When learning is work and work is...

Harold Jarche has a great blog and shares a lot of his thinking on old HR and old learning and what social learning could bring to organizations. Recently he had a post titled 'Work is learning and learning it the work' that got me thinking.

He basically opposed against pulling learning and work out of each other, as it seems to be in many companies. This is shown by the fact that most companies have someone responsible for learning (HR manager or Learning & Development manager) and formal (online) training.

Learning should be the work. Maybe it's even stronger: Learning is the work. Harold challenges us to actively observe how people are learning to do their job right now.

But why is this so hard for companies? I've written about Peter Senge's book before. Hardly any companies I know can truly be called a learning organization. And Senge's book has been out for more than 20 years now...

As Harold proposes, a simple step could be to "provide time and space for reflection and reading". Some companies like Google explicitly give employees time to do something else. But most people are not given time to reflect. They have to take it themselves, because they themselves find it important to learn. What's wrong here?

Maybe the solution is to start at the personal level. Like Harold's focus on PKM (personal knowledge management), we should start with personal learning. We decide to want to learn and therefore need time to reflect and read. If your company doesn't give you that space, maybe you should move on. Is that it? Or are there other ways?

Also refer to this post by John Stepper about why managers do stupid things.

Mastering the Social Work Mindset - HR and Enterprise 2.0 #e20s

This breakout (track 3) at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit is about 'Mastering the social work mindset'. Breakout speakers are Anthony Poncier and Ellen Trude.

Anthony kicks off with a sort presentation about HR and Enterprise 2.0. (Last year there was only one participant from the HR department at this Summit. This year there are many more.) HR should be on the wagon because people are the core of organizations. McKinsey recently stressed that the role of HR in E2.0 is essential. Why? Because of the inter-generational cultures (millenials, etc.), new job descriptions (like the community manager), talent management, impact on visibility and mobility (career development, L&D), etc.
It's important to look at and change the tradition HR processes for E2.0 success.

Ellen doesn't like the word training relating to social media and enterprise 2.0. Training is too much a one-way lecture. At Ellen's company they developed a social learning environment. The courses are designed for the people and not the other way around. In the environment they start with suggestions for tasks not a prescriptive tasks. The trainers are facilitators and the participants train each other. The results surprised Ellen. There was huge amount of feedback between participants. It relates to workplace learning, instead of formal learning. Learning is more integrated into work. There was an immediate translation to their work.
Another interesting thing Ellen tells about is how the HR department goes out and listens to the organizational social networks to find out what is working well and how to improve social learning.
Ellen is convinced the Training department has to change their mindset. The Training department will not be needed in the future. It will have in the networks.

Great assignment

Just wanted to share my enthusiasm with you about a great assignment I received from a client. Recently we were contacted because our client wanted to set up a new intranet. They were thinking about doing an internal survey to find out what employees expected from their (future) intranet. Soon they concluded this would only give them a list of things they already knew. "We don't really know what we need." So, they came to us/me with the request to organize trips to five interesting intranets. Show us five interesting intranets that we can learn from. Based on those visits we will learn a lot about organizational issues, budget, technology platform, adoption strategies, types of intranets, etc.

Wow, what a great assignment! I also think this is smart thing to do. Why do it all yourself if there's so much to learn from others? Isn't this also a faster way to get to results?

I'm honored to get such an assignment and it's great to organize this for them. It's just as inspiring to me as it is to them.

The IT Flower Revisited

A long time ago I blogged about the IT Flower. I thought is was a very interesting diagram and I still use it regularly. I find it helps people understand the different types of work, how things get done and how they are(n't) support by tools in companies.

Recently I read Harold Jarche's post about "Informal Learning is a Business Imperative". I find his work on social learning and personal knowledge management highly interesting. Most of his posts contain lots of food for thought and have interesting diagrams to chew on.

