Horizontal networking often creates dissonance in the vertical enterprise

The vertical structure of knowledge did not foresee the coming of horizontal networking tools now shaping today’s workplace.

Today, there's a lot of chatter about bottom-up versus top-down, the collective wisdom of the organizational crowd, and various related themes.  However, there’s also ongoing dissonance or competition between the methods behind structured, highly-defined organizational forms and activity and the growing world of hyperlinked flows in which knowledge and meaning are built layer by layer, exchange by exchange (all those hyperlinked interactions that increasingly make up what we call "knowledge work") which social computing enable.

At the heart of the issue is the way work is designed and the organizational structure that contains the work.  A primary tool in designing work and structure is job evaluation (and derivatives like accountability mapping and redundancy analysis).  The methods used today were created in the mid-1950's and haven't changed much since then.  Their core assumptions are directly derived from, and have helped embed, Taylorism at the core of the modern organization.  

I don’t mean job evaluation as in assessing a person's performance on the job – I mean the function usually managed by HR departments that 'measures' or 'weighs' jobs, and assigns them to levels and pay grades based on job “weight” with respect to skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions (the legal criteria for assessing pay equity). I believe that these tools and their underlying assumptions are used to create the skeletal architecture of hierarchical organizations, the pyramid we all know. 

Dissonance in job requirements

The methodology of job evaluation is a very useful place to look at some of the key critical reasons for the ongoing dissonance and resistance to change we are seeing and will continue to experience.  The methodology of job evaluation situates jobs in the organizational hierarchy and creates pay grades, pay practices, thresholds for entry into bonus schemes and often is the main criterion for distinguishing between management and non-management jobs.

Fundamentally, job evaluation (work measurement in the professional jargon) relies on the core assumption that knowledge is structured, and used, hierarchically.  It follows that she or he (and the job requirements) who has more of the knowledge —on paper—is she or he who deserves to be "higher up" in the organization.

Redesigning work requirements

There are four or five major, well-known methodologies for measuring work.  They all use very similar factors (sometimes described a bit differently semantically, with a couple more or less factors or sub-factors) and they all essentially measure the same thing.

These fundamental principles of work design need to be examined and re-conceived if the significant power of social computing is ever to be realized. As an example I will use the measurement factors used by the Hay Guide Chart Method, as I know them the best.  I have also worked with the other major methodologies - they are essentially all the same: the Aiken Plan, and the Towers Perrin and Watson Wyatt job evaluation methodologies (now Towers Watson) in the past.

The Hay Method describes work as having three phases—input, throughput and output—and it employs three core factors to measure that input/throughput/output:

1.  Know-how (input) - knowledge and skills acquired through education and experience.
2.  Problem-solving (throughput) - the application of the said knowledge to problems encountered in the process of doing the work.
3. Accountability (output)- the level and type of responsibility a given job has for coordinating, managing or otherwise having impact on an organization's objectives.

There is a fourth factor called working conditions, but in many cases this is treated almost as a throwaway factor, especially when it comes to knowledge work.  It typically relates to physical factors such as lighting, air-conditioning, the presence of fumes or chemicals, outdoor exposure, dangerous physical conditions, unusual exogenous stress, etc.

As noted above, the core assumptions of these methods are derived from the philosophy of Taylorism (aka scientific management) and the divisions of labour and packaging of tasks that have underpinned the search for efficiency and scale ever since the beginning of the 20th century. On the face of it, they seem eminently reasonable and the Hay Method (and the related ones cited above) have since the mid-50's largely served organizations quite well for segmenting and dividing labour, identifying necessary expertise and specialization and, in effect, designing one or another particular hierarchical pyramid.  Today these methods are put into practice along with other key assumptions from that industrial era when organizations grew and prospered - mid--50's to approximately 2000. 

Changing assumptions about knowledge 

These methods set out a fundamental, foundational assumption about the nature of knowledge. They assume that knowledge and its acquisition, development and use is relatively quite stable, that it evolves quite slowly and carefully and that knowledge is based on an official, accepted taxonomy - a vertical arrangement of information and skills that are derived from the official institutions of our society (Jane Jacobs has a fair bit to say about this in Chapter 3 titled Credentialing vs. Educating in her last bookDark Age Ahead, as do others like John Taylor Gatto and Alfie Kohn, and as does David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous – the power of digital disorder).

