Collaboration zeitgeist

Collaboration feels like one of those zeitgeist topics.  I have been sense-making on this topic for a few months now.  Here are a few of the things that have been interesting me.

Two comments to start with. 

First, collaboration isn't something that can be converted or reified as if it is something concrete.  It is a complex responsive process in which participants actively engage with each other through conversation.  The conversation can be face-to-face or in print or online; it can therefore be synchronous or a-synchronous.  The conversations are emergent and self-organising and, to be successful, power needs to be shared.  

Second, collaboration has a sense of the 'new black' about it; it's not a new idea because, as humans, we have always collaborated by learning from each other.  However, the web is the engine of change; it is connecting people and amplyfying ideas at massive scale. 

The collaboration pyramid

I like Oscar Berg's collaboration pyramid because of the way it draws attention to the hidden value creating layers in organisations.  Therefore, rather than treating collaboration as something else to be done, perhaps the first step is just to recognise what's already happening.

Nodes and Networks

Harold Jarche blogs regularly on networked working and I'd recommend this piece 'It's all about networks'.  Things that stand out for me are that collaborative working will require a break from traditional organisational thinking; from having a position in a hierarchy to a node in a network.  The collaborative enterprise will require porous communities of people operating in looser hierarchies and stronger networks.  For example, the multinational food company Danone has created a 'Neworking Attitude' programme to shift a culture of localised, hierarchical decision making to one of cross-function/country collaboration.

Collaborating with customers

Extending the nodes and networks idea can also include collaboration with customers. Managers at the toymaker Lego saw that not everything needed to be developed internally and it draws on the interests of its loyal fan base to develop ideas for products.  

Chief Collaboration Officer?

Should there be a formal organisational response to collaboration?  There have been a number of articles and blogs about this over the past few months about the role of a Chief Collaboration Officer.

Can one person or function be responsible for collaboration?  If there is a case for creating such a role it is because organisations are seeing the opportunities that  greater connectedness, enabled by the web,is unleashing and that this then requires attention on a collaboration strategy and investment in relevant systems and tools.  And is this a new role or an extension of say the CEO, CIO or CLO?

Ten faces of management development

At the moment, I am working on the design of a leadership programme for new leaders. It's going to be a formal introduction to the topic of leadership to make sure that all new starters have got a grounding in the basics.  There will be a programme of 1 day workshops that will be accompanied by an online facility with a range of tools and resources.  It will add up to a solid piece of competence development I think...

...and then I came across a recent survey done by Jane Hart, written up in her blog Learning in a Social Workplace.  This showed that only 14% of respondents felt that company training was an essential way for them to learn in the workplace.   

It reminded me of a thought-provoking paper that I read  a while back called 'Ten Faces of Management Development' written by Stan Lees at Lancaster University in 1992.

Lees' analysis is interesting in that, of the 10 faces defined, only two or three might meet some kind of test as being for a formal learning purpose with an emphasis on performance. The rest tend to move away from comptence development as being the principal justification towards a concern for social conditioning into the-way-things-are-done-around-here. 

'Faces' like socialising managers into the corporate ethos or as a means of  regulating and administering succession management, or as compensation, i.e. learning as part of reward or in a ceremonial role to mark managers' journeys through organisations. 

Lees' observations reflect my experience, especially in management development.  And whilst on the surface formal training programmes may be justified in terms of raising performance - just like the programme I'm developing at the moment - maybe the underlying reasons might not be about training, or at least not in a formal sense. 

Perhaps it has always been the social element of our learning that's been important to us; the storytelling, the 'gathering around a camp fire'.  Jane Hart's survey shows that people place more value in social learning than formal company training.  In some ways not much has changed in 20 years since Lees published his paper.  But we are entering a time where online tools are creating step changes in the ways in which we can learn from and collaborate with each other and these will reduce both the performative and social justifications of traditional programmes.

Gennchi genbutsu...Go and see

One of the people that I follow on Twitter @orgsci tweeted Genchi Genbutsu....go see, to understand.  So I did and discovered that this is a concept from Lean Thinking.  I liked its clear direction to just 'go and see' and it captures succinctly my interest in using workplace action to inform management learning.

 

I also found this distinction between Western and Eastern learning ideologies, which is relevant to this post.  To quote from Pete Abilla's shmula blog:

In Lean Thinking, “Go and See” is more of a management mindset than a technique or tool applied. To contrast, here are two approaches to learning about and solving problems (these are general comments):

• In the West: problems are learned about and solved in a conference room or in a boardroom; there is distance. Decisions are made from a powerpoint presentation and excel spreadsheets.
• In the East: problems are learned about and solved where it actually happens; in manufacturing, fulfillment and distribution, and like occupations – that means on the factory or shop floor.

