Is this your HR leader?

Do companies need social media? Ever notice HR leaders shying away from this question, typically being led by the Marketing or IT group? Why is that? Why do our HR leaders focus more on the risks vs. the potential rewards of implementing this technology within the enterprise? And when HR leaders DO chime in, the conversation is shifted to the organization’s social media policy or lack thereof, the HR handbook, or some other compliance topic of little strategic benefit to the company. It’s almost like HR dumbs down the conversation or ignores it altogether.

It seems every day there is a new article, blog post, tweet, and other commentary questioningwhether companies “need” social media. It’s akin to asking, do companies “need” a website, email, PC’s, or mobile phones? The answer is obvious. Of course no company “needs” social media, although many will likely turn to Facebook’s Marketplace when looking for a buyer for their failing business.

As Human Resources professionals (and learning coaches―a.k.a. instructional designers), one of the things we’ve learned is that the medium is not the message¹. Just as we’ve been learning for years without all of the technology at our disposal today, companies have been conducting business for years without social media and will be conducting business for many years to come without it. So, stop fussing about whether your company needs social media- the answer is… it doesn’t need it.  As a profession, we should stop obsessing over hypotheticals and focus our energies on the needs of our companies we can meet―via social media or otherwise. This is where our greatest opportunity for impacting the bottom line lies.

Here’s a list of what companies do need, and by all means feel free to add more to list with your comments below:

• a productive and engaged workforce able to compete and succeed in today’s global market,
• a means with which to attract, recruit, communicate with, and provide challenging work to thedigital natives entering the workforce,
• a dynamic intranet, where employees can connect and quickly locate information, expertise, and each other to collaborate and execute the organizations plans,
• to stop mass marketing their products and services via mediums where their message is lost in a sea of useless noise, and to engage their customers in a very personal, authentic and focused manner,
• a “new and improved” vision for their learning management system, one that can accommodate learning events and opportunities not conceived of in the HR department- but born in “the field”, informal learning, and enables employees to learn from one another up, down and across the organization―geographical boundaries be damned,
• a means with which to capture some of the knowledge that’s about to walk out of their doors when baby boomers accelerate their retirement after this economic malaise we are currently in, and finally
• a good dose of leadership from their head of Human Resources to collaborate with their IT department, and educate the c-suite on how social media can and should be considered as part of their talent management strategy―and not just their marketing mix, to meet some of these needs

Social media technology has the potential to transform the enterprise and how we work, but only when implemented as part of a larger human resources strategy, with clear goals and objectives, and when applied to needs it can effectively meet. When implemented in pursuit of one of these goals above, and tracked with appropriate metrics, HR leaders will be able to demonstrate the value of implementing these systems, and not simply the risks which are so prominently written about that make the news headlines every day.

1. Clark, R. (1983). Reconsidering research on learning from media. Review of Educational Research 53(4), 445-59.

In his role as Co-founder, Managing Director of Collabor8 Learning, Alex Santos is developing enterprise social networks and e-learning programs that serve the training and development needs of large and small organizations. Alex's work in private industry over the past 15 years has focused heavily on the development of learning systems and courses that teach and transform performance. In this capacity, Alex has developed courses for use by the U.S. Navy, CSX Transportation, Visa International, Ocean Bank, Fontainebleau Resorts, and now the Ritter Academy. He earned his Master of Science in Instructional Systems from The Florida State University, and his Master of Business Administration from The University of Miami. In addition, he holds the coveted Senior Professional in Human Resources certification from the Human Capital Institute.

I complete exactly 3 months at ThoughtWorks today. While this has been a momentous career shift for me, I may not have written a blog post on it except for the learning. Needless to say, an understanding (albeit very rudimentary) of the Agile philosophy supersedes all other learning (and that has been plentiful too).

Coming from a very traditional, waterfall-driven background replete with all the drawbacks (what I perceive as drawbacks in comparison now), it took me quite a while to assimilate the philosophy - even the basics of Agile. A dictum like «Just deliver; don»™t document unless the document is going to add value» would throw me into a tizzy. Don’t we need to document so that in case a point comes when the blame-game starts (I assumed it would), we have our backs covered ? Apparently not because there is no blame game! There is no one to blame. Everyone is in this together - the team, the client, and all other remaining stakeholders.

