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Revisiting personal learning

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A number of years ago, I tried a stab at an innovation process. And I was reminded of it thinking about personal learning, and looked at it again. And it doesn’t seem to aged well. So I thought I’d revisit the model, and see what emerged. So here’s a mindmap of personal learning, and the associated thinking.

The earlier 5R model was based on Harold Jarche’s Seek-Sense-Share model, a deep model that has many rich aspects. I had reservations about the labels, and I think it’s sparse at either end.  (And, I worked to hard to try to keep it to ‘R’s, and  Reify just doesn’t work for me. ;)

Personal learning

In this new approach, I have a richer representation at either end. My notion of ‘seek’ (yes, I’m still using Harold’s framework, more at the end) has three different aspects. First is ‘info flows’. This is setting up the streams you will monitor. They’re filters on the overwhelming overload of info available. They’re your antenna for resonating with interesting new bits. You can also search for information, using DuckDuckGo or Google, or going straight to Wikipedia or other appropriate information resources you know. And, of course, you can ask, using your network, or Quora, or in any social media platform like LinkedIn or Facebook.  And there’re are different details in each.

To make sense of the information, you can do either or both of representing your understanding and experimenting. Representing is a valuable way to process what you’re hearing, to make it concrete. Experimenting is putting it to the test. And you naturally do both; for instance read a web page telling you how to do something that’s new, and you put it into practice and see if it works. Both require reflection, but getting concrete in trying it out or rendering it is valuable. Again, representing and experimenting break down into further details.

What you learn can (and often should) be shared. At whatever stage you’re at, there’s probably someone who would benefit from what you’ve learned.  You can post it publicly (like this blog), or circulate it to a well-selected set of individuals (and that can range from one other person to a small group or some channel that’s limited).  Or you can merely have it in readiness so that if someone asks, you can point them to your thoughts. Which is different than pointing them to some other resource, which is useful, but not necessarily learning. The point is to have others providing feedback on where you’re at.

I looked at Harold’s model more deeply after I did this exercise (a meta-learning on it’s own; take your own stab and then see what others have done).  I realize mine is done on sort of a first-principles basis from a cognitive perspective, while his is richer, being grounded in others’ frameworks. Harold’s is also more tested, having been used extensively in his well-regarded workshop.

I note that part of the meta-learning here is the ongoing monitoring of your own processes (the starred grey clouds). This is a key part of Harold’s workshop, by the way. Looking at your processes and evaluating them. An early exercise where you evaluate your own network systematically, for instance, struck me as really insightful. I’m grateful he was willing to share his materials with me.

So, this has been my sensing and sharing, so I hope you’ll take the opportunity to provide feedback!  What am I missing?

 

 

Question: values?

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So, I’m wrestling with how to characterize useful changes in an organization. I’ve been compiling a list of different tactics (e.g. implement coaching, show-your-work, support curation, etc), and want to map them to the changes you’ll get in the organization. I’ve wanted to tie them to another set of various outcomes: improved participation, innovation, etc. But, while I have the strategies, I’m looking at what breakdowns of outcomes are some minimal useful set. I’ll lay out my  very preliminary set of thoughts around the values we’re trying to develop/influence, and I welcome input, pointers, what have you.

My goal, I should be clear, is to try to take specific changes we want in an organization, and have them linked to specific tactics.  And, of course, a new school approach.  That is, tactics that move organizations into directions that create learning organizations.

I start with the three elements Dan Pink talks about in his book  Drive.  In it, he lists three core motivators of employees: Purpose, Autonomy, and Mastery (this is my order, not his).  Purpose is  why what you’re doing matters.  What does this do for the org, and that what the org is doing also matters. Then, autonomy is when you’re given the freedom to pursue your purposes.  Now, you may not be completely capable of that, so there’s support for mastery, to develop the capabilities to succeed. I think these are all great, but are they sufficient in and of themselves? Are these the right things to want to impact?

