SMART Goals in a SMAC World

Back after a long and deliberate break from blogging! Probably my longest thus far... Looking forward to writing and conversing with my community once again.

A couple of days back, I came across the article, The Scientific Reason Why Setting Goals can Backfire in Inc written by Rohini Venkatraman Replete with relevant data and insights, the article calls out the dangers of specific goals (SMART goals) which were and still are the darling of the corporate world, especially with the advent of MBO (Management by Objectives). Goals are cascaded down or rolled up, as the case may be. Individuals are measured against the goals achieved or not achieved (as per the manager/reviewer). The Bell Curve's existence depended on goals and still does. Organizations made and still make goal-based and goal-driven quarterly plans. This trend or practice is propelled by a strong desire to keep a control on the outcome, ensure stock prices rise, shareholders are happy, and predictability reigns. However, we also know that "predictable” jobs will be the first ones up for automation and robotization as Martin Ford mentions in his book, The Rise of the Robots.  

This process of setting goals and going all out to achieve them work very well when a large part of the external ecosystem is predictable or changes at a pace that does not have an immediate and drastic impact on the work being done. Like it was for the past fifty years till the advent of the World Wide Web, ubiquitous connectivity, and SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud). And now we are entering the age of Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Chatbots. The coming of the digital world is changing organizations and the nature of our work at unprecedented speed. Predictability is giving way to ambiguity, uncertainty and volatility. In this context, trying to pre-define rigid goals can only lead to disaster and to being blindsided, as Rohini Venkatraman very aptly points out in the article.

Does that means we strike the death knell of Goals just as many organizations are doing or have done with the Bell Curve? IMHO, perhaps not! What we do need is to be aware of the dangers and the downside of rigid goals and creating a reward-structure based on stringent goal adherence. Authors of the Harvard Business School working paper, Goals Gone Wild, mentioned that the “systematic downside of goal setting has been disregarded for a long time”. This could perhaps be because setting goals and chasing them are easier than exploring and staying with ambiguity, learning on the go and remaining open to multiple and emergent realities. The challenge is exacerbated by the fact that most management schools excel at churning out command and control, bring predictability to the unknown, harness and leverage all resources kind of a mindset as opposed to exploration, staying curious, and collaborating to solve complex challenges. In a world of wicked problems, complexity and emergence, rigid goals do more harm than good. Without the leeway to browse and explore, under pressure to deliver impossible targets against a deadline, the best of leaders turn into efficiency-driven, blinkered project managers. And the outcome can often be missed opportunities, rising frustration, and even the downfall of the business should the trend continue long enough.

The question then is, what is the formula for success in a volatile and complex world? Is there a formula at all?

Let’s take a look at the Cynefin framework as a point of reference. In the Complex domain, it is evident that practices are emergent and ambiguity rules. Specific goals give way to an overarching outcome. The current world we operate in falls in the complex domain. 

Against the backdrop of this shifting paradigms where the known is replaced increasingly by unknown unknowns (as seen in the Complex domain of the framework), goal setting can often be a futile exercise. Defining or envisioning one or more desired outcome, getting everyone involved, and enabling collaboration among groups of cognitively diverse and skilled individuals may be the route to get work done in this era. The critical question to ask then is, “If goal setting is not the way forward, what is”? I do not have the answer but I have attempted to provide some alternatives to goal setting in this post.

The nature of work and projects are changing. Work will increasingly get done by a set of dispersed and distributed individuals who are experts in their own space/field, and are cognitively diverse from each other. This set of individuals will likely come together within an organization to form a project team (much like a movie team comes together) and disperse once the work is done. They may also be individual freelancers coming together to complete a project bringing their expertise to the table. These individuals are not likely to be driven by rigid goals set by someone somewhere unknown to them. They will work in a collaborative manner very akin to a closed community to deliver a project outcome (in the manner of Wikipedia and Linux). As we move forward, projects and outcome desired will become increasingly more complex requiring cognitively and creatively diverse individuals to come together to deliver value. Goals will be set around the project rather than at an individual level. The success of the project will signify success for the team. An organization that fails to foster an environment where such communities can come together will very likely flounder. And those that enable such communities will innovate and thrive in the VUCA world.

I have highlighted some of the pitfalls of following rigid goals as I see it:

Can kill exploration -- Predefined goals often block the ability to see around it, especially in times of stress. Yet, it is during the most challenging times that we need to see beyond the obvious. Often, an overly narrow focus can be detrimental to innovation and  can lead to missed opportunities. Most of the well-known innovations of our time came from tinkering around and perhaps failing at some seemingly important task (remember the Post-It Notes!). An over-emphasis on goals can also take the joy out of the process, the journey towards achieving the dream.

Can reduce collaboration –- When individuals are driven only by their own goals, a culture of competition sets in. Furthermore, when bell-curve like performance management systems rule, adhering to and meeting one’s goals become even more critical often to the detriment of the overall organizational culture. This leads to a very common syndrome seen in organizations where everyone has apparently done what they had set out to do, but the client is not happy or the project outcome is not what it should have been. The whole somehow becomes less than the sum of the parts. 

Can reduce intrinsic motivation -- Goals, when rigidly defined, can reduce intrinsic motivation. The latter arises out of a combination of autonomy, mastery and purpose (as defined beautifully by Dan Pink). Stringent goals -- especially when set by someone else -- lead to reduction in inner motivation although external milestones may drive the person for sometime. But an over-fixation on goals can make people lose sight of their passion and  purpose.

