My mother, at the age of 14, became one of the 2 million refugees during the evacuation of East Prussia in 1945. Her mother took her six children from Kolberg [Kolobrzeg] to Celle, outside Hanover in Western Germany. I am not sure exactly when my mother, Elli, fled as she did not talk much about it. I do know that some of the trip was by boat, which was part of Operation Hannibal, one of the largest naval operations in history. In 1947 the family was reunited with my grandfather who had been a prisoner of war in France.

My mother rarely talked about her experiences during the war, only saying that war is terrible. Elli married in 1955 and moved with my father and older brother to Canada where I was born. My father died in a car accident when I was five and my mother found out at the same time that she was pregnant with her fourth child. Her family strongly suggested that she return to Canada. Elli did not go back, and later remarried and had another child.

I can only imagine how my mother’s early experiences affected her life decisions and perspectives on the world. I remember thinking at an early age how much easier my life was than had been my mother’s.

I recently came across a book review on Josie Holford’s blog — Rattlebag & Rhubarb. The book — All for Nothing — was written by Walter Kempowski, who was a refugee from East Prussia at the age of 15.

“Imagine, for a moment, a German novel about the final months of the Second World War, an epic tale of national collapse and shameful private defeat, the ruined landscape ribboned with refugees. Now imagine such a book written by a German who lived through those bitter months as a teen-ager, but written with a light touch, almost quizzically, the entire story suffused with an air of speculative detachment. I wouldn’t have thought it could be done. Then I encountered Walter Kempowski’s extraordinary novel “’All for Nothing’ (New York Review Books), first published in German in 2006, and now available in Anthea Bell’s vital translation.” —New Yorker 2018-04-09

I found the book and ordered it immediately, reading it over this past Thanksgiving weekend.

My view while reading ‘All for Nothing’ during Thanksgiving weekend 2021

This is not a book review, as you can get a good one from The Guardian. For me, it was a way of reflecting on how similar these events may have been for my mother. People in the book for the most part cannot comprehend a Soviet invasion or the defeat of the German Army. These are impossible concepts for them. Everyone in the book sees events from their unique, egocentric bubble. But then people start dying randomly and everyone becomes focused on survival. There are some acts of generosity, especially at the end of the book, but for the most part it’s everyone for themselves. Witnessing these events as a young girl must have been traumatic for my mother and I do not blame her for repressing these memories by not discussing what happened in 1945.

Walter Kempowski has done a great favour for the children of the survivors of the evacuation of East Prussia. He has shown it through the eyes of those who lived it and he has passed these impressions to the next generations. This is all the more important because so few have written about the experiences of the average German civilian. It has brought me a little closer to my mother, who passed away in 2019.

As Edwin Starr’s 1969 song asks — War (what is it good for?) — the answer is — all for nothing.

From the introduction of All For Nothing, by Jenny Erpenbeck

Back in the early 1990’s, Kempowski’s readers were confronted with the words “all for nothing” prominently displayed in a different context, in his novel Mark und Bein (Marrow and Bone). A young man from Hamburg on a business trip to modern-day Poland locates the spot where his father fell in battle. “All for nothing! ALL FOR NOTHING! And by this he meant not just his mother’s death, not just the death of his father […] but all the torments suffered by living beings, the flesh hung on the stake, the calf he saw bound and gagged, the shed in Marienburg prepared for torture, the line of exhausted refugees dragging themselves along beneath a condemning sky. It’s all for nothing! he thought again and again. And: Who is to blame?”

The time has come. Facebook is in the news today and not as the tech media darling it likes to portray itself as.

“Former Facebook (FB.O) employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen will urge the U.S. Congress on Tuesday to regulate the social media giant, which she plans to liken to tobacco companies that for decades denied that smoking damaged health, according to prepared testimony seen by Reuters.” —Reuters 2021-10-04

In 2007, I asked if we need an alternative to Facebook — As we become more interconnected and use the Web for problem solving, finding love and sharing our sorrow, we should seriously consider public infrastructure as the backbone for social networking. Just as we have funded roads and airports, we need to provide safe and open platforms for online community forming.

In 2008 I warned against walled gardens — I think that the major barrier to use of these systems [like Facebook], whether collaboration or learning-oriented, is the ‘walled garden’ framework. If I have ‘to go’ somewhere, then that’s a barrier to use. E-mail comes to me, so it’s easy. Personally, I prefer using my feed aggregator to follow people and news.

In 2009 I suggested a need for a home base that each of us own online — Having watched MySpace get marginalized while Facebook dominates for now, it’s only a matter of time before more new platforms that we don’t own come along and lure the next bunch of digital sharecroppers.

In 2010 I promoted the idea of an aggressively intelligent citizenry to counter consumer web platforms — Social media, social learning, social business – these all influence the social role of the creator and the work, and cannot be clearly delineated in our hyper-connected society. In a networked world, we need to divorce data from physical property. If not, we will have the worst of both worlds: corporations freely aggregating our crowd-sourced data and then selling it back to us. It’s happening already with Google, YouTube, Facebook, and all the other social media sites that use our data, legally own it, and profit from it.

In 2014 I raised the issue of crowd-milking — The economy is changing and we will see increasing market fragmentation. The only ones who will win in mass markets will be the big platform owners. Facebook dominates social networking, Amazon dominates book publishing, Google dominates online advertising, and Apple dominates online music sales. They are reaping the benefits of network effects with little trickle-down potential for any small players.

