Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.| Harold Jarche
When you learn with and from your customers, marketing and learning are the same. If companies are focused on their customers, why are learning resources not customer focused? Google’s power-searching course is an excellent example of marketing integrated with learning. As Jay Cross described:| Harold Jarche
Month: March 2024 | jarche.com
After many years of publishing my Fridays Finds, I have given up. Even Mastodon has made their user interface so opaque that after an hour I could not find the favourites I had marked for the last month. They were available on my phone app but I cannot be bothered trying to transfer each favourite from the phone to the desktop, where I usually write my posts. So it’s the end of an era. The first Fridays Find was posted in 2009 and there have been a total of 458, all in the archives.| Harold Jarche
What is connected leadership? It’s not the status quo. Stephen Downes provides a succinct counterpoint to certain popular leadership literature, especially ‘great man’ theories.| Harold Jarche
Collaboration Isn’t Working: What We Have Here is a Chasm writes Deb Lavoy in CMS Wire.| Harold Jarche
Twenty years ago I was finishing my Master’s thesis on learning in the information technology workplace. A significant part of my research relied on the work of Marshall McLuhan, especially his laws of media. My job at the time was the development of all training related to a fleet of helicopters employed in tactical aviation: from pilots, to technicians, and including flight simulation and computer based training. The web was a new thing in 1997. But I was convinced, based on my readings o...| jarche.com
What is the major difference between the scientific management framework that informed so many of our work practices, and the new management requirements for the connected enterprise in the network age?| Harold Jarche
Learning may be the work in the network age, but that does not mean that learning will get you the work. Inge De Waard discusses this in MOOCs change education, but jobs decline in a knowledge era:| Harold Jarche
As a result of economic changes, some workers are getting left behind, reports the New York Times:| Harold Jarche
As promised, here are the follow-up notes & links from yesterday’s social media workshops in Miramichi.| Harold Jarche
During this session, Robin (aka – Luigi Canali De Rossi) presented 9 systems, varying in price and pricing models. The two top scorers were systems I had never heard of before – Wave Three Session and Marratech. One insight that I picked up from Robin is that vendors need to create diversified products around core technologies in order to achieve mass customisation, because no two clients’ needs are the same. He was also critical of high-priced software, because customers cannot invest ...| Harold Jarche
This post is an excerpt from Jane Hart’s recently published Social Learning Handbook 2014.| jarche.com
“I put forward formless and unresolved notions, not to establish the truth but to seek it.” —Michel de Montaigne| Harold Jarche
“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” —Ellen Parr| Harold Jarche
How can we thrive in a broken system? This is perhaps one of the greatest challenges many of us face today, whether it be where we work, the institutions we deal with, or the governance systems that control us. Geoff Marlowe explains that how we perceive the situation and what type of humour we use, are critical in getting to a point where we may be able to take constructive action. Neither apathy nor cynicism will get us there, only irony might.| Harold Jarche
“Work is learning, learning work” — that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.| Harold Jarche
There’s a common saying that entrepreneurs should work on the business, and not in the business. It makes sense to stay above the day-to-day details in order to help steer the business. Perhaps it’s time to think of all businesses as networks of entrepreneurs. Everyone should be working on the business. As Peter Drucker said, “Nothing is less productive than doing what should not be done at all”. Being efficient at something that is not effective is a waste of time, and a cause for wo...| Harold Jarche
I have been keeping an eye on the hype & hope around artificial intelligence (AI), especially:| Harold Jarche
In our wake up call I wrote in mid-2020 that complexity and chaos are the new normal as climate change drives more crises our way — pandemics, refugees, environmental disasters, and the overall degradation of our environment. To prepare for chaos, we need people who can act. Identify these people and give them experiments or skunk-works to play with. We will need leaders who can also deal with complexity. They will have to be constantly experimenting and probing their ecosystems. Organizati...| Harold Jarche
I use Marshall and Eric McLuhan’s laws of media to ask better questions about how technology affects those who use it. In the following presentation I have put together a number of tetrads, or hypotheses on the possible impact of social media, the internet, and other technologies. In summary, the laws of media state that every medium (technology) extends a human property, obsolesces the previous medium (& makes it a luxury good), retrieves a much older medium & reverses its properties when ...| Harold Jarche
