Once upon a time, the world was predictable. Isaac Newton had convinced us that every action resulted in an opposite and equal reaction. Rene Descartes thought and therefore, was. People made long-term plans. Logic ruled.

Then we realized that everything is connected. Outcomes result from the interplay of complex adaptive systems. Butterfly effects, asymmetry, and self organization abound. What emerges next is anybody’s guess. It’s time to shed the delusion that we are in control. Logic is oversimplification.

What’s a person to do when complexity turns our clockwork universe on its head? In a increasingly volatile environment, rigidity is suicidal. But how can we be flexible without being wishy-washy?

My colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance agree that we need to embrace complexity, not hide from it. Harold Jarche writes, “Few are bored with complex challenges.  The more people who are engaged creatively, the more effective the organization will be and no, there isn’t a course you can take to address this.”

The undisputed authority in this field is Dave Snowden. In October, he’s leading a series of one-day executive seminars on Leading Through Complexity: A New Simplicity.

I’m going to attend the San Francisco event. Perhaps a bunch of us will head out to dinner afterward to review what’s we’ve learned. This stuff is important but it’s never easy!

Jay Cross is a champion of informal learning, web 2.0, and systems thinking. He has challenged conventional wisdom about how adults learn since designing the first business degree program offered by the University of Phoenix.

Do you remember the first time a boss implored you to work smarter and not harder? Unfortunately, the next thing you heard was probably something akin to “know what I mean?”.

No, as a matter of fact we don’t always know what working smarter means.

Jay’s new un-book Working Smarter (available in on-demand paperback or PDF download) examines how to boost an organization’s collective brainpower. You’ll find an excerpt of his book below that might strike a chord with you in the ongoing conversation that we’re having here at HRExaminer.com on the effective and perceived value of HR.

Cross mashes up his considerable experience in training, business consulting and web 2.0 thinking to put forth a straight forward book designed for managers who want a natural way to improve performance – without the typical management consulting crapola. When Cross does delve into charts, models and mind maps you can rest assured he does so with an aim to clarify, not to earn his business book writing chops. While I’m not done with the book yet I will say what stands out to me so far; Cross does a nice job of balancing the theoretical with the practical – and that’s really useful to us as people who want fresh ideas we can use to improve our team’s results.

I hope you try the book – I’m finding it a worthwhile investment of time. Don’t forget that you can buy the online copy, save some money, kill one less tree and convert the PDF into an online book reader for your iPhone, Android phone and many others.

- Julian Seery Gude, HRExaminer Collaborator and Editorial Advisory Board Member.

Article continues here.

I think of un-books as more of a subscription that a purchase. A major update is in the works. More than half will be new material. It’s a collaborative effort. Publication is a month or more in the future.  The price has not been set as yet. I suggest you buy both, but if you’re only buying one, I suggest you wait a while.

On YouTube, Peter Casebow and I continue our conversation, talking about learning and performance, and how informal learning works.

Learning and Performance 5:06

Informal Learning and Performance 5:39

How Managers Learn – In Their Own Words

Jay Cross & Peter Casebow video 1 -Intro
Jay and Peter introduce themselves, the internet time alliance and GoodPractice

In yestserday’s New York Times, Gretchen Morgenstern explained one reason Why All Earnings Are Not Equal. Corporate managers have lots of elbow room as to whether an item is an expense or an investment, and some push the limits of discretion.

More puzzling to me is why businesses are not permitted to account for social capital (such as know-how, relationships, and talent) which makes up more than half of their value. Hey, financiers, this emperor has no clothes!

Verna Allee is the only person I’m aware of who has a viable solution for describing and monitoring the role of intangibles in value creation.

Verna sees organizations as value networks. A value network is a web of relationships that generates economic value and other benefits through complex dynamic exchanges between two or more individuals, groups, or organizations. Any organization or group of organizations engaged in both tangible and intangible exchanges can be viewed as a value network, whether private industry, government, or public sector.

Rather than counting accounting’s funny-money, Verna directly tracks the flow of value through the organization’s circuitry. Her Value Network Analysis is the missing link that unites the formal organization, business process modeling, asset management, and social networks.

Let me take another run at what Verna does: She evaluates an entity as a living system. Every living system is a self-renewing network. Its structure is its best description. The focus is on the people, who are the nodes in the network. Verna connects the nodes with arrows (for direction) and labels (describing exchanges of matter, energy, and ideas between the nodes). Each node is linked to a scorecard that tallies the value of its exchanges. She uses the system map to spot bottlenecks and relationships that need improvement; managers need to focus on the white space between the nodes.