Goals definitely have their values. But in a complex and changing world, enjoying the process, developing skills like pattern sensing and a learner's approach is of greater value. 

Six Obstacles to Building Communities in Organizations

Rachel Happe begins her latest post, 10 Trends for the Future of Communities, with a comprehensive description of the various intersecting and intermingling streams and characteristics that inform communities, and I am quoting her below:

Communities sit at the intersection of a number of trends; social media, digital transformation, a generational shift to prioritize purposeful work, the future of work, change management, leadership and social learning.   

This is one of the most inclusive descriptions that captures the various threads and reasons for building communities in organizations. Yet, this is where organizations are struggling. In this post, I want to explore a few reasons for this struggle. I have written before about the fallibility of trying to have social learning as a bolt on strategy, on the role of social technology as an avenue for building communities in organizations, and the importance of building communities to facilitate emergent learning. 

The role of a Community Manager is becoming well-established with communities being perceived as platforms that have the potential to reduce the cost of communication, bridge organizational silos, facilitate cross-team conversations thus creating opportunities for innovation, knowledge transfer, expertise location, and more. However, despite of the various tangible and intangible benefits of communities, organizations are in reality discovering that establishing thriving communities and building a social business is challenging on various fronts, calling into question some of the very fundamental principles and frameworks on which organizations have been created. Here are some of the challenges:

1. Proliferating Platforms - Organizations, especially large, globally distributed organizations suffer from what I call the "unconscious silo syndrome". Most often, the inadvertent unawareness of what is happening in the rest of the organization give managers, decision-makers and other employees a feeling that "we are the new age torchbearers" and once it works in this team/project/business function, the initiative can be taken to the rest of the organization for an enterprise-wide implementation. Needless to say, it is human for all to want a bit of fame that comes with being the trendsetter and a possible organizational visionary. In reality, this leads to pockets of experimentation and duplication of effort without a holistic view of or alignment with the organizational strategy and business goals. The result is of course a less than desirable state of platform overdose, and an amplification of the offline silos onto a now online medium.

2. The "Bottom-Up" Approach - Many organizations tread on the conservative and cautious side and stay away from a big-bang launch for various reasons including skepticism at the leadership level, lack of skills in putting together a strategy for community building and management, fear of investing too much time and money without a clear idea of the intended results, and so on. The general approach usually adopted is to put in place a platform, do a bit of word-of-mouth marketing, and hope that people will start conversing and engaging on the platform. The initial few weeks, or even months, may see some traction, but it is usually scattered, disconnected and directionless. Very soon the enthusiasm of the initial few die down, the platform either becomes a ghost town or a land of thousand flowers and the expected outcome of communities and collaboration do not materialize. As Andrew McAfee, et al. highlight in their book Leading Digital...:

"...we saw no successful transformation happening bottom-up. Instead, executives in every Digital Master steered the transformation through strong top-down leadership: setting direction, building momentum, and ensuring that the company follows through." 

3. Policy-Driven Paralysis - When a decision is made to embark on a community and collaboration journey on the duly selected enterprise collaboration platform, organizations become suddenly fearful of all the possibilities of information leakage, open expression of sentiments by irate employees, sharing of sensitive and politically incorrect information, and so on. The reaction is to begin by creating guidelines and policies trying to encapsulate and articulate everything that employees cannot and should not do on the platform. The result is anything but inspiring or conducive to open collaboration. It is akin to tying people up in chains and then expecting them to do a tango. IMHO, it is time to let go and show more trust in the very employees that the organization has selected through well-defined recruitment and interviewing processes. 

4. Collaboration Conundrum - While we keep hearing the impending death knell of the bell curve, the truth is that a large percentage of organizations still abide by it for various reasons - lack of another system, familiarity syndrome, alignment of business and operational processes, management capability (or lack thereof in handling a new way of appraisal), HR and leadership lethargy, and more. The result is the creation of a tension between a competitive and a collaborative mindset. To be absolutely honest, it is very hard to be collaborative and share openly if an employee knows that s/he will be judged and measured against their peers when the appraisal time comes around. It is difficult for a manager to justify and facilitate open collaboration, and then do a rank and yank to fit a designated set of high-performers in the bell curve. And woe betide the manager who has too many high-performers and collaborators in his/her team. This false system of forced ranking eliminates collaboration, creates a sense of scarcity over abundance (be it for a specific rating or that prized project), and turns team members into opponents. Bye bye communities and collaboration!

5. Leadership Detachment - Many a times, something as critical as the building of a collaborative culture and thriving communities are left to the HR and L&D departments to drive. It is posited as "let's see if collaboration & social business works because everyone is talking about it". Senior leaders and C-suite members feel they are too time constrained to dabble in activities like communities when issues of graver import like shareholder profit, top line and bottom line figures, M&A's are awaiting their attention. However, the reality today is that without a connected, collaborative and resilient organization, all other strategy is likely to fail. Times of intense change and ambiguity as we are living in today demands collaboration and a strong leadership who will walk the talk. 

6. Dearth of Digital Skills - It is not that people do not know how to tweet or post pictures on Facebook or create a Pinterest board. IMHO, digital skills go beyond the common activities that almost everyone with a smart phone can indulge in today. Digital skills are closely related to a digital mindset, which I define as "the ability to understand the power of technology to democratize, scale and speed up every form of interaction and action." Very often, organizations -- this includes employees, leaders, managers, and everyone comprising the ecosystem -- lack this inherent capability of using technology to facilitate the building of PLNs (Personal Learning Networks) and communities. Digital skills include capabilities like working out loud, pattern sensing, sharing and connecting openly to develop a rich and diverse PLN, collaborating with a defined purpose, using technology with an awareness of its potential to promote self-driven learning, democratization of information, and so on. This mindset requires a degree of comfort with ambiguity, willingness to make mistakes, adopting a beginner's perspective, welcoming of diversity, and a willingness to learn from all possible sources. 

