Below an outline of the presentation and links to all the sources I used.

Innovation

A short explanation about what an innovation manager does and how an innovation funnel works.

Scenarios

The scenario process is explained and the four scenarios that were create at the Online Educa workshop are presented.

Sources

• Learning Scenarios Website
• Scenario planning op Wikipedia

Quantified Self

The history of the quantifying yourself (and the scientist and artists experimenting with it) is shown. Consumer products show that it is now not only scientist and artist anymore.

Sources

• Quantified Self movement
• Vannevar Bush op Wikipedia
• As We May Think by Vannevar Bush
• Steve Mann
• Wearable Computing: A First Step Toward Personal Imaging, an article by Steve Mann
• Gordon Bell
• MyLifeBits
• Total Recall, a book
• Remember This?, an article in the New Yorker about Gordon Bell
• Facebook Timeline
• Feltron Report
• Een interview met Nicholas Felton
• Nog een interview met Felton
• Fitbit
• Wakoopa
• Counting every moment, an article in The Economist about the Quantified Self
• Laurie Frick, experiments in self tracking

Learning

An exploration about what the quantified self might mean for learning (in organisations).

Sources

• Artistotle by Danny Hillis
• Openness and the Future of Assessment by David Wiley

Risks

There are risks around measuring yourself.

Sources

• Delete, a book
• Why we must remember to delete – and forget – in the digital age, an article in the Guardian about Delete
• The Filter Bubble
• Invisible sieve, an artikel in The Economist about the Filter Bubble
• Big Brother Awards
• Bits of Freedom

Peter de Jager on Change

Peter de Jager talk was titled “Reducing Change to Seven Questions”.

According to de Jager everybody believes that “people resist change”. He then gave us many examples of how we all make big changes in our lives (getting married, bearing children, moving cities, changing jobs). Something like having kids is much bigger than implementing SAP. We embrace the former and we resist the latter. What is the fundamental difference between the one and the other? It is: choice. We don’t resist change, we resist being changed. We resist the most trivial thing if we don’t have control.

This means that the first question around change management will always be: “Why?”. The best thing to get people to accept change is to get them involved.

De Jager likes to reduce change to a set of seven questions:

1. Why? Why is it necessary to do this? Don’t just tell me “because”. Why-questions seem to be taboo in organisations currently. We need to change this mentality and make sure that a real dialogue
2. What’s in it for me? The problem with this is that it is not about you, because it is about the organisation. This is unfortunate because with any change it is top of mind of any employee. It requires some honesty from a corporation to address this question. If as a corporation you don’t know the answer, then at least communicate that.
3. What might go wrong? We fool ourselves if we downplay the risk of change: there is always the change that something might go wrong.
4. What will go wrong? There will be problems, guaranteed. Make sure you are prepared.
5. What are your solutions?
6. What will change?
7. What will stay the same?

Peter de Jager has all the marks of an incessant self-promoter (I do realize I am on that journey too, but do hope I won’t get where he is). He presented without slides and clearly had told this exact story many times before. Unfortunately he still managed to lose me during his seven questions story. I am not even sure I captured them all correctly to be honest.

Nigel Harrison on How to be a True Business Partner through Performance Consulting

Nigel Harrison helps people adopt a consulting approach where they ask their clients what the problems is before they jump to solutions (what he calls solutioneering).

In traditional problem analysis we very often jump to solutions. The majority of the problems in our organizations is from previous solutions. Training is often one of these premature solutions. Harrison mentioned the conspiracy of convenience where everybody knows that it doesn’t deliver business value but it is in the interest of the learner, the trainer and the manager to act like the training is great.

His process for problem analysis works like this. Start by asking a few questions:

• Who is involved in this problem?
• What is happening now? This is about the current state.
• What do we want to see? This is about the desired state.

If you do this you can start asking: What is the value to the business if we close this gap? (Don’t forget to ask: What is the cost of doing nothing?)

He has a very nice image of his seven step process for performance consulting (find some more downloads here):

7 Steps of Performance Consulting

This is a simple process, but it does need skillful application to be effective:

• Building trust and support
• Really get into your business goals outside of L&D
• Drawing a systemic model with your client
• Supportive challenge to quantify the problem
• Creativity to develop integrated solutions

Common difficulties with the approach are:

• Dealing with the pressure for solutioneering
• The positioning of L&D
• Own power and credibility

He closed his session by showing how easy it then is to connect learning investment to business value. If you can’t define the business value then Nigel suggest to stop spending the money on the learning intervention.

Yvonne Earley on Talent Management

Yvonne Earley talked about talent management one of the five strategic objectives from her employer Abbott. They have truly integrated talent into their business planning.

