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Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week.

via @captic – Irving Wladawsky-Berger: The traditional, industrial age hierarchic organization must evolve

Value creation has thus been shifting from protecting proprietary knowledge, to fostering collaboration, both within the company and beyond its boundaries, in order to help the firm participate in as broad and diverse a range of knowledge flows and thus improve its competitive position.  It is within this context that one has to consider the business value of social networks, and their impact in helping people better connect with each other, and build sustaining relationships that enhance knowledge flows and innovation.

via @bbetts -Oscar Berg: Why traditional intranets fail today’s knowledge workers

To conclude: a major reason why traditional intranets fail today’s knowledge workers is that all information they provide access to is produced with a push-based production model. This model assumes that all information resources on the intranet must be produced in advance (only serving information needs which can be anticipated) by a small subset of all available resources (employees) and that the entire body of information needs to be supervised by a few people for the purpose of controlling the message, format and/or organization of the information resources.

A Man with a PhD: Natural selection: networks & diversity

One thing to remember is that true and pure natural selection would tend to drive genes to the best possible – the most fit – actually removing diversity. To a first approximation, selection would seem to produce a single set of genes that are ‘best’ evolved for a particular environment. Any other set of genes would be less fit.

In reality, selection is often not that fine, there are a range of different gene products that can probably be almost equally fit and most biological systems are designed to support a wide range of diversity.

It’s not the size of your network that matters but how you engage folks of diverse opinion & practice – Neighbor Networks

This argument implies that one cannot hope to get ahead of others just by finding the “right” network. “People think of their network as something they can expand, or buy a new version of, or change in some dramatic way as if it were clothing that you can take off and put on,” Burt says. A network does not give added competitive advantage independent of your effort. Rather, it allows a person to become more skillful at managing various connections so that he gains greater competitive advantage. It is what a person does with his network that counts.

via @jhagel – Generating Serendipity: diversity; sharing; network weaving; provocation

Serendipity is the emergence of desirable novelty from a chance encounter, the discovery of something wonderful, unknown and unpredictable. It is the act of unexpected cross-pollination, the seed of something new.

Much of lasting value comes into being serendipitously. How many of the most amazing things that have happened to you have happened because of an overheard word, an accidental encounter, a connection made by a friend? Serendipity is the antithesis of control.

Connections drive innovation [and learning] by @timkastelle

The moral of the story is simple. Connections drive innovation. We need input from people with a diversity of viewpoints to help generate innovative new ideas. If our circle of connections grow too small, or if everyone in it starts thinking the same way, we’ll stop generating new ideas. And then we’ll forget things like how to make a fishing hook. Or a trident missile.

via @charlesjennings – Paris stages ‘festival of errors‘ to teach French schoolchildren how to think

“I’m a scientist. I had nothing to do with education. But then my six-year-old boy went to school and his teacher told me, ‘He’s a nice kid, but he asks too many questions,’” said François Taddei, the author of an education report published last year for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

“This is the problem of the French system,” he added.

“You are supposed to know the right answer. You are not supposed to express your own opinions or ask questions.”

In The Learning Layer , the concept of reversing the idea funnel is discussed in depth. Traditional innovation processes take many ideas, and through elimination, narrow these down to a few. Flipping the funnel reverses this by breaking ideas into capability components and building on them.

Most business ideas are a bundle of two or more of our capability components [tangible & intangible assets - technologies, processes, people, IP, relationships]. For example, even if a business idea is based on a technological breakthrough, the overall opportunity is likely to also include other differentiating components, such as processes (say, a specific marketing process). It is the uniqueness of the bundle of components that provides the economic value-creating potential of the idea, and the ability to defy the easy copying by other marketplace participants that leads to rapid value collapse.

This is what effective innovators do, says author Steve Flinn – “They break things down into their essential features, and then try to visualize the effect of different combinations, orientations, and application approaches.”

One of my current projects is working on knowledge transfer, such as the commercialization of research, at Mount Allison University. I’m still learning how this happens here and at other universities, but for the most part, it seems to be a traditional funnel. However, this type of funnel can also be flipped.

Embedding the flipping-the-funnel process within the learning layer is a powerful, contemporary approach to the management of innovation and R&D. But there are other related learning layer opportunities that should not be overlooked. For example, technology transfer processes. Here the idea is to enable third parties to leverage inventions and developments that are developed by other organizations, whether private or public. As mentioned previously, extending the learning layer across organizations is an ideal way to generate creative synergy. And the flipping-the-funnel approach can be adapted, and coupled with the cross-organizational learning layer, to enable more collaborative and valuable technology transfers.

One example of cross-pollination in technology transfer is Futurity.org, which aggregates research findings from all AAU universities.

The ability to even conceive of a learning layer is due to our advances in network communication technologies. This has caused the explosion in web social media and user-generated content. While looking for a picture to illustrate this post, I came across the image below on Flickr, an image sharing service. The image was linked to a blog post that asks if the prevalence of social media require us to re-think the lead generation funnel. It seems that network effects have flipped some of our older industrial models.