I’m also a fan of Amy Edmondson’s quadrant model of psychological safety and accountability. Without either, you’re loafing. With just safety, you’re happy. With just accountability, you’re fearful. But if you’ve accountability  and  safety, you get results.  This draws upon the richer work of Garvin, Gino, and Edmondson on the components of innovation.  That model adds time for reflection, diversity, and openness to new ideas. Is this a better way to think about it?

There’re also personal values (which might be organizational, too).  Barack Obama, in his keynote to ATD 2018, had two very simple ones: be kind, and be useful.  I’ve extended that out one notch, to include three: responsibility (do the right thing, and  do something [useful]), integrity (honesty, do what you promise), and compassion (respect, helping, etc [kind]).  Is that a full set? Or is responsibility derivable from integrity? I’ve a collection of a suite of value proposals (five, with entries ranging from 5 – 8 core values).  Can you derive some of the others from the three I have? E.g. does courage come from integrity and responsibility? Does fairness come from compassion and integrity?  I don’t know.

And so, I’m not sure what the  right core set is.  Trust has to be in there somehow, but is that derivative from integrity?  And do I frame it from the change we want in the org, or the change in the people?  I’m inclined to the former.  And are they unitary, or can the tactics impact more than one? (Preliminary: more than one.)

Obviously, I’m at an early stage in formulating this.  I can beaver away on it on my own, but I’m happy to hear pointers, thoughts, etc.  Yes, I’m trying to diagram it too, but nothing coherent has  yet emerged.  So, once again, this is me ‘thinking out loud’.  Care to do similarly and share?

Chief Cognitive Officer?

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Businesses are composed of core functions, and they optimize them to succeed. In areas like finance, operations, and information technology, they prioritize investments, and look for continual improvement. But, with the shift in the competitive landscape, there‘s a gap that’s being missed. And I‘m wondering if a focus on cognitive science needs to be foregrounded.

In the old days, most people were cogs in the machine. They weren‘t counted on to be thinking, but instead a few were thinking for the many. And those who could do so were selected on that basis. But that world is gone.

Increasingly, anything that can be automated should be automated.   The differentiators for organizations are no longer on the execution of the obvious, but instead the new advantage is the ability to outthink the competition. Innovation is the new watchword.   People are becoming the competitive advantage.

However, most organizations aren‘t working in alignment with this new reality. Despite mantras like ‘human capital management’ or ‘talent development’, too many practices are in play that are contrary to what‘s known about getting the best from people. Outdated views like putting information into the head, squelching discussion, and avoiding mistakes are rife. And the solutions we apply are simplistic.

Ok, so neuroscientist John Medina  says our understanding of the brain is ‘childlike‘.   Regardless, we have considerable empirical evidence and conceptual frameworks that give us excellent advice about things like distributed, situated, and social cognition. We know about our mistakes in reasoning, and approaches to avoid making mistakes. Yet we‘re not seeing these in practice!

What I‘m suggesting is a new focus.   A new area of expertise to complement technology, business nous, financial smarts, and more.   That area is cognitive expertise. Here I’m talking about someone with organizational responsibility, and authority, to work on aligning practices and processes with what‘s known about how we think, work, and learn. A colleague suggested that L&D might make more sense in operations than in HR, but this goes further. And, I suggest, is the natural culmination of that thought.

So I‘m calling for a Chief Cognitive Officer. Someone who‘s responsibility ranges from aligning tools (read: UI/UX) with how we work, through designing continual learning experiences, to leveraging collective intelligence to support innovation and informal learning.   Doing these effectively are all linked to an understanding of how our brains operate, and having it distributed isn‘t working.  The other problem is that not having it coordinated means it‘s idiosyncratic at best.

One problem is that there‘s too little of cognitive awareness anywhere in the organization.  Where does it belong?  The people closest are (or should be) the L&D (P&D) people.  If not, what’s their role going to be?  Someone needs to own this.

Digital transformation is needed, but to do so without understanding the other half of the equation is sort of like using AI on top of bad data; you still get bad outcomes.  It’s time to do better. It’s a radical reorg, but is it a necessary change?  Obviously, I think it is. What do you think?