The three fundamental things about the program are:

• Visibility of talent across the functions and across the divisions is really key.
• How do we assess our talent and how accurate is our assessment?
• How do we differentiate our talent? Our top talent should be in our strategic business critical positions so that they can have high impact experiences.

Everybody has a talent profile which serves as an internal resume/CV. The manager makes the assessment decisions around career trajectory, their potential (consists of aspiration, ability and commitment), performance, potential next moves, etc. (Leadership) Potential and Performance are rated in a 9 box two dimensional grid:

9 Box Grid: Potential and Performance

Their onboarding process is as follows:

• Getting prepared (pre-hire)
• Getting started (30 days)
• Getting productive (60 days)
• Broadening perspective (90 days)
• Maintaining alignment (the first year)

Earley had an amazing amount of other slides with frameworks and diagrams. Abbott seems to be a very process heavy organisation!

You can download the presentation as a PDF or watch in on SlideShare:

I’ve used many sources to create the presentation. Here are all the relevant links in context.

In the past I have thought a bit about seredendipity and have written a few blogposts about the topic.

Bert De Coutere describes how Learning and Development is stuck in his blog post Learning got stuck in itself…. Steve Wheeler writes about the differences between upstairs (where the Learning Technologies conference was held) and downstairs (where the learning vendors could tout their wares) in his post titled Upstairs downstairs.

If you are interested to learn more about Omphaloskepsis, check out this Wikipedia article.

The following three companies (among many others) offer benchmarking in the learning space: Corporate University Exchange, BrandonHall and Bersin (their benchmarking data for 2011 is available here).

Youngme Moon has written a book titled Different in which she explains why products in a category all become alike. Harold Jarche reviews the book in a blog post titled Different – Review. In that review he refers to Tim Kastelle who lifts stwo diagrams out of Moon’s book in Be Great at One Thing. I remade the diagrams using the excellent Inkscape.

The Wikipedia page about the Cynefin Framework isn’t bad. Dave Snowden’s Harvard Business Review article about his framework and how it can help with leadership is titled Leader’s Framework for Decision Making (and maybe I should credit Mary E. Boone for once).

Automattic is an amazing company. They create and host the wordpress.com platform (more information). The Automattic creed is available on Matt Mullenweg’s website. Matt gets interviewed here. This map shows where all the “Automatticians” are located. Check out this page if you want to know more about Automattic or are interested in working for them.

If you want to know more about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) you should start here and then quickly move on to what Stephen Downes writes in his piece What a MOOC Does. The MOOC example I decided to reference in the presentation is Digital Storytelling also known as DS106.

The term Edupunk was coined in Jim Groom’s post The Glass Bees and quickly got its own Wikipedia article. Stephen Downes tied together a few good posts about the topic here and this article on BlogHer could also be a good start.

The big open online courses that are now fashionable and are starting to get a commercial face (Coursera and Udacity) owe their debts to MOOCs and the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU).

If you want to be kept up to date about learning technology “on the edge” then your best bet is likely to pay close attention to Audrey Watters’ blog Hack Education (not mentioned in my presentation).

Mozilla‘s mission page is here and it is worthwile reading their whole manifesto. Their Open Badges program is getting a lot of deserved attention and could always use more participants. You can read about all their learning plans on their Learning Wiki, this is also the place to go to if you want to get involved.

If you are interested in becoming more entrepreneurial and innovative, regardless of whether you have your own business or are working in a company/organisation, you can’t do better than read The Lean Startup.

1. To what extent to you believe soft skills can be trained online?
“Believe” is probably the right verb for this question. Learning technology is still too often driven by opinions. Having said so, I definitely believe in it. First: a lot of soft skills have become online skills: how you behave in an online community, how you share knowledge through microblogging, or how you can be a good team member in an international virtual team. Additionally, it’s perfectly possible to practice all sorts of soft skills online. I see a natural increase of the “fidelity” of the practice process: from practicing in simple webchats, to practice in teleconferences, to practice with webcams or maybe even telepresence spaces. Finally, I think good design enables training of all sorts of skills.

2. What developments in the field of online training of soft skills do you find most promising? Can you name an example?
The biggest “opportunity space” is gaming. Recently I have been investigating two examples of games that try to train soft skills online:

• X-Team is a 3D game in which you have to visit as many pagodes as possible, before getting to the finish line in time. These pagodes are at islands that can only be reached through bridges. Each bridge can only be crossed a limited number of times (you are with 12, but only 6 people can cross the bridge, wat do you do?). Everything is measured, making it easy to guide a teambuilding process through facilitation and adjusting the game’s parameters.
• Code 4 from Hubbub and Demovides is a game that is played in runs of three weeks. This video explains the game (Dutch):

3. What do you think is the biggest challenge in training soft skills online?
Practice is key in developing skills, so that’s the biggest challenge: How do you get people to do what they find really difficult? How do you get them beyond their fear of trying new behavior? Well developed games might just be the solution to this.