As I mulled over these rather shocking, almost blasphemous, aspects of Agile, I thought it would be a good idea to pen down my thoughts and put them forth for inspection and feedback. And to track my understanding over time.

The original Agile Manifesto, which is my source of inspiration, can be found here.

My interpretation of the Agile philosophy

I am trying to acquire better ways of learning and building personal knowledge networks and helping others do it. Through this endeavor, I have come to value:

• Adaptive over predictive
• Collaboration over documentation
• Continuous feedback over periodic reviews
• Generalization over specialization

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, I value the items on the left more and have found them to be in synch with what is required today to build a learning organization, an organization of motivated, passionate individuals.

Unpacking each claim

Adaptive over  predictive

Ruth Clark describes adaptive in relation to expertise in her book Building Expertise: Cognitive Methods for Training and Performance Improvement, and I think it reflects my understanding of Agile philosophy very well. Being adaptive means to be flexible, open to change, reacting to situations just as the situation demands. Adaptive expertise brings open-ended inquiry to the problem and not a pre-defined solution. Being adaptive is to be always ready. In this context, I am reminded of the phrase «a mind like water» by David Allen. Paraphrasing from Getting Things Done below:

Water neither flinches nor ignores the impact when a huge boulder hits its surface. It welcomes a boulder just like it would a pebble. The ripples it generates are in direct proportion to the size and impact - neither more nor less. Water neither underreacts nor overreacts. And very soon, water goes back to its natural state - open and clear - ready for the next impact.

This is the state of being truly adaptive and agile. With the unknown and the complex becoming the norm in knowledge work, adaptability is the key to dealing with challenges, to be comfortable with ambiguity, and to move to a state where we are constantly learning.

As Eric Hoffer very aptly says (the highlights are mine):

We can never really be prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves. It needs subordinate self-confidence to face drastic change without inner trembling.

Collaboration over  documentation

Going back to my roots in traditional organizations where documentations supersede communication, conversations and listening, I can appreciate the value of collaboration. Please note that I am not advocating doing away with documentation, but documenting only what adds value and when it adds value - to the project, to the team, to the stakeholders or to oneself. I am using the Minutes of Meetings (MOMs) as an example to make my case.

Coming from a culture where minutes of meetings were more important than the meeting participants, I can truly appreciate the need for collaboration. Unlike any of the methodologies that fall under the umbrella of Agile, in traditional orgs most meetings are conducted as rote and many of the crucial stakeholders are missing. Hence, a stringent documentation is required to capture what transpired and to keep everyone in the loop (so to speak). Needless to say, many of the subtleties of discussions are lost, and the minutes become more of a «save our backs in the future» documents with little of value coming out of them.

Let me take this a little further. When I claim that under the aegis of Agile philosophy, collaboration is more valued, this is what I imply. First of all, collaboration for me implies disciplined collaboration - a term popularized by Morten T. Hansen in his book Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results. Disciplined collaboration is to collaborate for results. And this is precisely what the philosophy of Agile supports. Some of the quotes from the book that supports my understanding of effective collaboration are:

« The idea of disciplined collaboration can be summed up in one phrase: the leadership practice of properly assessing when to collaborate (and when not to) and instilling in people both the willingness and the ability to collaborate when required. »

« Disciplined collaboration requires that organizations be decentralized and yet coordinated. To build this model, leaders need to detect the barriers to collaboration and overcome them without reducing the benefits of a decentralized structure. »

« Collaborative companies run on networks, those informal working relationships among people that cut across formal lines of reporting. If the formal org chart shows how work is divided into pieces, networks reveal the informal organization-how people actually work together. »

Finally, a collaborative company can do away with unnecessary documentation, remain lightweight and agile because the concerned people are all in it together. Everyone is in the loop, always!

Continuous feedback over  periodic reviews

This is my biggest learning from Agile. The very environment and processes - pair programming, TDD, retrospectives, continuous integration, whatever else you will - support continuous feedback, one of the keys to learning. In this environment, a mistake becomes a stepping stone to excellence. A philosophy that centers on feedback also encourages mistakes by default. I think of these as bunkos where a «bunko» means - «to make a mistake from which the benefits of what you learned exceed the costs of the screw-up» as described in The Adventures of Johnny Bunko. Because one knows that feedback will be immediate, one is not scared to experiment, think big and explore. Imagine the reverse of this - where feedback comes in the form of yearly appraisals that tell you how many times you have screwed up far removed from the time and the context of the screw up itself. It leaves one mentally screaming, «Why didn’t you tell me earlier? How does it help now?»