The Learning Layer: Building the next level of intellect in your organization, begins with some solid insights on how learning is the key to performing in the networked workplace. Learning has been the traditional realm of HR while most systems are supported by IT. This means that HR supports the people who produce the tacit knowledge while IT supports the systems that store the explicit knowledge. Steve Flinn, the author, uses the analogy of knowledge as stock and learning as flow. An organization’s intellectual capital is a factor of both, which “makes it really clear just how inseparable the management of a business’s knowledge is from the learning processes”.

The proliferation of current web technologies now presents us with two major opportunities:

The knowledge and insights within the heads of people can be leveraged without overtly taking actions to make it so. And that systems can actually learn, and more specifically, learn from latent intellectual capital.

Previous legacy IT systems used hierarchical structures, making them unsuitable for real learning applications, so “if we want an integrated organization of people and systems that effectively learns, we should start with a focus on a network-based architecture that has the capacity to reshape itself over time and that is layered over what came before, because that’s how the brain works.”

Flinn goes on to explain that Web 2.0 technologies have created “socially aware” systems that can identify some behaviour patterns between systems and users, giving us various levels of adaptation. Amazon.com is the best known commercial application of this, with its product recommendations. Very soon, adaptive recommendations in work systems will become ubiquitous, providing some extent of contextual and personalized learning on demand. The learning layer is an amalgamation of socially aware, adaptive systems with social networks [uniting KM and SoMe] .The social network is the larger network of connected people with smaller workflow processes inside:

Because the workflow is woven right into the learning layer itself, it also offers the opportunity for ‘recombinant’ processes, where process sections can be cleaved off and recombined to form new, synthetic processes. This is the ultimate in flexibility and efficiency, and can serve to make the benefits of processes realizable in even the most complex and fluid of work settings. Think of it as basically the mass customization of business processes.

Flinn also shows how learning value is created, can be measured and then assessed against project value, providing a clearer picture of the value of intellectual capital. He further recommends changes in how we develop ideas for innovation and suggests reversing the traditional idea funnel. Then Flinn takes these ideas and compares them against the three business archetypes: Product Innovator, Relationship Owner & Supply Network Architect.

The first three parts of the book are full of good ideas, insight and analysis, but Part 4 is a bit of a letdown. Implementing the Learning Layer, a mere six pages, doesn’t tell you much. However, there is a lot in the previous sections for guidance if you already understand processes and technologies from IT, HR, OD and  social media. If not, you could engage ManyWorlds for consulting and then implement on their Epiture platform.

In looking at the specifications for Epiture (aka “the learning layer”) the company describes it as a Web 3.0 system that includes enterprise level web site management; document management;  social networking and tagging & ontologies. Even without a full product comparison, I would say that several other platforms, including open source Elgg or Drupal can do much of this.

The key difficulty I see in the implementation of a learning layer is getting people to use it. As a layer, it is not integrated into the work tools. Even if socially aware systems collect and analyze data and feed these into the learning layer, the layer has to be used by people. Perhaps it can be effective if only a portion of the work force is involved in the active sharing of tacit knowledge through social networking. While I agree in principle with the learning layer, I’d have to see it in action and understand how the organization got there. I have little doubt in the potential of the learning layer but I’m not sure if it will revolutionize organizational learning.

In spite of my comments in the paragraph above, I would strongly recommend this book. Just the analysis on learning in networks is worth it. Much of what is recommended here reinforces 1) the wirearchy framework and 2) PKM and PLE development. Some form of learning layer could become the means by which wirearchies work and also use the cumulative results of individuals and their personal – knowledge/learning – management/sharing – systems/environments.

Other Related Posts:

Knowledge Stock & Flows

BRP & ERP

We may think we should adopt best practices, but to be really effective and innovative we need to practice to be best.

First, we have to do the hard thinking  about how to do things better. Jay Deragon talks about how important it is to think about what we do and not just emulate others:

Social Doo Doo’s are those that practice and copy, what others do expecting to get the same or better results. Social Doo Doo’s are a dime a dozen and the market seems to think hiring the Doo Doo’s will help their business do something different. Doing something different and getting more than you’ve gotten in the past  requires you to know how to think which isn’t what others are doing.

Gaining  new knowledge or creating new knowledge and knowing what to do with it is more productive than doing what others do. To gain or create new knowledge requires thinking which is a lot deeper than doing.

Another example of advancing practice in a field is provided in The New Yorker’s The Bell Curve: What happens when patients find out how good their doctors really are? In this article, a doctor explains how radically new thinking saved the life of a fire fighter but his mates refused to try something different and they perished.