There has been much discussion of Thomas Friedman’s recent book The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century. Will Richardson connects this flatness to education:| Harold Jarche
Month: January 2024 | jarche.com
A pragmatic approach for supporting workplace learning, especially distributed teams and organizations.| Harold Jarche
A cohort-based online workshop to help professionals work smarter| Harold Jarche
Here are some observations and insights that were shared on social media this past fortnight. I call these Friday’s Finds.| Harold Jarche
In The Learning Layer , the concept of reversing the idea funnel is discussed in depth. Traditional innovation processes take many ideas, and through elimination, narrow these down to a few. Flipping the funnel reverses this by breaking ideas into capability components and building on them.| Harold Jarche
There are a lot of numbers that ‘social media experts’ will tell you to maximize. But there are few that make any difference. For instance, I put out the word on social media about my social learning workshop: on LinkedIn it had 79 likes and 4,630 views. One of my tweets received 22 link clicks and 5,611 views. But only one metric mattered: registrations. That number was 1. If I kept looking at how often these were shared on social media I might think there was interest in taking my wo...| jarche.com
Continued from focus on the system.| Harold Jarche
Were the two recent crashes of Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft a result of inadequate training, or design and safety flaws resulting from a lack of regulator oversight? I don’t know and I cannot speculate. However, I am interested in how training design decisions are made and what role Learning & Development (L&D) professionals play in the relationship between building aircraft and flying them. Is there something to learn here?| Harold Jarche
There is a certain irony that the most popular TED Talk — Do schools kill creativity? — is seriously questioned in a TEDx talk over a decade later. Ken Robinson’s talk on creativity has had over 55 million views. Basically he says that our schools suck the creativity out of children.| Harold Jarche
Training courses are artifacts of a time when resources were scarce and connections were few. That time has passed.| Harold Jarche
This article appeared in Inside Learning Technologies & Skills Magazine, January 2015| Harold Jarche
“Learning by doing is really how we learn: Teaching others to do this is the next step in the education revolution.” —Roger Schank| Harold Jarche
This is a retrospective on how my work has been influenced by the Cynefin framework, which I first came across in late 2007, many years after it had been originally published in 1999. It’s interesting to note that this was the same year as The Cluetrain Manifesto which shifted how we think about markets in light of the internet.| Harold Jarche
How do gamers learn? They try things out and usually fail: lots of times. They learn from these mistakes and look for patterns. If they get stuck, they check out what others have shared, in online forums. They may ask a friend for help. Sometimes they will look for a ‘hack’, or a way around an impasse. Once they learn something, they might record it and share it, so others can learn. What they do not do is look for the rule book.| Harold Jarche
Month: August 2020 | jarche.com
Has an enormous skills gap developed since 2016?| Harold Jarche
At the Work Literacy course (starts today, with 365 people registered) we’re using Ning as our social networking platform. According to my co-facilitator, Michele Martin, “Online social networks facilitate connections between people based on shared interests, values, membership in particular groups (i.e., friends, professional colleagues), etc. They make it easier for people to find and communicate with individuals who are in their networks using the Web as the interface.” That’s an o...| Harold Jarche
Here are some of the things that were shared via Twitter this past week.| jarche.com
Writing my essays at university was always a painful process. We were still allowed to write them, though more professors were requiring essays to be submitted typed. My essays were never good because I often left them to the last minute and hand-writing a better version was just too much time and effort. As much as I loved reading and new ideas, I was not a good writer.| Harold Jarche
To tweet or not to tweet, that is the question.| Harold Jarche
I wrote in agile sensemaking (2018) that radical innovation only comes from networks with large structural holes which are more diverse. This is why social networks cannot also be work teams, or they become echo chambers. Work teams can focus intensely on incremental innovation, to get better at what they already do. Communities of practice, with both strong and weak social ties, then become a bridge on this network continuum, enabling both individual and interactive creativity.| Harold Jarche
