Connecting

Becoming joined; meeting for transference; establishing rapport

The value of metrics, and vice-versa

Feb 142011

For a while there, I thought Joe Gerstandt was full of crap.

Somebody tweeted a line from one of Joe’s blog posts: ”We are not accountants. We are Jedi. We play on a completely different field.”

“Jedi” alone is often enough to make me go find something else to do, but instead I read the full post, The False Tyranny of Metrics. And for a while, I continued to think Gerstandt was full of crap. Or maybe just way out there, because my initial skimming said that he was saying metrics don’t matter.

That wasn’t the case. It took me longer than I like to admit to realize that the Talent Anarchy blog is (at least in part) a dialog between Gerstandt and his business partner, Jason Lauritsen. So this post was part of their thinking out loud about what matters.

The heart of what Gerstandt is talking about emerges in a follow-up post (and at the end of my post, I’ve put links to several posts from Talent Anarchy):

And maybe I do not think that measurement is evil…measurement is a tool after all, so it boils down to how you use it. But this is what I do believe:

one: We over-prioritize things that come with metrics.

two: We have told ourselves some great lies about what we can measure.

three: The outcome of our use of metrics is often evil.

The conversation really struck me because of several themes or issues running through my life right now. One of them is a client I’ll call Hephaestus. I’ll say they make household fans and heaters. As a manufacturer, Hephaestus has some serious metrics having to do with production–rate, quality, reject rate, cost, all the sorts of things you’d expect. And the sorts of things that make sense there.

Does Hephaestus have other ways of knowing how they’re doing? I’m pretty sure they do, though the project I’m dealing with doesn’t extend that far. I haven’t been called in by the CEO or the VP of manufacturing. Even so, I see potential wisdom for me and for my client in the Talent Anarchy discussion.

Our project is about how to bring new manufacturing workers to competency. If you’ve worked in a plant, you have some idea what these jobs can be like. At a GE appliance factory, I observed workers in charge of powder-paint application, wire-harness installation, and similar jobs.

How do you help a new person do that safely and accurately–and with acceptable progress to the necessary speed?

It’s not all feeds and speeds, either with regard to turning out those appliances, or with regard to how people learn. I think there’s a lot of value in questioning assumptions, especially those we don’t even recognize as assumptions.

Here are links to the posts in the discussion at Talent Anarchy, along with a quote pulled from each. Worth the time to go through. You’re likely to find value in the comments as well:

The Measurement Imperative (Jason)

(the post in which Jason starts the discussion)
I know that measurement and metrics aren’t your favorite thing to talk about, but what do you think? Where does measurement fit into the work we do?

The False Tyranny of Metrics (Joe)

(from a comment on this post)
I was talking with my boss about the situation [of half the staff at a health facility frequently arriving late] when he asked me if my team cared about the people we served and if they were dedicated to helping those folks achieve outcomes. I answered yes – they excelled at achieving outcomes. He then challenged me by pointing out that the only reason I was on my time-clock tirade was because I could hit a button on the computer and spit out the metrics related to the situation. Punch reports were the metrics I had available so that was what I managed to.

Despite What You May Have Heard, Measurement Isn’t Evil (Jason)

What I heard you say is that putting metrics and measurement before the actual work, or worse, substituting it as the work is really damaging and counter-productive. And I would agree with that. When the metric becomes what you are trying to accomplish, you have lost.

More Metrics Madness (Joe)

I do understand the importance of profit. I am a business owner myself…I get it. But the purpose of my business is not profit. I work, at least partly, because I need to make a living, but I do the particular work that I do for reasons that have nothing to do with profit. Profit is mandatory, I am not in any way confused about that, but saying that an organizations exists for the purpose of profit is kind of like saying that the purpose of a persons life is breathing (which also can be measured quite well by the way).

A Defense (of a sort) of Metrics
(a guest post by Mark D. Hirschfeld and F. Leigh Branham

We may not be able to measure honesty, compassion, and courage, but we can measure the results that those traits produce–lower voluntary turnover, lower quit rates, fewer grievances filed, more internal job progressions allowed, more customers returning more frequently and referring their friends, more managers coaching (often confronting), recognizing (more often) and giving constructive feedback, more new employees being hired through referrals from happier, more engaged employees–all measures of not just more, but of better places to work that do indeed serve as measures of progress toward becoming a remarkable workplace.