As Berwick explained, the organization had unravelled. The men had lost their ability to think coherently, to act together, to recognize that a lifesaving idea might be possible. This is what happens to all flawed organizations in a disaster, and, he argued, that’s what is happening in modern health care. To fix medicine, Berwick maintained, we need to do two things: measure ourselves and be more open about what we are doing. This meant routinely comparing the performance of doctors and hospitals, looking at everything from complication rates to how often a drug ordered for a patient is delivered correctly and on time. And, he insisted, hospitals should give patients total access to the information. “ ‘No secrets’ is the new rule in my escape fire,” he said. He argued that openness would drive improvement, if simply through embarrassment. It would make it clear that the well-being and convenience of patients, not doctors, were paramount. It would also serve a fundamental moral good, because people should be able to learn about anything that affects their lives.

Imitating what others do is not the way to make progress, or as Marshall McLuhan said,  “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” Individuals and organizations need to chart their own courses but “Best Practice” thinking is still widespread.  I have found that decision-makers in organizations can be too lazy to extrapolate and figure out how to apply practices in their own context. They want easy, clear answers and hence have the tendency to hire cookie-cutter solutions from big name consultancies. But there are no easy answers. As my colleague Jon Husband says of his wirearchy framework, it enables the mass customization of business, and that is what we need to replace best practices. Individuals and organizations continuously practicing to be best, on a large scale.

No technology or process improvement will save an unraveling industry or organization. What is needed is better thinking and learning while practicing to be the best. This starts with transparency in sharing our knowledge and doing our work.

Even though we have witnessed significant changes in the work we do, F.W. Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911) still informs much of our business practice.

It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.

Best practices are published in most business journals and management books, because the aim of an industrial business is to simplify processes as much as possible in order to replicate them at scale. Design once and repeat many times is also the foundation of our education and training systems. Maybe that’s why organizations are breaking down all over the place. Whether it’s oil companies, financial institutions, or military commands, they all have one thing in common – the command & control organizational chart. We engineered our organizations to get efficiencies of scale and then addressed problems as they arose by layering on support functions. What came first, the business or the human resource function? For organizations to function in complexity, they need to simplify:

“When you choose radical simplicity, the great industrial age systems of power and control begin to buckle and break. So simplify.” ~ Umair Haque

Taylor’s model needs to be reversed because our work has been reversed. From mostly simple tasks and a few complicated ones a century ago, we now have many complicated tasks and growing complex ones. There isn’t much simple work that anybody is willing to pay for any more. Much of it has been outsourced to the end-user, in forms such as automatic tellers or online ordering.

Radical simplicity or a more natural management framework for complex work environments could be described as follows:

It is only through innovative and contextual methods, the self-selection of the most appropriate tools and work conditions and willing cooperation that more productive work can be assured. The duty of being transparent in our work and sharing our knowledge  rests with all workers.

With simplicity, significantly fewer control methods and processes are required.

Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week:

Quotes of the Week:

@ralphmercer – “committees are places to lure great ideas to be killed while absolving everyone of the blame”

via @planetrussell- “Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while giving the appearance of stability.” —Nassim Nicholas Taleb, PhD.

“when hiring, we don’t care about formal education” says @JasonFried of 37Signals – the new workplace, the new normal

—

via @sebpaquet – Cognitive research shows that facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds:

Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

via @robpatrob – Jesse’s Café Américain – Nothing was sacred: The theft of the American dream:

“Eliminating government” is a trap put forward by the plutocrats for those unable to reason except by prejudice, as they desire to exercise their power unimpeded by the rule of law. Once you knock down the protections and the safeguards in the name of reform, the wolves will turn on the public in an orgy of looting and exploitation. This is an old story, and sadly it often works.

The approaching end of the corporation as a closed box by @euan

So many of my conversations with clients end up being about either maintaining the corporation’s managerial integrity in the face of marauding hordes of Facebook enabled staff, or protecting their brand integrity in the face of viral damage spinning out of control online when a customer decides to get their own back for a bad experience. Neither the fantasy of brand nor managerial integrity are sustainable.

“Social” thinking vs Doing – by @jderagon

Gaining  new knowledge or creating new knowledge and knowing what to do with it is more productive than doing what others do. To gain or create new knowledge requires thinking which is a lot deeper than doing.

“Every amateur epistemologist knows that knowledge cannot be managed. Education has always assumed that knowledge can be transferred and that we can carefully control the process through education. That is a grand illusion.” David Jonassen

While knowledge cannot be managed [at an organizational level*], we can work at managing our own knowledge. That’s what personal knowledge management (PKM) is all about. Individually we can manage information flows, make sense of them and share with others, especially people with similar interests or common goals. Enterprise “knowledge management” initiatives have not been proven to work very well and may even be irredeemably corrupted. Dave Pollard’s experience with knowledge management shows how important it is to personalize our sense-making and how futile standardized methods and practices can be:

So my conclusion this time around was that the centralized stuff we spent so much time and money maintaining was simply not very useful to most practitioners. The practitioners I talked to about PPI [Personal Productivity Improvement] said they would love to participate in PPI coaching, provided it was focused on the content on their own desktops and hard drives, and not the stuff in the central repositories.

