Eating the Dog Food

What would you do if you had to keep 150 sales people around the world up to date on healthcare and IT?

Intel Digital Health had been posting cell phone recordings to a traditional website. Busy sales people couldn’t be counted on to check them out and the medium lacked pizzazz.

A general manager/VP knew that Cisco, IHOP, and others were distributing information via podcasts. He listened to a sample podcast put together by his staff and gave the project a green light.

Intel instructional designer Marc Porter took on the project. He purchased a video iPod for every member of the sales force. The iPods remain the property of Intel. When someone leaves the company, they return the iPod, just as they do with their cell phone and laptop.

On the content front, Marc began by converting the firm’s library into 20 QuickTime videos that were distributed with the machines. Employees were permitted to keep music on the iPods as well as the Intel videos.

Intel next produced an “The Expert Series” of customer interviews that highlight best practices. These were professionally produced, and the sales force loved them, especially the anecdotal information. 84% were satisfied.

To develop a podcast, Marc would meet with a subject matter expert to identify a topic, offer a method for producing it, and select the level of presentation.

Early on, Intel discovered that PowerPoint was the wrong medium for the iPod. They also determined that the iPod is not appropriate for restricted information: iPods have no passive security on board; a lost iPod causes no collateral damage.

Marc Porter won Intel’s 2007 innovation award for setting up and running the iPod program for Intel Digital Health’s community of practice.

When I read Amy Jo Kim’s Community-Building on the Web in 2000, I was enthralled. Few books on this topic were available. Most of what I knew about online communities I had picked up here and there on the WeLL. My knowledge was fuzzy. Amy Jo’s book made things clear. Re-reading her work eight years and countless other community-building books later, her message still rings true.

Excerpts:

Successful, long-lasting communities almost always start off small, simple and focused, and then grow organically over time—adding breadth, depth and complexity in response to the changing needs of the members, and the changing conditions of the environment.

Successful community building is a constant balancing act between the efforts of management (that’s you) to plan, organize and run the space, and the ideas, suggestions and needs of your members. To manage this co-evolution, you’ll need to keep your finger on the community pulse — and you’ll do this by creating and maintaining feedback loops between members and management.

Nine Timeless Design Strategies: “Social Scaffolding:”

1. Define and articulate your PURPOSE

Communities come to life when they fulfill an ongoing need in people’s lives. To create a successful community, you’ll need to first understand why you’re building it and who you’re building it for - and then express your vision in the design, navigation, technology and policies of your community.

2. Build flexible, extensible gathering PLACES

Wherever people gather together for a shared purpose, and start talking amongst themselves, a community can begin take root. Once you’ve defined your purpose, you’ll want to build a flexible, small-scale infrastructure of gathering places, which you’ll co-evolve along with your members.

3. Create meaningful and evolving member PROFILES

You can get to know your members - and help them get to know each other - by developing robust, evolving and up-to-date member profiles. If handled with integrity, these profiles can help you build trust, foster relationships, and deliver personalized services - while infusing your community with a
sense of history and context.

4. Design for a range of ROLES

Addressing the needs of newcomers without alienating the regulars is an ongoing balancing act. As your community grows, it will become increasingly important to provide guidance to newcomers – while offering leadership, ownership and commerce opportunities to more experienced members.

5. Develop a strong LEADERSHIP program

Community leaders are the fuel in your engine: they greet visitors, encourage newbies, teach classes, answer questions, and deal with trouble-makers before they destroy the fun for everyone else. An effective leadership program requires careful planning and ongoing management, but the results can be well worth the investment.

6. Encourage appropriate ETIQUETTE

Every community has it’s share of internal squabbling. If handled well, conflict can be invigorating - but disagreements often spin out of control, and tear a community apart. To avoid this, it’s crucial to develop some groundrules for participation, and set up systems that allow you to enforce and evolve your community standards.

7. Promote cyclic EVENTS

Communities come together around regular events: sitting down to dinner, going to church on Sunday, attending a monthly meeting or a yearly offsite. To develop a loyal following, and foster deeper relationships among your members, you’ll want to establish regular online events, and help your members develop and run their own events.

8. Integrate the RITUALS of community life

All communities use rituals to acknowledge their members, and celebrate important social transitions. By celebrating holiday marking seasonal changes, and integrating personal transitions and rites of passage, you’ll be laying the foundation for a true online culture.

9. Facilitate member-run SUBGROUPS

If your goal is to grow a large-scale community, you’ll want to provide enabling technologies to help your members create and run subgroups. It’s a substantial undertaking — but this powerful feature can drive lasting member loyalty, and help to distinguish you community from it’s competition

Harold Jarche pointed out that it would be nice were the learning/living model…

…to highlight the differences between learning, KM, OD, education, performance support, communities, and HPT. Continue Reading »

Clark Quinn has developed instructional games for decades. Here’s his take on the situation today.

Serious Games (or, to be Politically Correct™, Immersive Learning Simulations) have hit the corporate learning mainstream, so you should be asking yourself: “why are people excited?” Quite simply, because games (I’m not PC™) are probably the most pragmatically effective learning practice you can get. Sure, mentored real performance is the ideal, but there are two potential hiccups: scaling individual mentors has proven to be unrealistically expensive, and mistakes in live practice often are expensive, dangerous, or both. Why do you think we have flight simulators?

For principled reasons, the best learning practice is contextualized, motivating, and challenging. Interestingly, so are the most engaging experiences. It turns out that the elements that cause effective educational practice line up perfectly with those that create engaging experiences. Thus, we can safely say that learning should be ‘hard fun’.

Then the issue becomes if we can do this reliably, repeatably, and on a cost-effective basis. It turns out that the answer to this question is also in the affirmative. While you can’t just shove gamers and educators in a room and expect the result to work (all the bad examples that led to ‘edutainment’ becoming a bad word are evidence), if they understand the alignment above, systematically follow a creative process (no, systematic creativity is not an oxymoron; why do we have brainstorming processes?), and are willing to take time to ‘tune’ the result, we can do this reliably.

The question is really: when to use games. The answer for engine-driven (read: programmed, variable) games is when we have a need for deep practice: when there are complex relationships to explore, or making the change will be really hard. Branching scenarios are useful when we want to experience some contextualized practice but we don’t need a lot of it. And the principles suggest that at minimum, we should write better multiple-choice questions that put learners into contexts where they must make decisions where they’re applying the knowledge, not just reciting it.

And, yes, we can spend millions of dollars (I can help), but for many needs we may not need to. While there isn’t any one tool that lets us do this, there are a number of cost-effective ways to develop and deliver on the resulting design. As I say “if you get the design right, there are lots of ways to implement it; if you don’t get the design right, it doesn’t matter how you implement it”.

