Blog

“What is essential is invisible.”

There’s a lot of talk going on these days about how businesses need to embrace their social nature and intangible elements in order to compete [see Enterprise 2.0, Social Business Design, etc.]. The reason being that very few businesses produce anything tangible and even those that do still rely on a complex web of relationships, ideas, insight, brand, collaboration and leadership in order to do it.

This evolving understanding of the business landscape reminds me of man’s understanding of a different scape >>> space.

Until recently it was believed that our Universe of visible stuff [planets, stars, comets, gas, etc.] would continue expanding for a bit and then begin to recede. But the data didn’t agree. The expansion of the universe was actually found to be accelerating at a rate that means it will continue to expand eternally.

What’s behind this mystery? Dark matter and dark energy. Their presence is required in order to explain the behavior of the objects in space that we can see. The same is true for the networks and intangibles in organizations.

Dark matter is described as being “undetectable by its emitted radiation, but whose presence can be inferred by gravitational effects on visible matter.” Sounds like office politics to me.

Seriously, though, dark matter and dark energy are true forces with which to be reckoned. Estimates are that they make up about 95% of the known universe as the chart here shows.

Scientists were recently able to visualize these forms of matter and energy through what I’m sure is some pretty basic math [not]. What they produced was both eye-opening and jaw-dropping. It shows what was previously invisible and is allowing them to better understand it and its effect on us.

The picture here shows a lonely Hubble [to the lower left] as it peers out into the distance and sees massive clusters of galaxies [the bright spots in the image] surrounded by enormous globs of dark matter.

The ability to see these formations as well as analyze the data that comprise them allows scientists to better understand how the Universe works and how our role in it can be affected.

Until recently most organizations focused just on visible things [products, materials, warehouses, property, etc.] in order to operate and compete. The problem was that only focusing on tangible things left out the major driving forces of business today [i.e. relationships, ideas, knowledge, brand, etc.].

And just as scientists needed to be able to *see* dark matter and dark energy in order to measure and understand it, we too need ways of visualizing the critical elements of organizational performance in order to affect it in the new business landscape. Enter Organizational Network Analysis and Value Network Analysis - two tools designed to see how organizations really operate today.

An Organizational (aka Social) Network Analysis reveals the social fabric of an organizations and, depending on the question asked, can show us who people go to for information, which geographic locations that may be out of the loop, where holes may develop as a result of succession planning, and countless other scenarios.

The image here is the actual output from one of our clients with global operations. Dots=people; lines=information flow. Just knowing that you can see that there is no information flowing from site to site – it all comes through corporate. Not being able to see this as well as analyze the data behind it wouldn’t allows us to create and execute on a strategy to save money, reduce rework, increase innovation, etc.

A Value Network Analysis shows us how work really gets done from more of a process perspective. The key differentiator is that a VNA includes both the tangible [i.e. reports, deliverables, communications] as well as intangible [i.e. credibility, confidence, brand, etc.] elements that are required for success in business today.

The image here is another real example from a global client. There were several departments at headquarters whose collective objective was to support the activities of various global sites but they had never been able to visualize how their activities were affecting the sites. The VNA revealed that despite their best intentions, the sites [the oval on far left; mid-way up vertically] were not receiving the intended support and allowed us to create a strategy that coordinated and focused these activities into a process that reduced workload and better supported stakeholders in the field.

The topics of Social Media, Social Networking, Enterprise 2.0, etc. are all the buzz these days. There’s even a raging debate on whether to include the word ’social’ [my opinion is that 'intangibles' is more inclusive/accurate than social but not nearly as sexy]. Scratch the surface, though, and much of these discussions revolve around technology. I’m the first to admit that there are some pretty slick tech offerings out there to help organizations operate in this new landscape but to implement them correctly there must be a comprehensive understanding of the whole environment.

So just as scientists have leveraged Hubble and some wicked math to learn about how our Universe is structured and therefore how we can play in it, businesses must have a deep understanding of their culture, ecosystem, processes, people, etc. before launching any of these social [intangible] initiatives. So…what does your organization really look like? Can you illustrate the invisible forces that are truly determining your path?

Microsoft’s line of videos about business collaboration are well done and inspire a lot of thought about the possibilities of the new networked business landscape.  What they make me wonder though is which product are they espousing be used for this purpose?