In 2015 I suggested that we need to understand our tools — For individuals, the core skill is critical thinking, or questioning all assumptions, including one’s own. People can learn through their various communities and develop social literacy. Information literacy is improved by connecting to a diversity of networks. But control of networks by any single source (e.g. Facebook) destroys the ability for people and communities to develop real network era fluency, which is not good for society in the long run and may kill innovation and our collective ability to adapt.

In 2017 I recommended examining open source (OS) to own our data — OS quite often is messy and takes a bit of effort to use. On the other hand, with free commercial software (e.g. GMail, Facebook), you usually have to give something away in order to use it. Most often it’s your privacy, as you do not own your data, or you may have to put up with advertising on your application, or both. In the end, someone has to pay.

By 2019 it was becoming obvious that Facebook was a post-truth machine — Persuading people through disinformation or conspiracy theories is become relatively easy by using consumer social media platforms, like Facebook. Such was the case of Cambridge Analytica and the Brexit campaign.

“You don’t need to change everyone’s mind, argues Brittany Kaiser, former director of business development at Cambridge Analytica. You just need to change the minds of the ‘persuadables.’ And the way you identify them is through understanding not just what they buy or say about themselves, but how they think. Through harvesting personal data, Cambridge Analytica could, and did, identify and persuade them.”

The challenge for every citizen is not to be a ‘persuadable’. Can you be persuaded by social media?

In 2020 we saw the resulting constant doubt and outrage created by social media and especially Facebook — Research on the self-perception of knowledge shows how viewing previews without going to the original article gives an inflated sense of understanding on the subject, “audiences who only read article previews are overly confident in their knowledge, especially individuals who are motivated to experience strong emotions and, thus, tend to form strong opinions.”

Social media have created a worldwide Dunning-Kruger effect. Our collective self-perception of knowledge acquired through social media is greater than it actually is. And the outrage continues because we ignore our common humanity.

I summarized the issues with Facebook at the end of 2020, calling it a global clown show — And there is no doubt that our social networks can influence us, as shown in the research Christakis and Fowler did for their 2011 book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives — How Your Friends’ Friends’ Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do — “As part of a social network, we transcend ourselves, for good or ill, and become a part of something much larger. We are connected.”

But Facebook is not an all-powerful entity that is smarter or better than society collectively. Zuckerberg just got lucky, like “a clown car that fell into a gold mine”.

Now in 2021 I believe that human engagement is critical for our collective sensemaking but Facebook is not the place to do it — This pandemic has shown the abject failure in communications from many of our institutions and authorities around the world. First they have to get out of their ‘ivory towers’ and meet people where they are. Leadership by walking around — physically or virtually — is necessary in our connected world. If our experts are not helping society make better decisions about health care, then what are they doing?

Finally, it’s worth reminding ourselves that networks are not communities. Communities are trusted spaces run by and for members. Facebook is not a trusted space.

Pexels image @cottonbro

This week I took Alastair Somerville’s workshop on Network Thinking. The format is based on a podcast, followed by a discussion on Zoom, supported by a card designed by Alastair. I must say it was quite effective. A key actionable insight I gained from our session was the importance of Alignment — “Sharing a moment to align a sense of place, of time, and togetherness. Rooting learning in a shared, but still personal, sense of being”. This reflects many aspects of PKM as well as social learning.

Image: Acuity Design

I was reminded of Marilyn Taylor’s (1987) model on how students learn in formal education. First they may be disoriented, and this lasts for different periods of time for each student. Then they are ready explore, and the end of which they reorient their thinking. They then achieve some kind of equilibrium until the next disorienting situation.

In 2007 I suggested that this disorientation in learning is becoming more frequent in workplace learning. I concluded that in information intensive work environments (which are almost everywhere), there will be longer and more frequent periods between disorientation and reorientation. That means that we have to be comfortable exploring options and possibilities, even though we lack a solid mental framework or easy solutions. Artists do this all the time and now it’s necessary for all of us.

Considering how much teaching and learning is done online and that it is difficult to align so many different perspectives, places, and even a sense of togetherness, it is important to find ways to assist with initial alignment. This could decrease the period of disorientation and provide more time for less stressful exploration. Showing Taylor’s model at the beginning of any intervention may be helpful. Providing cards as Alastair has done was helpful to me. Using ‘advance organizers’, developed by David Ausubel, is another established good practice in teaching.

Advance Organizers ARE:

Organizational cues
Tools that help connect the known to the unknown
Frameworks for helping students understand what it is they’ll be learning

Advance organizers are NOT

A review of what was covered in the previous class session
A simple overview
Recalling what was done last week or last year
Telling the students about tomorrow
Recalling a personal experience and relating it to what will be learned
Stating the objectives of the lesson
—TOPR University of Central Florida

I will definitely put more consideration into alignment when designing any future workshops.

Nick Milton raises an interesting point about the terms implicit, explicit,and tacit knowledge. Do you know what each term means? It seems that many in the knowledge management discipline does not.

Which of these three most closely matches your understanding of the term “Explicit Knowledge”

A. Knowledge which has been explained in some way (spoken or recorded)

B. Knowledge which has been recorded (eg in documents, files etc)

C. Knowledge which can be explained, but may or may not have been either spoken or recorded.

About 40 people answered the poll, and the results were as follows.

A- 23%

B – 53%

C – 23%

So the participants were evenly split between those who thought that explicit knowledge was synonymous with recorded knowledge, and those who thought that it wasn’t. And among those who thought it wasn’t, there was an even split between exactly where the line lies between tacit and explicit.

