This past weekend, we were doing some home work, and I had occasion to go to the hardware store. Several. Several times.  What’s interesting to me was two different interactions and the possible implications.

So, first I needed some paint.  The guy I worked with was quite helpful, asking questions. (Somehow, he always seemed to be up selling, but that’s beside the point.) Actually, we ended up short on the quantity of paint, but we got paint we liked.  What I didn’t get a sense of, however, was the underlying reasoning behind his questions.

In a non-comparable situation, we were having trouble installing some flooring.  The click and lock wasn’t going quite fine.  So, on the pursuit of a tool and some baseboards, I made an extra point of asking for help from the expert.  He asked some diagnostic questions, and proceeded to explain what he thought our problem had to be.  In this instance, I felt like I understood the process better.

So they’re not the same: in one case I’m buying product, and in another I’m troubleshooting. But what occurred to me is the opportunity here for thinking out loud to be a customer-benefit.  You’ve seen or can imagine the situation where the newer hardware store employee, stymied by the question, tracks down the ‘oldie’ who knows everything and gets the answer. It’s often very helpful to the customer to hear the oldie talk in a way that educates the youngster as well as the customer.

We’ve been advocating the Coherent Organization, and as Jay Cross rightly points out, this extends beyond the organization to the extended enterprise.  What struck me was what the opportunity might be if every consumer-facing  employee in an organization was coached in effective ‘thinking out loud’.  There’d be internal benefits, of course, in having the wisdom of the ‘oldies’ available to the newer members of the team.  But the real upside, it seems to me, is in the benefit to the customer.  For one, the trust that comes from a willingness to share.  It’d be hard to do if the major compensation is commission, as you wouldn’t want to be sharing those thoughts (cue the ClueTrain), but certainly you could be talking about tradeoffs between solutions and clue in the customer on what’s important in the evaluation.

I know I’d be more likely to return to a store that helps me learn about the products. Solution selling could be more than just a methodology, in this case it could be a significant upskilling of the customer base (and employee base).  It’s moving the social network back to conversation, away from the media channels, but it’s a significant augment.  What do you think would be the benefit of coaching on ‘thinking out loud’ to not only internal employees but customer-facing ones?6

As excited as I am about the Coherent Organization as a framework, it’s not done by any means.  I riffed on it for a Chief Learning Officer magazine, and my Internet Time Alliance colleagues have followed up. However, I want to take it further.  The original elements I put into the diagram were ad-hoc, though there were principles behind them.  As a start, I wanted to go back and look at these elements and see if I could be more systematic about it.

I had, as Harold’s original model provided the basis for, separate groups for Work Teams, Communities of Practice, and Social Networks.  Within each were separate elements.

In Work Teams, I had included: share problems, co-coach, assist, brainstorm effectively, continuous feedback, welcome contributions, learn from mistakes, align with mission, narrate work, champion diversity, and measure improvement.

Under Communities of Practice I listed: document practice, leave tracks, workshop issues, share examples, co-mentor, discuss principles, continually refine practice, think ‘out loud’, and share concerns.

And in Social Networks I had put: share, contribute, listen, care, interact, and discuss values.  I also had connecters between the groups, each ways, so Work Teams were connected to Communities of Practice by bringing in outside ideas and sharing progress, while Communities of Practice were linked to Social Networks by tracking related areas and sharing results.

What I couldn’t claim was that this was the exhaustive list.  I’d put them in there with some thoughts of both putting in and taking out, but I wanted to go further.

What I did was separate out each of the three areas, and start grouping like terms together (I just took all the terms in the above diagram and dropped them into a new diagram, and started sorting). As I did so, some commonalities emerged. I ended up with the following diagram, which is very much a work in progress.  What I’m  trying to get to is the set of behaviors that would be essential for such an organization to succeed, ultimately coming up with a set of dimensions that might be useful as an assessment.  What emerged is a characterization of several different areas within which behaviors fall, which is useful because then I can look for missing (or redundant) elements.

In addition to the connecting tasks, we see several overarching types of behaviors.  Besides the connection between the areas, they grouped like I show here.