This post did as well. The diagram in this post clearly shows the different types of work and how they relate to different types of learning. This fits perfectly on my two above-mentioned posts about the IT Flower. This diagram is an extra layer focused on types of work and learning. (Or the other way around, whatever you like!) I’m also happy to see that the diagram shows that even in very structured work there are still non-routine tasks. Just like in typical knowledge work, routine stuff like filling in hourly reports has to be done...

I love these connections via the blogosphere. Information learning in practice!

(Diagram is link to actual picture by Harold Jarche.)

Learning Organizations Then and Now

‘The Learning Organization’ was a hot topic in the nineties. Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline was published at the beginning of the nineties (1990). And The Fifth Disciplines Fieldbook shortly after that (1994). Recently I reread the Fieldbook. Nowadays lots is being written about social media and its power for personal and business use. Not very often you hear people and businesses say they use new media for learning. Although this area is very interesting.

Harold Jarche and Jay Cross (who recently pointed me to these interesting posts about this topic), to name just two experts, have been writing and publishing about this topic. They wonder: How can learning be improved by using social media? How does social media affect and possibly change learning? What is social learning? Related to this, Jarche also writes and talks about personal knowledge management, which also relates to personal learning. Really interesting stuff. I follow their work closely. (I've collected some links here.)

Back to the Fieldbook. Peter Senge’s work was published before the internet went mainstream. And way before we even thought about social media, likes blogs and wiki’s. Reading the Fieldbook in 2011 is fascinating if you keep that in mind. Often I wondered: How would people in the nineties have implemented that idea? Now, with modern tools that’s easy, but then?

The core of the learning organization was that people agreed to increase the collective insight and capacity of the organization. And by learning faster than the competition, a competitive advantage could be achieved.

Interestingly the book is also focused on managers that want to ‘learn to learn’ from the results, reflections and experiments of others. This information which is shared and developed, is not only discussed but used as springboard for new experiments and initiatives.

The Learning Organization consists of 5 learning disciplines (which are never done):

• Personal mastership: using our skills to get the results we want and create an organizational context in which all are encouraged to develop in the direction of the goals of their choice.
• Mental models: think about our internal world view, continuously changing and improving it, influencing our actions and decisions.
• Collective vision: work towards a joint vision of the future and define the principles with which we want to achieve that future.
• Team learning: create a situation in which the collective intelligence of the whole is more than the sum of the individuals.
• Systems thinking: understanding and using the whole to create harmony.

One of the things learning does is make people want to change. Learning and change are not the same, but they are tightly related.

According to the Fieldbook, which is based on cases from practioners, successful learning organizations will be defined by the following:

• Power is distributed
• Self-discipline is encouraged
• Systems thinking will be developed
• Improved discussion skills
• Leaders will be followed voluntarily 

And the three most important principles of learning organizations:

• The whole is more important than the sums of its parts
• ‘me’ is intrinsically connected with and part of the whole
• The creational power of language 

When you read through this book and my notes, I’m sure you think: Hey, this relates nicely to social media and that connect to social media concepts. Right?

Of course the focus of the learning organization book is on changing organizations and people. So when they talk about implementing the learning organization they look at changing employee behavior and skills, and organizational structures. Every now and then technology does pop up in the book through. An example from AT&T mentions forums. And email, virtual meeting (then called: electronic meetings), computer networks and databases are mentioned. The databases are mentioned relating to the importance of institutional memory in communities.

The learning organization sees companies as communities (organisms). A very interesting statement is made towards the end of the book:

The lifeblood of the organization as community is dialogue, not only within teams but in the whole organization. If intellectual capital is the most important production factor than the capacity to have deep discussions about important topics is essential for breakthrough thinking and innovation.

Isn’t this interesting? Isn’t this also one of the ways social media can be used inside and outside organizations? To facilitate and encourage dialogue. And learning. To be that’s what using social media has brought me. And the nice thing is, you and I can do this if we’re manager or not. The tools to support learning have a lot to do with human skills. But the tools can support that learning processes in huge vibrant networks. By articulating what we learned, what our questions are, who we know, what we’ve found, etc. And we’re not limited to doing this within organization anymore. We can do this between organizations and institutions as well.