This is a temp page. It will be spit among the topics:

eat

Adaptation

Time for a collective swig of gin

cog

Natural Learning

Hans Monderman, RIP

Conceptual Models Redux

org

Implementation 2.0

eco

Learningscaping (check for dupes)

Inexpensive, self-managed knowledge management that works

Benchmarking your learning culture

Classrooms in the Wild

biz

The future of management

The Income Statement Isn’t

How businesses are using Web 2.0: A McKinsey Global Survey

tools

Touring the Jay Cross Ecosystem with Trailfire

The magic of mash-ups

Live help helps

Google Search

Cloud Computing

org

PAPA BEAR
Papa Bear, sometimes known as executive management, has slept through Baby’s and Mama’s online collaborative campaigns. Sleep is good, he thinks to himself. Having been around long enough to be sporting an occasional grey hair, Papa’s nose tells him something important is going on.

Papa Bear’s primary concern is milking online collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 for all they are worth. He knows it’s important for workers, clients, and partners to connect and collaborate. Papa Bear wants to be certain he’s leaving no honey, oops money, on the table.

WHERE IS EVERYBODY?
The rest of the business world was hardly standing still while Papa Bear hibernated, for this is the age of networks. Collaborative software will connect prospects and sales people, customers and service, partners and product information, and supply chain with operations.

The future world of business is evolving into plug-and-play, outsourcing functions that are not core. Internet technology provides a common language for connecting business functions and processing routine transactions. “I’ll have my computers talk with your computers.”

Papa Bear knows that without an online collaboration framework in-house, the company could be cut off from its customers and business partners. Also, it’s unlikely many of the people being hired right out of college would buy into the old lone worker with pencil and paper routine.

Papa Bear expects collaboration and network infrastructure to follow the trajectory of IT. At first, computing was relegated to the low- hanging fruit: routine tasks like accounting that were simple to automate with the same logic humans had already applied. In time, IT expanded to become enterprise software, an octopus hooked into sales, inventory, accounting, financial forecasting, HR, marketing, business intelligence, and vendor relations. Collaboration – relationships – give an organisation the agility to adapt to change and the speed to create value ahead of others.

Whenever a bottom-up phenomenon in business evolves into a strategically vital proposition, executive management steps in to insure the firm isn’t treading on thin ice and to track to make sure the return their investment is optimal, neither too risky nor too conservative.

THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN
For three hundred years, bears (and people) have revered efficiency, productivity, the accumulation of wealth, and things they could see and touch. This view of the world became second nature, so obvious that we didn’t question it. Until now. We are in transition from the industrial age to the network era. When it’s difficult for people to make connections, knowledge and power are scarce, and a few ‘haves’ control the ‘have-nots’. We see this top-down structure in feudalism, kingdoms, colonies, armies, and industrial organisations.

When it becomes easy for people to make connections, knowledge and power are distributed, and everyone has a say. The internet lives to make connections, millions of them daily. Connections beget connections, making the whole ever more value, and perhaps ending up a ‘singularity’ where things happen so fast that we no longer recognise what’s going on.

No organisation inhabits these extremes. Even the most command-and-control firm uses email and has internet access; the most networked still harbour unconnected nooks and crannies. Most knowledge organisations today find themselves in this in-between state. They have one foot in the command-and-control model. New hires, at this point twenty-somethings, are bringing the ways they have been doing projects at home with them.

New recruits are refusing to work with organisations that don’t permit them to post a personal profile, use instant messenger, and connect to friends when they encounter a question. Elliott Masie tells of his disappointment with a new hire who had the continual distraction of six friends always a click away on her desktop. How could she concentrate? Then he realised that instead of having one new person working for The Masie Centre, he had seven!

LOOK IN THE MIRROR
We’re not all Motorolas or Ciscos, ready to adopt new technology at the drop of a hat. Most companies are somewhere between being stuck in the past and embracing the future.

I think of organisations with the industrial-age beliefs as ice, because they are rigid. In addition to their orientation to control, ice organisations think business is a zero-sum game; for me to win, you must lose. They have a black-and-white view of the world; things are rigid; the fundamentals still apply. Secrecy is competition advantage; hoarding information is the norm.

Water companies are less sure of themselves or what the future will bring; Reality is the unpredictable result of complex adaptive forces. Nothing’s perfect; stuff happens. Cooperation is a win-win game. Relationships are all-important, and the more open you are, the easier it is to form them.

Where is your organisation? Ice or water? Your answers to a few questions will probably make it clear:

• Can employees access the entire internet from their desktops?
• Are People in our company not learning and growing fast enough to keep up with the needs of our business?
• Does corporate policy forbid blogging outside our firewall.
• Do our sales people share sales techniques and call reports online?
• Following a major success or failure, do we take time to reflect on what we’ve learned?
• Do people know how their work relates to our mission and vision?
• Do employees in one department know what’s happening in other parts of the company?
• Is it simple to set up an online meeting here?
• Does my team frequently talk about the trends and forces that drive our business?
• Are relationships between departments cooperative and effective?
• Do we distribute information through podcasts?
• Do we believe in transparency and openness whenever possible?

You don’t need an answer key to figure out where you are.

If your company is on the water side, you are a candidate for the transformation Andy McAfee describes.

MURPHY’S LAW
In the interest of getting a lot of suggestions in front of you, I have focused on what has worked. One could write a longer paper on what has not gone well. Implementing collaboration online systems is not a day at the beach. Doing it right takes vision, persistence, and courage. Don’t give up; the rewards are worth the effort.

THE NEXT STEP
In your father’s time, workers prospered by knowing how to do their jobs and doing them. In our time, workers get along by connecting with others and staying in sync with ever- changing conditions. Increasingly, what they need to know is not in their heads; it’s a shared understanding held by lots of people. Having exceeded the limits of what any of us can understand on our own, we turn to our collective intelligence to survive.

Organisations at the top of the food chain are shucking off industrial-age thinking as best they can, but it is difficult. Since your great- great- great- great- great- great- great- greatgrandfather’s day, we’ve revered efficiency, productivity, the accumulation of wealth, and things we could see and touch. The game is changing. With one foot in the industrial age and the other in the evolving network age, our organisations are being ripped up the middle. The world is too volatile to wait for it to pass over.

Never before in history has progress raced along at such a rate that children lap their parents. If you’d like to brainstorm how to inject collaborative technology into your organisation, please call me or any thirteen-year old. Collaborate with them.

MAMA BEAR
Mama Bear is practical. She has little choice: raising a cub while holding down a full-time job is no picnic. Baby Bear was happy to conduct experiments. Mama Bear is hungry for major change. She is chasing after value. Baby Bear was a little scared; Mama is a fearless huntress. Baby Bear tried a few prototypes. Mama contemplates a network of networks that’s grows like a virus.

