Harold Jarche

A guiding goal in much of my work is the democratization of the workplace. Democracy is our best structure for political governance and I believe it should be the basis of our workplaces as well. As work and learning become integrated in a networked society, I see great opportunities to create better employment models.

So is it possible to have Enterprise 2.0 or a Social Business without a democratic foundation? Is the employer/employee relationship the only way we can get work done? In describing Enterprise 2.0, Andy McAfee, who originated the term, says that our work structures will not change:

No, it’s not the death of the hierarchy, of the manager, of the org chart, of the job description, any of that stuff. Some of my colleagues who are interested in this phenomenon, I think take it a bit far, and they become zealots for the manager-free, hierarchy-free, gestalt organization. I don’t think that’s smart, and I don’t think it’s likely, and I don’t think it would be a good idea.

Everything we’re talking about is totally compatible with an official chain of command in a hierarchy. You still need someone to set direction and give marching orders. But the idea of input by many and decisions by few is a pretty powerful idea.

Perhaps hierarchy is a major part of the problem, though. Thomas Malone, in The Future of Work (2004) envisaged four potential organizational models for the network era:

Loose hierarchies
Literal democracy – voting for your boss
Outsourcing through specialized guilds
Markets within organizations

All of these are democratic to some extent. Malone wrote that we need to move away from Command & Control and toward a Coordinate & Cultivate management model. Is that possible without democracy?

Democracy is a work in progress, as we know from history, and the first step is commitment. David Korten in The Great Turning, described America, the Unfinished Project:

Democracy is neither a gift nor a license; it is a possibility realized through practice grounded in a deep commitment to truth and an acceptance of the responsibility to seek justice for all.

Commitment to democratic principles is often lacking in descriptions of Enterprise 2.0 and social business. Without such commitment, I think these initiatives will be seen in hindsight as just another management buzz-word. In 2008, some of the best known management experts were brought together to “lay out an agenda for reinventing management“. Their main premises were that:

1) management models are important social technologies;

2) the current models are out-of-date; and

3) we need to develop more human models for the near future.

There was consensus that our current management systems do not work and several of their 25 recommendations were based on democratic principles:

• Redefine the work of leadership.
• Share the work of setting direction.
• Create a democracy of information.
• Expand the scope of employee autonomy.
• Retool management for an open world.
• Humanize the language and practice of business.

For management to work in the network era, it needs to embrace democracy, but we are so accustomed to existing structures that many executives would say it is impossible to run a business as a democracy. However, there are democratic business models that work today. Just not enough.

Enterprise 2.0 will not fulfill its potential unless its foundation is more than just web technologies or connected businesses. We need to integrate democratic organizing principles into our discussions on Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business. Without a solid architectural organizing principle, I don’t think the Enterprise 2.0 ship will sail very far.

Self-governance not only works, it works better than command & control. In Management Rewired: Why feedback doesn’t work and other surprising lessons from the latest brain science, Charles Jacobs covered learning, management models and democracy in the workplace. A consistent theme is to let people manage themselves, because that works:

Rather than limit decentralization to the top of the hierarchy, why not drive it down into the organization as far as possible? Modern information technology makes such “radical decentralization” much easier now than it was in [Alfred] Sloan’s day.

Such an approach enables people to control their own destinies. From a Darwinian perspective, it’s aligned with the urgings of our selfish genes. From a market perspective, it’s more efficient and effective. From a cultural perspective, virtually every organizational innovation since the Western Electric Hawthorne studies has been aimed at fostering democracy and initiative in the workplace because it’s good for both people and the business. Moving to an entrepreneurial organization is just the next step.

Democracy can be a competitive advantage. At TEDx Belfast, Mark Dowds provided 8 reasons to democratize the workplace:

1. Reduced costs
2. Reduced workforce
3. Increased productivity
4. Getting closer to customers
5. Fewer layers of bureaucracy
6. Shorter time to market
7. Increased employee motivation
8. Increased recognition of employee contributions

Let me close with this note from Gwynne Dyer, who wrote that, “Tyranny was the solution to what was essentially a communications problem“.

Modern democracy first appeared in the West only because the West was the first part of the world to develop mass communications. It was a technological advantage, not a cultural one – and as literacy and the technology of mass communications have spread around the world, all the other mass societies have begun to reclaim their heritage too.

We finally have the technology, so that even business no longer needs to be run as a tyranny.

—

Image: Bank of Canada

If you pit a good performer against a bad system, the system will win almost every time.

This quote from Rummler & Brache in Improving Performance, sums up many of the symptoms of hierarchical systems, whether they be schools, businesses or even prisons.

The great work to be done at the beginning of this century is the democratization of the workplace. Efficiency and effectiveness are not enough, and too often become mechanistic. It’s time to discard industrial management models that emphasize command and control and ensure that individuals at all levels have opportunities to engage in and question the system.

Without questioning, things can quickly go awry.

Gary Stager discussed the well-known Milgram Experiments, conducted in the 1960′s to see how far people would go in administering electric shocks to learners. These experiments were replicated by ABC News and Stager picked up the direct link to public education [please read the whole article]:

One of the subjects in the television program was a 7th grade teacher who explained that she didn’t stop shocking the learner because as a teacher she had learned when a student’s complaints were phoney. I thought to myself, “Has she electrocuted many students?”

The teacher asked the researcher, “There isn’t going to be any lawsuit from this medical facility, right?” When told that the teacher was not liable, she replied, “That’s what I needed to know.” It is however worth noting that this was after she induced the maximum shock and the learner demanded that the experiment be terminated.

This is why we need to change the entire education system – constraining curriculum; compulsory testing; useless homework; irrelevant subjects; classrooms cut off from the world; systemic bullying; etc. More or better teachers won’t help; we need to change the system.