Above I have offered an example (paraphrasing the Hay Method's semantic scales for measuring a job's knowledge).  It describes a vertical arrangement of Know-How (knowledge) and the method creates, supports and sustains vertical reporting relationships.  The other two factors (problem-solving and accountability) derive from, and reinforce, the know-how factor. For example, the rules of job evaluation are such that you cannot have a problem-solving or accountability factor assessment that is of a higher order than the know-how slotting.

The definitions of the know-how (knowledge and skills ) factor levels are paraphrased from the semantic definitions on the actual Hay Guide Chart.

A - Unschooled and unskilled
B - Some school, some skill
C - Basic high school, routine work
D - Vocational school, community college, trades, senior administrative
E - University graduation, senior trades, managerial (reads the books)
F - University plus 10 years experience, grad school (puts the books to use)
G - Deep knowledge and expertise (writes the books)
H - God (has others write the books)

These methods did not envision or foresee the Web, hyperlinks and the exchanges of information which have spawned and carry the bit-by-bit layering and assembly of knowledge and peer-to-peer negotiation of results and responsibilities we are seeing emerge with greater frequency in this new networked world. 

Multiple ways to structure knowledge

We are beginning to understand that the main way we have structured knowledge isonly one way, and that this way is captive to core assumptions about the ordering and classification of information as created by some of the great thinkers, organizers and classifiers of information and knowledge who helped build up our growing understanding of the world around us (Linnaeus, Darwin, Dewey, etc.).

What we have developed into solid and maybe seemingly unassailable beliefs about knowledge are built upon the principles we have inherited from a time when human progress benefited greatly from regular and related discoveries about the world around us, both natural and man-made.

For example, it’s clear that there was a proliferation of written / printed material from the 1600’s through the 1900’s, containing amongst other things much codification of discoveries of the knowledge we use today in a wide range of domains and disciplines. More and more (too much ?) of this knowledge is accessible very rapidly on today’s Web in ‘fragments of one’ (nod to Dave Snowden’s assertion that the brain works most effectively with fragments of information) connected by search engines, hyperlinks and a range of easily used publishing platforms.

So ... now let's look at how information is shared and exchanged in order to build and use knowledge amongst networked individuals or groups.  The use of knowledge in a networked context is very often much more horizontal, sideways and based on accessibility and collaboration - much more so than is the (official) use of knowledge in formally structured hierarchies. 

Linked knowledge

What we know today is that people with vastly different types and forms of knowledge can be or are linked together for a wide (and potentially limitless) range of purposes (though clearly we are learning quickly about the limits to cognitive attention as lessons in social cognition surplus are offered up to us almost every day).

In networks-of-purpose, addressing Purpose A connects individuals with Skill and Knowledge Set B, Interests and Knowledge Set B, and Connections and Knowledge Set C (and of course the second-order concentric ring of connections each of them brings to any given network in which any of them participate). Each of them subscribes to different sets of feeds and has access to different sources of flows of information than each of the others, but can forward to all those in the on-purpose network anything that comes across their attention that may be pertinent to the purpose at hand.

In the dynamics of attention, flow and circulation of pertinent and relevant information such as this comes the power of social computing that KM practitioners may have been noticing as Web 2.0 tools, service and capabilities become more firmly ensconced in knowledge work in the guise of platforms for collaboration—the domain increasingly called Enterprise 2.0.

I think it is (very) safe to say that problem-solving or accountability is assigned or accepted in that situation based on negotiation of ‘who knows what’ or ‘how to get something done’, and often a call (Tweet, blog post, Skype chat, email) is put out to find and access some additional skill or knowledge that is required, and accountability is negotiated based on the constraints of the purposeful activity at hand.