Although it’s flying off the shelves, SharePoint is known to be strong when documents are the central focus – this creates space in the market for SharePoint’s Featured Partners who extend the functionality to support communities of practice, knowledge networks, innovation and more.

As I look at these after-market products as compared to the potential that collaboration and learning communities can bring to an organization I have to wonder how long it will take before one is just gobbled up and integrated right into SharePoint?

One of our projects now is hung up in IT due to our desire to use a SharePoint plug-in ASP provider with Community of Practice functionality – it’ll be nice when all of this comes in one ‘box.’

Well I’ve been noodling [aka procrastinating] on this post awhile – given my recent interview with Inc. Magazine on selecting collaboration tools, though, I thought it was time…

For many of the organizations that I speak/work with regarding knowledge networks/communities of practice they have [or are planning on implementing] a collaboration software package with many slick bells and whistles but without a clear path and strategy for getting up and running – this often results in an empty knowledge landscape with little showing except for some bells and whistles strewn about.

Even in the CIO world it’s popular to say that collaboration and innovation isn’t about the software but what do you do in addition to buying software? 

The Iceberg in IT

The delimna I frequently witness is what I call the ‘Iceberg in IT’ conundrum.  Someone decided that people needed to collaborate more and told IT to implement a package that enables collaboration.  While a good software package is certainly a required step, I prefer to put it near last instead of first. 

Using the admittedly cliche and ubiquitous iceberg metaphor above, social software is simply the visible thing that enables collaboration to happen.  When IT is told to purchase it when there is no strategy to generate adoption, it will feel cold and barren [sorry - couldn't help it].  In order to truly affect how this can help people do their jobs there is a large amount of work that needs to done behind the scenes…hence the 7Cs of success:

• Capturing:  the notion of collaboration is foreign in many organizations so people often need to be shown what potential is there if they were to collaborate.  We always visit different geographic locations and capture [via video, audio, memory stick, etc.] what people are working on so that we can determine common topics and have some seed material to begin populating the software system.
• Connecting:  even software that’s designed to connect people will do little in that regard if left on its own.  People [especially when at the early phases] need some help connecting with one another – simple things like setting up bridge calls and facilitating conversations serve to build trust and awareness and provide nuggets of content that can be housed in the platform.
• Combining: in a dispersed organization you’re bound to find bits and pieces of similar work living in a great many places.  Helping the users combine that information using the wiki feature of a platform, for example, will show users the efficiency in working together while training them on what in the world a ‘wiki’ is.
• Contextualizing: the most effective collaboration initiatives will integrate members from an organization’s suppliers and customers and related academic institutions.  Translating that into compelling content that will make sense to your users will be critical in getting them to absorb and leverage it.
• Confirming:  similar to above, if you’re getting knowledge from various sources, care must be taken to ensure that what’s being provided is accurate information so that it can be acted upon.
• Circulating:  what good is the best information if no one knows about it?  The role of a community/network coordinator is essential in circulating news about what’s new, recent questions, etc.
• Communicating: having someone dedicated to getting the word out about the success stories in your knowledge network will go a long way in generating interest, excitement and ,of course, additional funds that will be necessary to continue operations.

Having an effective Web 2.0 collaboration platform at the center of this activity certainly will make it much easier to coordinate but the software alone [today's versions anyhow] will never replace the behind-the-scenes efforts required to start and sustain collaboration and innovation.

CLO Magazine just reported on a survey that was done on emerging markets using Web 2.0 tools.  It’s worth taking a look at their write-up as they have some interesting findings in the data.

The most compelling message to me, though, was that people will be constantly “wired” and accustomed to working with these 2.0 tools that many today may feel are foreign.  This will be a critical understanding for the next crop of Chief Learning Officers – if their workforce of the future is comfortable collaborating in communities and with people all over the world in their personal and professional lives you can bet they’ll be looking for jobs that allow them to continue that trend.  To take someone of this mindset and stick them in traditional training classes and prevent them from peer-to-peer learning will be doing a large disservice to the workforce, the organization and customers.  