4. In the evolution of learning, are there things you hope/desire and/or you’re afraid of? Alan Kay has a famous definition of technology: “Technology is everything that didn’t exist when you were born”. His pal Danny Hillis has an even better definition: “Technology is everything that doesn’t work yet”. We no longer call an elevator, technology. So I’m looking forward to seeing things we still call technology, actually work. For a nice example of how that could look like for smartphones with apps, read this (under “Why Mobile Apps Must Die”).

Being afraid is not something that fits in with how I look at life. I think we, as people, will always figure out our relationship with technology. But if I have to name something, I worry about the integrity of the Internet with the web as a platform for innovation on top of it. The five ”stacks” (as Bruce Sterling calls them): Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook are all working hard to build closed ecosystems. We are going to suffer from this in the coming years and it will probably really have to hurt before these silos will be opened up.

5. What weblogs, people or organisations inspire you?
The person I learn a lot from is Stephen Downes. He writes a daily newsletter about this things he, as a philosopher, technologist and education theorist, finds interesting. His newsletter is published under a Creative Commons license and you can freely subscribe. Additionally, I keep a close eye on George Siemens and the Internet Time Alliance and I try to make time to read Audrey Watters: a learning technology journalist with a punk attitude. I keep on top of internet technology in general by listening to Guardian Tech Weekly and the shows of Leo Laporte (especially This Week in Tech). Thinkers such as Clay Shirky, Yochai Benkler, Lawrence Lessig and Douglas Rushkoff guide me.

One of my personal heroes is Martin Dougiamas, inventor of Moodle. It’s his natural leadership and personal character that have made Moodle as succesful as it is today, making even a giant such as Blackboard take notice.

Other organisations that inspire me are those that democratize education and technology in a non-commercial way. Think of Mozilla architects of the open internet (they also have a learning outfit and work hard at an Open Badges infrastructure), or the Peer 2 Peer University, Tactical Technology Collective and Ushahidi. It is no coincidence that all these projects are open-source. I believe in the value of open-source a lot, from a practical and a moral standpoint.

Deze presentatie legt in vijf delen uit waarom de trend om jezelf te meten (quantified self) grote gevolgen gaat hebben voor hoe wij in de toekomst gaan leren (je kunt de presentatie ook als PDF downloaden en dan werken de overlay quotes bij de foto’s wel):

Innovatie

Een korte uitleg over wat een innovatie manager doet en over de innovatie funnel.

Scenario’s

Het scenario proces wordt uitgelegd en de vier scenarios die uit een workshop op de Online Educa zijn gekomen worden toegelicht.

Bronnen

• Learning Scenarios Website
• Scenario planning op Wikipedia

Quantified Self

De geschiedenis van de trend om jezelf te meten wordt uit de doeken gedaan. Met consumentenvoorbeelden is te zien dat het niet meer alleen voor wetenschappers en artiesten is weggelegd.

Bronnen

• Quantified Self movement
• Vannevar Bush op Wikipedia
• As We May Think door Vannevar Bush
• Steve Mann
• Wearable Computing: A First Step Toward Personal Imaging, een artikel van Steve Mann
• Gordon Bell
• MyLifeBits
• Total Recall, een boek
• Remember This?, een artikel in de New Yorker over Gordon Bell
• Facebook Timeline
• Feltron Report
• Een interview met Nicholas Felton
• Nog een interview met Felton
• Fitbit
• Wakoopa
• Counting every moment, een artikel in The Economist over the Quantified Self
• Laurie Frick, experiments in self tracking

Leren

Een verkenning van wat de Quantified Self trend kan betekenen voor leren (in organisaties).

Bronnen

• Artistotle door Danny Hillis
• Openness and the Future of Assessment door David Wiley

Risico’s

Er kleven ook risico’s aan jezelf meten.

Bronnen

• Delete, een boek
• Why we must remember to delete – and forget – in the digital age, een artikel in de Guardian over Delete
• The Filter Bubble
• Invisible sieve, een artikel in The Economist over the Filter Bubble
• Big Brother Awards
• Bits of Freedom

Presentatie

De volledige presentatie kan hier als PDF gedownload worden.

