Its about the work. Not where you work from!

It has been a few weeks since Marissa Mayer's memo to Yahoo employees decreed - “To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side” . “Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home.”
 
Was past midnight in India when a colleague in the US pinged me the article. I had been at work since 8 AM that morning, from my home office (mind you!), closing on project issues with colleagues from across the globe. 

But possibly because I spared myself the trauma of being caught in a Bengaluru traffic jam, spending an hour staring at a mole on the neck of a motorcyclist (true story!)...I still had the energy to type 'It's a loyalty test...' in response.

Marissa, in my view, is playing the age old game of 'cut the flab'. Whatever the reason, am stumped by the method and the message that it sends out on telecommuting.

Wasn't telecommuting the bait that was used to lure 'cubicle haters' like me to work in the industry in the first place?

I remember the converzation I had with my first mentor, an Apple fellow, who pointed at my zany Macintosh and said, "Remember, with this baby right here...its always going to be about the quality of your work. Not where you work from."

Zaps me therefore that after 20 years of building business models based on 'going virtual' ...we come to this...the absurdity of professing 'co-location for better collaboration'. Couldn't you have picked a better excuse Marissa?

Well....its not like I haven't experienced the advantage of  midnight pizza binges with my colleagues in the Singapore office and the 'creativity' that our dinner conversations on Posh Spice and David Beckham's bedroom antics induced.   Fabulous days those....!

But my argument is that we managed to get the same creative buzz, high quality work and inane gossip fixes, irrespective of where we connected to work from...our homes, the beach, the office or from another country. We were a team of performers who took pride in our deliverables and the company we worked for. Where we worked from was immaterial.

Also the reason I get shocked when I hear senior folks in my India office equal telecommuting to slacking. Comments I hear often - "Only for dead end jobs." "For moms who have babies to take care of." "Real consultants don't telecommute. They work at client sites." "Men who telecommute run their own businesses you know...they are not doing company work most of the time."

Point to note is that these comments are made while we are in the midst of putting together  'deals' via ping or telephone with colleagues sitting in the same office, because it is so 'darn difficult' to find a meeting room.  Or while 'the consultant' works out of an expensive 5 star hotel room at a client site, waiting for the fleeting hour long face time with the 'client' that he traveled 4 days to get to. Ho Hum.

Marissa, congratulations on your bonus and wishing you the very best with locking your employees in their cubicles, to (ironically) dream up innovations that will help the world 'collaborate virtually'!

Fearless vs. Fatigued

"What is it that sets Silicon Valley apart from everything else you've experienced?"

It was Dr.Tony Tan, Singapore's Deputy Prime Minister that had asked my 'recently returned from the valley' MBA class that question, way back in 2001.  

"Fearlessness," I had responded. "They are unafraid to fail. I believe it is a quality that has to be nurtured....not copied."

Ironical therefore that I caught myself repeating the same statement to my reflection in the mirror this morning.

Why am I letting go of my need to be innovative? Why am I letting the environment get the better of me? Does self-motivation not suffice? Can FATIGUE be an excuse?

Questions that are key to the debate on employee engagement.

Khan, SME and Me!

I started my career making educational video films as a part of an University Grants Commission program in India. It was a job that paid me (an eager 20 year old) next to nothing. The reward, however, came in the form of 3 takeaways that are as relevant and powerful to this day:

• People like to 'share' knowledge. They like to 'educate'. And the key motivation is respect, not money. I had Nobel Prize winners, professors, television personalities like Charu Sharma wade through scripts with me and brave long shoots for no more than a coffee and a snack from the dingy office canteen. 'All in the spirit of giveback' ...Charu never tired of reminding me.... lest I assume that my power of persuasion had anything to do with it.

• We learn best from stories.  Takes me back to the time I was struggling to get a concept through and my camera man gave me a sound piece of advice that business experts credit themselves for discovering. :-) "Humanize it", he told me. "Explain it to me in the form of a story...with examples I can relate to."

• The visual medium is a story teller's best friend. It brings in an unbeatable combination of clarity, speed and reach. I have never referred to the television as the 'idiot box' after my stint at UGC. Too powerful to trivialize. Saddens me though when I see the power being used to misguide and manipulate... but that's a story for another time.