What opportunities are there in your organization to begin incorporating the Web 2.0 tools slowly before the entire workforce demands it?  Here’s a hint…think less about the tools/technology and look for opportunities to help.  If multiple people on a sales team are passing around many drafts of a proposal consider putting it on a wiki until it’s in final form; if disparate teams are working on common projects/problems/innovations but don’t know each other a social networking app may be helpful.  Web 2.0 is really just an enabler to get us back to the natural way we want to learn and interact but often can’t…

I was having a conversation with someone yesterday afternoon about how the number of software vendors offering wikis, blogs, discussions boards, rapid elearning, etc. was enormous and that there would certainly come a time when things would begin to consolidate and major players would begin to emerge.  This will prevent organizations from having to cobble together these elements and the pain and inefficiencies associated with cobbling.

An ‘ERP of Learning’ is sure to be on the horizon was the synopsis of our talk – then I saw a press release from OutStart today [note - this is not my prediction that this is the 'Learning ERP'...just an indication that it's a comin'] detailing the merger of OutStart and Eedo.

As Chief Learning Officers become more prevalent and powerful and as the trends in learning continue to incorporate elements of informal learning (i.e. communities of practice) and others suitable for knowledge workers it will be an exciting time to watch as the various software offerings in the learning space make moves to secure their future or their fate – there are certainly demands in the market for this functionality and a sole source vendor to provide it doesn’t exist yet.

It’s our combined thoughts that bring us great things.

What a great quote, eh?

This came straight from my wife after a couple years of explaining to her what I do for a living.  After all the talk of wikis, social networking, collective intelligence, blogs, knowledge management, Web 2.0, etc. it was her that boiled it down to that statement.

Being so mired in the world of next-generation learning and development I am accustomed to, and comfortable with, the buzzwords of the trade but it’s sometimes difficult to translate the purpose and benefit of all of these funny sounding things to someone that has little insight into this world.

And her statement summed up quite a bit of it.  So much so that when she said it I sat up straight and wrote it down on a bar napkin [a relic of pre-Web 2.0 for any Gen Nexters that may be reading].

The more I thought about it this really encompasses the theory driving this revolution in how people learn, collaborate, innovate, communicate, etc. and the buzzwords are really just the ‘how.’  Communities of practice, social network analysis, rapid elearning, knowledge management and many others are just methods to accomplish the purpose of my wife’s synopsis – harnessing the power of people connected.

As with many other examples, it takes an outsider’s lens to shed a light of clarity on a topic that can become quite complex when left to the experts.

My Dad grew up in a rural part of Kentucky in the late 30’s and early 40’s. The automobile certainly wasn’t ubiquitous during that period and many of my Dad’s encounters with cars involved some sort of trouble. If they were able to get the engine to start it usually didn’t take long before one of the tires was flat.

Fast forward to 1995 and my first exposure to the Internet. I feel like I’ll be regaling my own children someday about the trials and tribulations from the early days of the Information Superhighway. I’m preparing my stories now…

“Back in my day we used dial-up to connect only after a few minutes of the most unusual noises you can imagine. Then came wireless and we used to have to unlpug and restart our routers daily to keep connected…you kids don’t know how good you have it.”

It doesn’t have quite the same impact as walking to school in the snow with cardboard shoes uphill both ways but, hey, it’s what I know.

Due to our heavy travel schedules my wife and I work from home quite a bit.  Our internet service went out yesterday and this is just the latest in a long line of events that seem to want to keep us disconnected. I know that children being born today will not have these issues to contend with as we’re still in the infancy stage of the World Wide Web and things will only get more seamless.

When I check into a hotel or log onto a remote network there is always a slight sense of relief when I see my home page load.  This is a feeling that my yet-to-be-born children will likely never know.  Being connected to the Internet to them will worry them as much as starting my car worries me today – and that’s not much.

It’s exciting to be part of the beginning of the Internet revolution that has catapulted us into a knowledge society – using Web 2.0 technology I can now compile all of the stories needed to assure children and grandchildren that the Internet as they know it is a blessing for which they should rejoice…if only I can stay connected long enough to post this… 

Way back in my undergrad psychology classes we read much about the classic debate over nature vs. nurture in regard to human development. The ‘nature’ camp believed that we are who we are from birth – our genes (nature) determines how we wind up. The ‘nurture’ camp felt that who we become is solely dependent on how we were raised (nurtured) – we are born a blank slate upon which our defining moments sketch out our eventual selves.

Then someone came along and proposed that perhaps nature and nurture each had a part in developing the whole person. This argument was of course called ‘nature/nurture.’