I think I have always been averse to hierarchies, yet I joined the Army and entered the most hierarchical organization in the country. I graduated from military college and began my career as an infantry officer. Career progression was through promotion, based on yearly performance reviews.| Harold Jarche
Month: April 2023 | jarche.com
Month: March 2023 | jarche.com
In 2019 I summarized my observations about innovation in — What is innovation? I concluded that while innovation may be 15 different things to 15 different people, I still found nine general guidelines.| Harold Jarche
Last year I wrote that this pandemic has become a crisis in network leadership because understanding what domain of complexity we are dealing with is now an essential requirement for decision-makers. At its outbreak the pandemic was chaotic and required immediate action. Developing vaccines went from complex to complicated. Dealing with people and how various groups reacted to the pandemic oscillated between ordered and unordered domains but has been mostly complex. Clear and simple communic...| Harold Jarche
A long time ago — pre-pandemic and pre-9/11 — I was flying on a commercial passenger aircraft. The flight was over-booked and as I was wearing my Army uniform, I was offered to sit in the jump seat, just behind the pilots. Yes, these things happened in the ‘before times’.| Harold Jarche
In what is likely the best example of my mantra that ‘work is learning and learning is the work’, Nokia’s Chairman Risto Siilasmaa describes how he learned about machine learning because everyone was talking about it but he still did not understand it enough to describe it. Frustrated, he was acting like many of his fellow executives| Harold Jarche
Race Bannon sees AI (or really machine learning) changing many jobs, such as technical writing, in the near future.| Harold Jarche
In Only Humans Need Apply, the authors note that one phenomenon of machine automation and augmentation is a decrease in entry-level jobs.| Harold Jarche
“There is a need to deal with the problem independent of the solutions at hand. We have a tendency to define the problem in terms of the solutions we already have. We fail most often not because we fail to solve the problem we face, but because we fail to face the right problem. Rather than doing what we should, we do what we can. In the systems view, it is the solution that has to fit the problem, not vice versa.” — Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity: A Platform for Design...| Harold Jarche
Being a knowledge catalyst means taking the time to add value to your knowledge. One way is to simplify what you know. Make your work human understandable. Speak in non-geek terms. If experts do not do this they will become surrounded by less informed people over time. This has become evident over the course of the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, now in its third year. We seem to be collectively getting more stupid. People are voting for bombastic populists and supporting policies that make all ...| Harold Jarche
Why is machine learning [ML] important for your business? If you work at Nokia, your Chairman can explain it to you in a one hour presentation he developed over six months of research. Risto Siilasmaa helped make his network smarter. Everyone needs to know if ML can help with their business problems, but first they have to understand the basics, says Siilasmaa.| Harold Jarche
It is possible that early humans diverged from other primates when they began eating meat. This meat was likely burnt from frequent lightning strikes on the African savanna. They did not even have to know how start a fire, only how to keep one going. Eating cooked meat gave a much higher caloric intake and human brains grew significantly larger than their primate cousins. As humans developed a taste for meat and a source of constant fire at their campsites, they had to work together socially....| Harold Jarche
Every fortnight I collate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.| Harold Jarche
Month: December 2022 | jarche.com
Creative people are at all levels of an organization, including the janitor, and are not ‘human resources’ but individuals who have the capability of gaining wisdom. What are often referred to as ‘soft skills’ are becoming more important than traditional hard skills. Why is this? First of all, work in networks requires different skills than in controlled hierarchies. Information and knowledge flow faster and new connections are constantly being made. The status quo is temporary. Th...| Harold Jarche
Automation| Harold Jarche
The End of the Market Era| Harold Jarche
Now is the time for a serious rethinking of how we organize in our society: from businesses, to schools, and as communities. We need to base all of our organizations on the principle of temporary, negotiated hierarchies. In this way, citizens can freely cooperate and from time to time, as required, collaborate to get things done. This requires a new approach to organizing work, abolishing the separation of employer & employee, as well as the artificial and unequal division between labour and ...| Harold Jarche