Imagine this was another discipline. Imagine if doctors could not agree whether coma and death were the same thing, and those who thought they were different, could not agree on the line between death and coma lies. It would be dangerous chaos. —The problem with “tacit/explicit”

Nick goes on to show that these terms are not used in the ISO KM standard and that we should not use them at all and instead be clear about what we are talking about — impossible to express, can be expressed but has not been yet, expressed in speech but not documented, recorded knowledge, or information.

Given this state of confusion I have updated one of the knowledge management graphics that I use frequently.

On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“One day historians will view ant-vaxxers the same way they viewed climate deniers and those who drowned women because they were witches.” —@DavidPrice

“When the virus is circulating in a vaccinated population, variants that are more rapidly transmitting are selected for — those are vaccine evading variants. By vaccinating without shutting down transmission we are promoting vaccine evading variants.” —@YaneerBarYam

“Maybe the problem is that we shouldn’t be looking to politicians for leadership. There’s nothing saying anyone we elect at virtually any position have any abilities to succeed in times of this. We need to develop a civic self-efficacy where we join together with those around us.” —@ClayForsberg

Not Noble: the fake fact of economics by @Mintzberg141

Each of the social sciences has its central concept, for example power in political science, culture in anthropology, and markets in economics. Considered together, in balance, they provide a range of perspectives on human behavior. Considered alone, each narrows our perspective, at the limit into a dogma. Should we see our behavior primarily through the lens of power, or of culture?

‘Identity is not destiny’

Identity is everything today. Your race, your sexuality and your gender are now considered the most important things about you. Judging others according to their identity, rather than their achievements, has become increasingly normalised. It was not long ago that people identified more strongly with their occupation, with their political tribes or with their nations – without having to give it much thought. Yet today, we are constantly fixated on and anxious about our identities. What has given rise to this identitarian age?

Covid gives us a chance to fix indoor air pollution forever

While the early days of the pandemic were spent frantically sanitising surfaces and constantly washing our hands, the scientific consensus eventually settled on the fact that Sars-CoV-2 was airborne, and the focus shifted to proper ventilation to reduce its spread.

But some scientists argue that we shouldn’t stop with those efforts when the threat of Covid-19 dissipates. Many have been clamouring for years that poor indoor air quality has been having massive detrimental effects on our health and productivity. And the pandemic may be the tide change. “It feels like The Great Awakening,” says Joseph Allen, director of the Healthy Buildings programme at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Finally, the world has woken up to the importance of healthy buildings.”

Image: sketchplanations

I have often said that a critical role for people in leadership positions today is helping make the network smarter. In a recent recent blog post, the author discusses another critical aspect of leadership — convening the right people — and uses the example of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

“Leadership in a collective or networked world is defined by those who have vision to convene the necessary group (Dixon, 2009) and those who spend resources wisely for the right things. Merkel was brilliant in setting up shop in Berlin. In the future, that means Germany will be internationally known for epidemiology. She will also inspire a new generation of German scientists and doctors based on this hub. Of course, she didn’t just fall into leading in science, she has her PhD in quantum chemistry (The Atlantic, 2020). Merkel is technically competent, knows how interact with others, and can conceptualize a future the at better than present for tracking pandemics (Jacques, 1986). That is leadership.” —Hilda831

We see this in Canada and how the Nova Scotia Chief Medical Officer of Health has worked during the pandemic. This Atlantic Canadian province has been relatively successful in keeping cases down and Doctor Strang thanks his network.

“I know that I’m not making those decisions alone, I have lots of good people behind me. My [deputy] medical officer of health [Dr. Gaynor Watson-Creed] and other public health colleagues talk a lot. I talk to colleagues across the country. I’m getting really good advice that I lean on.” —CBC 2021-01-01

Compare the COVID19 cases between Manitoba (pop. 1.28M), Saskatchewan (pop. 1.18M ), and Nova Scotia (pop. 0.94M). Convening the right people for advice may be a factor in facing a complex challenge like a pandemic.

Source: Covid19Tracker.ca (2021-09-10)

Making your network smarter is one aspect of leadership in our digitally connected world and so is convening the best parts of your network in order to address complex issues and make decisions. In crises, sometimes perfection is the enemy of the good, so having a diverse, knowledgeable, and experienced group of advisors becomes critical.

“ninety percent of everything is crap” —Sturgeon’s Revelation

“Twitter is often derided as a forum for gossip and nonsense, which it also is. But I find more serious discussion of critical issues, more sources shared and claims checked here than in most of the mainstream media.” —George Monbiot

While 90% of what is shared on Twitter may be crap, a critical eye and good information filters will reveal the 10% that is great. Good personal knowledge mastery practices will lead to filter success.

We all need to set up knowledge filters and not let the platforms feed what they want to us.

People see what they want to see, therefore filter failure is a human failure

A knowledge society, using digital networks, has to be based on trusted relationships or it becomes a surveillance society.

These practices can be learned on the PKM in 40 Days online workshop.

I have mentioned over the years that you have to own your data and that many online platforms are set up for crowd-milking. One of the latest platforms for writers to make-it-rich is Substack, where the top writers may earn six figures. Substack lets writers set up paid subscriptions and takes 10 percent. However, the platform also paid high profile writers in advance to get them to use the platform, and in turn could say how much money writers were making. Annalee Newitz described this scam, ironically, on Substack [as an aside, I think that Newitz is a great writer].