Here’s one of my sources of understanding and clarity on the purpose of feedback and the way to deliver as well as receive it: Tightening the Feedback Loop by Patrick Kua.

Generalization over  specialization

With the edges of our roles and jobs disintegrating, it is of utmost importance to be able to wear multiple hats. While we will definitely have our specializations (that after all is what we were hired for), this should not make us incapable of playing multiple roles. Generalization helps in a number of ways (I am referring to generalization around one’s core skills).

In a world and world economy where situations throw us into unpredictable circumstances and poses unknown problems, being a specialist with crystallized intelligence can be a bit of a hindrance. Ruth Clark in the aforementioned book talks about this at length. I have described it briefly here. To remain adaptive and responsive to changing situations, it is important to develop a fluid intelligence, one that enables us to take on the role of inquiring novices when required, which in turn helps to view a problem from different perspectives.

To quote Ruth Clark:

Fluid intelligence is the basis for reasoning on novel tasks or within unfamiliar contexts; in other words, it gives rise to adaptive expertise. In contrast, crystallized intelligence is predicated on learned skills» and is the basis for routine expertise.

It is clear that adaptive expertise is the basis of being a generalist. A generalist, according to me, is one who can explore, venture into unknown territories and domain, learn from new experiences and apply that in areas beyond one’s specialization. 

  

An Enterprise Community Manager and Learning and Development Consultant at ThoughtWorks, Sahana Chattopadhyay works at the intersection of instructional design, knowledge management, enterprise collaboration and community development. Passionate about the power of collaborative learning and social media in meeting the challenges of today’s complex work environment, she is helping to build communities to facilitate conversations, knowledge sharing and creation, and open communication in a distributed organization.

Learning professionals have long recognized that the majority of learning takes place outside the classroom, primarily because effective learning takes place contextually. An employee will naturally seek a learning opportunity at his or her time of need, often seeking help from the 'expert employee' over the cubicle wall, or by reaching out to them over the phone, email or instant messaging. It goes like this: "I've never had a situation like this! What would Michael or Kelly do? I'll go ask!"

Much of this activity is a direct result of the fact that formal training tends to focus on policies and procedures, and doesn't often capture best practices which are constantly evolving through day-to-day business interactions. The people that are creating the best practices are usually not the people designing the training courses. This explains both the gap and the opportunity that can be addressed through social learning. And while it's almost cliché to speak of the "fast pace of today's business environment" and "the increased need for collaboration and knowledge sharing", it could not be more true. An organization’s ability to compete locally, nationally, or globally is very much tied to its ability to foster and enable collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Then along comes the explosive rise of social media which have led to many learning professionals and learning technology vendors looking to capitalize on the opportunity to support social learning in the workplace. As with any major paradigm shift, we have seen a number of different approaches - not all successful. Software vendors and corporations with entrenched, legacy systems typically either wait and do nothing, or create "bolt on" solutions. These approaches are often clunky and limited by the workflow and design goals of the "top down" systems upon which they are built. In many cases long term user adoption is a complete failure as the bolt on systems are by their nature limited by constrained governance models, firewall issues, and un-evolved corporate policy, which means that employees may not find the learning delivery to be fast enough, relevant enough, easily used and consumed, and available at the most opportune time. Thus, there is an increasing risk of leaving employees who are hip to today’s web 2.0 and mobile technologies disengaged and bored (more on this in a future post!).

Fortunately, social learning has evolved to the extent that some best practices are emerging. Learning technologies are now available that enable organizations to adopt powerful social learning solutions cost-effectively and quickly.

Stay tuned for our next post as we dig into some of the practical considerations for social learning.

Tony Yang leads marketing at Knoodle, which includes the company's go-to-market strategy, product marketing, lead generation, and content development. Prior to joining Knoodle, Tony consulted for large tech companies, cloud-based enterprise 2.0 startups, and non-profit organizations including Microsoft, BillFLO, and California Against Slavery. He was previously the Director of Marketing at LeapFILE, a large file transfer and cloud storage company. He also spent several years overseas in China, where he contributed in marketing and business development roles for IBM Global Services. Tony holds an MBA from the Marshall School of Business at University of Southern California, a Masters in Information Systems Management from Keller Graduate School of Management, and BA degrees in both Economics and Chinese Studies from the University of California, San Diego. He is fluent in both English and Chinese.

