Tues Nov 3 I’ll be at the Mass chapter of ISPI to hear Cammy Bean talk about eLearning authoring tools. Several other #lrnchat folks will be there too.

Tues Nov 17 I’m planning to go to the Greater Boston ASTD meeting to hear Dave Wilkins speak about Social Learning and Social Networking.

This report from McKinsey talks about the importance of collaboration to knowledge workers. Interestingly enough, they did an analysis on how things are right now, or the current state of performance of knowledge workers. The report says in some industries knowledge workers make up about 75% of the workplace. The authors found a “performance gap between top and bottom companies in collaboration-intense sectors is nine times that of production- or transaction-intense sectors”. So organizations with knowledge workers have not figured out what sorts of remedies need to be apply to close performace gaps for knowledge workers.

Its actually worse than that – the researches also found that measurements for effective “collaboration productivity” doesn’t really exist. Everyone says they want a highly motivated, highly collaborative workpace, but no one knows how to measure what’s going on now and no one knows how to get people to that highly collaborative state.

The report has a neat tool that breaks up well-known roles by tasks and possible social media tools that could help them be more effective (in a tag cloud no less!).

The report also suggests a very strategic approach to choosing the tools to create the desired collabortive state:

1. Understand the specific requirements of interactive tasks
2. Identify which tasks create disproportionate value for the organization
3. Determining the types of inefficiencies and wasted efforts that bog down many interactions

It is a great report. More and more we’re talking about disruptive technology, but this technology is also going to disrupt our known ways of doing things. We’re going to need folks to get their arms around this idea of measuring performance by what is really going on, not by how things used to get done. And this approach seems like a practical way to blend the new technology into current organizations.

What are you seeing?

Notice the huge bottom layer of “losers”. Losers isn’t necessarily this sort of loser:

But as Venkatesh Rao (inventor of the Gervais principle) explains, loser is more in the economic sense. You have this huge mass of people who give up their chance to fully participate in the economy to work at company. They gain the security of working for an employer in trade for doing as the company directs. In the sense that they have given up their economic autonomy, they are losers.

That term losers is so loaded isn’t it? Language contains the cultural cues that help us define our world. Gendered language keeps popping up for me in this blog and in my personal life. So this post is about how gendered language perpetuates losers by homogenizing (or flattening) out that bottom section of the triangle.

Let me give a specific example. Yahoo hosts Open Hack Days for developers that use their APIs. For the last couple of years (at least) the Open Hack Day in Taiwan has included “Hack Girls”. Not strippers really, sort of cheerleaders in skimpy outfits who dance like strippers with some  of the participants. Yahoo apologized after there was an online outcry over pictures of the “Hack Girls”, and they promised it would never happen again.

This post isn’t about that event, or how Yahoo has responded. It is about the language used by the techies responding to the issue.Here are some of the responses to Yahoo’s apology:

• “We’re adults here, let’s act like one instead of acting like a little revealing clothing offended our Puritan hearts so much”
• “This is Taiwan… the other side of the world to you Americans. If China invaded would you care? Nope. But some dancing girls appear at a technology function and you’re all jumping up and down screaming about inappropriate behaviour. Again forcing your views on what’s morally right on the rest of the world.”
• “Honestly I think everyone is getting worked up over nothing. The fact remains that the majority of attendees at these events are men. Men like scantily clad women. It’s not hard to understand why they were there.”
• “Making a gigantic fuss and screaming about feminism is the problem. Hell, I’m a woman and it annoys me. Get over yourselves. If you think that the strippers at this event are undermining your talent, then obviously you’re not a very good developer.”
• “Women in IT who flaunt their intellects make it very uncomfortable for the hack girls who just want to be able to trade off their good <looks>. Get over yourselves”

The same sort of language is used every time someone brings up the issue of institutionalized discrimination against women in the IT industry. You will always hear variations of these words:

• Stop being so uptight
• Boys will be boys
• Only men show up, so what do you expect
• I’m a woman and I am ashamed of all women who speak up
• If you are complaining, you are obviously not an “awesome” enough coder/developer/engineer..
• Get over yourself

All of these words serve to marginalize those who point out discriminatory practices. Women who speak up are told to stop being uptight, embarrassing the other women, and their skills are called into question. Its almost like the only buckets for women in IT are a hot “Hack Girl”, a woman who is “one of the guys” who won’t speak up when she feels uncomfortable, or the angry feminazi who is always bringing everyone down.

The words are used over and over again. They are what permit these narrow views of what a woman in IT should be – they homogenize us all. They keep us all in that bottom loser category. Not just the women, but the men too. If you can’t see another type of woman, you’ve been homogenized too.

If we want to get to the point where we have a connected world, where we are able to make full use of everyone’s contributions, where the value networks that are constructed to get the work done include all workers, we have to start thinking about our language.