Sharing is individual putting out things, which is less pro-active and interactive than actually contributing.  That distinction isn’t quite clear to me either, but sharing might be more pointers to things where contribute is a more substantial contribution.  Which means my elements may not be properly categorized.

Monitoring is both watching what’s going on and pro-actively evaluating outcomes.  Does this need to be broken out into two separate areas? Personal is where you’re working with a specific person (or recipient thereof).  And the culture dimension is where you’re actively aware of and reviewing the underlying values behind what you’re doing.

By no means do I consider this ‘done’, but I share it as part of my commitment to practicing what I preach, thinking ‘out loud’.  This will get refined.  I most certainly welcome your thoughts!

#itashare

Brian Brushwood riffed off his success with Scam School and other scams to provide lessons about branding and new media opportunity.

I was having a discussion the other day with my ITA colleague Jay Cross, and the topic wandered over to how to use the social approaches we foster under the umbrella of the Coherent Organization to help organizations  become one. And I went feral.

Do we work top down, or bottom up?  In the course of the conversation it occurred to me that given the model we propose, that you can’t just have the broader social network create it, and you can’t even really build a community of practice (CoP).  The smallest unit is the working group; how could we use that?

The thought that struck me was creating a working group who’s goal was to create a CoP around being a Coherent Organization. That is, they’d have to understand the principles, start defining and discussing it, document the opportunities, and start disseminating the ideas through the organization.  Inherently, it  has  to be viral, and the most effective way to introduce a virus is by inoculation.

The idea then is that the mission of the working group is to develop a community of practice around understanding and implementing developing communities of practice. It’s a bit recursive or self-referential, but it’s the seed that needs to sprout.  Seeding it is the action that’s needed to get it going, and then some feeding needs to happen.  While it’s possible that a self-supported initiative could survive, having some external support may make sense in making this happen.

Yes, I’m assuming that the end result is desirable and possible.  The former is, I think, reasonably well accepted (short form: working effectively is a necessary survival tactic, going forward), even if the path to get there isn’t.  I’m suggesting that this is a path to get there. It’s not easy; it takes persistence, support, all those things that make organizational initiatives succeed, with an understanding of the strategies, policies, and cultural adjustments needed.  Yet I’ll suggest that it is doable.  Now, it’s time to do it!

#itashare

A recent post on organizational cognitive load got me thinking (I like this quote: “major learning and performance initiatives will likely fail to achieve the hoped-for outcomes if we don‘t consider that there is a theoretical limit to collective throughput for learning”). I do believe organizations have distributed thinking that they apply to solving problems. Usually this is individual, but how might it be greater than that?

I think back to the Coherent Organization, and how folks are collaborating and cooperating in moving the organization forward. There’s lots of thinking going on, in many ways. Folks are solving problems in formal or informal working groups in many ways, whether achieving organizational goals directly, developing themselves together, and furthering the frontiers of their field in a variety of ways. Individual cognitive load we address through providing resources and tools. How do we reduce collective load?

In short, by making access to social networks, to collaborative media, as easy and ‘ready to hand‘ as possible. We want the focus to be on the task, not the tools. It’s about co-creating a performance ecosystem that works fluidly, seamlessly integrating the different resources we need.

It’s cultural as well as structural. You need to remove the barriers to working well, facilitating the ability to constructively interact by welcoming diversity, sponsoring psychological safety, soliciting new ideas, and providing space and time for reflection. You need leaders who walk the talk, learning out loud.

You can’t do this if you don’t understand how folks work and play together, and what it takes to get you there and stay there. The field continues to develop, but you need to be explicit about how this happen, and actively work to minimize interference with effective flow: communication and work.

#itashare

I’ve been revisiting performance support in preparation for the Guild’s Performance Support Symposium  next month, and I’m seeing a connection between two models that really excite me. It’s about how social and performance support are a natural connection.

