Dave Desforges began piloting "Work From Home" solutions over 3 years ago. His role required identifying additional candidate requirements and necessary remote work practices for both employees and managers at Sun Microsystems. His current work encompasses blending appropriate technology, organizational practices, and workplace environments to support mobile and distributed teams.
Jim McGee is currently a Director at Huron Consulting Group. He has spent much of the last 30 years working to understand, design, and apply information and technology innovations in organizations. Before Huron, Jim taught at the Kellogg School and was one of the founding partners of DiamondCluster International. With Larry Prusak, he was the co-author of Managing Information Strategically (Wiley, 1993). Jim has both an MBA and a doctorate in Information Technology, Organization, and Strategy from the Harvard Business School.
Regina Miller has more than 18 years of experience in Organization Development, Human Resources, Leadership Development and International Operations. Regina recently launched a global consultancy called The Seventh Suite which assists growing companies bolster their competitive edge via aligned strategy and progressive people practices. Her last corporate job was as the VP HR/OD for Oskar (Vodafone) which has been dubbed “one of the fastest growing mobile operators in Eastern Europe.” More info here.
Giovanni Rodriguez - Through a combination of luck and persistence, Giovanni has worked in the company of some of the most interesting and colorful leaders in several worlds: the law, theater, and technology. Today, he is a principal at Eastwick Communications, a Silicon Valley PR agency, where he advises both emerging companies and market leaders on executive leadership, public speaking, marketing strategy and media relations. He has worked for, consulted and advised numerous businesses and organizations including HP, Stanford University, Fujitsu Computer Systems, Cadence Design Systems, VMware, the American Arbitration Association, and the Unified Court System of New York. He is a graduate of Princeton University (Religion and Anthropology), and he has done graduate course work at the Columbia School of Journalism and N.Y.U.
Jim Ware is a cofounder of the Work Design Collaborative and the Future of Work program. He has over 30 years experience in research, executive education, consulting, and management, including five years on the faculty of the Harvard Business School. He was the lead author of The Search for Digital Excellence, (McGraw-Hill, 1998), and holds Ph.D., M.A., and B.Sc. degrees from Cornell University and an MBA (With Distinction) from the Harvard Business School.
The late Isaac Asimov once observed that "the most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'that’s funny'." What piques your curiosity is an excellent indicator of where your learning energies ought to be focused. Curiosity is an edge phenomenon where new inputs have enough structure and content from your perspective to emerge as something more than background noise and chaos, yet are not so well-defined as to be immediately classifiable. Becoming more mindful of the terminology, issues, and phenomenon that are separating themselves from background noise helps identify topics you should consider investing learning time in. [IT Learning at the Boundaries of Your Ignorance]
I started thinking about "boundaries of ignorance" and "circles of knowledge" while putting together a presentation on learning and knowledge management. I began with the simple notion of learning as expanding your circle of knowledge and quickly hit on the notion that expanding my circle of knowledge was simultaneously expanding the boundaries of my ignorance. The more things I learned, the more things I became aware of that I didn't know.
In my teens, that manifested itself as reading everything I could lay my hands on in the quest for the "one right answer." I wasn't as smart as Alan Kay to realize early on that books had limits or could be wrong. I was so engrossed in the world that books opened up for me that it took quite a while to grasp their limits. My dad used to say that he could always tell when I had finished a book by my fervent belief in some new world view. In retrospect, I suspect my ignorance was growing faster than my knowledge. But I was more focused on the inside of the circle than on its contact with the rest of knowledge.
My first cut at visualizing this image was along the following lines:
In this version, learning can be viewed as either expanding your circle of knowledge or as increasing your boundary of ignorance. So, the more you learn the more you know, but also the more you know that you don't know. Depending on your temperament, this can be either encouraging or discouraging to your efforts to continue learning.
Formal schooling focuses attention on the inside of the circle and keeps you carefully inside the boundaries. The credentialing system of education looks backward at what you are supposed to have learned. On the plus side, a good school environment helps keep you from falling off the edge into material you are unable to understand or appreciate. I can remember trying to read various books on philosophy in my wildly eclectic romps through the public library during my high school days. All fields have their professional vocabulary and one purpose of schools is to introduce you to that vocabulary in a coherent order. While we are hard-wired to learn spoken languages simply by being immersed in them, I don't think the same strategy would work as well for learning calculus or modern European history.