CC-licensed production parts image by iamphejom.

Personal learning, epistemology, and Philip Henslowe

Connecting, Learning

Sep 172010

If you saw Shakespeare in Love, you may remember an early scene in which Philip Henslowe, the producer, is warned by moneylenders that when people don’t pay their debts, their boots catch fire. (The real-life Henslowe kept a diary–actually an account book listing payments and other data–that’s a prime source for information about the Elizabethan theater.) Eventually Henslowe convinces the money guys to back Will Shakespeare’s new play, Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter.

You see? Comedy. Love, and a bit with a dog. That's what they want.

Geoffrey Rush as Philip Henslowe

In this first week’s experience of PLENK 2010 (the online course about personal learning environments), I kept hearing Henslowe and the moneylender discuss how a play comes to be.

Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.

Fennyman: So what do we do?

Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.

Fennyman: How?

Henslowe: I don’t know. It’s a mystery.

By no means am I implying that PLENK is on the road to imminent disaster. Or better, it’s a road company, in at least two senses:

It’s a work in progress. What goes in, what happens, and especially what comes out can’t be known. Like the road company for a play, it takes place in multiple locations. (See the Google map started by Heli Nurmi, with only some of the 1,000+ registrants.)

It’s a group of people. They’ve met in this virtual space for their own reasons, much like an earlier group:

At nyght were come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye
Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.

By nightfall, into those lodgings had come
Nine-and-twenty people in a company
Of sundry folk, by chance fallen
Into fellowship, and they were all pilgrims
Wanting to ride to Canterbury.

As with Chaucer’s pilgrims, each person in PLENK showed up at the virtual Tabard Inn because of his own reasons: curiosity, a desire for focus, challenges to address. And each one will have a story to tell.

More than one story, I think. Harry Bailey, the host, urged that compaignye to each tell two stories on the way to Canterbury, and two on the return. He wanted the travelers to enjoy the two-day to Canterbury (an early suggestion that the journey could be the reward).

It's my way, not the highway. PLENK’s company isn’t like Chaucer’s; one of our commonalities is that we’ve got different destinations (if in fact we’ve figured out where we want to go).

So the “road” that the company travels isn’t a specific route. It’s more like the Oregon Trail or the Silk Road: a general direction with multiple paths.

For my own part, I’ve read a sheaf of blog posts and discussion posts from participants this week, along with some of the resources contained in PLENK’s daily feed. These are the stories that the pilgrims tell–not fictional ones, told on the way to Canterbury, but sense-making ones, told on the way to understanding.

I’ve found people trying to make sense of PLNs and PLEs in contexts like high school teaching, graduate education, personal growth, and (thank goodness) learning on the job.

Not all the sense they’re making makes sense to me, but it’s not supposed to, any more than every presentation at a conference or every course in the catalog is supposed to. Really, I’m still feeling my way along, but I’m not too uncomfortable with that.

PLENK facilitator Rita Kop wrote about information abundance and economy of attention the other day. She mentioned John Hagel‘s thoughts on attention as an increasingly scarce resource. My quick take on what that means: the more inputs available to you, the less you can afford to, well, pay attention to all of them–because you’ve only got so much attention to spread around before you hit cognitive homeopathy.

Kop was trying to work out concerns of some PLENK participants and wondering about whether there’s a good match between “learner needs and educator support.” I couldn’t say, but included this in my comment at her post:

For some people, plopping into PLENK is like an American suddenly teleporting to London. Or maybe Amsterdam, where enough people speak English that he’s mostly disconcerted by all that Dutch on signs.

For some, though, it’s like being teleported to Riga or Mumbai, with a lot more “foreignness” — an abundance of unfamiliar information. When it comes to economy of attention, they feel like their account is overdrawn.

Speaking of which, if attention’s an account, then time is the wallet you keep the card in, and I have to watch how often I get that wallet out.

Can’t spell “persona” without “person”

Connecting, PLENK2010

Sep 152010

I had a side conversation just now about some technical glitches related to #PLENK2010 (the online course about personal learning environments). Well, I think I did — it was via Facebook message, but I don’t see evidence of that in the ad-crammed junk drawer of Facebook’s interface.

No matter. I found myself thinking of this exchange (and similar ones with other people) in terms of how you connect in general with people you don’t know.