NETWORK GROWTH
Metcalf’s Law posits that value of a network grows exponentially with the addition of connections. Left unfettered, network nodes reproduce like rabbits on espresso. Think, for example, of the hyper growth of the internet, the web, MySpace, YouTube, and FaceBook. Once social networks take hold, expect them to grow like topsy, too. Moreover, the denser the network, the faster its cycle time. More connections make it quicker to get from one node to another.

Imagine how this can happen in an organisation. The first nodes appear as the company experiments with a few small projects such as co-ordinating online project groups or making it easier to find information with a ‘Wikipedia inside.’ New hires are accustomed to going wherever they wish in a network; imagine that they begin communicating between silos.

HR realises that the company-pedia can accelerate onboarding new employees. Customer service improves as everyone gains access to corporate resources such as who does what and how to find them. Replacing multiple versions with a single source of information cuts bureaucracy and chops email volume back. The growth of corporate connections feeds on itself.

WHAT PROBLEM SHOULD WE BE SOLVING?
Baby Bear was looking for simple applications that showed the potential of online collaboration. Mama Bear is out for the biggest bang for the buck. She will have to explain her choices to the bears with more seniority. It’s sensitive.

Here’s a list of organisational dysfunctions and opportunities for improvement that others have solved using enterprise 2.0. Mama Bear will use the list to set her mind to work; she will share it with the other bears to get their insight. Which of these things will return the most value to the corporation?

Inefficiency and bureaucracy

• Deluged by internal email
• Can’t find the right person when you need to
• People don’t know who knows what
• Can’t find the right information when you need it
• Project coordination is tedious and things fall through the cracks
• Re-invent the same documents and processes over and over again
• Departments squabble more often than they collaborate
• Don’t learn from the people who join us from competitors
• Execs can’t get a read of progress on projects
• Documentation is dated, versions confuse Not learning
• Not prepared for the onslaught of digital natives we’re recruiting
• Training can’t keep pace with the business
• Training administration, creation, and delivery cost too much
• Managers hoard information
• Not learning fast enough to keep up with the needs of our business

Unenthusiastic, sluggish staff

• Recruiting is harder than ever
• Some do the minimum to get by
• People are not innovators and don’t keep up
• Our know-how is walking out the door due to retirement and turnover
• People are glum because of the economy, an industry slump, etc
• Turnover is too high
• When good people leave, we never see or hear from them again
• No time for experimentation or prototyping Underdeveloped organisation
• Difficult to collaborate inside the corporate firewall
• Difficult to collaborate outside the corporate firewall
• People prefer to work solo than on teams
• Takes too long for new hires to become productive
• Analysis paralysis
• ‘Wait and see’ attitude = missed opportunities
• Culture clash, as if we are two organisations with different priorities

Suboptimal execution

• Not everyone is on the same page
• Our people don’t know our history, values, culture
• Set in our ways, reluctant to change
• Not moving fast enough to stay ahead of competitors
• Functional silos thwart process improvement
• Still acting like two separate organisations long after the merger
• Hard to find out where we are as an organisation
• Teams don’t talk about the trends and forces that drive our business
• Don’t reflect on the lessons of our successes and failures
• Don’t take advantage of our collective intelligence

Substandard revenue

• Sales are declining, customers are postponing decisions
• Sales and marketing departments are on different planets
• Sales force cannot express benefits of new products
• Sellers unaware of industry conditions and competition
• Friction in relationships with distributors
• Partners are not well informed
• Relationships with customers are arms-length Deficient service
• Response time to customers is sub-par
• After-sales enquiries are bogging down our call centres
• 800 numbers and phone trees are driving customers away
• Service is inconvenient for customers, not 24/7
• We don’t learn from our customers
• Not building customer loyalty
• Customer and prospects are confused, frustrated

SUSTAINING MOMENTUM
As the organisation’s use of collaborative software crosses the chasm from speciality item to important business process, focus shifts to keeping collaboration vibrant, disseminating lessons learned, and informally benchmarking performance.

Companies that have made the transition suggest these practices for maintaining momentum after initial enthusiasm wears thin:

• Dismantle roadblocks to collaboration
• Make the goal and ground rules clear at the outset
• Structure the initial framework to fit the task
• Make the online environment attracting and inviting
• Pre-load templates, background info, defaults
• Provide emotional support for newcomers
• Delegate responsibility for keeping the ball rolling to the team
• Rely on self-regulation
• Don’t micro-manage
• Market the service: publicity, seed with enthusiasts, contests
• Incentives to get things ramped up
• Report results at least quarterly
• Conclude project teams with written evaluation
• Participants suggest “How we can make this better”
• Don’t skimp on investment. This is all cheap compared to the alternative.
• Use bots to send periodic reminders about what’s going on
• Encourage (or enforce!) tagging, making things searchable and thus easier to use

HOW ‘PULL’ GIVES THE USER CHOICE
Many workers are drowning in information and info-clutter. Their lives are not their own because they feel they must deal with every incoming email or announcement.

Every day it’s as if an evil genie dumps boatloads of information, price increases, questions, recall notices, changes to plans, trade regulations, competitive threats, and email into our offices to greet us in the morning.

Most of what we receive is not relevant to our needs; it was the product of a thoughtless cc: or mass mailing. As with spam, the sender incurs no cost but the recipient pays dearly in time and distraction.

One way out of this quagmire is going after the information you need rather than taking all the information that is pushed on you. My first blog post on the first day of 2007 said “The tide will turn, saving humankind from drowning in diversions. At the point of being overwhelmed by repeated shotgun blasts of
infobits, people will turn the gun around and hunt down what they want.”

We’ll be able to select what mail, email, television programmes, phone calls, and reports we want in our lives. We’re accustomed to taking whatever is delivered; in the future, we’ll take what we choose. Media, software, training, and telephones will give us the ability to filter what gets past our personal firewalls.

I’m not predicting that pull will replace push everywhere we get information, just that the balance will shift more toward the pull end of the spectrum than the push.

TRUST
As social networks become more visible in the organisation, they are certain to attract scrutiny by senior managers who never received their Online Collaboration Driver License. Giving every worker the ability to write things into documents that can be seen by all looks like a formula for chaos. And won’t some bad actors muck about, spraying the files with digital graffiti. Time and time again, the answer has turned out to be ‘no.’

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has addressed the issue of vandalism countless times. He draws an analogy to opening a new restaurant. This is America, so the restaurant is going to serve steak. Some steak is tough, so he will provide patrons with steak knives. People can stab one another with knives, so he will seat his guests in cages.

Whoa! Time out! You’ve got to trust the people to behave in a civilised manner or give up on the restaurant idea entirely.

And so it goes with open collaboration in the corporate world. Employees don’t turn into monsters just because they are online. Everything submitted carries the name of its author. What better way to lose your job than by acting foolishly in front of all to see.