Any of us familiar with medium to large sized organizations can begin to see, I believe, that the fundamental Taylorist assumption that knowledge is structured vertically and put to use in siloed pyramidic structures and cascaded down to the execution level must be straining at the seams in the increasingly highly-connected social networks in which many people work today. 

Social computing – first dissonance, then participative flow ? 

Thus, it seems clear that the introduction of wikis, blogs and RSS feeds (and now micro-blogging a la Twitter) for project work, for analysis and planning, for research and development and for other knowledge-intensive work is likely to introduce some reasonable levels of dissonance into the common and accepted organizational dynamics (or "organizational sociology") of formal, traditionally structured organizations. 

This is an area where David Weinberger's phrase from the Cluetrain Manifesto — “hyperlinks subvert hierarchy” (or expose it, which may be better)—is likely to have real impact. 

Take Weinberger’s additional concept of first- , second- , and third-order organization of emergent knowledge (outlined in his "Everything Is Miscellaneous"), combine it with hyperlinks and spaces designed for interaction based on core usability principles and you have a potent recipe for looking at the design of socially-networked work groups.

In some senses, we’ve been here before … social interaction with other knowledge workers is the foundation of (for example) Fred & Merrilyn Emery’s theory and method of Participative Work Design and is at the heart of socio-technical systems (STS) methodologies for organizational development and change.  These theories and methods by and large reflect “getting the whole system into the room”.

Of course, with the arrival of the Internet and the advent of the interactive participative environment that is generally called Web 2.0, “the room” is larger and “the whole system” increasingly does indeed mean everyone, or at least the whole of the organizational crowd that makes up that organization.

Reams have been written about the Internet’s potential to democratize the access to and use of information. It does seem clear that the use of the Web, collaboration platforms, software-as-a-service, and cloud-based social computing by organizations that see information, knowledge and responsive innovation as mission-critical are core factors enabling the growth of network-based ways of creating pertinent and useful just-in-time knowledge and putting it to work. 

Vertical knowledge disrupted

This causes dissonance and ambiguity because typically performance objectives, job assignments, compensation arrangements and bonus schemes are generally almost always predicated on causality derived from the vertical arrangements of knowledge and its use in planned and structured initiatives.  As more and more knowledge work is carried out by people communicating and exchanging information using hyperlinks in social networks (where knowledge lives ) and routing it to where it is needed at any point in time, vertical arrangements of knowledge are disrupted, if not subverted. 

Call for organizational redevelopment

Based on the notions I have explored above and in previous writings, I believe there is a rapidly-growing need for what I call eOD (enterprise Organisational Development).  With greater fanfare It's also been called Social business. As social business initiatives continue to proliferate, I cannot see how the latent dissonance I have tried to articulate will be avoided. I think it will have to be addressed by using new design principles for knowledge work.

Many parts of knowledge work have been routinized and standardized with the ongoing marriages of business processes and integrated enterprise information systems. What has not changed much yet is the adaptation of structures and culture to permit easily building flows of information into pertinent, useful and just-in-time knowledge, or fanning out problem-solving and accountability into networks of connected workers.

I think many executives and senior managers sense massive challenges to the power and status relationships (the core of yet-to-change organizational structure) that exist in most of today's larger organizations.  This sense of a growing challenge is behind many senior managers' and executives' struggles to understand or become enthusiastic about the possibilities of Enterprise 2.0.  There is no Guide Chart yet about networked know-how, problem-solving or accountability.

Never mind that there is much rhetoric about the need for leadership at all levels, or about the empowerment and democratization of workers in organization X or Y.  Performance management, grade levels and compensation have yet to recognize how work gets done in networked environments and in a networked world.

And if any of you have any experience with performance management programs or in assigning someone in a job to a different grade level, or in making changes to levels of pay or bonus schemes, you know what a minefield those can be.