Ikea’s Human Resources department actively uses these videos to share how their culture lives and it can be really be a tool that engages people with the company. Storytelling is all about gaining trust. Authenticity is important. This means there is a big difference between a message coming from high above or a message coming from “the workfloor”. I personally find these type of stories (consciously not using a big Ikea logo in the back) of which they have more than a thousand(!) incredibly valuable. According to Shelton they are also timeless.

She then shared the example of the “home furnishing introduction”. This was an assignment where she, as a learning person, had to help the home furnishing manager with some of her goals around how people should be engaged with home furnishing. She created a story about a guy who is a bit in mess and who starts reflecting on himself through his own home. She played us the first episode. The film was made with as little spoken language as possible as it had to be translated into 28 languages. The video is then used in a two-hour lightly facilitated workshop.

If you want to have maximum impact with your story (on learning), then it is very important to have discussions after watching the film, usually by asking questions about the video.

One more thing I learned from this session is that there is a circular Ikea store built in 1965 Stockholm inspired by New York’s Guggenheim, interesting!

Ikea Store inspired by Guggenheim

His students at the university do everything (and he means everything) using blogs and Twitter. He stopped giving lectures and instead works with students in a single place a few times a week. This makes it very hard for him to follow what is going on. The number of posts that are generated in his courses are too many for him to read them all. If you are facilitating a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) this gets worse. This is why we do learning analytics. This has a lot of attention now with a conference and a Society for Learning Analytics Research

Nike+ Fuelband

Next he mentions the quantified self movement: self-knowledge to self-tracking. If a tool gives you a good mirror about your behaviour, then this might make it easier to actually change your behaviour. He showed many examples from the consumer market (i.e. Nike+ Fuelband or the Fitbit. He is trying to see if you could develop similar applications for learning. Imagine setting a goal for how many words you want to learn every day and a device that shows you how many you’ve learned for the day. He wants to create awareness in the student, so that they can “drive” themselves better. This is different from the current efforts in learning analytics where they are mostly used to give more information to the institution (Duval doesn’t like that). He showed us an example of the dashboard that he uses to see the student’s activity on the blogs and on Twitter. The students have access to this information too and can see that data for their peers: openness and full transparency. This measuring leads to externalities that aren’t necessarily good (think students writing tweetbots to get good score). Duval depends on the self-regulating abilities of the group of students.

At the beginning of each course he tells his student that everything will be open in the course. He might have a debate about this, but he never gives in. He doesn’t think you can become an engineer without having the ability to engage openly with the society. If a student has very conscionable objections around privatey, then he sometimes allows them to publish under an alias.

If you collect a lot of data about people, then you can make technology enhanced learning more of an exact (i.e. hard) science. He wrote a paper titled: Dataset-driven Research for Improving Recommender Systems for Learning.

This whole field has a couple of issues:

• What can we measure? Time, time spent artefact produced, socal interactions, location. Many other things might be important.
• Privacy might become an issue: we will know so many things about everybody. One solution might be Attention Trust which defines four consumer rights for your (attention) data: property, mobility, economy and transparency. Our idea about privacy is changing, he referred to Public Parts by Jeff Jarvis.
• When does support become enslaving (see this blogpost)

His solution for the problems (once again): openness.

Duval’s talk had a lot of similarities with the talk I will be delivering tomorrow. Luckily we both come from slightly different angles and don’t share all our examples. If you attended his talk and didn’t enjoy his, then you can skip mine! If you loved it, come and get more tomorrow morning.

Theo Rinsema, General Manager Microsoft Netherlands

Rinsema talked about new ways of working (“het nieuwe werken”), a concept that in the Netherlands has been appropriated by Microsoft. His first point was that current times have accelerated the amount of change and that this means that we will have to learn contineously. Learning and change are very much related. The causes for this speed of change can be found in a couple of trends that drive change in the virtual world: cloud computing, data explosion, social computing, apps, natural interfaces, connections, computing ecosystems and mobile workplaces. Cloud computing, for example, lowers the barrier of entry in a market. This create more competition and this accelerates development.

Microsoft in the Netherlands went through a change process (1100 people work for Microsoft in the Netherlands). The focused on productivity (can we really become more productive every year or are we just working more hours?), talent (how can we attract more women to our mostly male organization?) and the boundaries between work life and private life (how do we solve the puzzle where our offices are only utilised 24% of the time, people like the flexibility, but don’t like their private/work mix). They were on a multi-year journey where they one of the key elements was creating trust between employees and about creating real conversations between staff (I wonder whether he has read the Cluetrain Manifesto).

