Tag: Learning

Two spaces or one; change and persistence

Selectric-ElementI learned to type before I learned to drive; now nearly 50 years ago. I was taught that you put two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence. Eventually, I left typewriters behind and began to write with text editors and word processors. I learned a little bit about proportional fonts and typesetting and, at some point in the somewhat less distant past switched over to using a single space.

This morning, i came across the following link in my Facebook newsfeed – Space Invaders: Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period. – posted by Andy McAfee. It’s an old item and it’s an old controversy (for example, see Why two spaces after a period isn’t wrong (or, the lies typographers tell about history)).

What I find interesting about this is what it reveals about change and habits. The very first comment in response to Andy’s post was from someone who had also learned to type a long time ago. In their view, the controversy was a silly waste of time and they intended to happily continue to insert two spaces until the end of time. I’m sure that if I went back to the thread. someone else will have weighed in otherwise. There will be yet another impassioned argument over a convention. How do you get new knowledge into an established system of practice? How do you get from new knowledge to new practice?

We are now three hundred years or so past the Enlightenment. How long do you think it will be before reason triumphs over tradition?

duckrabbitgod

Connected Courses Course – An Experiment in Collaboration – #CCourses

I’m carving out time to participate in what I see as a worthy experiment in collaboration. It’s been organized by some of the most interesting people working on online learning and seems to be attracting an equally interesting collection of people interesting in participating.

Here’s what they have to say:

We invite you to participate in a free open online learning experience designed to get you ready to teach open, connected courses no matter what kind of institution you’re working in. We’ll explore how openness and collaboration can improve your practice and help you develop new, open approaches.

You can mix and match — take one unit or take them all, and go at your own pace. You’ll be joined by other participants from around the world who are looking to:

  • get hands-on with the tools of openness;
  • create open educational resources, curriculum and teaching activities and get feedback from a community of your peers; and
  • connect with and learn alongside other faculty, educators and technologists.

Sign up and receive updates from the organizers. Everyone is welcome, and no experience is required. We will all learn together in this free and fun opportunity to start planning your own connected course. The instructors, award-winning university professors from around the globe, are the innovative educators behind successful connected courses such as FemTechNet, ds106, phonar, and the National Writing Project CLMOOC.

An orientation starts Sept. 2 and the first unit starts Sept. 15, 2014 and you can sign up and find more details about the topics we’ll be exploring at connectedcourses.net.

[Connected Courses Sign Up]

This is being billed as “a collaborative community of faculty in higher education developing networked, open courses that embody the principles of connected learning and the values of the open web.” I think it is something richer than that.

Paying attention is the least that you should do if you are interested in issues of collaboration, learning, and new organizational forms. Jumping into the pool with the rest of the crowd is a better idea.

Which rules? Teaching or Learning?

Another thought provoking cartoon from the good fools at xkcd. There are actually two interesting thoughts in this one. Yes, humans are pretty good teachers at that. More importantly, however, we manage to get by even with less than stellar teachers because humans are so supremely gifted at learning. Computers demand extraordinarily adept teachers because computers are such obtuse learners and that is the only possible way they will learn.

Humans, children in particular, are such natural learners that they can survive in spite of the most mediocre of teachers. Which may be one of the reasons we’re too willing to tolerate mediocrity.

Progeny

Sugata Mitra on designing systems for learning – TED talk

I’ve finally gotten around to the following TED video that’s been queued up in my "to read/watch" stack. In it, Sugata Mitra describes his "Hole in the Wall" experiments that placed internet connected PCs into New Delhi slums and watched what happened. It’s worth 20 minutes of your time.

 

Mitra’s conclusion is that you can get a lot of learning for very little investment, particularly in the trappings of formal education that we tend to take for granted. People are wired to learn and appear to do so best in small groups of like-minded learners. They need access to resources and encouragement. They don’t particularly need someone more expert to guide them; their natural curiosity works as well or better. Mitra’s view is that education is best treated as a self-organizing system.

Digging into how learning works versus how we naively think it works is important in the world we find ourselves in. Individually and organizationally, we are faced with ongoing challenges to learn. Neither we nor our organizations can afford the necessary learning time if it has to be in the form of conventional settings. Following the threads worked for the kids in Mitra’s experiments. We need to follow a similar path. We also need to experiment with integrating those learning paths into the demands of day-to-day work.

Collaboration, games, and the real world

I’ve been thinking a lot about hard problems that need multiple people collaborating to solve. There’s no shortage of them to choose from.

This TED video from Jane McGonigal makes a persuasive case that I need to invest some more time looking at the world of online gaming for insight. Watch the video  and see if you don’t come to a similar conclusion.