Nonetheless, because this is a new medium and because you’ve got corporate attorneys assuming the worst, it’s wise to set expectations and post guidelines. Here’s one organisation’s policy for participating in the in-house wiki:

Assume good faith. Assume that most people who work on the project are trying to help it, not hurt it.

Civility. Being rude, insensitive or petty makes people upset and hinders collaboration. Try to discourage others from being uncivil, and be careful to avoid offending people unintentionally.

Common sense. Don’t do anything in the collaborative environment that you wouldn’t do face to face.

Editing policy. Improve pages wherever you can, and don’t worry about leaving them imperfect. (It’s all beta.)

No personal attacks. Do not make personal attacks. Comment on content, not on the contributor. Personal attacks damage the community and deter users. Nobody likes abuse.

Ownership of articles. You agreed to allow others to modify your work. So let them.

WHERE DOES IT START?
Baby Bear is intensely curious, driven to try new things just for the heck of it. Most collaboration projects begin at the bottom of the organisation and migrate upward. Typically, a young internet enthusiast who knows the web 2.0 environment joins the company. She sees an opportunity to improve local performance with a blog or wiki. She takes a proposal to her manager. One hopes that the manager asks “What’s the business case?” If they decide the proposal is worthy of consideration, the next step will be to create a prototype to try the idea on for size.

Happily, the costs of setting up a web 2.0 application are trivial. Furthermore, applications are simple to program. You no longer need to be a programmer to produce a prototype for show-and-tell. Many a prototype has been developed in a matter of hours.

Baby bear is the application champion. If he is low in the organisation, he probably begins with a simple, free, online wiki to deal with
a local problem and builds support by pointing people to the wiki. Baby bears come in all sizes. In addition to the local enthusiasts, social software projects have been initiated by:

• CIO - fulfiling request from others
• CIO - trial, seeing if it lives up to rumours
• Line manager with specific problem to solve
• Staff - exploring process improvements
• HR - best practices, organisation development
• Exec - read about it in airplane magazine
• Exec - major push, organisational challenge.

The U.S. Department of Defence spends the most money on training of any organisation in the world, yet a simple web application started by two company commanders on their own has become the most important source of collaboration and knowledge sharing among officers in Iraq.

Two company commanders who had been classmates at West Point shared quarters. In the evening, they would talk over the day’s events and reflect on what they had learned. Sensing that other officers might want to join the conversation, they started a blog. Rather than go through channels, they didn’t ask for permission. (Anyone can set up a blog for free in less than five minutes.)

The blog spread virally among company commanders, becoming more valuable as more voices chimed in. Soon the blog, Company Command, was a must-read. Unlike material coming from the Pentagon, the conversations in the blog told what had happened only hours before; they were in everyday, conversational English, not bureaucratese; they focused on need-to-know information for survival, not something one might use next year.

In another case, a staffer in a large company thought an in-house Wikipedia would help employees find information and retain a corporate memory. A technology evangelist downloaded free software and implemented a wiki behind the firewall. It soon became the bridge among five divisional silos and the go-to place for finding things out. Volunteers populated the system with handy information from all corners. New hires get up to speed by spending a day exploring the in-house information centre.

Bottom-up collaborative environments all over the corporation tend to improve functions that are already in place. Criteria for selection: pick the low-hanging fruit.

When small projects gain enough attention to appear on the corporate radar, responsibility for selecting and implementing social software is delegated to the IT department, either to take the prototype forward or perhaps because the IT press and CIO community say it’s the thing to do. CIO magazine, once sceptical of the web as an intrusion onto IT’s turf, is now singing its praises, e.g.:

One of the driving forces behind Web 2.0 is the virtual office - teams of far-flung experts collaborating online to create a whole greater than the sum of its contributors

A KM system that’s ‘actually being used’ - this kind of language hints at the scepticism both users and CIOs have had about KM for years.

One final bit of good news: Users say the new, simpler KM tools make it easier to justify the investment to your fellow C-level executives. “It can be very difficult to make a pitch to senior management about why knowledge management is important, because it’s not real to them,” explains Northwestern Mutual’s Austin. Now, she just shows them blog users engaged in explaining their projects to coworkers.

Enterprise 2.0 tools make it easier to share and organise information. Tagging and rating provide a straightforward way to find content and make judgments about what to look at. Blogs and wikis are natural collaboration and communication platforms. Social network tools help staff find the right individual or group of people. Enterprise 2.0 has the potential to provide knowledge and content management in a surprisingly cheap and easy fashion using Web-based tools (ABC An Introduction to Web 2.0, CIO magazine, July 12, 2007).

Sometimes IT becomes involved because it controls everything to do with computers. This can have disastrous consequences if IT takes full control. Implementing online collaboration deals more with people issues than software decisions, but IT people solve IT issues.

A typical selection process may involve setting up a matrix of vendors and features, yet features are unimportant compared to ease of use and other factors. Social software is often lightweight, but inexpensive can translate as unimportant to IT. The upshot is that often the customer view is not taken into account.
Little bear needs IT’s help in enforcing the standards necessary for efficiency. IT should lend its expertise and influence in security, compliance, and building a foundation for growth.

If not an IT decision, a business user with a problem to solve probably initiates the inquiry. Sometimes the goal is meta, for example, increasing innovation. More often the issue is immediately practical, for example  onboarding 1,500 new staff or tracking plans for 75 customers. Criteria for selection: solve a burning business problem.

Sometimes executives mandate experiments with social software because they’ve read about it in the business press or hear success stories from colleagues. Their interest may be faster cycle times, unleashing corporate wisdom, consolidating an acquisition, or other over-arching need. Criteria for
project selection: focus on strategically important areas.

One of the driving forces behind Web 2.0 is the virtual office - teams of far-flung experts collaborating online to create a whole greater than the sum of its contributors.

IS BABY BEAR’S ORGANISATION READY FOR THIS?
At this stage, all we have is a prototype. Nonetheless it’s a good idea to test the water before jumping into the pool. At least that will keep you from diving into hot water.

Consultant, online advocate, and champion of NGOs Beth Kanter has lots of experience assessing whether an organisation is ready for online collaboration. Beth thinks you are not ready if:

• Management is obsessively controlling
• The organisation will not accept changes in how you work
• Your employees are not online
• Everything must be vetted by central authority

On the other hand, you may be prepared if you want to:

• Make it easy for people to share knowledge
• Are willing to share ideas in progress and let others join in
• Want to enable many voices
• Can deal with messiness

SELECTING A STARTER APPLICATION
Your mileage may vary, but initial projects have a better chance of thriving if:

• Participants have a shared need.
• It’s easy for participants to see what’s in it for them.
• The information involved is not controversial.
• A sound business case can be made.
• Stand-alone implementation is feasible (i.e. not requiring connection with other systems)
• The project yields a good example to use when getting support for other projects.
• You can open in New Haven.