Warms my heart therefore, to see these takeaways mirrored in the work that Salman Khan (not to be confused with the Bollywood superstar) is doing with  Khan Academy. 



Depresses me too, because I have not been able to harness and harvest the value of the 'video vault' at work...as yet. Have yet to get to a tool that will get an Eureka whoop out of me....

Screenr is the closest that I have come to. 

Do you know of other tools and examples? What have your workplace experiences been with using video as a medium to harness and harvest the 'social' construct? What will enable or has enabled 'share and learn'?

Consultants don't do Instructional Design!

We are consultants. We do not want to do Instructional Design. 

I hear this statement quite often these days. Every time, I smile and respond with a 'Sure you don't'. 

It is my wish that one day, the consultants who share this view with me, ask for the reason behind the smile. 

I would tell them then, that they should stay away not because the science and art of instructional design is beneath them. But because a majority of them do not have the skills to be good instructional designers. 

The video below is an example of my reasoning. It is a quick view of instructional design in its base form....the ability to understand the key nuances of a business/industry/subject, distill out the key learning message and present in a manner that resonates with the learner.



It is again, a piece of work that takes multidisciplinary skills combined with years of experience and practice...not to mention creativity. Not something that folks can get into 'just because'...premium consultants or not.

Delving deeper, I would define the person who came up with the video based learning byte as an 'associate instructional designer'. A senior designer, in my book, would have transitioned from 'program' to 'organization'....from 'making learning stick' to 'defining and designing for complex business problems'. 

Traits of good instructional designers: 

1. Passion for telling a story. 

2. The ‘who am I this time’ attitude. Ability to work in and pick up key nuances of a variety of  fields/subjects (retail/aerospace/healthcare/computing/ business soft skills…). It pains me when I hear organizations advertising for instructional designers with 'SAP' functional experience. Ignorance in this case is not bliss...it leads to the deluge of bad design that plagues our industry today.

3. Focus on the message and not on the medium. An instructional designer should have interests and knowledge that pans across communication disciplines. The ID’s work straddles the disciplines of the printed word, visual medium, video, audio and computing. 

4. A combination of both theoretical and practical knowledge. 

5. Transferable skills. An instructional designer should be able to apply learning across different situations to come up with innovative ideas. The result should be practical new strategies that are credible and that work. 

6. Ability to simplify and explain a problem. An instructional designer should be able to think in both abstract (concepts) and concrete (facts). Yet another key requirement is the ability to think on their feet when challenged and to improvise. 

7. Great interviewing skills. It is critical that an instructional designer be a good listener. 

8. Attention to detail. 

9. A team player. While personal goals are important, the customer’s goal must come first. 

10. Ability to market themselves and gain the client's trust and respect.

11. Humility and wisdom to remember that the customer is always the star of the story. 

Why is there such little understanding of and respect for the profession? Why does Instructional Design receive the bad rap that it does today? 

I would lay the blame on the profession and those that profess to be a part of it. In our mad rush to embrace the 'factory model' we forgot to alert our clients and the rest of the world on the difference between 'instructional designers' and 'content collators'... leading them to believe erroneously that they are both the same. As true as equating a data entry person to a solution architect...and as unpardonable.

The Future of Work

The Future of Work is a presentation by Innovation Excellence .  

A capture of ideas that I am in absolute tandem with...'learning by doing', the 'networked knowledge', 'the social workflow'. 

God sent on a Sunday evening. Gives me reason to want to wake up and take on the world tomorrow. 

The Future of Work from Innovation Excellence

'Tis the season for Career Anxiety

Come January and there is the inevitable spike in conversations around career anxiety and job snobbery. Topics that define the generation that we are.

It is as if we as a generation have geared ourselves into being 'dissatisfied' in the work that we do. Is 'dissatisfaction' productive and a harbinger of 'greater things to come'? 

The logical answer seems to be a Yes. My mom, an army man daughter swore by the philosophy....frighten and shame to improve.

I, however, would argue for a kinder, gentler view. For 'happiness' and 'contentment' to be a part of the success quotient. 