In their article in Organization Science (1991: 2 (1): 40-57), ‘Organizational learning and communities of practice: toward a unified view of working, learning and innovation’, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid said:

Most conventional learning theory, including that implicit in most training courses, tends to endorse the valuation of abstract knowledge over actual practice and as a result to separate learning from working and, more significantly, learners from workers.

I think 'going and seeing' should be part of management learning practice.  We should ask managers to observe their practice and use the classroom as a reflective space.

There are three pedagogical reasons for this (with acknowledgement to the work of Professor Robert Chia).

1. The imperative to stay with the ambivalence and ambiguity of the not-yet-known

Managers have to act into the not-yet-known.  Models and theories might well provide some pointers but they also create the illusion that management practice can somehow be contained within a simplistic 2x2 matrix or a Venn diagram of overlapping circles.  If management practice is ambiguious then Management Learning practice should reflect the same challenges.  It should be a critical and reflexive form of inquiry that is focused on observed practices as they emerge and not limited to a diet of models that dulls the inquiry process and separates learning from working.   
       

2. How a situation emerges crucially shapes its meaning, interpretation and significance

In the course of their work, managers develop strategies, create visions, make statements about values and required behaviours and organise work.  But they do so as active members rather than separate from the systems they are trying to influence, and so, unlike a machine, human responses cannot be pre-programmed.  What happens is that when managers act people create their own meaning, interpretation and significance from what has been said or done.  Managers in turn have to respond to the responses and so the situation branches in many possible directions that cannot be predicted in advance. The alternative would only be possible if people really did respond like automatons to managerial direction.

3.  The significance and importance of experimental action as a means of surprising ourselves and, therefore, breaking new ground in our self-understanding.

We already know from research that at least 80% of  management knowledge comes from experience.  If we accept this as being valid, then it must also change the way in which management learning is practiced.  Formal programmes should, as minimum, be redesigned or possibly even replaced by approaches that place experimentation and action at the centre of how learning is done.  This would require the learner to experience the challenge of making and formulating their own inquiries from which they would break new ground in self-understanding. 

Conclusion

'Go and see' feels like a direct and practical way of expressing something rather important about managerial practice. My expectation is that this approach would enable managers to generate valuable workplace knowledge that is focused on performance rather than theory.  What surprises me is its absence from current learning practice.  Perhaps the forces of tradition and inertia perpetuate the status quo? 

I'm working on approaches that would integrate observational practice with more traditional management learning.  Part of what I'm considering is how best to get managers to do this well so that they can collect data of interest.

Future or present: development planning vs. development reflection?

Christopher Saeger posted this item recently on the Social Learning Community about the 70:20:10 model and training planning, having seen it in the training magazine LinkedIn group.  It got me thinking about the notion of development planning with its implicit focus on the future, rather than the present, and what's being taken-for-granted.

Question: "70/20/10 - Looking for discussion guides for people leaders

What questions should people leaders ask to help their team members create a development plan that is a mix of 70% on the job experiences. 20% coaching/feedback and 10% formal training?

 We would like to create a simple guide that asks questions like: 

• What project or assignments might stretch you?
• What team would broaden your perspective and expand your network?
• What kind of peer interaction would be valuable

Christopher's reflection was that:

'somehow it just didn't feel right to me. My take is that the 70:20:10 is over time not an annual event. I wanted to get your reactions'

In summary some of the responses were that:

1. 70:20:10 is not a prescriptive recipe. It simply reflects the way people tend to learn, mostly in the workplace and with others. (@charlesjennings)
2. The model is a statement of 'what is' not necessarily what 'should be' targeted (@britz)
3. Developing some guidelines to help a people manager with development objective setting during an annual review process isn't a necessarily a bad thing to do. It helps both manager and individual de-focus from the idea that 'development=formal courses'. (@CharlesJennings)

I agree and my perspective is this: 

Development planning is a common part of the annual performance discussion.  It makes sense, doesn't it?  Well to some extent, yes.  But I think there is something being taken-for-granted which is that the discussion is only about what is to come rather than on what is being done and what has already been done.  Continuous learning reflection is being drowned out by the needs of producing the annual plan.

I've just come back from a 'graduation day' for a fast-track scheme of young high potential managers that I've been working with over the past 18 months.  One of their learning highlights was the encouragement to self-reflect on what they had been doing, getting feedback from others and note taking throughout their time on the programme. 

I'm not trying to make this a choice between reflection or planning because people do and should make plans about their development. But maybe in so doing, something important is getting overlooked that is at the heart of 70:20:10 model and that's the reflection on the context-specific, contiuously changing experience of everyday practice; something that can't be planned, except perhaps for making reflection a regular discipline that is scheduled into each day.