I am pretty satisfied that most of you are already aware of the convergence between “learning content” and all other “content” in your organization. Some of you may be wrestling with what the move means to your organization, while others of you may be undertaking innovations or changes in your learning technology to accommodate the change. And, for those of you who are new to this viewpoint, or who want to argue it, humor me and just read along anyway.

The urge to converge

Here’s what is happening behind this notion about convergence. As learning professionals we fostered the belief that content prepared for learning environments stands apart from other content. In fact, we’ve been so convinced of it that there is a multi-billion dollar business built around it, consisting of technology and services to reinforce the position that training and development resources are something unique. And, we managed to get away with this concept about the significance of learning content because adult education bestowed a particular credence on the content’s worth for having the label of “course,” or similar tagged reference.

However, our conventional thinking about content for learning purposes was just hijacked; and, we are partially culprits. It came about as we increased our reliance on the technology of search, and expanded our uses of technology to produce content from elemental sources. These sources range from things like Word and PowerPoint documents to more intricate authoring and editing tools that let us work with audio and video or other digital media assets. All of a sudden, everyone is a content author and publisher.

There are innumerable books and reference materials about uses of the tools and instructional design concepts to apply to the outputs. The learning industry opened up an ability to be a content developer for anyone who could pay the modest purchase price of the software. And, now we can do it real-time from just about any digital device. Don’t believe me? Look at what folks are doing for learning experiences with YouTube, Vimeo, UpStream, and now my favorite Aurasma, in the video-on-demand world.

Next, our new generation of workers, the millennials, are intensifying the speed of this change, because to them content really is just content. When it comes to how they learn, the newest online experiences find them deciding what they want and how they want it, along with where they want it. Now hold onto this concept, because the story gets better.

It’s not enough that we have this convergence of content, but there’s another situation worsening the scenario. It’s “big data.” The world is producing too much of it; and, much of this content is unlike our well-formed content in neatly packaged courses with nicely structured curriculum. This unstructured content does not even benefit from any special orchestration to make it easily accessible.

And, if you are in a “knowledge-intensive enterprise,” the chances are that your organization is slam up against these digital data mega-challenges:

• A confluence of new technologies and business models, e.g. social media;
• Exponential increases in the consumption and delivery of information;
• Boundless proliferation and generation of content; and
• An inundation of smart devices and an explosion in apps for them.

So, for you all this change provokes a must contend scenario, in which you should have shifted gears to wrestle with a myriad of issues around understanding and managing content complexity. The hyper-complex content transformation and transmission landscape requires that we rethink our content and learning strategies and respond with an arsenal of capabilities, including the ability to create new models for providing access to, and uses of, content. The response to these challenges has everything to do with you and your work with technology to improve all aspect of the content, and especially the user experience.

Suffice it to say that you are to be a different kind of person doing very different things to support your organization’s ability to meet its business goals and to align the business with the demands of everyone in its value chain. I have two directions to take you. Are you ready?

Intelligent content engineering

First, the organization has to get a real serious grasp of its content. There are important “best practices” with which to render content manageable, to enhance its searchability, and to produce it in formats that collectively create remarkable new value for the content.

I call this “intelligent content engineering,” a concept defined by and belonging to Joe Gollner (among a select few). In his blog in January this year, Joe explains intelligent content this way: “It is content that has been consciously designed to be manageable and reusable such that automation can be efficiently applied to the discovery and delivery of the content in an unlimited range of contexts and in formats that satisfy the intended purposes of the content consumers.” (See the references at the end of the article.)

If you can produce content for your organization as Joe defines it, you just satisfied a big outcry from our millennials, when they petition you to give them what they want. You might note that nowhere in the definition is there a word about courses, curriculum, or learning management. Joe does underscore two concepts – search (discovery) and distribution (delivery), while also promoting contextualizing content.

I’m not about to advocate abandoning what we formally do to produce, manage, track, and report on content use and users. Mostly, the value has as much to do with the analytics, as with the impact on what the learner took away from the learning event. It’s important to know that we prompt and persuade our folks to encourage their learning, and that we have indicators about the use and results of use of learning experiences.