"I need to be at peace with myself to create. I guess, I need to define success on my own terms for that," is what I had told my professor at Sloan. I hold on to that view to this day. 

Here's Alain de Botton with a way more eloquent take on the subject.

Collaboration and the 'Organization'

I am product of the dot-com times. The mantra that I lived by (with my band of merry colleagues) for over 6 years of my life was to 'collaborate or die'.  

Fridays were reserved for networking...meeting people to ideate and look for ways to work together. It didn't matter if you were a CEO or a 'fresh college grad' with an idea, didn't matter if you were from Timbuctoo or if you spoke with an accent we had to strain our ears to get...we learnt to deal with it.

We didn't have too much by the way of expense accounts...so we went virtual. We met with people in virtual lounges, built presentations together, argued, fell in love with each others avatars and grew to understand and respect each other as people, using technology that was far inferior to what we have right now. 

We functioned as a loose network of small businesses spread across Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, HongKong, India ...all tied together by a single mantra...collaborate or die.

Cut to the lament that I hear across the huge organizations that I work with today..."We have fancy collaboration technology in place, we have fancy education and hand-holding sessions...but where are the people? Why aren't the 'droves' materializing?"

Well...it is because, they don't have to. They have nothing to lose if they don't. No change in ratings or paychecks. No fear of having to suit up and live in a cubicle for the rest of their lives because they already are. ;-)

And the view from the cubicle that they exist in, is hardly conducive. It is of a hierarchical construct that pits people against each other using a laughably flawed performance rating system. What do you expect?

Going social, as I never tire of saying, is more about culture and context than technology.

Reaping the benefits of 'virtual collaboration' requires us finding the 'what's in it for them' first. We need to identify the key business pain points that the 'collaboration' can help address and resolve. Define the right organization construct. And then the best technology and support enablement. Not the other way round.

Why I would invite a bull into this china shop...

A bull in a china shop...I was a sun burnt, pig tailed twelve year old when I first heard the phrase...

It was my favorite aunt who said the words as she invited me to break a few plates in her dinner set on purpose. "I so need a new set..." she said. "I can't get him to go shopping until I get rid of the old one. Be a sport and play the bull in a china shop for me."

I guess it was because she used the phrase in its most literal form that it stuck with me as being something positive...a definitive doing away of the old (smash, sweep, throw in the bin where it belongs) and an ushering in of the new.

It is this view that flashes through my head every time I sit through painful discussions on 'smart learning'. 

Everyone agrees that we are in the era of the 'network' organization. We agree that the demands of this era are very different from the world we left behind. Workers are no longer 'cogs in the wheel' but the center of focus. The value they bring as individuals is critical to the well being and growth of the network. 

We even agree that learning will be a key enabler in keeping the network going.

And yet, the response we bring onto the table, is to add in a few 'jingle-jangles' (that we nauseatingly call 'wow') to an old antiquated system that we are afraid to say is broken.

Smart Learning is not 'training'. Training is an 'imposition'...akin to the 'one size fits all' training road maps we dish out every year or the mandatory and yet irrelevant courses that flood my inbox every day. Smart Learning is a recognition of the learner being in charge...of the learner being able to define and choose the path forward.

Smart Learning is not the creation of virtual shovel ware that will 'save' money in the short term but will in the process, cripple the very enablement that we foresee. It is a true blend of instances of gaining and sharing knowledge, reflection, collaboration and practice.

Smart Learning is not about consumption. It is about enabling business value. It needs a very different view of metrics.

And most importantly, Smart Learning cannot be achieved with the mindset, skills, technology and organization construct we use to deliver 'training'. 

No, event managers cannot morph into Smart Learning consultants overnight. No, we cannot retrofit the tracking of collaborative learning into an existing Learning Management System. No, learning and knowledge are not different and don't need to be controlled by two different organization constructs.

And no, the band aid that you are putting in place, in the name of transformation is not going to yield any positive results and it will not be because Smart Learning is a 'bubble' that burst in your face.

Here's the cue for my proverbial bull to come charging into this china shop and do a definitive breakdown of everything old....a thorough cleansing in lieu of the ushering in of the new.

Are there any bulls out there? You have a standing invitation.