Published as Workplace Learning: New thinking and practice, a Special Supplement to global focus, The EFMD Business Magazine, Issue 01 2012

OUT OF TIME
More happens in a minute today than in one of your great grandmother’s hours. Not only is more and more activity packed into every minute, the rate of change itself is increasing. Measured by achievements, the twenty-first century will contain not a hundred years twentieth-century years, but twenty thousand of them. Change itself is accelerating. People are anxious. The future is unpredictable. Companies are run by sound bites. People plan; God laughs. The traditional mode of training employees is obsolete.

INFORMAL LEARNING
Learning is that which enables you to participate successfully in life, at work, and in the groups that matter to you. Informal learning is the unofficial, unscheduled, impromptu way people learn to do their jobs. Formal learning is like riding a bus: the driver decides where the bus is going; the passengers are along for the ride. Informal learning is like riding a bike: the rider chooses the destination, the speed, and the route. The rider can take a detour at a moment’s notice to admire the scenery or go to the bathroom. Learning is adaptation. Taking advantage of the double meaning of the word network, to learn is to optimize the quality of one’s networks.

All learning is part formal and part informal. What matters is the proportion of formality or informality.

SHOW ME THE MONEY
Executives don’t want learning; they want execution. They want the job done. They want performance. Informal learning is a profit strategy. Companies are applying it to:

• Increase sales by making product knowledge instantly searchable
• Improve knowledge worker productivity
• Transform an organization from near-bankruptcy to record profits
• Generate fresh ideas and increase innovation
• Reduce stress, absenteeism, and health care costs
• Invest development resources where they will have the most impact
• Increase professionalism and professional growth
• Cut costs and improve responsiveness with self-service learning

Knowledge workers demand respect and expect to be treated fairly. They thrive when given the freedom to decide how they will do what they’re asked to do. They rise or fall to meet expectations.

Training managers have complained for years that senior managers don’t understand the value of training. Lots of formal learning programs do not work. Maybe the executives do understand the value of formal training. They’ve determined that in its present form, it’s not worth much.

Tragically, many firms have mistaken measuring activity for measuring results. Training directors measure participant satisfaction, the ability to pass tests, and demonstrations. They don’t measure business results because they don’t own the yardstick by which business results are measured.

EMERGENCE
Training is something that’s pushed on you; someone else is in charge. Learning is something you choose to do, whether you’re being trained or not. You’re in charge. Many knowledge workers will tell you, “I love to learn but I hate to be trained.”

Formal learning takes place in classrooms; informal learning happens in workscapes, that is, learning ecologies. It’s learning without borders.
Critics say that it’s impossible to formalize informal learning and therefore informal learning is unmanageable. In fact, I don’t want an executive managing learning; that’s the worker’s responsibility. What I want to do is optimize learning outcomes. Optimization means removing obstacles, seeding communities, increasing bandwidth, encouraging conversation, and so forth.

CONNECTING
Reinventing the wheel, looking for information in the wrong places, and answering questions from peers consume two-thirds of the average knowledge worker’s day. Slashing this waste provides a lot more time to devote to improving the business, reducing payroll, or, more likely, a bit of both. Knowledge management is no longer the intellectual high ground it once was, by and large because it didn’t work. Knowledge lives in people’s heads, not in mere words. You can no more capture true knowledge in a repository than you can trap lightning in a box.

The informal organization is how most business gets done, yet executives miss it because they can’t see it. Mapping social networks make the pattern clear. It’s not who you know that’s important; it’s who those others know.

META-LEARNING
Learning is a skill, like playing golf. The more you practice, the better your performance is, but if golfers followed the pattern of businesspeople learning, they would arrive for a match without ever having thought about the game or touched a club.

Many traditional training departments concentrate almost all of their energy on providing training to novices. That’s like providing kindergarten classes to high school students to save money. In truth, the more mature learners, typically the top performers, are simply going to skip it entirely or become disgruntled.

Intuition is often more effective than logic because it calls on whole-body intelligence. It is born of relationships and patterns. It draws on the power of the unconscious mind to sort through meaningful experience as well as the immediate situation.

LEARNERS
If something improves the overall value of the ecosystem and the welfare of the individual worker, I’m in favor of it. This includes helping workers build personal strengths and overcome personal obstacles. If your basic mental systems are out of whack, you may be working extra hard just to cope.

It should come as no surprise that workers don’t like training. Most training is built atop the pessimistic assumption that trainees are deficient, and training is the cure for what’s broken. Everybody wins if the starting point is, “Be all that you can be.”

You may have the best thoughts in the world, but if you don’t communicate them effectively, they won’t help you or anyone else. I’m thinking about how you converse, tell stories, speak in public, and write.

ENVISIONING
We humans are sight mammals. We learn almost twice as well from images and words as from words alone. Visual language engages both hemispheres of the brain. Pictures translate across cultures, education levels, and age groups. Yet the majority of the content of corporate learning is text. Schools spend years on verbal literacy but only hours on visual literacy. It’s high time for us to open our eyes to the possibilities.

Graphics are not fluff. Consider how they can improve informal learning throughout your organization. Graphics work wonders when you need to:
• Bring deeper understanding to complex subject matter.
• Share results of dynamic meetings with others.
• Help the team see the big picture and focus attention.
• Improve the decision-making process.

CONVERSATION
Conversations both create and transmit knowledge. Frequent and open conversation increases innovation and learning. Schooling planted a false notion in our heads that real learning is something you do on your own. In fact, we learn things from other people. People love to talk. Bringing them together brings excitement.

People spend most of their time at work or at home. Work is a demanding, pressure-packed, rats-in-the-maze race with the clock to get the job done. Home is a comfortable, private space for sharing time with family and individual interests. Neither work nor home, a World Café is a neutral spot where people come together to offer hospitality, enjoy comradeship, welcome diverse perspectives, and have meaningful conversations.

Business conversations at Pfizer no longer consist of knee-jerk emotional responses, because people have a means of critiquing the quality of their conversations. They ask, “Is the information valid? Are we making an informed choice? Are we exercising mutual control over the conversation?”

COMMUNITIES
Unless you are a hermit, you are a member of several communities of practice, although you may not have thought of it that way.
For a long time, I maintained that communities were organic. Like truffles, they sort of sprouted up on their own, where they wanted, and the most you could do was to nurture them by providing time and space for them to meet. Times have changed. A quarter of the world’s truffles are cultivated on a plantation in Spain.

As fast and easy as it is to search Google, Cisco sales engineers can pinpoint just the knowledge they’re looking for. They query the in-house repository of video on demand, and the system takes them down to the exact sentences or slides of interest.

LEGO hobbyists are a community of practice. Subgroups create building standards that enable them to create large displays quickly.

UNBLENDED
It has become trite to point out that the e of eLearning doesn’t matter and that it’s the learning that counts. I don’t think the learning counts for much either. What’s important is the doing that results from learning. Executives don’t care about learning; they care about execution.
In 2001, training directors turned their attention to return on investment. Unfortunately, instead of learning cost-benefit analysis, people who wanted to speak the language of business studied accounting. Created long before knowledge work was invented, accounting values intangibles such as human capital at zero and counts training as an expense instead of an investment.

Consider how we managed to end up with a VCR in every classroom. Was it because teachers wanted to show nature documentaries? Hardly. Massive demand by America’s seemingly endless thirst for pornography drove the unit price to $100. Smart phones, voice recognition, and virtual reality are learning tools, but learning won’t drive their development. Courses are dead.

THE WEB
The Internet changed everything. In 1996, there were 16 million Internet users; in 2006 they number more than 1 billion. Google is the largest learning provider, answering thousands of inquiries every second.

Recently, I hosted a series of unworkshops on learning with blogs, wikis, and Web 2.0 tools. Why the un? To crush the old paradigm of workshop leader spoon-feeding participants.

Imagine having an in-house learning and information environment as rich as the Internet. You’d have blogs, search, syndication, podcasts, mash-ups, and more. You’d also have a platform just about everyone already knows how to use. CGI, a large Canadian services company is doing precisely that.

GROKKING
To grok is to understand profoundly through intuition or empathy. Learning without training is alive and well. BP employees in vital positions grok their roles in an extremely complex organization digesting several mega-mergers.

UNCONFERENCES
Business meetings used to come in one flavor: dull. New approaches are creating meetings that people enjoy, often organized in scant time, and at minimal cost. These meetings are not events; there’s typically activity before and after. If something is working well, why not share it with everyone? And why not keep it alive as long as you can? Successful gatherings are those where everyone participates.

There were no presentations at BAR Camp, no PowerPoints, no better-than-thou, no podium, and no positions carved in stone. Instead of presentations, campers had conversations. We were equals, co-discovering new ways to look at things. We sat in circles. No one was in charge because we were all in charge.

JUST DO IT
Management must assign enterprise-level accountability for learning. Unless you are blessed with a rare, sensitive executive management team, you must address governance or scrap plans of getting the benefits you’ve been reading about.

Natural learning requires an attitude of surrender and acceptance. Informal learning is unbounded. It enables us to find a voice to take its place alongside other parts of who we are as humans. We need all of who we are to be fully engaged, outside and with inner realms to meld with larger wisdom in the world.

As work and learning become one, good learning and good work become synonymous.

Don’t start with problems. Beginning with problems starts you off on the wrong path. You may solve the problem but miss a fantastic opportunity that was yours for the taking,

This is the cheat-sheet from the book Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance,

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“Wasting Time”
DeskTime, a firm that automates time sheets, posted an absurd infographic yesterday. This snip made me chuckle: Most people I know think using the net makes them more productive. “Socializing with co-…

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Most people I know think using the net makes them more productive. “Socializing with co-workers” is the primary way they learn things. Probably some of the long lunches and breaks occur because people learn more in coffee rooms and cafeterias than in classrooms. These are time-wasters?

As for the applications, my colleague Jane Hart’s Top 100 Tools for Learning 2011 has Twitter in the #1 slot and YouTube as #2. Unproductive? I don’t think so.

And email and Word are productive? Give me a break.

I would really, really hate to work for these guys.

Salim Ismael, founding executive director of Singularity University, joined a few dozen of us for lunch in Berkeley yesterday to discuss “Seeing the Next Disruptive Technology.”

Singularity University is neither a university nor about singularity. It’s not a university so much as what the founders hope universities will evolve into. Currently the main program involves 80 grad students who come from around the globe to attend a ten-week summer program. The first half is intensive exposure to a host of mind-blowing speakers on exponential technologies; the second is an incubator for dent-in-the-universe projects. Not only is SU not accredited; one of their sponsors, the Kauffman Foundation, said they’d withdraw funding if SU were to be accredited.

Singularity is the point where the collective intelligence of machines surpasses that of humans. When this happens, maybe as soon as 2045, a form of snowballing super-intelligence erupts with thoughts we humans won’t be able to fathom. My personal interpretation is that we hit the singularity when the pace of time has accelerated beyond our ability to comprehend. It’s the light show that crops up in the journey to the future in the movie 2001. It’s chaos.

Since SU’s goal is understanding rather than being swamped, I suggested to Salim that maybe it’s the Un-singularlity University. The folks at Kauffman Foundation call it an un-university. So maybe we’re dealing with the Un-singularity Un-university. Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

The goal of Singularity University is to rewire students’ brains so they can escape the incremental thinking that bogs most of us down. Students learn not only about exponentially accelerating technologies such as DNA sequencing, communication, nanotech and AI, but about the interplay among them that will lead to “manifold intertwined technological revolutions.”

Here’s Ray Kurzweil, the popularizer of the concept of singularity and the “Law of Accelerating Returns:”
“This is the nature of exponential growth. Although technology grows in the exponential domain, we humans live in a linear world. So technological trends are not noticed as small levels of technological power are doubled. Then seemingly out of nowhere, a technology explodes into view. For example, when the Internet went from 20,000 to 80,000 nodes over a two year period during the 1980s, this progress remained hidden from the general public. A decade later, when it went from 20 million to 80 million nodes in the same amount of time, the impact was rather conspicuous.”

“As exponential growth continues to accelerate into the first half of the twenty-first century, it will appear to explode into infinity, at least from the limited and linear perspective of contemporary humans. The progress will ultimately become so fast that it will rupture our ability to follow it. It will literally get out of our control. The illusion that we have our hand “on the plug,” will be dispelled.”

Is your head spinning yet? Most of us don’t think in these terms. The University’s mandate is to find and create a new generation of leaders who can.

The main campus is at the old NASA Ames Research Center on Moffett Field in Mountain View. (Ironically, we set up one of the first groups to participate in what evolved into the University of Phoenix at NASA Ames more than thirty years ago.)

This summer 80 participants selected from 2,200 applicants will trek to Mountain View. Tuition for the ten-week program is $25,000. The goal is to assemble a student body that’s ⅓ female and ¼ from developing countries. Most students have multiple masters degrees or PhDs and are wildly tech-savvy. Google, Autodesk, Cisco, and others provide money for scholarships.

Salim has become SU’s Global Ambassador and is setting up SUs around the world; early results are looking good.

“Large companies can’t innovate,” Salim told us. Silos are comfortable. When innovation rears its head, the corporation’s immune system goes to work to eradicate it.

Excerpts from an article by CLO’s Deanna Hartley:

Determining Relevance: Tangible vs. Intangible 
Starting with a business goal or problem to be solved around corporate culture, knowledge management or even systematic training can eliminate a narrow measurement focus, or as Jay Cross, CEO of the Internet Time Alliance, a knowledge exchange organization, explained it, getting hung up “on doing that part right rather than asking again and again: ‘Is this improving the business?’ ‘Is this helping us attain our current objectives?’ ‘Is this delighting our customers?’ And if it’s not, they shouldn’t be doing it,” he said.

Some learning leaders — perhaps fearful for their budgets and status as business partners — may be wary of seemingly unquantifiable learning initiatives such as social learning, but hard numbers aren’t always the best indicator of success. A focus on formal school or executive education-type learning involving tests, for example, may not provide valuable metrics anyway, Cross said, because grades or test results in school are unrelated to anything outside of school. They are essentially the wrong measures.

