RealTime Leadership

A much discussed article by Tony Bingham, the President of ASTD, appeared in the August 2009 T+D Magazine under the title “Learning Gets Social.”  In the piece, Tony delivers a shot across the bow for many learning and development departments, saying basically, if we all don’t get on board and start leveraging and supporting Web 2.0 technologies for learning, we’re simply going to be deemed irrelevant by the businesses we support.   The article quotes Karie Willeyard, CLO of Sun Microsystems, saying:

If the learning organization doesn’t get into that 70 percent and use social media, they’re going to get left behind.   They’re going to become irrelevant because people are going to be able to post and share knowledge with one another without the learning function.

The fact is, most employees are already embracing web 2.0 collaboration and sharing tools without the learning function, and the numbers are growing every day.   Two major trends t are fueling this shift to informal learning:

1. The Millennial Generation – those born between 1977 and 1997, essentially grew up with the Internet and are familiar with learning and sharing information online.  As the Baby Boom generation retires, this is the generation that is currently moving into the workforce and changing the landscape.  By 2014, it is estimated that the Millennial generation will comprise 47% of the workforce.  
2. Technology – continues to make it easier to share, collaborate and learn online.  Today, if someone wants advice on how to become a better leader, they use Google, Wikipedia , Twitter, LinkedIn or other Web 2.0 technologies to address their unique learning need immediately.  They don’t sign up for the management training course offered next quarter.

The collective force of these two trends is transforming how employees learn, shifting the model from a didactic model to a collaborative model.  Tony Bingham makes the case for how Millenials are changing learning landscape:

In education, they are forcing a change in the model, from a teacher-focused approach based on instruction, to a student-focused model based on collaboration.

I refer to this as a shift from the “Sage on the stage” model to the “guide on the side.”  Web 2.0 technologies facilitate the sharing of information and make it easier to collaborate with colleagues.  The widespread acceptance of these new technologies is rapidly increasing the shift to delivering learning at the point-of-need, giving employees the information they need when they need it.
Although the Bingham article is a great wake-up call to the learning profession, it fails to address the critical question of what can or should be done to address informal learning.  Bingham ends the article by saying:

“The pieces are there, and now is the time to connect those pieces to create a learning masterpiece that meaningfully demonstrates the critical importance of each and every one of your roles.”

Huh? This sounds to me like he is encouraging the learning profession to continue with its command and control attitude of dictating learning.  What’s needed, in my opinion, is for the learning profession to focus on supporting and fostering the technologies and experiences that will allow and empower employees to collaborate, share and learn on their own accord.  The “learning masterpiece” Bingham refers to will evolve on its own if we give employees the tools to share and collaborate, and then trust them to do the right thing.

In July, the U.S. Army broke with long-standing tradition and began encouraging all personnel to contribute to U.S. Army Field Manual.  The Army Field Manual, which contains detailed information and how-to’s, serves as a playbook for soldiers operating in the field.  The New York Times reports:

The goal, say the officers behind the effort, is to tap more experience and advice from battle-tested soldiers rather than relying on the specialists within the Army’s array of colleges and research centers who have traditionally written the manuals.

This is a major cultural shift for the quintessential “hierarchical” organization.  When people think of “top-down” management, the military is almost always one of the examples cited.  Now, the military is leap-frogging many U.S. corporations by opening the field manual to be authored by any and all personnel.  The director in charge of the project says:

For a couple hundred years, the Army has been writing doctrine in a particular way, and for a couple months, we have been doing it online in this wiki.  The only ones who could write doctrine were the select few. Now, imagine the challenge in accepting that anybody can go on the wiki and make a change — that is a big challenge, culturally.

I applaud this cultural shift by the military, and I think we are only scratching the surface with respect to how technologies like wikis, blogs and twitter will eventually flatten our organizations and empower the people on the front lines to make more and better decisions. 

 The wiki-Army Field Guide is an extension of the trend that started in 2001 when Jimmy Wales and Larry Senger applied the wiki concept to the encyclopedia.  At that time, the “select few” who were allowed to author encyclopedias were academics and researchers hand-picked by the editors.  While the information provided in the old format was often very good, it became outdated quickly and the total number of articles was limited by the size and cost of the books themselves.  Now, Wikipedia, has over 3 million articles in English alone, and is continuously updated as new information becomes available.  It will be interesting to see if the Army Field Manuel experiences a corresponding increase in size.  No doubt, the wiki Army Field Guide will be much timely and up-to-date.

 There is also a trend to watch here for leadership development.  In the past, many companies have handed out Leadership Resource Guides to their managers.  Some of these were written by “experts” within a company, but most often they were books written by the “select few” from consulting companies.  The Successful Managers Handbook from PDI and For Your Improvementfrom Lominger are two popular examples.  I consider both of these books to be analogous to the Encyclopedia Britannica before 2001 and the Army Field Guide before July 2009.   These books are being displaced by fast-growing  wiki leadership resource guides like Leadershipedia.  Any registered member of the Leadershipedia community can access and edit a comprehensive resource guide with tips, articles, books, blogs, podcasts and videos related to leadership and management.  If you’re not already a member, I encourage you to become one today by registering. 

At RealTime Performance we have also seen a trend in companies interested in developing a custom version of Leadershipedia that aligns with their own organizational culture and values.  Ross Smith of Microsoft developed the wiki-based Manager’s Playbook with tips and suggestions on how to build trust and become a better leader at Microsoft,  RealTime Performance recently started a project with Johnson & Johnson to develop a custom wiki-based resource guide for IT leadership development.

