Read on to understand learning in perpetual beta with Harold Jarche.
We live in a world that is increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. We experience constant change around us and that change goes faster than ever before. This has consequences for how we do business. More specifically, it changes how we are dealing with knowledge in the workplace.
I had the pleasure to spend a day at the Antwerp Port House (designed by Zaha Hadid) and learn from Harold Jarche about working in perpetual betaand leadership in networks. Jarche describes a world that thrives in change, a world that is continuously in beta mode, searching how the most complex problems can find a solution. I went home with 5 takeaways on digital workplace transformation:
- You should have started building your social network 10 years ago
- In a network era, you need implicit knowledge to create value
- Use experimentation for solving complex problems
- Communities of practice bridge teams and social networks
- Real leadership is what you can achieve if your title is taken away
Takeaway #1: You should have started building your social network 10 years ago
Guess what is the one thing that high performing individuals have in common. Is it working at least 50 hours a week? Is it creativity? Is it a university degree? Is it strategic insight? Nope. It appears to be networking. All high performing individuals have a strong social network and did not start working on it today, but at least 10 years ago.
Failing to master social media platforms in a work context, becomes a huge disadvantage for the contemporary knowledge worker
Just for the record, by social network I am not talking about Facebook or Snapchat. A network is the combination of meaningful connections with real people. These relations do not get established by merely sending a “friendship request”. Of course, social media platforms can be incredibly powerful for building your network. With these tools, you get access to 3 billion people. This is unseen in the world’s history. According to Jarche, failing to master these tools and apply them in a work context, becomes a huge disadvantage for the contemporary knowledge worker.
Reflecting upon this, I realized that my presence at this workshop is a direct result from my network. I knew the workshop’s organizer Filip Callewaert through a community on digital workplace transformation. The host of that community is Isabel De Clercqand we met here for the first time. In other words, the boundaries between real life and digital platforms have completely blurred and they strengthen each other both-ways. So, I used Twitter to connect with Jarche and explain about the similarities between network theory and Nassim Taleb’s work on anti-fragility, and this was his answer:
Takeaway #2: In a network era, you need implicit knowledge to create value
Jarche builds further on the work of David Rondfeldt about the evolution of society from tribes over institutions and markets to networks. He identified that the transition from one era to another coincides with the uptake of new communication means.
Currently, we are in the middle of the transition from a society dominated by markets to a network era. As result, the way we are doing business changes as well. In an industrial market economy, labor has been standardized and everything is routine. Compliance with the standards is critical for success. However, all work that can be standardized and defined by business rules gets automated nowadays. What is left, is non-routine work. It is work that you cannot program and that will dominate the creative network economy.
Non-routine work is always highly contextual. There is no standard procedure or cookbook. When everything is an exception, you require implicit knowledge. This is the type of knowledge that you gain through observation and conversation. Guess what, you need a social network to develop this kind of knowledge (see takeaway #1). Also, applying these principles on my work domain, it means that more processes will be automated and that the focus will change from business process management to adaptive case management.
What was an eye-opener for me, is that this shift is not necessarily related to manual versus cognitive labor. Just like self-driving cars will make Uber drivers redundant, so do certain tasks for lawyers get automated and we may need less lawyers in the future. But for finding the irretrievable water leak in my house, the “leak-hunter” will need a lot of creativity. Still, it’s manual labor.
Takeaway #3: Use experimentation for solving complex problems
If I look at my own company, I see a hierarchy but also a network of relations with solid lines and dotted lines, with explicit and implicit relations. The amount of relations increases and so does the complexity of doing business. This is typical for work in today’s network economy and we get better used to that. But not all work requires the same approach. Depending on the complexity of work, Jarche points out that you need different strategies and therefore he uses IBM’s Cynefin Framework for decision-making.
With simple problems, it’s easy. There is a clear relation between cause and effect and therefore you can document best practices in procedures and then train your workforce. As a company, you just need to ensure the right level of coordination so work get done effectively and efficiently. This is also the stuff that can easily be automated.
For complicated problems, the relation between cause and effect is less clear and you need some analysis, investigation or expertise before you can resolve them. For these problems, management has usually defined a common objective and people collaborate with each other to achieve it. As long as you do sufficient analysis and planning you can solve these problems and good practices will arise.
With complex problems, you can analyze forever and still find no solution
Now, when it comes to complex problems, standard project management techniques make no sense. As you can only perceive the relation between cause and effect in retrospect, you can analyze forever but you won’t find the solution. Instead it is wiser to do lots of small experiments. You will learn as you go and find emergent practices. But to find a solution, you also need people collaborating and exchanging implicit knowledge. Again, social media platforms are ideally suited for that (see takeaway #1).
Take for example Gmail which was in beta for over 5 years because Google had no clue how their system would scale with 100 million users. Even after the beta state, Google has been updating Gmail continuously, mostly through small changes and experiments with a subset of users. This also reminds to a design thinking approach that focuses on learning about human behavior through prototyping and small iterations.
Takeaway #4: Communities of practice bridge teams and social networks
When people are collaborating in a team, solving complicated problems and working towards a common goal, they participate in a community of practice to maintain their level of expertise. In a community of practice, people from different teams meet each other and share their lessons learnt. From here knowledge can be further shared through social networks.
Community of practice enable a loop of continuous learning
But it also works in the opposite direction. People from a community of practice can use social networks to seek new knowledge and discuss the applicability together. From here individual community members take what is relevant back to their teams. Altogether, community of practice enable a loop of continuous learning.
Takeaway #5: Real leadership is what you can achieve if your title is taken away
When Jarche talks about leadership, he uses a bold statement from online learning expert Stephen Downes:
“Leadership is the trait people who have been successful ascribe as the reason for their success. It is one of those properties that appears to be empirically unverifiable and is probably fictional.”
Building further on that, Jarche creates his own leadership definition and that statement is even bolder:
Real leadership is what you can achieve if your title is taken away.
In a world dominated by networks, brutal competition won’t make you win anymore in business. It’s a matter of building the right relations. These relations can be established through tangible assets like material goods or money, but also intangible assets like knowledge, trust, reputation, feedback, recognition or expertise. These intangibles are now much more important than before to succeed in business. So that’s why influencing and building trust are critical competencies for today’s leaders to have impact, not necessarily the level and position in a hierarchic structure.
When my company is a leading healthcare company, I believe that this is thanks to its open innovation model. Through incubators, licensing, acquisitions, co-development partnerships or strategic investments, a wealth of relations has been build with the outside world to advance new healthcare solutions. Similarly, the world’s leading biopharmaceutical companies collaborate now to develop pre-competitive partnerships to simplify and accelerate new innovative therapies. None of this would have been possible 25 years ago. None of this would be possible without a deep mutual understanding and trust between partners, and only people can establish that.
Having good relations is not enough to have a powerful network. If you always rely on a small number of people, your opinions will be conformed to what you already know. Social media platforms help to extend your reach to opinions, but that’s not enough. If your relations are from the same department, gender, age, background etc. you will also lack diversity. For instance, I follow some people in Twitter that I strongly disagree with. Still, they make me think from time to time about my own beliefs. And last but not least, this diversity of opinions is critical for driving innovation.
Did you read till the end? Congratulations. You still don’t believe anything about network theory? Then think about what the British statistician George Box said:
