The concept of a job, as we know it, is starting to go away.

Over the last year I've been speaking with many corporate business and HR leaders and have heard a common theme:we need our organizations to be more agile. We need to redesign the organization so we can learn faster, communicate better, and respond more rapidly to change. This quest for the agile organization has changed the nature of what we call a job.

Pfizer, for example, has set "increase business agility" as one of its four goals for the coming year. The company created an internal labor marketplace called PfizerWorks that lets employees bid on work from each other. Executives at Siemens told me that one of their biggest challenges today is moving engineers into new roles so they can focus on new business areas. InBev (Anheuser Busch), Scotiabank, and MetLifehave all launched global talent mobility programs to force people to gain global awareness and expand business opportunities.

Something very profound is happening. Jobs are getting more specialized, people work in teams and cross functional boundaries, and success is being redefined by expertise, not span of control.

And people without specialized skills are finding it harder to find work. Seth Godin calls it "the end of the average worker." As we prepare for our annual research conference (IMPACT 2012: Building Agility through People), I would like to talk a little bit about a theme which I call "the end of a job as we know it."

The History of a Job

Many decades ago organizational development experts came up with the concept of "a job" - a functional role which was defined by a set of responsibilities, functional competencies (skills needed to succeed), a job title, level, and career path. These functional roles are institutionalized around the world. We write "job descriptions" when we hire people; we create organization charts which show functional roles in a hierarchy; we have billions of dollars of HR software which manage job competencies, compensation levels, and skills; and we have millions of workers and managers who have been trained to hire, manage, and organize their teams around these pre-defined jobs.

For you as an employee, you read the job description, take on the "job," try to do it well, and expect regular rewards and upward promotion. And if you work for a well run organization, there are training tools, assessments, feedback, and recognition programs to help you succeed.

Well, the world has changed. It's all about expertise, not just experience.

Well the world has changed. Today, thanks to communications technology, people can do their "jobs" everywhere and anywhere. We collaborate across the globe just as easily as we can in the same room. People don't necessarily progress "upward," but often "sideways" or "deeper" in expertise.

And as a result of this shift, if you let your skills atrophy, you're dead. Your employer can likely find those skills elsewhere by hiring a contractor, bidding out work, or finding another internal expert. We have entered a workforce where deep skills are the currency of employment, not just experience.

In our research we call this "the borderless workplace," a concept which explains how workers work seamlessly with people inside and outside their organization on a continuous basis. And this shift has redefined what a "job" actually is.

Let's look at a few examples.

Customer service agents work in some type of support center. But today this may be virtual, taking place at home or in a remote location. Service agents can instantly access experts in engineering, sales, or product design through knowledge portals, online video, and email. So if you are a customer service agent that specializes in the support of one particular product, are you a "customer support agent" or are you a "product specialist?" If your company is smart, they will redefine your job as "product specialist" and put you into a role which lets you share your expertise with other service agents. You will make more money and serve others in the organization.

Look at IT and engineering. In the 1980's companies hired "computer programmers." These were people with general programming skills and they came to your company with to learn your systems. Today there are dozens of highly specialized IT skills (UI specialists, Ruby-on-Rails experts, data scientists, systems architects, IOS experts,etc). If you don't have deep expertise in one of these areas, you're going to find it hard to find a "programming" job. And IT executives use borderlessness more than ever: if your company needs a programming skill, they will find it in India, China, or eastern Europe.

Your value as an employee is no longer "I am good at my job" but "how much demand is there for my skills."

This is the process of "increasing specialization," a process which naturally takes place in high-performing organizations. Much research has been done over the years and it all shows that "specialists out perform generalists" by up to 10:1. Specialized software engineers produce 10X more productivity than generalists. Specialized sales people can sell 5-10 times as much as generalized sales people, and on and on.

Malcolm Galdwell's best-selling book Outliers is explains how all experts develop their special skills over long periods of time (7+ years to become excellent), and ultimately become world-class at narrower and narrower skills.

Roles not Jobs: Tasks and Projects, not Functions.

What this all means is that in today's high performing companies, people now take on"roles" not "jobs." They are responsible for "tasks" and "projects" and not simply "functions."

While a company may still need to hire a "customer service agent" or a "director of customer service," what they really want to do is find a person who has a highly refined set of skills which they need for their company. So if the company is Southwest Airlines, they're going to look for someone with great sense of humor, a high degree of emotional intelligence, and the willingness to do what it takes to solve a customer's problems. They aren't looking for people who "have had that job" but rather people who "have these skills."

And leadership, by the way, is just a "role" like any other - with its own particular set of skills. Grundfos, one of the world's most successful global manufacturers, defines its leadership as "innovators," "executers," and "managers" - all peers with each other.

This is particularly true in technical and professional roles. Many of the HR executives I talk with tell me they're having an increasingly difficult time recruiting. As our research points out, this is not because there aren't people looking for jobs, it's because their organization needs specialized roles and the workforce itself has not fully adjusted to this new world. The VP of Talent Acquisition at one major insurance company told me that she is no longer looking for "IT staff" or "computer programmers" but rather "Ruby on Rails Programmers with 5+ years of experience in Agile software development."

This is the essence of my thesis: "jobs as we know them are changing dramatically."

Five Ways High-Performing Organizations Manage People

I talk with many companies each year, and have found that high-performing organizations (the "agile" ones) manage people differently. They have embraced the new definition of work:

1. They reward results and expertise, not position.

Accenture rewards its consultants based on a 7-level capability model, which people are expected to focus on over many years of their career. People are evaluated based on the "internal demand" for their skills, not just their manager's assessment of performance.

Intel regularly rewards and moves top engineering talent around the company to promote and build their expertise.

2. They break down functional silos and facilitate work across business functions.

One of Pfizer's greatest organizational breakthroughs was the company's focus on "science teams" which collaborate and share information on various body systems, organs, and molecules across different product teams.

IBM regularly creates global action-teams which take people from functional groups and brings them together to work on large client projects.

3. They reward continuous learning and "learning agility."

The Federal Reserve and even the IRS now reward people for contributing knowledge to others becoming better teachers and learners. Some academics call this a push for "serial incompetence," meaning people are regularly moved into new roles to expand their breadth of experience.

4. They hire for values, innate skills, and fit, not for experience.

The famous Google hiring tests focus on intellectual ability and fit, not on experience.

Swardovski, one of the world's leading retailers, looks for integrity and sense of value in its candidates, not retail experience. Even the giant American Express has changed its hiring standards to look for "hospitality personalities" not customer service experience.

5. They encourage and promote horizontal mobility.

United Health Group posts all major job opportunities internally and has built a whole team dedicated to "facilitated talent mobility." This team helps people find new jobs internally, develop their own internal careers, and saves the company millions in external hiring.

All these high-performing business focus on people taking on "roles" and "responsibilities" and building deeper levels of skills and cross-functional contribution.

Implications for You, Your Organization, and the HR Marketplace

I've been talking with companies about this for the last year, and this shift has many important implications.

Job Seekers:

If you are a job seeker, it means that now, more than ever, it is time to focus on your own skills and abilities. Decide what you are truly good at, and focus on building this set of skills in a deeper and more meaningful way. Read everything you can. Take courses to build fundamental skills. Remember that experience drives mastery: get more experience doing different types of projects in your own job today. This makes you more valuable to your own employer as well as to the external job market.

Business Leaders:

If you are a manager or business executive, think hard about your own organization. Have you created enough flexibility in the organization to empower people to develop expertise and bring it to your customers? Do you encourage continuous learning and learning from mistakes? Do you reward expertise and functional depth? Do you define a "high-potential" as a strong technical or functional leader and not only a strong manager or executive? (Managerial skills are actually "functional skills" also.) For more on this, read about our High-Impact Learning Culture research.

HR Vendors and Suppliers:

Are you delivering the right products and services which reflect this huge shift in the nature of the workforce? Do you have tools and services which help people build expertise, find expertise, and develop and improve internal organizational agility? If not you may find yourself selling products which rapidly become obsolete. (Look at how quickly Monster.com, a  job-board is being replaced by LinkedIn an expertise network. The company's earnings just dropped 5% despite a 9% increase in the number of postings.)

HR Executives and Managers:

Are you promoting HR practices which create cross-organizational work and expertise? Is your reward system flexible and open enough to enable people to work on project teams which cross the organization? Is your performance management process agile and flexible and does it force continuous feedback and transparency? Do you hire for skills and capabilities or just experience? Do you promote and facilitate talent mobility? Do you regularly communicate company values, goals, and strategies to encourage people to think of the organization as "one team" and not a set of functional silos?

The world of work is dramatically changing.

I’ve written before about the changes I see coming for organizations (e.g. here), and they’re driven by the changes I am seeing in business and in society.  Things are moving faster, and this has all sorts of consequences: it means that change is occurring more frequently, information is doubling, our competition is more aggressive, and more.  Really, we’re unmasking the chaos that we’ve been able to cover with observed patterns, and explain away the excepti0ns. Well, now the patterns are changing fast enough that we can’t expect to be able to plan, prepare and execute to succeed. We have to be more nimble, more agile.  In short, we have to move away from depending on formal learning to be able to cope, and we need a new solution.

The solution is to empower individuals so that they’re pulling together.  No longer can a few do the thinking for everyone, as we see in a hierarchical organization. Instead, we need to make sure everyone understands what the overall goal is, and have them work together to achieve it.  We need to tap into the collective intelligence of the entire organization. This is a redefinition of learning as performance, incorporating problem-solving, innovation, creativity, design, research, and more.

That means a number of things: we need to be explicit about goals, transparent about processes, supportive about collaborative skills, and proactive in creating a culture that fosters and nurtures the necessary approaches.  This doesn’t come for free.  Who is responsible for ensuring this works?

In some organizations it’s the information services group, or the knowledge management group.  And they certainly should be on board; ideally you don’t want a hodgepodge of different systems to do the same thing, you want a coordinated environment that supports lessons learned in one area to be easily shareable elsewhere in the organization.  At core, however, I believe that folks who understand learning have to be part of the picture.  They may not own it, but they need to be actively facilitating across the organization.

And this, to me, defines the future of  the training department.  It can no longer be just about courses.  It’s got to include performance support, and informal learning. It’s got to be about culture, and learning together skills, and facilitating productive information interchange and productive interactions. We have technologies now to empower user-generated content, collaboration and more, but the associated skills are being assumed, which is a mistake.  The ability to use these tools will continually need updating and support.

This should not be threatening or anxiety-inducing!  Training used to be important, as skilled workers were critical.  As we’ve automated more work and started developing training for more knowledge work without adapting our methods (and, consequently, making generally dreadful learning experiences), the training role is less and less seen as worthwhile. The opportunity to reestablish a strategic role in the organization should be viewed with excitement, and taken up as the gift it is!

So, I see the future of the training department being as learning facilitators, and the path there to be to take on more and more of that role.  In the future, I reckon, learning facilitators will be partners with the technology infrastructure units in providing an innovation infrastructure, a performance ecosystem.  These facilitators will be (virtually) distributed across the enterprise just as the technology infrastructure is.  Yes, there’s likely some re-skilling involved, but it beats irrelevancy, or worse.  Here’s to redefinition !

Clark Quinn earned a PhD in applied cognitive science at UCSD, and brings a deep understanding of learning as well as experience designing technology solutions to ensure that the learner, learning, and user experience are integrated into a successful performance solution. http://blog.learnlets.com/

“Social Business” is not about technology, or about “corporate culture”. It is a sociopolitical historical shift that is bigger, broader and much more fascinating.

A new perspective is changing how we think about society, politics, interpersonal relationships, science, government and business. New approaches are emerging. Learning and self-expression are exploding. Values are changing. Leadership is changing. The economy is changing. Change itself is changing – it is accelerating and becoming the norm.

Business structures founded on command and control, automation and process are giving way to structures that are less hierarchical and more dynamic, designed to engage people’s hearts and minds to make a difference in the world. Business models of the past – some of which focused on exploiting resources – human, resource, financial or legal – are beginning to fail as we reach the limits of their sustainability (Umair Haque’s New Capitalist Manifesto is a very well written and brilliant description of these forces). The new successful businesses and governments are building, not destroying. Creating durable value that is greater than the cost (financial, societal, environmental and otherwise) of the resources they consume.

In the past most business value was derived from controlling land, resources or intellectual property (processes, technologies and patents). A “Social Business” is one that derives most of its value from the hearts and minds of people who work there and the people who buy from them. A social business’s first priority is not structure or process, but the aspiration and approach that engages those hearts and minds.

If the industrial revolution’s idea of a great business was one in which every role, process and activity was well defined and controlled by management, social business is one in which every employee and customer are aligned around a common purpose.

There are 2 shifts in thinking that are driving the move to “Social Business”

1. From Command and Control to Network Management.

We have maxed out what we can do with Command and Control organizations, and we’re learning to manage networks of capable people instead.
Social Businesses are beginning to recognize that we’ve fully milked the mechanistic, reductionist concepts that lead to command and control, and to go forward, we need a new model.

Let me put that into English – Since the dawn of civilization, most organizations – governments, military and businesses – have operated in a command and control fashion. Why? First, this was the only way to communicate at scale, and second, people lacked, or were thought to lack the competence and/or the will to operate independently toward the leaderships goals. The communication problem is rapidly disappearing (though it lingers), and higher levels of education generally have profoundly reduced the need for command and control, while the complexity of the world and need for speed have diminished its effectiveness.

Stuff is changing so fast that the rigid mechanistic structures are simply failing. It has actually become harder to be productive in a big organization – economies of scale are reversing themselves in command and control environments. And in these new organizations that are networks of capable individuals who have great communications tools, leadership emerges as more important than command structure. even if most people have never heard of John Holland and Complexity Theory (I’ve recently been reminded how obscure they still are).

Hierarchy, process and automation are returning to their proper place – as tools that support human efficiency and capability. Rather than the 20th century model of people existing to keep the processes running, we are now flipping it around so that processes exist to support us. Processes and automation amplify human capability. Importantly, there is another profound amplifier of human capability – and that is other humans! The focus on collaboration fueled by radically improved communication and the internet that William Gibson deliciously described as our “increasingly efficient, communal, prosthetic memory” is dramatically changing how we think about organizational structure, efficiency, learning and innovation – even if most people have never heard of Complexity Theory.

2. Business needs people and people need respect.

To do good work, people must constantly be scanning their environment, understanding and inventing solutions to problems. Command and control is not the best way to encourage or benefit from this – particularly as the organization grows large. Consumers (constituents, clients etc), similarly, are tired of being taken for granted, and also wish to be respected as the ultimate judges of your organization’s value. The same increase in talent, education and capability that makes networked organizations possible, means that the people themselves have thought beyond their occupation as a means to survival. They want more from it, and want to offer more to it.

Hence, your organization is now in the business of earning and maintaining the respect of your market and your team. Your team is useless to you if it is not well respected, and your market will simply walk away if it thinks you are trying to trick, cajole or manipulate it. Daniel Pink’s research shows that people, in order to be truly motivated in their work, require autonomy, mastery and purpose. Simon Sinek goes on to show how purpose is also key to market success. The common thread here is respect. Respect the purpose of your organization, respect the capabilities of your workforce, respect the attention and value of your customers.

Command and Control doesn’t allow for that kind of engagement. A strictly hierarchical organization struggles to engage and consider each of its employees. Executives miss many, many opportunities for insight and problem solving because they don’t know how or don’t value the contribution of their corps. Similarly, a company that is not maximizing the amount of engagement between its employees and the people they serve are walking away from the real value potential they have – which is to understand an audience, and share their perspective with it.

Social Business is one that recognizes that their mission is engaging hearts and minds to achieve excellence. Social Business is about respecting people.

Geeking out on the riff, or what E2.0 really stands for

Social Business is a reflection of a larger societal shift. Its tempting to draw analogies between what is happening now and the Enlightenment, which began transforming Europe in the mid 17th century and ran straight into the the 18th. The Enlightenment changed how we westerners thought. We went from norms of feudalism and mythology to democracy, rationalism and reductionism.
It brought us both democracy and the industrial revolution. Woah. It took a century or so, but it was a radical rewrite of how we think about who we are and how we live.
It was hastened on its way by the invention of the printing press, Newtonian math and science, Liberalism, and a number of philosopher scientists who were later excommunicated.