Simon Owens recently discussed the gritty reality of Substack’s middle class. He has turned down full-time writing and editorial jobs and is completely focused on producing content, both free and paid. His observations include:

“you really have to minimize time spent on anything other than content creation”
“You need some sort of financial cushion.” — “I think it’s safe to say that you’ll want to have a minimum of one year’s salary in the bank before even considering making the plunge.”
“While I was constantly experimenting with small tweaks during this time, there was simply no way to collect quantitative data on whether they were actually effective.”
“I do think it’s very much possible for the average person to join this middle class, but it’s important that everyone understands the punishing economics at play.”

Owens does not reveal how much he makes on the platform. As a writer I can say that it is very difficult to make money at it. My blog is free, as it is how I connect with others, show some of my skills, and perhaps find new clients. It’s indirect and like Owens has said, hard to collect quantitative data. This is why I removed reader-tracking a few years ago. I have been paid to write white papers and some blog posts but even that line of business has dried-up in the past five years.

What has worked is to diversify my work, using the blog as a point of entry. Almost all of my clients have been introduced to my work through my blog. I have also set up a community of practice — the perpetual beta coffee club — with paid membership. It does not generate significant revenue but members get my attention and we learn a lot from other. It  has been a wonderful refuge during the pandemic.

The PKM online workshops are another source of income and are also good at introducing potential client organizations to my work. I also do public speaking which has dropped significantly since March 2020. My e-book series generates a bit of money which helps when times are tough. My main source of revenue is consulting or advisory work. By mixing business offerings and having one add to the other I have been able to carve out a business since 2003. The market keeps changing and an attitude of perpetual beta is necessary.

So you could focus all your effort on writing, as long as you have a partner with another source of income, or a year’s salary in the bank. Or you can diversify your offerings so that you might weather the next storm. I survived the 2008 Great Recession [barely] and am making it through this pandemic. On this Labour Day 2021, I thought I would share a bit about my own labour. I thank all the people who subscribe to my blog and especially those who offer constructive criticism or new ideas.

Young labourers early 20th century

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds. The next Friday’s Finds post will be on 24 September, as these will now be posted the last Friday of each month.

“Twitter is a place where you can watch people who don’t read books argue with people who write them.” —Mark Safranski

“It’s far better to adapt your organisation to the future than to try and force everyone back into the past. This ‘return to the office’ has more to do with status symbols, fragile executive egos, and idiocy than shareholder value. It is bonkers — Hybrid [work] is just a way of saying ‘let us have the future but just like the past because we’ve spent lots of money on the past’. It never works but we never seem to learn.” —@SWardley

“Vaccinated people are like wet logs, unvaccinated like dry kindling. COVID is the fire.
Can wet logs catch fire? Yes.
Can wet logs SPREAD fire once they catch flame? Sure.
But it’s MUCH harder to start a fire with wet logs, and nearly impossible when there’s no more kindling.” —@AuforGA

The Five Fundamental Changes that have Reset how we Work

1. Most of us now have a work-from-home mindset ingrained, whether we like it or not
2. The hype days of technology are over. It’s all about what enterprises need, not what vendors are trying to sell them.
3. We are not so afraid of change as Horizon 3 [exponential innovation] unfolds before our eyes.
4. Locations have become irrelevant, as access to talent takes center stage.
5. Values and philosophies beyond capitalism increasingly dictate where our emerging talent chooses to work.

Image by Timothy Caulfield

Continued from — social learning powers distributed work.

Social learning is about people in trusted relationships sharing and building collective knowledge. It is part of our common evolutionarily developed ‘social suite’.

In Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of A Good Society, Nicholas Christakis argues that this coevolution has equipped us with a “social suite” of traits that arose through genetic evolution and that have been amplified by cultural evolution, which has in turn influenced our genetic evolution toward propensities that support the social suite. These include the “capacity to have and recognize individual identity,” “love for partners and offspring,” friendship, social networks, cooperation, “preference for one’s own group (‘in-group bias’),” “mild hierarchy (that is, relative egalitarianism),” and “social learning and teaching.” —Howard Rheingold

These seven traits identified by Christakis can be arranged in how valuable they are to overall society.  Self-identity has high individual value while social learning is how we developed our second evolutionary strand — shared culture and knowledge.

“Once humans evolved to be capable of teaching and learning, they developed a parallel evolutionary strand, cultural evolution, side by side with genetic. These two strands intersect repeatedly in many places and times. Each leaves its mark on the other.” —Nicholas Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

In some ways over the past couple of centuries we have collectively forgotten the power of social learning. Most of our education systems are based on individual grades. Many of our workplaces have individual performance reviews. Apprentice programs are only available in a select few occupations.

The shift to distributed work has made many of the flaws in our modern work and education settings much more visible. Zoom showed us how useless many meetings really are. It also showed that many teachers were just talking heads. Working, and learning, from anywhere has shown us that there are better ways to learn than through lectures and that there are better ways to share knowledge than through meetings.

As distributed work becomes the norm, other shifts in how we work and learn will be required. Competition is now global and a lot of work is viewed as a commodity, pushing down wages for any type of repetitive work. Knowledge workers will have to find professional communities to stay current and these may not be in their organization. They will need to connect through digital networks.

With distributed work, serendipitous workplace encounters may decrease unless people find ways to also connect outside their work bubbles. Local co-working spaces may flourish as workers look for human connections. Workers will have to use digital means to learn and gain understanding. Frameworks like personal knowledge mastery will become essential.

We have developed as social animals and our brains are wired to deal with social relationships. By combining technology with our brainpower, we can figure things out. We are naturally creative and curious. We just have to build systems that nurture our inherent abilities.