Yet, the reality is that the investment and efforts for formal education and training represent only 10% of learning and development, as espoused by Robert Eichinger and Michael Lomdardo of The Center for Creative Leadership. They further point out that 20% of learning occurs through other people informally, or formally through coaching and mentoring; and, 70% takes place from real life and on-the-job experiences, tasks, and problem-solving. So, let me jump back to Joe. Before we expend resources of whatever magnitude to produce any content, we must give regard to what it is, where it is going, and what it is to do for the organization and its consumer.

Build a strategy

For content to be intelligent, you begin by building a content strategy. While there’s no room in this article to dig into that topic, make note of two points. One, you have to know what your audiences are looking for from your organization; and, two, you have to make sure content supports key objectives of the organization.

These points might seem like a no brainer. We often conduct requirements analysis in our professional practices. So, here’s some numbers to consider. Above 70% of enterprise organizations have a LMS and use various learning technology methods for 40% of learning hours, including mobile, but less than 20% of them can produce a formal learning strategy document, with only 6.5% having defined a content strategy within it. (See Gerry Kranz’s article in the References.)

In times of dramatic change, like now, the shift occurring from the digital disruption introduced by mobile technology demands nothing short of a transformative strategy in what we are doing with content. Regular news stories on mobile and broadband topics confirm it.

Produce intelligent content for mobile learning

Therefore, a strategy to produce intelligent content must represent the means to build skill and agility at exploring, exposing, extracting, and exploiting content value – especially if the output is about gaining new understanding, insights, or skills. You have to know how to move content into, through, and out to your consumers in forms that engage and ignite use in the ways that your consumers need and want. Successfully undertaking intelligent content engineering will keep the organization on top of its game and in front of its competitors in these times of incredibly accelerated content expansion.

What does intelligent content look like? The actual manifestation goes back to the Gollner definition. The content has “… an unlimited range of contexts and in formats that satisfy the intended purposes of the content consumers.” With that in mind, I’m going to narrow the response particularly to mobile learning.

A big part of what your content strategy for mobile will do is commit you to what Dr. Gary Woodill describes as: “relevant activity from which the learner is able to gain new insights and knowledge.” The quote is from Chapter 3 (page 66) in The Mobile Learning Edge where he goes through seven principles associated with producing “relevance” for mobile learning and advances the argument that context matters.

Mobile technology is a tool for augmenting the learner experience. The value of the technology goes up when the device supports what is already going on in the learner’s experience. The content can have situational and possibly locational context. The relevance in this case can be job specific, project or task specific, or work-collaboration specific. And, what the learner is able to retrieve from the smart appliance is in a particular format suited to the situation. But how does that happen?

A case in point

Remember Rule Two! Bring dexterity to your content. Here’s a business case to explain.

A global enterprise manages a huge portfolio of properties – many are world-class office buildings and office parks with some unique office campuses. The corporation’s business is predominantly three channels – brokerage (leasing space), real estate sales (selling the buildings or complexes), and property management (caring for and maintaining facilities).

A particular population with critical content requirements is the operating engineers, who supervise and oversee the property maintenance from landscaping to waste management and from HVAC to elevators. Any one engineer may have responsibility for five or more properties. The professionals have a dependency on facility maps, diagrams, equipment and system manuals or schematics, details on electrical and plumbing, and also layouts of the physical facilities and floor plans. In addition, there are regulatory and compliance management requirements to satisfy: fire and public safety, traffic management, and government building codes.

The leading obstacle historically was Internet access through a computer to information sources in the corporation. Too often engineers experienced firewall blockage and poor connectivity. With mobile technology – smartphones and tablets – the corporation undertook a process of content transformation. The effort took seven months to complete.

Today, these engineers carry out their jobs without barriers to connectivity and are using content based on geo-location and situation. Two selections from their device produce all appropriate and available content – physical property coordinates and purpose at the location. Users turn on the GPS and select the action for being at the location. In addition, the regulatory and compliance system, supported by the corporate LMS, provides access to that information, manages updates and alerts, and orchestrates managing the engineer’s compliance certification. An investment of $1.9 million annually improves job performance by a measurable 30%, which translates into almost $4 million in recurring savings. This is bottom line net new dollars for the business.

This is a classic example of the promise for the just in time, anytime, and anywhere use of mobile technology. It’s not training and development, although it can be; but, it is about knowledge acquisition when you need it.

