Category: Professional Development

What kind of organization do you want to work in?

‘Social enterprise’, ‘networked enterprise’, ‘learning culture’ and many more related buzzwords are flying around at the time being and influencing the professional literature and conferences.  What perhaps makes these themes different, to their predecessors, is that it is clear they cut across traditional disciplines as, arguably, the first big shift of power away from IT departments since their creation.

Tools such as ThisWorkedWell offer, on the face of it, walled garden knowledge capture and dissemination.  For many organizations this would have been the responsibility of knowledge/information departments in the past.  However, such new tools recognize the value in collaboration for learning and efficiency, thus rethinking workplace learning and communications.

The mobile, BYOD, nature of many of these tools arguably democratize the workforce, albeit with the need for some staff to “let go of control“.  A point in that “let go of control” article, about Google’s environment, is that transparency is key.

Ultimately the questions over all of these related areas, for me, come back to “what kind of organization do I want to work in?” My answer would have to include characteristics such as the organization:

  • being transparent,
  • recognizes learning happens all the time,
  • encourages and supports value from people reflecting upon, and sharing, their work with others,
  • having efficient and effective communication platforms (as advocated on this ‘engaged worker’ infographic),
  • make use of my data as appropriate (for example, could you expose my twitter data – as in Gwittr profile below – to my colleagues to show my areas of interest?),
  • recognizes the value in play (such as the social areas in Google offices) and skills from activities such as playing video games.

What I am really talking about here is knowledge work and I have to agree with much from Jarche.com.  This of course relates to corporate culture and much more, again cutting across traditional theoretical disciplines.  An interesting time, especially for organisational design professionals.

Gwittr stats on use of Twitter up to May 2014
Gwittr data in May 2014

What to call teachers and learning events?

Various things of late have got me thinking again about the nature of learning and the value of different terminology to guide behavior.  Some quick notes, for my reference, below.

This address by Bill Clinton highlights some useful examples of education schemes from around the globe, with the focus being on the impact of education upon poverty and opportunity.  A key thread in his argument is the need for young people to be exposed to at least one ‘great teacher’.  This grates slightly due to my dislike of the idea of ‘teaching’ in a connected environment where there are many kinds of learning event.  Does the facilitator’s title have to be driven by the nature of the learning event and, as such, ‘teacher’ may be perfectly valid in a remote African classroom?

Thinking back to the variety of event types that now exist, as discussed on a previous blog, we are seeing more and more formats emerge, often based around what a specific tool (such as Google Hangouts) can do.  One term I did not list was ‘Festival’ but the once-upon-a-time JISC Conference (which I attended a number of times) is now the JISC Digital Festival (although they do host an online conference too).  How can we best leverage subtle changes such as naming conventions, room design, catering, etc. to engage attendees of all types to develop a better formal/informal learning experience?  Can we best label ‘delegates’ and ‘teachers’ to maintain a sense of respect (where needed) but also shift the responsibility for (all) learning toward the learner and their network?  I personally do not think we should see this is as age related where we expect the young to respect their ‘teachers’ but the name for the role being less important in other age groups.

In the above I am seeing conferences and other events as learning opportunities, perhaps one trick is to have conference delegates agree to certain expectations in the same way you may have a student, in a formal education environment, sign up to a ‘charter’ or other form of learning contract?

Overall, I would like to see different names for facilitators of learning based on the nature of the event, this would help people be clear on the expectations.  For example, a webinar presenter is one thing whereas a classroom facilitator does something very different.

Can there be ‘original thought’ in the era of the knowledge-age organization?

I think I have only ever applied for one temporary ‘professional’ role.  My logic normally is that with constraints such as a mortgage I would not want to risk a period of unemployment.  However, in the case of this particular role it sounded fantastic so I thought I would apply.  I was pleasantly surprised when I was offered an interview even though I did not have one of the key ‘essential’ criteria of the person specification.  When interview day came I, for some reason, developed horrendous hiccups and generally did not do very well.

Anyway, one particularly awkward point was where I started describing past achievements and relating them to some of the prevalent best-practice theory in the discipline (eLearning).  Now I think I might have come across as suggesting that I (or rather my employer of the time and team) were ahead of the game.  At one point, I think, I even suggested it being a little ‘chicken and egg’ in that practice and theory become so intertwined that it becomes difficult to remember what came first – theory, you implementing an idea, recognized best practice, etc.  At best I think I suggested I was an original thinker and innovator, but without really backing it up as a reflective practitioner perhaps should be able to, at worst I appeared egomaniac-ish saying “I was first” to do various things.