Cross said there is actually a significant amount of learning taking place in formal situations that fails to translate to behavior change on the job. To increase the likelihood of behavioral change, gathering immediate metrics — smile sheets for example — might not be as beneficial as waiting to ascertain whether learning stuck and is being applied on the job.

“When I measure the effectiveness of a learning initiative, I want to go in and talk to people six months later after they’ve had a chance to forget it or not,” he said. “I’m going to go after a period of time and I’m going to talk to people about: ‘What are you able to do now that you couldn’t do before?’ ‘How did you learn it?’ Then generalize from talking to the sample of people to the whole organization.”

Ultimately, the learning function exists to solve business needs, so CLOs should ask themselves exactly that: how are they helping to solve a business problem?

“Where CLOs make a mistake is by not talking in advance about what capabilities the organization needs and delivering on that and reporting back on that,” Cross said. “Instead, the CLO [should get] together a governance body where they [have] people in charge of the organization who say: ‘What do we want the people to be able to do that they can’t do, and what part of that can learning address?”

Summary:

First thing Sunday morning, I dropped in at the Internet Time Alliance water cooler on Skype. Jane had posted a warning that my sites had been hacked in the night.

Google issues alerts like this to warn visitors of malicious sites. I began to get nervous.

I called BlueHost, my ISP. They had backed up my sites around midnight. I asked them to restore everything from the backup. Alas, the hackers had broken in earlier, so the back-up was ridden with malware, too.

BlueHost has been a great ISP. They offer all kinds of services and nearly unlimited storage for $10/month. They answer the phone! They are generally very helpful. When I called them back, however, all they could offer were a few pages of general anti-malware advice and the suggestion that I look through my directories for suspicious files. Hmmm. I’ve been online for years. I maintain more than a dozen sites. I have about 28 gigabytes of material in some 90,000 files. Too much to eyeball.

My associate Paul Simbeck-Hampson got on the case, feeding me information on malware he found on the net. I was frantically scanning files on jaycross.com and internettime.com, the sites that seems to be generating the error messages. Needles in haystacks. This was going nowhere.

I didn’t know what else to do at this point. Sucuri offers a fix-it package for $89 for one site. I had nine sites I wanted to keep. Hence, I signed up for their $290 business deal. I’m glad I did.

Around 3:00 pm, I submitted a Malware Removal support ticket at Sucuri. They emailed me that I need to complete one ticket per site. Half an hour later, they notified me that I had given them a bad FTP password. I didn’t see the notice until 24 hours later. Half an hour after that, Sucuri was cleaning malware out of the sites and locating obsolete installations of WordPress on my site.

The next day, Sucuri started emailing that this site or that one was free of malware. However, a few of the sites gave me 500 Server Errors or would not let me log in. Sucuri went back to work, looking at file permissions and so on.

The Google alert notices were still up. In fact they were proliferating. Sites that linked to internettime.com were receiving warnings. My Gmail stopped functioning because it was connected to internettime.com. My wiki was quarantined. I pinged Google to re-check the health of my sites. Then I discovered that it generally takes 10 hours after a site is pristine for Google to take down the warning.

Supposedly, everything is back in working order now. I’ve followed Sucuri’s advice for preventing this in the future.

I’ve spent the better part of three days clearing obsolete material from my sites and looking for prank code. Miraculously, I found a rogue script that had been injected into a .php file and quashed it. Most of the time I felt like I was playing a game in which I only knew half the rules. I was nervous that I’d lose huge swaths of material that I should have backed up — but hadn’t. These three days have been among the least productive of my life. Malshare got all my mindshare.

How did the bad guys get in? I’ll never know. It could have been one of the obsolete versions of WordPress I’d forgotten about. Or a rogue script we’d brought in to handle contact requests. Or a file with the wrong permissions. Heaven only knows.

One site remains off the air. When I try to update a couple of others, I receive Server errors. These are minor annoyances compared to what’s been happening.

I am so glad this nightmare is over.

I’ll be keeping my WordPress installs and extensions up to date from now on.

I recommend Sucuri for dealing with malware. All our correspondence has been through trouble tickets and email but they have been quite responsive.

This feels like home invasion, but in this case, the criminals are simply being malicious.

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Next month at this time, I’ll be boarding a plane for Delhi. In the sixties I dreamed of visiting India but never made it. Finally fulfilling the dream has me totally jazzed.

I’ll be taking part in EdgeX,  an event that covers two important themes for education – Learning X.O (the emergence of network based, collaborative, social, informal and community-led approaches to learning) and Simulations & Serious Games (being able to seriously use these advanced learning tools at strategic scale).

EdgeX aims to be disruptive. With the likes of George Siemens, Stephen Downes, Dave Cornier, Alec Couros, Clark Quinn, Grainne Conole, and me on board, I’m confident it will be.