Workplace Learning in a World "Beyond Automation"

I just finished reading an HBR article by Thomas Davenport and Julia Kirby called Beyond Automation, which is the trigger for this post. With automation, AI and robots looming over the job scene, there seems to be a constant fear of humans losing out to computers and technology. It's akin to one of our childhood sci-fi movies finally becoming a reality - the machines are taking over. The digital disruptors in the shape of Robots, Big Data and Sensors are here. However, this HBR article takes a different view of automation and digitization of work, going beyond the gloom and doom mindset. It posits:

What new feats might people achieve if they had better thinking machines to assist them? Instead of seeing work as a zero-sum game with machines taking an ever greater share, we might see growing possibilities for employment. We could reframe the threat of automation as an opportunity for augmentation.

In another related HBR article with an interesting title, We Should Want Robots to Take Some Jobs, the writer makes a valid point:

In the task-centered economy humans have no value beyond the tasks they perform. Consequently, they are indistinguishable from machines and will be replaced by them for reasons of cost-efficiency as soon as technically feasible. In the human-centered economy on the other hand machines liberate humans from predefined tasks with prestated outcomes. This allows them to exercise the value that emerges from collaborating with other humans on open-ended, creative endeavors. (Highlights mine)

Workplaces will have to become more human-centered and purpose driven if they wish to survive and thrive in the 21st Century. And another telling line from the post emphasizes this point : "In the 21st century, creating meaning and innovating will be democratized through technology."

The key is to remember that the tasks which cannot be automated - the ones that require contextual and human touch - are also the ones that cannot be codified and structured. Increasingly the human workforce will have to take on the unstructured work that requires skills like judgement, decision making, pattern sensing, emotional intelligence, social intelligence, and more. The reality is that any work that can be codified will be automated. The remaining tasks will require individuals who fundamentally think differently about work and learning. The key question we (as L&D/HR) need to think of is how are we going to support workplace learning to build such skills in the workforce? The table below captures the shifts as I see it:

I have been writing about social and collaborative learning, the importance of communities of practices and networked learning skills like building one's PLN and PKM for some time now. The overarching requirement is to develop workers who think for themselves, who can drive their own learning and are not restrained by the norms and processes of the past. Certain skills will become fundamental to thriving in future organizations. Given that the culture of an organization will also play a crucial role in whether employees are enabled and empowered to think and act autonomously, that is a complex topic related to reinventing organizations and their underlying structures. The transformation required are deep and often painful. 

The diagram below by Charles Jennings captures the shift succinctly. The last point in the image is particularly important -- in the past, workers were seen as part of the machine, replaceable cogs whose performance was measured by efficiency. In today's world, workers are co-creators with machines where the latter augment and help individuals to do what we are inherently good at while taking away the repetitive, "codifiable" tasks.  

Unfortunately organizations have been created with efficiency in mind. All the management framework and operational processes have been honed and polished to increase productivity and to bring about standardization. The digital era has suddenly turned everything upside down by bringing in automation and replacing the human cogs and requiring humans to become more "human like" - thinking, feeling, social and collaborative. This massive shift cannot be dealt with at an incremental level and requires a complete re-imagination and transformation of management models and operational processes. That is the topic for another post. 

This post tries to explore how L&D can partner with business to prepare organizations to meet this shift with greater equanimity and success. 

Build communities - Increasingly it is becoming evident that the era of "follow orders and processes" are gone. Unlike what Henry Ford had once said of his employees: “Why is it every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?”, it is imperative for today's workers to bring their heads to hearts to work as well. However, complexity and constant emergence, exceptions and novel challenges also mean that individual workers will not be able to solve problems. An individual worker can be efficient; but innovation calls for collaboration, conversation, and cognitive diversity. Inclusive and diverse communities of talented and passionate individuals can do what computers and robots cannot. Communities foster collaboration and cooperation, exchange of diverse perspectives and creation of entirely new knowledge. CoPs lead to an outcome that is greater than the sum of the parts. And L&D must be able to enable such community building within organizations. 

A successful organization today will be an amalgamation of different communities - some of these will be transient forming around projects consisting of multi-disciplinary and cross-functional members. Other communities will be more permanent in nature forming around domains and practices to strengthen thought-leadership and innovation in key areas. L&D's role will be to enable these communities to form, to function effectively and provide sustained value to the members and to the organization.  

