Consultants Howard Smith and Peter Fingar shot back a month later with a paperback retort entitled IT Doesn’t Matter – Business Processes Do. I ordered a copy the day I met Peter last week, and I read the booklet yesterday evening. In 120 pages, Smith and Fingar skewer Carr, show why IT will matter more than ever, and explain how business process management creates riches.

Peter Fingar

The big argument is that “Business process management (BPM) systems can, for the first time in the history of business automation, let companies deal directly with business processes: their discovery, design, deployment, change, and optimization.” As long as there’s innovation, there’s room for making processes better. BPM promises to obliterate the “Business-IT Divide.

To optimize a process, the right hand must know what the left is doing. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), the melding of ERP, SCM, CRM, PLM, and what-not into one all-encompassing application, is a major step forward, but it doesn’t link the organization with those outside the firewall such as partners and suppliers. Web Services integrate the enterprise with the outside world, connecting business to business, just as the Web connected consumers to businesses in the last decade.

Does this mean all business is going to be carried out using common processes that embed best practices? Not on your life. “BPM will be used both to differentiate (best-in-class) and to standardize (best-practice).” Count on Amazon, for example, to use best-practice standards for email and credit-checking, and FedEx will deliver your order. Don’t expect Amazon to let you peak into proprietary systems such as One-Click Ordering, for that’s where their competitive advantage lies.

Nick Carr’s screed in HBR attacked data processing as we’ve known it. Indeed, that’s not where to look for big value in the future. Business organizations are moving up the ladder a notch to MetaIT. Instead of one-time automation to save labor, they are establishing structures to continuously improve the way they do things.

Authors Smith and Fingar tell us it’s time for the IT tail to stop wagging the Business dog. In their vision of the future, business people will define and own business processes. Instead of doing what-if analyses with numbers on spreadsheets, decision-makers will do what-if analyses of how their business operates or might operate.

As I recently wrote here, it’s as if builders could move walls by shifting them on blueprints displayed on their laptops. With a comprehensive business blueprint, an executive can hand off an entire bundle of processes, say payroll, with minimal fuss (and with knowledge of precisely what savings will result.) A manager can experiment with different ways of getting a job done and chose the one with the most profit potential. A worker can fix a glitch in the system that has been irritating customers for once and for all. In the BPM world, business runs the show.

The authors propose a daunting laundry list of other functions the new paradigm can help accomplish, among them “accountability, activity-based costing, business process outsourcing, competitive intelligence, concurrent engineering, crisis management, inter-organizational systems, just-in-time (JIT), key performance indicators, lifetime customer value, pay-for-performance, resource-based strategy, security audit, scenario planning, and supply chain optimization.” (Whew.)

My interest in all this is how it improves learning and human performance. Process-oriented environments will impact traditional training just as word processing and social change eliminated most of the nation’s secretaries. Process innovation empowers us to create jobs that provide more throughput and greater worker satisfaction, although not through traditional training departments. Imagine the potential of:

• Workflow learning
• Transparent human development
• Grid learning
• Accountable training
• Activity-based certification
• Training value analysis
• Learning performance management
• Concurrent knowledge capture
• Customer learning alignment
• Personal flow monitoring
• Psychological stress alerts
• Individual performance indicators
• Team competency management
• Lifetime worker contribution
• Individualized learning paths
• Tailored management development
• On the fly simulations

For training directors and CLOs, the future holds good news or bad news. It depends on where you’re coming from. Training administrators who fail to understand the new dynamics of business as likely to find themselves stripped bare, evaluated by metrics they do not understand, and looking for another line of work. Those who adopt the process mindset take on significant new responsibilities, for everyone knows that the people in the organization are more important than the technology.

After fifty years of waiting for instructions in its corporate cocoon, training is ready to unfold its wings and be recognized as a full-fledged business process.

I wrote this post nearly ten years ago. The wheels of innovation turn slowly.

Brooks separates knowledge into technical knowledge and practical knowledge.

Technical Knowledge enables us to understand a field. These are basics like statistics or fundamentals of biology. You can find it in books. The faculty teaches it. In many cases, a MOOC or a robot could teach it. It’s the mainstay on campus.

Practical Knowledge is about being rather than knowing. It can’t be taught in the classrooms or books. You learn it through experience. You absorb it from your environment. You can pick it up from your communities of practice.