New Haven? Sixty years ago, producers staged new plays at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, before taking them to Broadway. No critics were in the audience, so if a major overhaul was required before the official release, no one was the wiser. Similarly, if your first prototype bombs, it’s nice to be able to sweep it under the carpet and begin anew.

DOCUMENT THE BUSINESS CASE
To maintain focus, the owner of a project should prepare a document in response to these questions:

• What is the goal of the collaboration?
• What’s the current situation?
• What do you expect it to be after the project?
• How will this be accomplished?
• What is the business benefit? (In business terms).
• How do you quantify the size of the benefit?
• Who’s going to take part?
• What might go wrong?
• Is this a one-time project or an on-going process?
• Do we have sponsorship higher up?
• Who will participate on the team?
• If it’s a one-timer, when will it be completed? What is the kill date?

Display your answers prominently on the wiki, blog, or whatever tool is involved.

COMMITMENT BY TEAM MEMBERS
It’s great to begin a long-term collaboration with a face-to-face meeting. Either in person or virtual, social bonding comes before business, for that’s the platform on which the work will be built. Begin with games and getting-to-know-you exercises. Give people time to talk and become familiar with one another.

Social connections remain vital throughout the collaboration. People work best with people they know. Encourage people to share information about themselves. Post photographs of participants. Pinpoint their locations on a map. It’s important that collaborators are working under the same set of assumptions. Discuss each of these areas and ask for individual commitment to them.

• Respect the team, and do what is best to accomplish the objective. Be selfless, not selfish.
• Members will be active. If a member spots something to improve the collaboration, she volunteers to do it.
• Members freely share ideas and suggestions. They do not hoard information or keep secrets.
• Members treat each other with respect. The team is committed to continuous improvement.
• Members care for one another emotionally, helping one another over rough spots and fears.
• Use whatever tools are appropriate to advance the project: phone calls, on-line meetings.
• Members trust one another. They ‘make this marriage work.’

Be prepared for push-back. Workers who see collaboration as hindering their work rather than supporting it will be reluctant to join the effort. organisations that are accustomed to a single viewpoint (usually top management’s) can become rattled as other voices begin to speak. It’s useful to recruit a band of early supporters to help sell the value of the project.

ONLINE COLLABORATION DRIVER LICENSE
You cannot learn to swim without getting in the water. You will not appreciate collaborative technology without writing entries in a blog, taking part in a wiki, and subscribing to an RSS feed.

If you haven’t experienced these things, don’t go into denial. Yes, you really need to do them. No, logic is insufficient for grasping what is going on. It needn’t take more than an hour or two, spread out over a week or two to experience these things. Find a private place to practice. Trust us, it’s painless. And you’ll be rewarded with not only your online collaboration license but also a big ah-ha of understanding.

To earn your automobile license, you have to demonstrate that you can drive the vehicle. Likewise, you don’t really qualify for a collaboration driver license until you’ve taken part in a successful collaboration.

Hints on what works with social software

• Keep it simple
• Keep it flexible
• Do it yourself (blog/wiki) or you won’t understand it
• Be innovative, ever alert to productivity improvements
• Be open to new ways of doing things
• Release early and release often. Just do it
• Promotion is important. Remind people where to look
• Focus on the function rather than on the tools
• Provide step-by-step how-to guides
• Provide the opportunity to celebrate small successes
• Give people time to practice using the software - it is easy to forget how to do things, especially when you don’t use the software regularly.

The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Forbes, Stephen Colbert, the Manchester Guardian, Learning Circuits, and other leading voices can’t stop talking about Web 2.0. You’ve read the stories: The web is now the read/write web. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia of 9.1 million articles in 253 languages, written entirely by volunteers. Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr are growing faster than the web in its meteoric growth phase. There are 70 million blogs online, and 120,000 new blogs are created every day (that’s about 1.4 new blogs per second). These phenomena are global; only 35% of all blogs are in English.

This is all well and good, but it provides no guidance to the manager who wants to take advantage of the new technologies. Managers need to know the opportunities and the pitfalls, applications and benefits, tricks of the trade and lessons of experience. That’s the sort of thing I intend to start (but not finish) here.

The Web is chock full of explanations of blogs, tags, and other social software.1 I interviewed scores of people to capture their thoughts on the human side of implementing and sustaining collaborative networks. As you would expect, people have different notions of what works. I’ve tried to capture these multiple perspectives in the checklists and vignettes that follow.

Collaboration rules.

When people work together instead of individually, they produce greater results and derive more pleasure from their work. Until quite recently, collaboration was not easy, especially when distance was involved or people couldn’t access the same information or a worker couldn’t figure out who was the right person to contact. Those barriers are fading fast. Software and networks that support collaboration are in place and inexpensive. Everyone complains about departmental silos; social networks bore through silo walls.

I asked Harvard Business School’s Andrew McAfee, who coined the term Enterprise 2.0, why he thinks social software will transform the business world. He told me that today’s collaborative technologies can knit together an enterprise and facilitate knowledge work in ways that were simply not possible previously. They have the potential to usher in a new era by making both the practices of knowledge work and its outputs more visible.

Many Happy Returns

Business has already squeezed the big process improvements out of its physical systems, but for many companies, collaboration and networking processes are virgin territory. The upside potential is staggering: people innovating, sharing, supporting one another, all naturally and without barriers. The traditional approach has been to automate routine tasks in order to reduce cost; the new vision is to empower people to take advantage of their innate desire to share, learn together and innovate.

Web 2.0, the “collaborative web,” renders overstuffed file cabinets and hard drives overflowing with email obsolete. Members of a group can share information and make improvements to one copy that’s virtually available to everyone. Workers learn to remix rather than re-invent, and having everyone read from the same page reduces the odds of mistaking obsolete information for current. Distance no longer keeps workers apart. As we remove obstacles, the time required to do anything shrivels up.

Why bother?

Collaboration that does not increase revenue, improve relationships with customers, cut costs, grow employees, expand innovation, communicate values, streamline the work process, or help execute strategy should not be funded.

Companies are using social software to:

Speed up the flow of information through the organization
Improve customer service
Streamline workflow and slash bureaucracy
Unleash the power of collective intelligence
Create nerve centers for corporate news and market intelligence
Make all corporate know-how accessible 24/7
Recruit the best candidates for new positions and make them productive quickly
Replace training classes with informal, hands-on learning
Open the process of innovation to all employees
Help workers build strong, supportive relationships
Enable managers to assess the status and direction of projects
Empower all employees to contribute ideas and feel part of the team
Develop more productive relationships with customers, prospects, recruits, partners, supply chain, and other employees

Compared to old-style groupware such as Lotus Notes, today’s social software is simple, unstructured, emergent, inherently transparent, and it scales.

