A connected citizenry can be an effective way to re-balance democratic power. But in order to do so, all citizens must make the effort to be connected and take the time to discuss important issues. No person can know everything, but connected people can know more than any individual, elected or appointed. Connecting to others is no longer a luxury, it is essential in order to keep our democracies alive. Democracy vs Platform Capitalism

An article in Time magazine on engineering serendipity discusses ways to create better physical environments as well as the push for software that will improve innovation by increasing the potential for serendipitous encounters. The author, Greg Lindsay, concludes that social networks are the key. "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." - Greg Lindsay, The Aspen Institute While Silicon Valley CEO’s keep trying to engineer serendipity in their organizations, I would focus on the individual. Chance favours the connected mind, said Steven B. Johnson, and with social media, any mind can be connected today. No special tools or software are required, only the meta-cognition inherent in all people. Stepping outside our routines and looking at how we get information, and from whom, should be a regular reflective activity. Examining your social networks for diversity (age, gender, location, language, religion, political views, etc.) can indicate if you are living in a media echo chamber. While not required, organizational network analysis tools can help, such as Synapp or mapping tools like Kumu.io. However, focusing on the technology is the wrong priority. Simple exercises, like asking yourself - why am I following this person on Twitter? - can be more helpful. Getting out and doing different activities is often missed in today’s over-scheduled work and home life. For example, I often take public transport when traveling. You will get a much better feel for a place and its people when you do than you would in a chauffeured limousine. I saw a very different part of Las Vegas, while at a conference, by cycling and taking public buses across the city. We can all discover unknown unknowns, by being mindful of our connections and our actions that can bring about new connections. This is a key component of the discipline of personal knowledge mastery. It is a practice of "accidental intentions". "Putting myself into places (online and physical places) where serendipitous discoveries can happen is not efficient, and of course, cannot be planned. Serendipity helped me discover people, concepts, and ideas that I would have never known before. Relationships-online, physical, mixed, new and old-and time and space are not easily planned. Serendipity does not map to set goals or plans. Instead serendipity has surprised me with energy, thoughts, knowledge, ideas, concepts, realizations, experiences, and relationships." - Anne Adrian

When I started writing this blog almost a dozen years ago, I was pretty excited to connect with people in other countries. Just over a year ago I launched the first ‘PKM in 40 days‘ online workshop. The idea was hatched in the Netherlands, inspired by my friends at Link2Learn. Now, after only six workshops, the global audience of PKM practitioners is growing. We have had individual participants from 21 countries, in addition to an international audience through UCLG who participated in a custom, private workshop this year. Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States … (who is next?) Being able to connect so easily with others who have similar interests is incredibly powerful, and this was very difficult even when I started as a freelancer in 2003. Easy payment enablers, like PayPal, have allowed me to do business all over the world. In my early years as an independent consultant, all of my work was with organizations. I had to respond to Requests for Proposals (which I no longer do) and had to deal with various financial departments in order to get paid. Once I had to wait over 200 days for payment. Now that I can provide a service to individuals, I no longer deal as often with middlemen. This has been very liberating for my business, and I really appreciate getting to personally know the people who have signed up for my workshops. I would like to thank all the participants who have helped to promote the concepts and ideas behind PKM and social learning.  The last PKM workshops for 2015 starts on 7 September, but I plan on continuing to adapt and revise the program and run more workshops in 2016. I am also developing a new workshop, but there is still a lot of design work needed.