Whilst I did not deal with it very well on that interview day, I would have now suggested that 100% ‘original thinking’ is incredibly difficult in our networked world.  In other words, we are products of our environments and if one has a particularly active personal learning ecosystem the ‘original’ source of an idea is difficult to track.  The challenge then should be to ensure you ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’ rather than reinventing the wheel.  Whilst the Internet has accelerated growth and sharing of ideas contributing to a world that is rapidly changing [I wouldn’t agree with all of this video but it is at least useful for seeing the prevailing mood] it also means that you can quickly appear out-of-date or just rehashing the work of others.  This has been particularly highlighted in the last week or so…

  • This article on big data in Higher Education, for example, makes a number of valid points but few are original.  Where it mentions work being done to track student achievement by their library use, many in HE will be already familiar with examples of such work.  Indeed some institutions already track devices (certainly of guests) to their networks and LMS/VLE data (should) has been used in ways such as those mentioned in the article.  Perhaps the issue the author really alludes to is the potential value in linking data and (I would argue) warehousing data from multiple institutions to see bigger trends.  Indeed this cross-pollination would help improve the data usage, for organisational effectiveness purposes, mentioned in the article.
  • In the L&D space, this week I watched the recording of a recent LSG webinar from Jane Hart.  Now I have followed Jane online for years which makes it tricky to pick out how much she is confirming my hunches/way of doing things as opposed to leading my thinking with original ideas but this recording really hit home.  Whilst I agree that it is fair to say ‘lets not kid ourselves, people are not going to adopt all of this’ (a point approximately made in the presentation) I have to feel that in an office/knowledge/people based business there has to be much smarter coming together of learning, sharing, collaboration, knowledge/information/resource management, etc. in the kind of ways Jane mentions.  I tweeted at an event earlier in the year that Salesforce-centric employees seemed to always be the example given of where some of this works, but surely there are leaders out there who are implementing appropriate organisational development(s)?

I would argue that joined up systems and data are one thing but, realistically, you need an enterprise where learning is fully embedded culturally.  Here is where education organizations have an advantage as learning is their mission but they should also be able to use the LMS/VLE as their organizational platform, alas I would imagine too many break that shared social hub by using separate Intranets, etc.  Yes there remain specialist functions, that need certain software (arguably a Library Management System would be an example), but for being an employee of a collaborative organization that shares, reflects, learns and adapts as one I really do feel we need to move from breaking things into silos of learning, knowledge, resource, etc. management.

Perhaps it is my own environment and ‘professional genetics’ of training and beliefs that sends me down the above road but surely the above should be the case and I am not diving into ‘original thinking’.  However, when you see so many project management, L&D, learning technology and other advertised posts which are clearly based around old models it does make me wonder.

LIKE event – Content strategies

I have often seen adverts for potentially useful LIKE (London Information & Knowledge Exchange) events without being able to go.  However, last week, I made it to one – the main presentation from the BrilliantNoise digital agency:

The evening mixed presentation about the 6Ps (using the above slides) with participant groups (organised via seating by what food people had ordered in advance – which worked as quite an effective way to get people to mix) thinking about the 6Ps in relation to their work in a way similar to what BrilliantNoise would do with clients in a 2-day workshop.  This was tailored somewhat to the audience, with the presenter not going into specific areas in too much detail, especially items such as taxonomies where she recognized the audience probably held expert level understanding already.  The appendix in the slides is the handout we worked through.

I felt I somewhat took over my group’s conversations and we tended to start our discussions with considering content in terms of my department’s work.  However, we did get a mix of views and others in the group elaborated on their experiences (mostly in law and accountancy firms) in regards to handling training materials and other content via intranets, content management systems, etc.

I found the 6P model a sensible one, recognizing many of its considerations from how I have worked in the past.  Indeed I may articulate these more explicitly when considering ‘Content Strategy’ type work in the future.

