Of late, Wheatley has been writing about how to persevere in the face of adversity and how to shift thinking in the midst of difficult circumstances, both timely skills.

So I was eager to read the recent conversation between Wheatley and the sharp-thinking Art Kleiner, editor-in-chief of strategy+business. They don’t disappoint.

Wheatley says that it is a difficult time for leaders to be innovative, and that there is little time in modern organizations for reflection and learning what works and doesn’t work.

“For me, community — people working together and knowing that others are there to support them — is a critically important but largely invisible resource. . . But community is hard to find in most organizations. Not only do many leaders deny that this capacity is important, but they’re actually destroying it through their current management approaches.”

Such as? Whteatley says she many forward-thinking business leaders are being driven by their boards and bosses to implement continuous cutbacks and produce more results with fewer resources.

“Too many leaders fail to realize that the old ways, their mental maps, aren’t giving them the information they need. But instead of acknowledging that, they push on more frantically, desperate to have the old ways work. When human beings work from fear and panic, we lose nearly all of our best reasoning capacities. We can’t see patterns, think about the future, or make moral judgments.”

When you’re lost, Wheatley says, the solution is to admit it and call together everyone who might have information that’s needed to construct a new map, people from all levels of the organization.

Kleiner pushes Wheatley to explain her view that the only leaders who succeed are those who practise a spiritual discipline. Wheatly doesn’t back down, though she makes clear that, by “spiritual discipline,” she doesn’t mean a religious practice per se but rather “some regular activity that leads you to reflect on your struggles and challenges in a larger context.” That might be meditation, time in a natural space, or even Alcoholics Anonymous. Her point is that leaders must engage in some practice that pushes them out of the perception that they are the centre of the universe.

You can find the original article here (registration may be required)

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Meg Wheatley on Perseverance

How about starting by reducing the barriers that get in the way of productive interaction and collaboration with colleagues. Matson (McKinsey) and Prusak (Institute for Knowledge Management) advise organizations to look here for answers because knowledge workers spend a great deal of time interacting with other knowledge workers.

Matson’s and Prusak’s research shows that half of all interactions are constrained by one of five barriers.

1 and 2. Physical and technical barriers: geographic distance or lack of tools for locating the right people. Workaround — Communities of practice supported by online tools to help workers find colleagues with useful information.

3. Social/cultural barriers: rigid hierarchies that discourage sharing. Workaround — Organization-specific case studies discussed in small groups to promote a better understanding of company culture; incorporating knowledge sharing in performance reviews.

4. Contextual barriers: difficulty translating knowledge widely. Workaround — Rotate employees across teams and divisions; stage creative forums where specialists can learn about other specialists’ projects.

5. Time barriers: perceived lack of time to interact. Workaround — Identify employees that knowledge workers need to interact with and on what topics.

“Boosting the productivity of knowledge workers,” by Eric Matson and Laurence Prusak; McKinsey Quarterly (September 2010)

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5 Ways to Make Knowledge Workers Productive

Not really, say researchers from INSEAD and Apple University. Singh, Hansen, and Podolny suggest there are two dynamics at play. One, employees who belong to the periphery of an organization — women and those with lower tenure or poor connectedness to experts — have limited awareness of who knows what in an organization and a lower ability to seek help from others best suited to guide the search. Two, when these employees do seek information, they tend to contact colleagues like themselves who are also outliers.

The researchers say employees on the periphery need to cross social boundaries to discover “who knows what,” and that their managers have a role in making this happen.

“We speculate that reliance on interpersonal networks remains crucial when a firm’s knowledge cannot be easily codified and stored in databases, when it changes
quickly (making it difficult to keep track of who knows what), and when it is distributed across people who are not official experts,” the researchers write in their working paper The World is Not Small for Everyone. “This calls for managers to recognize that formal IT systems are rarely substitutes for inter-personal networks. The implication is that managers need to help members on the periphery develop their networks.”

“The World is Not Small for Everyone: Inequity in Searching for Knowledge in Organizations”, by Jasjit Singh, Morten T. Hansen, and Joel M. Podolny; INSEAD working paper 2009/49/ST/EFE

photo credit: Sambhu Sankar

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Why Outliers Need Insiders

To test this assumption, Birgit Verworn (HTW Dresden, Germany) studied the suggestion systems used at two German locations of a large European company, focusing on a sample of 633 submitted ideas. In these systems, suggestions were rewarded depending on their quality; quality was assessed by the resulting potential revenues or savings.

The surprising finding: the over-55 age cohort scored highest. “In contrast to our assumptions, older employees submitted more valuable ideas than younger employees,” Vermorn writes in the journal Creativity and Innovation. “The most and the most valuable ideas came from employees older than 55, who also achieved the highest average value per employee of that age group of EUR24,918.”