The danger of formal schooling (even when well done) is too much focus on what you already know. If you don't push yourself out to the boundaries, you seriously limit your opportunities for significant new learning. Formal schooling tends to overly protect you from failure and, therefore, from opportunities for deeper learning. Granted, I've come to appreciate the importance of failure in real learning courtesy of my work with Roger Schank. The more important learning becomes as an ongoing career development activity, the more you have to deal with not knowing. This can become a real challenge as you advance in your career and as you become recognized for your expertise.
Over time and as you get farther away from your school days, your circle of knowledge starts to get spiky:
You become more expert and informed on certain topics at the expense of others. The nice, well-rounded, circle that might have characterized the end of a classical liberal arts education has been replaced with the distinctive profile of an expert in some particular domain.
If you assume that you do, in fact, need to continue to learn, regardless of your current level of expertise, is there some way to use this notion of the "boundary of ignorance" to guide ongoing learning? For an individual topic,
Monitoring your curiosity consists of becoming aware of terms, tools, topics, and techniques that you are encountering in your environment, yet are not part of your current knowledge and skills. As these become visible to you, the next step is to cluster and chunk that material into a learning agenda; a sequence of topics ranging from the nearly familiar to the barely recognized. [IT Learning at the Boundaries of Your Ignorance]
In addition to tuning into the language of a topic, you can also start to identify the experts and authorities who are working in the domain.
In general, your learning agenda is not likely to be a single topic. Instead, you will be pushing out along multiple dimensions. It might be helpful to visualize that process in terms of progress along several learning vectors. For example, I might group my learning activities along the following dimensions:
This larger picture of learning would help assess what kind of balance I was striking across topics and whether that balance was suitable.
What you are left with at this point is a map for what you want to learn based on the edges of what you know now coupled with what captures your curiosity. What comes next is the effort to learn topic by topic and to fit that learning into the demands of performing.
I'm in the midst of reading John Thackara's excellent In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World, which will eventually warrant a full review. Today, I want to pick up on one particular observation Thackara makes on the role of learning in organizations. He makes the point that
...the most important skills of all are so-called metacognitive skills--an understanding of guiding principles, of what really matters, and the abilility to filter out the growing flood of stuff that does not. "We need to be able to formulate new questions, " [Howard] Gardner argues..."and not just rely on tasks or problems posed by others. We need the ability to learn in new ways, to evaluate our own progress, to be able to transfer knowledge from one context to another." [pp.136-37, In the Bubble]
What makes this particularly important is that virtually no corporate training and precious little other training/education addresses these metacognitive skill issues. That's partly because developing good metacognitive learning skills diminishes the relative importance of the training department. If you become adept at identifying and monitoring your own learning, you may well conclude that the organization's curriculum bears little relationship to your needs.
As individuals, we need to assess whether our learning mix includes sufficient attention to the metacognitive. Do we have a good sense of how we learn? How well can we identify gaps in our skills or knowledge and map those to useful learning opportunities? How accurately can we monitor our level of mastery of a new skill?
If we have the appropriate organizational influence, we should be asking similar questions of our organizational training and development programs.
Today's San Francisco Chronicle carries an important story by technology writer Tom Abate ("Tech engineers fear U.S. is falling behind"). It reports on a recent survey by EE Times magazine showing that only 10% of American engineers are confident the U.S. will maintain its technological edge over time. The survey results are available online, at http://www.mcbru.com/news/insight2005.php. This isn't just about offshoring, however. It's also about the U.S. education system, which is falling way behind the rest of the developed world. And even if you live outside the U.S. and don't care that much about U.S. competitiveness, you have to be concerned about the state of technology innovation in the global economy.
This is a piece I ran on my own blog before Future Tense launched. It struck me that it was worth sharing here to see how this group might react. Enjoy!
