I’m feeling a tad guilty that I didn’t write a reflection on 2012 last week, but c’est la vie. I also haven’t been reading as much as of late due to the fact that I’ve been steeped in various projects. However, here are some interesting things I’ve encountered:
This handy guide to different major learning theories—visualised!
A really insightful article about agile project management—a process that makes sense given the increasing complexity of work problems and our own cognitive limitations.
When teams begin to work in matrices, collaborating across functions and geographies, the skills, behaviours and competencies required for work must also change. This is what I heard yet again this week in a networked learning webinar that I attended. I also learned that leaders around the executive tables across the globe—regardless of industry—are demanding significant performance gains from staff in times of limited human resources.
According to the Bersin & Associates study, large business investment in social learning tools nearly doubled in 2011 to $40,000. Social learning is no longer an experiment. Companies increasingly use it to drive innovation in their learning organizations. By allowing employees to collaborate, share ideas and exchange information, organizations are empowering users to teach one another and are supporting conversations that naturally foster creativity and problem solving.
The investment in social learning is another example of U.S. companies reinvesting in training to address the skills gap. It also signals a turning away from formal classroom training and traditional e-learning programs to only deliver learning workers need, just in time…
The recession only increased the pressure on learning organizations to become more cost effective, leverage online social learning and align more closely with business needs. These pressures also forced a change in roles within the learning function. Traditional classroom instructors are now delivering more training online and in one-to-one sessions. Learning organizations are moving beyond order taking and are building consulting skills to provide effective recommendations and solutions to business partners.
Again, the statistics on firms’ current capacity for networked performance show that there is a lot of room for improvement—only 1/3rd of employees are currently displaying capability for networked learning. We cannot ask individuals to work harder, only smarter and the key to doing this comes down to embedding networked learning activities into daily workflows to help drive network performance. Again, informal learning is where the greatest gains lie and in times of tight budgets, this is welcome news. We all need to learn to ‘work smarter’ and Jane Hart has been working on determining how to introduce this to learners in organisations. (I’m looking forward to seeing where this work leads.)
Though informal learning is the area that provides the greatest impact, networked learning skills should be reinforced throughout other learning activities in the organisation, including formal training. Note:formal training should include intact teams and those who work together through workflows to help allow time for teams to learn and practice how to work and learn together in more of a networked environment. Employees who work together should learn together: Learning together helps to build an understanding of the need for reciprocity, it can enhance relationships and it also ensures that the learning is relevant to the task at hand.
One interesting example of formal learning that integrates networked learning involves the identification of informal leaders to problem solve issues, motivate their peers and reinforce learning. The idea behind this: Informal leaders are ideal candidates for integrating networked learning activities because of the dynamic between them and their colleagues—they are both connected to the ‘ground’ to help peers see the relevance of the learning to everyday workflows and informal leaders have the respect of their cohort needed to motivate and reinforce what is being learned. Here is one example of how to do that:
Informal leaders were gathered and selected to be included in training (in this case, the training was to address safety issues)
These informal leaders reviewed safety stories and identified behaviours that were reducing performance. They then identified what should be done differently and how they would influence their peers to achieve this goal (in this case, improving workplace safety).
Following this, informal leaders delivered a training session for peers where they identified issues through stories, and suggested ways to work differently to become a safer workplace.
These sessions inspire reciprocity—a key part of networked learning/work—as peers, who trust their informal leader colleagues, begin sharing stories about why the issue is important… and in essence learn from each other.
This week I continued thinking about the feasibility of nudging an organisation towards becoming more networked and over the week I ran into a series of interlinked articles that were really helpful. In my travels I also made some related discoveries: one about the need to revisit the standard model for professional development and another that adds insight into the level of vulnerability required for networked work (including some thoughts on how to work on it).
“…implementation has boiled down to two components: individual skills & organizational support. Effective organizational collaboration comes about when workers regularly narrate their work within a structure that encourages transparency and shares power & decision-making. I have also learned that changing work routines can be a messy process that requires significant time, much of it dedicated tomodelling behaviours.”
Another good piece from Jarche describing why creativity stems from cooperation—it’s not enough to seek collaboration when the work is complex.
Clark Quinn has taken the above and run with it, tentatively plotting out the skills and behaviours needed to become a networked organization (or ‘coherent’, as he describes it). UPDATE: Jay Cross has expanded on this work here.
My takeaway: There needs to be both individual and organisational support to foster a networked organisation, and that work begins with individuals seeing the value of working differently. I suspect what I’m sure I’ve heard before—but perhaps hadn’t fully made sense of—that narration of one’s work comes first to demonstrate the value of sharing learning on-the-job and establish trust.