About this change to the site…

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So, I’d been unhappy with how hard it was to update my site. It had some problems, but I was afraid to change it because of the repercussions. Well, it turns out that’s not a problem! So what you see is my first stab at a new site. A little background…

My ISP, a good friend, colleague, and mentor, was making some changes to how my sites are implemented.  While my other sites (Quinnovation and the book sites) are all done in a WYSIWIG tool called RapidWeaver, Learnlets is a WordPress site. While I could do a blog  in Rapidweaver, I’m afraid I’d lose my decade+ of posts!  So, I’ve kept it in WordPress.  And that’s handy for updating the site when I’m on the road (e.g. for mindmaps).

However, my ISP, in addition to being a tech guru, is also a security guru.  He does tech for a living, and is kind enough to host me as well. To prevent some of the attacks that were happening to WordPress sites (hey, write a script that hammers WordPress vulnerabilities and point it to all their sites you can find), he instituted some security measures. One was that I couldn’t get into the PHP code for my sidebar!  It made sense, because if anyone could get access to my admin code, they could not only change the look and feel (easy to fix), they could alter the code and put in malicious stuff. Not good. But…

I’d cobbled it together with cut-and-pasted code, but now I couldn’t edit it without downloading the raw source (once I could find the file in the WordPress hierarchies), editing it, and uploading.  I couldn’t even access the sidebar editor!  I had a second login for upgrading the site, but it wouldn’t allow access to things I wanted to customize. And I have a bad habit of tinkering!  As things happen, I might want to add an image, or…what have you.

So, with this upgrade, I mentioned my problems with the site, and he installed some new themes I could play with.  And, I found, it was pretty much click and type to create a new sidebar. Suddenly, it’s  easy to change the site, without coding!  It’s not perfect, but it’s better for mobile (a friend had complained about that).

As evidence, somehow it seized up in the midst of creating the first draft.  I was going to have to  re-create the new site!  First, it would’ve been easy. I’d created most of the graphics and put them in a location.  And, it remembered my previous choices, and restored them so I didn’t have to!

I asked my lad, who has a good digital aesthetic, to give me feedback on two of the options my colleague installed, and he liked this one, with a suggestion on the background (not a stock photo).  I’m using the background image from the  Designing mLearning book cover, but that can be changed.  He didn’t like the idea of the bag of bulbs from the Quinnovation site, as he thought it was ‘stock’. I  think it’s aligned with the notion of Quinnovations (or I wouldn’t have used it), and so too with Learnlets, but in honor of his opinion I’m sticking with this for now.  And I appreciate that he shared his thinking!

Now that I have a draft up, what’s working and what’s not?  I still need to figure out a way to let folks sign up for Learnlets as an email feed (beyond RSS, but through Feedblitz, the service I use), but other than that it’s pretty much the same. And easier to tweak! (E.g., I have subsequently gone to the Feedblitz site, used their tool to create the widget HTML code, and it’s now on the sidebar as well.)

So, the question is, what  should I tweak?  I’ll definitely listen on usability issues, and I’ll consider aesthetic ones ;).  Regardless, thought I’d share the rationale and the process, because that’s what ‘working out loud’ is, and I think it’s part of the moves we need to see. And in return, getting feedback. So, what doesn’t work for you?

Let’s talk

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“Conversations are the stem cells of learning.” – Jay Cross

I recently read something that intrigued me. I couldn’t find it again, so I’ll paraphrase the message.  As context, the author was talking about how someone with a different world view was opining about the views of the author. And his simple message was “if you want to know what I, or an X, thinks, ask me or an X. Don’t ask the anti-X.”  And I think that’s important.  We need to talk together to figure things out. We have to get out of our comfort zone.

It’s all too evident that we seem to be getting  more divisive. And it’s too easy these days to only see stuff that you agree with.  You can choose to only follow channels that are simpatico with your beliefs, and even supposedly unbiased platforms actually filter what you see to keep you happy. Yet, the real way to advance, to learn, is to see opposing sides and work to find a viable resolution.