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.| Harold Jarche
“The public has concluded that our 20th century institutions are incapable of dealing with 21st century challenges.” – Washington Post| Harold Jarche
Month: April 2018 | jarche.com
In the book, Only Humans Need Apply (2016), the authors identify five ways that people can work with machines. They call it ‘stepping’. We are seeing an increasing need to do what they call ‘stepping in’ or using machines [and software] to augment work. In GPT-3 through a glass darkly I used the McLuhans’ media tetrad to examine this form of machine learning, which is all over the media today.| Harold Jarche
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” —Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018)| Harold Jarche
A while back I wrote on the age of dissonance and how our way of structuring work, particularly the job, was inadequate for the networked, creative economy:| Harold Jarche
A recent study conducted by Facebook suggests that when it comes to vaccine doubts and misinformation, “a small group appears to play a big role in pushing the skepticism”.| Harold Jarche
In my PKM workshops we discuss the differences between communities and networks. This includes the dark sides of communities as well as the constant doubt and outrage on social media. My general advice is to seek diverse perspectives in social networks but to seek more private, trusted communities for deeper conversations and understanding.| Harold Jarche
In 2007 I was concerned that Facebook was selling personal data. That same year I asked if there could be a public alternative to Facebook. By 2010 I had left the platform.| Harold Jarche
When I was visiting Rome in 2012 I met a fellow tourist, an older gentleman from Australia, who told me that he had stopped a pick-pocket on the train who was trying to lift his wallet. He had cried out and grabbed the thief’s hand. As the train came to a stop, the locals on the train created a human wall and forced the thief out, while at the same time calling for the police. They then apologized on behalf of their city. Rome is a 2,750 year-old community that keeps on trying, in spite of ...| Harold Jarche
I was recently interviewed for an article in Forbes magazine and asked what I thought about ‘The Cloud’. There was a typographical error in my response, so here it is corrected.| Harold Jarche
“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” —Father John Culkin (1967) in ‘A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan’.| Harold Jarche
Here are some observations and insights that were shared on social media this past fortnight. I call these Friday’s Finds.| Harold Jarche
The basic premise of the long tail is that there is an equal or perhaps larger market of those willing to buy unpopular items (or services) than all the people who buy the popular items. It goes against traditional wisdom of focusing on items that can be sold many times, as you may be missing an even larger opportunity in the long tail. Instead, the long tail theory is to sell a few things to a few people at a time, but repeat this many times over. Of course the kicker is that it only works i...| Harold Jarche
In 2004 I commented on an article by Peter Levesque calling for new leadership for the information revolution. He said that communities have not been as successful as corporations in producing certain kinds of societal benefits as a result of the internet’s enabling connectivity. “I suggest that the leaders will be found among the aggressively intelligent citizenry, liberated from many tasks and obligations by technology freely shared; using data, information and knowledge acquired from ...| Harold Jarche
I noted that it’s important to know where’s your data but you also need some control over all the social media you’re using. The problem is that you’re on somebody else’s platform. A blog can be used as the more stable node in your social media ecosystem. For example here are several social media applications I’ve used but have pretty much discarded for one reason or another — Furl, Magnolia, Spoke, Xing, Blogflux, Eduspaces (insert your own list). However, my blog hasn’t chan...| Harold Jarche
Following up on Boring is Good, I think that the major barrier to use of these systems, whether collaboration or learning-oriented, is the “walled garden” framework. If I have “to go” somewhere, then that’s a barrier to use. E-mail comes to me, so it’s easy. Personally, I prefer using my feed aggregator to follow people and news. I use my blog and then perhaps Facebook to write once and publish to many. I find these tools EASIER than e-mail, but I’ve been using them for a long t...| Harold Jarche
As we become more interconnected and use the Web for problem solving, finding love and sharing our sorrow, we should seriously consider public infrastructure as the backbone for social networking. Just as we have funded roads and airports, we need to provide safe and open platforms for online community forming. As private systems proliferate, it’s time for our publicly-funded institutions to jump on the Web 2.0 cluetrain and offer an alternative.| Harold Jarche