Shell’s Method of Introducing Networked Work
I learned that Shell also has an innovative method to build capacity for networked work. They’ve successfully implemented this withgeographically di sparate teams to help them to work and learn together to deal with complexity. I don’t think there is copyright attached to this work, so I’ll share my notes:
Employees refer to a checklist to determine whether a problem is complex enough that neither they could solve it alone, nor could a manager—that it warrants presenting the problem to other team members using the following protocol:
The ‘presenter’ prepares ahead to present the problem to two other ‘peer consultants’, who refrain from problem solving and instead ask deep, probing questions to help the presenter to determine the best solution.
The result of this increases net learning and knowledge flow beyond one-on-one (reciprocal learning). Having more than one ‘consultant’ holds the peer consultants in check from rushing to solutions, as opposed to asking probing questions. This also works for examining why something went well.
The result:
Parties are better acquainted with each other’s work
Parties tap into the wisdom and experience of the group
Parties learn to see each other as resources
Assurance gained that colleagues aren’t alone in their issues (despite geographic isolation, in Shell’s case)
Team building effect (trust and support develops)
Introducing the protocol requires facilitation. This process needs to be facilitated in front of the entire team first (at least once or twice) to ensure that all parties know how to use the protocol.
A few alternatives for the facilitation piece:
Alternative 1: This can be scaled up a bit, but recommend no more than 10 people and time accordingly. This gives more time to the consultants but can be overwhelming for the presenter.
Alternative 2: Can do a large group and run parallel groups (groups of 3 in room). Do 3 rounds. Break into 5 or 6 groups.
NOTE: Virtual teams should try to have videoconference or some other way of having all parties see one another given the level of risk involved in initial practice sessions.
Given the counteractive role that fear plays in networked work, we need to trust one another enough to show vulnerability. Julnar Rizk examines this and proposes some strategies to overcome fear.
Dave Snowden has a reminder about being pragmatic when pursuing change: “You can have the support of a main board member, but there are limits to what they can do if three layers down the system is working against you.”
This week I made the most obvious of discoveries through a couple of conversations: Knowledge sharing *is* communicating. (Sometimes we overcomplicate things.)
More on heutagogy: This article provides a framework from pedagogy to andragogy to heutagogy, the latter of which is a core competency for the 21st Century—a must read! Note: I’ve been reading that we’re no longer in a knowledge economy: we are in a collaboration economy.
One of the reasons I’d love to learn how to conduct a network analysis is to uncover connections and relationships that are hard to locate otherwise—it’s so related to Knowledge Management (KM)! I also thought that this observation of the potential impact of networked arrangements on organisations in this article was particularly interesting: “…interconnectivity is beneficial but also brings in vulnerability: if you and I are connected we can share resources; meanwhile your problems can become mine, and vice versa”. Is this a dark side of networks?
Interesting Finds:
The etymology of the Personal Learning Network seems to go back as far as 1998. Thanks Clint!
This past week our guest presenter in EC&I 831 was Alan Levine. Alan demonstrated a number of online tools that can be used to help students to develop their own narratives. Since I deal with adult learners and organisational learning, I’m always looking to connect our course content to my workplace, and in this case, narrative learning has a direct connection to not only adult learning but also to organisations themselves. According to Merriam, Caffarella & Baumgartner (2007) narrative learning became popular in education in the 1990s and was adopted by adult education shortly thereafter. Adult education was drawn to narrative learning through the link between storytelling, wisdom and experience. Also, as we know, one of Knowles’ assumptions of adult learners is that they bring a wealth of experience to their learning (note: criticisms of this assumption do argue that this experience is variable and they point out that what has been learned in the past may not have been accurate). There are a number of other reasons that storytelling is important to adult learning—cultural being one example—but it all comes down to the observation that Jonassen and Hernandez-Serrano made in 2002 that narrative learning is “the oldest and most natural form of sense making,” (as cited in Merriam, Caffarella & Baumgartner, 2007, p. 208). Today in adult learning there are typically three ways that narratives are used: in ‘storying’ content being studied, storytelling and through autobiography.