This is what social learning is all about. Not just solving problems, but creating new ways of working. There are amazing technological inventions and discoveries every day, yet we and our media focus too often on our problems. On the edges of society people are experimenting with new ways of working and living together.

“Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.” —Albert Bandura

Distributed work is here to stay, because many people like it, the pandemic is not over and there will be others, and market forces will seek to maximize profits and reduce labour costs. But Zoom calls all day are not going to create work environments where knowledge workers can deal with complex problems or create innovative solutions. The key to distributed work is social learning.

Distributed work is driving a work-from-anywhere culture and is increasingly reliant on asynchronous communication, as people move to multiple time zones. In order to share the necessary implicit knowledge needed for complex work, trust has to be developed. People only share with others they trust. This trust takes time to develop between people. How can they do this when they are not in the same office?

Those of us who have been blogging over the past two decades understand that deep professional relationships can be developed without ever meeting someone. How did we do it? We shared our knowledge, insights, concerns, and perspectives freely. Over time, people in this emerging online global network saw value in our work and gave back. In this network, communities developed. We learned from each and continue to do so. But if you do not give, you will not get anything back. To give freely is a leap of faith — faith in humanity. Of course we also learned that some people will take advantage of this. But we also share that information.

The same will happen in organizations. People who share information and knowledge of value will become better connected nodes in the network. Asynchronous communications will rise in importance. Writing, image creation, and video recording will get information across faster than video calls with dozens of participants.

Supporting workplace learning in distributed workplaces is much more than pushing content or creating courses. Social learning is about people in trusted relationships sharing and building collective knowledge. The prime role for ‘learning & development’ professionals will be to help make connections by supporting professional networks and communities of practice.

We have witnessed in this coronavirus pandemic that many disciplines disagree with others on what societies should be doing. For example, epidemiology, immunology, and public health experts did not agree with air flow experts that the coronavirus is airborne, because this would question some deeply held assumptions underlying their fields.

“They’ll die defending their view,” said one longstanding W.H.O. consultant, who did not wish to be identified because of her continuing work for the organization. Even its staunchest supporters said the committee should diversify its expertise and relax its criteria for proof, especially in a fast-moving outbreak.

“I do get frustrated about the issues of airflow and sizing of particles, absolutely,” said Mary-Louise McLaws, a committee member and epidemiologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

“If we started revisiting airflow, we would have to be prepared to change a lot of what we do,” she said. “I think it’s a good idea, a very good idea, but it will cause an enormous shudder through the infection control society.” —NYT 2020-06-04

Developing trusted relationships across disciplinary silos will become essential for all fields of human work. No single discipline has all the answers. The answer to solving complex problems is diverse, distributed networks of trust in order to take action and co-create value. Social learning through trusted human relationships is how we will get there. The way to start is to open up, share, and connect with others.

I will be discussing the power of social learning in more detail at eLearning Fusion on 23 September 2021.

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

The Twitter Paradox — “I loathe the fact that Twitter is a place where I am exposed to profound thoughts and new experiences, as well as a breeding ground for hate and harassment.” —@TheWorstDev

Before Tom Peters, before Peter Drucker, we had Mary Parker Follett by @TimKastelle

“There are three ways of dealing with difference: domination, compromise, and integration. By domination only one side gets what it wants; by compromise neither side gets what it wants; by integration we find a way by which both sides may get what they wish.” —Mary Parker Follett

Rummler and Brache: Improving Performance by @Dave_Ferguson

What are some of the things that currently frustrate you about the learning and development profession?

“The same thing that frustrated me 45 years ago — the fact that it’s a solution in search of a problem. People have developed all this wonderful stuff around learning and development, and it’s become a thing in and of itself rather than something that exists to help people be more effective in their jobs.

Bad management makes it worse because managers read the magazines, see the fads, and call the training people to say, ‘I want us to try this’. There’s no corrective force in that relationship. In fact, training has become in many ways the enabler for bad management because now the default solution is to fix the people. You’ve got vendors inventing things, business publications promoting them, managers reading them and thinking they should be doing this, and the training department going along with it all too eagerly. It is a whole business.” —Geary Rummler (2007)

How Companies Benefit When Employees Work Remotely

To put their findings in perspective and offer a framework for future research, the researchers emphasized the nature of a patent examiner’s work, which requires little coordination with co-workers on a daily basis. Examiners perform their work independently, adhering to the same best practices of patent searches—a style of work that prior research has termed “pooled interdependence.” Choudhury stresses that the research results apply only to companies or units that employ this type of worker.

“For the vast majority of such employers, remote work is a win-win, because the employee can move to a location of choice and save money in cost of living, and the employer will see higher productivity and lower attrition, and save on real estate costs,” says Choudhury.

7 Differences between complex and complicated by @SonjaBl

Many people believe that complexity is just higher order complicatedness i.e. that there is a continuum and that the difference is one of degree, not type. When one considers however how very different these states are from each other, I tend to agree with Dave Snowden when he says that there are in fact phase shifts between them i.e. they are fundamentally different types of systems.

Why is this important: as long as decision-makers believe they are dealing with complicated systems, they will assume they are able to control outcomes; find solutions to problems and waste a lot of money on expert consultants to give them the ‘answers’. For organisations to become more resilient and sustainable, business science simply has to move beyond its Newtonian foundations towards an understanding of complexity.