It might be related in some way to the riddle of online resonance that Jenny Mackness and Matthias Melcher wrote about: in this virtual / at-a-distance context, they’re asking how what can cause the initial resonance that can nudge a potential connection along till it becomes an actual one.

In my own case, what I saw myself doing was delivering potentially frustrating feedback (“your X isn’t working” can often imply “and it ought to, buddy”). And I felt slightly ill at ease about that.

I’m usually sane enough to believe that people like the PLENK facilitators welcome comments meant to improve or enrich the experience. At the same time, I hate to seem querulous, let alone the online equivalent of a grammar fascist. (Trust me, I can be querulous. I just tend to dress it up with over-the-top humor.)

Which gets to the persona part, the image I’d like people to have of me (probably a lot like the image I’d like to have of me). In an early post here, I wrote that persona was the mask used by Greek and Roman actors, and that another meaning for “actor” is agent–the person causing something to happen.

So as I start doing things in a new community like PLENK, I’m scattering bits of evidence from which people will form impressions. I can’t control what those will be, but I can try to influence that a bit.

Early in the game, then, I take out “connection insurance”:

I tend to send feedback privately rather than publicly–in part because of my own self-consciousness, and in part because I might be incorrect.
I try to include useful, factual detail: the URL I have in mind, an exact title, a copied string of text.
I try to signal that I’m in a collaborative, non-confrontational frame of mind.

About confrontation: I know that some people see heated discussion as a sign of interest, and maybe even respect: I wouldn’t be arguing with you if I didn’t think you were worth the argument.

Closer to the main thread here, Mackness & Melcher in their second post talk about this chart by Magdalena Bottger.

Notice that arrow across the top. In terms of early connections, I see an analogy, a continuum from”folks you just met” (the right-hand side) through “people you know well and who know you well” (over on the left).

The way you move a from right to left–the way the “connection neurons” get all Hebbsian–is through a series of interactions over time. You take extra care initially to signal intent. People on the other side of the relationship will take that in, along with other signals.

In other words, if you’re polite in private messages but seem like a cranky, dismissive, and apostrophe-challenged troll on your blog, that politeness will only carry you so far.

When you have enough public personas, people can form a pattern from them. Might be the one you’d form, might not.

CC-licensed resonance image by gillicious.

Plunked into PLENK: personal learning DIY

Connecting

Sep 122010

I’ve signed up for PLENK2010, an online course on Personal Learning Environments, Networks, and Knowledge. The purpose of the course is to “clarify and substantiate” the concepts of personal learning environments (PLEs) and personal learning networks (PLNs).

Main link for course information is connect.downes.ca, which provides more description as well as links for registration, the course forum, and so on.
The instigators… I mean, facilitators, are Dave Cormier, Stephen Downes, George Siemens, and Rita Kop.

This is my first experience with a large online course, let alone one with a connectivist approach. What that last part means:

In a connectivist course, course materials and course content are defined by participants as the course progresses, rather than prior to the course by instructors. Though the course outline defines a set of selected topics, these function as signposts for an iterative process of search, practice and reflection, as described here.

The “here” is How This Course Works, which envisions four main types of activity for…well, me, and a few hundred fellow travelers.

Aggregating means the facilitators collect and the participants receive a variety of items in “The Daily,” an electronic document offering potential content. Yes, somebody’s doing the initial aggregation, but I expect more knowledge critters in the herd than I can fit into my cerebral corral, so I’ll be…

Re-aggregating. They call this “remixing,” but it comes to the same thing. You go through items in the initial aggregation, figure out which ones to follow, decided which of those were worth following, and eventually keep some. (I’ve already created a PLENK2010 tag in my Delicious account, and I’ll probably have a separate notebook in Evernote as well.

From a what-goes-on-in-your-brain point of view, those two activities are like taking in information. Repurposing involves actively working with it–not simply repeating it, but transforming it somehow. “This whole course will be about how to read or watch, understand, and work with the content other people create, and how to create your own new understanding and knowledge out of them.”

Feed forwarding as a term is a (slightly awkward) substitute for “share.” The facilitators encourage public sharing, thinking out loud, a willingness to make mistakes in front of people. That rarely feels as easy as it sounds, but I think it’s good advice. So I’m testing a WordPress tag (#PLENK2010), and I’ll see if this post shows up in the course feed. If it doesn’t, I’ll come back and create a WP category instead. (The different between a tag and a category only matters to WordPress.) So–look, Mom, I’m feed-forwarding!