Organisations also create their own mythologies in order to develop their own shared culture, norms and values (even if they’re not always the complete truth!) and it bears mentioning that while these shared myths can unite members under a shared vision of social betterment, for example, there can be a dark side to that: it can be used as a form of control and it can silence voices on the periphery of the firm. Who creates these organisational myths? Often this is a role that leaders play in order to reinvigorate or establish the organisational cultural context. Parry & Hansen (2007), however, argue that organisational stories can display leadership too:
Stories have an impact on audiences in the same way that leadership has an impact. Stories are enduring. They can be revitalized because they are not subject to the relatively static constraints of personality and reputation. Stories can spread and proliferate much like a social contagion. Because of this, their leadership effect can be widespread. Concomitant with this realization is our assertion that management should focus efforts on building better stories just as much as on building better ‘leaders’. (p. 293)
The authors argue that by viewing the stories themselves as leaders, the idea of leadership development can be decoupled from being considered the development of set of a behaviours, moving away from the idea of leadership as people development: “In seeing stories as leadership, our attention is drawn toward leadership effect and its reception by followers,” (Parry & Hansen, 2007, p. 294). This decoupling also allows for context in stories (and meaning to be drawn from the context), which provides followers with more autonomy to reflect and judge the story for themselves. Parry & Hansen (2007) suggest stories that spread through an organisation and include context are also less likely to be distorted for hidden agendas.
On a lighter note
For funsies, I’m up to the challenge of telling a story using one of the tools Alan shared with us on Tuesday. Here’s a Storify of what the hive mind is posting about Saskatchewan on Twitter at the moment… enjoy!
A few days ago, I tweeted out a basic ‘how to’ for adding a creative commons license to blogs because I just added a license to my blog. During the licensing process, Creative Commons makes it easy to select the license criteria. However, I wanted to provide a little bit more information about what this licensing is about and considerations that one might want to make (these are questions I had when going through the process) so that others might have an easier time determining which license best suits their needs.
Lovely, non? We can all create, share and connect through our experiences while still acknowledging one another for our work.
What license should I select?
There are six licensing options and I would recommend reading this when making a selection. Some key questions to ask yourself are:
Am I okay with someone making changes to my work?
Am I okay with my work being used for commercial purposes?
Can I select different licenses for different aspects of my blog?
You can. In fact, this is something to think carefully about. This is the recommendation from Creative Commons’ Before Licensing FAQ:
You need to be specific about exactly what you are CC-licensing when you apply the Creative Commons license to your work. We give you the option of identifying the format of the work in the metadata (text, audio, video, image, interactive) and you should use this. This enables more precise machine-readable language.
However, you should also think about exactly which elements of your work you are licensing. For example, in the case of a website, are you licensing just the text and images? Or also the stylesheets and the code that run the site? Similarly, if you make CC-licensed music available for download on your site, does the Creative Commons license apply to both the musical composition and the sound recording as well as any artwork and graphics at your site? And remember, as discussed under “2. Make sure you have the rights” above, you need to make sure you have the rights to each element that you license under a Creative Commons license.
Take a moment to think about exactly what you are intending to license and then frame your metadata and legal notice accordingly, eg. “All images at this site are licensed under a Creative Commons [insert description] 2.5 license.”
I decided to license my overall blog as I was comfortable with both my writing and the few images of my own that I have hosted (and will host in the future) being adapted and distributed in the same way. I also figure that if I want a different license to an image or something else, I’ll set up that license and notate separately.
Can I change my mind?
Yes you can adjust or revoke your license but bear in mind that if you put out work under a particular license and it’s picked up and distributed before you change/revoke the license, it’s a done deal.
Again, from Creative Commons:
This is an extremely important point for you to consider. Creative Commons licenses are non-revocable. This means that you cannot stop someone, who has obtained your work under a Creative Commons license, from using the work according to that license. You can stop offering your work under a Creative Commons license at any time you wish; but this will not affect the rights associated with any copies of your work already in circulation under a Creative Commons license. So you need to think carefully when choosing a Creative Commons license to make sure that you are happy for people to be using your work consistent with the terms of the license, even if you later stop distributing your work.
For some creators and/or licensors, this is not an important issue. And most educators who put their their educational resources online do so with the idea that they will be widely shared. But if you depend on controlling the copyrights in your resources for your livelihood, you should think carefully before giving away commercial rights to your creative work. For example, many musicians have discovered that offering work for noncommercial use can be quite rewarding. But anything beyond that requires careful consideration. We all admire generous souls. But if you want to be generous, we want you to think carefully about it before you are.
It’s worth investigating a Creative Commons license. As we’ve all likely learned from our guest speakers, Alec and one another, collective learning is the future. Let’s share responsibly!
Has anyone else added a Creative Commons license to material on their blog (or the entire blog)? What did you do? Have I missed any lessons that you’ve learned or do you have any suggestions for me and/or others?
UPDATE: I took my own advice (!) and made my license slightly more specific (when writing out the description of what’s covered). It should now be clearer that any of my text and my own uploaded images are governed by the license.
connectivité 