Examples of Practice Knowledge abound in Sheryl Sandberg’s recent book, “Lean In.” Says Brooks,

… tasks she describes as being important for anybody who wants to rise in this economy: the ability to be assertive in a meeting; to disagree pleasantly; to know when to interrupt and when not to; to understand the flow of discussion and how to change people’s minds; to attract mentors; to understand situations; to discern what can change and what can’t.

Brooks would have students master Practical Knowledge by leading the band or joining the debate club, something on campus. I think he’s off. Back to his “What is a university?” For most of us, the answer is “Not the best place to master Practical Knowledge for the workplace.”

What if we think of Technical Knowledge as explicit and Practical Knowledge as tacit?

• Technical Knowledge lays bare the intricacies of complicated concepts. It’s the facts. It’s clockwork models and the results they gin out time after time. Technical Knowledge deals with certainties and absolutes. In other words, it’s often theoretical and “not found in nature.”
• Practical Knowledge deals with complex, unpredictable, unruly patterns that emerge in real life. It is nature.

Caveat emptor. This next part is speculation on my part. I’m looking for corroboration.

The world is growing more complex. Outsourcing and automation have eliminated work that is merely complicated. The more interconnections in network, the greater the complexity, and the tendrils of networks everywhere are intertwining at a surreal pace. 

Things kicked into high gear in the last twenty years of the twentieth century. Between 1980 and 2000, the value of the publicly traded companies flip-flopped from 80% tangible assets to 80% intangible assets. 

This is an astounding change. Think about it. Most of a company’s worth had been in hard assets: plant, equipment, and cash. Two decades later, most of a company’s worth was in relationships, know-how, and secret sauce — things you can’t even see.

Many managers haven’t seen the light yet. Look at their allegiance to accounting measures that have less and less meaning in the real world. They righteously demand “hard numbers.” Those are the numbers that don’t mean to much any more.

As the world becomes more complex, are we not in the midst of another phase change? Might it be that the university heyday when explicit knowledge was king, is giving way to a new world where skills for navigating complexity rule?

If you can’t increase your social intelligence at college, isn’t it time to go somewhere else to get it?

The Times also reported that Essay-Grading Software Offers Professors a Break. Seems that elite MOOC consortium EdX is experimenting with automated essay grading. Skeptics of course came out of the woodwork. Anant Agarwal, the EdX chief, points out that the grading software begins by learning how professors would grade; then it gives students instant grades and an opportunity to improve.

That latter bit — instant feedback and opportunity to resubmit a stronger essay — has lots of promise.

The skeptics are fighting a pitched battle. Traditional grades, having to do only with Technical Knowledge, are not correlated to any measure of success outside of schools. A system can’t do much worse than that.

There’s also the myth of the learnèd professor working away into the wee hours marking papers. I’m sure this happens some places but it wasn’t the way things worked at Harvard Business School when I went there. I have reason to know.

Several of my papers were rejected. These were WACs, Written Assessment of Cases. When I explained my logic to my professors, they said my arguments were brilliant and original. In fact, my ideas were so original that they didn’t appear on the grading checklists given to the Radcliffe students who actually graded the papers. I’m not saying every prof did this nor do I know how it works today, but an automated system might be an improvement. #justsayin

Some of my notes from tonight’s session, mainly Alan Kay’s observations.

“The revolution is old but it feels like it’s just taking off.”

Kay and a bunch of his pals back in ARPA and PARC days remembered Licklider, who wanted ARPA to develop and intellectual amplifier. In those cold war days, money was not a problem. The influential were out to change the world, not to amass fortunes. Licklider called for developing an intergalactic network. Missing the mark created the internet.

Unfortunately, business people are rewarded for making money, not for improving the world. Imagine how business would look at marketing bicycles if starting from scratch. These things have one hell of a steep learning curve. And they are dangerous. Kids are going to ride them in traffic. Our lawyers will be in fits. Forget it.

Appropriately, Kay shared a Churchill anecdote with a great message: The future is cooperation, not competition.

The hostess at the manor party tells Sir Winston she’s just seen a senior peer pocket a solid silver salt cellar. Should she confront him?

Winston walked over to the earl, pocketing a salt shaker along the way. As he pulled the shaker from his pocket, he told the earl, “it looks like we’ve been discovered. Better put them back.”