In this interview, Dr. Philip Zimardo discussed the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, where students played their roles as guards or prisoners and abuses started within 24 hours:

But on the second morning, the prisoners rebelled; the guards crushed the rebellion and then instituted stern measures against these now “dangerous prisoners”. From then on, abuse, aggression, and eventually sadistic pleasure in degrading the prisoners became the daily norm. Within thirty-six hours the first prisoner had an emotional breakdown and had to be released, followed in kind by similar prisoner breakdowns on each of the next four days.

As Churchill said, “First we shape our structures, and then our structures shape us“. This reminds me of the question about who is the most important person on board a ship. Is it the Captain, the Navigator or the Engineer? Actually, it’s the Architect, because the initial design influences everything else.

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you cannot change the way things work in an organization. The problem may be the organizational model itself and it may be better to leave and create an alternative model than help keep a flawed one going.

Clay Burell had guest blogger Bill Farren discussing the hidden curriculum of school architectural design. He asked what hidden messages are our schools themselves asking by their inherent design:

• Did the building’s designers take into consideration its location?
• Who decided how (if) it should be built?
• Does the building make an attempt to connect students with their outside world?
• What does the formal, intentional curriculum teach?
• How is this formal, intentional curriculum taught?
• How is the school run?
• How is security portrayed?
• What is sold or advertised on campus?

There was an article I read many years ago, but never see cited, about designing learning environments. It’s Rodney Fulton’s SPATIAL model (1991) [my emphasis added]:

While a body of knowledge does exist that documents the relationships between learning and physical environment, there are problems that need to be resolved before the present level of understanding can be systematically advanced. One problem is that common vocabulary does not exist. Thus, in the literature, concepts are often described with similar but not identical terminology. Conversely, the same terms are used for similar but not exactly the same concepts. But this confusion in vocabulary is only a symptom of the fundamental problem: the lack of a conceptual model that explores relationships of physical environment to learning rather than to behavior in general. Architectural models address built environments, emphasizing both interior and exterior features of building design that allow, encourage, prohibit, or inhibit various behaviors. Psychological models discuss environmental attributes that set conditions for or even control human behavior. Sociological models emphasize the importance of environment in terms of how it facilitates human interactions. By emphasizing individual appreciation of the environment, aesthetic models address the relationship of values to human behavior. Workplace training models, including human factors engineering, emphasize the fit between environment and person and seek out optimal conditions for performance.

Each of these perspectives can add to a global understanding of the learning environment; however, a model that addresses learners in learning environments is a needed first step in refining educational research. The model described here – satisfaction-participation-achievement-transcendent/immanent attributes-authority-layout (SPATIAL) — can serve as a fundamental basis for organizing research designed to identify relationships between and among components of the learning environment and attributes of the learner. Further, this model has potential for weaving together findings from architectural, psychological, sociological, aesthetic, and human factors engineering studies.

Rodney Fulton responded, when I originally wrote this post in 2008:

I found it very interesting that some 17 years after I published the SPATIAL Model in a Jossey-Bass publication there was discussion that included the model. I am not aware of any significant use of the model or of any real impact on the field of Adult Education in the United States. I have longe since moved on from the field of Adult Education and am now very involved in Public Education at the Elementary level in the US. But again, it was gratifying to see my model referenced in 2008. If you know of any other people using or interested in the model, I’d be happy to hear from you. Thanks Rodney Fulton

There is still much structural work to be done.

Photo by Atelier Teee

Note: this post is an update of two previous posts from 2008

What if your organization got rid of the Learning & Development function? What would the average manager or department head do? What would workers do?

I’ve been thinking about this for a while. When work is learning, and learning is the work, training that is pushed from outside has less relevance. The L&D department is supposed to ensure that training is appropriate for the job, but with jobs constantly morphing into something else, a major disconnect is developing between the doers and the trainers. How many people take courses that are not relevant to their current work or are provided at the wrong time?

Let me propose some things managers and knowledge workers can do without a Learning & Development department.

Observe how people are learning to do their work already. Find these natural pathways and reinforce them.

Connect any “how-to” learning to the actual task. Show and tell only works if it can be put into practice. The forgetting curve is steep when there is no practice.

Make it everyone’s job to share what they learn. Have you ever noticed how easy it is to find “how-to” videos and explanations on the Web? That’s because someone has taken the time to post them. Everyone in the organization should do this, whether it’s a short text, a photo, a post, an article, a presentation with notes, or a full-blown video.

Make space to talk about things and capture what is passed on. Get these conversations in the open where they can be shared. Provide time and space for reflection and reading. There is more knowledge outside any organization than inside.

Break down barriers. Establish transparency as the default mode, so that anyone can know what others are doing. Unblock communication bottlenecks, like supervisors who control information flow. If supervisors can’t handle an open environment, get rid of them, because they are impeding organizational learning and it’s now mission critical.

If you do have an L&D department, share what you are doing and perhaps they will help you become more self-sufficient for your organizational learning. If they don’t, ignore them, as they will be going away anyway.

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@JaneBozarth – “Setting up only private internal social media platforms is like having phones that won’t call outside the building.”

On perpetual Beta & Social Learning: Are You Learning as Fast as the World Is Changing? – via @TimKastelle

Finally, and most personally, successful learners work hard not to be loners. These days, the most powerful insights often come from the most unexpected places — the hidden genius locked inside your company, the collective genius of customers, suppliers, and other smart people who would be eager to teach you what they know if you simply asked for their insights. But tapping this learning resource requires a new leadership mindset — enough ambition to address tough problems, enough humility to be willing to learn from everyone you encounter. Nobody alone learns as quickly as everybody together.