Jon Husband is a recognized expert on social media and social networks and their impacts on the established institutions of our society and the workplace of the future. He carries out research into business strategy, organizational structures and work design in the interconnected Knowledge Age, and consults to select organizations in Canada, the USA and western Europe   In the past Jon has been a banker and a Senior Principal for Hay Management Consultants in Canada and the UK where he specialized in work and organizational design and change initiatives for large multinational companies. In 2003 he co-founded a leading blog-related software company, and from 2004 – 2008 delivered workshops about the dynamics of interconnectivity and participation for clients such as Athabasca University's Executive MBA program and the Banff Centre's Leading Innovation program.   In 2007 he co-authored a book titled “Making Knowledge Work – the arrival of Web 2.0” and 2010 co-authored with Michel Cartier the book “La Société Émergente du XXIe Siècle”.   He writes and speaks about social media and social networks, and is an active speaker in Canada and internationally about the Web’s growing impact on enterprises and the societies in which we live, work and play.

Learning Organizations: New ways of managing

As companies grapple with the effects and opportunities of the Internet, social media and the smartphone, internal organizations are having to adapt and transform to accommodate new ways of communicating, new marketing methods and metrics and, in sum, new ways of managing.

The Internet is connecting customers, employees and communities and empowering them with information in ways never before possible. Taking decisions and managing organized activities are being impacted in powerful ways by interconnected networks of people and technology. 

The impacts we're experiencing are creating new dynamics in organizations as well as emergent forms of organized activities that are based on participation and peer-to-peer interaction. As people get used to operating in these new conditions, often (but not always) the results are nimble, responsive, and results-focused networked groups and teams. 

The new interconnected environment demands new principles for organizing collaborative activity. Traditional hierarchy does not lead and support networked activity as well as newer forms and principles.

And ... over the last ten years, it has become quite clear that the impacts of these living social networks will only grow, both in depth and reach. 

Welcome to the networked era ...

The Internet and the Web have been an insistently-growing part of our everyday lives for a decade now. For better or worse, interconnectedness demands a new paradigm for our individual and collective futures.  Now that almost a billion people are connected on some social network or other, the conditions are settling into place.  But we're barely starting to get used to the ways they are penetrating a wide range of organized human activity, both at work and elsewhere.

Wirearchy is an emergent organizing principle for this new environment defined by interconnected networks of people.  Social networks of all sorts have rapidly expanded over the past five years and are becoming key elements in the ecosystems of entertainment, work, education, politics and commerce.

The impacts of wirearchy are showing up in clear ways all around us, and can be seen in daily events and in the ways people are working, behaving, and buying.  Examples are reported on regularly, as the impacts of living in the digital infrastructure of an electronic age take root.

Hierarchy Is Morphing Into Wirearchy

We all know and understand hierarchy - the enduring principle of the institutions that govern us and in which we work and live. The people at the top of the institutions control the agendas and make the decisions, which are then "pushed" out and down to be executed, implemented, followed.

That's changing ... often dramatically.

The Web lets individual and connected groups of people "pull" information they want and/or need together in limitless combinations and ways, and distribute it amongst connections in almost any configuration.

This "wired" environment provides the conditions for a dramatic re-making of power relationships built on information and knowledge.  Online, consumers or colleagues or students or researchers (and so on) can operate in interconnected groups focused on given issues, topics or interests  ("Ridiculously easy group-forming", noted Clay Shirky in the 2009 book Here Comes Everybody) ... through sharing of information and knowledge, they can and do exert power that has not heretofore existed.  Generally, this (new) power seeks greater openness (often called transparency) by established institutions and markets with respect to practical information.

This emergent shift in power is also observable in the workplace of 2010 generally. The introduction of collaboration-based knowledge-work information systems that incorporate the Web and are central to an organization's information architecture brings employees and customers both to the fore, and makes social and cognitive behaviours of critical importance.  The integration of information about users & consumers with the information in databases and the easy accessibility of interfaces, hyperlinks and so on have created a new cognitive and social environment.  Economic and political governance assumptions are increasingly under examination, and the implicit social contract about work is becoming dated ... people increasingly work both together and alone under negotiated economic arrangements (short or long-term contracts), and under very different temporal conditions (real-time, and both synchronously and asynchronously).

Much has already been written about the reduced effectiveness of traditional hierarchy's dynamics of command-and-control as a touchstone management principle. Via networks, we are all making a transition to an environment in which championing ideas and then channeling and coordinating resources in order to achieve objectives are becoming the most effective means of increasing productivity and effectiveness. 

