THE NETWORK AGE

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Preface
What we are experiencing today is fundamental change. The industrial age is in its death throes, making way for the unfolding of the network age. This is akin to when the Industrial Revolution overwhelmed the agrarian age. During that time, people moved from farms to cities. Clock watching replaced working to the rhythm of the sun.

Repetitive, mindless factory labor replaced working holistically with nature. Taking orders replaced thinking for one’s self. Slums were born; society unraveled.
Industry won’t disappear, but about a third of all industrial companies probably will. The ranks of the permanently unemployed will swell. New categories of work will pop up to address network optimization, making connections, reconfiguring functions, real-time enterprise design, constructive destruction, virtual mentoring and so on. Hallowed laws, regulations, standards and memes will evaporate.

Management itself, the art of planning, organizing, deciding and controlling, will fall by the wayside. After all, planning is of little value in an unpredictable world. Organizing takes on new meaning when things self-organize. Deciding is everybody’s business when networks rule. Control is a nonstarter in a bottom-up, peer-powered society.

As networks continue to subvert hierarchy, successful organizations will embrace respect for the individual, flexibility and adaptation, openness and transparency, sharing and collaboration, honesty and authenticity, and immediacy. Training is obsolete because it deals with a past that won’t be repeated. Learning will be redefined as problem solving, achieving fit with one’s environment and having the connections to deal with novel situations.

Impending doom unfreezes organizational structure to make room for reorganizing, rearranging and replacing the status quo. Survivors will develop and present agendas for change while things are in flux. Here’s the pitch I’d offer the most senior person I could get a hearing with:

“Next week, we will close the training department. We are shifting our focus from training to performance. Any remaining training staff will become mentors, coaches and facilitators who work on improving core business processes, strengthening relationships with customers and cutting costs.”

“I’m changing my title from VP of training to VP of core capabilities. My assistants will become the director of sales readiness and the director of competitive advantage, respectively. The measure of our contributions will be results, not training measures. We’re scrapping the LMS posthaste. Wherever possible, we’re replacing proprietary software with open source.”

“All of our energies will go into peer-to-peer, self-service learning. If something doesn’t dramatically improve the capabilities of our people, we won’t do it. We are scrapping lengthy program development projects in favor of quick-and-dirty rapid development. We are abandoning classrooms.”

“We are eliminating all travel and helping others do the same by introducing Skype and free real-time conferencing. We’re setting up a corporate FAQ on a wiki to capture and distribute the information we once received from people who are no longer with us. In this and all of our efforts, we intend to work smarter, not lower our standards or quality of service.”

“Recognizing that informed customers make better customers, we are opening up most of our platforms for learning to them, as well as our employees and former employees. To the extent that we help them cut costs, improve performance and implement better methods, we both win.”

“Everything has a price tag. When we wring out costs, I want commitment from senior management to allocate time for people to help one another, exploit the benefits of social networks and converse with one another freely. This is a multiyear program. It will not work if we try to implement it while still doing business as usual. Burning people out is not a survival strategy.”

“That is my plan for this week. If I have your support, I’ll be happy to come back with a few more things next week.”

Work smarter

My objective is to help your organization work smarter by taking advantage of its collective brainpower.

Network Effects
The business world and the global economy are experiencing permanent climate change, not a passing storm. Things are not going to return to where they were, for we are witnessing the birth of a new order.

Ten thousand years ago, people discovered agriculture and began domesticating plants. Nomadic hunter-gatherers became farmers, formed communities, and invented civilization as we know it. The farmers learned to leverage tools in new ways and use animals to boost productivity, which enabled them to stockpile surpluses to tide them over in hard times and to trade with others.

Three hundred years ago, the steam engine replaced manual labor, and industrialists built factories for manufacturing and canals to open up trade. People migrated from farms to cities. Clock watching replaced working to the rhythm of the sun. Repetitive, mindless factory labor replaced working holistically with nature. Taking orders replaced thinking for one’s self. Slums were born. In time, people harnessed electricity, laid rails, and rationalized production, providing the material wealth we enjoy today.

Man plans; God laughs.