They created a few things:

• “Ruimte voor groei-dagen”: an event where the whole organizations get together and works on personal growth.
• “Raad van Anders”: they have about 50.000 visitors a year coming to check out their offices to see how they are working. Rinsema thought that Microsoft was starting to believe too much in themselves. They instituted a “board of others”, inviting non-Microsoft people (young people, government workers, women, disabled people) to come into their offices, have open doors everywhere and then get feedback on what Microsoft does (with the press present). This enables Microsoft to “see with different eyes” (Proust would have said: “see with new eyes”).
• “Silverlight Society a.k.a. project Crowley”: an alternate reality game in which Microsoft staff thought they were in a pilot from Microsoft research about collaborating in a virtual world. Members of this elite group of beta-tester had to solve more and more complex problems day by day forcing them to collaborate with each other and use social networks. 290 people participated.

I appreciated Rinsema’s talk for sounding authentic and for not mentioning SharePoint as an enabler for these new ways of working. This means he is smarter than 95% of the collaboration consultants in this space.

Erwin Blom on the Social Media Revolution

Erwin Blom from Fast Moving Targetsis a journalist who got addicted to the Internet in 1994 when he was working for Dutch media outfit VPRO. He produced a music program for the radio and found out that he suddenly wasn’t the expert anymore, his community of listeners knew more than him. He later became heaf of new media for the VPRO and now works for himself looking at how the net changes many aspects of society.

He showed Draw Something as an example of where people learn very naturally: his children play the game to learn English and learn how to visualize. It is incredible how quickly that game grew and for how much the creators were bought by Zynga. Another example of using game-based things is Codecademy. Another example is Foodzy. It teaches you about your own behaviours around food and teaches you a lot about food. Blom considers YouTube the largest collection of lessons in the world. In general these things work for one person, but they work even better if there are multiple people doing the same thing.

With social media everybody now is a publisher. We have endless means to tell each other stories. We underutilize the potential of storytelling (an important skill). We are now all connected and can ask each other questions and can have good conversations with people that were out of our reach (in many dimensions) before. Knowledge is now available everywhere, we need to learn how to find and select the information. Network building skills and “personal branding” skills are important for future proofing. You have to be present on this platforms and create narratives about yourselves.

He showed a nice example of what his daughter learns from her blog. She is learning about how to tell a story, about how to write headlines, about dealing with commentary about and she learns discipline (blogging twice a week). His son writes at Game Testers United and learns similar lessons. Blom asks himself why this isn’t a part of their school education. Can’t we make schools media production companies?

The Tulser offices

Tulser organised a masterclass with Etienne Wenger-Trayner at their fabulous Maastricht offices. The title (in Dutch) was “Slimmer werken in (online) communities” (“Working smarter in (online) communities”).

Learning How To Work Smarter

Jos Arets, Vivian Heijnen and Joost Robben kicked off the day. Their analysis of the issues around learning and development wasn’t groundbreaking, but is is interesting to see a company who have made this criticism a core part of their value proposition toward companies (they gave us a book titled: Preferably no Training).

According to them there is a lot of pressure on HR in general and the learning and development organization in particular. The shift from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy has profound consequences. The “Internet Storm” has only just started. It is starting to become a commodity and will the basis for completely different business models. If you see how the Internet has changed the music business, the newspaper business, the book business you can imagine how this will affect the learning organization. In most large organizations this shift has not yet happened in learning, they still work according to the old industrial paradigm: knowledge from books → in trainers heads → in participants heads → right or wrong knowledge at the workplace level → only 20-25% workers of the organization. A fast historical narrative would go something like this: Trainers delivered training, participants started to hate training so we develop e-learning instead and now participants hate e-learning too.

What are the problems in Learning and Development?

• Alignment: HRD sits outside the business
• Distribution (just in time, scalable, etc.)
• Wrong solutions for 80% of the performance problems
• Focus on formal learning
• Business models don’t really exist
• (Business) Metrics

Tulser’s solution to these problems is to change the focus from training towards performance. Most problems on the workplace are not caused by a gap in the knowledge of the people working in that workplace. They also advocate a shift away from competences towards a focus on tasks. They want to move away from e-learning toward micro-learning and performance support and from courses to resources and finally from classroom learning towards social and personalized learning.

Their final conclusion: “adapt or die”.

Social Learning Strategies

Etienne Wenger-Trayner

Wenger-Trayner, writer of the infamous Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, opened his talk by talking about his recent marriage and about finding a companion. His talk will be very much analogous to that story, you should try to find learning companionship. A good companion can make you a bigger “me” and that is really meaningful. In learning you might be able to find this in communities. The ability to have the experience of meaningful engagement is where we will be able to find informal learning.