What happens when reputation-based networked leadership comes up against hierarchical institutions and competitive market forces? In the short-term, it looks like it loses, as was the case of Greece’s finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis. "So what Varoufakis is doing here is harnessing the capacities of communication technologies to support transparency and genuinely intelligent policy debate, and thus empower the polity. Alas, the opposite of both of those trends is the dominant norm in the political use of the mass media and communication technologies." - Open Democracy But it may be the winning strategy for the long-term. "Varoufakis is experimenting with open and representative politics which seeks to advance the economic and social wellbeing of those he is elected to represent. Surprisingly, such an enterprise seems ‘new’ because the ‘realist’ norms of power governing high finance view the very idea of that sort of politician as an impossibility. If we have any serious commitment to the West’s democratic vision of power, let us hope there are more impossible politicians out there." - Open Democracy I noted in leadership in perpetual beta that in an age of pervasive networks, creativity and design are extended while command and control mechanisms like the executive suite are made obsolete. The art of storytelling as a leadership skill is retrieved from the past. Networks like Open Democracy are a platform for the narratives of new leaders like Varoukis. Other aspects of older societal leadership practices are also being retrieved, such as this example of democratic self-management used in West Africa. "Being self-managers by definition, they navigate conditions and engage in practices that drive serious effectiveness without bureaucracy: Zero Command Authority. All relationships, and all activities, are purely voluntary. No one has any authority to direct activities of any kind. All leadership is exercised through influence, persuasion and trust. The voluntary gathering of forty unpaid leaders for two full days of training was an expression of pure self-management. Nurturing the Network. The overall network is actually a network of networks (in the parlance of my friend, Ken Everett, N2N). Each leader has a local community network, nested within the larger community of communities. The leaders operate fluidly at both network levels and internalize self-management at a visceral level because they have no other way to get things done. Resources from the larger level (like learning) flow to the local level, and local resources (like information) flow to the larger level. Both network levels are necessary, and each nourishes the other. Learning Organization. The leaders gathered in small groups at break times to share insights, questions, observations and updates. The groups were fluid and information flowed easily from group to group and person to person, refining and anchoring the learning." - Doug Kirkpatrick As I complete my third book in the perpetual beta series, I see more signs of an emerging form of connected leadership as society and our economies move into the the next organizational form, from Tribes to Institutions to Markets, and now to Networks dominating the previous three forms. While tribes were mostly cooperative, sharing freely amongst themselves, they had a near horizon for sharing, and were usually patriarchal for major decision-making. In networks, these tribal tendencies for control are not optimal. Neither are the more sophisticated control methods of institutions and those of markets. Thinking that the role of leadership is to act and make short-term decisions misses out on how well fully functioning human networks can deal with most problems without intervention from above. When managers and executives get involved, they often make things worse for those doing the day-to-day work. This is even more pronounced when those doing the work are connected to their peers in social networks and communities of practice that have established and trusted knowledge-sharing practices. The real job of leaders today is to ‘hold the space’, and in order to hold it they need to first establish a space where connections are flourishing. Leading is connecting. Leaders help make connections. Leaders are network weavers, connecting others to make the network stronger. Leaders model good learning behaviours. Leaders practice personal knowledge mastery. My new e-book, Adapting to Perpetual Beta: Leadership in the Network Era, will be published here before the end of Summer.

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds. This is the 250th in the series. "I think it’s a discovery all artists make: the most interesting and bravest work is likely the hardest to make a living from." - @berkun "Our most successful clients have cross-flowing knowledge networks to handle the complexity/variety of their marketplace." - @orgnet "In a sense, cooperation is the temporary alignment of multiple, occasionally contradictory, purposes." - @indalogenesis "The One Year Club", a series of tweets by @infocloud "The One Year Club - organizations that buy tools to embrace a new way of working without understanding fit, and finding it really complex. Organizations realize 9 to 18 months in that their tools don’t fit and what they are trying to do is really complex & they need help. Today the One Year Club is far broader and running into vastly deeper problems than 6 to 8 years ago. The One Year Club persists and got worse by not trying to get smarter and understand things, but still thinking it was simple." Why Is It Difficult To Understand Complex Problems? - via @ToughLoveForx "Traditional problem solving depends on established patterns only. Problems are solved using pattern recognition. So traditional problem solving depends on having a grasp of well established patterns presented in  form of comprehensible knowledge, which is available in public domain. However, complex systems and their problems have both patterns and "no patterns." "No pattern" means existence of new patterns that have not been seen earlier. Therefore, to solve complex problems requires creation of new knowledge to address the emergence of "no pattern." Creating new knowledge is a difficult task. And the process of creating new knowledge, under constraints of time and resources, is not available. There is a gap. Hence most find it difficult to tackle complex problems and issues." Teaching with Twitter - via @JeffMerrell "The constraints of Twitter are also its affordances. Being asked to take an idea and put it in this constrained linguistic space of 140 characters forces us to think about and question our thinking in ways we wouldn’t otherwise." - Jesse Stommel "If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all." - Michelangelo - via @AmyBurvall Mastery by Amy Burvall