Right now, we’re moving from the industrial age to the era of networks, and once again, humanity is in turmoil. Yesterday’s bedrock is today’s soup. Businesses, governments, and citizens are becoming densely interconnected. The denser their connections, the faster networks cycle. Everything is relative because everything’s connected. The future is unpredictable, and the survivors will be those who learn to deal with surprises as they arrive.

In the network era, we will continue to have factories, just as we still have farms. Some functions will remain hierarchical. Pockets of old-style face-to-face instruction will soldier on. It’s just that the action will have shifted to where connections are active. Meaning will shift from entities to relationships.

“I am old enough to know that newspapers are where you get your political news and how you look for a job. I know that music comes from stores. I know that if you want to have a conversation with someone, you call them on the phone. I know that complicated things like software and encyclopedias have to be created by professionals. In the last fifteen years, I’ve had to unlearn every one of those things and a million others, because they have stopped being true.”

“I’ve become like the grown-ups arguing in my local paper about calculators; just as it took them a long time to realize that calculators were never going away, those of us old enough to remember a time before social tools became widely available are constantly playing catch-up. Meanwhile my students, many of whom are fifteen years younger than I am, don’t have to unlearn those things, because they never had to learn them in the first place.”

Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody

Organizations must seize the opportunity to change while things are in flux, and learn to continually adapt. It’s improvisation, not scripted performance. Organizations must leap the chasm from current conditions to the brave new world, and crossing the chasm takes a bold leap. Continual learning through problem solving and collaboration is the key.

Networks are growing faster than vines in the rain forest, reaching out, and encircling the earth. Denser connections yield faster throughput. The exponential growth of networks is the underlying reason that everything in the world appears to be speeding up.

Social networks, computer networks, communications networks, and any other network you can think up are constructed of nodes and connectors and nothing more. Each new node of a network increases the value of the overall network exponentially. Connecting networks to other networks turbocharges their growth.

New linkages distribute information and power, breaking down organizational boundaries and fiefdoms. Networks subvert hierarchy. Perhaps it took longer than we expected, but people were right when they said “The Net changes everything.”

Learning used to focus on what was in an individual’s head. The individual took the test, got the degree, or earned the certificate. Now we’re interconnected.

What’s important is doing the job right, not what’s in one person’s head. The workplace is an open-book exam.

What worker doesn’t have a cell phone and an internet connection? Smart companies encourage workers to use their lifelines to get help from colleagues and mine the world’s knowledge from the internet.

Knowledge is power, and through networks, knowledge is being shared among workers and citizens as never before. It’s power to the people as businesses embrace multiple systems of making decisions.

The purpose of the organization is to enable common men to do uncommon things. No organization can depend on genius; the supply is always scarce and unreliable. The test of an organization is the spirit of performance. The focus must be on the strengths of a man—on what he can do rather than what he cannot do. The focus of the organization must be on opportunities rather than problems.

Peter Drucker

Threatening as it seems to people accustomed to sitting on the top tier of hierarchies, the network era favors decentralization, democratization of the workforce, self-managed workers, peer decision-making, empowered teams, and bottom-up innovation.

In the previous commercial era, workers operated machinery to produce goods. You could see what they were doing and touch the goods they produced. Time-and-motion studies identified the one best way to do a job; training taught workers how to do it. Successful workers followed instructions. “You’re not paid to think.” Outcomes were predictable. Work was mechanical.

Today, workers apply knowledge to deliver services, often via networks. You can’t see most of what they’re doing, and their output is largely intangible. There’s always a better way to do a job; learning stretches minds to cope with new situations. Successful knowledge workers are rewarded for innovation and ingenuity. These workers are paid to think. Change is rampant and unpredictable. Work is social.

Unlike clockwork, this new net-work is a whole new space-time continuum. Results are not a function of time. When labor was manual, a great performer made 20% more widgets per hour than average; a poor performer, 20% less. Knowledge work is unpredictable, for its outputs are ideas and relationships.

A great performer may outperform the average a hundred-fold by re-inventing the business. The idea behind that re-invention may have occurred to its thinker in an instant.

Knowledge workers are often their own bosses. They manage their own time. Indeed, it’s tough for a supervisor to tell when a knowledge worker is goofing off. Knowledge workers exercise their personal judgment continuously. An overseer would be a nuisance.