The enlightenment was characterized by an intellectual elite that saw the opportunity for a better world. It gave us the tools to re-explore the world from a rational, reductionist perspective using scientific principles – predictable consequences of any action – to transform everything from navigation to technology and society itself. It was hastened on its way by the invention of the printing press, Newtonian math and science, Liberalism, and the work of philosopher scientists who were frequently excommunicated.

Rationalism lead to a massive diffusion and expansion of scientific knowledge, math and technology. in this mindset, the perfect system, the perfect business structure, was one where every variable was known, every detail calculated. Whether consciously or un, we tried to model our organizations after these ideals. When every variable was known, we would have complete control. Henry Ford capitalized (so to speak) on this principle with his famous assembly lines. Things became fast and consistent – a fundamental enabler of the industrial revolution and mass production which allowed for the creation of an educated middle class. [This TED talk which looks at how the invention of the washing machine lead to the modern concept of parenting, seems at first blush silly and then absolutely profound. Imagine if women in developing countries didn't have to carry water - but I digress (and you should too - the TED talk and water stats are worth seeing).]

Enlightenment 2.0, which we could argue is what’s happening now, has been catalyzed by quantum mechanics (you really can’t know it all, sister), complexity theory, and social media technologies, is leading us from the age of reason to the age of – emergence (?!?) – where we will start to understand that while we cannot predict or control what will happen, we can surf it. It is enriched by humanist thinking and a general increase in the global standard of living that allows people to care about determining their lives, rather than simply surviving. We are again seeing the rise of the polyglot polymath- the person who knows some science, some philosophy, some business, some politics and is taking control of producing their ideas. (Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson are as well known for their contributions to science and technology as to politics). This is a time when we are again inventing, acting, doing as well as learning. This will change the way we think and act as dramatically as the first Age of Enlightenment, though it may take as long to unfold. It takes a while to re-wire the human psyche.

Human behavior is one of the most non-deterministic, irreducible forces we deal with in day to day life. The Enlightenment respected that, at the same time as it created the paradoxes of command and control and mechanistic views of the world. We’re now able to come back and reevaluate the role of human complexity in society. Enlightenment 2.0 is causing Enterprise 2.0 to embrace complexity and human behavior.

A Social Business is a business that respects and profits from the complexity and unlimited potential of people.

The best is yet to come.

In this series of three articles, i want to explore social learning from the perspective of the individual and the organisation in today’s workplace and then take a look to the future, to where social may take us.

Social learning takes place in the grey space between the formal worlds of work and the informal social spaces that we inhabit outside. It is typified by rapid dialogue, by semi evolved ideas and opinions and by an ease of engagement, irrespective of technology, time or place. Social learning may sit within a curriculum but as an activity it rarely has formal structure. That’s not to say that it is without purpose, rather that it tends to look for emergent knowledge rather than the discovery of pre formed ideas.

The emergence of social learning has followed a fairly simple path: first we saw the purely social applications of new technology with the development of community sites based around specialist activities and interests, often involving common functionality such as the collection of ‘friends’ and the ability to express ‘likes’. Be it music, gardening or looking up old school friends, social spaces generated high levels of engagement, far higher than we were seeing in any formal workplace learning environments.

At the heart of social learning is a new dynamic, that the proletariat are in charge of the messaging. Whilst we have always been able to allow discussion and debate within classroom based training, there is something fundamentally formal about how we learn at work. The physical space as well as the messaging is owned by the organisation. Behaviours are, or should be, ‘work’ behaviours, there is a hierarchy of organisation and power and all conversations and interactions take place within that formal structure.

In social spaces however, we rely more on our social capital, our ability to shape and broadcast messages, take part in debate and listen. Our position is less formal, more fluid, with leadership emerging as a more contextual behaviour, changing between conversations and people as we move into and out of our areas of expertise.

As learning moves further away from abstract, codified experiences, discrete chunks of ‘learning’ time and more towards an activity that is continuous and integrated more firmly into our everyday working lives, as we become more agile learners in this new economy of knowledge and opportunity, so the skills to be successful in social environments take a new pre-eminence.