Innovation depends on creative tension, and we need to continue to innovate.  So we need to continue to engage.  Indeed, my colleague Harold Jarche points to the book  Collaborating with the Enemy  and argues that’s a  good thing.  The point is that when things are really tough, we have to go beyond our boundaries.  And life is getting more complex.

So I keep connections with a few people who don’t think like me, and I try to understand the things that they say. I don’t want to listen just to those who think like me, I recognize that I need to understand their viewpoints if we’re going to make progress.  Of course, I can’t guarantee reciprocity, but I can recognize that’s not my problem.

And I read what academic research has to say. I prefer peer-review to opinion, although I keep an open mind as to the problems with academic research as well. I have published enough, and reviewed many submissions, so I recognize the challenges.  Yet it’s better than the alternative ;).

This is, however, the way we have to be as professionals. We have to understand other viewpoints.  It matters to our world, but even in the small little worlds we inhabit professionally.  We need to talk.  And face to face. It matters, it turns out.  Which may not be a surprise.  Still, getting together with colleagues, attending events, and talking, even disagreeing (civilly) are all necessary.

So please, talk.  Engage.  Let’s figure stuff out and make things better. Please.

 

My Professional Learner’s Toolkit

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My colleague, Harold Jarche, recently posted about his professional learning toolkit, reflecting our colleague Jane Hart’s post about a Modern Learner’s Toolkit. It’s a different cut through the top 10 tools.  So I thought I’d share mine, and my reflections.

Favorite browser and search engine: I use Safari and Google, by default. Of course, I keep Chrome and Firefox around for when something doesn’t work (e.g. Qualtrics).  I would prefer another search engine, probably DuckDuckGo, but I’m not facile with it, for instance finding images.

A set of trusted web resources: That’d be Wikipedia, pretty much. And online magazines, such as eLearnMag and Learning Solutions, and ones for my personal interests. I use Pixabay many times to find images.

A number of news and curation tools: I use Google News and the ABC (Oz, not US) in my browser, and the BBC and News apps on my iDevices. I also use Feedblitz to bring blogposts into my email.  I keep my own bookmarks using my browser.

Favorite web course platforms: I haven’t really taken online courses. I’ve used Zoom to share.

A range of social networks: I use LinkedIn professionally, as well as Slack. And Twitter, of course.  I stay in touch with my ITA colleagues via Skype.  Facebook is largely personal.

A personal information system: I use both Notability and Notes to take notes.  Notes more for personal stuff, Notability for work-related. I use Omnigraffle for diagrams and mindmaps.  And OmniOutliner also helps when I want to think hierarchically.

A blogging or website tool: I use WordPress for Learnlets (i.e. here), and I use Rapidweaver for my sites: Quinnovation and my book sites.

A variety of productivity apps and tools: Calendar is crucial, and Pagico keeps me on track for projects. I use Google Maps for navigation. I use SplashID for passwords and other private data. I often read and markup documents on my iPad with GoodReader. CloudClip lets me share a multi-item clipboard across my devices.    Reflection: this overlaps with the personal information system.

A preferred office suite: I don’t have a preferred suite, though I’d like to use the Apple Suite. I use Word to write (Pages hasn’t had industrial-strength outlining), Keynote to create presentations (e.g. one from each suite). I don’t create sheets often.

A range of  communication and collaboration tools: I use Google Drive to collaborate on representations.  I have used Dropbox to share documents as well. And of course Mail for email.   Reflection: this overlaps with social networks.

1 or more smart devices: I’d be lost without my iPhone and iPad (neither of which is the latest model). I use the phone for ‘in the moment’ things, the iPad for when I have longer time frames.

So, that’s my toolkit, what’s yours?