If you want to learn something about a field you know little about, what do you do? There are many areas where I know very little, and learning about them in depth would be a major time commitment. Is there anything we can do do to make it easier? I think so. My knowledge of biology is quite limited. I never took the subject in high school or in university. Part of my strategy in using social media, like Twitter, is to connect with people who know more than I do. Shaun Coffey @shauncoffey is one of these people. We share an interest in knowledge management and PKM, but Shaun has a background in agricultural science of which I know nothing. A recent tweet of his was a link to an article on GMO (genetically modified organisms) which is an area of interest to me as a consumer, but something I found rather complex to understand. Since I trust Shaun, I read the article, Unhealthy Fixation. While I am still not an expert, I feel better informed on GMO. More of my knowledge and understanding is coming through my network. First I develop a relationship with the person, in understanding perspectives, depth of knowledge, and consistency. The small pieces shared and commented on via Twitter let me start to see patterns and determine the authenticity of the person. We don’t need to have conversations, as I can lurk on their conversations with others. Over time I can get a good sense of the person. This is why I follow Michael Geist @MGeist as he brings a fair and comprehensive perspective on Canadian Internet and e-commerce law.  There are many others in my networks who help me make sense of my world, such as Valdis Krebs @orgnet for organizational network analysis. Building knowledge networks of trusted connections is one way we can learn as a society and address the complex problems facing us. Nobody can do it alone. Explicitly using social media and social networks to better understand complex issues should be part of all education programmes and everyone’s professional practice. There is so much to know and very little time. I call this serendipitous drip-fed learning. You just have to find the feeds, thankfully of which there are many.

The third volume in the perpetual beta series is now ready. Adapting to Perpetual Beta continues to explore the network era and its effects on society, business, and education. It follows seeking perpetual beta and finding perpetual beta published in 2014. This volume is focused on leadership and adapting to perpetual beta: dealing with constant change while still getting things done. All of the ideas discussed here have been explored initially on my blog, established in 2004. I describe my blog as a place to post ‘half-baked ideas’, and often build upon one post after another. Discussing these ideas in public lets me test them before committing them to my professional practice. I have written over 2,700 posts on my blog, so this book series provides a concise synthesis of the various themes posted here. Adapting to Perpetual Beta, a 67 page DRM-free PDF, is available for individual purchase until mid-September for $19. All three perpetual beta volumes may be purchased for $33 here. The files will be emailed to the address provided within 12 hours (usually much quicker). Table of Contents 1. THE INTELLIGENT ENTERPRISE Perpetual Beta Complexity Democracy 2. LEADERSHIP IN THE NETWORK ERA Sharing Power Social Structures Leadership by Example Immersion 3. ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING Hard Soft Skills Managing Talent 4. NETWORKED MANAGEMENT Implementing Networked Management The Networked Workplace Excerpt: Adapting to a networked life in perpetual beta means that people have to learn how to deal with more ambiguity and complexity at work. Automation of routine and standardized work is forcing people to do do more non-routine manual and cognitive work. If the work can be mapped and analyzed, it will be automated. As networked, distributed, non-routine work becomes the norm, trust will emerge only in those work environments that are open, transparent, and diverse. Trust is necessary to ensure that implicit knowledge flows, which contributes to organizational longevity. Organizations need to learn as fast as their environments. Constant experimentation must be the order of each day. Therefore, those in leadership and management positions today must find ways to nurture creativity and critical thinking. Management must set the initial example of transparency and working out loud. In addition, self-management is required at all levels. When there is no one to defer work to, everyone sets an example through their actions. In this environment everyone is learning and everyone is teaching by example. As a result, work gets done very quickly. From this foundation, today’s organizations can prepare for a new world of work. Machines will continue to replace jobs but people can create new work roles that are creative and social, beyond the reach of automation. Leadership in networks is exercised through reputation, not positional authority. Having influence in multiple networks, not just the organization, makes a leader even more effective. The ability to span networks becomes important as organizational lifespans decrease and worker mobility increases. To remain connected to the changes in their networks, good leaders are curious and promote experimentation, but do not need to control it. Leadership in networks is helping the network make better decisions, and this requires a focus on the best organizational design to meet the changing situations. Strong networks, combined with temporary and negotiated hierarchies to get work done, become the simple building blocks for an organization in a state of perpetual beta.