Clueless in Davos – “A very interesting article in the Foreign Policy magazine about the relevance of Davos – via @AdrianCheok”

… the forum’s two major flaws. The first is that the Davos meeting is a gathering of the global establishment. By definition, establishments are slow and even unable to see and understand developments that run contrary to the orthodoxy of the establishment. One should never expect the unexpected from an establishment institution. The second flaw is even more serious. It is that the theory of globalization underlying the Davos concept is false. That theory holds that globalization is a win-win economic movement that will enrich the whole world and thereby lead the nations to democracy and eternal peace.

Going Mainstream by @reubentozman via @quinnovator

The next change required is to stop talking about “performance support” as though it were a job aid or a little something you use to support a training effort. We need to start talking about performance support as though it were the very essence of what we do and look at training as something that may be used when required. We also tend to use performance support to talk about “just-in-time” training. In the world of business process mapping and systems thinking, everything is “just in time.” All of our interventions need to come when required as dictated by the system. The questions we need to continually ask ourselves are how do we strengthen the system? What interventions and when will lead to better performance of the system?

QR Codes: bad idea or terrible idea? – via @KevinMarks

The only place you should use QR codes is if you have a dedicated reader for them, like a classic barcode scanner, and a workflow that is designed for this that actually saves time. If you do empirical research on using QR codes for the public, you’ll likely see 80% worse performance than text, like this museum did. By all means try the experiment and report your results. Put up a QR code and a printed URL and see which gets the most usage.

Photo by Scott Blake

I had the pleasure of writing an article for the book, Enabling Innovation: Innovative Capability – German and International Views as a follow-up to some work I did with the EU’s International Monitoring Organisation. An interesting aspect of this book is that major articles are written by German researchers and then shorter comments or additions are presented from an international perspective. My article was in response to a weighty paper by Sibylle Peters, entitled, New Forms of Project Organisation and Project Management – Dynamic and Open.

-

Abstract
The increasing structuring of work and organizational processes by forming project involves new challenges to the handling of knowledge work and expands the scope to generate innovations. The classic project management alone is less and less able to manage complex, uncertain, knowledge-based processes. Through alternative approaches social, actor-oriented topics of management will be adressed.

If all you want to read is my short article, then let me save you the $189.00 list price for this book.

—

In New Forms of Project Organisation and Project Management – Dynamic and Open a key theme discussed is the lack of flexibility of traditional project management methods in dealing with complexity.

With increasing requirements for complex and creative work we need new models to get things done. Many of our practices are still premised on work being simple or complicated. Simple systems are easily knowable, whereas complicated systems, while not not simple, are still knowable through analysis. These can be easily managed. However, complex systems are not fully knowable though they can be partially understood through interaction with them. This is antithetical to many of the control protocols of traditional project management.

In the developed world, simple work is constantly getting automated (e.g. automatic bank tellers) while complicated work is outsourced to the cheapest labour market (e.g. off-shore call centres). If companies want to remain competitive in the global market, they need to focus on complex and creative work. Much of complex work is in exception-handling and when exceptions are the rule, rigid rules must become the exception.

We have to understand complex adaptive systems and develop work structures that let us focus our efforts on learning as we work in order to continuously develop next practices. In a knowledge-intensive and creative workplace the role of leadership becomes supportive and inspirational rather than directive. Artificial boundaries that limit collaboration and communication only serve to drag projects (and companies) down and create opportunities for more agile competitors.

While agile methods for project management are discussed in New Forms of Project Organisation and Project Management, an overall agile mindset is also required. This can be fostered in a culture of perpetual Beta. Perpetual Beta means we never get to the final release of our work and that our learning will never stop. Agile organisations realize they will never reach some future point where everything stabilizes and they don’t need to learn or do anything new.

In additional to a mindset of agility, workers need a skillset of autonomy. However, we are trained early in life to look to authority for direction in learning and work. The idea that there is a right answer or an expert with the right answer begins in our schools. Too often, the message from the workplace continues to be that good employees wait for their supervisor to tell them what to do. This is counter-productive in dealing with complexity and working in perpetual Beta. It destroys creativity.

When we move away from a “design it first, then build it” mindset, we can then engage everyone in critical and systems thinking. Workers in agile workplaces must be passionate, adaptive, innovative, and collaborative. Autonomy is the beginning.

Fostering autonomy and agility means that we talk about work differently. For example, dropping the notion of being paid for time is one way to start this change. An hourly wage implies that people are interchangeable, but no two minds are the same. Being paid for time fosters neither autonomy nor agility. There are many other human resource practices should be questioned and dropped, such as job competencies.

The new networked workplace requires collaboration and cooperation. Complex problems cannot be solved alone. Tacit knowledge flows in networks through social learning. Learner autonomy is a foundation for effective social learning. It is the lubricant for an agile organisation. Agility becomes a necessity as we deal with increasing complexity. In order to develop the necessary emergent practices to deal with complexity we therefore need to cultivate the diversity and autonomy of each worker. We also must foster richer and deeper connections which can be built through meaningful conversations. This is social learning in the workplace.

Even in project management, learning is the work.

One example of encouraging social learning is the government of British Columbia, Canada which developed an interactive intranet in order to foster collaboration and communication.

The success of a social intranet ultimately has less to do with technology than with planning, governing and managing change. Walsh [B.C.’s Manager of Creative Strategies] had these lessons to share.

Ditch perfectionism [perpetual Beta]

Communicate! Communicate! Communicate! [social learning]

Trust your team [Autonomy]

Not your government’s voice

As traditional core activities get automated or outsourced, almost all high value work will be done at the outer edge of organisations. At the fuzzy edge of the organisation life is complex and even chaotic. On this periphery, where things are less homogenous, there is more diversity and more opportunities for innovation. Individuals, project teams and organisations have to move operations to the edge to continue learning and developing. In agile organisations, a greater percentage of workers will be on the edge. The core will be managed by very few internal staff. What does this mean for project management? No matter what model one prefers, it will have to be more open, networked and cooperative.