Jane's toolkit diagram

#AECT17 Reflections

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Ok, so I was an academic for a brief and remarkably good period of time (a long time ago). Mind you, I’ve kept my hand in: reviewing journal and conference submissions, writing the occasional book chapter, contributing to some research, even playing a small role in some grant-funded projects.  I like academics, it’s just that circumstances took me away (and I like consulting too; different, not one better). However, there’re a lot of benefits from being engaged, particularly keeping up with the state of the art. At least one perspective… Hence, I attended the most recent meeting of the Association of Educational Communications & Technology, pretty much the society for academics in instructional technology.

The event features many of your typical components: keynotes, sessions, receptions, and the interstitial social connections. One of the differences is that there’s no vendor exhibition. And there are a lot of concurrent sessions: roughly 27 per time slot!    Now, you have to understand, there are multiple agendas, including giving students and new faculty members opportunities for presentations and feedback. There are also sessions designed for tapping into the wisdom of the elders, and working sessions to progress understandings. This was only my second, so I may have the overall tenor wrong.  Regardless, here are some reflections from the event:

For one, it’s clear that there’s an overall awareness of what could, and should, be happening in education. In the keynotes, the speakers repeatedly conveyed messages about effective learning. What wasn‘t effectively addressed was the comprehensive resistance of the education system to meaningful change.  Still, all three keynotes, Driscoll, Cabrera, and Reeves, commented in one way or another on problems and opportunities in education. Given that many of the faculty members come from Departments of Education, this is understandable.

Another repeated emergent theme (at least for me) was the need for meaningful research. What was expressed by Tom Reeves in a separate session was the need for a new approach to research grounded in focusing on real problems. I’ve been a fan of his call for Design-Based Research, and liked what he said: all thesis students should introduce their topics with the statement “the problem I’m looking at is”. The sessions, however, seemed to include too many small studies. (In my most cynical moments, I wonder how many studies have looked at teaching students or teacher professional development and their reflections/use of technology…).

One session I attended was quite exciting. The topic was the use of neuroscience in learning, and the panel were all people using scans and other neuroscience data to inform learning design. While I generally deride the hype that usually accompanies the topic, here were real researchers talking actual data and the implications, e.g. for dyslexia.  While most of the results from research that have implications for design are still are at the cognitive level, it’s important to continue to push the boundaries.

I focused my attendance mostly on the Organizational Training & Performance group, and heard a couple of good talks.  One was a nice survey of mentoring, looking across the research, and identifying what results there were, and where there were still opportunities for research. Another study did a nice job of synthesizing models for human performance technology, though the subsequent validation approach concerned me.

I did a couple of presentations myself that I’ll summarize in tomorrow’s post, but it was a valuable experience. The challenges are different than in corporate learning technology, but there are interesting outcomes that are worth tracking.  A valuable experience.

FocusOn Learning reflections

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If you follow this blog (and you should :), it was pretty obvious that I was at the FocusOn Learning conference in San Diego last week (previous 2 posts were mindmaps of the keynotes). And it was fun as always.  Here are my reflections on what happened a bit more, as an exercise in meta-learning.

There were three themes to the conference: mobile, games, and video.  I’m pretty active in the first two (two books on the former, one on the latter), and the last is related to things I care and talk about.  The focus led to some interesting outcomes: some folks were very interested in just one of the topics, while others were looking a bit more broadly.  Whether that’s good or not depends on your perspective, I guess.

Mobile was present, happily, and continues to evolve.  People are still talking about courses on a phone, but more folks were talking about extending the learning.  Some of it was pretty dumb – just content or flash cards as learning augmentation – but there were interesting applications. Importantly, there was a growing awareness about performance support as a sensible approach.  It’s nice to see the field mature.

For games, there were positive and negative signs.  The good news is that games are being more fully understood in terms of their role in learning, e.g. deep practice.  The bad news is that there’s still a lot of interest in gamification without a concomitant awareness of the important distinctions. Tarting up drill-and-kill with PBL (points, badges, and leaderboards; the new acronym apparently)  isn’t worth significant interest!  We know how to drill things that must be, but our focus  should be on intrinsic interest.