There is a revolution brewing in our conception of what learning is and how educational systems can be rethought. Influenced in large part due to the efforts of the speakers on this theme, the conversations around alternate ways of conceiving learning and the learning experience have centred around the following key aspects:

• Informal Learning, Communities of Practice, Connectivism
  Personal Learning Environments, Open Distributed
  Learning, Net Pedagogy, Learning “Design” in a 2.0 world
• Learning Analytics, Ubiquitous learning
• MOOCs, OER University, Stanford AI
• Role of teachers and coaching in an open distributed learning environment
• New forms of assessments

These key aspects present a coherent and urgent picture of the imminent changes in Learning and Teaching. All aspects of the teaching learning experience are impacted by this change.

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Everything’s Coming Up Networks (except learning)
Sloan Management Review has a great interview with Andy McAfee on What Sells CEOs on Social Networking. CEOs excitedly agree with Lew Platt’s old observation about Hewlett-Packard: “If only HP knew wh…

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Yesterday IBM presented a compelling case for social business excellence at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris. Social networks are so patently good for business that managers are routing around IT to put them in place. The social business captures value through capturing tacit information, fostering collaboration & discovery, filtering information flow & finding patterns, and transforming exception processing & making processes resilient.

David Weinberger’s Too Big To Know convinced me that networks have radically changed the notion of what constitutes knowledge. Lots of our previous concepts about knowledge were due to the limitations of paper, not that there’s some absolute truth out there. On the net, facts don’t stay on the page. There are no isolated ideas; there never were; there are only webs of ideas. We can improve those webs through open access, good filters, metadata, linking everything, and opening up institutions.

David describes leadership as an emergent property of an organizational network. Leadership resides more with the group being led than the purported leader. Strong leadership is simply a means for a group to accomplish its objectives.

Yesterday on Dan Pink’s Office Hours, Gary Hamel described the irrelevance of 100 year old models of management and the growing impatience of disgruntled workers, customers, and shareholders. Hamel has said that the future model of management looks a lot like web 2.0.

So networks underpin leadership, business performance, knowledge, and management.

It’s undeniable that the internet is an unprecedented game changer. People and ideas and knowledge and happenings are connected as never before, and there’s no end in sight. The omnipresent network makes us look at processes instead of events: everything has a precedent and an antecedent. Murphy’s Second Law kicks in: You can never do just one thing. Institutions that block connections, be they schools or close-lipped corporations, are increasingly out of step with the times.

But I have a question about this: Why isn’t anyone talking about learning networks?

Neither McAfee nor IBM nor Weinberger nor Hamel talks about networks for learning. This parallels the situation with informal learning and eLearning. Even after people accepted that informal learning is the primary way people learn to do their jobs, few corporate training organizations lifted a finger to do anything about it. eLearning — the boring, one-way, content slapped on pages for self study variety — was a total flop because learning involves more than exposure to information. Two major opportunities to boost performance were squandered. I don’t intend to stand idly by as business thought leaders repeat the same mistake with learning networks.

Networks were made for learning. And in a ever-changing world, learning is a survival skill.

This is hardly a new idea. I wrote about it in Informal Learning in 2005:

ENGINEERING THE INDIVIDUAL’S LEARNING NETWORK
Learning originally meant finding the right path. Paths are connectors; people are nodes. The world is constructed of networks. We’re back where we started.

In networks, connections are the only thing that matters. We network with people; we use networks to gather information and to learn things; we have neural networks in our heads.

Learning is optimizing our connections to the networks that matter to us.

This satisfies both the community concept of learning (social networking) and the knowledge aspect (gaining access to information and fitting it into the patterns in one’s head).

To learn is to adapt to fit with one’s ecosystems. We can look at learning as making and maintaining good connections in a network. Cultivators of learning environments can borrow from network engineers, focusing on such things as:

• Improving signal-to-noise ratio

• Installing fat pipes for backbone connections

• Pruning worthless, unproductive branches

• Promoting standards for interoperability

• Balancing the load

• Seeking continuous improvement

This echoes a white paper, Informal Learning – the other 80%, I wrote nine years ago.

We need to think of learning as optimizing our networks. Learning consists of making good connections.

Taking advantage of the double meaning of the word network, “to learn” is to optimize the quality of one’s networks.

Learning is optimizing our connections to the networks that matter to us.

A sustainable social business provides the means and motivation for workers to learn what they need: the know-how, know-who, and know-what to get things done and get better at doing them. This takes more than access to social networks, blogs, and wikis. Organizations must provide the scaffolding that focuses on discovery, practice, sharing, and reinforcement. Organizations that lack a clear understanding of their learning architectures are doomed to descend into an aimless world of social noise and meaningless chit-chat. Facebook-itus.

Next week I’ll release a white paper on the Internet Time Alliance site on how to develop an enterprise learning network.

Looking at other cultures inevitably teaches me about nuances I had failed notice in my own.