There are professionals adept at the approach to creating a system for intelligent content. There are a number of resources for exploring more about the topic. Here are the benefits that I recognize. The engineering …

• Provides effective content management automation and processing sophistication;
• Increases content value rapidly, as it improves throughput efficiency;
• Creates a product far easier to use, support, and maintain;
• Incorporates meta-tagging for search and discovery;
• Optimizes content structuring for multi-modality use, reuse, and repurposing;
• Permits single-source publishing for multi-channel distribution;
• Creates content with device-specific sensitivity; and
• Produces content with contextual awareness.

Know your content consumer

The second direction is an exploration of the content consumer. These folks are the “learners,” among other consumer roles. To start us on this exploration I’ll begin with a quotation from New Social Learning, by Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner: “Learning is what makes us more vibrant participants in a world seeking fresh perspectives, novel insights, and first-hand experiences. When shared, what we have learned mixes with what others have learned, then ripples out, transforming organizations…”

The point is that learning happens, and we need to do nothing. Remember Rule One: you are no longer in the business of learning content development and delivery. So, what are you?

Digital disruption is not solely about cultural, business, or social impact. It gets very personal. In the case of content development, and most specifically instructional design, the disruption is introducing changes that require realignment of how you consider your job. Processes remain important, but processing is now about content ingestion, aggregation, cataloging, indexing, orchestration, curation, transformation, and transmission.

Content is coming from sources inside and outside the organization. Often the content is outside your control and is the product of processes that are very different from the well-formed and structured methods of the ISDworld. Your importance to the organization could be how well you contend with the exponential expansion of content. Are you going to rule content? Or, is content going to ruin you?

Your role is going to require the production of content with delivery through the formal and informal channels of interaction that have the greatest appeal to the organization’s consumer world – lifestyle and workstyle, not the methods of formalized learning technology. Success will require an ability to facilitate an organizational-specificmodel with variable options for content access and use, including end-user abilities for authoring, publishing, and distributing content. You are going to need provision for managing the content generation from virtual communities, social networks, and exchanges outside organizational control (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, industry blogs, and ad hoc media sources).

You are going to continue formal learning with added features for social learning and personalization of learner use. Your world has to offer convenience and efficiency in a secure environment where you can develop sharing with content consumers, along with levels of governance and control to protect the integrity of your organization and its content.

What’s it all mean for our work?

This last sentence introduces my final say about the content consumer. Self-expression is the new online entertainment. People don’t want to just be consumers of content. They want to be participants in creating content.

It’s an impulse that means your biggest new role and responsibility is harnessing and cultivating the content inputs and their uses. You become the “content curator,” choosing how content sources make inputs, how the inputs of content mix and move into some cohesive collection of knowledge assets.

And consider this: by 2015, we can expect that 90% of content production posted on the Internet will be some video format. And, blogs are going to produce more audio conversation than text. What will be your methodology for monitoring, capturing, curating, and cataloging these rich content media? How do you know that those new assets don’t just pile up like so much of the content stored by our organizations? Most content is not recyclable. It is collecting in digital dumps of stuff that we cannot find, access, or use.

I had a conversation today with an innovative thinker about the future of learning. We were kicking around how to reasonably manage unstructured content. He pointed out that my intention is to turn it into some structured form with catalog structures, indexes, and tags. He is thinking that we’ll evolve new algorithms that sniff out the value and believes it is human uses that decide what is worthwhile showing up in a search in some usable form or not. While he and I wrestle with the future, I leave you with the following.

Better content is better business. And, if the content has the expressed purpose of advancing knowledge acquisition, it should be intelligent content in order to produce the greatest learning value. It’s now your job to take care of it.

References

• Bingham, T. and Conner, M. (2010) New Social Learning – A Guide to Transforming Organizations through Social Media. American Society for Training and Development. p. 20.
• Gollner, Joe. “The Business of Intelligent Content,” January 31, 2011, Fractal Enterprise .http://www.gollner.ca.
• Lombardo, M. and Eichinger R. (2001) The Career Architect Planner, 3^rd Edition, Princeton University Press.
• Kranz, Garry. “eLearning Hits its Stride, ”Workforce Magazine Online, February, 2011.
• Woodill, Gary. The Mobile Learning Edge (2011) The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. p. 66.

This article originally appeared on Learning Solutions Magazine

How does work really get accomplished in organizations?