Luis Suarez prefers the term knowledge sharing to knowledge management. If this helps us move away from central digital information repositories (Knowledge Management, Document Management, Learning Content Management Systems, Content Management Systems, etc.) then I’m all for it.  I’m not advocating tearing down any existing IT infrastructure (yet); but we need to enable a parallel system that can handle the distributed nature of work in addressing complex problems, namely weaker central control and better distributed communications and decision-making.

The best first step in getting work done is to help each worker develop a PKM process, with an emphasis on personal. As each person seeks information, makes sense of it through reflection and articulation, and then shares it through conversation, a distributed knowledge base is created. It’s messier and looser than traditional KM, but it’s also more robust. This is what many of us already do. If you take all the published resources of my colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance you will see a loosely connected knowledge base of thousands of assets. They can be found, sometimes by searching and frequently by asking the person who created them. We each use different systems and connect with the open protocols of the web, like RSS, hyperlinks, OPML, etc.

The way to implement organizational knowledge sharing is already visible on the edges of the workplace. Many bloggers are doing it and have been for years. All it takes is getting everyone to do some form of PKM, on their own terms. Once most everyone is seeking, sensing and especially sharing, it’s a relatively easy task to start harvesting and analyzing our collective knowledge. For instance, take what Tony Karrer has done with eLearningLearning and expand this to include social bookmarks and synthesized micro-sharing, like my weekly Friday’s Finds on Twitter.

The real value of PKM is when enough people in an organization do it and create a critical mass of diverse conversations. PKM is our part of a social learning contract that makes us better off individually and collectively. For workers to be engaged over the long term, PKM must remain personal, and the organization must use a gentle hand at all times.

Using open Web systems ensures that not only will the organization get access to valuable information flows, but workers will be able take their piece of it if they leave. A little give and take will go a long way. Allowing the tools to be portable will ensure commitment and engagement without any coercive action on the part of the organization.

The collective sharing of PKM in the enterprise has the potential to create a dynamic knowledge base for idea management that can drive innovation.

* added to give clarification, in case of any confusion

Is social media added to a learning platform the answer to promoting informal and social learning in the enterprise?

To address these trends and take advantage of the new capabilities that social computing and social networks can bring to learning, SkillSoft’s Books24×7 division introduced inGenius. It enables social learning by extending the value of expert information and infusing it with the knowledge and expertise of an organization’s own employees. Unlike many stand-alone social networking applications, inGenius is built on SkillSoft’s Books24×7 on demand content collections containing more than 25,000 titles — digital books from leading publishers, analyst research reports, and white papers — as well as 1,300 videos of thought leaders and practitioners.

SkillSoft says they realize that learning has become more social and the interest in peer learning has increased. This is the right decision, within the constraints of SkillSoft’s technology platform and current business model. We can’t expect incumbents to just cast away their cash cows. The question is whether it is enough to give a significant organizational performance advantage. The model of having conversations around social objects, such as books, can work well in an organization that values and encourages reading and discussions. This model worked in the past with Company Command.

In A Framework for Social Learning in Enterprise I wrote:

Our workplaces are becoming interconnected because technology has enabled communication networks on a worldwide scale. This means that systemic changes are sensed almost immediately. Reaction times and feedback loops have to get faster and more effective. We need to know who to ask for advice right now but that requires a level of trust and trusted relationships take time to nurture. Our default action is to turn to our friends and trusted colleagues; those people with whom we’ve shared experiences. Therefore, we need to share more of our work experiences in order to grow those trusted networks. This is social learning and it is critical for networked organizational effectiveness.

While social media additions to legacy systems are an advancement, I think they are not enough. Learning and working must be embedded in the work flow. The SkillSoft example, one of the bettter ones in the industry that I have seen, encourages conversations, but these conversations are still divorced from the necessary daily work of collaboration. Knowledge has to be applied, so we have to stop this industrial separation of learning and working. We need systems that help get the work done. As our work environments become more complex, we need to:

• make sense of constantly changing and growing information flows;
• share tacit knowledge and use it to …
• develop emergent practices together (especially barely repeatable processes).

Here are some of the things I learned on Twitter this past week:

Mark Twain’s Posthumous Bombshells by @cburell

Why is Mark Twain’s autobiography only coming out now, 100 years after his death? Because he stipulated so before dying.

What he expresses in these screenshots from a PBS Newshour clip of the manuscript suggests why he might have wanted these thoughts to stay silent for a century. And they’re strangely resonant in our own day.

via @couchlearner – The Most Important Question to Ask a Consultant Before Saying Yes – by @timberry:

So the most important question to ask, before you agree to a consulting job,  is who is actually going to be doing the work. Who will deliver it, and who will you talk to in the interim. Yes, you’d think that would all be obvious. But the bigger and more successful the consulting company, the less likely that the actual work will be done by the people you talk to. For example, with most of the top 10 consulting firms the partners sell the jobs (they call them engagements) and the associates – relatively recent hires – do the work.