Kay set a hurdle for software. It should be like the human body, which replaces every molecule in the course of seven years; it doesn’t have to die for maintenance and then reboot. Software should accommodate improvement without shutting down.

The typical Silicon Valley has a little angel on her shoulder, saying “Change the world.” On the other should sits a little devil saying “Get rich quick.”

Why is the movie industry in Hollywood? It’s not just the light. It was as far as they could get away from New York. Similarly, Xerox put PARC in Palo Alto, far from the executive offices in Stamford, CT.

Kay hasn’t seen much true innovation beyond mere scaling.

Business people seem to feel as if God had given them this verdant valley, and they figure it’s their right to strip it bare.

MOOCs? The amazing thing is their popularity. The underbelly is Backlash.

Maxwell (or maybe it was Faraday) gave Disraeli a demo of two small motors. “What are they good for?” The reply: “What are human babies good for?”

Most managers are more concerned about maintaining control than with doing the job well.

Free-form responses. n=20, Business+MOOCS Survey 2/25-26/2103

What is positive about MOOCs?

People who are prepared to learn and are willing to accept some limitations of the paradigm are successful. Those that need external motivation or lots of hand holding will not find this fruitful.

2/26/2013 3:16 PMView Responses

danah spells her name in lower case, but everything else about her is upper case: Master’s in Sociable Media with Judith Donath at the MIT Media Lab, PhD at UC Berkeley School of Information advised by Peter Lyman and Mimi Ito, fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication, fellow at the Berkman Center at Harvard, work at Yahoo, Intel, Google, and now Microsoft.

danah has been studying teenagers for a decade. She reminds me of Temple Grandin, the autistic horse whisperer who looks at the world from the animals’ perspective. boyd is an anthropologist who knows teenagers better than they know themselves.

Organizations

Transformation happens at the boundaries of organizations, not the center. Organizations are like LP records: the outer edge is moving fast but the center hardly moves at all. Young people don’t understand why traditional employees gravitate toward the center. Why not go to the edge, where things are happening? Why stay inside the corporate walls when you can talk with everyone?

Information flows faster when it’s available to everyone. It’s stupid to keep secrets from customers and partners who can help you. Overall, young people are challenging the way boundaries work.

Changes in the technology sector are forcing us to consider changes in the organizational culture. Fifteen years ago, coding was a slow, laborious process. Programmers coded every function from scratch. Computers were slow. A programmer would submit a program on punch cards and wait hours for it to compile.

Computers got faster; compiling became instantaneous, and extensibility became the rule. How much of my code can be recycled? Instead of coding, programmers built apps by mashing up shared packages of code. Prototyping became fast and cheap. If a mashup produced a Frankenmonster, you threw it away and tried something else. Programming became communal, sharing replaced building from scratch, and programmers migrated to co-working spaces. They share information with competitors because sharing is to everyone’s advantage. It takes place after hours in bars. Social networks have become the fabric of the high tech industry.

Workers in high-tech know what their executives overlook. Learning is experiential. You learn from your peers and from doing things. Techies tend to move on every three years in search of fresh opportunities to learn.

Teenagers

Teenagers have a different perspective on what’s public and what’s private. They can talk with the world over the net, even when they are forbidden to leave home. They gain privacy by controlling the social situation.

A girl is horrified when her mom joins Facebook. Mom’s comments embarrass her. To tell her friends about breaking up with her boyfriend, she references a song from Life of Brian, Always look on the bright side of life. Her friends understand and begin texting her; her mother doesn’t get it. Privacy is attained by hiding in plain sight.

Sorry, but I can’t resist telling an old joke. A teenage boy writes, “Oh, no. My father has joined Facebook. WTF?” His dad writes, “What does WTF mean?” The son replies “Welcome to Facebook.”

Teens are hacking the Attention Economy. They play with boundaries, not within. Consider Remix culture. Mix Monty Python and the Holy Grail with Star Wars. It skips over the copyright boundary but creates something new and engaging. Teenagers on Twitter and Instagram have millions of followers. Their ecosystem exceeds that of adults. They see the Internet as their own.

The 21^st century

Networks rule. People are organizing by networks instead of groups. This is a radical shift.

Success in today’s workforce is about being networked in a way that makes sense. How do you build relationships that help you sustain the right kinds of connections?

