Yesterday I spent the day at Cisco talking with old friends and new about what Fast Company recently described as an “unprecedented forward-looking strategy to unleash what it’s calling a ‘human network effect’ both on and off the Cisco campus.” Despite the over-the-top hype, the new approach is very real. Key business initiatives are managed by councils and boards. Leaderless groups receive support from facilitators. The exercise is not optional: this is the way things are done for projects and nearly thirty top-level priorities.
Major transformations take time, even in a go-go outfit like Cisco. Managers were already accustomed to sharing information to get the job done. However, it’s still a little sticky when you get to the middle level of the organization, where people have to support the new way of doing things while still performing their old jobs. Collaboration figures in everyone’s job description, but people are use different definitions to describe it. All-in-all, I give Cisco high marks for innovation and consider the company’s structure an exemplar for others to follow.
That said, many companies would not be successful taking Cisco’s leaderless, social approach. Cisco people are driven, dedicated, and intensely curious. Motivation is not a big issue, because Cisco hires only gung-ho people to begin with.
In six hours of conversation, we talked about all manner of things, some overlapping and some not, so I’m going to share the links and follow-up I promised various folks right here:
- Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions.
- Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources.
- Learning may reside in non-human appliances.
- Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known
- Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning.
- Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.
- Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities.
- Decision-making is itself a learning process. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong tomorrow due to alterations in the information climate affecting the decision.
The Meteoric Rise of Social Media. Social media: terrible name for “let’s get together.” Yes, folks, this is important. Social media — Facebook, Twitter, and other things you thought were for kids — are the way to stay connected and keep up with the world. They create “ambient awareness,” the feeling that you’re close to someone even when you are not.
Enterprise Twitter. A corporate Twitter network puts power in the hands of the troops, and that’s threatening to an old-timey officer corps. Not that this will stop young workers from bringing it into the workplace with them.
Activity Streams are going to be wildly important for social learning. Few people have time to traipse around looking into all the nooks and crannies where a netizen or company is streaming content. The thought leaders in the activity streams space are thinking about standards for interoperability, how people can grant access to their feeds selectively, stream searching, de-duping, and security concerns. Last week, Google, Facebook, Nokia, Yahoo!, MySpace, Comcast, and other players huddled around a conference table in the offices of Six Apart in San Francisco to discuss activity streams.
Action Notebook, Digital habitats: stewarding technology for communities by Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, and John D. Smith refines the role of technology steward, an essential supporting role in digital communities.
Seminal documents by Ivan Illich, George Siemens, Steven Downes, Eric Raymond, Tim O’Reilly, and others provide the foundation for a lot of my thinking.
The two books I’m taking on my upcoming trip to the Continent are:
Informal by Cecil Balmond. “Balmond is one of the most important structural engineers working in architecture today. His structural thinking differs from that of other engineers in his field in its completely new conception of the engineer’s contribution to architecture. The plasticity of architectural plans is enhanced through a decisive development of their structural designs. The borderline between structure and architecture thus becomes increasingly blurred. This process is explained in detail in Informal by reference to eight exemplary projects. Balmond elucidates the theoretical basis of his engineering solutions and his sketches transcend purely technical illustration–they are the key to his approach. Informal invites readers to rethink their understanding of the relationship between architecture and engineering.” (I figure this will be good preparation for touring the Guggenheim in Bilbao.)
Driving Results Through Social Networks by Rob Cross and Robert J. Thomas. I’m looking forward to this one, because Rob Cross is one of the few people to look at the quality of connections in human networks, not just volume. “Driving Results Through Social Networks shows executives and managers how to obtain substantial performance and innovation impact by better leveraging these traditionally invisible assets. For the past decade, Rob Cross and Robert J. Thomas have worked closely with executives from over a hundred top-level companies and government agencies. In this groundbreaking book, they describe in-depth how these leaders are using network thinking to increase revenues, lower costs, and accelerate innovation.”
Learning Irregulars is in formation. We are committed to making the world a better place by accelerating innovation in organizational learning. We are open, inquisitive, non-profit, impatient, and feisty.
Luis Suarez is the IBMer who is documenting his efforts to give up work email. Visiting Luis’s blog right now, I note that there’s a new “Did you know?” video out. This lacks the punch of the original but is a fantastic eye-opener nonetheless.
The end of email: discover new ways to stay in touch is one of many articles explaining how an investment bank eliminated most internal email and improved quality of work life by replacing email with a shared wiki.
Tools for Social Capitalists links technologies to learning needs. This version is a couple of years old but still has legs.
Connectivism, a learning theory for the digital age (2004) is an overview of George Siemens’ work that locates knowledge not in our heads, but in a shared space among us all. George’s thoughts on this are so right-on that rather than explain them to people, I simply say “What he said.”
New hires balked at the lack of social space at Cisco.
One outcome was collaboration nooks like this one.
Every company needs collaboration spaces. This one
is in an open area alongside a massive coffee room.
It was an exhilarating day.
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Jay,
Hey, intriguing article on the end of email (replaced by wikis). Article written in July 2007 with prediction that email use would be reduced significantly. Do you know if this has come to pass, whether Cisco and other users have kept up in the wiki usage, etc.?