“Does Age Have an Impact on Having Ideas? An Analysis of the Quantity and Quality of Ideas Submitted to a Suggestion System,” by Birgit Verworn; Creativity and Innovation Management (Vol. 18 No. 4, 2009, pp. 326-334)

photo credit: Adam Melancon

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Great Ideas Never Grow Old

Peters and Snowden write that the democratisation of information, from Google and blogs to wikis and YouTube, is an “irresistible tide.” On a personal level, we can easily call up information on any subject, “and can add our own voice, usually unmoderated, to the discussion, or start a brand-new discussion of our own.” In the organizational world, a company can buy an online collection of management research and own a  library of research similar to that found in a business school.

So in this information-saturated environment, what can organizations add of learning value? The authors suggest two things: action learning and critical thinking. Action learning is essentially “learning by doing” and then reflecting on successes and failures, either with the support of other learners or a coach. Critical thinking is a particularly vital skill these days because it enables people to be more discerning about the information they consume.

“Both of these, the latter especially, will help both individuals and organizations gain more from the increasing democratisation of information, and from the increasing informality of learning.”

Video killed the radio star, but has Google killed the learning organization?, by John Peters and Kate Snowden; The Learning Organization (Vol. 15 No. 6, 2008 pp. 449-453)

Email me for a copy of this paper: Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com

photo credit: swortman53

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Has Google Killed the Learning Org?

At 19:27, there is an amusing anecdote about Google CEO Eric Schmidt arriving at his new private office and being met by a squatter who introduced himself as the “Chief Lumber Jack” (the guy in charge of the logs). As it would happen, the two  bunked together in the office for a few months, giving Schmidt a great introduction to the organization.

At 21:20, Varian talks about “OKRs”, Objectives and Key Results, that all Google employees complete to list work plans for the following quarter.

At 27:02, he talks about how business decisions are made either by HiPPOS (“Highly Paid Person’s Opinions” or hard data.

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Managing Knowledge Workers, Google-Style

Here’s your chance to get in on the ground floor: Submissions are invited for the inaugural issue. The theme: “Current issues and future directions in workplace e-learning: Mapping the research landscape”. In addition, best practice examples and commentary articles may be submitted to be either peer or editor reviewed. Non-refereed contributions in the form of technical/application notes (tools, how-tos) and book/Web site reviews are also invited.

Manuscript deadline: June 1, 2009.

Everything you need to know can be found at this site.

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New Journal on Workplace E-learning

To find out, Nick Oliver of University of Edinburgh studied the adoption of Japanese “lean” manufacturing methods in the UK, in a couple of unconventional ways. First, he was a participant-observer in a one-day seminar by lean guru Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt. Second, he studied the response of the UK engineering community to the publication of a report questioning the financial benefits of lean manufacturing methods.

Oliver found in these two cases that the language used to discuss lean ideas sounded a lot like the language used in religious conversions, and the responses to criticism of the methods were similar to responses to religious blasphemy. So much for rationality.
Oliver concluded that factors such as the aesthetics of ideas, their intuitive appeal, the method by which they’re delivered, and the characteristics of their promoters all influence their acceptance at least as much as hard evidence of their efficacy.

There is a payoff for change management practitioners. If the author is to be believed, purveyors of new ideas (such as org change) should project “expertness”, trustworthiness, and personal dynamism. As for the ideas themselves, there should be local demonstrations of applicability and they should somehow predict events and/or solve problems previously considered to be intractable.

Rational choice or leap of faith? The creation and defence of a management orthodoxy; Nick Oliver; The Learning Organization Journal (2008, vol. 15, no. 5, 373-387)

Email me for a copy of this paper: Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com

photo credit: systemsrelaunch

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So-So Idea, But What a Smile

Goodman and Beenen developed the contract specifically for university management schools, and you can guess why: schools are under continued pressure to be relevant and deliver value to their “customers.” But it is intriguing to consider how their model can be applied to a non-academic organization. If you are truly committed to building a learning organization, writing this into a contract with each employee is one powerful way of getting your point across.

There are three basic elements to Goodman and Beenen’s organizational learning contract:
1. Learning outcomes. These are specific, explicitly communicated, and developed with the organization in mind.
2. Learning environments. What types of learning environments will be used to ensure the various outcomes.
3. Learning systems. How the contract will be implemented, outcomes measured, and curriculum redesigned.

The authors say organization-level learning contracts build in accountability, are a force for integration, and can be used as diagnostic tools to identify learning gaps or mismatched expectations. This is quite a radical concept for business schools but is no less valuable for non-academic organizations.

Organization Learning Contracts and Management Education; Paul Goodman and Gerard Beenen; Academy of Management Learning & Education (2008, vol. 7, no. 4, 521-534)

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Learning Contract on Steroids