In traditional higher ed, colleges are not a place to learn skills. Professors give horrible lectures on esoteric subjects. They teach so they can do their research. People go to those institutions for social networking. Negotiating the dynamics of the Ivy League dorm room builds relationships that sustain the elite connections of our country.

This has gotten messier now with social media. Young people find people like them even before they get on campus. At work, people recommend people who are like them. This reinforces homogeneity. We need to train people about thinking how DIVERSE their networks are.

As you build skills, how to you build social networks and relationships?

When we see young people experimenting with networks, we encourage them. Yet young people are told not to meet strangers. We need to meet people who are NOT LIKE US in order to build and learn.

Building out relationships through social networking is not just an HR issue – it’s connected to the ability to become a lifelong learner. Exposing people to other people who know what they don’t know.

We need disruption to help grow things (e.g., outsiders coming into your organization).

How do we prepare learners for the skills of the future, and also how do we prepare them to engage with the ecosystem?

Future organizations

danah suggests that the high tech development approach is a great model for business organizations in general. I agree. The Stoos Movement is working to bring it about. For example, Steve Denning’s Radical Management concept mashes up the zeitgeist of Scrum, Agile, and Kanban with business management:

• Delight customers
• Dynamic linking
• From value to values
• Communications: conversations
• Managers enable self-organizing teams

danah’s talk put another item on my to-do list: I’ve got to get to know some teenagers!

Acknowledgement

Cammy Bean’s live-blogged post on danah’s session was invaluable in writing this summary.

Her blog.

I finished reading Cathy Davidson’s Now You See It yesterday afternoon. It is brilliant. Extremely well-written. Nearly impossible to put down. I love the way this woman thinks. This is a beautiful book.

Have you ever watched the television series Eureka? The characters get trapped in a virtual reality environment and when the force field gets hosed, the picture jiggles and sometimes what you thought was the real world begins to pixelate and morph into little cubes. Your eyes are pried open by the reality shift. That’s what I experienced reading Now You See It. The world’s not quite what I thought.

We all suffer inattention blindness. Humans have low bandwidth. When we pay attention to one thing, we don’t register lots of concurrent alternatives.

Our culture is leaving the industrial era. It’s not accidental that we began to imagine our brains were linear, machine-like, inflexible, and subject to decay a hundred years ago; we came up with the assembly line and time clock at the same time. We’ve got to see that for what it is and then cultivate the distraction to take another perspective. Oh yeah, those aren’t chickens; they’re ducks. Classrooms discourage learning. Grades and multiple choice and standardization are obsolete.

“We need to be thinking of interconnected, not discrete, twenty-first-century skills. Instead of testing for the best answer to discrete questions, we need to measure the ability to make connections, to synthesize, collaborate, network manage projects, solve problems and respond to constantly changing technologies interfaces and eventually in the workplace, new arrangements of labor and new economies. For schools this means that in addition to the three Rs of reading, writing and arithmetic, kids should be learning critical thinking, innovation, creativity, and problem solving, all of the skills one can build upon and mesh with the skills of others.”

She gets there, in the words of a reviewer for The Times Educational Supplement by

“…taking us on a tour through a welter of psychological theories and principles as she explains how learning happens. Along the way, she considers the Hebbian principle of neuronal pathways (“neurons that fire together, wire together”), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and Asperger’s syndrome, Alzheimer’s disease, Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory, Stanford-Binet intelligence testing, Freudian psychodynamics and a galaxy of other psychological theories and themes in order to illustrate and hammer home her point that education, as it is currently conducted, is preparing young people for the past, not the future. She critiques many of our tried and tested assessment methods as obsolete and in need of replacement, and argues that formalized learning environments fail to model new modes of working, many of which are ambient and untethered, arriving at the conclusion that we need to “question whether the form of learning and knowledge making we are instilling in our children is useful for their future”.

I recall someone at IBM’s Almaden Lab once lamenting that “We look at the world through industrial-age goggles.”

“Whether applied to life on the assembly line or inside the new skyscrapers, efficiency was a harsh taskmaster. It required that humans be as uniform as possible, despite their individual circumstances, talents, or predispositions. Working regular hours, each person was assigned aplace an a function; doing what one was told an not question the efficacy of the process were both part of the twentieth=century work. But a problem increasingly reports in the modern offericce was self-motivation. With os much control exerted by others, there wasn’t much reason for the office worker to think for himself, to exceed expectation ro to innovate. Regularity and regulation do not inspire self-movitated workers.”