To me this is progress. This really helps us implement the learning organization in our daily lives. And in that we in the organizations, communities and institutions we live in and work for. We are creating and using “creation spaces” as mentioned in The Power of Pull (p. 19):

Creation spaces differ in at least two ways from the “learning organization” approaches pioneered a couple of decades ago. First, they emerge as ecosystems across institutions rather than within a single institution, so they reach a much more diverse set of participants. Second, they are not primarily focused on learning – their goal is to drive more rapid performance improvement, and learning occurs as a by-product of these efforts.

Bonus quote from the Fieldbook relating to social media/enterprise 2.0 ROI: “Measure in a quantitive way what can be measured quantitively; measure qualitively what can’t be measured.”

How to Become Successful - My Review of Outliers

Malcolm Gladwell is a great story writer. I've enjoyed reading three of his books: The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers. (I'll review the first two later on.) I like the way he delves into topics that intrigue many of us and comes up with an answer you wouldn't expect.

Success
Outliers is also such a book. In this book Gladwell wants to understand what success is. It's about men and women who do things that are out of the ordinary. They are 'outliers'. The book wants to show there is something wrong with the way we make sense of success. It's not (only) about personal qualities (passion, talent, hard work). Or what a successful person is like. It also depends on where and when a person grew up. In fact: "It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't." (p.19)

Succes, Time & System
Gladwell shows that our notion it is the best and the brightest who effortlessly rise to the top is much to simplistic. Success also has to do with what sociologists call "accumulative advantage". He uses the example and data of professional hockey players. Some start out a little bit better than the rest. But this small difference leads to a larger difference based on the amount of time they practiced. And older hockey players have more time than younger ones. They basically lived longer. The other point is: selecting players at a certain point in the year, doesn't help either. The players with birth dates near the cut-off date have more chance of getting through that younger ones. They lived longer and had more time to practice. This applies to school exams as well. Basically the system has a large role in deciding who is or isn't successful.

Success & Practice
In the next chapter Gladwell points to research which tried to but couldn't find "any "naturals"; people that floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time. Nor could they find any people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn't have what it takes to break the top ranks. (p.39) Practice is essential. How much practice is needed? "Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness." (p.41) "Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good." (p.42) 10.000 hours is a lot of time. You need to be in a special situation to get the time to practice that much. You have to be lucky. You don't only have to have talent, you have to be given the opportunity. (p.76)

Success & Family
Another interesting point Gladwell makes is about IQ. Research shows that the relationship between success and IQ only works up to a point. "Once someone has reached an IQ of somewhere around 120, having additional IQ points doesn't seem to translate into any measurable real-world advantage." (p.79) So, other factors like imagination become more important. And practical intelligence. General and practical intelligence are orthogonal. "The presence of one doesn't imply the presence of the other." (p.101) We learn practical intelligence from our families. We get this or don't get this from the way we are raised. The way our life is structured. And what the context of our life is. E.g. is it surrounded with books?

Succes & Location
So, the first part of this book says: "when and where you are born, what your parents did for a living, and what the circumstances of your upbringing were make a significant difference in how well you do in the world." (p.175) The second part of the book is about if traditions and attitudes we inherit play the same role. And this seems to be the case. "Our ability to succeed at what we do is powerfully bound up with where we're from...". (p.209)

Success & Attitude
Success is also an attitude. "Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds." (p246)

Gladwell's own summary of the book:

... success follows a predictable course. It is not the brightest who succeed. ... Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those that have been given an opportunities - and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them. (p.267)

Questions about Success
BusinessWeek also ran a short review of the book with a couple of questions. The biggest question I have about the book is: How does this all apply in the ever-changing world we are in? Books like The Power of Pull and Macrowikinomics seem to imply that we can only learn fast enough in networks. As soon as we think we know something, our knowledge will be outdated. Outliers says you need to spend 10.000 hours on a subject to master it. How do these two approaches relate? Should we focus on core skills, like logic and writing? Any ideas?