I challenge all of you to wrestle with these terms, with these definitions. I urge all of you to realize that the words we use to deal with the problem of the lack of woman in IT are huge indicators of the real underlying problem. Make it easy for women to speak up. If someone points out an obvious example of sexism, speak out against it! Don’t say, well that is an isolated example or yes but that is not why there are not women in IT.

I believe if we can change the language of oppression, we can work together to eliminate that loser section of the triangle, and move instead to a more connected way of management and working.

Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves.

This principle was based on this image of Company Hierarchy by Hugh MacLeod. This image is a take on the Peter Principle, or the idea that in a hierarchy a person will rise to his/her level of incompetence.

The Gervais Principle asserts that hierarchies are not the victim of the Peter Principle, but they create this crazy triangle of power out of necessity.

In the previous blog post, I bemoaned the fact that I am learning about the guys who wrote all the top down, command and control management theories in one of my classes this semester. So great – I’m learning the management schemes that prevent collaboration and innovation.

So maybe I should look at this from a performance standpoint. We know the actual performance state of many companies is this chart. We know this because of the popularity in comic devices such as Dilbert, Office Space, and The Office (which has a UK and US version, proving the triangle problem is global).

If this is the actual performance state, what would be the desired performance state of a company’s management system?

Polly Pearson blogged about an inverted triangle. Could this be the desired state?

I think this may be closer. Here is what she had to say:

Today, EMC is moving rapidly toward to the Inverted Pyramid, the one where everyone can have an idea, be passionate about it and facilitate success.  We are transitioning from the world of one spiritual leader/mentor/motivator in a company to Many — all joined by community, customers, and a common goal. This is our 2009 Pyramid, reflective of the faces behind the best ideas from the more than 1,400 submitted by EMCers in 19 countries this past few months.

Here is my idea: manage the organization, from the inside out using value networks.

Take Polly’s inverted triangle, and build one for every organization in the company. Point all the smallest angles of the triangles at each other to form a circle. Put the executives in the middle of the circle, with connections to every part of the organization. Give the little guy like me a way to network and use our expertise to help the business.

I think it would look something like this image:

I need to work on that image, I know. Hopefully my idea comes across. What do you think? Does this sort of management principle already exist?

If we can agree that top-down, command and control management doesn’t work, we know we need to get rid of the triangle. Is my circle idea a desired performance state for management? If so, how do we get there?

Will need to play with this more after midterms, but here is my first attempt:

.. talking earlier as to how we could change that mix (men to women at the conference) but we can’t hire what isn’t there.

This is what started the conversation. Zilla is sincere in wanting to see more women, but there do not seem to be women available with the proper skillset, so how can more women be hired? So a woman asked him about his job, in particular how much it paid, and he basically told her how hard the job is.

I thought it was weird he’d complain about no women to hire, and tell a woman who asked about pay how sucky the job is. To be far, zilla is an extremely strait shooter, doesn’t mince words, and doesn’t sugar his responses about anything (and that is why I like him!). So he was just being honest about what the job requires, and he’s a geek not an recruiting rep. He’s not the only person that describes jobs in our industry in that straight-forward way, and lets be honest there is a tremendous amount of work and stress that comes with many of our roles. But shouldn’t we sell the good parts first, tell about the challenges of the role, and let the individual decide if they want to risk it? Maybe this is one of the problems the industry has?

Another lady jumped in and reminded us about the study of young girls to find out why they don’t want to go into technology. Reasons: girls think that computers and engineering are “boring” , “filled with nerds” and “you are stuck to a desk all day” and most strangely that “there is no money in it”.

This got me thinking – how the heck did I get into, and stay in technology if all the job descriptions suck? I’ll tell my story, and ladies, please tell yours!

I have always loved to break things to figure out how they work. I’ve written before about how I grew up very poor, so the only time I got to figure out how things work was when one of my dad’s best friends, who was a garbage collector, would bring me broken transistor radios. I loved tearing things apart.

I went to community college as a non-trad, and they first tried to put me in business school. I said nope, I want to do Electronics. I mostly wanted to take the EET curriculum to find out how sound and video ACTUALLY went over the air waves. I was so happy when we finally got to that.

I could have stopped there, but I had started to teach myself (and my instructors) how to do HTML and had been taking programming courses. This was in 1999, and some of my brother’s friends we finishing their CS degrees, and were telling me how much money I could make with a Bachelor’s degree. So I decided to risk it and transferred to Florida State.

So what was my motivation? My kids. I wanted a steady job, with insurance. When I found out I could have that as well as make enough money to try and make up for all the years I lived under the poverty level, not to mention doing work I was very interested in, I was sold. That mother’s instinct to care for her family should not be underestimated. I’ve put up with all sorts of nonsense to provide for my kids. I would even have considered the job description ‘zilla gave.