As a side note, the demise of Flash has left us without a good game development environment. Flash is both a development environment and a delivery platform. As a development environment  Flash had a low learning threshold, and yet could be used to build complex games.  As a delivery platform, however, it’s woefully insecure (so much so that it’s been proscribed in most browsers). The fact that Adobe couldn’t be bothered to generate acceptable HTML5 out of the development environment, and let it languish, leaves the market open for another accessible tool. And Unity or Unreal provide good support (as I understand it), but still require coding.  So we’re not at an easily accessible place. Oh, for HyperCard!

Most of the video interest was either in technical issues (how to get quality and/or on the cheap), but a lot of interest was also in interactive video. I think branching video is a real powerful learning environment for contextualized decision making.  As a consequence the advent of tools that make it easier is to be lauded. An interesting session with the wise Joe Ganci (@elearningjoe) and a GoAnimate guy talked about when to use video versus animation, which largely seemed to reflect my view (confirmation bias ;) that it’s about whether you want more context (video) or concept (animation). Of course, it was also about the cost of production and the need for fidelity (video more than animation in both cases).

There was a lot of interest in VR, which crossed over between video and games.  Which is interesting because it’s not inherently tied to games or video!  In short,  it’s a delivery technology.  You can do branching scenarios, full game engine delivery, or just video in VR. The visuals can be generated as video or from digital models. There was some awareness, e.g. fun was made of the idea of presenting powerpoint in VR (just like 2nd Life ;).

I did an ecosystem presentation that contextualized all three (video, games, mobile) in the bigger picture, and also drew upon their cognitive and then L&D roles. I also deconstructed the game Fluxx (a really fun game with an interesting ‘twist’). Overall, it was a good conference (and nice to be in San Diego, one of my ‘homes’).

Evil design?

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This is a rant, but it’s coupled with lessons.  

I’ve been away, and one side effect was a lack of internet bandwidth at the residence.  In the first day I’d used up a fifth of the allocation for the whole time (> 5 days)!  So, I determined to do all I could to cut my internet usage while away from the office.  The consequences of that have been heinous, and  on the principle of “it’s ok to lose, but don’t lose the lesson”, I want to share what I learned.  I don’t think it was evil, but it well could’ve been, and in other instances it might be.

So, to start, I’m an Apple fan.  It started when I followed the developments at Xerox with SmallTalk and the Alto as an outgrowth of Alan Kay‘s Dynabook work. Then the Apple Lisa was announced, and I knew this was the path I was interested in. I did my graduate study in a lab that was focused on usability, and my advisor was consulting to Apple, so when the Mac came out I finally justified a computer to write my PhD thesis on. And over the years, while they’ve made mistakes (canceling HyperCard), I’ve enjoyed their focus on making me more productive. So when I say that they’ve driven me to almost homicidal fury, I want you to understand how extreme that is!

I’d turned on iCloud, Apple’s cloud-based storage.  Innocently, I’d ticked the ‘desktop/documents’ syncing (don’t).  Now, with  every other such system that I know of, it’s stored locally *and* duplicated on the cloud.  That is, it’s a backup. That was my mental model.  And that model was reinforced:  I’d been able to access my files even when offline.  So, worried about the bandwidth of syncing to the cloud, I turned it off.

When I did, there was a warning that  said something to the effect of: “you’ll lose your desktop/documents”.  And, I admit, I didn’t interpret that literally (see: model, above).  I figured it would disconnect their syncing. Or I’d lose the cloud version. Because, who would actually steal the files from your hard drive, right?

Well, Apple DID!  Gone. With an option to have them transferred, but….

I turned it back on, but didn’t want to not have internet, so I turned it off again but ticked the box that said to copy the files to my hard drive.  COPY BACK MY OWN @##$%^& FILES!  (See fury, above.)   Of course, it started, and then said “finishing”.  For 5 days!  And I could see that my files weren’t coming back in any meaningful rate. But there was work  to do!