The notes I made, to add detail to the above slides, included:

  1. Purpose: Why the content exists, this can match your overall business goal.  [This depends on the purpose of your team and how niche it is in the organization?]
  2. Principles: examples include gov.uk’s “10 Needs” [I think this was talking about these from gov.uk].  Mentioned work with Nokia on their social media strategy, key outcome principle was “consider social opportunity in everything we do”.  Argued these should be high level with support of detailed style guides, etc.  Issue identified in the room was compliance and that getting people to follow principles and processes often proves impossible.  You should also consider how you work in existing company principles, values and other issues.
  3. Platforms: included a mention for wikis, Yammer and Diigo (the latter apparently used by a lot of their clients).  There was discussion in the room around corporate buy in to Microsoft products versus the productivity people have found via use of Web2 tech.  However, whilst the criticism of Office, SharePoint and CMS systems was predictable it was good to hear the point that ‘amplifying’ content is more than just Facebook and Twitter.  It was also acknowledged that content work is too often led by platforms with the tools leading the strategy [same could be said for Learning Management Systems, Authoring Tools, etc].
  4. Processes: these need to be clear, including who needs to be involved at the different stages.  It was argued that this is key for ROI and that you should not view in-house authoring/content as ‘free’.  The group activity again highlighted that, like with principles, whilst things can be clearly set out there remains the tendency for other priorities to overcome work, such as client work meaning people are not available [i.e. “everyone is too busy syndrome”].
  5. People: who is going to be involved, for example, who will be the editors, etc.  Suggestion was that there is no set way of doing things as team roles in relation to content really vary by how the individual business works.  Chief Content Officers are emerging as another c-level acronym, for example, at The Telegraph group.  The logic behind such roles being to encourage people to look beyond traditional editorial duties now that we are working in digital domains.  Challenges were identified in the room, including the silos created by different departments and how to tackle ‘enthusiasm’ where you need to find balance between a free for all of creation by proactive staff against too rigid a structure of control.  Finally, on this point, there was some discussion as to what ‘decency’ means internally with one person in the room telling a story about internal plagiarism of research and how you might need to ensure that recognition of original authorship/research is included in your content policies.
  6. Performance: is not just about page views, ‘likes’ and shares [mention for Forrester’s Engagement Framework (slide 31)].  Research has shown social media sharers often do not read the whole article or even spend much time on the page.  Instead you should try and seek feedback and intervention is key, if something is not being used then you need to think “why?”.  There was a nod here to making people more digitally literate and if content is not being used if there is a need for the author to attend some kind of training.  Benchmarks are difficult, you really need to base them on your hopes and expectations as well as what people have done in the past.

All in all it was an interesting evening [even though I had to leave soon after the main talk finished] and the 6P model is certainly something I will try to keep in mind going forward for making the key considerations, in many areas beyond content too, more explicit.

“Please enter your professional email address” – a fair request?

As mentioned previously, I attend a lot of free webinars, seminars, etc.

My attendance of in-person events has dropped somewhat since my most recent change of jobs (almost two years ago now!) as it is not so easy for me to attend things in the centre of London.  I always tried to take advantage of events ‘in town’, especially the multitude that happen around the academic hub that is Bloomsbury, all too aware that when the time comes for me to abandon London (hopefully career driven rather than meteorological) online events will be all that I have.

One worrying trend I have noticed though, with a number of recent events, is an increase in the insistence of registering with ‘professional’ credentials.  This takes a number of approaches, including:

  • registration forms that block @yahoo/hotmail/gmail addresses or insist on a certain suffix (such as .ac.uk)
  • selection of your organization from a drop down list (usually UK HEIs for the kind of events I want to attend)
  • increasingly clever forms that do not take, for example, 0 or 00000000000 as a valid phone number

Now I have a number of issues with this, including:

  1. I want to attend events for MY personal development, by registering with my personal email address the organizer has all they need to realize this fact.  If they want to know who I am they can Google me still, or look me up on LinkedIn (which I know plenty have done).
  2. If it is an event to create sales or, at least, to encourage follow up sale calls then by not completing my organization you should see that this is PRIMARILY for my personal interest, this is not to say that I will not repay a good event (especially if it was free) with business in the future, this saves the organizers time by not having to do followup calls.
  3. There are a lot of unemployed people who would, no doubt, find webinars useful for keeping up-to-date whilst out of work.  Certainly any charity or academic organization’s webinars, I feel, should not block these people, they may well be your future workforce.
  4. I appreciate some events (I’m thinking of those organized by JISC here) are for a particular community and are effectively prepaid for by those attending organizations via existing funding arrangements.  However, as MOOCs have shown, there is value in opening events up to get input from others, one enlightening comment from ‘the outside’ might make the event useful for the majority.
  5. You can use polls in a webinar to learn more about me than what a registration form typically asks for, this can be used to tailor a session so it is of most use for the majority of the attendees.

Overall, it seems to be a failure by some organizations to realise the importance in person-to-person relationships (and therefore sales) instead thinking about things from too much of a business-to-business/organization-to-organization viewpoint.