The taken-for-granted practices of learning in organisations

When we talk about the 70:20:10 model of learning there seems little, if any, disagreement that this mix of experience, peer learning and formal learning feels about right.  

However, even for those organisations whose L&D functions aspire to 70:20:10 as an organising principle, their practices continue to reinforce the status quo: that learning is about the 10%, i.e. attending courses. 

Here are 6 examples of common learning processes that interest me not because of their lack of good intentions or, in some cases necessity, but because of what's being taken-for-granted.  

1. Pre and post learning activities

Many organisationally managed learning processes focus on one or more face-to-face learning events.  Communications with participants talk about pre-workshop preparation and post workshop development actions.  It's my experience that these feel rather half-hearted.  Whilst their inclusion in the design is intended to create a link between the day-to-day work and the learning event, it's rare for participants to have done the work in advance; it's rare for the facilitator to then expect the participant to have come prepared; it's even rarer for organisations to address this break in process.  Tacitly, everyone seems to know this and the result is that the pre and post learning activities are seen to be, as a very minimum, optional and this reinforces the taken-for-granted that the workshop, rather than the work itself, is the focus for the learning and the course becomes a somewhat standalone event. 

2. Line manager briefing and debriefing

It is a common complaint in L&D that line managers don't follow the briefing and de-briefing process.  In conversation with some L&D people recently, they were telling me of their plans to talk to line managers about development and the 70:20:10 mix.  Whilst this feels like a good thing to do it was not clear that there was to be any change in the ways of working of L&D and how they would support workplace performance.  The briefing/debriefing process comes from the fact that the work which L&D does is separate from the day-to-day work of the business.  Typically, their work starts when a worker becomes a prospective course participant, which then triggers the need to create a link between the day-to-day work and the learning event.  The problem is that the formal learning course comes as a pre-designed package of content and deals with issues that are abstracted from the day-to-day work. Somebody else has taken the decision as to what will be covered and this rather limits the responsibility of the line manager.  As a result, it's no surprise that the briefing/de-briefing process, if done at all, becomes a rather superficial discussion.  

3. Learning projects and doing the 'day job' 

The inclusion of experiential learning in the form of project work on modular programmes is a common way of trying to link the classroom learning with the workplace.  There is plenty of evidence from learning theory that shows the value of reflective processes to enhance retention.  However, for many organisations the notion of a project is steeped in its own set of dogmas and processes, which means that when we talk about learning projects these also come with the same preconceptions: that a project is about more work that is over and above what's expected in the 'day job'.    

4. Nominations

If you run classroom-based courses, then you need people to attend them and many organisations operate a nomination process as a filter. The problem is that it reinforces a deep seated assumption that learning is rationed and you must wait for your time to be called to attend.

5. Organising attendance

Like nominations, if you run classroom-based workshops and courses then it follows that a room and a facilitator needs to be booked in advance and participant attendance needs to be managed.  The fact that these are necessary is not the point.  The problem is that the focus becomes the schedule and availability to attend on the given date rather than on the timeliness of the learning. 

6. Evaluation

Models of learning evaluation like Kirkpatrick propose an approach to assess the transfer of knowledge and business impact.  Although organisations often call for measurable impacts to be assessed, in my 20 years of experience I have seen just two occasions where any sustained attempt was made to go beyond level 1.  The virtue of level 1 data is that it is easy to collect and its, often, positive results, are seductive for programme sponsors, L&D and facilitators keen to justify their worth...but it tells you nothing about the value of the learning.     

How might things be different?

As the saying goes, 'we are where we are' and the trends in learning that I've written about recently point to how things are changing.  

As I explore my own practice in learning, two things really interest me.  First, the idea of reversal or flipping.  For learning in organisations, I think there is much to be gained from turning the relationship between the learner and the teacher/facilitator upside down and truly supporting the learners own questions and interests.  Second, placing practice centre-stage to look in detail at what is happening in the everyday-always-happening flow of work and conversation to create concrete, observable data that can then be used to ask the question 'what is there to be learned about?'  

4 trends in learning

Over the past few months I have been exploring the social web to find out more about it, to work out how I might use it and to learn from others.  My eyes have been truly opened as to what there is to be learned.  It may be a truism that the volume and quality of topics is extraordinary but I have only really appreciated quite how much is available by getting involved.  So far, Twitter has stood out as my favorite personal learning network.  Without any direct personal experience and a perception that I might be wasting my time, I was originally swayed by its detractors as to its triviality.  However, as I have started using Twitter actively, I have learned how to find #topics and interesting people.  I particularly like the fact that I can tap into the conversations of others, at a time that suits me, which means that I don't feel I have missed out due to being somewhere else when the conversation was taking place.