Walt Kelly’s 1971 Earth Day Essay

Walt Kelly 1971

Every year, Jane Hart asks, “What are the most popular digital tools for learning and why?”. This is the fifteenth year Jane asked this question — and compiled the results into a valuable resource — and this is my tenth year responding.

Once again my responses have not changed much from my 2020 tools list. I explained last year why I used these tools.

Zoom has moved up, for obvious reasons given the pandemic and lockdowns. WordPress remains on top as it powers this blog, my online workshops, and our community. I have been listening to more podcasts this past year, so Overcast has moved into 10th place.

Two important sensemaking types of tools that everyone should use are feed aggregators and social bookmarks. Though the specific tools may change, everyone needs a way to control the push of information and a way to save, categorize, and annotate resources for later use. For the last two years I have I used Feedly and Pinboard.

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds. After a two-week hiatus I will slowly get back to more regular blogging.

@PicardTips — “Picard management tip: Keep group meetings short. Take your time with one-on-ones.”

@DThom_ — “Universities: let’s be leaders and innovate, innovate, innovate. Also universities: let’s not mandate vaccines unless everyone else does first.”

Stanford psychology professor Albert Bandura has died

In 1961 Bandura began a series of experiments that became synonymous with his name and defined his early career. In these “Bobo Doll” experiments, children who observed an adult hitting and yelling at an inflatable doll, called Bobo, were more likely to display aggressive behavior toward the doll when playing with it later. The children watched interactions with the doll in person, and (in later experiments) via video with similar results.

The Bobo Doll studies demonstrated that children learn from watching adult behavior and suggested that televised violence can teach and glamorize aggressive behavior. The findings of the experiments upended the established behavioral doctrine that learning was a conditioned response to external punishments and rewards. The results also challenged the prevailing theory that watching violence on television alleviated aggressive impulses in children.

Machine learning sucks at covid

The worst part of machine learning snake-oil isn’t that it’s useless or harmful – it’s that ML-based statistical conclusions have the veneer of mathematics, the empirical facewash that makes otherwise suspect conclusions seem neutral, factual and scientific … There are statistical techniques for compensating for fragmentary and heterogeneous data – they are difficult and labor-intensive, and work best through collaboration and disclosure, not secrecy and competition.

Economist Mariana Mazzucato — Mission critical

What we need is for this call to action to fundamentally change how we think about the governance of all organizations that produce value: how to organize dynamic government agencies outside static silos; how to rethink corporate governance structures so that they are more focused on the long term and they reward all the actors that help create profits; and how to listen to the movements in civil society — whether the green movement or those calling for better healthcare — to formulate the missions of the future that can drive innovation for the decades to come. The populist wave around the world is evidence that this will not succeed if it is not truly participatory, allowing different voices to come to the table, and to negotiate healthier deals, creating an economy that is more innovative, sustainable, and inclusive. I believe it is very difficult, but truly possible.

@KashPrime — “Here is a checklist you can show your local school administrators on protecting kids <12 before school starts. Will post supporting documents and explainers later this week, but we have no time to waste… we have a month to get this right.”

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“The hardest part of teaching: Having to justify to students that what they’re learning in school is relevant and will be useful in the future.” —@AnaFabrega11

The Most Precious Resource is Agency

Agency is the capacity to act. More subtly: An individual’s life can continue, with a certain inertia, that will lead them on to the next year or decade. Most people today more-or-less know what they are going to be doing for the first twenty-or-more years of their life—being in some kind of school (the “doing” is almost more “being told what to do”). Beyond that age there is of course the proverbial worker, in modern stories usually an office worker, who is often so inert that he becomes blindsided by a sudden yank of reality (that forces him out of his inertia, and in doing so the story begins).

Gaining agency is gaining the capacity to do something differently from, or in addition to, the events that simply happen to you. Most famous people go off-script early, usually in more than one way. Carnegie becoming a message boy is one opportunity, asking how to operate the telegraph is another. Da Vinci had plenty of small-time commissions, but he quit them in favor of offering his services to the Duke of Milan. And of course no one has to write a book, or start a company. But imagine instead if Carnegie or Da Vinci were compelled to stay in school for ten more years instead. What would have happened?

Differentiating online variations of the Commonplace Book:
Digital Gardens, Wikis, Zettlekasten, Waste Books, Florilegia, and Second Brains

“Historically commonplace books are one of the oldest and most influential structures in the note taking, writing, and thinking space. They have generally been physical books written by hand that contain notes which are categorized by headings (or in a modern context categories or tags. Often they’re created with an index to help their creators find and organize their notes.

They originated in ancient Greece and Rome out of the thought of Aristotle and Cicero as a tool for thinking and writing and have generally enjoyed a solid place in history since. A huge variety of commonplaces have been either copied by hand or published in print book form over the centuries.”

Sense-making and meaning-making — The terms have distinct meanings

In other words, sense-making is about making sense of the external world, while meaning-making is about relating it to our inner world. Asking the question: “What does this situation mean to me?” … A simple way of looking at it is as follows. If sense-making asks, “What is going on?”, meaning-making asks, “What are the implications of what’s going on for me (or my family or my organization)?”

Makers, Don’t Let Yourself Be Forced Into the ‘Manager Schedule’

No such thing as “too much collaboration”?

The reason why many managers fail to see and address this problem is that they are used to looking at communication and assume it’s a good thing. Because they see activity. People are attending meetings, talking to each other, the online presence indicators are bright green. Clearly, a lot of work is happening!

At the same time, real work is not getting done. Meaningful work is usually done quietly and in solitude.