Ten years ago I fell so deliriously in love that I neglected my work, lost my job, and flew to a Caribbean island to sort out my priorities. My mistress was the web, I love her still, and she’s been very, very good to me.

Computers

When I graduated from college with a degree in sociology and no technical background whatsoever, I took a job programming and selling mainframes. Computers are commonplace today but in the mid-sixties the popular press was full of articles about giant mechanical brains that might rise to take over human civilization. The initials IBM conjured up images of mile-high IQs, theoretical physics, The Outer Limits, space travel, and Albert Einstein. Computers were mysterious and cool. I learned COBOL and Assembler, and devoured Datamation magazine.

My freshly minted computer background enabled me to avoid the Viet Nam War by getting a direct commission into the Army, where for two years I oversaw mobile computer centers in Germany. I’ve skirted the edge of the software business off and on ever since. Generally my computer lust was like this thing I had for Catherine Deneuve: beautiful but distant.

Learning

In the late seventies, a group of academics hired me to research the market potential of an adults-only off-campus degree program in business. Firms up and down Silicon Valley were enthusiastic. I spent the next two years developing interactive workshops in management, marketing, finance, accounting, business law, and so forth for what morphed into the University of Phoenix. When the gang moved from San Jose to Phoenix, I quit to join a start-up in California to train bankers how to make sound loan decisions. A majority of the top 100 banks in the U.S. bought the idea, and for a dozen years I worked with senior loan officers, training directors, and instructional designers at big banks.

The Web

The Well (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) was a doorway to thousands of online conversations among digerati, deadheads, do-gooders, dabblers, degenerates, and co-conspirators. I became jaycross@well.com learned about online community from Howard Rheingold, Cliff Figallo, Tom Mandel, Robert Rossney, and dozens of others. I surfed the web when the only on-ramp was Tim Berners-Lee’s Next machine at CERN. I coded a web site when few people had ever heard of the web.

I became a web fanatic. Just imagine what could come of coupling learning to boundaryless computer networks. Colleagues grew weary of my rants. Our company was focused 110% on CD-ROM interactive multimedia. I left the firm and flew to a Caribbean island to figure out what to do next.

Web + Learning = Internet Time Group

The concept of Internet Time Group came to me whilst sitting amid the Mayan ruins of Cozumel. My calling would be helping people improve their performance on the job and satisfaction in life. My experience with the University of Phoenix and the Well led me to challenge conventional wisdom about how adults learn. Often networking was at the heart of it.

Back in the States, I talked with Silicon Valley companies about harnessing the power of the web to teach technical skills that were in short supply. I posted my thoughts on the web. When the CEO of the largest CD-ROM training company decided his firm needed to switch to hosted distance learning, the firm scoured the web for someone who knew the topic. My name came up 1, 2, 3, and 4, and for the following two years, I read the tea leaves and wrote the white papers at SmartForce, the eLearning Company.

Beyond the road less traveled

Oddball stuff is often regular stuff making a premature appearance.

When I began blogging (in the last century!), my friends didn’t “get it.” When I started writing about eLearning, Brandon Hall emailed me that he didn’t like the term; it wouldn’t stick. Others debated that eLearning would never be as good as what takes place in the classroom.

Traditionalists were not pleased with my observation that “Courses are dead.” People put down informal learning, saying it lacked rigor and was uncontrollable.

To the naysayers I have sparred with since 1998, I have but one thing to say: Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

I believe we are at the gates of a new wave of human consciousness. Everything is becoming connected. The global brain is kicking in. The global heart won’t be far behind.

jay

A group of us, few enough to sit comfortably at a cafe table, were having a dialog about how we’re helping customers progress in this increasingly challenging world.

Web 2.0 was the hot button in learning and business, but few people seemed to be getting beyond grafting blogs, wikis, and social networks onto existing structures. It was like the early days of automobiles: they were carriages with add-ons. We wanted to go deeper, to investigate how people can adapt to rapidly changing business environments, how organizations can balance efficiency and flexibility, and how to prosper in the transition from an industrial era to the age of networks.

Believing that we should practice what we preach, we decided to collaborate. (Jay suggested we might call ourselves the Dogfood Cafe.) Collaboration is the crucible of innovation. We knew in our hearts that we would challenge one another to come up with great ideas — concepts of a quality that none of us would have come up with on our own. We also figured we would have more fun working with one another than continuing to work on our own.

We bring a rich portfolio of skills to the table. We have gray hair (if any) and the wisdom of experience. We are driven. Most of us have written books on learning, delivered presentations at international forums, and been recognized as thought leaders. Our backgrounds encompass corporate training and higher education; work inside major corporations and small NGOs; and demonstrated success achieving corporate objectives, boosting sales, and helping people make sound decisions. We have expertise in learning, OD, informal learning, coaching, learning governance, unmeetings, systems, marketing, networks, sociology, finance, philosophy, open software, web 2.0, learning games, simulations, mobile learning, change management, agile development, visualization, appreciative inquiry, open space technology, community building, motivation, metrics, statistics, performance support, and more. We’ve been around the block.

We’re not just thinkers, we’re doers. We’ve created innovative and yet pragmatic solutions. We’ve led teams, built systems, designed business models, created marketing plans, managed projects, and delivered outcomes. We’ve walked the walk and can talk the talk. And we’ve demonstrated, repeatedly, an ability to think outside the box and come at things in new ways, to draw upon that rich experience to transcend and ultimately to revolutionize.

The Cafe provides high-value advice in small and large quantities. We do not participate in competitive bidding. We avoid engaging with the clueless. We shine at multidisciplinary challenges and enjoy generalist projects. We seek out projects of sufficient challenge that we can learn from them. We do not sell packaged solutions. We focus on people, culture, and organizational success.

On principle, we work with integrity: we only want to play if we’re adding value, and we’re not interested in milk. We don’t waste time needlessly, we use what’s known when it makes sense, and innovate happily when needed. We’re friendly, which means we have a good time, we’re with you in bad times, and we’ll tell you what you need to hear, not what you’d like. And we’re practical, looking for solutions that will work, but we also have the ability to be creative in looking for solutions without falling into familiar traps.

We can marshal ad-hoc teams for large projects. but some “group projects” involve only two of us. When we look at what senior management needs, it goes way beyond the usual innovate, improve, and inspire. It’s not incremental, for baby steps are not going to get anyone across the coming chasm of disruption. A phase change is on the way. Executives sense the change, but don’t know what to do about it. The cafe is a resource that helps senior management reduce the risk of making faulty decisions. We are a sounding board and second opinion.