Did you read this book? And did you like it? Please leave a comment and/or point to your review.

Safe to Fail, Blog to Fail

Learning is an interesting topic. It's one of the main reasons I blog. Failing is also an interesting topic. I've blogged about it before. And I wondered: Is failure also one of the reasons I blog. I think so. Blogging helps me fail. I write things down, get things wrong, get corrected by comments, etc. I'm learning!

Not too long ago Harvard Business Review published an interesting article about failure. It was written by Amy Edmondson and is titled 'Strategies For Learning From Failure' (April 2011). I'm not going to summarize the article for you (this time). But it's pack with great insights and learning points. For instance it explains how we are programmed to think that all failure is bad, what different types of failure there are (good and bad ones), how organizations can embrace failure and how leaders can build a safe environment for failure.

I found the last point most interesting. I think embracing failure is a personal decision. In this case you are the leader. But leaders can also get others to open up and fail more safely. This article give a couple of steps to create this environment, I'd like to list them here:

• employees must learn to understand the different kinds of failure that can be expected and why openness and collaboration are important for surfacing and learning from them
• reward those that come forward with bad news, questions or mistakes.
• be open about what you don't know
• promote intelligent experiments, ask for employees to detect and analyze failures
• employees feel paradoxically safer when leaders are clear about what acts are blameworthy and there must be consequences

What do you do to embrace failure? I relate blogging to failure. Does that make sense to you?

Books I'm Reading... Or Plan to Read

Writing reviews about the books I´ve been reading isn't easy I find. For some reason when I finish a book I postpone writing a review for a long time. I'm open to tips to posting it soon. Review while you're reading? Block the calendar, focus and type it out?

Well, I hope to share my comments on a couple of great books I've read. Free by Chris Anderson, Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, Macrowikinomics by Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams, Grown up digital by Don Tapscott and The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge. These books were an interesting and enjoyable read.

Currently I'm reading two books and planning to read three more. I'm reading The Cluetrain Manifesto by Levine et al (actually re-reading it, with the 'Cluetrain-10-years-later-commentary') and What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly.
The other three books that are waiting on my desk are: The Living Company, The Information and The Power of Pull by John Hagel, John Seely Brown & Lang Divison.
Lots to read - as ever! But I'll make sure I post the promised reviews before September 1.

What are you reading? Are you reading or have you read one of the above-mentioned books? Please leave a comment.

Knowledge Sharing and Incentives Revisited

The Internet is such a great place to share and learn. I find it a fantastic place to connect with all kinds of people you hardly know, but are willing to share and help you learn anyway.

I recently had such an experience I'd like to share with you. Remember my post on knowledge sharing and incentives? I could have kept this thought to myself, researched it and come up with the answer myself. But I didn't. I blogged about it, commented on a related post (which popped right when I was thinking about the topic...) and shared it in the LinkedIn Group 'Gurteen Knowledge Community'.

What did I get back? Did my readers or experts in the field criticize or laugh at me for wondering about this topic or asking 'dumb' questions? Did they leave me in the cold, completely not responding to me at all? Of course, this can all happen, but none of this (has ever) happened to me. I'll tell you what I got back in this case.

