Category: Innovation

Working Smarter in Online Communities – Etienne Wenger at Tulser

The Tulser offices
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
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
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
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.

Developing for a Consumerized Enterprise World

 

Yang and Ishii
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.

Create More Value Than You Capture

 

Tim O'Reilly (CC licensed by Pelle Sten)
Tim O'Reilly (CC licensed by Pelle Sten)

Tim O’Reilly was interviewed by Andrew McAfee (writer of Rage against the Machine). It is worthwile to fully quote the introduction to the session:

One of the great failures of any company – for that matter of a capitalist economy – is ecosystem failure. Great companies build great ecosystems, one in which value is created not just for a single company or group of industry players, but for partners who didn’t even exist when the product or service was introduced. Many companies start out creating huge value. Consider Microsoft, whose vision of a computer on every desk and in every home changed the world of computing forever, and created a rich ecosystem for developers. But as Microsoft’s growth stalled, they gradually consumed more and more of the opportunity for themselves, and innovators moved elsewhere, to the Internet. Internet innovators like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter have also created a rich ecosystem of opportunity, but like Microsoft before them, they are leaving less and less on the table for others. This is a bad trend. Wall Street firms, which got their start trading on behalf of clients, then began trading against them, then created vast Ponzi economies to drain the value from entire segments of the economy are even more dire examples of this trend. But this crisis of capitalism goes beyond individual industry segments. For example, the race by companies to eliminate labor costs has been a short term profit win but a long term loss. Since the cycle of capitalism depends on consumers as well as producers, and consumers are less and less able to find employment, at some point, we’re going to have to start thinking about how to put people to work, rather than how to put them out of work. At O’Reilly, we’ve always tried to live by the slogan “Create more value than you capture.” It’s a great way to build a sustainable business and a sustainable economy.

O’Reilly started off by talking about the banking industry which went from a value-creating industry to a value-destroying industry by wanting to keep more from themselves. He next switched to Microsoft which in its startup days managed to create a true platform on which others could create a massive amount of value. When Microsoft started to try and capture that value for themselves the value creators moved out and onto the web (O’Reilly’s was the first commercial site on the web). The definition of ultimate ecosystem failure is if you take more value out than you create. He says that we are effectively stealing from our grand children.

He observes that very often value creation starts by people having fun and then only later do entrepreneurs come along and start monetizing that value. An example is the make movement. We are only now (seven years into the maker fair) have people turning this movement into serious businesses. He really dislikes the current culture of startups raising money and then going for an exit (“despicable” is the word he used). A lot of these startups see money as gas and see what it is that they do as a journey from gas station to gas station, rather than as creating something that brings value to people. Finding your passion, getting people to believe in it and then try and make a difference is a more sustainable model. Great companies should have big and audacious goals.

The open source movement has had an immense positive impact on the technology ecosystem. These people very often did not make buckets of money, but they did create the infrastructure that all of us are building on top of now. He described to the clothes line paradox: when somebody decides to hang their clothes on the clothes line instead of using the dryer, we don’t just shift some energy use from hydrocarbons to renewables: it just disappears. This is a great metaphor for what is happening on the Internet with open source. MySQL for example “shrunk” the database market, but when you really look at it, it actually grew the market and created a lot of value.

How do you actually measure this type of value and the size of this (free unmeasurable) economy? That is hard. Investors don’t create jobs, customers create jobs. The only reason you need investors is because you cannot keep up with the demand of the customer. Tim O’Reilly is now looking for ways to put labour back into the economy. His first example is the Apple store. Most other retailers have laid off as much staff as possible. Apple has found a new model that works. Walgreens is now trying to do the same with healthcare. Other examples are Kickstarter and Etsy which both are putting labour back into the economy. He thinks we will be doing more of this “added value for eachother”. There is also a whole peer to peer thing happening. If you see a sharing economy it eventually does get monetized, so policy makers can start protecting the future from the past, rather than the past from the future.