Buzzwords travel from the U.S. to France incredibly fast.

Lots of French vendors are touting social learning although they no more get it than American LMS providers promising systems to manage informal learning. One outfit here claimed to deliver social learning experiences on CD-ROM. Catalog of courses? Social? Huh?

Gamification is big but here it’s always Serious Games. This is because French companies don’t believe learning should be fun. (And you can’t call these things joux serieux because in French the all-important adjective comes after the noun.)

Some concepts were missing in action. For example, no one was touting user-generated content or peer-to-peer. My friend Peter’s Learnscaper moves user-generated (and instructor-generated) content center stage but when he was explaining it to someone, we realized there’s no term for the concept in French!

The Internet Time Alliance and I have been pushing the meme Working Smarter for several years. The French are into smarter in a big way:

This one is right out of the Colbert Report, n’est-ce pas? “French, a language for tomorrow.” For whom?

How’s this for a lost cause? Learn Provençal, the dead language once spoken in Southeast France.

I saw some luscious graphics although the company showing this one admitted that it’s just the demo.

I don’t mean to be so negative. We had wonderful conversations at both events.

On Thursday, I’ll be addressing the social web and its impact on practical education at Expo-Langues in Paris. I plan to talk about the shift from push learning to pull that refocuses language learning from courses to learning environments. Du pousser au tirer. 

Today started with a black swan event: snow on the French Riviera:

I used to bring California weather with me wherever I travelled. Now I seem to bring snow and ice. Brrrrr….

Just got back to my apartment in Paris after a lovely dinner (grilled sardines, lieu noir, creme brûlée) discussing innovation, Sarkosy, and whether the Stoos vision of management will ever fly in France. (Oui, non, peut-w)

People and organizations around the globe are linking into a single vast network. Every new connection creates more value than it gives up. Membership is snowballing. Interconnections form like topsy. Time accelerates because the denser the interconnections of a network, the faster its cycle time.

As events come faster and faster, change becomes visible. We can see that what once appeared rigid is actually fluid.

This…

…becomes this:

Look at a flower in your garden. You see a still life that doesn’t appear to grow.

Watch a stop-action film that collapses a month of that flower’s life into minutes, and you see that the flower is growing all the time.

Organizations are not so different from flowers. They’re both alive. As time speeds up, constants become variables. New opportunities unfold. Nurture the growth of organizations or flowers and they thrive; neglect them and they wither.

More than a million people have signed up with Chinese Pod to learn to speak Chinese.

Co-host Jenny Zhu filled me in on how this Shanghai-based company is helping adult learners, 60% of them from the U.S., attain fluency. Podcasts, more than a thousand of them, are part of the answer, but it takes more than exposure to 12-minute podcasts to master a language.

Most of Chinese Pod’s learners are 25-50 year old adults who are learning Chinese for personal growth, as a hobby, or because they have Chinese spouses or kids. 75% are native speakers of English. Increasingly, they’re abandoning their desktops and using smartphones and tablets to access Chinese Pod. Some are expats living in China and some are university students supplementing what they learn in class.

What made Chinese Pod the leading choice for learning Chinese? For one thing, you can sign up for free. Fewer than 1% of those registered users are paying for the experience.

Also, when Chinese Pod debuted in 2005, most textbooks and training materials were disembodied from real life. Few teachers had ever visited China and knew little of Chinese culture. Chinese Pod’s approach was to focus on providing something useful; the alternatives were merely academic.

Personally, I think I’m immune to learning languages in a classroom. I’ve studied French, Latin, Spanish, Italian, and German and can’t speak any of them. If I wanted to learn Chinese, I’d give Chinese Pod a try.

New Seasons exemplifies taking a non-training alternative to workplace learning.

That New Seasons is a people-oriented business echoes in their approach to learning.

• New hires receive a brief orientation and are then let loose to learn by walking around and asking questions.
• The HR director explains “New employees are given time to look around and get to know the products, ask questions, go online, read literature and shadow experienced employees. From a training perspective, we’ve created an environment where an employee’s learning style is accommodated because they learn their own way, at their own pace and in an order that makes sense to them.”
• New Seasons executives host a Disorientation to go over values and what it takes to be successful a month after people come on board. It makes so much sense to conduct this after new hires understand what makes the organization tick.
• People keep up to speed by attending short two-way sessions with a dozen or fewer colleagues on the job floor.

New Seasons trusts its employees to do their best — and the employees return the favor by doing it.