For one, Nick Milton wrote a separate post about my question. Secondly from the Gurteen Knowledge Community I got several replies. I'll share some here:

Pink and others have also done some TED presentations on this.
As Dave said, tasks with simple action-objective structures do well with exogenous rewards like money/tokens/etc., but anything where reflective thought, innovation, creativity, etc. are involved or where the action-objective link is complex, exogenous rewards tend to have the opposite effects.
My guess is that it is a Stroop-effect thing going on or one of those mutually inhibiting effects like when you wake up the nucleus accumbens with a reward like cash and the generosity of a person takes a dive.
In a practical sense, I have seen how money rewards or even individual rewards tend to simply lead to gaming behavior and a big pile of worthless junk instead of usable or novel material.
Bottom line is that you are trying to increase use of social values, not inhibit them.
- Posted by Matthew Loxton

Samuel, read Dan Pink's book "Drive". In the book he says that the research shows that for simple tasks that require no cognitive processing - rewards work - but for more sophisticated tasks that require even a modicum of cognitive engagement - they have an adverse effect. Asking someone to call in to report that they saw something in connection with a crime seems to me to fall in the first category.
Dan Pink and Alfie Kohn also state that when you offer a reward for something - the reward becomes the motivation and replaces the intrinsic motivation to do good. So I would not be surprised if research found that people who are rewarded to report a crime would be less inclined to do so at a future date when no reward was offered.
So yes it seems to be more subtle and at times counter-intuitive.
- David Gurteen

Agree...that's why for KM I think it's about "engagement" that's why I think this slidedeck is spot on http://www.slideshare.net/TSystemsMMS/the-wikipedia-myth-enterprise-20-knowledge-management
Dan Pink also has a video for RSA http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2010/drive-the-surprising-truth-about-what-motivates-us
Also and animation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
To mix it up, here's some research on children
http://johntropea.tumblr.com/post/685512595/rewards-reduce-intrinsic-motivation-the-children
http://johntropea.tumblr.com/post/391619553/being-cautious-about-rewards
http://johntropea.tumblr.com/post/391616299/intrinsic-reinforcements

- John Tropea

Isn't this wonderful? Direct answers to my questions, pointers to information answering my questions, implicit links to people knowledgeable about the subject, etc.

Thanks all for your help! This has been my repeated experience as a blogger. And I hope this post will encourage many more to start or continue blogging. The blogosphere is alive and kicking!

Realistic Influencing (part two)

Some time ago I blogged about a course I followed: Realistic Influencing. I promised I would write about day three as well. Here's my list of learning points:

1. When in a discussion you have opposite conclusions look for facts and criteria (refer to previous post) you agree upon and/or have in common and starting talking from there.
2. Remember to summarize someone's criteria when you think you see one and ask for feedback to see if you're correct.
3. We all have several different voices in our head. You can give them names. Like my Einstein voice telling me to be creative, think out-of-the-box, etc. But this voice can have contradictory voice telling me to be pragmatic for instance. Talk about these voices out loud in a conversation, it helps people understand what going on in your head. It also buys you time.
4. During the course we also looked at Hersey & Blanchard's situational leadership matrix. I really like that model. It's a great model to use to talk with your manager about how you want to be managed or how you experience his/her management. Striking is the fact that if you e.g. think you are delegated a task but your manager coaches you, you fall back one or two development levels. I've had the experience several times in my career.
5. Finally we went through the 'point of view flow'. This gives some context and flow to the influencing model I wrote about in the previous blogpost. I found the two different phases, pacing and leading, interesting. Because usually people are good one or the other: pacing is easier for softer people, leading for macho's. This flow says, you have to try to do both. And during the whole process 'rapport' is important: being in sync with the other (watching his body language, truly listening, etc.)

I really enjoyed this course, not just because of the interesting theory, models and flows. But also because of all the assignments we had to do to translate theory into practice and learn!

Tread Softly

In 2006 Sir Ken Robinson gave a wonderful talk at TED about education. I've watched that talk numerous time, because it's so inspiring and true. Recently he gave another talk at TED and it just as great as the first one. I inserted it for you below. And also added the poem he ends his speech with. It speaks to the hart when you have kids. But isn't this also the way we should see our colleagues?

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet,
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams

W.B. Yeats

Realistic Influencing (part one)

Recently I went to a three-day course about 'Realistic Influencing'. I've been wanting to go to a course about influencing for some time. My role, as an information architect, is about influencing. And I'd like to know how courses about influencing try to help people be better influencers. I enjoyed the course and would like to share some learning points with you. Here's part one.