Clark Quinn recently asked, as have many others, the difference between collaboration and cooperation, and why it is important. "collaboration means ‘working together’. That’s why you see it in market economies. markets are based on quantity and mass. cooperation means ’sharing’. That’s why you see it in networks. In networks, the nature of the connection is important; it is not simply about quantity and mass … You and I are in a network - but we do not collaborate (we do not align ourselves to the same goal, subscribe to the same vision statement, etc), we *cooperate* - Stephen Downes Cooperation makes more sense as the term to describe working together in a networked and non-directed relationship. This is an important distinction from collaboration. For example, Jérôme Delacroix also sees cooperation as the suitable term for what we do in networks [in French]. Jérôme explains why his site is called Cooperatique and not Collaboratique - collaboration happens around some kind of plan or structure, while cooperation presumes the freedom of individuals to join and participate. He also says that cooperation, not collaboration, is a driver of creativity. It is difficult to be creative while collaborating, because the objective has already been established. Work in networks requires different skills than in directed hierarchies. Cooperation is a foundational behaviour for effectively working in networks, and it’s in networks where most of us, and our children, will be working. Cooperation presumes the freedom of individuals to join and participate. People in networks cannot be told what to do, only influenced through other nodes (people) due to their reputation. If people don’t like you, they won’t connect. In a hierarchy you only have to please your boss. In a network you have to be seen as having some value, though not the same value, by many others. Source: seeking perpetual beta While all levels of complexity exist in our world, more and more of our work deals with real complex problems (in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect), whether they be social, technological, or economic. Complex environments and problems are best addressed when we organize as networks, work to continuously develop emergent practices, and cooperate to advance our aspirations. Cooperation is not the same as collaboration, though they are complementary. Teams, groups, and markets collaborate. Online social networks and communities of practice cooperate. Working cooperatively requires a different mindset than merely collaborating on a defined project. Organizations need to extend the notion of work beyond collaboration, beyond teams, and beyond the corporate fire wall. They need to make social networks, communities of practice, and narrative part of the work. It’s a big leap but we need to change the business conversation away from confident military terms (target market, strategic plan, marketing campaign) and instead talk in terms of complexity, wicked problems, and cooperation. Source: seeking perpetual beta We are moving from a market economy to a network economy and the level of complexity is increasing with this hyper-connectedness. Managing in complex adaptive systems means influencing possibilities rather than striving for predictability (good or best practices). Cooperation in our work is needed so that we can continuously develop emergent practices demanded by this complexity. What worked yesterday won’t work today. No one has the definitive answer any more, but we can use the intelligence of our networks to make sense together and see how we can influence desired results. This is cooperation and this is the future, which is already here, albeit unevenly distributed. Shifting the emphasis of work from collaboration, which still is required to get tasks done, to cooperation, in order to thrive in a networked enterprise, means reassessing some of our assumptions and work practices. For instance: The lessening importance of teamwork, versus exploring outside the organization may change our perceptions about being a "team player". Detailed roles and job descriptions are inadequate for work at the edge. Getting rid of individual performance reviews and focusing the performance of the whole organization. One major challenge is that cooperation is much less controllable than our institutions, hierarchies, and HR practices would like to accept. Here is an example from nature. Martin Nowak, a mathematical biologist, concludes The Evolution of Cooperation with the following winning strategy: "What I find very interesting in these games of conditional reciprocity, direct and indirect reciprocity, we can make the point that winning strategies have the following three properties: they must be generous, hopeful and forgiving. Generous in the following sense: if I have a new interaction, now I realize (and this is I think where most people go wrong) that this is not a game where it’s either the other person or me who is winning. Most of our interactions are not like a tennis game in the US Open where one person loses and one person goes to the next round. Most of our interactions are more like let us share the pie and I’m happy to get 49 percent, but the pie is not destroyed. I’m willing to make a deal, and sometimes I accept less than 50 percent. The worst outcome would be to have no deal at all. So in that sense, generous means I never try to get more than the other person. Tit-for-tat never wins in any single encounter; neither does Generous Tit-for-tat. Hopeful is that if there is a new person coming, I start with cooperation. My first move has to be cooperation. If a strategy starts with defection, it’s not a winning strategy. And forgiving, in the sense that if the other person makes a mistake, there must be a mechanism to get over this and to reestablish cooperation." - Martin Nowak This clearly shows how cooperation differs from collaboration. To be generous, hopeful, and forgiving will in the long run make for stronger networks and communities. It works in nature. Cooperation is a necessary behaviour to be open to serendipity and encourage experimentation. Source: adapting to perpetual beta Network societies are mainly cooperative. The rules are no longer clear, as they are in institutions or market economies. When we know who we are working with (suppliers, partners, customers) then collaboration is optimal. But in networks, someone may be our supplier or even our boss one day and our customer the next, so cooperation becomes the best behaviour. In such a society, people can have multiple valences as nodes in many networks at the same time. Successful individuals in a network society will see that their connections change over time, and that openly sharing will make them more valued nodes in the long run. In networks, cooperation is simultaneously altruistic and selfish. We are becoming the global village, described by Marshall McLuhan, and like a tribal village certain aspects of human behaviours that we have ignored for centuries are becoming important as we move into a network society. For instance, there was little privacy in the village, as there seems to be no more privacy today. While we will not repeat the past, there is much we can learn from it. A network society has the potential to extend civil society, while obsolescing hierarchies. It retrieves the cooperation that once existed with kinship, but when pushed to its limits might reverse into the deception of a surveillance society. Cooperation amongst citizens and peers may ensure the latter does not happen. Source: finding perpetual beta

Over the past year, we've implemented some new technologies that will help bring the Learning Ecosystem to life.It also expands the number of applications and technologies that are now available to us.Tools and toys we can use to help create an environment that supports people.Because of the huge increase in complexity, I figured it was time to find a model that could help organize this and bring some structure to what I was trying to do.-------------------I've been playing with the SWAT team over the past year or so, in between work on a major Unified Communications implementation.The SWAT team is trying to bring Enterprise Architecture into our organization.  Planning. Configuration Management. Some knowledge around what we actually have and how we can use it. This has become more important as our organization finds itself tightening its belt.The old "Shiny thing, must buy" approach is (finally) being questioned.(Yay!)-------------------- The SWAT team boss, invited me to join his team for TOGAF 9 certification. TOGAF is an open source enterprise architecture methodology and framework that seems to be increasingly popular.Some things I liked about this model:The emphasis on the business processIt has a well-defined series of steps / phasesThe open source community has already developed templates and models we can use in each step It accommodates project management and service delivery models in a really tidy way (vs just focusing on one aspect of work life)A number of IT departments are using this....so as educators, we are beginning to speak the same "language" as our IT folks.It is built to solve the problem I have - accommodating a mess of stuff into one organized architecture that I can plan against.So with shiny new cert in hand (yay me!), I am in the process of restructuring the ecosystem to fit this new model.Around the regular parts of my job, of course.....And with the usual limited resources + healthy skepticism of a large portion of my org.Guerrilla change management...again.