Great quote from Einstein: “The positive development of a society in the absence of creative, independently thinking, critical individuals is as inconceivable as the development of an individual in the absence of the stimulus of the community”

A community of practice is a self-governed learning partnership among people who:

• share challenges, passion or interest
• interact regularly
• learn from and with each other
• improve their ability to do what they care about
• define in practice what competence means in their context (he gave a great example where it was actually impossible to do the job according to how the people were trained, they had to find out their own methodologies)

In gangs they learn how to survice on the streets, in organizations they provide better service to clients.

Communities of practice is not a technique invented by a consultancy. It is a natural human technique.

In the industrial mode of production, the source of value creation is in the design, the formal is driving the informal and you leave your identity at the door. As we shift, we will see that formal will start to support the informal. The source of value creation is knowledge companies are conversations (compare the Cluetrain Manifesto). In a knowledge economy the distinction between soft and hard skills are not so clear anymore.

Next he started answering questions from the audience:

• Is technology important? Yes, it can make a difference but it barely ever is the driver and it is not necessary for succes. You should think about the community first and the technology second.
• In an organizations do you need to seed the community and be active to get it started? Good communities usually have people “occupying the space” and mature communities are actually full of leadership. And there is a difference between leadership and facilitation. The best leaders are “social artists” that have true ability to create a space where people can engage and also manage to avoid group think.

How to Implement Social Learning and Value Creation

One thing you can try to do is “Horizontalization”, the negotiation of mutual relevance (as an alternative to the Provider-Recipient relationship). The best way to understand the notion of a community of practice is to imagine a social discipline of learning. He has created a little framework with the key processes for this discipline (bring practice in, push practice forward, create self-representation and reflect and selfdesign):

A Social Discipline of Learning

Practitioners need a community to:

• help each other solve problems (this is a very fundamental reason to participate, much better than the usual knowledge sharing imperative)
• hear each other’s stories and avoid local blindness
• reflect on their practice and improve it
• build shared understanding
• keep up with change
• cooperate on innovation
• find synergy across structures
• find a voice and gain strategic influence

One question he often gets is why you should share knowledge if knowledge = power. Wenger-Trayner agrees that knowledge = power, but that doesn’t mean you have to keep it yourself if there is a platform for building a reputation (reflection from Hans: this is where Yammer currently is lacking a little bit).

He showed the following slide nearly as a teaser (apologies, it is hard to read, the top right says: 1. exchanges, 2. productive inquiries, 3. building shared understanding, 4. producing assets, 5. creating standards, 6. formal access to knowledge, 7. visits):

A Typology of Learning Activities

This is an extremely rich picture that shows the broad range of possibilities for informal learning.

Social learning can also be a strategy with communities of practice as the steward of strategic capabilities towards performance. The circle is as follows: Strategy → Domains → Communities → Practices → Performance → Learning → Sharing → Stewardship → Strategy. If you don’t do this, then you are not doing knowledge management. This makes social learning a strategic responsibility and consists of managing a portfolio of domains on a continuum of formality.

What is the difference between a network and a community? There are not two different things, instead they are different aspects of the learning fabric of an organization (i.e. characteristics of a social system).

One thing to follow up is to look at the Value-creation assessment framework.

Only by making current and potential business models more explicit will it be possible fundamentally change the way learning operates in an organisation.

Willem Manders and I are starting a year of playing with business models. We need help.

Join us!

Wrong Thing #1

A random startup founder: “Sales are great! We just closed our second round of financing for 25 million dollars”

Every business has two markets:

1. For goods and services (to your customers)
2. For itself (to investors)

During the tech boom number 2 was more important than 1. According to Searls we are in a tech boom now. The conceit of big data today is that the system understands better what you want than you do yourself. Searls deconstructed the concept of the loyalty card which started as a concept in the early nineties:

Google NGram on Loyalty Card (1950 - now)

His main point: they don’t work are a bad idea and are just a retail fad. Read more here

Wrong Thing #2

Avoiding customers and treating them like cattle or worse. It is now standard practice to talk about “acquiring,” “capturing,” “locking in,” “owning” and “managing” customers. On the net we use the client/server metaphor a lot (that was chosen because slave/master didn’t sound good). The cookie is the main tool for the server to keep track what is happening with the client. Searls tells us how Phil Windley writes up the history of ecommerce:

1995: Invention of the Cookie.

The End.