Work usually doesn’t get accomplished the way management sees it formally. The problem with formality is the fact that you really cannot foresee every circumstance that takes place in an organization, especially unanticipated circumstances. For example, a mid-level manager is called into his boss and she says that “we need to do a project and my idea is to do it in such as way, now go ahead and put it together and let me know if you have any questions.”

You will typically see that mid-level managers going back to his or her section and calling people together where he needs participation on a project.  The first thing they will do is try to figure out exactly what the instructions entail. The thing to keep in mind is that every person has to interpret something in their own way. There is no way that two or more people see something in exactly the same way. The management needs to interpret those instructions and have an interaction with his/her people and try to determine what needs to get done.

Most likely, he will probably go back to the next level supervisor and say “is this exactly what you said you thought needs to get done?”

What you really have at work is what Charles refers to as ‘muddling through’, which is not a bad definition. You get things done, but not exactly as how we first laid things out.  The old saying is that the best laid out plans and programs never work exactly as anticipated.

What are organizational sweet spots?

Charles published his last book called the ‘Organizational Sweet Spot’ in 2009 with Springer Publishing. Essentially, a Sweet Spot in an organization, there are in fact more than one, is where the formal organization overlaps with the informal organization. We need to realize that every single organization has an informal network where 70% of the work takes place.

The Sweet Spot can be understood by visualizing three overlapping circles.

1. The first circle on the left-hand side is composed of systems, processes, the technology used, and the management structure. This is your wire diagram for your organization.

When we talk about self organizing systems, that management structure goes away. It is not an absolute necessity within an organization. What is a necessity are the systems, processes and technology, otherwise you wouldn’t get anything done.

2. Management Informal Networks: In the uppermost circle you can see what Charles refers to as the management informal networks. Management themselves have informal networks, primarily to figure out what needs to get done in an organization and how we need to manage to get the workers to participate as we like them to.

3. Worker Informal Networks: The final circle is referred to as the worker informal networks. They exist to help workers try to figure out not only how to best survive in this organization, but also what exactly is required in the organization and how do I fit into getting these things done.

At the center of these 3 overlapping circles is what Charles refers to as the ‘Sweet Spot’.  This is where the actual work takes place and where the interactions take place.

Another vital point is realizing what you can and cannot manage in an organization.

1. What you can manage in an organization is the formal organization – the systems, process and technology. You can also manipulate and build the management structure any way you want.

2. What cannot be managed is the Sweet Spot and informal networks, both on a management side and a worker’s side.

The Sweet Spot is emergent. People come together and ask each other questions such as “have you thought about this thing?” and the other would reply “no I haven’t thought of that”… You can sit back and come up with examples to experience your self. It is very important to keep in mind what you can and cannot manage. The Sweet Spot and informal networks are out of bounds. The best you can do to run an organization as best as possible is to play with that formal system and try to see if the emergent system, the Sweet Spot, fits better into it as time passes.

How do organizations make the transition from the old to the new?

This is the most difficult thing to accomplish within an organization. In his first book 10 years ago, titled Unleashing Intellectual Capital, Charles divided fundamental organizational context into 2 categories:

1. Controlled Access System

The controlled access system is pretty much what we are all used to in a top down organization. It is defined as “where access to the resources and activities of the group are controlled by one or few select individuals.”

2. Shared Access System

The shared access system is defined as resources of a group and its activities are impartially dealt with by all members of the group. That usually is a preferred social context for people, believe it or not. However, most of the organizations are run in control access mode.

What you are trying to do is to go from a controlled access mode to a shared access mode. That is very difficult because we are so used to the top down structure. Charles has put together a few principles that help to transition an organization to that shared access mode. These are not pre-scripted principles, but de-scripted principles. The reason for this is very simple. Every organization is different. Even different organizations that produce the same product or provide the same services have different people and chemistries.

The following are the four principles Charles developed over the last 10 years:

1. Individual Autonomy

What you want to do as best as possible is give every individual a lot of elbow room. This means you need to be very selective on who you invite to work in a self-organizing system. You can’t just ask anyone off the street to come in and to self organize. We all know what transpires after that. Having the right people in place is one of the most difficult aspects of running or converting into a shared access mode. This does not mean being snobbish. Autonomy is very important and the people you invite in need role responsibilities and need to be committed. They need empathy and attunement for the people they work with. Obviously, they need the right talent and skills in order to get the work done.