Knowledge workers need leaders, not managers. They need challenges, not detailed instructions. Indeed, knowledge workers resent being told what to do; they prefer being told what needs to be done. Because they are dealing with unpredictable conditions, their work is better driven by values than by rules.

Value has migrated from physical things to ideas. Thirty years ago, most of the value of publically traded companies was vested in the tangible assets on the balance sheet, things you could see and touch, like cash, real estate, factories and equipment. Ten years later, 80% of the market value of corporations had migrated to intangibles, things like customer relationships, intellectual property, and know-how. Measurement systems that fail to take intangibles into account mistake what’s easily measured for what’s most important.

Progress along a career path once entailed building repertoire, that is, the skills to do the job. Increasingly, career development is a matter of becoming a professional. Professionals maintain standards, improve the practice of the profession, share worthy practices, and take pride in their work. It’s not just a job.

The belief that our ships are immobile, as if moored in concrete, is called learned helplessness. We see what we expect to see and are blind to possibilities beyond our expectations. Here are some eye-openers.

Business Results
In the network era, brains replace brawn, and most work evolves into knowledge work. Using your brain(s) effectively becomes the key to prosperity and the ultimate corporate survival skill.

In today’s volatile, unpredictable times, brainpower and collective intelligence are the keys to corporate responsiveness and survival. While learning is ascendant, training is in decline, for workers are embracing self-service learning; they learn in the context of work, not at some training class divorced from work.

It is best to learn as we go, not go as we have learned.

Leslie Jeanne Sahler

I envision corporations where everyone is a teacher, the workplace is the classroom, performance on the job is the measure of success, and learning is the pathway to continuous improvement.

Embedding learning in work reduces overall spending while improving performance. Abandoning obsolete practices saves time and cuts costs. Relying on natural, peer-based learning improves business results.

Lower costs, greater return.
Learning can be either push or pull. Push is the sort of learning you encountered in school, where authorities selected the curriculum and lessons were imposed on you. Pull describes the way you learn from Google or discovered how to kiss a lover. With pull learning, you select what you want to learn and how you want to learn it.

Pull learning is more cost-effective than push. It doesn’t require as much in the way of control mechanisms, structure, and outside assistance. Furthermore, lessons learned through pull are more likely to stick because they’re relevant to perceived need, delivered when required, and usually reinforced with immediate application. Pull learning delivers more bang for the buck.

Organizations that increase the ratio of pull learning to push learning can lower their overall investment in learning without sacrificing results. Given the greater payback of pull learning, the result is more return from smaller investment.

Isn’t that what business is all about?

What can we do to improve this informal learning?
Managers accustomed to top-down control wring their hands at all this, saying it’s not their job or there’s nothing to be done or you just have to hire the right people in the first place. That’s crazy talk. All kinds of interventions can improve the quality and quantity of informal learning, for instance:

Support the informal learning process:

• Provide time for informal learning on the job.
• Create useful, peer-rated FAQs and knowledge bases.
• Provide places for workers to congregate and learn.
• Supplement self-directed learning with mentors and experts.
• Set up help desks 24×7 for informal inquiries.
• Build networks, blogs, Wikis and knowledge bases to facilitate discovery.
• Use smart tech to make it easier to collaborate and network.
• Encourage cross-functional gatherings.

Help workers improve their learning skills:

• Explicitly teach workers how to learn.
• Support opportunities for meta-learning.
• Share ways others have learned subjects.
• Enlist learning coaches to encourage reflection.
• Calculate lifetime value of a learning “customer.”
• Explain the know-who, know-how framework.

Create a supportive organizational culture:

• Set up a budget for informal learning. (There’s no free lunch.)
• Don’t confuse “informal” with “random” or “optional.”
• Publish a statement of support for informal learning.
• Position learning as a growth experience.
• Conduct a learning culture audit.
• Add learning and teaching goals to job descriptions.
• Consider all-in cost of turnover and of not growing your own.
• Support innovation (which requires making failure “OK”).
• Encourage learning relationships.
• Support participation in professional communities of practice.

—oo0oo—

This article is published with the author’s (Jay Cross) permission

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