Foster meta-learning skills - It is evident from the HBR article that individuals who wish to grow and add value to themselves and to their work need to develop a different set of skills from what worked in the past. The past was driven by fixed knowledge bases, set ways of doing certain things, and a focus on increasing efficiency through task repetition, process improvement, and time management. The future will be driven by learning agility, effectiveness, and process innovation. The big question for L&D/Organization is how can meta-learning skills be fostered? How can workers become self-driven learners? What are the fundamental support required to enable this? IMHO, here are a few things organizations can do to start with:

• Encourage "working out loud" - Put in place an Enterprise Social Network (ESN), provide community management support, and make openness the default behavior of senior leaders.  
• Help individuals to extract learning from work - We know that most of workplace learning is experiential, happening on the job while in the process of solving a novel challenge or when creating a new design or managing a particularly "difficult" client. There are two ways to approach the work. There will be employees who will do what needs to be done to complete the work and then move on to something else. Then, there are those who do what needs to be done and take some time to reflect/analyse the learning gleaned from this. The latter are extracting learning from their work and thus building stronger neural pathways to tackle similar challenges in the future. L&D needs to facilitate this for organizations to continually learn. Managers and mentors can give feedback, encourage introspection, and show how sharing in a common forum can help in extracting and codifying the learning. 
• Provide cross-functional exposure - L&D can recommend and support business in defining learning paths that will enable individuals to work across different functions on stretch assignments. Not only will this ensure that an organization has employees with a holistic view of how the business operates but also provide the diversity much-needed to build pattern sensing and critical thinking skills. It is now well-known that often the best solutions to crowd-sourced problems come from individuals who are far removed from the specific domain of the challenge.  
• Create space for social learning -  While we know that all learning is social and individuals learn from each other, from experiences, from the environment and the ecosystem, creating a space dedicated to collaborating and co-operating with one's peers can help to build greater confidence in those still tentative about social learning. This will also mean an L&D team well-versed in the various aspects of building one's personal learning networks (PLNs). They will need to actively help the workforce build the required skills well-articulated in the PKM framework developed by Harold Jarche. 

Prepare for future "unknown" skills - This is a tricky one that most organizations steer clear of. There isn't any direct pathway that tell us what will be the core skills needed for the organization to survive 5 years from now. However, a little bit of research tells us that many a promising and thriving org vanished into oblivion because they failed to see what the future held. With organizational lifespan rapidly shrinking (down to 15 years from an average of 75 earlier), preparing to meet the future before it gets us is perhaps the smartest move. But how? The onus is on the organization, on L&D and on each individual to stay on the cutting edge of their domain, follow the digital and technical transformations taking place and evaluate their collective impact. Look at how the newspaper industry has transformed or the film industry for that matter. Kodak failed to see what was coming and went down ignominiously. No one can sit on their laurels and bask in past glory any more. The future can be bright or brutal depending on how we prepare to meet it. L&D and the business have the responsibility to maintain an ongoing research in their domain of operation on the skills they need to develop to grow the domain, the community and to create ongoing value. 

Develop a "growth mindset" - Today more than ever before, organizations need individuals with a growth mindset and flexible expertise. Dr. Carol Dweck eloquently writes about what growth mindset can achieve in her book, Mindset - The New Psychology of Success. According to her, growth of individuals - be they corporate leaders or sports-persons - can be largely attributed to a growth mindset. She cites examples from diverse fields to show how those with a fixed mindset eventually brought about not only their own downfall but also that of the organization they were leading or the team they were a part of. In this age of automation, one of the make or break skills/abilities could be developing a growth mindset. Without an ability to constantly introspect and learn, we will gradually become irrelevant with outdated skills and ways of working. L&D and business need to be constantly vigilant. An organization's culture can impact mindset. A repressive leader can kill passion and a desire to learn. A closed, ego-driven culture can foster a fixed mindset. I highly recommend the book for a through understanding of how to develop a growth mindset in individuals, in oneself and in the organization one serves. 

How is this linked to human work being augmented by machines?
It is closely related. Without the ability to self-direct one's learning and keep pace with change, we will run the risk of remaining tied to past skills and doing well those tasks that can be done more efficiently by machines. A growth mindset and learning agility ensure that we are able to course-correct and keep developing skills that can be augmented by a machine but not completely automated. The same HBR article referenced above talks of 5 ways that an individual can build and develop deeper skills in their domain. For a detailed understanding, do read the article. For a quick reference, I have inserted the diagram below. 

Some fields undergoing rapid development are healthcare, retail, telecom, manufacturing, and BFSI. The digital revolution will eventually embrace all aspects of business irrespective of domain. The dichotomy is that while we are scared of losing our current jobs to computers, we are not equipped to fulfill the potentials and promises that a digital era heralds across industries. Organizations have to be prepared to let go of what made them successful in the Industrial era to build the framework for success in the future. There is a serious dearth of skilled workers in all domains. How do we tackle this dilemma? And training is not the answer. The solution has to be holistic enough to let the employee learn in the natural course of his/her work and strengthen that learning through ongoing collaboration and social participation. 

There is much to do and much to think about...this is but a start. 

Social Learning Cannot be a Bolt-On Strategy

 

“I’m arguing that something much bigger is happening than the application collaborative tools within the enterprise – it’s a profound transformation of the enterprise as we know it.”  Don Tapscott (italics mine)

I recently wrote about the challenges of integrating sociallearning in the workplace. Even as I was mulling over the topic and browsing through Dion Hinchcliffe's posts for insights on social business, I had a moment of epiphany. Social Learning and social business go hand in hand. To facilitate social learning, an organization has to become a social business first. When we talk about social learning, we are talking about the fundamental organizational structure of a business.  A truly social business encapsulates the necessary preconditions for social learning -- transparent, supportive and collaborative. An organization cannot bolt on social learning just as it cannot bolt on a few Facebook and Twitter-like tools and call itself a social business. A hierarchical, permission-driven organization will find it very difficult to get employees to collaborate or cooperate voluntarily. In such cultural settings, social learning naturally fails in spite of state of the art enterprise collaboration platforms and other technology. Most organizations are still missing the cultural aspect of it. The current failure of organizations to integrate social learning stems from their bolt-on strategy. Read Hinchcliffe's 2014 post Going Beyond"Bolt-On" Digital Transformation for a deeper understanding. 

