PKM Workshop

"Abstract Everyone desires a secure life. Yet the security of more and more regions is undermined by unreliable and unequal availability of basics such as energy, water, food, natural resources, funds, co-operation, trust and hope for the future. Shocks such as the credit crunch, infectious diseases, climate instability and ecological collapses are converging towards a 'planet crunch' where security would become a fond memory. Traditional policy-making, that manages problems separately and incrementally, offers only the illusion of protection against impending unaffordable and irreversible shocks affecting all people. "

"I have found that business value keeps shifting. I used to get paid well to help companies select new learning technologies. I have not done that type of work for over five years. I have also seen organizations move away from using external consultants. I think the entire consulting model is ripe for disruptive change. When LinkedIn advertises ex-McKinsey consultants available for $60 per hour, you know that it's an obsolete business model."

" Culture will overcome any structural chart or any reorganisation. Companies fail because they believe that a restructure will change the culture of the company.  Even if a restructure creates temporary success, culture will reassert itself. Often senior managers ignore organisational culture because it works for them, by ignoring culture; the senior managers indicate that the organisation cannot learn because they engage in single loop learning. "

"The first one, It's the Company's Job to Help Employees Learn written by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Mara Swan (HBR 18 July) made a number of significant points. Here are a few soundbites: "most jobs today demand … the capacity to keep learning and developing new skills and expertise, even if they are not obviously linked to one's current job" "a major pillar in Google's recruitment strategy is to hire "learning animals"" "Sadly, most organizations have yet to wake up to this reality, so they continue to pay too much attention to academic qualifications and hard skills, as if what entry-level employees had learned during university actually equipped them for today's job market." "workplace learnability is far less structured and formulaic than college learnability, and employees must juggle the tension between the demand for the short-term efficiencies of productivity with the long-term quest for intellectual growth" "So how can managers do a better job of fostering learnability in the workplace? Select for it … Nurture it … Reward it""

"Understanding the effects of pervasive networks like social media is an essential literacy today. Each citizen has to be informed through active engagement in a digitally-mediated society. Unconsciously we do not trust experts, so we have to consciously develop expert networks that we do trust. This requires effort, such as the discipline of personal knowledge mastery. In the long run our networks can make our sense-making much easier. Without personal knowledge networks, we are at the whim of whatever current outrage is flowing through the social media platforms. "Maybe your friends and family aren't experts … but they surely have your best interests at heart, and that it why they are nearly as trusted on this topic as scientists, despite their lack of expertise. So here we have a partial answer to why experts aren't trusted. They aren't trusted by people who feel alienated from them. My reading of this study would be that it isn't that we live in a 'post-fact' political climate. Rather it is that attempts to take facts out of their social context won't work." - Tom Stafford"

"A Foundation for Modern Work My Personal Knowledge Mastery model of Seek > Sense > Share is focused on helping individuals work better in teams, and contribute to professional communities by developing and engaging their social networks to continuously learn. This approach has been used in several organizations. Today, it is critical to take control of your own learning and build a professional network. Engaging with other people, especially those different from us, is the key to making sense of information."

""The fiction at the heart of neoliberalism is that everybody can enjoy the consumer lifestyle without wages rising," Mason writes. "You can go on creating money forever but if a declining share of it flows to workers, and yet a growing part of profits is generated out of their mortgages and credit cards, you are eventually going to hit a wall. At some point, the expansion of financial profit through providing loans to stressed consumers will break, and snap back.""

"WEAVING INNOVATION INTO THE VERY FABRIC OF YOUR COMPANY Armed with a definition for innovation and the knowledge that it is critical to one's long-term success, organizations must take the next step, which is building a culture of innovation. And this is when the real work begins, because organizations can't just spend their way to successful innovation."

"What Skills will Self-Sustain Digital Workers? To be fair to IT and HR departments around the world, the digital workplace target does move incredibly fast and is picking up speed. And there never was a finish line. Fortunately, I believe there are novel, effective and increasingly well-understood new ways for most organizations to address their current digital workplace gaps, and it's not (just) by "giving up non-essential control", deploying liberal BYOD/BYOT programs to cultivate employee-led change, figuring out how to do things like learn or change behavior faster, or any of the ten strategies I've previously recommended."

"In the process of applying technology, we can't forget that workforce engagement, the measure of whether an employee merely does the minimum required of them, versus proactively driving innovation and new value for the organization, is the ultimate objective here. Thus, engagement can only ever be partially accounted for by deploying the latest new collaborative technology, and probably significantly less than many of its proponents would have you believe."

"The traditional guardians of our democracy, such as the Fourth Estate and our legislators, are in the thrall of the new platform monopolists. Interconnected and engaged citizens are our hope for a better future. We need to learn how to navigate the emerging network era. People have to take control of their learning: being connected, mobile, and global while conversely contractual, part-time, and local."

"Taylorism-derived job analysis, evaluation and measurement are the tools (along with their underlying assumptions) that are used to create the skeletal architecture of hierarchical organizations, the pyramid we all know. - Jon Husband in Knowledge, power, and an historic shift in work and organizational design"

"Networks enable organizations to deal with complexity by empowering people to connect with whom they need to, without permission. Network thinking means that anyone can connect to another colleague, and the default permission to get access to information is public. Networks are in a state of perpetual Beta. Unlike hierarchies, they can continuously change shape, size, and composition, without the need for a formal reorganization. Our thinking needs to continuously change as well. Hierarchies were essentially a solution to a communications problem. They are artifacts of a time when information was scarce and hard to share, and when connections with others were difficult to make. That time is over. Markets, competitors, customers, and suppliers are already highly connected. The Internet has done this. It is why a Triple-A enterprise needs to be organized more like the Internet, and less like a tightly controlled machine. Continue to next post: the trinity model"

Professional Eco System "There's no longer such thing as a job for life; people are constantly moving around, and we are now seeing the early-stages of the so-called Freelance or Gig Economy. Individuals need to be ready to drop in and out of jobs with up-to-date skills and knowledge, as required. In order to do that they need to take responsibility for their own career development; they can't rely on their company to support their career aspirations - so they need to be constantly learning in many different ways, not just for their current jobs but for their future jobs. "

Jane Hart - a major shift "In this post, however, I want to consider the Individual's Perspective of Workplace Learning. First of all, please note, I have not used the word Learner here, because for the Individual - the employee, the worker - it is clear it is not all about the learning but about the work. It's primarily about getting their work done, addressing performance problems, and being part of a functioning team - and in fact learning is often an unconscious activity here! But it is also about personal improvement through both company-organised and self-initiatives, and about keeping up to date with what is happening in their industry or profession so that they remain relevant. So, here is a graphic that shows 10 ways how an individual might learn at and for work."

Good summary of why social learning in the workplace is a business necessity. "Dealing with people, and their organizations, is complex. These types of complex circumstances, confronting us more frequently in many walks of life, require emergent practices in order to try the new. They should be based on solid explicit knowledge in addition to networked implicit knowledge. To deal with complex issues, social learning at work is a business necessity."

A foundation post on the evolution of jobs! "Standardized work continues to be automated, by software and machines.  The re-wiring of work is essential for every part of our economy. The challenge is to identify what work can be automated and focus people on being more creative, both in dealing with complex problems and in identifying new opportunities. Human creativity is a limitless resource. Too often, it is wasted in our organizational structures."