The one right thing

Loving your customers and letting them leave. He uses Trader Joes as a an example:

• No gimmicks
• No advertising
• No loyalty cards
• No discounts
• Don’t do retail trade shows
• Never say “consumer” (always say “customer”)
• Marketing = talking to customers

Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) Movement

Project VRM started in 1996. Its goal is to provide tools that make customers independent of vendors and better able to engage with vendors. Basically to create instruments of personal intentions. With VRM the customer drives. A couple of examples:

• Run your own personal cloud. Examples include Mydex, Azigo and Trustfabric
• Program the way your cloud interacts on the live web. An example is kynetx.
• Set your own terms of service. It should be possible to say things like: “don’t track me outside your site or service”, “give me my data in a usable form that I specify”, “wipe my data when I say so”, “here is my fourth party who represents me” or “here is my trust network”.
• Get full value from your digital assets. See pde.cc.
• Personal Request for Proposals (RFP): “I have 200 dollars and need x and y”

Summary

Free customers will always create more value than captive ones. His new book The Intention Economy will be out in May 2012 and more information will soon be available on the Customer Commons website.

How we work is changing. But where we work isn’t. Over the last ten years a new way of working has emerged, along with some people who live it every day. They’re available 24/7. They network endlessly, and then plug their skills into others’ in surprising combinations. They choose when and how they do what they do, on their terms. They don’t want job security – they want career fluidity. We call them free radicals. And they’re creating the future of work. But when they look for a place to do all that, the options are weirdly outdated: office, home, or on the go – say, a café. Those are actually poor choices. Offices mean fixed cost and daily routine. Home is isolated and full of distractions. And cafés get old after the second latté.

The speakers at this panel were from Grind (beautiful concept and beautiful website, check it out!), the Freelancers Union, Coolhunting and Behance.

To connect somebody to the workspace now comes at the same costs and space requirements of a single laptop. This is happening in a time where there is a big amount of distrust towards big corporations. The space for free-radicals is growing fast (it will grow 25% in 2013). We seem to all become a little more selfish: we expect to be fully utilised, do what we love, work on our terms, we have little time for bureaucracy and want more meritocracy. If you are in a job that doesn’t give you these things, then because of the lack of fraction for doing something for yourself, you now have few excuses for going on working for large corporations. One excuse that is still there is the lack of economic security (things like health insurance). The infrastructure for creating that safety net is now being build around the power and resources of the group.

Scott Belsky talked about how we can create the feedback, refinement and discipline that comes with working in large organizations for free radicals too. Promotion doesn’t exist anymore as a way to gauge your progress. He expects to see meritocratic communities spring up to fulfil this need and co-working spaces to help this process.

It is now increasingly possible to be a free radical inside a company. It is possible to adopt this methodology of work within this corporate structure (to be honest: this is something that I am trying to do more and more myself). The more successful you are in doing this, the more likely you are to do your best work. There are two clear benefits for this for companies: the first one is the real estate costs going down, the second is the advantage to have a more fluid way of pulling together a bespoke team of expert free radicals and make proper use of talent. So it makes sense for organizations to try and reduce the friction to make free radicals succeed.

One problem is that our current education system doesn’t prepare us for this kind of life- and workstyle. High schools are trying to mimic the cubicle workplace (via Audrey Watters):

Highschool trying to mimic a cubicle farm

One thing that is enabling this free radical revolution is the democratization of professional tools. You used to have to “join the mothership” to be able to get access to the tools you need to do your job. Now you can get these tools for 99 bucks. The documentary PressPausePlay addresses this point:

Personal marketing is very important. There is a little bit of a taboo around self-marketing in the creative world, but you have to spend some time making sure people can see the work that you have done. This led to a little bit of a discussion on whether free radicals need some sort of collective brand. The panel was divided on this: some thought it was a bit contrary to the point of being your own (wo)man. Others thought it was important to popularize the notion and one panelist even thought it was very important for the movement to put a proper label on it and create a group identity.

The Princes of Serendip

This was a big panel (five people from IBM, Deloitte Center for the Edge, Dell and the Community Roundtable) talking about serendipity. The word serendipity was coined by Horace Walpole who formed it from the Persian fairy tale The three princes of Serendip. The session was introduced as follows:

Call it chance, luck, or juju, serendipity is the act of unexpectedly finding something of value. It is the muse of innovation and a silent driver of business; consider how Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of the antibiotic penicillin revolutionized medicine, reducing suffering across the entire world. From the world changing to the mundane task of finding relevant information on Google+ or Twitter, serendipity is the mysterious force that gives us the breaks that many of us seek. But what is serendipity? How do you encourage it? Is there a downside to it? How does it apply to work, art or play? Can you design for serendipity? We say you can and should. Whether you’re building the next super social network, doing scientific research, or building a community, there are steps you can take and skills you can develop to help you recognize and act on it. It is more than just naturally being fortuitous; rather, it takes practice to get lucky.