The support  guy I reached had some suggestion that really didn’t work. I did try to drag my entire documents folder from the iCloud drive to my hard drive, but it said it was making the estimate of how long, and hung on that for a day and a half.  Not helpful.

In meantime, I started copying over the files I needed to do work. And continuing to generate the new ones that reflected what I was working on.  Which meant that the folders in the cloud, and the ones on my hard drive that I  had  copied over, weren’t in sync any longer.  And I have a  lot of folders in my documents folder.  Writing, diagrams, client files, lots of important information!

I admit I made some decisions in my panic that weren’t optimal.  However, after returning I called Apple again, and they admitted that I’d have to manually copy stuff back.  This has taken hours of my time, and hours yet to go!

Lessons learned

So, there are several learnings from this.  First, this is bad design. It’s frankly evil to take someone’s hard drive files after making it easy to establish the initial relationship.  Now, I don’t  think Apple’s intention was to hurt me this way, they just made a bad decision (I hope; an argument could be made that this was of the “lock them in and then jack them up” variety, but that’s contrary to most of their policies so I discount it).  Others, however,  do make these decisions (e.g. providers of internet and cable from whom you can only get a 1 or 2  year price which will then ramp up  and unless you remember to check/change, you’ll end up paying them more than you should until you get around to noticing and doing something about it).  Caveat emptor.

Second, models are important and can be used for or against you. We do  create models about how things work and use evidence to convince ourselves of their validity (with a bit of confirmation bias). The learning lesson is to provide good models.  The warning is to check your models when there’s a financial stake that could take advantage of them for someone else’s gain!

And the importance of models for working and performing is clear. Helping people get good models is an important boost to successful performance!  They’re not necessarily easy to find (experts don’t have access to 70% of what they do), but there are ways to develop them, and you’ll be improving your outcomes if you do.

Finally, until Apple changes their policy, if you’re a Mac and iCloud user I  strongly recommend you avoid the iCloud option to include Desktop and Documents in the cloud unless you can guarantee that you won’t have a bandwidth blockage.  I like the idea of backing my documents to the cloud, but not when I can’t turn it off without losing files. It’s a bad policy that has unexpected consequences to user expectations, and frankly violates my rights to  my data.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled blog topics.

 

Disruptive Innovation

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I recently came across a document  (PDF) about disruptive innovation based upon Clayton Christensen’s models, which I’d heard about but hadn’t really penetrated. This one was presented around higher education innovation (a topic I’ve  some familiarity with ;), so it provided a good basis for me to explore the story.  It had some interesting features that are worth portraying, and then some implications for my thoughts on innovation, so I thought I’d share.

The model’s premise is that disruption requires two major things: a technology enabler and a business model innovation.  That is, there has to be a way to deliver this new advance, and it has to be coupled with a way to capitalize on the benefits.  It can’t just be a new technology in an existing business model, as that’s merely the traditional competitive innovation. Similarly, a new business model around existing technology is still within  competitive advancement.

A related requirement is to have a new entity ready to capitalize. This quote captured me: “In those few instances in which the leader in one generation became the leader in the next disruptive one, the company did so by setting up a completely autonomous business unit…”  You can’t do disruption from inside the game.  Even if you’re a player, you have to liberate resources to start anew.

Which is quite different than most innovation. Typical innovation is ‘within the box’.  This comes from having an environment where people can experiment, share, be exposed to new ideas, and allowing it to incubate (ferment/percolate) over time.  And this is a good thing. Disruptive innovation makes new industries, new companies, etc.  And that’s also good (except, perhaps, for the disrupted).  The point being that both innovations are valuable, but different.

It’s not clear to me what happens when an internal innovation comes up with an idea that’s really disruptive. Clearly, if the idea  clears the hurdles of complacency and inertia, you’d probably want to spin it off.  But most innovations just need a fair airing and trialing to get traction (though depending on scope, a bit of change management might be useful).

I encourage innovation, and creating the environment where it can happen. It’s valuable even in established businesses, and a fair bit is known about how to create an environment where it can flourish.  So, what can we innovate about innovation?