I’ve been thinking about the knowledge work as craft idea for a while now. Maybe it was the prospect of Revenge of the Sith opening, or just the slow percolating of ideas, but apprenticeship has been on my mind the last couple of weeks. I'm still working through this, but wanted to see what others might think.
In a craft economy, your craft was your birthright and you learned it through long apprenticeship. One strength of the industrial revolution was to define jobs and skills that could be taught more rapidly and systematically than craft apprenticing practices. This led to a host of cultural consequences that culminated in the social mobility that characterized the U.S. economy for so many years.
Richard Posner offers an economic analysis of the issue of elite professional women leaving the workforce (mainly to have children) from the point of view of the university/professional school. He states that given roughly half (see his post for numbers) of professional women from elite universities drop out of the career world, the full value of their places in the university is not achieved. This means that places didn't go to a number of (mostly) men, who would have more fully "productive careers."
But I have to try to be precise about the meaning of "more productive" in this context. I mean only that if a man and woman of similar ability were competing for a place in the entering class of an elite professional school, the man would (on average) pay more for the place than the woman would; admission would create more "value added" for him than for her.
The article is an interesting read, and his economic analysis and proposed solutions to the problem are correct from an economic perspective:
A better idea, though counterintuitive, might be to raise tuition to all students but couple the raise with a program of rebates for graduates who work full time. For example, they might be rebated 1 percent of their tuition for each year they worked full time. Probably the graduates working full time at good jobs would not take the rebate but instead would convert it into a donation. The real significance of the plan would be the higher tuition, which would discourage applicants who were not planning to have full working careers (including applicants of advanced age and professional graduate students). This would open up places to applicants who will use their professional education more productively; they are the more deserving applicants.
The problem I have is with his unspoken assumption that labor market practices (not to mention US tax policy) will remain static. Today, these labor practices (and tax policies) are problemmatic for professional women (and men who want to spend more time with their family). I am not going to go into all of the difficulties, but let's state that there are serious issues with work-life balance/family-friendly policies. Enlightened companies are getting on the bandwagon and changing these policies to keep their valuable employees. I would argue that given real change is now possible in the way work is conducted (particularly knowledge work), given technological change and new business models, that the assumption of status quo is a dangerous one.
By focusing as Posner does on economically based measures universities can take, for example, we miss the most important player for in keeping women in the workforce who want to stay: the employer. Any action the university takes in such a vacuum can only have unintended consequences. Better for universities to engage with employers to look at the problem holistically vs. from their individual silos.
Interesting article in this morning's NY Times on computer science education and efforts to develop a richer and deeper perspective on how technology skill connects to other skills and needs inside organizations. It strikes me as another case example of a broader trend to find a new balance between specialization and general skills in organizations:
Edward D. Lazowska, a professor at the University of Washington, points to students like Mr. Michelson as computer science success stories. The real value of the discipline, Mr. Lazowska said, is less in acquiring a skill with technology tools - the usual definition of computer literacy - than in teaching students to manage complexity; to navigate and assess information; to master modeling and abstraction; and to think analytically in terms of algorithms, or step-by-step procedures. [A Techie, Absolutely, and More, NY Times]
One way to get a handle on the future of work is to get to know some of those who are already there.
In the recent news about layoffs at HP, several sources noted that Alan Kay is among those getting a pink slip. It struck me that Alan is a perfect embodiment of William Gibson's observation that "the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed." He is the prototypical example of someone who has been living in, and creating, our future for the past 30 years. Taking some time to examine and reflect on his thinking is time well spent.
Alan was one of the scientist/engineers at Xerox PARC. Much of the technology we use and take for granted today traces its lineage to work Alan and his colleagues did in the 1970s at PARC. Alan is an engineer not an academic; more interested in building things than in writing papers for journals. If you ever get an opportunity to hear Alan talk, take it. In the meantime, there are some worthwhile starting points on the web I can recommend:
Alan is also fond of aphorisms. Two of my favorites and among his best known are "the best way to predict the future is to invent it," and "point of view is worth 80 IQ points."
Giovanni Rodriguez
Elizabeth Albrycht
Dave Desforges
Jim McGee
Jim Ware