The following excerpt from his blog summarizes it beautifully: 

A Social Business isn't a company that just has a Facebook page and a Twitter account. Social Business means that every department, from HR to marketing to product development to customer service to sales, uses social media the way it uses any other tool and channel to do its job. It's an organization that uses social networking tools fluently to communicate with people inside and outside the company. It's a strategic approach to shaping a business culture, highly dependent upon executive leadership and corporate strategy, including business process design, risk management, leadership development, financial controls and use of business analytics. Becoming a Social Business can help an organization deepen customer relationships, generate new ideas faster, identify expertise and enable a more effective workforce. 
(http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/enterprise/2011/10/your_social_business_co-pilot.php)

This epiphany further led me to mull over the relation between social business, social learning and Peter Senge's Learning Organization. Senge's definition of a Learning Organization closely reflects a collaborative and social learning environment: 

…organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together. ...for a ‘learning organization it is not enough to survive. "Survival learning' or what is more often termed “adaptive learning” is important – indeed it is necessary. But for a learning organization, “adaptive learning” must be joined by “generative learning”, learning that enhances our capacity to create’ (Senge 1990:14). (http://infed.org/mobi/peter-senge-and-the-learning-organization/)

What Senge describes as "generative learning" is also the goal of social learning -- the ability to come together and create new insights, innovate and re-imagine. And it is perhaps one of the critical survival measures for any organization. Senge based his observation on the premise that on occasions of rapid change and flux, people will be able to adapt and excel. The cornerstone of Senge's Learning Organization is Systems Thinking -- the ability to see the whole as well as the interrelated parts of a complex system. What perhaps didn't exist when Senge wrote about Learning Organizations is the digital and uber connected world we live in today. Given the rapid proliferation of technology and their impact, a Systems Thinking approach to how work and learning happen becomes crucial. The physical borders have blurred and melted; we live in a border-less world and digital growth is the path-maker. A piecemeal approach to social learning will only serve to confound us further. 

As work becomes more complex, distributed, novel and challenging, organizations have no choice but to adopt a more connected, integrated approach to everything they do. What Hinchcliffe says above about social business being a strategic approach applies equally to organizations seeking to adopt social learning and become learning organizations. With organizations embarking on the path of social and collaborative learning, even if it's in name only, it is critical to understand the baseline requirements. 

1. Adopt a Systems Thinking approach: Integrating social learning requires a systemic change that includes culture, business and operational processes as well as organizational vision. It requires CEO/CLO intervention and strategic thinking to create an environment where the behaviours that construe social learning can thrive. It means altering how the management models operate; it means questioning the existing management practices and discarding those that do not align with the spirit of social business. This calls for fundamental shifts in the way organizations operate including their leadership styles, management focus and the underlying spoken and unspoken norms. To give an example, organizations where authority trumps expertise and capability are not yet ready for social learning where everyone gets an equal hearing. This shift in mindset will perhaps be one of the most challenging to overcome. Becoming a truly social business is an inside out change. 

2. Acquire the key digital skills: Today's globally distributed workplaces use digital tools and tech to stay connected and get their work done. Most of the digital usage happen as a matter of course driven by project requirements. Very few organizations are effectively using this amalgam of digital tech to consciously collaborate, work out loud or learn together. To effectively do the latter, everyone including managers and top level executives must pick up some of the fundamental digital skills. Dion Hinchcliffe describes the skills in detail in this post: What are the Required Skills for Today's Digital Workforce? The diagram below from the blog summarizes this beautifully: 

3. Encourage and facilitate network effects: As organizations become more dispersed and work becomes location agnostic spanning diverse skill sets and huge amount of data, workers will no longer be able to deliver results by working in silos. Even teamwork will not breed success unless the team is composed of individuals with cognitive diversity, possessing different skills and abilities and pull learning from their own PLNs. By encouraging employees to build their own Personal Learning Networks (PLN) and enabling them to use digital tools for more efficient Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), organizations will reap the benefits of this networked learning. 

4. Make contributions not credential matter: Whether an idea comes from an EVP or a front-line manager, every idea/piece of knowledge needs to be judged on its merit. As soon as authority and credential is given greater power, collaboration and sharing will stop. No one wants to feel that their ideas will be ignored just because they are a few rungs lower on the corporate ladder. And the converse is often true -- because those lower down the hierarchy are the ones in the forefront, they often have more cogent ideas for improvement and innovation. 

5. Instil the skills of networked leadership: Networked leadership is about replacing control with influence enabled by a work environment based on autonomy, empowerment, trust, sharing, and collaboration. Leaders must actively don the mantle of coaches and mentors to help employees develop organizational understanding, network skills and influencing capabilities. It means actively seeking projects that span LOBs, facilitates the interconnection of employees, increases employee visibility across the enterprise. A networked leader is not only adept at the skills mentioned above but actively encourages their employees to develop the skills, and coaches them into doing so. They have the ability to build strong networks -- both internal and external to the organization and believes in the power of collaborations and cooperation. They are learning agile, embraces change and are not afraid to put themselves out there. They understand that networks will trump individual capabilities in this age of complexity and change. 