Invention & Inspiration: Building a Better World

Dean Kamen, founder of DEKA Research and Development and inventor of the Segway, iBot, an insulin pump and a portable dialysis machine, started by thanking the IEEE as the place in the background that makes sure that things keep on working and told us that ADD is one of his greatest assets.

He talked about three of his projects:

Prosthetics

The Deka Prosthetic Arm
The Deka Prosthetic Arm

He was approached by DARPA who told him that weapons have developed a lot in the last 150 years, but that prosthetics has bare ly developed at all. They challenged Kamen to make a 9 pounds prosthetic arm in two years that would allow somebody to pick up a grape and a raisin from the table and eat it. He thought the assignment was impossible and didn’t really want to take it on. At night he couldn’t sleep and kept rolling around his bed. He then thought: how do you roll around if you don’t have arms, so he decided to take it on. After about 15 months of development tey had their first generation prototype which could be used by somebody to pick up the grape after about 10 hours of training. The second generation of the arm will come out soon.

Water & Power

These are two of the world’s greatest problems. 1.1 billion people in the world lack access to safe drinking water. If we could give clean water, then 50% of all disease in the world go away. 1.6 billion people lack access to electricity. Without access to electricity it is hard to participate in the global modern economy. We are using a 19th century centralized model to distribute water and electricity. We now have different models for distribution. An example is the way that cell phones have taken off from the bottom up.

Water is tough: you need too much infrastructure to get the right amount of filters, chemicals and other solutions to clean the water. Kamen’s idea was to make a box with two hoses. One hose you put in any type of water and out of the other hose come water that is crystal clear and meets all standards for water quality. The box should be small enough to move around and should be able to support one hundred people. Distillation is a process that could work, but that normally takes too much energy. They found a process (a vapour compression distiller) that could re-use a lot of the energy to boil the water. The box needed a little bit of electricity which could be a problem. So they needed another box that could generate electricity: the stirling engine. They trialled these technologies in Bangladesh and in Honduras. The technology is now there, so he needs help to find a way to distribute this globally and get it in every little village. The one product that has a truly global distribution system is Coca Cola (they have over 300.000 in Africa for example). So he is now partenering with them to develop a next generation fountain. He is now challenging coca cola to become the world’s largest healthcare provider.

FIRST

For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) is his project to fix a cultural problem in which we don’t celebrate the things that matter. We are obsessed with sports and entertainment. So he has created a sports inspired set of competitions around science and technology:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1QyM9WTF18]

Street-Level Genius: An African Maker Safari

Inventive Africa
Inventive Africa

Anita Pyke (Petproject.mobi) moderated a panel with Juliana Rotich (Ushahidi and Afrigadget), Steve Daniels (Makeshift Magazine and writer of Making Do) and John Kidendafor a discussion that was billed as follows:

From bicycle-powered mobile phone chargers to a helicopter built from an old Honda Civic and the remains of a crashed 747, Africa has been producing a unique strain of innovators long before the maker movement started trending in the US. With projects ranging from the practical (DIY biofuel systems), to the whimsical (home-made robots), street-level makers in the most resource-poor communities show time and again that the only essential materials for innovation are ingenuity and ambition.

They started with sharing some examples:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyNAbOJFZIc]

Flood Ready Bike (from Makeshift Magazine)
Flood Ready Bike (from Makeshift Magazine)

The types of environments in which these innovations usually don’t have regulations: often a whitespace area where there isn’t a lot of control. Usually there are many resource constraints driving this type of innovation. All the resources are constanty reused and recycled. On the one hand these informal economies (in Kenya 75% of employment is in the informal economy) allow a space for experimentation, but it also comes with a lot of risks. The speed of adoption is very quick too: if something works, then it is copied fast. Sometimes this inhibits innovation in Kenya, because inventors are afraid that their work will just be copied. The copying problem led to an interesting discussion on intellectual property and how that should be approached in these informal economies. An interesting distinction was the difference between efficiency (making a particular product with as little use of resources as possible) versus resourcefulness (making as much as possible from a limited set of resources).