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I had intended writing a series of blog posts in the run up to the pilot launch of  The Smart Work Company's social learning platform in September. Turmoil in global financial markets, with the downgrading of the US credit rating and simultaneous shenanigans in the Euro zone, gives focus to the topics I want to explore.
The series, Smart Working in Turbulent Times, will include themes that I have talked about before in previous blog posts in a random way. My hope is that this series will pull topics together to create a rationale for smart working, to explore what it is, to make the case for why now (urgently) and to show how smart working practices can be enabled, drawing on researching new ways of working over a fifteen year period and years of practical experience of helping senior executives make the transition to new ways of working.
Themes
Off the top of my head, the themes will include:
What?
Context: turbulent times past and present - there are lessons
How organisations work (and don't) - relationship dynamics, power, culture, conflict, alliances, psychological needs, performance environments etc
Smart principles underpinning design for:
Viability (including emotional and psychological well-being)
Adaptability
Autonomy
Integration
Collaboration
Wirearchy
Distributed diversity
Collective intelligence
Social skills
Thinking skills
Leadership skills
Learning skills
Performance environments, including:
Cultural and social environment
Online place
Physical space
Whole system of leadership
How?
All this research and good practice that others have found effective in specific contexts and at specific times cannot be be copied or rolled out. What to do?
Draw out principles and interpret for your own situation
Create hypotheses about what is happening or what you want to happen
What might work?
What might enable or prev

We will continue to focus relentlessly on our customers. * We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions. * We will continue to measure our programs and the effectiveness of our investments analytically, to jettison those that do not provide acceptable returns, and to step up our investment in those that work best. We will continue to learn from both our successes and our failures.* We will make bold rather than timid investment decisions where we see a sufficient probability of gaining market leadership advantages. Some of these investments will pay off, others will not, and we will have learned another valuable lesson in either case. * When forced to choose between optimizing the appearance of our GAAP accounting and maximizing the present value of future cash flows, we'll take the cash flows. * We will share our strategic thought processes with you when we make bold choices (to the extent competitive pressures allow), so that you may evaluate for yourselves whether we are making rational long-term leadership investments. * We will work hard to spend wisely and maintain our lean culture. We understand the importance of continually reinforcing a cost-conscious culture, particularly in a business incurring net losses. * We will balance our focus on growth with emphasis on long-term profitability and capital management. At this stage, we choose to prioritize growth because we believe that scale is central to achieving the potential of our business model. * We will continue to focus on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees, and continue to weight their compensation to stock options rather than cash. We know our success will be largely affected by our ability to attract and retain a motivated employee base, each of whom must think like, and therefore must actually be, an owner

statistics about our changing world. There are for more interesting numbers and resources than I could ever reference so I'm creating this post (which will get revised over time) to point you to their sources.

This question came up in an online seminar this morning. "How can I demonstrate the value of Informal Learning?"

First of all, understand that you're not buying informal learning. It's already going on in your organization. In fact, three-quarters of the learning on and about how to do one's job is informal.

The natural learning that occurs outside of classes and workshops is vital but it probably flies under your corporate radar. No manager is accountable; no department is committed to making improvements; there's no identifiable budget. Hence, one of the most important functions in an organization, keeping up with skills to prosper in the future, is left largely to chance.

The adaptive organisation is the second-last chapter of Adapt: Why success always starts with failure, followed by Adapting and you. In the final chapters, Tim Hartford examines how groups and individuals can strive to adapt, and here are some highlights.

"So let's first acknowledge a crucial difference: individuals, unlike populations, can succeed without adapting." This statement explains a lot about what happens in organizations ;)

Case study of Timpson:

The first thing Timpson does when it buys another business is to rip out the electronic point-of-sale machines (there are always EPOS machines) and replace them with old-fashioned cash registers. 'EPOS lets people at head office run the business', explains John Timpson. 'I don't want them to run the business.' EPOS machines empower head offices but they make it harder to be flexible and give customers what they need.

Whole Service: Some service systems provide "whole service" to the people within them. For example, a city provides "whole service" for its citizens and visitors, including flow of things people need (e.g., transportation, water, food, energy, communications), development activities for people (e.g., buildings, retail, finance, health, education), and governance (e.g., laws, security, dispute resolution, etc.). To a lesser degree, but similar in kind, a luxury cruise-ship provides "whole service" to its passengers. Even old-time homestead farms and ranches, because they had to sustain families and hired hands sometimes over multiple generations with minimal external inputs, are to some degree providing "whole service" to those people living within them.

Holistic Service Systems: To first approximation, the study of holistic service systems is concerned with how well these entities provide "whole service" to the people within them. Whole service deals with a conjunction of three types of service, namely (1) flow of things people need, (2) development activities for people, and (3) governance for individuals and institutions. A holistic service system is defined as "a service system that can support the people within it, with some level of (1) completeness (quality of life associated with whole service - flows, development, and governance), (2) independence (from all external service systems),and (3) extended duration (longer than a month if necessary and in some cases indefinitely)." Noteworthy levels of completeness, independence, and extended duration of "whole service" are the three defining properties of holistic service systems.

Innovation is the lifeblood of our global economy and a strategic priority for all CEOs everywhere. We're all familiar with classic cases where revolutionary ideas upended industries and generated enormous wealth: the Apple iPod's outplaying the Sony Walkman; Starbucks' beans and atmosphere flooding out traditional coffee shops; Skype's using a strategy of "free" to unspool AT&T. But how about Reckitt Benckiser Group, the British consumer products giant (Lysol, Woolite, Clearasil), which looks to customers, among others, to find new methods to detect parasites?