Change and complexity are becoming the norm in our work. We already see this with increasing numbers of freelancers and contractors. Any work where complexity is not the norm will be of diminishing value.

Embracing complexity and chaos is where the future of work lies.

Medecins sans frontières [MSF], or Doctors Without Borders, is marking its 40th anniversary with a collection of stories exposing what it’s like to confront those difficult decisions. The book is called Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience and it comes out later this month.

CBC’s program The Current covers the uncomfortable compromises that humanitarian aid workers regularly face. As The Guardian reports:

Marie Noelle Rodrigue, operations director of MSF in Paris, said: “The time has come to explain the fragile equilibrium between the price it is necessary for an organisation to pay so that you are helping the victims.

“Often that means making a compromise to a degree where you are helping the authorities. This is a question that no-one has wanted to examine and it is good that MSF have looked into it and I think we are happy that we’ve done it honestly.”

MSF is keenly focused on learning from its mistakes and this book is part of that process. Some of those lessons:

Everything is political and influences medical assistance.

Gut feeling is very important to assess complex situations.

Finding common ground between parties in conflict is very difficult and too often simple, but ineffective, solutions are chosen.

The situation is always changing and there is a need for constant reflection, as individuals and at an organizational level.

Impartiality [trust] is the “red line” that cannot be crossed.

Every action is a compromise.

Conflicts are messy & dirty – therefore the humanitarian assistance is messy & dirty.

Learning through constant discussions is critical for all members of the organization.

MSF has a culture of debate and exposing the truth and this lets the organization move forward.

MSF follows the principles of narration and transparency to ensure it stays a viable organization facing complex, messy situations. Many organizations who are trying to adapt to the network era could learn from MSF.

Here are some lessons I’ve learned about online learning communities that are developed in support of training and education:

• A loose-knit online learning community can scale to many participants and remain effective.
• Only a small percentage, ~ 10%, of members, will be active.
• If facilitators can seed good topics and provide feedback, then conversations can flourish.
• If you use a very gentle hand in controlling members/learners, some will become highly participative.
• Design for after the formal course, using tools like social bookmarks, so that artifacts can be used for reference or performance support.
• Create the role of “synthesizer” (could be the community manager or someone else) from the onset, who will summarize the previous week’s activities.
• Keep the structure loose enough so that it can grow or change according to the needs of the community.

Here are some of the insights and observations that were shared via Twitter this past week.

“If the structure does not permit dialogue the structure must be changed. ~ Paulo Freire” – via @surreallyno

“Learning is the human activity which least needs manipulation by others. ~ Ivan Illich” – via @IvanIllich2

@flowchainsensei – “Any organisation is screwed when it believes only certain privileged individuals can lead and/or manage.”

@melissapierce – “If you were a real rebel, you’d realize that anger is the trendiest emotion of all and you’d buck that trend with lusty immutable joy.”

@doctorjeff – “Next time a child comes at you with question after question – embrace it with a smile, for they chose … you.”

@umairh – “It’s no coincidence that “Davos” rhymes with “McFuture”.”

Yochai Benkler: Seven Lessons from SOPA/PIPA/Megauplaod and Four Proposals on Where We Go From Here – via @hreingold

Lesson 3: As the networked environment resists control, more of the flow of networked economy has to be sucked in to the enforcement vortex.

The Net is proving much harder to control than the industries anticipated when they got the Digital Millennium Copyright Act DMCA passed in 1998. In order to actually control materials on the Net, SOPA and PIPA tried to harness a range of technical, economic, and bureaucratic platforms, aimed to impede the functions of an ever-more-vaguely defined set of targets. Technical platforms included most prominently the DNS service and registrars and the search engines. Business platforms included payment systems and advertising systems. In order to achieve effective enforcement in a global digitally networked environment, Hollywood seems destined to try to draw an ever-larger set of platforms and actors into the risk of potential copyright and near-copyright liability.

When an enterprise moves to an organic, value-creating, diverse network, the training department has to join the fray. – by @jaycross

What did CLOs do with the insight that informal learning matters? Next to nothing. They left informal learning to chance. Even now, with the cost-effectiveness and responsiveness of informal learning pushing it to the top of CLO’s priority lists, most are taking baby steps if any steps at all. This is extremely disappointing. We who understand how people learn need to be at the vanguard of establishing social networks, expertise location, online communities, information streams, agile instructional design, help desks, federated content management, continuing reinforcement, peer development, and so on.

Homework: To Flip or to Toss? we read homework in class, discuss it in class, clarify and debate it in class — then briefly write about it at home – by @cburell

My current experiment involves not so much flipping homework as (almost) ending it. I’m using document-based lessons in which all reading and discussion is done in class, and the only homework is a reflective blog post about the day’s content on a team blog — which student team-members read and comment on with corrections, extensions, challenges, etc. I like this so far, for several reasons …

Sebastian Thrun: you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students, but I’ve taken the red pill (video) – via @downes

Much of my work is in helping organizations prepare for increasingly creative and complex work because this is where the business value is, whether in offering differentiated services in a competitive market or in advancing scientific R&D. I have found that Dave Snowden’s Cynefyn framework has been helpful in my sense-making around this and Dave has recently advanced this model with a Work in Progress (WIP).

Complex, as defined by Cynefyn is a state in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance. The approach is to Probe – Sense – Respond in order to sense emergent practice.This is essentially the notion of perpetual Beta; constantly making probes of the environment, sensing what happens and developing next practices in view of the evidence. One cannot understand the environment until one probes it. Analysis is not enough.