My reaction to this revelation? Duh.

Of course our genes shape who we are. Of course our experiences do too. The warring camps seemed too extreme and too black and white for me. It was clear that some interaction of how we are nurtured built upon how we are naturally resulted in what we become when we grow up.

I felt the same when reading the recent article in Fast Company, Is the Tipping Point Toast?

The author profiles Duncan Watts and his research that theorizes that the Influentials from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point are a misnomer. Watts suggests that trends ebb and flow more as a factor of the population’s readiness for them as opposed to the people that started them.

I think Watts makes interesting points and that they’re right some of the time. Am I to believe, though, that a popular blogger with a solid reputation for cogent insight is just as likely to stir up interest about something as someone that’s a known spammer? Tough to swallow…

In our work with clients we often start projects with a social network analysis. This dandy piece of software spits out network maps that provide us an x-ray into how information flows through an organization. We can clearly see the people within organizations that are sought out the most often. And they’re not random.

Individuals can become go-to/influential people due to their personality, insight, access or any number of other variables. It’s helpful to identify these individuals and utilize them in a new twist on change management [where influentials are selected to help with communication rather than the shotgun approach of most change initiatives] or knowledge transfer [where knowledge is downloaded from influentials prior to them being transfered or retiring and leaving a knowledge void in the network]. And it’s always been a foundational element in building a thriving learning community/community of practice [CoP].

So while there are elements of a given population having to be ready to accept a trend, there are also certainly factors emanating from different people that will affect the reach and rate of a trend that they [willingly or otherwise] attempt to start. Similar to the nature/nurture debate, there are elements from both sides that come into play when looking at the final outcome.

I’ve been absent from the monthly Big Questions over at the Learning Circuits blog – mainly due to us getting our own new site up and populated. I almost rang in on February but couldn’t pull it together…even with the extra day for Leap Year! I couldn’t resist March’s Big Question though…

“What is the scope of our responsibility as learning professionals?”

More compelling than the question, though, was some of the fodder and follow-up questions that Tony Karrer shared in the post.

• …a Chief Learning Officer panel discussion where it seemed that supporting informal learning or communities of practice was not something they were considering. 
• Do educational institutions and corporate learning and development departments have responsibility for supporting Long Tail Learning? 
• Do they have responsibility for learning beyond what can be delivered through instruction?

It shocked me to hear about the CLO panel discussion. With the overwhelming research out there confirming that today’s workforce is getting more and more of the information they need to do their job through informal means it’s difficult to understand why CLOs would resist supporting communities of practice or broader informal learning.

I feel that learning professionals should support learning. Period. Whatever form(s) of learning that are most beneficial to the workforce (as well as appropriate members of the value-chain) are the ones that should be pursued. There may be some organizations where communities of practice and/or informal learning don’t make sense as part of the learning portfolio but they should at least be considered.

As we move further away from our industrial society and further into our information society it’s my belief that a big part of learning initiatives will be providing easy access to information rather than supplying more information. The advent of Web 2.0 tools arrived at a great time for the renewed interest in communities of practice and I’m sure there is a symbiotic relationship between the two. It’s not about the technology though…it’s about the possibilities that now exist for what knowledge workers can do with the information they need. Now they can be part of creating and shaping the information they need rather than just recipients of content they are prescribed.

This combined with social network analyses and careful crafting of learning communities results in a sophisticated and dynamic learning strategy that happens to mesh well with the dynamic roles of many people in organizations today. It’s becoming increasingly difficult (if not impossible) to fit everything that someone needs to know into a course of any kind. Execution of strategy is or should be changing rather frequently as markets, customers, etc. fluctuate and the traditional forms of training won’t work as the sole solution for the workforce in these organizations. To ignore this is dangerous.

In an age where formal content is often ‘obsolete upon receipt’ it’s my belief that learning professionals will need to widen their scope in terms of what they will consider using as part of their learning portfolio. As with other investments in complex markets, it often pays to be diversified and to focus on areas where you’ll get the greatest return. Discounting new methods for supporting knowledge workers is akin to keeping all of your savings in CDs, bonds or treasury bills…you’re sure to get a little return but you’re not leveraging all of the opportunities out there; some of which may be better suited to your situation and therefore more likely to get you a better return.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference: Lead the Evolution