So what is your story? What motivated you to become a technologist, and what has kept you in the field? Maybe we can start telling stories about how all the nonsense of the jobs are worth it, and convince more women to make the move to work with us. Leave a comment here, or write a post linking back here. And spread the word!

I’m taking two performance courses this semester. In one of the courses we are studying the origins of Human Performance Technology (HPT). I’ve been blogging that homework (see here , here, and here). As I’ve learned about the history, I’ve had a growing feeling of unease.

I blame it on CCK08 – last year’s Connectivism and Connected Knowledge course. That class really got me thinking about what it takes to create an environment for learning. And what I learned there is very different than what is in practice, and to some extent what I’m learning at school. (The course has started up for this year, check it out here).

I made a nice network of folks from that class as well. One of them, Mike Bogle, wrote a post a couple of days ago that describes part of how I feel. In the post he said this:

How on Earth can I make a difference and affect change in a culture that is almost diametrically opposed to my way of thinking?  How can I reconcile the growing notion that so much of the culture I am currently situated in, I completely disagree with, and likewise disagrees with me?  Quite literally I’m grasping at straws for an answer right now.

He was talking about his experience in higher ed, but I feel the exact same way sometimes. Mike and I aren’t in the “mushy middle”, and I want to believe that at some point we’ll start to see the change we hope to affect.

But then I do my HPT homework.

Why am I studying about the guys that dismantled indigenous ways of learning in favor of industrialized performance management? Are these guys really the founders of HPT? Or were the behavioral scientists of the 50s and 60s trying to undue the damage that was done by treating people as mere extensions of machines (or resources)?

I know I have lots of explaining to do. What is indigenous learning? I’m going to save that for an upcoming blog post. All I can say is it is the opposite of the Gervais Principle of management, which states:

Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves.

I think its all triangles as opposed to circles. I’ll explain more in the next post.

2007

The idea was an evolution — so let’s start at the beginning.

The first year EMC had an innovation conference was 2007. For some reason, I was nominated to be a judge of the conference. So it was me – an individual contributor (from the education department no less!!) — and a bunch of Senior VPs judging the most innovative ideas at EMC. Boy was that weird. Take away from 2007: Senior VPs are nice people who listen to ICs after all.

2008

The second year of the Innovation Conference – 2008 – I was pumped up. I worked with some folks in my organization who have their PhDs in IS and Performance (one of them from FSU!) on the idea that we should create a customizable PLE (personal learning environment).  We explained the business need for a PLE, defined educational terms, and then laid out what the PLE would actual do.  In the first iteration, we saw two important facets, a PLE with the Portfolio:

PLE Components

Formal Learning

• Assigned Learning Path: Information pulled from the Education Services Portal about Technical courses as well as EMCU courses

Informal Learning

• eRooms: A list of eRooms the user should be accessing, based on role
• Email Distribution Lists: A list of email distribution lists that can be accessed for information, based on role
• EMC ONE Communities: A list of EMC ONE communities that can be accessed for information, based on role
• Departmental Learning Resources: A list of wikis, message boards, shares, etc that can be accessed for information
• Industry Specific Resources: A configurable widget that allows the learner to bring in external information using RSS feeds. This information could be blogs, websites, conference information, message boards, etc.

Demonstrate Competency

This was a way for learners to prove they had gained competency of a skill in all sorts of ways (not restricted to formal learning):

• Formal Learning: A list of courses that the learner has successfully completed
• Certifications: A list of certifications that the learner has obtained
• Link to Employee Blog: Links to relevant posts in the learner’s blog that prove competencies
• Link to Employee Portfolio: Link to the employee’s portfolio, with a better picture of how the employee feels he or she is meeting the competencies for the role

Description of the Personal Portfolio

We didn’t feel like it was enough to have a checklist of what each employee could do. We wanted a way for the employee to demonstrate skill and comptency beyond the restrictions of the LMS, or even practice groups. We felt that the Personal Portfolio should be controlled by the employee and should include:

• A blog: The employee can blog about their accomplishments, lessons learned engagements, etc. This will develop the social media skills of EMC’s workforce, and also provide a place to document skills that may not be captured by the formal learning process.
• Competencies based on role: This should be a pre-populated widget that brings in the competencies that have been determined for the employee’s role.
• Development Plan: This information is pulled from the Education Services portal. It includes the development plan and a list of the employee’s mentors
• My 5-Year Plan: The employee should also be able to look at the competencies of other roles, so that they can make personal decisions about what skills they need to develop in order to advance their career. This widget should be personalized by the employee, with their goals and plans for the next 5-years.
• Other information: This widget will allow the employee to import information that proves their competency from  other social media sites, such as LinkedIn
• Privacy Settings: The employee should have the option to advertise their portfolio to everyone within EMC. If they choose to keep the portfolio private, the employee’s management team will always have access to view it.