2. Shared Identity

The key word is belonging. You need to develop an organization where people feel they belong, almost as a family atmosphere. This is the key to success and you can only do this comfortably with organizations that are not much larger than 150 people. The first question of course is that if you have a organization with thousands of people, how do we apply that principle? The simple way to look at this is that you need divide that organization into comfortably interacting groups of 150 people and then connect these people in a meaningful way.

The other part of shared identity is that people accept different identities. They value differences and they have a synergistic relationship.

3. Challenging Aspirations

The key word here is possibilities. This goes beyond the traditional mission statement. Challenging aspirations means that you are always looking for the best possibilities on how to solve problems and take advantage of opportunities. The focus is on possibilities.

You also need shared aims and incentives and individual aims and incentives. This is extremely important and we tend to forget it. You always have organizational goals and incentives, but we forget about the individual. Each individual has different goals and objectives, as well as different incentives.

Another thing that is almost invariably ignored and we have talked about it a little more lately is periodic reflection. Most people’s reaction to sitting back to discuss where we are and how well we are doing will be to say it is a waste of time. “Time is money, we can’t afford to do that.” Charles believe this is very wrong.

4. Dynamic Alignment

The final principle is dynamic alignment and is run as ‘catalytic leadership’. You have transparent decisions, you promote interdependent thinking, and you constantly anticipate change. This whole thing runs on catalytic leadership, which is a new term that Charles came up with. It is a new type of leadership which was included in the ‘Sweet Spot’, the last book he published.

Catalytic leadership is founded on leadership based on expertise, not position power. This is very hard to think when in a traditional organization. True leadership has very little to do with position power. True leadership is based on value added knowledge facilitation. There is nothing in the foundation of value added knowledge facilitation that says you are bossing people around.

Catalytic leadership is defined as encouraging others to participate in value added activities that they are either not aware of or hesitant to initiate action on their own, that would benefit everyone involved. There is nothing in that definition that is about bossing people around. It is convincing people what needs to get done and helping them to think things through. At the same time it is being receptive to advice from others.

What is a self managing organization?

You have to remember that all life forms, not only self-organizing systems, by design self organization constitutes the primary process by which all organizational entities interact with one another. For example, if you take for instance the concept of homeostasis - which is essential about blood pressure and temperature which our bodies automatically maintain. This homeostasis extends beyond our bodies. If you think about it a quite famous scientist suggested a few years ago that we are only aware of one millionth of what takes place in our brains. We don’t pay too much attention to this. However, we have certain innate drives and pre-dispositions that we follow and don’t’ even know.

Self organization is the insight that we cannot control and think of everything all the time, but things come together. The main points of self organizing systems include:

1. An entities intrinsic ability to change itself as it interacts with its environment and strives to maintain its identity. For people, identity is extremely important. It is more important than maintaining a job or doing what the boss tells you. It is an intrinsic ability to change as conditions change.

2. Interactions that produce self-referential patterns, without the need to be designed or managed. As we interact with things and people in our environment certain patterns develop. A good definition of a pattern is habits you fall into. You need to be very careful with the assumptions you start making.

3. Evolving patterns of both sustained and transformed by spontaneous interactions. As we interact with other people we sustain certain patterns and certain things are in flux.

4. Creativity and destruction of part of the emergent process as attraction and repulsion.

These are our ‘automatic’ things which we don’t’ even consciously pay attention to. We are an emergent system. That is how we react internally and externally. What you don’t want to do, which is a critical point, is to have an organization that restrains that self organization. Charles is not referring to criminal activity. Only 1 to 5 percent of people have intrinsic patterns that are things which we don’t want to associate with. However, the average individual needs to have that autonomy to really be able to function properly, as well as to be able to contribute towards innovation.

If you restrain an individual and tell him, similar to your own children…you want to help and lead them in a certain direction but obviously you eventually want them to take control over situations by themselves. You can’t be there all the time. The same thing is true for management. The best option is that the shared access mode of operation is beneficial to both productivity and increasing an organization’s innovative capacity.

Charles Ehin is an author and recognized innovation dynamics and management authority. He is emeritus professor of management at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S.A. where he also served as the Dean of the Gore School of Business. His latest book is The Organizational Sweet Spot: Engaging the Innovative Dynamics of Your Social Networks (Springer, 2009). His website is: www.UnManagement.com