In my last post, I discussed the challenges of integrating social learning in an organization because it is predominantly a cultural transformation that is the key. The question is what comes first? Digital transformation or Cultural Transformational? IMHO, it is a synchronous activity. One cannot bolt-on new technology while following old processes and expect change to happen. It's a synergistic interplay of cutlural transformation with digital adoption that needs to be led by the likes of CTOs / CEOs / CLOs in close collaboration. As Dion Hinchcliffe very succinctly and precisely puts it: 

Then there is the ‘digital transformation’ approach to digital. It’s a full-on, meaningful reconception of the business, often using a startup or incubator model, with the intent to re-imagine a digital native organization with all that it entails, from new business models, culture shifts, remodeling of the structure and processes of the business, and rethinking of the very foundations of the enterprise across the full spectrum of digital possibility.

Emergent Workplaces: Learning in the Networked World

This is my area of passion. A recent, very brief conversation with @krishashok triggered a few thoughts related to emergent workplaces and what learning in the networked world will look like. And after mulling over some of these, I thought they were worth putting down on virtual paper.

Setting the Context

Here are two definitions from Wikipedia that captures the essence of Networked Learning:

Networked learning is a process of developing and maintaining connections with people and information, and communicating in such a way so as to support one another's learning. The central term in this definition is connections. It takes a relational stance in which learning takes place both in relation to others and in relation to learning resources.  

Network learners of the future will have access to formal and informal education of their choice, wherever they are located, whenever they are able to participate … The network learner will be an active participant … learning with and from experts and peers wherever they are located.

Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Networked_learning

We are in an era of ubiquitous connectivity. Agreed that the future is unevenly distributed but it is catching up way faster than envisaged. Those unwilling to or unable to accept the pace of change are in the state Red Queen describes in Alice in Wonderland: 

“My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.”

The moot point is that we have no choice but to change how we do things. To quote Charles Darwin: 

It is becoming evident that be it organizations or individuals, those who are adaptive, agile, and open to learning are the ones who will survive. Coming to the topic of this post, IMHO, we will soon cease to speak of technology enabled learning because it will be seamless, integrated and the way everyone not only learns but also works and lives. It will become the norm. Whether that will lead to a dystopian future of fragmented lives and robots for company remain to be seen. But the fact is that technology is here to stay. It is becoming all pervasive. And will impact all spheres of our lives.

The Future Workplace 

It is not as much in the future as we would like to think. The nature of work has changed. We no longer need to go to a physical building to do our work. At least a lot of us don't need to. There have been quite a few paradigm shifts that we need to wrap our heads around. I have listed a few in the diagram below. 

These shifts have a profound impact on our day-to-day lives of which work and learning are an integral part. While on the surface they are unnerving, they can also deeply and positively influence how we take charge of our own lives. No longer is knowledge and information tied to workplace hierarchy. No longer are we expected to leave our passion at home and drag ourselves to the drudgery called work. Passion and creativity and not productivity per hour will increasingly become the measure of success. In an insightful article from HBR called From the Knowledge Economy to the Human Economy, there is this telling para that reflects the organizations and workers of the future: 

In the human economy, the most valuable workers will be hired hearts. The know-how and analytic skills that made them indispensable in the knowledge economy no longer give them an advantage over increasingly intelligent machines. But they will still bring to their work essential traits that can’t be and won’t be programmed into software, like creativity, passion, character, and collaborative spirit—their humanity, in other words. The ability to leverage these strengths will be the source of one organization’s superiority over another.

A human economy is intrinsically based on collaboration, communication, creativity and flexibility. I have written earlier about Re-imagining Work and Learning in a Networked World. I will elaborate some of the key themes here. Dr. Lynda Gratton in her book, The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here encapsulates the possibilities and promises of a connected world in this para.

A crucial question for understanding the future of work is predicting what people will actually do with this unprecedented level of connectivity, content and productive possibilities. Over the next two decades we can expect the knowledge of the world to be digitalised, with an exponential rise in user-generated content, "wise-crowd" application and open innovation applications. 

However, the truth is that most organizations find themselves eminently unprepared to meet this changing state of being. They are tied to the dual masts of hierarchy and command and control while the ground beneath their feet is roiling and shifting under the pressures of various disruptions. They are caught between Efficiency and Innovation -- the former they understand and are set up for; the latter is a whole new animal that they are unprepared to meet. The table below lists some of the contrasting characteristics:

To survive, organizations have to shift from the left to the right, if not completely then at least enough to reach a median balance. And to do so they need to not only take stock of the organizational culture but also how people learn, interact and connect. This requires enabling people to learn how to learn in the networked world, providing them with the infrastructure and then getting out of their way. Organizations need to become facilitators, communities and platforms for people to explore and express their passion. Today, people are seeking solutions to their challenges--both on the professional and personal front--in various ways: 

• Asking their networks 
• Collaborating and participating in online communities 
• Googling  
• Taking a MOOC 
• Sharing 
• Working out loud 
• On the job

The concept and practice of employees waiting to be trained before being put on the job is fast disappearing. Even onboarding new employees is becoming a social and experiential learning journey. Employees want to feel a sense of belonging and purpose when they join an organization. Connecting them to relevant communities and groups foster that sense of belonging and lessens isolation and disconnect, especially important for those working remotely, from client locations, from home or elsewhere. Thus, distributed organizations can stay connected via communities and build an identity as well as generate a sense of purpose. To make this change stick, organizations have to enable the process, and this involves adoption of some new skills. 