Dave identifies  two danger areas in the complex domain, both of which I have seen in organizations: SB & Co:

Strong belief [SB] – Low/Medium convergence, low coherence

I’m not sure of the name here, but this is the domain of different factions with similar power resulted in a fractured and disjoined position. This is one of the issues that techniques such as SNS are designed to resolve; by allowing different groups to work in parallel with interaction, conflict can be resolved through action not dialogue.

Confused [Co] – Low convergence, low/medium coherence

We’ve got some structure in the need but we don’t even have factions fighting between the options. Individuals have needs but there is no clumping or links between those individuals. It’s a mess with few patterns or structures that we can do anything with.

When I was talking to HR Executives last year, the consensus around social media was that they knew their companies had to change but they did not know where to start: Confused. Many seemed to be waiting for a list of Best Practices, but we know from Cynefin that these are only suitable for the Simple domain.

Conversely I have seen requests for proposals developed by one or two departments in an organizations, usually Purchasing & IT, for a workplace collaboration product/service that is highly detailed and constrained but does not reflect the real needs of the workers. Just ask an L&D department if they are satisfied with the technology that was ‘given’ to them to do their jobs: Strong Belief.

So how could you balance convergence and coherence in the complex domain in order to make decisions?

Adopting three principles for working smarter in networked organizations might be a start:

1. Transparency
2. Narration of Work
3. Distribution of Power

I have found Value Network Analysis a good exercise to break down beliefs in the embedded hierarchy and visualize how value actually flows. This helps with transparency, as people can see the organization through a new lens.

The narration of work can bridge beliefs by exposing people daily to what other people are doing. It’s like walking a mile in someone else’s shoes, but  only 140 characters at a time.

Finally, if power is held by one group, let’s say Purchasing & IT, for all software acquisitions, then the end-users won’t even try to get involved in the process. I have seen many such departments resigned to the fact they will have to deal with another enterprise software implementation having had no say in the matter. Understanding the environment and building consensus are the real work of leaders in networks.

We can learn a lot from open conversations with trusted colleagues who want to improve their professional expertise. My colleagues have these conversations regularly and I have learned a lot over the past two years that we’ve been together.

A professional is anyone who does work that cannot be standardized easily and who continuously welcomes challenges at the cutting edge of his or her expertise. ~ David Shaffer

When we updated the Internet Time Alliance website last month, a major component that Paul designed was the integration of our best articles into a single database, called Insights. Every page now dynamically generates recommended readings and we keep adding articles, so that we now have over one hundred.

We have also just curated a number of our thoughts into a single presentation that shows our perspectives on workplace transformation. It’s like an extended business card from all of us.

These days it’s more productive to think of organizations as organisms. Managers become stewards of the living. Their role is to energize people, empower teams, foster continuous improvement, develop competence, leverage collective knowledge, coach workers, encourage collaboration, remove barriers to progress, and get rid of obsolete practices.

Living systems thrive on values that go far beyond the machine era’s dogged pursuit of efficiency through control. Living systems are networks. Optimal networks run on such values as respect for people, trust, continuous learning, transparency, openness, engagement, integrity, and meaning. ~ Jay Cross

Do we really need managers? Is management as we currently practise it out of date for the networked era?

Everything I know, I did not learn in kindergarten. I didn’t go to kindergarten. Perhaps that was good, as that was the year that my father died, and I still did not speak much English anyway. It could have made for a stressful year. No kindergarten meant I could start school a bit later and I think I was really ready when I entered that one-room schoolhouse which was probably the best learning environment I ever had.

There were only three of us in Grade One, so I was also able to listen to what was going on in the Second Grade, in the same row, just ahead of me. Recess and lunch were usually fun, with all ages playing games together. There were not enough students in any one grade to form a dominant group. I was later home-schooled by my mother who never had any formal education in English. This was my introduction to public education.

I went to university straight out of high school and did a standard four-year degree. I got a gentleman’s pass from the Royal Military College and then put my books away. What remains of my undergraduate education is not so much my knowledge of History as my fluency in French. It wasn’t the classes that helped me master the language, but the girl I met in Québec between first and second year. That was real informal learning, watching morning TV cartoons with her young niece, whose French wasn’t too much more advanced than mine. I was one of only a few of my classmates who achieved fluency from no ability at all on entry. Motivation was the critical part of my learning.

Thirteen years later I went to graduate school part-time, with a full-time job and a young family. I could not have done it without the support of my wife. I received a graduate degree in Education but my real education has been in the 14 years since. I have been learning mostly online, first by accessing all of the information available on the web that interested me and more recently by connecting to a worldwide network of people, most of whom I have not met face-to-face. This network now numbers in the thousands.

I have learned that it was a shotgun wedding between robber baron capitalists and progressives, who at the turn of the last century helped to create our public education system, with age-based cohorts, classrooms, bells and a standardized curriculum. The capitalists needed workers who could read instructions, while progressives, like Moses Coady, founder of the Antigonish movement, felt it their mission to help society.

I have noticed with our boys now finishing up at school, that for the most part, the current system does not help them learn. If anything, it stops them from learning. One-size fits nobody, I call it. We were lucky, in that one or both of us parents could be at home during the day. Our boys could stay at home from time to time, such as the year one was frequently bullied – by the teacher. They knew they always had an option not to go to school. If I had to do it over again, I would pull our kids out of the system during middle school and let them become self-directed learners, later having them rejoin their friends in high school. Middle school was a needlessly stressful time for our family.