Has Knowledge Management Been Bad For Us? by @rickladd

But I think we’re missing the point about the real value of knowledge. If, in fact, the largest (by far) percentage of an enterprise’s useful knowledge is locked between the heads of its employees and, if (as we frequently say about tacit knowledge) much of it can’t be accessed until it’s required, why are we not spending more of our limited funds on facilitating the connection and communication, as well as the findability and collaborative capabilities of our employees?

@robpatrob – How to break through the culture barriers in Social Media – Veterans Affairs [VAC] creates a Wedge

So even before “Social Media” was a buzz word, VAC had created a site, using kids, where the public could find out about their loved ones online and where the public could not only look but participate.

The key issue here in terms of culture and barriers, is that this is quite real – the public are really contributing and the service is authentic and valuable – but that the risks are low. Above all that VAC is learning by doing how to get a start.

@DanielPink “The real reason China is laughing at the US” - Creativity: one core skill here, via @charlesjennings

@rossdawson – 5 graphic frameworks showing the future of media:

In PKM in a Nutshell, I linked my various posts on personal knowledge management to make the framework more coherent. My ITA colleague, Jane Hart has just released an extensive resource that correlates nicely with the PKM framework. It is called A WORKING SMARTER RESOURCE: A Practical Guide to using Social Media in Your Job and includes seven sections (my annotations on how they connect to PKM):

1. Finding things out on the Web (SEEK)
2. Keeping up to date with new Web content (SEEK)
3. Building a trusted network of colleagues (SEEK & SHARE)
4. Communicating with your colleagues (SHARE)
5. Sharing resources, ideas and experiences with your colleagues (SHARE)
6. Collaborating with your colleagues (SHARE & USE)
7. Improving your personal productivity (SENSE & USE)

Here’s the a description and rationale for adopting PKM, individually and within organizations:

• PKM is a way to deal with ever-increasing amounts of digital information.
• It requires an open attitude toward learning and finding new things (I Seek).
• PKM methods can help to develop processes of filing, classifying and annotating for later retrieval.
• PKM leverages  open web-based systems that facilitate sharing.
• A PKM mindset aids in observing, thinking and using information & knowledge better (I Sense).
• Transparent PKM helps to share ideas with others (We Share).
• After a while, you begin to realize you’re in a community of practice when your practice changes (We Use).
• PKM prepares the mind to be open to new ideas (enhanced serendipity, or chance favours the prepared mind).

Formal training just won’t cut it any more as the primary means by which we prepare and adapt in order to get work done. Training isn’t dead, it’s just not enough, and cannot be the only tool in the box.

—

As Jay Cross stated in a recent interview:

Formal learning can be somewhat effective when things don’t change much and the world is predictable …

Today’s world is the opposite in every way imaginable …

Things are changing amazingly fast …

There’s so much to learn …

Today’s work is all about dealing with novel situations …

This image, from Cynthia Kurtz’s post, Confluence, clearly shows the challenge we face in our networked organizations competing and collaborating in complex adaptive systems.

The challenge is getting organizations that are used to dealing with the Known & Knowable to be able to manage in Complex environments and even Chaotic ones from time to time. As can be seen in Kurtz’s graphic, that means weaker central control which is, of course, scary for traditional management. This is not a training problem but rather a management issue. How can you be less directive and enable distributed work, and therefore distributed (and undirected) learning? Actually there are historical examples, including guerrilla groups; religious movements; and social organizations. We need to look back as well as into the future. There are lessons and examples that can help us once we cast off some of our industrial management assumptions.

Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911) inform many of our current practices but there are other models and frameworks available. The first step is seeing that we have a problem and our current models are inadequate. This is a conversation that all business managers and organizational leaders need to have. We should be ready to have many informed conversations about managing in complexity and put forward some plausible options. For further reading:

General framework: Wirearchy

Background & Models: Gary Hamel: Future of Management; Thomas Malone: The Future of Work; Andrew McAfee: Enterprise 2.0

Ideas & Methods: Working Smarter Fieldbook; State of Learning in the Workplace

More conversations: The Smart Work Company; Internet Time Alliance blog;

The Working Smarter Fieldbook (June 2010 version) is now out. This is a collaborative effort by all of us at the Internet Time Alliance and was spearheaded by Jay Cross. Our intention is get the conversation focused on what’s important for business, including the training & learning department – working smarter. Learning is just a means and not the end, but this perspective has somehow been lost along the way in many organizations over the past decades.

A toolbox
Years ago, Stewart Brand published The Whole Earth Catalog to provide “access to tools.” It listed all manner of interesting and oddball stuff, from windmill kits to hiking sox to books like Vibration Cooking. The Catalog didn’t tell readers how to live their lives; it merely described things that might help them to do their own thing. Feedback and articles submitted by readers made each edition better than its predecessor.
The Working Smarter Fieldbook follows the tradition of The Whole Earth Catalog. Harold, Jane, Clark, Charles, Jon, and Jay provide access to the tips, tricks, frameworks, and resources that we’ve used to help organizations work smarter. Our goal is to put together an irresistible package of advice.