Networked Learning Characteristics

The onus is not only on organizations but also on individuals. However, for generations brought up on top-down schooling followed by hierarchical organizations with top-down training, networked learning skills don't come naturally. They have to be inculcated and deliberately practised for both organizations and individuals to benefit. The skills can be fostered in various ways, and I have tried to capture a few in the diagram below:

Needless to say, putting any or all of these in place require considerable effort and deep understanding of community building, online facilitation and collaboration skills supported by an organizational culture of openness and trust. 

MOOCs in Workplace Learning - Part 2: Designing a MOOC

@ignatia (Inge de Waard) describes MOOCs thus in her Master’s Thesis, which I have referred to: 

“MOOC is above all referring to a pedagogical model with independent learners, access to information, opportunity to create emerging, spontaneous, yet not directed learning communities, etcetera. As such the term MOOC can be seen as a new educational term.” ~Analyzing the Impact of Mobile Access on Learner Interaction in a MOOC.

Corporate Learning will be transformed and will take on more importance wrote Josh Bersin in his HR predictions for 2015. Job fragmentation, task specialization, globalization, economy of individuals, and a global talent pool are all impacting the job economy. Jobs and roles are rapidly evolving with new ones emerging, and old ones getting automated or vanishing altogether. All of these are putting organizations and individuals in a tough spot. While the onus of continuous professional development is gradually shifting to the employees, there is an increasing dearth of skills required to successfully run today’s organizations – from skills like leadership for a networked age to understanding analytics and its impact on various organizational functions. There is an urgent need to re-imagine workplace learning for the networked world.

Organizations can no longer hope to recruit experienced people and expect they will have the necessary skills. The new age of work requires novel and emergent skills, people with learning agility, and organizations that will enable and empower their employees. Thus, along with coaching and mentoring, there is a growing requirement for organizations to build and facilitate an environment of continuous learning. The technological affordances of social and mobile add to the ability to provide an ecosystem of continuous and pervasive learning. In the context of this need for continuous learning, MOOCs can play a critical role. Organizations are beginning to realize this and are seeking to shift their learning strategy to more fluid and dynamic methodologies like MOOCs, social and informal learning. In this post, I have explored some of the ways that corporate MOOCs can enable and foster ongoing learning and the building of personal learning networks (PLNs) in organizations.

The MOOC format provides scope for bringing together diverse learning forms – formal, informal and social, and different modalities – elearning modules, videos, podcasts, book excerpts, articles, and links to blogs, communities, etc. Dialogue is an important aspect of learning and the MOOCs support conversation. Moreover, providing MOOCs on mobile devices further augments interaction and networking thus increasing the participation level. MOOCs can enable learners to learn whenever there is a need by facilitating seamless switching between formal and informal modes, and social or individual learning.  MOOCs may possibly herald a more agile and mobile working & learning methods, global collaboration and a changing relationship with knowledge. It’s a fundamental shift in the ways we interact with data, with knowledge, with people.

Wrote Inge de Waard in her #lsmag article, Seamless Learning: Forget MOOCs, Mobile Learning, and Ubiquitous Access: 

“Creating support for optimized individual learning (such as creating personal learning environments) is as important as collaborative learning and peer-to-peer learning in this networked world. A factor affecting personal learning, mentioned in MOOCs for example, is coping with the abundance of information. Coping with content and lots of information is a part of seamless learning because the capacity to do so affects effective learning.”

The characteristics of seamless learning described by Wong and Looi in the MSL (mobile assisted seamless learning) framework quoted in the same article appositely describe MOOCs. These are: 

1. MSL 1): Encompassing formal and informal learning 
2. (MSL 2): Encompassing personal and social learning 
3. (MSL 3): Across time 
4. (MSL 4): Across locations 
5. (MSL 5): Ubiquitous access to learning resources 
6. (MSL 6): Encompassing physical and digital worlds 
7. (MSL 7): Combined use of multiple device types (tech) 
8. (MSL 8): Seamless switching between multiple learning tasks 
9. (MSL 9): Knowledge synthesis (prior knowledge, new knowledge, multidisciplinary learning) 
10. (MSL 10): Encompassing multiple pedagogical or learning-activity models (facilitated by teachers) 

“According to Vygotsky (Nassaji & Swain, 2000), knowledge is social in nature and is constructed through a process of collaboration, interaction and communication among learners in social settings.”

I have written about what defines a corporate MOOC in Part 1 of this post. In this post, I will focus on some of the design considerations and organizational requirement in building and launching a MOOC. Just to set the context, corporate MOOCs can serve different purposes some of which are listed below: 

1. On-board new employees 
2. Self-directed development 
3. Build talent pipeline 
4. Workplace and on-the-job training 
5. Brand marketing 
6. Collaboration and innovation 
7. Train channel partners and customers

While creating MOOCs for each of the goals above require different design decisions and approaches, there are some fundamental requirements that are common to all types of MOOCs. I will briefly touch upon each of those in the post here.

“…ubiquity and pervasiveness are essential requirements to support formal and informal learning and to allow all learning community members, from a variety of locations, to cooperate with each other by means of a large variety of technology-enhanced equipment.”

IMHO, the following design principles need to be kept in mind when designing a MOOC:

Micro-learning principles: I have written about this here: From Micro-Learning to Corporate MOOCs and Micro-Learning: Its role in formal, informal and incidental learning. No component of a MOOC should ideally exceed more than 10~15 mins to consume. Given that today, a MOOC participant is likely to access it from a mobile device, the design must consider learner behavior when using a mobile. Research says that while a user will check a mobile device upto 150 times a day, they will do so for short durations.