Todd Hudson describes the New Seasons experience on his Maverick Institute blog. I fully agree with his takeaways:

1. How you deliver training should reinforce your values and business model. Is customer service key to your success? Face-to-face methods like mentoring might be best. Yes, everyone’s jumping on the e-learning bandwagon today, but before you do, ask yourself ‘How does sitting at a computer taking in information align with the value our employees deliver?’ There are plenty of situations where e-learning is the right choice. Just make sure it’s your situation.
2. Training should align with the environment. Learning by walking around at a grocery store is great. But at a copper mine? Not on your life! Too dangerous; more structure would be needed. Walking around ‘virtually’ in a simulation would be a great alternative. Whenever possible, let the work environment organically teach employees as much as it can and at their pace.
3. Training and learning should be a part of the natural rhythm of your company’s work day. Don’t let training stick out like a sore thumb and disturb your business. If you have night shifts, train at night. If your company’s work pace is irregular, then training should fit into these periods of inactivity. Here’s a simple rule: If people are complaining about training, you’re doing it wrong.

Todd’s white paper on Lean Knowledge Transfer is worth a read. I’m going to bring this to the attention of the Stoos Network; we’re on the lookout for examples of enlightened next practices. If you share my interest in mashing up agile development and corporate learning, you may want to check out Unmanagement.net.

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Before the gathering in Stoos, Steve Denning put together this comparison of approaches to transforming management. I’ve revisited the document again and again.

Today, the expectations of learners are much different than they were only a few years ago. Much of what is currently rolled up monolithic, one-size-fits-all courses must give way to small but relevant content updated and delivered continuously to learners based on their individual profiles or needs. In other words, learning needs to go Agile.

What’s in it for us?

Agile Development is an approach where vendors deliver very fast, iterative product development through close collaboration with its user base (i.e. training organizations).

Dawn describes the basic Agile Development process and promises to come back with implications in a subsequent post.

Dawn references Josh Bersin’s insightful post last fall which goes beyond the training function to examine the benefits of agile in HR.

The Agile Model comes to Management, Learning, and Human Resources

Over the last five years the business of software development has been totally transformed by the concepts of agile development.  So is the business of Management and Human Resources.

Social Business is becoming the new normal
2012 is the year of Social Business. My Internet Time Alliance colleague Jane Hart aptly describes the coming environment:

Predictions for an upcoming new year are inevitably based on the “flow” from the current year, so if you have taken a look at my Top 100 articles of 2011 (or even my complete 2011 Reading List), you will not be surprised to hear that many predict that 2012 will be the “Year of Social Business“.

Up to now, for many organisations, Social Business has been about social media marketing and engaging customers, but as IBM explains …

“A Social Business isn’t just a company that has a Facebook page and a Twitter account. A Social Business is one that embraces and cultivates a spirit of collaboration and community throughout its organization—both internally and externally.”

And as Amin points out in Thriving as an HR professional in a social business era,

“With a 10-year delay, the social media revolution is finally entering the workplace and its influence is going to be comparable to the consumer social media revolution.”

As many others explain, social business will change the way we do everything, as organisations move from being traditional hierarchical businesses to networked organisations.”Social” will not just be something that is bolted-on to traditional processes but will underpin a fundamental new approach to working – and learning.

Paul Adams summed this up nicely in Stop talking about “social”.

“Social is not a feature. Social is not an application. Social is a deep human motivation that drives our behavior almost every second that we’re awake … The leading businesses are recognizing that the web is moving away from being centered around content, to being centered around people.That is the biggest social thunderstorm, and all of us are going to have to understand it to succeed. So stop talking about social as a distinct entity. Assume it in everything you do.“

Leveraging Learning in Social Business
Installing social network software and encouraging people to exploit their connections is not enough. The fabric of a social business, its workscape, must incorporate structures and guidance to help people learn. After all, learning underpins continuous improvement and that’s what this is all about.

A sustainable workscape must provide the means and motivation for corporate citizens to learn what they need: the know-how, know-who, and know-what to get things done and get better at doing them. This takes more than access to social networking tools, blogs, and wikis. Self-organization helps but L&D professionals need to supplement social systems with scaffolding that focuses on learning. Without that, many organizations will descend into an aimless world of social noise and meaningless chit-chat.

I take chief learning officers’ abysmal track record with informal learning to-date as a warning shot. In today’s fast-paced world, people who do not learn continuously, on the job, rapidly fall behind. Yet CLOs continue to focus on formal classes, as if they’re running schools instead of creating business value. Formal classes and workshops are necessary, but they constitute a tiny slice of the overall learning pie.

Several years ago, L&D professionals began to accept the fact that learning by experience and informally, with others, has many times the impact of traditional training.

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.

CLOs who do not make it easier for social business people to learn are toast.

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.

When an enterprise commits to becoming an organic, value-creating network of diverse individuals, the training department has to join the fray.

The Leader’s Dilemma: How to Build an Empowered and Adaptive Organization Without Losing Control by Jeremy Hope, Peter Bunce, and Franz Röösli

The Leader’s Dilemma describes a practical new approach to management that has grown out of a dozen years of discussions by an outfit named the Beyond Budgeting Roundtable.