 

Finding knowledge work practices worth emulating and adapting

[Cross posted at FASTForward Blog]

How might we best go about improving knowledge work, both practices and outputs, in today’s complex organizational environment? Are there paths other than simple trial and error that might lead to systematic gains?

Frederick Taylor and his followers built their careers on finding the one best way to carry out a particular physical task. Later proponents of this way of thinking transferred their approach to defining the one best way to carry out information processing tasks. John Reed of Citibank launched his career by applying factory management principles to automating check handling. Reengineering essentially rebooted these approaches for a richer technology environment, but held to the premise that outputs were a given, tasks could be well-defined, and processes could be optimized.

Peter Drucker, in his typical way, pointed out that the key to understanding and improving knowledge work (PDF) was that there was no defined task to be optimized. Knowledge workers start by defining the task at hand and an output of suitable quality. This is not an approach which lends itself to conventional improvement or optimization approaches.

Two useful approaches come to mind. One would be to identify and shadow individual knowledge workers deemed to be particularly effective. Observing, understanding, and emulating their personal practices would be time well spent. A second approach would be to identify a class of knowledge workers who have been dealing with the problems of knowledge work in the modern enterprise long enough to have developed practices and approaches that might be broadly adaptable to knowledge work activities in general.

Both of these approaches are well worth undertaking. Today, I’d like to take a look at this second approach. A recent blog post by Eric Raymond prompts looking at a group I’ve often thought of as the leading edge of modern knowledge work– software developers. Over the last half-century, this group has been inventing and developing the technological infrastructure that shapes our modern enterprises. As such, they have been the first to encounter and address the challenges of knowledge work. Certainly any group responsible for the Internet and the invention of open-source software will have lessons for the rest of us as we try to bring forth our own examples of knowledge work products.

Raymond, among many other things, is the author of the excellent The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. He also maintains the always interesting and provocative blog Armed and Dangerous. In a recent post, “the social utility of hacker humor”, Raymond dives into the number of the behavioral norms that he believes characterize hackers and software developers. The entire blog post is well worth your time, but let me call your attention to the following excerpt:

…every once in a while something erupts out of them that is a game changer on a civilization-wide level. Two of the big ones were the Internet and open-source software. These two movements were intimately intertwined with hacker culture, both produced by it and productive of it. The origins of our tribe go back a bit further than either technology, but we have since re-invented ourselves as the people who make that stuff work.

And I don t mean make it work in a narrow technical sense, either. As long as there are people who laugh at INTERCAL and RFC1149 and the Unix koans of Master Foo, and recognize themselves in the Jargon File, those same people will care passionately that computing technology is an instrument of liberation rather than control. They won t be able to help themselves, because they will have absorbed inextricably with the jokes some values that are no joke at all. High standards of craftsmanship; a subversive sense of humor; a belief in the power of creative choice and voluntary cooperation; a spirit of individualism and playfulness; and not least, a skepticism about the pretensions of credentialism, bureaucracy and authority that is both healthy and bone-deep.

[Raymond, Eric S. Armed and Dangerous. “The social utility of hacker humor“]

Substitute “knowledge worker” for “hacker” and I believe we will find parallels worth exploring.

This is still in the working hypothesis stage. I can think of a number of practices that might prove worth emulating and some useful entry points into learning more.

Practices worth investigating

Serious software developers have adopted a number of practices as they’ve struggled with the challenge of designing, developing, and evolving products that are pure thought stuff. To the extent that knowledge work is also a process of developing outputs that are themselves largely thought stuff, these practices ought to have analogues. Here’s a preliminary list, in no particular order.

  • Version control/source code control. Final outputs and products grow through a process of successive refinement.

Rethinking thought leadership as an operating principle

Thought leadership risks becoming an empty marketing phrase just as it becomes essential to long term success. In an idea economy more and more firms understand the importance of getting credit for being on the leading edge, but getting credit is best preceded by actually being there. Organizations that depend on generating and exploiting ideas need to become more systematic about integrating thought leadership into their operating principles and practices not just their marketing.

Value of thought leadership

How many of today’s successful organizations are built on top of better ideas? Some, like FedEx or Southwest Airlines, were built on top of a powerful core idea. Others, like Amazon or Apple, were built on a powerful core plus ongoing extension and elaboration of that core with new ideas. Still others, like the best professional services firms, depend on a steady stream of new ideas.

If you’re fortunate enough to come up with a FedEx or Southwest quality idea, ongoing thought leadership isn’t much of an issue and you can focus your organizational energies on execution. On the other hand, if you’re in an organization or industry where the half-life of ideas is continuing to shrink, then you need a more explicit strategy than waiting for the next flash of entrepreneurial genius.