Emerge, converge, and know.I captured a few minutes of Verna leading a workshop on Value Networks last fall:

Might Value Networks be the appropriate measurement system for optimizing Wirearchy?

Related links:
Value Networks Library
Value Networks.com
Open Value Networks

George Siemens began the day by challenging us to see the world as a set of trade-offs. What’s the optimal balance point?

Asking people to jot ideas on the white board, the line that divides presenter from audience began to blur. We’re all audience; we all presenters; it shifts back and forth. Few things are black or white; most are shades of gray. As George said, it’s nutty for only one person to do the talking among a group of 125 people. Group scribbling on the white board proved a catalyst to discussion. I think it’s like taking notes: you don’t have to re-read the notes to end up with stronger memories.

Internet Time Alliance took the stage to reflect on the overall event and to field questions. We had a rollicking good time — and I think the audience was with us.

The six of us began by recounting why we came together to form Internet Time Alliance. I preach collaboration — but found myself working in isolation. I was already turning to others for help: Jane Hart for social learning and tools, Jon Husband for KM and competencies, Harold Jarche for open source and design, Charles Jennings for the major CLO’s view, and Clark Quinn for learning theory, m-learning, and serious games. We started Internet Time Alliance in order to learn from one another.

Audience questions guided what we talked about today. We had the requisite PowerPoints at the ready but we ended up showing them in random order as questions arose.

Next we brought our customers into the loop. Six heads are better than one; seven or eight are better than that. Our engagements often begin with an organization presenting a question. Could we point out pitfalls in a new plan? Which supplier would we trust? How would we roll out knowledge in their organization? We help refine the question and then hash out solutions and observations as a group. We come back with recommendations and models. This is our loss-leader proposition. For as little as $1000, we return with consensus advice from six of the leading thinkers in organizational learning. Here’s what we’ve been pondering lately.

My conclusion from this event is that not only is learning the work, it’s also the most important work.

Chris also cautioned us against going off half-cocked:

You can learn more about the DAU story from Leading a Learning Revolution, a book by Chris and DAU Chief Executive Frank Anderson.

At one point, Chris showed a slide saying 20% of learning is formal; 80% is informal. He said he’d found no proof, only one person citing another. During his talk, I pulled together this page on the source of the 80 and the 20.

I always do my best work while asleep and now that I’ve slept two nights since DevLearn, here’s what I’m thinking.

The last item begs explanation. In the past, we’ve focused on individuals but work is performed by groups. Hence, I expect us to start helping groups learn to perform instead of individuals.

From:

to…

Related posts:

What is informal learning?

Excerpt from Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways that Inspire Innovation and Performance

My thanks to Mark Oelhert (our counselor at Social Learning Camp) for helping me sharpen my focus.

CLO Magazine, October 2009

Whose Learning Are You Responsible For?

by Jay Cross

Last month I conducted several workshops to inject informal and social learning practices into hidebound organizations that were anxious to ramp up to the future. I encouraged them to address the needs of people who had traditionally been left out of the corporate training agenda.

In the old days, corporate training departments focused solely on workers on the payroll. Most of the effort went into getting novices up to speed and grooming fast-trackers as future leaders. Training departments largely overlooked improving the skills of seasoned employees, despite the fact that these were the people whose efforts were paying the bills.

This myopia is the result of looking at training as a cure for cluelessness rather than the route to ever-greater levels of performance. The logic went, “If it’s broken, fix it,” but don’t waste time converting adequate performers into stars. The world’s become too competitive to let this neglect continue.

Any organization that is committed to working smarter needs to assess the impact of helping employees learn at every step in their career cycle. What’s it worth, for example, to offer learning opportunities to potential recruits before they come on board? These “pre-hires” can become familiar with the company before signing on. This cuts costly hiring mistakes that hurt both the organization and the new hire.

Seasoned employees are not going to flock to classes and workshops; they have work to do. But making it easier through collaboration, self-service learning and skill bites helps sharp people become sharper. Making a producer just a little bit more productive yields greater rewards than anything you can do with novices.

Old hands may have known it all in yesterday’s world, but they can only remain productive by keeping up with changes. Furthermore, a company that doesn’t tap its community elders as coaches, mentors and guides is missing an important trick. IBM and other corporations generate leads and harvest insider knowledge by keeping former employees in the community — and, therefore, in the loop.