Here are some of the things I learned on Twitter this past week:

QUOTES OF THE WEEK:

@KareAnderson “Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

“Most of what we know we learn from other people. We pay tuition to a few of these teachers … but most of it we get for free, and often in ways that are mutual – without a distinction between student and teacher … We know this kind of external effect is common to all the arts and sciences – the ‘creative professions.’ All of intellectual history is the history of such effects.” Does Milwaukee have enough college graduates to thrive?

@faboolous “Knowledge work thus requires that each party offer something with no guarantee that they will get anything specific in return”.

@bduperrin “The more social you are you [the] more opportunities you get, the more busy you are, the less social you become.”

@jonhusband “Unfortunately, HR is the home base for the management practices based on old mental models about work & motivation .. not synched with networked work”

@tdebaillon “Most companies aren’t designed for collaboration.” My Little Enterprise 2.0 Diffusion Framework

@umairh “The problem isn’t that we need new jobs. It’s that we need a better economy, composed of new kinds of companies, built for a higher purpose.”

Henry Mintzberg: “In a word, corporate America is sick.” – “A viable economy needs to be led by explorers, not exploiters.” – “The Problem Is Enterprise, Not Economics” via @jonhusband

Survey results from a 2009 Chief Learning Officer survey showed that 77% of respondents felt that people in their organization were not growing fast enough to keep up with the business. And what have the learning and development (L&D) specialists been doing about it? Not much it seems. Donald Clark reports that decision-makers at UK organizations feel that:

• 55% claim L&D failing to deliver necessary training
• 46% doubt L&D can deliver
• less than 18% agree that L&D aligned with business

But let’s not blame just L&D. Human Resources (HR) seem to be out of sync with organizational needs as well, nicely summed up in a recent FastCompany article:

I think successful organizations are very rigorous and creative about getting profitable work from their employees, their managers, and their business units. The problem is, those organizations don’t expect as much from HR, hence HR is usually not overseen, not measured, and not judged for its performance. It’s the department no one wants to be responsible for. It’s the department that is not subjected to outcomes analysis.

But the real culprit is management and that’s what needs to change. Steve Denning blames the Harvard Business School mindset for holding back organizational progress and goes on to explain how senior management kills innovation in many areas, including knowledge management:

So even when an oasis of excellence and innovation is established within an organization being run on traditional management lines, the experience doesn’t take root and replicate throughout the organization because the setting isn’t congenial. The fundamental assumptions, attitudes and values are at odds with those of traditional management.

I’m seeing that all of our initiatives for increased knowledge-sharing; communities of practice; social business;  or networked learning are rather futile unless management itself changes. The real chasm at work is between the C-suite and the K-workers. I’m not sure how to change this, but the focus (or in German: schwerpunkt) has be on three things: management, management & management. Anything else is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

@ADDIE_ID is a Twitter pseudonym for someone who discusses “Analysis-Design-Development-Implementation-Evaluation” and the “Instructional Design” model, and is really most sincerely dead, as are many training-related theories. A recent Tweet on multiple intelligences started off a chain-reaction in my mind:

I responded that many learning theories-in-use have become the hocus-pocus of the training industry. Here is what a quick search on multiple intelligences (which has a tendency to be linked with learning styles) brought:

Howard Gardner: The Myth of Multiple Intelligence

Gardner’s multiple intelligences have therefore been utilised to justify the development of broader curriculum opportunities and increased differentiation in teaching. The theory has also been aligned with learning styles. This paper raises serious concerns regarding the empirical basis for the theory of multiple intelligences and suggests that it has confused the social basis of intellectual activity with a proposed set of biologically based characteristics.

Occam’s Donkey: Mind Myth 7

Intelligence as a concept is generally associated with the kind of thinking capacity that make for success as school. Gardner’s labeling the aptitudes he proposed as intelligences, naturally led teachers to erroneously assume that they were fungible (one could substitute for another) and should be taught to.

Multiple Intelligences: The Making of a Modern Myth

In the end, Gardner’s theory is simply not all that helpful. For scientists, the theory of the mind is almost certainly incorrect. For educators, the daring applications forwarded by others in Gardner’s name (and of which he apparently disapproves) are unlikely to help students. Gardner’s applications are relatively uncontroversial, although hard data on their effects are lacking. The fact that the theory is an inaccurate description of the mind makes it likely that the more closely an application draws on the theory, the less likely the application is to be effective. All in all, educators would likely do well to turn their time and attention elsewhere.

Another theory that informs practice in the field of education and training is Bloom’s Taxonomy, which has major flaws, as I wrote in Better than Bloom’s [see comments for more references]. I’m sure that many others can be added, so feel free to comment or link.