Month: October 2021 | jarche.com
Did print enable democracy, and is that why the founders of the USA put freedom of the press into their Constitution?| Harold Jarche
Continued from: understanding the shift| Harold Jarche
Most people have heard Clay Shirky’s quote that, “It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure.” The professor and author has coined terms such as ‘cognitive surplus’ to explain that we have the mental capacity to do a lot more with our collective intelligence, but too often, societal barriers inhibit us. We are too busy with the day-to-day commute, usually in a deluge of noise from radios, billboards, and news sources, to reflect and consider bigger issues. Getting paid e...| Harold Jarche
A couple of times each week I head down to our local coffee shop and discuss politics, economics and our community with my friend Graham Watt. I’ve posted several of Graham’s articles on this blog, the latest being O Canada, so obviously I respect his opinions. For my birthday, Graham gave me a copy of Ronald Wright’s What is America?, and appended the sub-title, and why?| Harold Jarche
Month: December 2019 | jarche.com
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.| Harold Jarche
Working Smarter with Personal Knowledge Mastery| Harold Jarche
Jane McConnell published her 9th annual report on The Organization in the Digital Age last month. Jane recently posted 10 key findings from the nearly 300 organizations surveyed.| Harold Jarche
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.| Harold Jarche
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.| Harold Jarche
Probably one of the greatest barriers to positive change is convenience. For example, we know that automobiles contribute significantly to pollution, obesity, and greenhouse gases. However, most of us own at least one car and many of us own more than one. Why? Cars are extremely convenient. Having lived car-free in a rural North American town for the past three years I can attest to how inconvenient it is to not own a car. We are even thinking of buying a car since our car share program shut ...| Harold Jarche
There is a lot of talk in the mainstream media about the increasing automation of work and jobs. I have discussed automation and outsourcing here for several years and it’s fairly obvious that standardized work will keep getting automated, by software or robots. Addressing this technology-driven shift should be a high priority for everyone, from unions, to governments, and human resource professionals. As we move into a post-job economy, society needs to restructure how work gets done and h...| Harold Jarche
I do a fair bit of public speaking. But I doubt that much of it has changed anyone’s behaviour. I may have presented some new ideas and sparked some thinking. With a one-hour lecture, you cannot expect more. Yet a lot of our training programs consist of an expert presenting to ‘learners’. Do we really expect behaviour change from this? That would be rather wishful thinking. Learning is a process, not an event.| Harold Jarche
There is little consensus, based on research, showing exactly how flight simulation should be employed. I know, I started researching flight simulation in the mid-1990’s. This is definitely an area that requires more research by those who purport to be experts in human learning. Just checking-the-box continues to be all too prevalent in training systems.| Harold Jarche
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds. “The internet didn’t make us stupid. It made stupidity scalable.” —J.A. Westenberg “Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.” —George Orwell, ‘1984’ “you can give someone a fish and then teach them to fish. It’s a lot easier to learn how to fish when you’re not starving....| Harold Jarche
The image below is one I have often used in explaining sensemaking with the PKM framework. It describes how we can use different types of filters to seek information and knowledge and then apply this by doing and creating, and then share, with added value, what we have learned. One emerging challenge today is that our algorithmic knowledge filters are becoming dominated by the output of generative pre-trained transformers based on large language models. And more and more, these are generating...| Harold Jarche
When the SARS-2 pandemic hit the global community, many organizations were able to quickly pivot to remote work, among other adaptations. This will likely not be the last pandemic and other crises will emerge that will require more adaptations to how work gets done. The AI tidal wave may even increase the pace of change. In these environments, learning and innovation have to be woven into the fabric of daily work.| Harold Jarche
When the pandemic broke out, the situation was generally chaotic and the best response was to act firmly, such as establish a lock-down as soon as possible.| Harold Jarche
post-truth (adjective) Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. —Oxford Dictionaries| Harold Jarche