Todd Suomela's Library tagged management →  View Popular

Learnscapes are the factory floor of knowledge organizations. The “scape” part underscores the need to deal at the level of the learning environment or ecology. The old focus on events such as workshops won’t cut it in the ever-changing swirl produced by networks. The “learn” part highlights the importance of baking the principles of sound learning into that environment rather than leaving it to chance.

A modern learning ecology embraces departments and disciplines that were once considered separate functions: training, independent study, collaboration, knowledge management, corporate communications, organizational development, communities of practice, leadership development, expertise location and social media. The corporation’s values, standards and investments define the structure of the ecology within which people are granted the freedom to act.

Corporations can create superior learnscapes by injecting practices that foster optimal learning: drip-feeding, interaction, ease of access, timely reinforcement, peer coaching, respect for reflection, setting standards, cognitive apprenticeship and so on.

As I’ve suggested in Unleashing Intellectual Capital and in Hidden Assets, organizational ecologies, from my perspective, fall into the following two general categories:



• Controlled-Access System: Where access to the resources of a group and its activities are controlled by one or a few select individuals.
• Shared-Access System: Where resources of a group and its activities are impartially dealt with by all members of an organization.

Too many employers are poorly equipped to weather the recession because they use workers’ skills and talents poorly, tie them up in rules and procedures, and give them little say over how they do their work, The Work Foundation says today.

A major new survey of the work-lives of 2011 workers found that:

• 40 per cent of employees have more skills than their jobs require.

• 65 per cent of workers said the primary characteristic of the organisations they worked for was ‘rule and policy bound’ – though just five per cent said this was their preference.

• 40 per cent said they had little or no flexibility over the hours they worked.

• 20 per cent of graduates are in ‘low knowledge content’ jobs.

‘So far in this recession employers have been reluctant to lose the skills, talents and experience of their workforces. Yet at the same time they seem to be failing to make the most of them. Many people could be doing more, but are denied the chance to do so.

‘To keep job losses to a minimum, organisations should be taking full advantage of widespread opportunities to give people more responsibility, move away from rules and procedure-based workplace cultures, and re-organise work and use new technologies to give individuals more flexibility over hours. More autonomy for people and less intensive management should be the order of the day – in other words greater use of the principles of good work. Trapping so many workers in roles in which their skills and abilities are poorly matched with their jobs is a waste both of economic potential and human possibility.’

If our far thoughts are more distorted to present good images, then the next step down the rabbit hole is this: to judge how we will typically act, others should prefer to see our near thoughts, at least if they can distinguish near versus far thoughts. After all, near thoughts drive most day to day actions. And we should each look more to our own near thoughts to judge our own sincerity.

Once we evolved to weigh near others' thoughts more heavily, the next step would be to look for cheap ways to have good-looking near-thoughts, without paying the full price of distorting important actions. That is, our mind designer would look for ways to show "detached" near thoughts, consistent with good-image far-thoughts, but not actually impacting much on important near decisions.

Like professionals, millions of service-economy and clerical workers are now expected to donate hours of work off the clock, donating time to email and other employer-related communication, engaging in unpaid training and “keeping up,” etc. Throughout the economy, workers are urged to give freely of themselves--to serve--in exchange for psychic returns. All of this “acting professional,” however, doesn’t come with what used to be a professional’s paycheck.

On the other hand, management is increasingly professionalized, via the worldwide triumph of the business curriculum--the first true global monoculture, with the keywords and master concepts (excellence, quality, change, accountability, learning organization, eg.) framed by the “great authors” of our time: W. Edwards Deming, Peter Senge, etc.