Social learning is all about user generated content, less about the study of textbooks, although we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of well designed social learning experiences. Whilst at the moment much use is being made of the forums and freeform debate that is possible in social, i believe that as we see greater uptake and utilisation we will see more formally defined experiences, still retaining the unstructured and inclusive features of social spaces, but with more closely defined learning outcomes and probably greater demands on the learner. Social will become more of an approach that is applied to a subject than an end in it’s own right.

Right now, the challenge for individuals is to build their social capital, to become experienced social learners. Most of the challenges around the uptake of social relate to trust, integrity and the need to understand the ground rules in spaces that are familiar and yet strangely different from what we are used to. For experienced online denizens, this may be easy, for people less accustomed to the occasional rough and tumble and hazardous pitfalls, it’s daunting.

The purpose of social is to engage with learners more deeply, to allow a closer symbiosis between groups, between subject and learner and between organisation and team. We need to ensure that we don’t just create a new, disenfranchised group of disengaged learners, lost because of a lack of understanding or confidence in the new space.

At it’s best, social learning is fun, it’s challenging and it’s vibrant. At it’s worst, it’s threatening, abusive or disenfranchising. The ownership of this challenge falls to the individual, to learn new skills and to the organisation, to adopt the correct stance to these spaces, which is what we will explore tomorrow.

Continuous acquisition and application of knowledge, skills, and beliefs by individuals, teams, and the whole enterprise is an essential aspect of high performance organizations. However, barriers to this learning are common in organizations. These barriers must be overcome in order for organizations to have long term success.

Twelve of these common barriers are:

1. Program focus : “ new programs and services are evaluated in isolation rather than as interdependent parts of the whole organization, e.g., a diversity workshop is evaluated by the participants at the end of the workshop, not by everyone in the organization weeks and months after the workshop
2. Limited resources : “ learning is not given adequate funding and support, e.g., staff are not given resources to experiment with new ideas before risking large scale implementation
3. Work-learning dichotomy : “ producing and selling things is valued whereas learning is merely tolerated, e.g., little involvement of supervisors in the training of their direct-reports
4. Passive leadership : “ leaders don't ask themselves the hard questions and their boards and co-workers don't question their actions, e.g., a hospital CEO continues to push for hospital expansion while nobody asks, "Is expansion in the best interests of patients, employees, doctors, and the community?"
5. Non-learning culture : “ organizational values, assumptions, beliefs, behaviors, and norms do not support learning, e.g., recognizing (praise, reward, promotion, etc.) individual success but not recognizing team success
6. Resistance to change : “ trying new ways of doing things is not encouraged, e.g., individuals are told to be creative and innovative but not allowed to implement their ideas
7. Not discussing the un-discussable : “ everyone has a shared but un-spoken understanding that certain issues are not to be confronted and resolved, e.g., one employee's negative attitudes are bringing down morale of the organization but nobody will talk about this problem for fear of retribution
8. Need for control : managers intentionally and unintentionally use organization charts, policy manuals, rules and regulations, performance evaluation, compensation, budget and expense monitoring, security systems, and work-space arrangements to constrain and limit sharing and applying knowledge, e.g., lines of communication are enforced within an organization to the point that a manager in one department may not talk to a manager in another department
9. Focus on short-term, simple solutions : managers taking the most expedient course of action without solving the long term problems within their organizations, e.g., doing multi-person layoffs to reduce costs when the real problem is not offering products and services that customers want
10. Skilled incompetence : the tendency of managers to avoid embarrassing or threatening interactions, place blame on others, and not accept responsibility for problems, e.g., the leader of a team that failed to complete an assignment avoids asking himself, "What is it about what I am doing or saying that contributes to other people behaving in ineffective and destructive ways?"
11. Blame, not gain language : employees tend to use mostly language that is judgmental and punitive rather than language that facilitates learning, e.g., when something goes wrong, the first words out of a manager's mouth are, "Who is responsible for this problem?"
12. Selective attention : not seeing (literally) and, therefore, not learning from unexpected events, e.g., two employees attend the same presentation by their CEO but understand the new organizational direction in very different ways

What additional barriers to learning have you observed in organizations?

Stephen J. Gill is an independent consultant working with businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies on learning and performance improvement. He writes www.ThePerformanceImprovementBlog.com. His latest book is Communication in High Performance Organizations: Principles and Best Practices, available as an ebook from Amazon Kindle.