2009

Lets jump to the 2009 Submission. We tried to make the idea short and to the point, I think that may have been our fatal flaw. This is what we submitted:

Practical problem solved:

This solves the problem helping all EMC employees (customer-facing and non-customer-facing) have access to the learning environments that make the best sense to them, so they are able to learn faster and execute better than our competitors.

There are many different silos of learning assets in and outside of EMC. We have official formal training from Ed Services, we have communities, we have documentation on Powerlink. Outside EMC there are blogs, communities, technical groups, etc. How do we enable individuals to create their own Personal Learning Environments to keep up with this data?

How it works:

We need to make it easier for our knowledge workers to build their own Personal Learning Environment (PLE).

This could be done by building a widget-keeper that could be installed on someone’s desktop, their blog, or even their profile on EMC|ONE. The keeper could recommend widgets based on the individual’s role. For example, someone in sales would have an Ed Services widget that is connected to SABA, so their formal learning path is visible. They could also have a widget for relevant EMC|ONE info, competitive info, Powerlink information, etc. They would have an RSS widget to gather their own learning links, as well as other social media links to help them stay connected to the sales (and customer) community.

2010

So will we try in 2010? Perhaps.

I definitely think that a PLE can be enabled from a corporate education group. We are chartered with helping the workforce learn, and to help them be ready to work. We know we can’t do this on our own. Why not provide the workers with a way to get organized, to access the critical information they need to do their jobs in the most efficient manner? And on top of that, give them a way to bring in all the other ways of learning that make sense to *them*?

This is my dream. Maybe one day I’ll be working on it!

Anyone can perform the ID function

You heard me correctly. ANYONE.

I have to say I was so disappointed in last week’s #lrnchat when everyone kept dissing SMEs.

For my readers who are not education folks, ID means Instructional Designer. In pure Instructional Design, the ID would follow the Instructional Design process to Analyze needs, Design the learning strategy to meet those needs,  Develop the proposed learning strategy, Implement this strategy, and then Evaluate the effect of the learning that was delivered.

That’s right, I said ADDIE.

An SME is a Subject Matter expert who is interviewed (usually in the “develop” stage) in order to get the technical details needed for the instruction.

If you had been a fly on the wall at #lrnchat last week, you may have been surprised to know that typical IDs really do not respect SMEs. They think that SMEs could never understand the complicated science of designing learning.

I have a problem with that attitude. First of all, I am a technical SME, and I am an ID. Second of all, do IDs really think that people who build, implement and manage things like email servers, data center management applications, san management applications, storage arrays, etc are not intelligent enough to learn the science of designing instruction?

Give me a break!!

You can teach people how to design instruction way faster than you can teach them to get around a UNIX operating system or how to get around the insides of a CLARiiON! I have news for you, at least in the technical arena, we don’t need dedicated IDs. Technology moves too fast to be burdened with that extra process. Teach the techies basic principles of instructional design, have some folks with ID background running inteference to get learning assets into the LMS, and then get the heck out of the way!

Should just anyone perform the ID function?

OK, all you geeks who think writing training is easy, now its your turn.

You don’t want to wait for the official training to come out. Heck, you have these cool open source tools that let you create slidecasts that you can post to youtube or slideshare. Maybe you are THE authority at your company on a certain technology and you honestly believe that you will be helping the company by producing your own training.

ID is not that easy. ID should be aligned to the business, so that training reflects that key messages that the marketing, product management, and support teams want to convey. ID should create a learnscape that is easy to navigate, and easy to repeat for each individual learner. That takes time. My degree – Instructional Systems – is an MS (Master of Science) degree for a reason.

There is more to corporate education than recording a knowledge dump and sticking it on YouTube. You have to take all your technical skills to know the product intimately, and then think about how people will use the technology. How “should” people use the tech? Does this change if you are talking to people in different job roles? What is supported and what is not supported? How will this training alignvto their job and more importantly to the overall business?

Do you really have time for that? Aren’t you supposed to be selling, or coding, or something else?

Do you really want to deal with people when they argue with an acronym you used? Or with your spelling and grammar?

No, you don’t. Leave that to us, the folks who think about all these things as we design a course. Let us navigate the instructional design process, but for goodness sake pick up the phone when we need a set of eyes to review what we have created!

Moral of the story

We cannot move to Learning 2.0 (or whatever you want to call it) if there is such disdain for SMEs. Maybe we don’t need the ID function. Maybe we need to teach SMEs to be the IDs. That is what we’ve done at EMC.

Pursuing the elusive metaphor of community in e-learning environments