1. In the 1st place I like the diagram (inserted as a picture in this post). I like it's simplicity. And we went through all the parts of it and experimented with it. 'Facts' are things a person sees as real. His or her experienced truth. This don't not have to be the same as a fact, as we usually talk about facts. Like 2+2=4. As we know (and maybe even have experienced) some would dare say the equation is not true, not a fact either... The idea behind this model is to take the persons 'fact' as a fact.

'Criteria' are personal norms and values a person finds important. Sometimes they are implicit, sometimes explicit. Criteria are the ground of convictions. Some criteria are valid forever, some are valid during a project or a weekend, for instance. Example of a criterion is 'result driven' and 'be on time'. Note: a fact can also be a criterion.

The last part of the diagram is 'Conclusions'. Conclusions are the conclusions people draw based on the 'Facts' and 'Criteria'.

The whole model together comprised our 'Convictions'. So, 'Convictions' consists of 'Facts', 'Criteria' and 'Conclusions'.

2. As I said 'Criteria' can be implicit or explicit. Finding a person's criteria is important when influencing. Based on someone's 'Conclusions' you can try to find the other's 'Criteria' by asking: 'Why do you conclude this?'

The same goes for 'Facts'. They can be implicit or explicit too. Often people just state their 'Conclusions'. Understanding their underlying 'Facts' is essential for influencing. Asking 'What their factual basis is for their conclusion' is an easy way to find the fact or facts underlying their conclusion.

3. This diagram basically says: Don't try to change someone's Facts and Criteria. It's really hard to do that. This was an eye-opener to me. I find myself often not wondering what the criteria are of the person I'm trying to influence (usually because there is not enough time... - not an excuse!). Or I find myself working on his/her facts. Trying to prove the facts are wrong... And usually this doesn't work.

4. The underlying conviction(!) of this diagram is you need to 'click' with the other person to be able to influence. This 'click' needs to be on the level of 'convictions'.

5. So, the only place we can start is we have to start is Conclusions. How do we change them? There are three strategies:

1. Offer alternatives: based on the same facts and conclusions, draw different conclusions

2. Reframing: draw new conclusions, based on extra facts (remember don't try to change his/her facts!) you put next to the facts of the person you're trying to influence. Don't use too many extra facts!

3. Pragmatic evaluation: don't change a thing but think the filled in diagram through. What consequences do the conclusions have based on the facts and criteria. Are these consequences realistic, intended, etc.

6. We played around with the diagram and strategies, as said. And practiced using it in in real discussions.

7. We also examined our own criteria. We made a list of them and tried to rank them. (As I wrote, don't try to change someone's criteria. But if you have to try to start with the one that is ranked lowest.) Comparing your list to other's helped find overlap in criteria. This overlap is a good starting point for influencing.

Asking each other what his/her criteria are is a good way of finding the 'click'. The other can change the way you see him/her or he/she sees you are really listening.

What are some of my criteria? Honesty, Faithfulness, Justice, Do your best, etc.

8. An interesting part of the course was investigating our inner-voice. Most people have voices in their head telling them what to do. These voices can contradict each other. These voices usually have a link to short-term or long-term personal criteria. Listening to them is important to understand your personal criteria. You can play with them by speaking out loud about them. 'On the one hand I'd like to, but on the other hand...'.

9. We also went into nonverbal communication. Are these cues incongruent with what is being said?

10. And finally, on day 2 of the first part of the course, we also looked at 'Objections'. Objections are barriers that block seeing the future bright world. Objections can be practical or relate to criteria. Use the above-mentioned strategies to approach criteria-related objections. Approach objections related to practice with practical solutions.

That was all for the first part of the course. I'll blog about the second part soon.

I hope you enjoyed this post. How do you influence others? What is your approach? What works for you? I'd love to hear your thoughts.