So, let’s start with a performance model. This model came from a look at how people act in the world and I was reminded of it during a conversation on informal learning. Most of the time, we’re acting in well-understood ways (e.g. driving), and we can keep our minds free for other things.  However, there may be times when we can’t rely on that well-practiced approach (say, for instance, if our usual route home is blocked for some reason). Then we have a breakdown, and need to consciously problem-solve. Ideally, if we find the solution, we reflect on it and make it part of our well-practiced repertoire.

So what I wanted to do was use this understanding to think about how we might support performance.  What support do we need at these different stages?  I propose that when we have a breakdown, ideally we find the answer, either as an information resource, or from a person with the answer.  Some of the time, we might identify a real skill shift we need, and then we might actually take a course, but it’s a small part of the picture.

If we find the answer, we can go back into action, but if we can’t find the answer, we have to go into problem-solving mode. Here, the support we need differs.  We may need data to look for patterns that can explain what’s going on, or models to help find a solution, or even people. Note, however, that the people here are different than the people we would access for the answer. If there were a person with the answer, we would’ve found them in the first step. Here it’s likely to be good collaborators, people with complementary skills and  a willingness to help.

If and when we find the answer, then we should share that so that others don’t have to do the same problem-solving, but can access the resource (or you) in the first step. This step is often skipped, because it’s not safe to share, or there’s just not a focus on such contributions and it’s too easy to just get back to work without recognizing the bigger picture.  This is one of the components of what Harold Jarche means by ‘narrating your work‘, and I mean in ‘learning out loud’.  If it’s habitual, it’s beneficial.

The connection that I see, however, is that there’s a very strong relationship between this model, and the coherent organization model. At the first step, finding the answer, likely comes from your community of practice or even the broader network (internal or external).  This is cooperation, where they’re willing to share the answer.

At the second step, if you get to problem-solving, this is collaboration.  It may not just be in a work group (though, implicitly, it  is  a work group), but could be folks from anywhere.  The bigger the problem, the more it’s a formal work group.

The point is that while the L&D group can be providing some of the support, in terms of courses and fixed resources, at other times the solution is going to require ‘the network’. That is, folks are going to play a part in meeting the increasing needs for working.  The resources themselves are increasingly likely to be collaboratively developed,  the answer is more likely ‘out there’ than necessarily codified in house.

There’s going to of necessity be a greater shift to more flexible solutions across resources and people, to support organizational performance.  The performance support model will increasingly require an infrastructure to support the coherent organization.  Are you ready?

In an insightful piece, Harold Jarche puts together how collaboration and cooperation are needed to make organizations work ‘smarter’, integrating workgroups with the broader social network by using communities of practice as the intermediary.  This makes a lot of sense to me, and I was inspired to take a look at the practices within those categories.  (Jay Cross has explored different facets of the implications of this way of thinking and talks about how we are building on this.)

In this depiction,we see behaviors of effective collaboration within work groups, such as coaching each other, using good practices for brainstorming, the elements of a learning organization, being willing to admit to problems, and being willing to lose if you don’t lose the lesson.

At the next level, communities of practice need to continue to evolve their practices, sharing issues and working together to resolve them.  Within these communities, sharing pointers as well as deeper thoughts are mechanisms for ‘stealth mentoring‘ and explicit mentoring is valuable as well.

At the outermost level, social networks are about tracking what’s happening and who knows what, looking for developments in related fields as mechanisms for improving designs, and sharing practice is a way to give back to the community.

At the intersections, you need practices of both sharing outward and bringing inward, always looking for fresh inspiration and valuable feedback. The transparency provides real value in developing trust among the constituencies.

I put reflection underpinning all of these, as a core practice.  Reflection is absolutely critical to continual improvement in every area.

Note that the firewall tends to cross the middle of the diagram, and by blocking access you’re effectively cutting off a portion of the corporate brain!

This should not by any means be considered definitive, as it’s my first draft, but I think it helps (me, at least) think about what practices could accelerate an organization to be both effective and efficient, able to move nimbly to deliver ongoing customer delight by continual innovation while executing as well. We’re thinking about this as the ‘Coherent Organization’, aligning the flows of information, and aligning the work with the organizational goals.   As always, I welcome your feedback: what should be added, removed, modified, etc.