When I went to school, if a book was not available in the library system, in reality, it did not exist. Now my children can find and read most of what they need. The shift from scarcity to abundance of information is one of the many reasons we need educational reform. There can be no standard curriculum when everything is miscellaneous, as Cluetrain.com co-author Dave Weinberger says. Courses are artifacts of a time when information was scarce and connections were few. With ubiquitous computing, that time is over. Our children know that.

I watch how our kids learn to play computer games. There is no rule book. The fun of the game is in figuring it out. This is always done collaboratively. Collaboration seems natural to this generation. While studying, Facebook is usually open and classmates send messages back and forth as they share in their learning. The whole notion of cheating may be gone in a generation.

I think this generation will be one of the last in the current system. I hope the next public education system is not another shotgun wedding, or a reaction to change, like charter schools can be. Actually, I hope that it’s not a system at all. It should be a network, like the Internet – open, with no centre, using only basic protocols and allowing for innovation at the edges. If we let our children design it, that is most likely what it would be like. It might look like Stockholm’s school without classrooms or something even more radical.

Here are some of the insights and observations that were shared via Twitter this past week.

Quotable Moments:

“The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change. ~ Carl Rogers” – via @timbuckteeth

“The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud. ~ Coco Chanel” – via @transarchitect

@flowchainsensei – “Projects” are no way to run a railway – or any other kind of business, for that matter.”

Audience question about IBM Connect during Lotusphere 2012 “Did you evaluate enterprise LMS [learning management systems] before you built this?” A, “No, we began with how people learn.” – via @marciamarcia

Maps only get you so far:

@upriver_ca - If you were going to be thrown into a fast-moving river, would you rather have a map or a canoe?

Much of the world of management is built around drawing maps. And maps are wonderful things if the things that the map represents are manageable. All too often we confuse the map with the terrain, though, and we imagine that while many leaders would like the map, many of those in the water would prefer the canoe.

Walled Gardens:

@MarkFederman – “re: Apple/iTunes becoming de facto textbook gatekeeper. Given their walled garden/control mentality, this is very concerning.”

Jaron Lanier: The False Ideals of the Web – via @jhagel

The obvious strategy in the fight for a piece of the advertising pie is to close off substantial parts of the Internet so Google doesn’t see it all anymore. That’s how Facebook hopes to make money, by sealing off a huge amount of user-generated information into a separate, non-Google world. Networks lock in their users, whether it is Facebook’s members or Google’s advertisers.

Wired – Dirty Little Secrets: The Trouble With Social Search

Still, this potentially marks a real transformation to the way we have looked for information on the web, one with real winners and losers. It also signals a real danger to the balance of power between users and megacompanies. We are increasingly moving from a bottom-up web, where users vote with their links, keyboards and their clicks to show what’s relevant to them, to a top-down web where that’s doubly or triply mediated by browsers, search engines and social networks.

Oopsie! The Audacious iBooks Author EULA - via @nwinton

Apple, in this EULA [end user license agreement], is claiming a right not just to its software, but to its software’s output. It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty. As far as I know, in the consumer software industry, this practice is unprecedented. I’m sure it’s commonplace with enterprise software, but the difference is that those contracts are negotiated by corporate legal departments and signed the old-fashioned way, with pen and ink and penalties and termination clauses. A by-using-you-agree-to license that oh by the way asserts rights over a file format? Unheard of, in my experience.

In social networks we can learn from each other; modelling behaviours, telling stories, and sharing what we know. This may not be highly efficient, but it it can be very effective. You will know you’re in a real community of practice if it changes your practices.

Education and training are shaping technologies. They reward successive approximations of the desired behaviour. Modelling, on the other hand, is the foundation of social learning:

Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory posits that people learn from one another, via observation, imitation, and modeling. The theory has often been called a bridge between behaviorist and cognitive learning theories because it encompasses attention, memory, and motivation.

If we look at how organizational training & development has functioned, it has been separate from the work being done and focused on shaping behaviours. There is strong evidence that we need to integrate learning into our work in order to deal with the increasing complexity of knowledge work. The valued work in the enterprise is increasing in variety and decreasing in standardization. I have suggested that communities of practice are the bridge between work teams and open social networks, with narration of work an enabler of knowledge-sharing, and of course, modelling behaviour.

The way that Triple Creek [I have no relationship with this company] positions its Open Mentoring platform is a current example of a tool that could enhance social learning (modelling) in the bridging area that communities of practice can offer.

As long as this type of tool is not tied to any team, project or supervisor, it could help connect members of a community of practice. The challenge would be in finding a balance between intrinsic and extrinsic goals. Too much shaping and not enough modelling could turn this into one more thing that has to be done (like annual performance reviews).

Communities are more like dance halls than factories. Platforms that have too much control will not be adopted on a community level. As a consultant, I would like to be able to recommend a variety of these platforms, that can inter-operate on some level, so that enterprise communities can choose the most suitable ones for their stage of development. All communities of practice are unique and will grow, mature and often die over time. No single platform will meet all community needs, but if it supports one of these principles for working smarter - Transparency, Narration of Work or Distribution of Power – it would be worth checking out.

This site was offline from sunrise to sunset today [yes, I missed you, too], in support of the anti-SOPA/PIPA protests. One factor that influenced my decision was this article (and several others) by Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet Law:

Some of the Internet’s leading websites, including Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla, WordPress, and BoingBoing, will go dark today to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). The U.S. bills have generated massive public protest over proposed provisions that could cause enormous harm to the Internet and freedom of speech. My blog will join the protest by going dark tomorrow. While there is little that Canadians can do to influence U.S. legislation, there are many reasons why I think it is important for Canadians to participate.

Here is the Wikipedia article on SOPA/PIPA, the only page available on that site today:

What are SOPA and PIPA?