The bottom line is that wikis take authorship away from the “select few” experts and open up authorship to everyone. This changes the flow of knowledge from a top-down model to a network model, where everyone has the potential to be both student and teacher.  This, in turn, fosters collaboration and teamwork.  And in the end, better information gets into everyone’s hands, and the quality of decision making goes up across the board.

In October 2006, Netflix announced a competition to significantly improve the recommendation system currently used at the popular movie rental site.   Teams and individuals were competing for a $1 million prize.   Last week, an article in the New York Times reported that two finalist teams have been selected and a winner will be declared in September.

There was no shortage of entries for this competition, so what was it that contributed to the success of these two teams?  When pressed, these teams did not credit some brilliant insight, rather they pointed to the power of teamwork and collaboration. The article notes:

“…the formula for success was to bring together people with complimentary skills and combine different methods of problem-solving.”

One of the leading teams is from AT&T Research and is comprised of statisticians, machine learning experts  and computer engineers from four different countries.  The other leading team is actually an conglomeration of over 30 people called the Ensemble, the result of team combinations as the contest progressed.  It turns out, as more and more teams combined their best ideas, the solution got better and better.  One of the contestants, David Weiss, says:

“the surprise was that the collaborative approach works so well, that trying all the algorithms, coding them putting the together far exceeded our expectations.”

And Weiss might add that the combined solution worked better than any one team’s approach (with the possible exception of AT&T Research) and certainly better than any one individual’s approach. 

This kind of competition, and the incredible innovation it is driving for Netflix is the tangible result of several trends that we, in the leadership development community, must be aware of and adapt to:

1. Technology enables greater collaboration.  The kind of collaboration and teamwork required to conduct a competition like this is only possible because of the rapid changes in technology.  It is much easier and simple now for teams to work remotely and share information in real-time.   As Web 2.0 tools become more ubiquitous, the successful organizations will be the ones that are able to rapidly build high performing teams in a way that is faster and more effective than the competition.
2. Diversity of thought and perspective leads to the best solution.  In the past, diversity has been viewed by many in our field as a compliance issue.  What the Netflix competition highlights is that diversity of thought and perspective is a crucial ingredient for any team or organization that is attempting to solve problems and find optimal solutions.  This idea, although not new, is thoroughly explored in the book The Difference by Scott Page.
3. Successful companies manage talent both internally and externally.  Traditional talent management is about attracting and developing talent within the organization, but that is starting to change with the advent of crowdsourcing.  When you think about it, what Netflix has accomplished here is the successful outsourcing of an incredibly complex research and development problem.  From a talent management perspective, we need to give Netflix credit for attracting and motivating some of the best minds in the world to work on their problem, and the net investment was only $1 million.   In return Netflix has gained two great solutions and a lot of free publicity.   Motivating  talent outside of your organization to solve difficult and complex problems is a growing trend and a major shift in how organizations have traditionally viewed leadership and talent management. 

The global cellphone market is huge with many different players, but when I read this recently, it really caught my eye: 

Apple and Blackberry’s Research In Motion accounted for only 3% of all cellphones sold in the world last year but 35%of operating profits. 

It was a reminder of how innovation can really pay-off for a company.  This is why so many CEOs cite innovation as a key strategy, and so many companies include innovation as a cultural value.

Innovation is largely regarded as one of the last sources of competitive advantage in the global economy, especially for companies in the developed world.  In a 2006 IBM Global Study  on Innovation, Klaus Kleinfeld, President and CEO of Siemens AG said:

You can only win the ‘war’ with ideas, not with spending cuts.

I think his words are even more relevant today.  As a leadership development professional, how do we foster innovation?  How do we make innovation a central tennant of our employee culture?  How do we develop innovation skills in our workforce?

One myth that needs to be debunked is that of the mad-scientist working alone in the laboratory where a flash of insight leads to the next great innovation.   Most innovation happens at the ground level of an organization, close to the customer, not at the top or in some research lab.  Great ideas do not come to people in a flash of brilliance, rather they come into the world as “bad” ideas, or what you might call “not full formed.”  And the entire process of growing “bad” ideas into great ideas and then transforming them into actual innovation requires a team of cross-functional people.  

It turns out there is a clear set of observable behaviors exhibited by successful innovators that allow them to drive innovation within a team or organization.  These behvaiors were orginally discovered by A. J. Chopra, author of Managing the People Side of Innovation.  Chopra observed and videotaped hundreds of hours of meetings, conversations and brain-storming sessions as he followed around successful innovators.   He condensed the traits of maverick innovators into 8 Rules for Engaging Minds and Hearts:

1. Grow ideas, don’t mow them down.
2. Manage the ego agenda, don’t let it run the show
3. Practice the art of Hands-on Listening
4. Go Upstream…if you want people to change their course
5. Expose your ideas to criticism before they are fully grown
6. Involve people, but keep them off your decision turf
7. Acknoledge contributions to your thinking
8. Invite ideas only when you’re open to them

Source: Managing the People Side of Innovation (A. J. Chopra)

A. J. Chopra and I recently took these 8 Rules a step further and broke them down into 47 Innovation Practices.  We then converted these Innovation Practices into a 360-assessment.  So much of innovation is about how leaders interact with ideas and with other people, so it is critical for leaders to understand how they are perceived by others when it comes to fostering innovation.  Are they open to the ideas of others?  Do they really listen to the people who work for them?  By giving leaders feedback at the behvaior level and providing them with actionable recommendations for improvement, you can grow a culture of innovation at your company.