 

The main topic that I have been following has been trends in learning.  This post is about some of the things I've been noticing and the implications as I see them for learning. 

1. Collaborative, conversational, collective

There is a profound shift taking place from 'me' to 'we'.  In one sense, I don't think all the collaboration and sharing that's going on in borne out of altruism, but there is something happening that is socially interesting.  

There has always been a social element to our learning, whether this was about hunting trips in pre-historic times to conversations about the latest gossip around the water-cooler.  Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger created a Social Learning Theory in their work on Situated Learning that showed how different groups: tailors, midwives and butchers, amongst others, learned how to do their work by observing and interacting with expert practitioners. 

  

The shift that's taking place isn't that we are somehow becoming more social but that we are sharing what we know in different ways using social media.   Most markedly for me is the way in which I can interact with others that breach traditional boundaries be that hierarchies, communities, time zones and so on.

The implication is the amplification and democratisation of information and ideas.   

2. Strong and weak social ties

Building on this, I have found Harold Jarche's presentation Bridging the gap very thought provoking.  He makes interesting points about the 21C organisation and the importance of strong and weak social ties.  

What interests me is the massive growth and adoption of social media networks that operate independently of traditional organisation boundaries and how this will effect the nature of managerial work.  There are implications for how power and authority is exercised.   

3. Flipping classrooms

There are several interesting examples of changes taking place in the way knowledge is being taught in schools and these feel some steps ahead of what is happening in companies.  Examples like the Khan Academy with its claim 'learn almost anything for free', have shown what's possible, at huge scale.  And there are interesting trials taking place where teachers are making good use of technology to change the relationship betwen classroom teaching and student homework.  For examples follow these links:  Educational Technology blog for a nice description of flipped classrooms and Millie the Geography teacher for an engaging example of how a teacher in a UK secondary school is using social media to enhance learning.

My experience of being both a buyer and supplier of learning is that the current approach is still dominated by a teacher-led, classroom model.  Notwithstanding the wider adoption of e-learning by organisations , my sense is that this shift is only scratching the surface.  The Towards Maturity 2011 benchmarking report provides some useful data on current trends.

4. Making collaboration happen

Perhaps the most interesting blog that I have read lately is this one about the potential need for the role of a Chief Collaboration Officer.

The argument goes that if the future is about putting collaboration to work, then perhaps there is a need for a role that has responsibility for making this happen; a role that can work across the traditional silos and foster collaboration.  I'm not sure about this as I fear an organisational response that will attempt to place responsibility with one person whereas it's an intangible that is the responsibility of all.

However, along with the other trends I have commented on, it is showing something interesting about the rising awareness of collaboration as a serious topic for debate.

Conclusion

The examples I have pointed to here show us how learning can become deeper and much more practice focused.  The implications are signficant on many levels: for our expectations of the role of the L&D function and the role of the trainer, eliminating the artificial seperation between learning and working and creating the conditions in which everybody's knowledge can be shared democratically and amplified through strong and weak ties. 

 

A change of perspective

There is a new book about to be published called The Present by Paul Graham, who is a New York-based photographer.  His photographs are of ordinary street scenes, presented in pairs and triptychs, taken a few seconds apart.  This creates subtle shifts in perspective giving an impression of the continuum of life: before/after, coming/going, either/or. The effect is to slow the viewer down and to pay attention to the flow of time.

What is striking to me about all this is the attention that it gives to the everyday, always happening nature of life.  Few of us other than, say, professional ethnographers or anthropologists give any attention to the myriad small details of the way life comes at us; and even if you did take a look at the fine-grained details of everyday interaction what you would see, barring occasional extraordinary incidents and dramas, is a flow of seemingly mundane events.

Grand narratives and diverse practices

Leadership development is popular but it is a field that is awash with ideas and generalisations, rather than a solid core of theories, which produce a narrative of an idealised world.  And the practices that support it are incredibly diverse.

John Burgoyne, Professor of Management Learning, Lancaster University, UK puts is like this:

It may not be far from the truth to argue that any new activity, whether it is the latest 'adrenalin' hobby like bungee jumping or the most recent advance in chaos theory, is likely to be tried out as a contribution to management development.  This suggests a field that is so uncertain about its solutions that anything is worth a try.

Seen but unnoticed

What Paul Graham has done with his photographs is to encourage us to see things differently; to get down to street level, slow down the action of everyday life and to look at what's going on.

This seems relevant to me when I think about my practice in management learning.  There is a lot going on minute-by-minute that we usually gloss over in favour of a set of abstracted ideas that may or may not be relevant to the working context.