Frederick Taylor

The first time I read Frederick Taylor in the original, I was outraged. How could he think so little of his fellow man? What gumption it must take to tell someone, “You’re not paid to think.” As I reflected on the value created in industrial age and the comforts it showered upon us, I tempered my feelings. Taylor wanted to increase production so there would be more for all to share. However, at the end of the day, whatever you think of Taylor and his one best way, he’s dead and those days are over.

We need a new set of tricks. Davidson asks,

“Given the new options in our digital world, why exactly, would we want to do thing the way we did them before? Why would we choose to measure the new possibilities of the digital age against a standard invented to count productivity in the old industrial regime? Given the newly interconnecte world we all now live, learn, and work in, given the new ways of connecting that our world affords, why would we not want to use our options? They question isn’t which is better, the past or the present. The question is, given the current possibilities, how can we imagine and work toward a better future?”

Ceci n’est-pas une pipe!

This is a not a picture.

What confuses the brain delights the brain. I love this” “The mind always wanders off task because the mind’s task is to wander.”

“We currently have a national education policy based on a style of learning — the standardized, machine-readable multiple-choice test — that reinforces a type of thinking and form of attention well suited to the industrial worker — a role that increasingly fewer of our kids will ever fill,” she writes. Thanks mainly to the Internet, “their world is different from the one into which we were born, therefore they start shearing and shaping different neural pathways from the outset. We may not even be able to see their unique gifts and efficiencies.”

One thing I don’t get yet is the IBM-in-Second Life thing. The big section on Chuck Hamilton and his avatar pals got me to skipping pages. Maybe I’m an old fuddie duddie. (Or need a corporate sponsor to fund my technology needs.)

The Wall Street Journal Review neatly summarizes that the “….central argument of the book: that since every individual is bound to miss something, by working together people can cover one another’s blind spots and collectively see the big picture.”

In a review for The New York Times Book Review, Christopher Chabris trashes Davidson’s thesis by saying there’s no proof of what she proposes. “No hard evidence.” The reviewer also studies inattention blindness. In fact, he corrects Davidson for calling the phenomenon attention blindness. The “Now You See It” of Davidson’s title gives away the theme of the reviewer’s book, which is about the famous gorilla-sighting video. Sour grapes?

Budges? We don’t need no stinking badges.

“No hard evidence”

The Times reviewer’s putdown reminds me of a run-in I had with an American academic at a conference in India earlier this year. He had opined that 70-20-10 was hogwash — spurious figures somehow derived from a misinterpretation of Archimedes. I flipped out and challenged him to a debate at the conference. He said he wouldn’t dignify this totally make-believe myth because it had never been verified and reported in a peer-reviewed journal. Specifically, he told me six PhD students who combed the past 50 years of peer-reviewed articles couldn’t find any empirical research to back it up. He said the numbers were therefore meaningless and the issue was not debatable.

This is the sort of nonsense Cathy Davidson warned us about” using yesterday’s yardstick (50 years!) in an attempt to measure today’s reality. It’s not apples and oranges. It’s apples and black holes. Nothing to compare.

And guess what? When you’re on the cutting edge, there isn’t any proof yet. Maybe there’s an emerging pattern, but there’s no “hard evidence.” That goes with the territory. Otherwise, you’re not on the edge. Given that the entire world is getting edgier (you can quote me on that), you better get used to it.

The book reviewer finds Davidson overly optimistic. I share her pronoia — the feeling that the world is conspiring to make our lives better. Davidson’s stories will inspire you to think highly of the future of learning and work. You got a problem with that?

I’m an advocate of common sense. Davidson gives us lots of ponder.

#eyeopener

#justsayin

#wakeupcall

#dreamland

#itateam

This year will be the 8th Future of Talent Retreat. I’ve been to every one and will be attending this one in San Francisco, November 16-20.

We have few presentations. Instead we engage in conversations and collaborative activities that will give you practical information to take back and use in your organization. We have great food, drink wonderful wine, and make long lasting friends.

This is a highly interactive, hands-on event where participants contribute and learn from each other as well as the faculty.

Vernor Vinge, who came up with the concept of the singularity.