We are beginning free-form and will create structure as we go along. Let’s avoid trying to strap ourselves down with restrictions. We are not a corporation. Our sales point is US, not some organization. We aim to be more akin to an open source team than a proprietary software firm.

need project descriptions

Tim O’Reilly says we are at a turning point in human history because web 2.0 is becoming the platform for everything. It turms the enterprise inside out. It is the platform beneath a new way of living. We face a huge change in the way the world works. Doug Engelbart’s vision of harnessing our collective intelligence is unfolding. We’ve only just begun. The turning tide is frightening or wonderful; that’s a matter of perspective.

If you hear a simple definition of web 2.0, disregard it, for web 2.0 means many things to many people at many levels.

Applications such as blogs, wikis, and mash-ups.
Concepts such as viral marketing, the long tail, virtuous circles, folksonomy, permalinks, co-development, and loose coupling.
Connections between millions of organizations and individuals.
Social web, social media, social software, social relationships
Free phone calls, free software, free news.
Organizational applications such as Software as a Service.
Technololgies such as HTTP, XML, PHP, and AJAX.
Structures such as LAMP and SLATES.
Conventions such as first-in/first-up on blogs, collaborative writing on wikis, and observe before participating in online communities.
Services such as Google, Technorati, Flickr, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, eBay, Craigslist
Use-cases like Intellipedia, online project teams, CEO blogs, and user-driven customer service.

Web 2.0 is the participatory, two-way that replaced the one-way billboard that was web 1.0. Web 1.0 was passive, and web 2.0 is decidely active; web 1.0 was push and web 2.0 is pull. Web 2.0 is the read/write, collaborative, web as platform, and raison d’etre of hundreds of companies that assemble mash-ups and widgets.

Web 2.0 is small pieces, loosely joined. It is an attitude, not a technology.

The web is the carrier wave of civilization, and web 2.0 is an early snapshot. It’s a pity the web 2.0 name took. It’s better than yesterday and will make tomorrow better to; that will happen without web 1.95 or web 2.45.

Workers have more sophisticated web 2.0 tools and techniques at home than at work. It’s as if they write with a word processor at home but have only a manual typewriter to use at the office. Individuals get the latest stuff when they want to while the enterprise feels compelled to filter things through entrenched departments, stodgy procedures, drawn-out planning, and multiple layers of approval.  Continue Reading »

When you’re in Chartres, don’t miss the cathedral.
Continue Reading »

At the turn of the century, investors agreed that for eLearning, the sky was the limit. Or maybe it was more:  shoot for the moon. As a reminder to never drink the Kool-Aid without reflection, here is the advice investment houses were putting out before the dot-bomb implosion:
Continue Reading »

The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid argues that the medium is not the message. The world is not binary, things exist (and persist) for a reason, and you can’t separate content from its container without losing something in the process. “Generations of videoconferencing are still far from capturing the essence of a firm handshake or a straight look in the eye.” In 1938, the New York Times predicted that typewriters would make the pencil obsolete.

“Computer scientists have a tendency to count “1, 2, 3, one million,…,” as if scale were insignificant once the first steps were taken.”

“The more cavalier futurists sometimes appear to work with a magical brand of computer not available to the rest of us. It’s hard to believe that if they had to deal with the inexplicable crashed, data corruption, incompatibilities, buggy downloads, terrifying error messages, and power outages that are standard fare for most, they could remain quite so confident about the ease of hot desking and home working.”

“The desire to show that with a computer one person can do everything may look not forward, but back to the stage in social evolution before anyone noticed the advantages of the division of labor.”

First three chapters of Social Life… from First Monday

“Coming away with a degree is much better than wearing a T-shirt saying ‘college of the streets’ or ‘university of hard knocks.’”

jnd

You no longer need to be tethered computer to link to the web; a phone will do. It’s all the same cloud. Learning has broken loose from the classroom. Now it’s breaking loose from physical moorings altogether.

Continue Reading »

(instructions on reporting broken links, making suggestions, etc., go here)

Traditionally, HR has two major functions: administration and developing people. The administrative part is the busywork benefits, personnel policies, retirement plans, reporting and other routine activities. Outsourcing this clutter is generally a good idea.

What remains is talent. Some people call this Talent Management but management is the wrong term. We want to inspire people to do great work; telling them to do great work is a non-starter. People are not assets; all assets depreciate in value over time. Think of your people as investors. High performance is in an investor’s self interest. In-house investor relations is more a matter of stewardship. When I use the term talent, talent stewardship is what I mean.

Talent has everything to do with relationships: recruiting the right people, developing people, keeping them on board, and seeing that they are fulfilled. Successful relationships are flexible and personalized.

In lieu of control, organizations must provide opportunities for people to grow, to excel, to find meaning in work, and to find a higher purpose in what they do. Once we point to the desired destination, we must trust our people/investors to head there.

Power to the people! Giving people freedom is a trade-off with trying to control them. Micro-managing adherence to rules instead of helping our people focus on outcomes gets in the way of getting the job done. People resent the intrusion. It is high time to replace rules-based management with principles-based leadership.

Traditionalists worry about the time unmanaged people will waste going down blind alleys. This sort of thinking misses the bigger picture. Giving people more freedom enriches the role of the manager. Gone is the tarpit of looking for exceptions and whipping people back into line. You can inspire many times as many people as you can try to control. Eliminating needless minor adjustments frees up manager time to work on the big stuff.

Most of these are Kevin Wheeler’s ideas, not mine.

When we deal with others, control is often superfluous. The best policy for managing knowledge workers is to get up on managing them. Inspire them instead.

Managers Coaches need to give people challenges and very broad boundaries to operate within. It’s analogous to a child’s puzzle. Give people the dots but let them connect them for themselves. Managers have build up elaborate rituals to doublecheck their people are connecting the dots in the proper sequence. Cruft accumulates on the simplest of processes, obscuring their original meaning.

Kevin Wheeler shared a story that provides a solid example:

A new manager found herself fielding the usual headaches of dealing with “managed” workers. Some complained of having too much to do. Others had finished what they were working on and asked what to do next. Projects were falling behind schedule. People were not happy.

The manager was called away for a month-long business trip. She called everyone into a conference room. They brainstormed lists of what needed to be accomplished while the manager was away. They left with an understanding of what needed to be done but no individual assignments for doing it.

When the manager returned, the group exceeded expectation. All projects were accomplished. People were proud of their accomplishment. The manager learned that her job was to set direction; next, she had to get out of people’s way so they could do it. Many managers spend too much time managing.

Kevin Wheeler is CEO of Global Learning Resources, architects of talent strategies and solutions. His website is a cornucopia of white papers, presentations, and guidelines on inspiring people. Chief talent officers of top-tier companies attend his Future of Talent enclaves to swap stories and advance the emerging field of talent management.
Continue Reading »

Tip #1. Create infrastructure for questions
When dealing with small businesses, questions are par for the course, and every business’ questions are unique. While no single person can possibly answer them all, an environment that invites questions and answers from businesses of all types always has someone with answers.