A major shift in the ways activities are planned and managed is occurring in many spheres of human activity, from command-and-control to coordinate-and-channel. When customers have more power and employees want to communicate and be heard, the dynamics have to change. 

A new organizing principle is emerging, called Wirearchy.  The working definition of wirearchy is: 
a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology

(Image courtesy of Marc Ngui)

Today's rapid flows of information are like electronic grains of sand, eroding the pillars of rigid hierarchies. This new set of conditions is having real impact on organizational structures and on the ways we do things and behave.

As an organizing principle for the networked era, wirearchy will continue to emerge and have impact. The generations coming into the workplace have interactive games, ICQ, Napster, chat rooms, MySpace, Facebook, and ubiquitous mobility under their skin. They're equipped with smarter software, and they take interconnectedness and flow for granted - it's second nature to them.

Polarities are appearing everywhere (hence the oft-cited notion of Both/And rather than Either/Or).  Different dimensions and dynamics of influence, power and control are emerging at various nodes of the interconnected workplace and world. 

The dynamics of wirearchy are similar to, and different than, traditional hierarchy - yet need effective hierarchical structure and action to work smoothly.

Some of this is exhilarating, and great. Some of it is not. Some of it is about greater confusion, stress and frantic action. Some of it is about clarity, calm and right action in the context of an interconnected world. 

The next fifty years will be about learning how we will behave, effectively and otherwise, in an interconnected world and workplace.

Stay tuned .. there's lots more to come.  The Internet is here to stay, and we in all likelihood will never go back to the way things were done before it's arrival.

Having said that, it's certain that making definitive predictions is one of the surest ways to make a fool of oneself.  So, please consider the preceding paragraph to be an informed opinion and not a prediction.

What Wirearchy Means For You 

As a Leader - become deeply aware of - and truly mindful about - the scope and reach of interconnected markets and flows of information. Understand how people are connecting, talking, sharing information. Be prepared to listen deeply, be responsible, accountable and transparent. 

As a Manager - become knowledgeable about online work systems and how the need for collaboration is changing the nature of work, generally - and the nature of managerial work specifically. Learning how to be an effective coach is all-important. 

As an Employee - become more aware of the changing nature of work, and the traditional structures of authority. Develop a clear understanding of how to be both empowered and valuable and of service. Understand how to navigate on one's own through a constantly shifting landscape of work. 

As a Citizen - understand the possibilities and responsibilities inherent in open and public dissemination of information. Understand and exercise the responsibilities of citizenship in a country. Understand how to have influence via electronic participation and collaboration. 

How To Respond to Wirearchy

It is about adapting on a continuous basis, to an environment that keeps changing based on real-time feedback.

This means: 

- being aware of, and identifying, the changes, 
- setting a direction for a desired future, 
- translating that into goals, 
- learning how to fulfill the goals, 
- taking the necessary actions. 

As the impacts of information technology have penetrated more deeply and pervasively into the workplace, the nature of work has shifted. The first responses were a general flattening of organizational structure and a focus on developing and implementing teamwork. 

Today, the responses are emerging thick and fast - and there are clear patterns emerging from those responses. 

Today's patterns will become tomorrow's structures.  The time to begin adapting is now.

Jon Husband is a recognized expert on social media and social networks and their impacts on the established institutions of our society and the workplace of the future. He carries out research into business strategy, organizational structures and work design in the interconnected Knowledge Age, and consults to select organizations in Canada, the USA and western Europe   In the past Jon has been a banker and a Senior Principal for Hay Management Consultants in Canada and the UK where he specialized in work and organizational design and change initiatives for large multinational companies. In 2003 he co-founded a leading blog-related software company, and from 2004 – 2008 delivered workshops about the dynamics of interconnectivity and participation for clients such as Athabasca University's Executive MBA program and the Banff Centre's Leading Innovation program.   In 2007 he co-authored a book titled “Making Knowledge Work – the arrival of Web 2.0” and 2010 co-authored with Michel Cartier the book “La Société Émergente du XXIe Siècle”.   He writes and speaks about social media and social networks, and is an active speaker in Canada and internationally about the Web’s growing impact on enterprises and the societies in which we live, work and play.