Social learning principles: One of the key components of a MOOC is the ability to discuss and collaborate with fellow participants. MOOCs also provide opportunities for peer-feedback and group projects. These social learning components are not only good to have but also essential in today’s world of increasing complexity, need for speed and agile learning. It’s become imperative for organizations to enable collaborative learning if they wish to survive in the face of rapid change.

“Pull” learning: Participation in a MOOC cannot be mandated; it needs to be facilitated. Employees will come if they find the content relevant, the discussions meaningful, and the communities engaging. These require adept facilitation, good design and effective content creation and curation. Moreover, participants need to have the freedom to drive their own learning – by using both formal learning pathways as well as the informal components.

Constructivist Learning Theory: In constructivist learning, learners “create” their own meaning through interaction in context (situated learning). MOOCs, by supporting collaborative and cooperative learning, use constructivist theory as the underlying design. Participants learn as much from one another as from the content.  

“…there is a shift toward constructive learning, in which learners are given the opportunity to construct their own meaning from the information presented during the online sessions.” Ally (2008)

Connectivist Theory: According to Siemens (2004), Connectivist Theory is for the digital age, where individuals learn and work in a networked environment. This is the defining theory behind how a MOOC is designed. The original MOOC (in 2008) was designed to illustrate this theory in practice—how learning happens in a connected and networked world with ubiquitous access to the learning device (mobile devices), the content and the communities (via social platforms). Thus, a MOOC takes advantage of the affordances of the social, mobile and networked nature of today’s participants.

  

I have replicated the diagram from Foundations of Educational Theory for Online Learning to show the different learner interactions points in a MOOC. MOOCs by their nature make learning broader and deeper: broader by extending the learning experience beyond fixed content and deeper by providing opportunities for further research, dialogue and user contribution.

A MOOC has the following core components: 

Content 

• Custom built – The base content of a MOOC can consist of custom-designed content as required by the org and the purpose of the program. To reiterate, whether it’s a video or an e-learning module, the design should ideally follow micro-learning principles. Today’s employees will mostly access the MOOC components from their mobile devices while on the go or during a lull at work or when they feel the need to refer to something. They will want the information to be easily accessible and presented in a manner that lends itself to quick assimilation. 
• Curated – In this era of information abundance, not all content needs to be created from scratch. It is perfectly possible to curate content from the web with the help of a subject matter expert (SME). It is important to check for IPR and creative commons license, and in some cases, permission from the original content creator may need to be sought. In most cases, content on the open web are free to use for reference. 
• User-generated – The beauty of a MOOC lies in its fluidity and open endedness. A MOOC is launched with some pre-defined content but evolves with every addition of user-generated content. This shared content creation is a powerful learning tool and is what adds value to a MOOC. 

Discussion Space & Facilitators 

• This is the heart and spirit of a MOOC. The discussions, if energizing and inspiring, will spill over outside the limit of the MOOC platform into coffee hours, lunch conversations, twitter, and other offline and online spaces. To build a thriving discussion around a topic, it is important to have experienced community facilitators, clear guidelines, and thoughtful conversation triggers – questions, observations, excerpts from the course, personal experience related to the topic – anything that will stimulate discussions. 

Synchronous Learning through Video Lectures 

• Imagine the potential impact of such lectures should holographic technology enter the scene. Refer to this article on Potential and Applications of Holograms to Engage Learners. Otherwise also, learners can join lectures / video sessions at the pre-determined time and get a chance to hear an SME (subject matter expert) explain a concept, process or idea.  Such synchronous learning moments energize those learners who want and need some direct guidance even as they make the shift from directed to self-directed learning. 

Participants and Communities 

• A MOOC is only as good as the participants. Without collaborative participation, a MOOC is just another course. Hence, it is critical for an organization to foster an open culture that promote collaboration, sharing and learning from one another. The MOOC itself – if well designed – can push the learner to engage in self-driven and authentic learning activities. It must encompass personal and social learning along with its formal components. 

Program Outline and Objectives 

• MOOCs typically provide an overview of the program along with an outline, a recommended learning path, and objectives. While it is not mandatory for participants to follow one single path, it helps to anchor those who are new to the MOOC way of learning. 

User Guide 

• There is likely to be a significant number of individuals who have not taken a MOOC earlier and may struggle to figure out how it works. A user participation guide along with what to expect as the course evolves, how to go about building one’s PLN, and some fundamentals of social learning will make it easy for those new to this learning format. 

Mobile Accessibility 

• Research shows that learner interactions are enhanced by enabling mobile access to MOOCs. Since dialogues and networking are integral to MOOCs, mobile access strengthen these by increasing the opportunities to effortlessly engage in such interactions without the constraints of time and location. Making a MOOC mobile compatible helps frequent dialogues with colleagues and peers, retrieval of information at the point of need, quick addition of content by the users, documentation of personal experiences through various means – videos, photographs, podcasts, micro-blogs, etc. – and sharing of the same with the learner community. These varied communication and collaboration methods enhance learning in context. Thus mobile access enables continuity between the contexts of formal and informal learning. Mobile is changing how we perceive learning – the shift from learning as discrete events to be attended as a separate activity is being replaced by instantaneous access, informal communications and an integral part of our day-to-day activities.

In conclusion, Malcolm Knowles in his Theory of Andragogy (adult learning) has said: 

“…it is no longer functional to define education as a process of transmitting what is known; it must now be defined as a lifelong process of continuing inquiry.”