SOPA and PIPA represent two bills in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate respectively. SOPA is short for the “Stop Online Piracy Act,” and PIPA is an acronym for the “Protect IP Act.” (“IP” stands for “intellectual property.”) In short, these bills are efforts to stop copyright infringement committed by foreign web sites, but, in our opinion, they do so in a way that actually infringes free expression while harming the Internet. Detailed information about these bills can be found in the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act articles on Wikipedia, which are available during the blackout. GovTrack lets you follow both bills through the legislative process : SOPA on this page, and PIPA on this one. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to advocating for the public interest in the digital realm, has summarized why these bills are simply unacceptable in a world that values an open, secure, and free Internet.

I see three major principles for working smarter in networked organizations:

1. Transparency
2. Narration of Work
3. Distribution of Power

I spoke about the distribution of power in my last post on the democratization of the workplace. The narration of one’s work is an essential practice that enables this. Hans de Zwart discusses a narrating-your-work experiment that had a 17 member team use Yammer to share daily experiences with colleagues. He talks about the barriers to narration as well as the perceived benefits of this two-month experiment.

His conclusions and recommendations:

• Don’t formalize narrating your work and don’t make it mandatory. Many people commented that this is one aspect that they didn’t like about the experiment.
• Focus on helping each other to turn narrating your work into a habit. I think it is important to set behavioural expectations about the amount of narrating that somebody does. I imagine a future in which it is considered out of the norm if you don’t share what you are up to. The formal documentation and stream of private emails that is the current output of most knowledge workers in virtual teams is not going to cut it going forward. We need to think about how we can move towards that culture.
• We should have both a private group for the intimate team (in which we can be ourselves as much as possible) as well as have a set of open topic based groups that we can share our work in. So if I want to post about an interesting meeting I had with some learning technology provider with a new product I should post that in a group about “Learning Innovation”. If have worked on a further rationalization of our learning portfolio I should post this in a group about the “Learning Application Portfolio” and so on.

The recommendation of both private and public narration components aligns with the need to support both strong and weak social ties. Covering the public/private spectrum can promote social learning, increase collaboration, and nurture an environment for cross-disciplinary innovation – and bridge the gap to working smarter.

There was a most interesting thread on Twitter today. Bert van Lamoen (@transarchitect) in a series of tweets, said [paraphrasing several]: “Senge’s five disciplines provided instant utility for learning to organizations in 1990, yet learning organizations remain rare to this day. Hierarchy kills all learning. Our social systems are not designed to cope with complexity. Organizational learning is fundamental change. Today’s organization is not fit for organizational learning. Therefore, we need total redesign. Social and transformational architecture encompasses complexity and emergent change.”

In wither the learning organization, I linked to a paper on Why aren’t we all working for Learning Organisations? [PDF]. The authors, John Seddon and Brendan O’Donovan, open with a reference to W. Edwards Deming’s commentary on Peter Senge’s book, The Fifth Discipline (1990).

“Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers – a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars – and on up through the university.

On the job people, teams, and divisions are ranked, reward for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by Objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable.”

After explaining how double-loop learning gets managers to focus on the system and away from controlling people, the authors conclude:

Our argument is that Deming’s statements in his 1990 review of Senge’s work continue to hold true: it is the dominance of the command and control management thinking which, 20 years on, still prevails and prevents the development of more generative learning. It is only by studying an organisation as a system and creating double-loop learning that we might finally see Senge’s ‘learning organizations’ stop being the exceptional and instead become the norm.

Double-loop learning requires an understanding, and a constant questioning, of the governing variables and of course this is where learning abruptly comes up against command & control. Flattening the organization is one way to open communications and delegate responsibility, but asking employees to engage in real critical thinking [double-loop learning], and accepting the resulting actions, will not work unless there is a multi-way flow of power and authority. Critical thinking is not just thinking more deeply but also asking difficult and discomfiting questions. Without power and authority, these become meaningless.

The BetaCodex Network advocates first reducing hierarchy, and then making work independent of the formal structure, in order to increase the value creation structure. This makes sense, but who other than an enlightened CEO is going to make these changes? People like Semler are still outliers in the business world – “On his first day as CEO, Ricardo Semler fired sixty percent of all top managers.”

According to Charles Green this is how large-scale change happens:

Ideas lead technology. Technology leads organizations. Organizations lead institutions. Then ideology brings up the rear, lagging all the rest—that’s when things really get set in concrete.

We have the ideas (and some examples) on the great work that needs to be done at the beginning of this century – create new organizational models that reflect (and actually capitalize on) our humanity. We also have technologies that enable and support collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and connecting on a human level. The major obstacles seem to be that there are not enough good examples and that these organizations are not influential enough to change the dominant business ideologies.

To spread these ideas may require more than just mavens, connectors and salespeople to reach a tipping point. We may also need to identify the “Doer”s inside more organizations and find ways to help them become double-loop learners. We should engage the trustworthy, those people with strong intimacy skills who get things done.

Perhaps we have been focused at the wrong level. I know that my most successful consulting engagements have not been at the very top, but with people who are doing the work. If we can create a mid-level groundswell, without giving up on finding enlightened executives, we may get somewhere.

Unless the dominant command & control management ideology is replaced, then most organizational change initiatives will just be tinkering at the edges. I can see why some people could become jaded over time with every successive new management system that still does not produce real change. The democratization of the workplace has been my guiding mission for the past decade. Democracy is the foundation upon which the likes of  Enterprise 2.0 or the Social Business need to build, in order to foster double-loop learning organizations that can thrive in complexity.

Here are some of the insights and observations that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@EskoKilpi – “Learning is the main driver for productivity. Productivity of learning determines the speed of productivity improvement.”