In this series of three articles, we first explored the experience of the individual, looking at how social capital is increasingly important: the ability to survive and thrive in online spaces and how this differs from the past. Next we looked at the challenges for the organisation, around legal and ethical issues, as well as the role of the moderator. Today i want to look to the future, to indulge in some wild speculation around where social learning may take us going forward.

The ways that we learn are changing. We used to learn things and keep them in our heads for later: today, it’s more important to know how to find things out and to know how to synthesise that knowledge into meaningful and transformative action. Your ability to get things done at speed, to collaborate, to produce quality work and to provide both challenge and support to others are probably more important than simply knowing things.

This means that the skills required for success today are different from those skills that were required yesterday. We have to adapt. The methodology that we use for designing and delivering learning needs to adapt too. Today, learning is more spread out: whilst there is still a need for formal training programmes, we increasingly surround those experiences with semi formal and informal layers.

As we move further away from the core, formal, learning space, the layers become more conversational, more fluid. Truth is something that emerges rather than being presented as fact. It’s healthy to have this range: core learning in a curriculum and progressive layers of debate that surround it. For example, theory and demonstration may sit within the formal space, but ways to implement the learning in the business day to day may be built within the semi formal space that surrounds it. This will happen through discussion, debate, challenge and the drawing together of disparate ideas.

Moving into the future, i think that the types of community in which this discussion and debate take place will become more of a feature of our work, more likely to be the first place we turn to for support and help. Instead of being limited to getting support from managers or HR departments, we will see the natural place to turn to be with our community. And we are unlikely to have one community that serves all our needs, but rather a range of specialist ones: a leadership community to turn to for challenges around running our team, a sales community to help us develop sales strategy and a gardening community for helping us grow better peas. These communities will be typified by engaged individuals and sharing of knowledge, debate and discussion that will happen at speed.

In some communities we will see a more formal element, maybe through the moderation and drawing together of knowledge to provide a legacy from debate. Other communities will remain informal, sociable as well as social learning spaces. Initially we will see that communities will spring up around distinct topics, but i think it’s likely that, over time, the communities will become more permanent, being bought to bear around specific challenges, rather than being linked to one specific project. To be truly functional, a community needs differentiation of roles, and for this to happen takes time. In more transient communities, we tend to get stuck at the forming stage, with everyone jostling for position.

Having more permanent groups that apply their muscle to specific problems will be one way to avoid this. There is a flip side though, in that roles are likely to be more fluid: leadership, subject matter expertise and challenge are likely to come from different quarters for different subjects. The formal structures that typify formal environments are less likely to persist in agile online learning spaces.

This does highlight what may be perceived as more of a challenge though: the disenfranchised learner. As your social capital becomes more important, those who lack it will miss out. Whilst some people take to social learning like fish to water, others will be left behind. Unless we spend time and effort in engaging with these learners and addressing their very real concerns, we may simply make learning the preserve of the capable and engaged majority, but lose sight of the silent minority. There are many reasons why some people won’t engage online, many of them good ones. Often the reason is that there is no perceived value, it’s just seen as people wasting time or venting frustration. This is often a feature of emergent communities.

We need to move beyond the initial venting of steam and into productive discussion, which can come down to the role of the moderator. Another reason people won’t engage is if they don’t get the etiquette. This is apparent with a channel like Twitter: if you don’t understand hashtags and tagging, if you don’t get the semi stylised format of the communication, it’s daunting to engage with it.

In longer term approaches to the adoption of social learning within the organisational strategy, we should be able to address this through targeted programmes designed to engage with all learners. This does mean having a clear view of how people will be rewarded for participation, after all, what gets measured gets done. Are we measuring quality or quantity of discussion? Are we looking at the roles that people take, rewarding people who offer support or challenge, or are we going to leave the community to it’s own devices and simply view it as an additional, but informal activity?