Please note that this overview is absolutely NOT a replacement for reading the materials or taking a certification course.Open Group - TOGAF documentation and white papersAn Introduction to TOGAF 9.1 - free pdfAny comments about TOGAF in this blog are my personal opinion, understanding and application.I will be linking to appropriate pictures so you can see the source material. ------------------One of the things I like about TOGAF is that it deals in layers - from general to specific.Here is the general picture of the framework.Our definitions:Enterprise Strategic Architecture - all of the IT systems in our organization, including contracted cloud solutions.  Our learning ecosystem is meant to mesh in with this greater Enterprise layer as much as possible. From the beginning, one of the key tenants of the ecosystem was to integrate and mesh with the greater environment as much as possible.  Because this is where people spend most of their time working.  At least in my world.  And I'm in higher ed.  My audience doesn't do their day-to-day work in the LMS. At least last I checked.It is also (in my mind) a win-win for both the educators and IT.  We get the tools we need to do our business quickly, the enterprise maximizes their IT investment, and it is much easier for the IT group to support us. Segment Architecture (we are here) - for the purpose of the Learning Ecosystem, we are dividing this segment based on function. "Is it used for executing 'learning' stuff?" This level will help define the interconnections between the various applications and tools we use in practice. In this layer, we are looking at start-to-finish workflows, the tools we use to execute those workflows, and how everything inter-relates.  It's the "Program Management" layer - with "Learning Technologies" as the program.When we are talking about start-to-finish workflows, we are not only talking about the technologies.  We are talking about what people are doing. Handoffs.  Choices and exceptions.  How people actually do their work.  In any of these methodologies driven by technologists, despite the best of intentions by the designers....application tends to be technology focused.  Less messy.  I'm trying not to fall into that trap.Capability Layer - for the purpose of the Learning Ecosystem, this is the individual piece. For instance, SkillPort LMS would be a Capability layer.  All of the information about SkillPort (direct connections in and out, contracts, workflows, etc) would be within that specific capability.  Another capability layer would be set up for WebEx.  Another for the training portal we are developing using SharePoint.  Another for classroom registration. Another for instructional design....The capability layers should NOT be limited to technology and the technologies we use.  We're trying to get a clear picture of all of our activities so we can plan a strategy and make decisions. The first challenge, for me, is going to be making sure I have all of the capabilities defined in a way that captures everything that should be in the Learning Ecosystem and that makes sense to people.I'll be sharing these as I get these layers more tightly defined.

In TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Forum) terms - this is the Architectural Development Model (ADM).  Because acronyms are awesome.Please go to Introduction to the ADM and scroll down to section 5.2.2 for the official explanation and definitions.These are mine (with apologies to the Open Group)Preliminary - "What do I have lying around?"  Our organization is here.Requirements - "What do people want this thing to do".  Lots and lots of levels to this.  I'm in the process of gathering 7 years worth of stories and figuring out how to build a requirements library.A - Architecture Vision - "What is the high-level architecture and, roughly, how do we want this to evolve?"  Don't worry - the next few phases will nail this down.B - Business Architecture - Nailing down processes and workflows.  What people actually do.  "How do we want to improve the process?"  Note: This piece SHOULD guide the other architectures.  However, B, C and D are often developed in parallel in practice.C - Information Systems Architecture - This is all of the tools that you use to perform your processes. The model breaks it down even further into Application architecture and Data Architecture.Application architecture focuses on what tools you use. The Data architecture focuses on what information goes in and out of the applications and where it goes.  Don't neglect the Data architecture. We will need this for reporting later.  You are doing reporting, aren't you?D - Technology Architecture - This is the servers and network etc. Making friends with your IT department will be key.  You know...in case they move a server your LMS is housed into the cloud.  Because there are other, non-technological ramifications to this action. Like having your user interfaces change on you without warning.  Or if they are having a maintenance outage that suddenly prohibits access to your webinar tool on the day you are presenting to 100 people. So it is good to have at least a rough idea of the technology architecture of your applications.E - Opportunities and Solutions - This is where we nail down where we want to go.  What we want our future state to look like.F - Migration Planning - This is where we plan how we are going to get there.  Which projects, what order, who we need to help us, that sort of thing.G - Implementation Governance - "Git'r Done". Making real.H - Architecture Change Management - Did we actually get there?  What worked? What didn't? What needs to change in the architecture plan? Where do we want to go next?  For those of us versed in ADDIE - this is the "Evaluation" piece.As we were warned in our certification training - the first go-around through the cycle is the toughest.  Because all of the stuff is spread out and disorganized and housed in people's heads.Our organization is using the Learning Ecosystem as a smaller scale way to start hashing through this cycle.  Mostly because I am motivated to actually use this thing I learned - at least for my own needs, even if few other people find it useful. And I think it is "low profile" enough to allow the SWAT team and I to experiment with some things around how this might operate on a larger scale.