I would like to see a serious discussion, online or in physical space, that gets at many of the theories we use and shows practitioners what they are based on, how they work and their validity in view of the current science and research. We should keep in mind that while, “All models are wrong, some are useful” ~ George E.P. Box. This discussion should not be a myth-busting exercise but more of a pragmatic approach on what works and why. For educators, trainers, developers, vendors, etc. – we owe it to our field.

Suggested tag for Delicious, Twitter, et al – lrntheory

The last time I looked at roles in education I was inspired by Anil Mammen to create a table based on his definitions. I think some of the descriptions can be used in a prescriptive way of getting out of our industrial, hierarchical mindset and moving to an enterprise 2.0 or wirearchical culture. In networks, learning is the work, so a critical part of this culture shift is viewing learning as quite different from traditional training. The objective is to become a wirearchy:

a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology

Though incremental change may not always work, it might be easier for established organizations to move to a transition zone in getting there:

Hierarchical Getting There Wirearchical Training – Learning & Development – Organizational Development – HR
Representative of the establishment. Guide Peer in learning. Responsible for imparting approved knowledge. Knows what to teach, when & how. Continuously learn & unlearn. Omit & modify as necessary.

Collude with the establishment. Knowledgeable on a given subject.

Interpreter of information. Provocateur

Connector

Workers - Learners – Employees – Associates

Powerless receiver of knowledge. Empowered to find knowledge. Critical Thinker.

Democratization of knowledge.
Studies out of fear of failure, reprisal, or displacement. Closing of teacher-learner divide.
Decentralization of authority.
Selfish motive to learn – job, money, fame, power, desire to appear smart. Opportunities for self-directed learners. Seeker of truth.

Engaged professional-amateur.

Arete* [via Stephen Downes]

* Arete in ancient Greek culture was courage and strength in the face of adversity and it was to what all people aspired.

Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week:

@Louisvancuijk – “Knowledge is only a rumour until it is in the muscles.”

Connected, a declaration of interdependence by @tiffanyshlain

Combining powerful visuals, humor, animation, irony, and serious messages, Connected explores the visible and invisible connections between the major issues of our time — the environment, population growth, technology, human rights, and the global economy – demonstrating how they are all interdependent. Following the filmmaker’s exploration of her own place in the world during a transformative set of circumstances in her life, Connected exposes the importance of personal connectedness in relation to understanding global conditions, ultimately showing how all of humanity is invested in today’s crucial issues.

Online Communities are Changing my World – by @edavidove

#1 – I was organizing a conference in London UK for a client. I researched the internet (blogs, discussion threads, social networks, etc.) and found 2 very interesting speakers to participate. One was from Finland and one was from the USA. The first time we met in person was at the conference. We continue to network and collaborate to this day. One of the speakers connected me to an incredible career opportunity.

Birthing; midwives; knowledge management; organizations & structures – by @johnt

What I got out of it is that midwives are facilitators in uncertain situations.

No two births are alike, and nearly all births don’t fall on the planned date.

Every “mother to be” is different and the midwives both have to deal with people and their situation. They don’t know what to expect as they have not seen the “mother to be” going through a birth, either has the “mother to be” if it’s their first (even if it was the second or third baby, not every birth is the same anyway, so not even the “mother to be” knows how she will react to new circumstances, especially in different environments).

Performance Consulting: finding the best solution from the training, informal learning, performance support mix – by @c4lpt

When confronted with a learning or performance problem, the normal and traditional response from L&D is to create a training solution, probably in the form of an all-singing, all-dancing content-rich e-learning course. For a long while I’ve compared this approach with using a hammer to crack the proverbial nut!

Steve Denning: HBR: Rushing to the 20th Century – via @RossDawson

Want to kill your firm quickly? Then study the current issue of Harvard Business Review. Imbibe its philosophy, its attitudes and its values. Implement everything it says. In so doing, you will be well on the way to turning your organization into a fully-fledged 20th Century organization, with a life expectancy of around 5-10 years.

Competition is overrated: Startups are primarly competing against indifference, lack of awareness, and lack of understanding — not other startups – via @sebpaquet

1) Almost every good idea has already been built. Sometimes new ideas are just ahead of their time. There were probably 50 companies that tried to do viral video sharing before YouTube. Before 2005, when YouTube was founded, relatively few users had broadband and video cameras. YouTube also took advantage of the latest version of Flash that could play videos seamlessly.

Here’s an infographic from Ross Dawson on Trend Blends to watch as we consider our common futures:

I’ve noticed these trends pop up in my readings and observations, for example:

Power Shifts Eastward: Clay Burell’s advice for teachers scorned:

Teachers have “asked what they can do for their country,” and they do it. Daily. But they should have the good sense to also ask what their country is doing for them, patriotic martyrdom propaganda aside. If their country has reached a “tottering, chaotic” point at which it “loathes” them, then teachers do have choices.