A mature organisational view will be one that is fluid, able to utilise social learning in different ways in different contexts, just as the mature learners will engage in different spaces to different levels at different times. Indeed, with social learning there is a good argument for making all communities transient, or at least only semi permanent. It’s true that many forum spaces become stale or stagnant over time, so a good clear out never hurts, although it’s nice to combine that with the ability to build a legacy. I feel that a good role for the moderator is to draw out the stories and present them back to the group in terms of narrative documents, kind of informal white papers that summarise group learning if you like.

Social learning is here to stay: the old days of abstract formal learning and then being pitched back into the fray are gone. Whilst it’s not clear what the future will hold, we know for sure that the technology is mature, but that it will take more than just technology to make a difference. Social learning skills will be crucial, and our ability to nurture and develop these key.

Lately I’ve been saying that you should cultivate learning in your organization as you might manage an ecological resource, like a forest, or any other complex system of high priority (like your computer network or your budget). As if learning were a “cognitive enterprise infrastructure” or worked like a kind of water cycle. But how would you do that, and what would it be like, and how would it be different than what you do when you think of your workplace as a kind of machine that consistently produces material stuff? I am not totally sure, but here I take a guess at nine possible pieces of an ecology of workplace learning.

1. Cultivate Development, Rather Than Manage Performance. 

The point is not to manage people’s performances, but rather to get them to develop as much as they can, on the assumption that more highly evolved people do better things. The annual performance review that tracks behaviors against rather limited metrics and has a kind of binary output (wrong or OK) here evolves into something more like a coaching relationship in an experiential context: growth is the focus, not proscription. You look for activities that are motivating to the individual, that are a bit out of their comfort zone, yes, and you expect to support them in iterative cycles of trying things out, reflecting, adapting, and trying them out again. And you might add a variety of unheard-of supports and activities to help people think and reflect and be aware of themselves in a variety of dimensions, drawing on things from personality styles assessments to mentoring relationships to counseling-like activities, such as item 2, below. The trick is that these things, that we kinda do now in a knee-jerk way, away from work, would be more like the work.

2. Support Cognitive Development.

According to the work of Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey (whom I talk about a lot), we evolve through a series of increasingly sophisticated ways of seeing ourselves and the world around us. That is, we can so develop, if given the right environment. And with this increased epistemological sophistication comes a better ability to deal with and thrive in complex environments. One such complex environment is the increasingly global, flat, multi-cultural, resource-starved, post-ideological, environmentally-challenged, a-traditional, scary world of today. To help people be effective in this kind of world requires activities that help us know differently; Kegan and Lahey’s Immunity to Change coaching process is one such structure. Having done it myself, I am amazed by its ability to make you reinvent the way you think about yourself and the world in which you engage; I fairly salivate to try it with a team of colleagues in a workplace. The downside? It’s an intensive, six-month process of bi-weekly meetings, invoking much deep personal questioning; that’s a huge investment. But in an ecology of workplace learning, invest in people is what you do: no rain means no rivers means no seas means no evaporation means no rain, etc.

3. Assess Development in New Ways.

In Higher Education we try to assess student learning, and it’s a challenge. But we don’t even try to assess faculty and staff learning; and the generic workplace doesn’t generally assess staff learning, either. But we should.  To promote development over production, we have see where this development is happening, individually and in teams. Of course it gets tricky: it’s easy to see your behaviors, but how do you see what’s going on behind the behaviors? Fortunately there are new kinds of tools that have potential in this regard: things like theDevelopmental Testing Service’s reflective judgment assessments, such as their test of managerial decision-making, which asks you to analyze complex, asymmetrical workplace problems, assesses you according to a complex scale of cognitive development rooted in Kurt Fischer’s work, and gives you (you yourself, the test taker!) rich feedback about your strengths and ways in which you can improve, data which feeds right back into the coaching relationship I mention above.

4.Represent the Learning Ecosystem. 