“It’s fine as long as I keep busy”

Most makers don’t have the levels of control and autonomy necessary to block out half a day without any calls or meetings. So instead of pushing the issue with the management, we try to compensate by attempting to multitask – unfortunately, that rarely works. Building context can take hours, and context switching between communication and creative work only kills the quality of both.

Being busy feels like work to us, but it’s not the work that needs to be done.

Image: Nuclino Blog

In 2013 I wrote that work is already a game. Adding badges or other extrinsic motivators to professional learning only detracts from the real game. Gamification also creates incentives that, when removed, may result in going back to previous behaviours.

In a Twitter thread Ana Lorena Fabrega discusses gamification and suggests that it is often ‘pointsification’.

“Pointsification ties to external motivation—free time, tasty treats, or bragging rights. It’s taking the things that are least essential to games and making them the core of the experience.
The problem with pointsification is that it’s not sustainable.

While it may help tweak some behaviors in the short term, it doesn’t work for long enough to build actual skills.

Pointsification ‘solutions’ miss the heart of what makes a gameful experience effective for learning.”

Fabrega provides a solid definition of what makes a good game.

1. A GOAL or specific outcome that provides players with a sense of purpose.

2. RULES that place limitations on how players can achieve the goal—these are unnecessary obstacles that players *choose* to tackle.

3. A FEEDBACK SYSTEM that tells players how close they are to achieving the goal—this provides motivation to keep playing.

4. VOLUNTARY PARTICIPATION all players must know and willingly accept the goal, the rules, and the feedback.

There is also a reference to a game designed by Jane McGonigal for the New York Public Library.

“The game is designed to empower young people to find their own futures by bringing them face-to-face with the writings and objects of people who made an extraordinary difference. Like every game I make, it has one goal: to turn players into superempowered, hopeful individuals with real skills and ideas to help them change the world.”

Before we add gamification to workplace learning, let’s stop and ask if it’s merely ‘pointsification’. Is participation voluntary? Is there a sense of purpose? We should ask first if any gamification of workplace learning is helping to develop autonomous workers in learning organizations.

Distributed, remote, and even hybrid work have one similar quality — they expose cracks in the system that could be covered over in face-to-face settings. They make dysfunctional workplaces transparently obvious. Distributed work, like online teaching, has to be much more explicit. Both require excellent communication skills, especially writing, because the work becomes more asynchronous. In a global economy, work is distributed across both space and time.

Those in leadership positions — servant leaders — have to manage networked contributors working in environments that are transparent, diverse, and open. Anything less is sub-optimal. They need the skills developed by leading multiple players in online role-play games — creating highly motivated and remote collectives to battle elves or aliens or build civilisations. These skills are not taught in business schools and few senior managers or executives have them today.

The job of those in positions of leadership (you are not a leader if people don’t willingly follow you) is to help make their networks, communities, and teams smarter and more resilient. Why networks and communities as well as teams? We all work in a connected world. Making our network smarter helps us. For example, living in countries with high voluntary vaccination rates is good for everyone. Living in countries with active and engaged voters makes for a better democracy and can counter demagogues and populist movements. Companies that nourish their external networks and physical communities are more resilient to crises. Good leaders know this and act accordingly — helping make the network smarter.

The essence of connected leadership is helping your networks, communities, and teams make better decisions. It is not telling people what to do, or managing how they get things done, especially where more work is unique and non-routine. Those doing the work are often the only ones who really understand the context, while those directing the work may have obsolete mental models on how it is done.

John Wenger, in Why you can’t empower someone, suggested several years ago that people in positions of power should focus on “getting out of the way behaviours”. These activities are even more pertinent in a distributed workplace.

• Monitoring boundaries — clarifying limits of authority and accountability so that people know what they are responsible for and what they are not.
• Monitoring and stewarding team dynamics — shining a light on relationships and networks and encouraging their connection and interaction.
• Showing trust and belief — behaving in ways that let people know you trust them to get on with it.
• Being available — for advice, guidance, information, as a sounding board.
• Communicating respectfully — communication should be open and mutual.
• Coaching people to learn from mistakes — when someone makes a mistake, an enabling manager will work with the person to work out what went wrong, why it went wrong and ensure that they have the capability and awareness to prevent a repeat.
• Encouraging problem-solving — letting people bring their creativity to work.

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Always urgent, but never specific. That should get the result you want.” —@MeetingBoy

“Saying it’s ‘post-pandemic’ because your regional lockdown is over is like saying it’s ‘post-climate change’ because the flooding in your town receded.” —@emorwee

“Vaccine efforts, and much of public health for that matter, are about convincing and manipulating people rather than providing them options, data, or decision-making tools. The base assumption is that the public is stupid and that the information they get must be carefully controlled and metered. That approach doesn’t work well in a networked information-rich environment. To compensate for this and achieve planned outcomes, network technology companies are being enlisted to actively control, censor, and manage public discussions on public health. NOTE: we saw this happen with [US] politics in 2019.” —@JohnRobb

Return to the Office is Not the Same for Everyone by @WallyBock

“The move to working from home was sudden and forced by the pandemic. The move back to the office or something ‘hybrid’ promises to be a clusterfugg. The great move to return to the office will make Murphy of Murphy’s Law fame look like a wild-eyed optimist.”

Returning to ‘normal’ is really a return to ignorance

“The concept of a ‘traditional’ student has held on for so long because it is easy to design and make decisions for this idealised version of a student. Educators don’t need to change their teaching approach if they continue to assume that all students show up to class ready to give their undivided attention because they are free from any burdens, stressors, or anxieties. Administrators can continue to make decisions based on financial gain rather than students’ interests. This way of thinking is hurting college students’ experiences, success, and outcomes, and this became even clearer in 2020 when several events, from Covid to Black Lives Matter, revealed how much students are struggling.”