Increasingly, organizations are sustained by people who are not on the payroll. These are contract workers and individuals called in for a particular project. They are temps, specialists, consultants and service providers. Perhaps they work for an outsource provider.

However, these workers are not exempt from needing to know what’s going on and continuously getting better at what they do. It’s the logic of the supply chain: Since inefficient links get passed along to the customer, companies must optimize the performance of the chain. That means improving the brainpower of everyone who works for the company — not just those who receive paychecks.

The Cluetrain Manifesto, a set of 95 principles for businesses operating in the newly connected workplace, just turned 10 years old. Here’s the clue: Markets are conversations. Doc Searls, co-author of the manifesto, amended that to “markets are relationships.” Exactly. Companies can’t exist in isolation. Value has moved from the nodes to the connections. No business can survive without good ties to a healthy ecosystem.

And that applies to customer relationships as well. Take me, for example. I recently purchased a snazzy video camera. The manual appears to have been written for rocket scientists. The companion Web site is simply a PDF of the manual. Ugh.

Developing an amazing piece of machinery like this camera must cost millions. For just $100,000 more, the company could have set up a discussion site for customers to swap information, opened a customer hot line, hired an English grad student to write a coherent self-study manual, gotten feedback for new product development and provided a list of links to useful sites for new HD video camera owners. And to attract prospective buyers, they could have opened up lessons for all would-be videographers.

If I were greeted with useful resources such as those, I would be much more likely to buy from the same supplier again. As it is now, I have learned nothing from the camera makers, they have learned nothing from me, and we have no relationship at all.

Shouldn’t chief learning officers shoulder the responsibility for learning by everyone in the extended enterprise?

Click here to answer six straight-forward questions about learning in your organization.

Well, are you doing it or not? Are you following the path we prescribe? Find out without reading our article.

Simply answer these six questions about your organization. It will take  a few minutes at most. Your replies are anonymous. Save a snapshot of your responses so you can compare things with the overall results we’ll share here in about a month.

Here’s where to go: Chief Learning Officer / togetherLearn joint survey.

If you are a sole practitioner or consultant, please don’t take the survey. This one is for organizations. Leave a comment or wait for the results.

If you’re like me, you’re probably reluctant to take part in a survey if you don’t know what’s coming. Here are the questions. You’ll know whether taking part is in your interest.

Now take the survey. Thanks.

Wonderful short article in Harvard Business Publishing by Freek Vermuelen describes how top-down informationbases actually get in the way of doing business.

The advice to derive from this research? Shut down your expensive document databases; they tend to do more harm than good. They are a nuisance, impossible to navigate, and you can’t really store anything meaningful in them anyway, since real knowledge is quite impossible to put onto a piece of paper. Yet, do maintain your systems that help people identify and contact experts in your firm, because that can be beneficial, at least for people who lack experience. Therefore, make sure to only give your rookies the password.

Lately, I’ve been thinking we’re ready to pull down the silos housing, respectively, Training, CLO, KM, OD, and Corporate Communications. Often, marketing would be lumped in, too.

Strategically re-configuring the CLO+KM+OD+Com function needs to bolster the worthwhile functions and shut down the unworthy ones. KM seems poised for a slowdown, the weakest sister in the CLO+KM+OD+Com Learnscape.

Understanding Corporate Twitter, a post from an employee of EMC, got me thinking about the role of corporate culture in implementing the social learning platforms I’ve been calling learnscapes.

Traditional training programs are a reflection of their designers, authors, and instructors. Social learning platforms are more a reflection of the people who use them, sprinkled with a corporate culture and the ability to make good connections.

We have an extended core of “social people” at EMC.  They participate vigorously on the internal social platform.  They tend to blog proficiently inside and outside of the company.  You’ll see them leaving comments on other people’s blogs and comments.  Wherever you go, you’ll generally find the same EMCers participating and engaging.

They’re out there in force — representing themselves and EMC quite well, thank you!

And so, when Twitter (or whatever) comes along, there’s really no need for us to do anything.  The EMC social people find out about the service, set up shop, and do what they normally do — engage in discussion.

Shouldn’t that be at the heart of any corporate social media strategy?  To find, encourage and enlarge your internal group of proficient “social people”?  So that — regardless of the platform or context — they’re out there representing your company well?

Thus, improving the effectiveness of social learning rests in part on finding, encouraging and enlarging your internal group of proficient social learners. Traditional instructional design overlooks these natural supporters of peer-to-peer, collaborative learning at its peril.