Teaching: “The master taught by example to the apprentice, by coaching to the journeyman.” by @snowded

It matters who you teach. The more you know about the subject, the less able you are to [teach] beginners classes. I am sure there are some people who can manage this but i haven’t found one yet. In effect to teach (which again is different from speaking) you have to be separate but close in your knowledge base. Academic audiences are good for my work as they challenge and test in a way that a conference audience rarely does. Not only that, you can use words and reference concepts without explanation which means you move faster to more interesting grounds.

@flowchainsensei – “In a world of complexity and change, is consensus unrealistic, and does (ongoing) diversity of viewpoints offer more?”

No more business as usual: “As all business becomes social business, L&D professionals face a momentous choice.” by @JayCross

Our evolving view is that successful future organizations will become learning networks of individuals creating value. They will become stewards of the living. This is a major break from the past — and an opportunity for L&D professionals to become essential contributors to their organizations.

“… old ideas, no matter how thoroughly discredited, die a slow death as, one by one, their advocates pass away. ~ Stiglitz” – via @DemingSOS

Do we need patents? by @lemire

Granting monopolies, even temporary ones, is expensive. We need to be sure that the gains out-weight the costs. In this case, the rationalization offered by the industry does not stand up to scrutiny:

• The U.S. and the U.K. have always had strong patent laws protecting chemicals and drugs. Meanwhile, continental Europe had much weaker patent protection. Until recently, you could not patent a drug or a chemical in Germany (1967), Switzerland (1977) and Italy (1978). Where did the pharmaceutical industry thrive before the 1960s? In Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Though Italy was the fifth produce of drugs in the 1970s, its industry is now practically disappearing.

In The 3 Structures of an Organization, the BetaCodex Network covers the weaknesses of our existing management and organizational models and shows a better way to design more network-centic businesses. For example, the authors state that the average modern organization expends about 20% of its energy on value creation, while the best may spend 50%. This still accounts for a significant amount of wasted energy. Organizations should dedicate 70% of their energies toward value creation.

These value creation structures have to be externally (market/customer) focused and are the most important parts of the business. Modern work is increasingly dealing with exceptions, which is complex and cannot afford the rigidity of centralized control systems. Informal networks have to be recognized as they provide the glue that keeps the organization together. Formal structures are the least important and only serve to support value creation, the opposite of centralized, top-down hierarchies.

Formal Structure, as can solely serve the trivial purpose of external compliance, should be subdued to or coherent with [the] Value Creation Structure, in which the work is done and where [the] organizational periphery is in charge, not bosses.

This is the kind of world without bosses I referred to in my last post.

The guiding principles make a lot of sense, and reflect what I have seen in organizations. Real change does not begin until you change the formal structure.

Eliminate Formal Structure, as much as possible, by fully aligning it with value creation and by allowing it only for external compliance. Make the work independent of formal structure.

Focus all organizational energy (e.g. with regards to learning and mastery) on the first two structures – not on formal structure, which is trivial. Approach Informal and Value Creation Structures with a systemic mind-set.

Support the positive effects of Informal Structure through high levels of transparency, investment in self-awareness of teams, radical decentralization of decision-making towards the periphery, and also through bonding rituals, and strong, shared values and principles.

This presentation is part of an ongoing discussion at BetaCodex. If you are interested in how these principles might apply to learning and development, here is an excerpt from a draft white paper (in development):

Never, ever, attempt to manage individual performance, though, as individual performance does not exist.

You cannot and need not develop people. People can do that on their own. An organization, however, can create conditions for self-development, getting out of the way by not trying to control or contain it.

Individual mastery is the only viable problem-solving mechanism in complexity … We usually tend to over-rate talent, and under-rate systematic, disciplined learning.

No training budgets, but on-demand learning resources.

I wholeheartedly agree with these recommendations!

Other BetaCodex papers can be accessed from: www.betacodex.org/papers

Can your organization work without bosses? In the documentary, Ban the Boss (one hour BBC video) Paul Thomas shows that most organizations can run just fine without bosses, or at least without traditional, hierarchical bosses who tell workers what to do.

Gwynn Dyer explained that historically, hierarchies were the result of a communications problem, in Why the Arabs can handle democracy.

A mass society, thousands, then millions strong, confers immense advantages on its members. Within a few thousand years, the little hunting-and-gathering groups were pushed out of the good lands everywhere. By the time the first anthropologists appeared to study them, they were on their last legs, and none now survive in their original form. But we know why the societies that replaced them were all tyrannies.

The mass societies had many more decisions to make, and no way of making them in the old, egalitarian way. Their huge numbers made any attempt at discussing the question as equals impossible, so the only ones that survived and flourished were the ones that became brutal hierarchies. Tyranny was the solution to what was essentially a communications problem.

We have been able to communicate with each other better and better for the past half century, and now with mobile communications we need even fewer intermediaries to get work done. Many bosses don’t have a clue what is actually happening at the front-end, as is clear in the BBC documentary, and as I wrote in network walking.

Bob Marshall alerted me, via Twitter, to this documentary that shows just how difficult it can be to change attitudes and beliefs about work. In this case, the obvious place to start a boss-purge was at the vehicle service bay, with nine skilled mechanics “supported by” eight managers. The workers wound up keeping one manager, but on their terms. Other departments were more difficult.

Could you imagine if workers were allowed to vote their bosses in and out? Well they can now in Blaenau Gwent, Wales; as they have been able to do at Semco SA for decades. Listen to Ricardo Semler explain how Semco organizes work and “staff determine when they need a leader, and then choose their own bosses in a process akin to courtship”.

Yes, there is a different, and better, way to get work done, with fewer managers. If all you have are general management and supervision skills, your work days may be numbered.