This is the official description of how the Preliminary Stage works.This is what this phase feels like.....---------------------In my spare time (around projects and the job I am supposed to be doing), I am gathering all the things.The tools and applications we have lying around the shop - both stuff we currently use and stuff that may prove useful laterRequirements and stories from 7 years at this organizationOutside stories from my peers I may find useful (otherwise known as "best practices")Old project notesDocumentationModelsTemplatesOrganizational processes we need to work withinFor service delivery - we use ITIL to organize ourselvesFor project management - we use PMBOKContracts processes Procurement processesIntake processesDocument it even if you think you won't need it.  Chances are, it will pop up later when you actually threaten to do something.Stakeholders - including how supportive they are and how much they can hurt you.This, you might want to keep very separate from the other documentation.Organizational and environmental driversAny sacred cows - you DEFINITELY want to identify these. A lot of resistance will pop up from here.Below is a 3 minute video containing a brief demonstration of how we are starting to organize stuff.We're using SharePoint.

- From the Happy Medic. This is a lot more glamorous than preventing the fire in the first place.-------------------------- Resistance.  I've seen this over too many years and too many organizations.People nod their heads and go "Yes - planning is a great idea!  We should have a strategy!  This will help us make better decisions! We can save money! (etc)"And then they do everything they can to prevent it from happening.Why?Lack of "flexibility" - they can't just up and do what they want once there is a plan in place. Not that this was ever true, but before they could feign ignorance if things don't work out.The need to start saying "no" and set boundaries - a perceived political handicap for those whose entire career success is based on making people (especially higher-ups) "feel good".The fear of uncovering something they don't want uncovered - ANY of these planning / organization / architecture projects run the risk of uncovering some skeletons.Processes not "working" the way they are supposed to (and the resulting "surprise")People using the lack of transparency to serve their own purposesThe assumption that "knowledge is power" without understanding that knowledge is more powerful when shared.Even worse - when you are doing this within a culture that often actively punishes sharing.  Even if the touted "values" state otherwise.The activities of planning don't look like actual work.Or worse, too many instances of planning being done in replacement of actual work.  This happens enough times and any organization is going to get a bit cynical. Prevention isn't nearly as glamorous-looking as fire-fightingPeople love rescuers.  It just sucks when the problem could have been prevented in the first place.It's hard to prove your worth by showing what DIDN'T happen and preventing problems.  It's much easier to show the problems (that manifested) that you DID solve.   Irregardless of whether it was a self-created or preventable problem. As expected, as soon as real activity towards an architecture started happening, we started seeing resistance.----------------------Right now, the only mitigation strategy I have is to couch my activities in terms of "personal organization."  Small scale, low profile, low resource need. As long as I don't neglect my current primary responsibilities and don't ask for much, I should be OK.   Worst case scenario - I've learned something as a result of these efforts and have made some valuable changes to my portfolio that I can leverage in the future.