One of those choices is Asia. America used to be a magnet for other countries’ brain-drain. Asia seems the better magnet now.

It is for me, anyhow.  I’m thankful that I teach in Asia — because Asia is thankful for it, too.

Localism: Seeking Farmland is four people cycling across the land and connecting with local farmers. “We are two couples in our mid- to late twenties who, each having spent two to four years apprenticing on and managing various organic farms, are now seeking a long-term farming opportunity together.”

Volatility: A black eye for democracy, by Steve Paiken:

In Toronto the Good, we saw a law passed and enforced that was more anti-democratic than the War Measures Act. And we saw twice as many people arrested over a single 24-hour period in Toronto — more than 900 at last count — than what took place during the October Crisis in Quebec 40 years ago. And that event is in our history books as the most notorious abuse of civil rights in modern Canadian history.

Digitalisation: Goodbye to the office by Seth Godin:

1. If you have a laptop, you probably have the machine already, in your house.
2. If you do work with a keyboard and a mouse, the items you need to work on are on your laptop, not in the office.
3. The boss can easily keep tabs on productivity digitally.
4. How many meetings are important? If you didn’t go, what would happen?
5. You can get energy from people other than those in the same company.
6. Of the 100 people in your office, how many do you collaborate with daily?
7. So go someplace. But it doesn’t have to be to your office.

Globalisation: The World is Watching – the World Cup online, from any device, anywhere. Or, as @umairh writes, “when Chinese wages rise, kiss your made-in-china lifestyle goodbye. time for betterness.”

Urbanisation: Urban Revival by Richard Florida, “Long-established trends in the growth and decline of  America’s cities appear to be shifting …” – Cities
Anxiety: We need to learn more about healthy workplaces: What’s the future? A recent Canadian study showed that depression and anxiety affect up to 15% of pre-schoolers. Mental health is an important issue that will not go away and informed discussions are necessary at all levels. I’m glad I learned about this over the Summer.

Environmental Change: Climate change and environmental degradation should be obvious to all but many are still flogging the scientists.

Over three years ago I wrote that the future of learning is DIY:

With Google you can find most information that you need. YouTube is a quick and easy way to get “learning objects” to the world. Apple gives the essential tools for knowledge workers, and in a nice package. Wikipedia has shown that the wisdom of crowds is just as good as the wisdom of elites. Starbucks gives free-agents and road warriors a place to meet and work. These top brands provide the equivalent of the interstate highway system for the creative age.

Enabling DIY (do-it-yourself) on the Web appears to be a good business model. Even on the fringes, such as wi-fi from a café. This is the power of informal learning, if organisations decide to enable it. It has to be DIY, user-driven and uncontrolled. People will figure out what’s best for them, as they have for millennia.

Has anything changed?

There seem to be more DIY platforms today and they are being used, though the business models are not yet clear. Facebook has enabled DIY ridiculously easy group forming, but it comes with a price on privacy. Ning was wildly popular as a DIY online community builder, but that business model did not seem to work. Open source Elgg may replace Ning with a non locked-in platform, but its success remains to be seen.

For mass DIY, ease of use is the trump card. Just look at Google Docs, the best and easiest DIY online collaboration suite, in my opinion. I remember using Writely (sold to create Google Docs) and it had a better user interface in my opinion, but was only used by digital savvy folks. Google dumbed-down the interface and functions and that ease of use, plus growing demand, made Google Docs a market leader. Timing is everything.

Now that many people have used DIY tools for their online work and play, I can’t see the trend being reversed any time soon. Enabling DIY should be a prime directive in the development of technologies for collaborative work and networked learning as well. Please pass this on to those folks in e-learning

Almost any technology can be a learning technology, I wrote a while back. It’s how it’s used, not what is used.

1. What’s the difference between a conference room and a classroom?
2. What is the difference between a CMS and an LCMS?

A learning technology is mostly about branding  and I’m more interested in non-educational tools (social networking, wikis, blogs, social bookmarks) in that they are not limited by some pre-conceived notions about learning or a constrained pedagogical framework. I can use general tools for instruction, guided study or discovery learning; just as the same physical classroom can be alternately an exciting learning environment or a temporary prison cell.

I believe that special *learning technologies* actually restrain us.

Restraint may be defined as:

1. The act of restraining or the condition of being restrained.
2. Loss or abridgment of freedom.
3. An influence that inhibits or restrains; a limitation.
4. An instrument or a means of restraining.
5. Control or repression of feelings; constraint.

First, the notion of learning technologies as separate from working technologies continues to keep learning separate from work. This makes little sense in a networked workplace. Second, learning technologies become a special class of tools that only learning experts understand or care to learn about. Third, they create a class of vendors focused on the training & development department and not the overall organization. My experience is that the only organizations that benefit from learning technologies are those whose core business is learning with a focus on formal, structured delivery – schools.

Learning technologies, by their limiting nature, are instruments of restraint for the networked organization.