Franz Röösli, who suggested Stoos as the locus of our gathering 

Franz Röösli, co-director of the Roundtable and a co-author of the book, handed out copies at the Stoos Gathering. I haven’t been able to put it down.

The BBRT is an international shared learning network of member organizations with a common interest in transforming their performance management models to enable sustained, superior performance. BBRT helps organizations learn from world-wide best practice studies and encourages them to share information, past successes and implementation experiences to move beyond command and control.
The BBRT is at the heart of a movement that is searching for ways to build lean, adaptive and ethical enterprises that can sustain superior competitive performance. Its aim is to spread the idea through a vibrant community.

The Leader’s Dilemma is organized around the Beyond Budgeting Principles:

The Roundtable believes that by replacing the command and control model with a Beyond Budgeting alternative (that is, an Empowered and Adaptive Organization), leaders can create an organizaiton that:

• Responds rapidly to threats and opportunities. Adaptive organizations operate with speed and simplicity and this can best be achieved by giving managers the scope to act immediately and decisively within clear values and strategic boundaries. Making strategy an open, continuous and adaptive process is the key. It enables the firm to react to emerging threats and opportunities as they arise rather than being constrained by a fixed and outdated plan.
• Attracts and keeps the best people. It is no coincidence that Adaptive Organizations such as Google, Handelsbanken and W.L. Gore regularly appear in the lists of “best companies to work for”. The reasons are obvious. From the employee perspective, talented people want to learn and develop; they value time to think, reflect and try new ideas; they want decision-making responsibility and they want a friendly, collegiate culture. From the employer perspective they want people who have the right attitude, have ideas and can add value, want to participate in decision-making, are good team players and have the talent to become leaders at any level.
• Enables and encourages continuous innovation. Innovation is about thinking and acting differently whether it is about strategies, business models, processes, or management practices. In adaptive organizations, people work within an open and self-questioning environment. Clear governance principles set the right climate and builds the mutual trust needed to share knowledge and best practices. This is also encouraged by the move away from rewards based on budgets and toward rewards based on a business unit or group.
• Drives operational excellence. Adaptive organizations have lower costs. Not only do they connect the work that people do with customer needs, but they also align products, processes, projects, and structures with their strategy. Operating managers also challenge resources used rather than seeing them as ‘entitlements’. Just asking the question, “Does it add value to the customer?” is often sufficient to ensure that unnecessary work is eliminated.
• Leads to loyal and profitable customers. Adaptive organizations know how customers want to conduct business with them. Key issues are whether customers just want the lowest-cost transaction, added-value services, or customized solutions. Under this “outside-in” approach, firms know how to satisfy customers’ needs profitably. This means not only knowing their needs, but also their net profitability.
• Support good governance and ethical behavior. Adaptive organizations are held together by strong values and inviolate principles. But it is not a soft option. It exposes nonperformers. It challenges people all the time. You can’t just agree on a number. You have to show people that you can actually achieve real performance improvements, and must always be prepared to be judged against others with similar problems and opportunities.
• Leads to sustained value creation. Leaders in Adaptive organizations focus their attention (either explicitly or implicitly) on creating wealth over the longer term. In particular, they focus on setting high performance expectations and stretching people’s ambitions. Those companies that operate this way tend to beat the competition not just this quarter or this year but year after year.

The Adaptive Organization relies on teams:

Some leaders struggle with the idea that many small teams can actually cost less than a few large units. While economies of scale can look seductive on spreadsheets, creating many small teams leads to a more flexible and innovative organization that, with more accountability and less management, actually consumes fewer costs.

What do we mean by ‘teams’? In Beyond Budgeting organizations we believe there are three kinds of team (excluding ‘project’ teams that are usually temporary). The executive team is the C-level suite responsible for setting purpose, goals and strategic direction as well as challenging other units to maximize their performance. Support services teams (strategy, finance, human resources, marketing, supply chain management, design, production, logistics, sales and service teams, information technology and so forth) are responsible for serving and supporting value centers. Value centre teams are responsible for formulating strategy, investing capital and delivering value (or profit). They invariably have their own profit and loss accounts and are typically created around lines of business, brands/product groups, regions/countries and plants/branches.

 

The aim is to create as many value centre teams as possible by sub-dividing them and adding new ventures. They should be based round a clear market niche and have a distinctive customer value proposition. On the other hand, the aim is to reduce the numbers and size of support services centres. In other words, the aim is to have as many direct costs within value centres and as few indirect costs as possible.

With a tip of the hat to Meg Wheatley, BBRT argues that the appropriate mental model for the new-age organization is the complex adaptive system:

Putting this into practice is tough. The Leader’s Dilemma offers suggestions but I’m hungry for more. Of course, finding a way to turn dreams like these into reality was the whole purpose of meeting in Stoos.