Tip #2. Understand how comfortable users are with technology
While blogs are everywhere in the press, not every individual is comfortable with them.

Tip #3. Foster relationships
First, make sure that the environment has a variety of individuals from a variety of backgrounds. Then, build relationships with some of them in the same way that those individuals are building relationships with each other. And because most word of mouth happens offline, be sure to encourage offline relationships as well.

Tip #4. Utilize user-created content
User-created content is an excellent trigger for discussion. By making the content accessible and easy to find, those discussions happen much more easily.

Tip #5. Have a moderator
A moderator is useful in connecting people in similar industries and with similar interests, challenges, and problems. That’s important when a site has a lot of information where it may be difficult for people with like interests to find each other.

Jake McKee

A community is a group of people who form relationships over time by interacting regularly around shared experiences, which are of interest to all of them for varying individual reasons.  Jake McKee

•    Be people-centric. This applies both to how we design our tools, and how we market them.
•    Be willing to collaborate. We all belong to a community of like-minded tool developers, whether or not we are aware of it. Working together will both strengthen this community and improve our tools.
•    Create shared language. Our tools share more similarities than we may think. Conversing with our fellow tool builders will help reveal those similarities; creating a shared language will make those similarities apparent to all. As a shared language evolves, a shared conceptual framework for collaborative tools will emerge, revealing opportunities for improving the interoperability of our tools.
•    Keep improving. Improvement is an ongoing process. Introducing new efficiencies will change the way we collaborate, which in turn will create new opportunities to improve our tools.

from Jake McKee

If you enjoy a good rant and haven’t experienced John Taylor Gatto, you’re in for a treat. Gatto was an award-winning teacher before coming to believe that compulsory schooling is a sham foisted off on America for the needs of business, fear of a competent people, and a misreading of German mental science. His The Underground History of American Education is a gripping read — and it’s all available on the web. Gatto makes compelling arguments for dismantling our entire dysfunctional educational system.

Socrates foresaw if teaching became a formal profession, something like this would happen. Professional interest is served by making what is easy to do seem hard; by subordinating the laity to the priesthood. School is too vital a jobs-project, contract giver and protector of the social order to allow itself to be “re-formed.” It has political allies to guard its marches, that’s why reforms come and go without changing much. Even reformers can’t imagine school much different.
David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can’t tell which one learned first—the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I label Rachel “learning disabled” and slow David down a bit, too. For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won’t outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, “special education” fodder. She’ll be locked in her place forever.

In 30 years of teaching kids rich and poor I almost never met a learning disabled child; hardly ever met a gifted and talented one either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths, created by human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling.

Clark Quinn earned his Ph D in applied cognitive science under Don Norman and has designed mobile, performance support, serious games, online learning, and intelligent learning systems. Before striking out on his own as an advisor to corporations and government, Clark taught at University of New South Wales.

When we get together, the conversation turns to organizational learning strategies, meta-learning, and hops. I asked Clark to lend me a hand in an area I do not know much about: mobile learning. His words appear here, not mine.

Tap into Clark’s thinkiing at Quinnovation. Clark’s Learnlets blog is on my short list.

Two years ago I wrote flowing descriptions of how web 2.0 tools worked. When I saw one of Lee LeFever’s shorty videos, I dragged them into the trash.

A year ago, Lee and his bride Sachi returned from a year-long trip around the world. They had uploaded a lot of video for friends and decided to make a simple video of how RSS works. That video, RSS in Plain English has now been seen by 750,000 people! More than 400,000 have watched Wikis in Plain Englist. Overall, more than 1,000,000 have watched Lee and Sachi’s videos. Do a Google search on wikis or social networking and you’ll find a Plane English video on the first page. Lee’s explanation? Make content people want to see. Continue Reading »

presentation about the evolution of networks

Keynote pdf

Eating the Dogfood:
Getting things done in organizations

What follows in these pages are thoughts about getting things done in today’s volatile, unpredictable, accelerating world. The industrial age is over, and we are gradually shedding the rigid, dehumanizing practices that manufactured the goods that lifted us from subsistance to abundance. It’s jarring enough to give up a mindset that was so rewarding, but the challenge before us is even more daunting.

For most of history, humans were pawns of gods and spirits with scant identity of their own. Four centuries ago, Descartes declared himself independent of the spirits, saying “I think therefore I am.” Newton discovered “laws” that defined the physics of how the world works. For every action, there was an equal and opposite reaction. The Newtonian world is a machine, and god becomes a watchmaker. Descartes and Newton set the stage for the industrial revolution which is now coming to a close after a good quarter-millenium run.

Today people are in deep denial about the crumbling of their fundamental beliefs about time, matter, causality, logic, control, predictability, and knowledge, yet the evidence is pouring in:

Time is relative.
Matter is simultaneously a partical and wave.
Everything is connected; nothing is caused in isolation.
Asymetric results defy logic.
Control is in the imagination; probabilties rule.
The outcome of complex adaptive systems is forever unpredictable.
Knowledge is a shared reality, not something in our heads.

Growing into a new consciousness will require a whale of a lot of unlearning. Maybe de-programming is a more apt term. Such techniques as visualization, mindfullness, metaphor, and group activity will help. Decades.

In the meanwhile, organizations have missions to accomplish. We can’t sit on our hands until the new way of thinking is in place. That’s the core purpose of this un-book: helping organizations prosper during the transition. We focus on getting things done. Now

This is an un-book, what the Whole Earth Catalog might have been if its readers enjoyed access to the web. You’ll find tools here, but they will likely be mental frameworks rather than Swiss Army knives. This is knowledge work, not setting up communes. More of the un-book will appear online than in print. Readers Participants will buy the most recent version, not the final version, for neither the print nor the online component will ever be finished. The initial version has five topics:

Learnscaping: platforms in lieu of programs, networks and internet culture, Cluetrain vaues, transparency, trust, value-driven and do-it-yourself.

Cognition: natural learning, learning lifecycle, memory, group impact, identity, fulfillment, PKM, stories.

Organizations: getting things done in groups, phases of implementation, internal marketing, change process, core vs context, each one/teach one

Business: enterprise 2.0, let it be, losse coupling, community, distributed intelligence, talent, cut slack, KM, scope, group performance support.

Toolbox: web 2.0 suite, virtual life, mobile, games, search, LAMP, SLATES, video.

These topics do hot have final answers; we’ll provide catalysts, stories and illustriative samples. We’ve invited thought leaders to contribute to the work.

Publication of the first beta edition is scheduled for the tenth birthday of Internet Time Group: this May.