A very quick defition of serendipity would be: “the accidental discovery that leads to unexpected value”. How does innovation relate to serendipity? Innovation (unlike invention) needs to be accepted by society. There are things you can do to increase the chances of serendipity. One panel member calls that “facilitated creativity”. Interestingly this was the second time this week that I heard somebody recommending to have community management at the executive level. Why? Because facilitation is critical especially in virtual spaces. They then talked a lot about what kind of conscious design decisions you can make for your physical spaces when you want to encourage serendipity. These were a bit obvious (“obvious” would be my summary of the session): long lunch tables, open spaces and unconference type meetings, diversity in the room, introducing constraints, transparent glass walls, etc.

Kulasooriya made an interesting point: ambient location technologies (as discussed by Amber Case) will make cities even more important as “spiky places” for serendipitous connections. A term that relates to this is “coindensity”.

Yang and Ishii

George Ishii (founder of GENi which spun out Yammer and Sizhao Yang (one of the creators of the horrible but effective Farmville before it was sold to Zynga) both have a big history in the startup world and are now working on BetterWorks. They talked about the trends in business software.

When you think of enterprise software you think of big monolithic software like Oracle that costs multiple millions of dollars, you have an army of consultants implementing it (based on a series of requirements) and the implementation takes months. The price point of this software was high, because the only way to distribute this type of software was through an expensive sales force. The focus was on the decision maker, rather than on the user. The interface didn’t matter: who cares what the end-user sees? ssFrom around 2005 the consumer Internet started to create a whole new set of expectations from this type of technology. These expectations are created a shift in the type of enterprise software that gets created.

Ishii described five best practices for designing for consumer enterprise software:

• Instant gratification. The first encounter with the software should create value for the user immediately. Two questions are important: What is the goal? How do we educate the user?
• Focus on smaller workgroups. Allow managers of smaller groups in an organization to adopt the software at a local level. This means you could also create a first experience for the manager and that it should come with a low pricepoint. Virality in the distribution mechanism can only come from the small workgroup.
• Design matters (he showed us the ultimate bad example: LingsCars. The age of boring interfaces is going away and we are getting a new fun and friendly visual design sensibility. Design is not just about being pretty, it is also about information architecture and how you deal with the cognitive load of the users (that is why you use round corners versus sharp corners).
• Use before you buy. IF you allow the user to try the software then they will focus less on long feature lists. Again you should focus on activities that create value. You are bringing the tail end of the sales process into the decision making process.
• Incentivize distribution. Adoption of enterprise software is really hard. One one of doing this is to make sure that people share. You can reward viral behaviour (compare how Dropbox gives out 500MB of space for a successful referal). Good designers will design “nudges” for reinvites. Another incentive you can use is privacy (SlideShare is doing this). The distribution should be an intergral part of the solution you are offering to the customer. The biggest thing you can do though is to create engagement.

There is a whole new category that is starting to transform different verticals like HR, PM, Storage, Communication, Collaboration.

Entrepreneurs jumping on VCs

Mitch Kapor (Kapor Capital), Philip Bronner and Robert Hutter, moderated by Betsy Corcoran started by framing the problem with current education. Each of the speakers showed shocking graphs of educational attainment, inequity and the job market.

Philip Bronner immediately lost my intellectual respect when he started talking about how Novak Biddle invested in Blackboard around 15 years ago turning Blackboard into the de facto operating system of education. I do hope that this isn’t true. If it is, then I would consider that an affirmation of the problems, rather than part of the solution. Bronner then went on to define education as consisting of three pieces: content, somebody who teaches you the content and a way to certify that you know the content. Education as content: pretty shocking.

Hutter talked about data (Kapor would call them “anecdotes”) about programs that make good use of digital tools getting objective better results. It is Hutters goal to help scale up this programs and the last three years two things have happened that will have a big impact in this: campus wifi is everywhere now and batteries have made a humongous leap forward.

This whole panel is a complete mystery to me (to not call it surreal). Discussing education as if it is a market just sound plain wrong. I believe that the one thing that should have been discussed is the question of the actual purpose of education and who is responsible for providing it. I would suspect that each of the panelists would give a very different answer to that question and that I would have a fourth answer. They seemed to be discussing the wrong leverage points (Kapor started addressing it when he talked about how affluent the US has become and that technolology is necessary but not sufficient to solve the problems). I would have loved to hear what the panelists would say and think about this New York Times piece on education in Finland.