Image: Michael Mohammed — 21 Things you may not know about the Indian Act

Technology at Work v6.0 — The Coming of the Post-Production Society, is the latest research report from Citi Global Perspectives & Solutions, published in June 2021 [Disclosure: Citi is a client]. One year ago I summarized the previous version, The New Normal of Remote Work. I concluded that most people would like the option to work from home, most of the time. This is especially true for knowledge workers. They have tasted it, and in spite of the challenges of being forced into what I would prefer to call ‘distributed work’ — they like it.

The report has four chapters.

1. The Post-production Society
2. Covid-19 and Digitization
3. Fiscal Policy — From Life Preservers to Stimulus
4. Inventing the Future

I will highlight a few sections of interest, but there is much more in this +100 page report.

Automation and remote work are pushing service work to lower cost areas. It is not just manufacturing that has moved offshore.

“Thus, rather than a post-industrial society, rich countries are moving towards post-production society, in which both goods and services are increasingly being produced either abroad or by machines.
What this means is that a growing share of the population will specialize in tasks that relate to the early stages of the technology lifecycle (see Figure 1), which are primarily about generating new prototypes and ideas. They are about exploration and innovation rather than execution and production.” —p. 10

High value work in developed markets will be in the formation and expansion of new technologies. This is technology in the broad sense, as defined by Harold Stolovitch, “Technology is the application of organized and scientific knowledge to solve practical problems.”

Some of the authors focus on remote [distributed] work. They give five reasons why it will remain.

1. The stigma surrounding ‘work from home’ has been reduced.
2. Forced experimentation has helped employees and employers to overcome inertia, both in terms of costs and biased expectations about remote work.
3. Workers and firms will be able to maintain remote work at lower marginal cost after the pandemic.
4. There is a widespread reluctance among many to return to some pre-pandemic activities.
5. There has been an explosion in innovation aimed at supporting remote work in the past couple of months.
—p. 20

I have seen many other indicators that this trend will continue.

As for educational technology, universities have been slow to adapt.

“But a lot of the inertia [in the university sector] can be attributed to a lack of interest in technology-based solutions or indeed active pushback based on historic preferences or indeed political motivations.
In this context, we think the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been nothing short of seismic for the global education industry. The sudden forced move to online learning from March 2020 has resulted in a full scale re-appraisal of the role technology can play and its importance. Some of this is a function of necessity – a more rounded appreciation of the role online can play as a form of redundancy when in-person teaching is not available. However, we detect a broader recognition of some of the other benefits edtech [educational technology] can play longer term not only as a way of reducing costs but also broadening access and delivering better outcomes.” —p. 65

How the future plays out will depend on innovation, something overlooked in education and policy development.

“Right now, however, most innovation policy focuses on supporting people who have already decided to become inventors. As Anton Howes has pointed out, just about everything policymakers worry about when promoting innovation, from the patent system to funding basic science, is in a sense downstream of it. If people are not exposed to innovation at some point in life, they won’t become inventors.

The main reason that most people never innovate doesn’t have to do with the patent system but the very simple reason that it never occurs to them. Indeed, you already have to be an inventor for intellectual property to matter to you or particular sources of funding to be a concern.” —p. 105

This report is a rich summary of some key economic and policy forces at play in an emerging post-pandemic world. But it does not address the elephant in the room — climate change.

The Internet Time Alliance Award, in memory of Jay Cross, is presented to a workplace learning professional who has contributed in positive ways to the field of Informal Learning and is reflective of Jay’s lifetime of work.

Recipients champion workplace and social learning practices inside their organization and/or on the wider stage. They share their work in public and often challenge conventional wisdom. The Award is given to professionals who continuously welcome challenges at the cutting edge of their expertise and are convincing and effective advocates of a humanistic approach to workplace learning and performance.

We announce the award on 5 July, Jay’s birthday.

Following his death in November 2015, the partners of the Internet Time Alliance — Jane Hart, Charles Jennings, Clark Quinn, and myself — resolved to continue Jay’s work. Jay Cross was a deep thinker and a man of many talents, never resting on his past accomplishments, and this award is one way to keep pushing our professional fields and industries to find new and better ways to learn and work.

The Internet Time Alliance Jay Cross Memorial Award for 2021 is presented to Sahana Chattopadhyay.

Sahana is the founder of Proteeti — a Sanskrit word meaning learning that transforms — which describes the spirit of the award. She has written extensively about learning and development and has been active on social media for many years.

At her site, she talks about moving to “a world where many worlds fit” through acceptance of others, interconnection, and living with emergence. She applies these principles to organizations and leaders to facilitate shifting to more effective and humane ways of being.

“People without any privilege, power, or wealth are giving of their time and effort to save a nation from the face of collapse. They are coming together in self-organized teams and communities across cities and towns and villages to answer and amplify desperate calls for help. They are not waving any political banner. They claim no credit. They charge no money. Their affiliation is to humanity, compassion, and dignity for all. They have risen as citizens, neighbors, communities to help strangers in need.” —A crisis of leadership

As a vocal advocate for mindsets that unleash possibility, Sahana embodies the ideals Jay Cross worked towards. We’re honored to be able to recognize her work through the Jay Cross Memorial Award.

Sahana Chattopadhyay