There have been many attempts to make thought leadership more manageable. These range from the full fledged research labs of large organizations (e.g.,  Xerox PARC, Microsoft Research, IBM Research, Bell Labs) to various research centers in professional services firms (e.g., Deloitte Center for the Edge, McKinsey Global Institute, Accenture Global Research).

Most of these examples separate research from practice and model themselves along academic lines. While they often produce excellent work and contribute to the overall market reputation of their parent organizations, they have been less successful at leveraging the experience of their parents or at feeding their insights back into their organizations. These examples also stamp thought leadership as a luxury available only to the largest and most successful organizations.

Where we went off track

While we can recognize the value of thought leadership as a component of innovation and of attracting new customers, we’ve had less success in transforming thought leadership into something systematic and manageable. While the end products of thought leadership are attractive, they shed limited light on what practices contribute to those end products.

Thought leadership presents a situation where working backwards isn’t helpful. Seeing the marketing and reputational value of a published article, senior executives will call their Chief Marketing Officers and order an article for the next issue of the Harvard Business Review. Wise CMOs, recognizing that this request has not come from someone named Gates, or Buffet, or Welch, will negotiate a more plausible timeline, identify some plausible topics, and search for potential authors within the organization.

With a great deal of luck and effort, this approach might yield an article in a year or so. Successful or not, marketing has now come to own the thought leadership problem. If the focus remains on the end products, which is likely, marketing will pursue opportunities to create materials that can easily be used as marketing and sales collateral. Perhaps they will enlist help from customer service or training groups to leverage their materials as input to the process as well.

This is a classic confusion of form over substance. At an extreme, we see such nonsense as Gartner Group trumpeting TLM (thought leadership marketing) as the next frontier for IT services marketing. Somewhat more sensibly, we see a variety of marketing and PR consultants pushing thought leadership as a key marketing strategy. Some good recent examples include:

Getting back on track

Whatever the marketing value of thought leadership, it is secondary to the operational value of increasing the effectiveness of how an organization learns from and disseminates practice. When you recast thought leadership as a core operating principle instead of ancillary marketing program, several implication follow. First, it changes what you recognize as relevant data. Second, it changes the kinds of support you provide to your front line practitioners. Finally, it shapes the practices you promote among your workforce.

Where you see data

A survey of current customers or prospects often passes for data in faux thought leadership attempts. Or, a few thin paragraphs passing as a case study. The insights that fuel real thought leadership flow from the interaction of rich data and penetrating questions. Those are typically found at the edges of current practice.

Organizations will find their richest data in the histories and traces of those projects that challenge their capabilities and are placed in the hands of their most adept staff. It’s often difficult to know in advance which projects will fall into this category. More often, it’s easier to predict that certain efforts will likely be routine.

How you support the field

The best time to collect this rich field data is as it’s being generated. The greater the delay between action and reflection, the more that real insight is displaced by revisionist history. Organizationally, you can provide systems and tools that make it simpler to capture and catalog working papers and work products as they are created. Second, organizations can set aside the time and create expectations that professionals will reflect on their work as they perform it.

What practices make a difference

Despite the fervent wishes of bureaucrats, the kind of reflection and learning from practice that fuel meaningful thought leadership won’t map into standard operating procedures or fixed processes. It is much more fruitful to think in terms of practices to encourage. At the team level, for example, After Action Reviews are a simple practice to amplify learning among the team.

Individual practices can range from debriefing a meeting over a beer to maintaining a journal of questions and reflections. The journal could be as simple as a Moleskine notebook or as extensive as a private blog.

Payoff to knowledge workers and their organizations

Treating thought leadership as a marketing responsibility does create organizational value, but at a significant cost in terms of effort and disruption within the organization. Marketing staff need the full support and participation of those line contributors generating the experience on which thought leadership must be based but if they drive thought leadership efforts from their immediate needs they risk alienating those on whom they most depend with requests for substantial incremental work.

On the other hand, treating thought leadership as an operating principle better aligns the demands on those core contributors. Now, rich, high quality input to thought leadership efforts are relevant components of ongoing work. Moreover, this approach enhances individual and organizational learning as a primary goal; thought leadership becomes a valuable side effect of doing work, instead of being an onerous additional requirement.

Professionals grow and develop through reflective practice. They build and test mini-theories of how their actions lead to outcomes. In a simpler world, that reflection was built on the slow accretion of experience. In today’s world, it is more effective to build on a foundation of explicit reflection.

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