Excerpts from The Working Smarter Fieldbook

Buy it. | September 2010 Edition | Excerpts

Working smarter is the key to sustainability and continuous improvement. Knowledge work and learning to work smarter are becoming indistinguishable. The accelerating rate of change in business forces everyone in every organization to make a choice: learn while you work or become obsolete.

The infrastructure for working smarter is called a workscape. It’s not a separate function so much as another way of looking at how we organize work. Workscaping helps people grow so that their organizations may prosper. Workscapes are pervasive. They are certainly not lodged in a training department. In fact, they may make the training department obsolete.

Organizations must stop thinking of learning as something separate from work. The further we get into what Dan Pink calla the conceptual era, the greater the convergence of working and learning. In many cases, they are already one and the same.

Workers in a workscape learn by solving problems, coming up with fresh thinking, and collaborating with colleagues. They don’t learn about these things; they learn to do them.

The workscape is the aspect of an organization where learning and development become never-ending processes rather than one-time events. A workscape is a learning ecology. The workscaping viewpoint helps knowledge workers become more effective professionally and fulfilled personally. A sound workscape environment empowers workers to be all that they can be.