If you’re going to try to manage an ecosystem, you need some kind of a representation of it. As the water cycle has its famous circular chart with arrows and the budget has its classic representations in profit/loss statements and balance sheets, so does the learning system have something. I don’t know what it will look like, exactly; but I imagine it will be something like the famous Kellogg Logic Model, which the well-known foundation suggests you use to understand your various high-stakes interventions, and which helps you see programmatic inputs, outputs, assessments, changes. With a key difference: the effect of your ecology isn’t an output external to you, it’s an evolution of your ecology. So a learning logic model would show as its characteristic feature a looping back upon its constantly changing self.

5. Analyze How We Work; Analyze Our Culture. 

Part of learning is seeing yourself learn. That may be the single biggest difference between a learning organization and a producing organization: the learning organization sees itself and not just the things it makes. We will need to learn to pay attention not just to the products of our culture but to our culture, not just to the deliverable of the project, but to the way we work together on the project. For that a lot of tools exist already, like various kinds of post-activity group reflection encouraged in psychologically safe spaces, that let anyone share their experiences along the way. But new tools will help: the same sort of analytics thinking that has been transforming everything around us can help transform how we work together: social and network analyses to show us how we engage, corpus-linguistics analyses on the big data of our communications and cultural artifacts; these will help us, too, to see the patterns that make up our togetherness.

6. Assign Staff to Cultivate Learning. 

Of course you can’t really have a garden without a gardener. And all the network analysis and group reflection exercises you might want to use won’t be that helpful unless it’s somebody’s job to watch learning in the organization at a meta level: to gather relevant data, assess its meaning, and help the group understand where it’s going. The teacher, if you will, of the organization. This would be a new thing: we’re used to thinking of Chief Information Officers, Chief Information Security Officers, Chief Executive Officers: this would be a Chief Learning Officer. Although of course it needs to be more than one person. And of course everyone has to be involved. But still the CLO might help organize it all. How much of your people resources should you put into learning, CLO and everything else thrown in? I propose 20% as a start. But I suspect it should be more, maybe up to 50%. Maybe 63%.

7. Find New Ways to Gather and Share Ideas. Which Means Liking Them.

One of the most important things in your organization are the ideas in people’s minds. The business world is just beginning to learn that to be relentlessly innovative, they have to gather and tend ideas in new ways, because ideas are the seed of innovation, be these ideas from their staff, their customers, their partners, their competitors. (See my last post for more on this). Part of this idea-tending requires a real cultural change–towards the acceptance and collective cultivation of ideas–and away from the general distrust of all things new that naturally grows up in an organization designed to perform consistently. Let me say that again: we will have to learn to like each other’s ideas.  And treat them, as it were, like a community resource, like, as it were, children. Because without them growing and maturing, we’ll fail. Businesses are starting to do this by building open, inclusive, idea-participation systems called Ideation Engines or Idea Stock Markets that aim to make the ideas in the group transparent and collectively developed. But I suspect you can go a long way without a particularly unique tool (a shared spreadsheet might work as well).

8. Create Loops and Groups. 

In my perhaps over-simplified way of thinking, learning comes down to loops (in that feedback and reflection are crucial) and groups (in that learning is social; and in that your co-learners are as important for your learning as your own mind). So I think much of the key work of the Chief Learning Officer and her team will boil down to finding or building, and supporting, new sorts of groups in which people are desirous of learning together, and in adding “loops” to existing processes, to work reflection into the fabric of the organization.

9. Do Some Old-School Ethnography. 

I am continually amazed by the complexity and mystery of people and of organizations. And by the fact that all you need to do to begin seeing and unravelling (or ravelling) the mystery is to observe people and ask questions (of course taking notes and writing down the answers). This is the way anthropologists settled on coming to know things as complex and mysterious as entire alien (to them) cultures. Libraries and IT departments have recently begun seeing that ethnography helps them understand the mysterious complexities of cultures alien to them, too (their customers). And it will work for you. On a certain level you can see an ethnographically-inclined research project as a kind of mirror to the people (if its results are shared with the people it studies), a loop at a high level, that both honors people and lets them see what’s going on. I think a lot about the emphasis in the popular Reggio Emilia model on the artful documentation of what the learners are doing; an ethnographic approach to your own organization is like that.

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