So that’s where I am today. I expect things to seem messy at first. I know they’ll be confusing: I’m still wandering around the course Moodle like a transfer student trying to find PSYC 423, the parking permit office, and someplace with decent coffee.

One thing I’ve learned: don’t subscribe to email updates for the “introduce yourself” thread. Or, if you do, set up a mail rule to channel all that stuff.

I don’t tend to think of the web of people and resources I learn from as a PLE or a PLN. That’s mainly from a anti-jargon bias. These are the people I learn things from, but I don’t think of them as having special status or membership cards.

I realize that most folks who do use PLE and PLN as terms don’t think that way, either; this is just freelance grousing. Notice, I am in the course.

I wonder whether PLENK2010 will become a time sink: too many topics, too many potential activities, too many possible routes. (I’m remembering Stephen Leacock’s line: “Lord Ronald said nothing; he flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.”)

But that’s kind of the way that learning works. Clearly, people can and do learn in highly structured environments; indeed, sometimes the structure can help focus attention and keep distraction at bay. I think it’s likely, though, that especially as you get deeper into a topic or field, a high degree of structure has less and less to do with your learning.

And you always have control over what goes into your own time sink.

The plan calls for ten weeks, beginning September 13 and continuing into mid-November. As soon as I figure out what the first week’s activities are, I’ll start on them, keep some notes, and see how things go.

CC-licensed image by ghemflor / Heather A.

Social media at work, or, is there a Ford in your future?

Connecting

Aug 192010

Disclosure: I grew up in Detroit (and I don’t mean Livonia, let alone Auburn Hills). My dad was an auto worker (and so was I, for one summer). People back there say things like “Chrysler’s is doing better,” using the possessive even when the company is the subject of the sentence.

Well, Ford’s is doing well, too. Not just in car sales, though those are on the uptick. I’m thinking of the Ford Motor Company digital participation guidelines just posted at Scribd. Like any large corporate, Ford doubtless has lots and lots of text somewhere, but these guidelines are a great example of sensible policy to guide employees who are using social media.

You really ought to read the whole thing for yourself, but I’m going to summarize and comment here.

Be honest about who you are.

The gist: when your online conversations relates to our business or industry, identify yourself as working for Ford Motor Company. Say who you are without giving out detailed information.

Not too much to ask in any conversation.

Make it clear that your views are your own.

Include the following somewhere in every social media profile:

“I work at Ford, but this is my own opinion and is not the opinion of Ford Motor Company.”

“Somewhere in the profile” isn’t an onerous requirement. For nearly 10 years, in one online forum, my signature line concluded with “My opinions, not GE’s.” In case people weren’t sure.

Mind your manners.

Treat coworkers, other personnel, customer, competitions, the company, and yourself with respect. Don’t post offensive, demeaning, or inappropriate comments. Respectfully withdraw from discussions that go off-topic or become profane.

I’ve seen lots of discussion about how the immediacy (and physical safety) of the Internet encourage people to be… more than assertive, let’s say. Good for attention, not so good for reputation. At least not positive reputation.

Use your common sense.

Keep certain business-related topics confidential. If you’re talking about the company or the industry, focus on matters of public record. Don’t divulge non-public company information, or personal information about others.

Remember: what happens online, stays online.

“Search engines and other technologies make it virtually impossible to take something back. Be sure you mean what you say, and say what you mean.”

Also, consider everything you post online the same as posting to a physical bulletin board or submitting a letter to a newspaper. Assume that reporters, competitors, and your boss will be able to read it.

Anyone who’s been online for more than three months knows this. It’s not bad to recall it, though.

* * *

If you’ve ever worked in a corporate environment, you know that’s not the whole of it. The guidelines tell you want to do about company intellectual property, about vehicle or repair concerns, about dealer issues. And if you’re unsure, ask the corporate communications or legal staff for advice.

Notice: there’s nobody you have to check with and ask if you can participate in arenas like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. The document says, “we have advised our personnel to observe these guidelines when participating in an online conversation regarding Ford or the automotive industry.”

Older Entries

Dave's Whiteboard

Connecting

The value of metrics, and vice-versa

Personal learning, epistemology, and Philip Henslowe

Can’t spell “persona” without “person”

Plunked into PLENK: personal learning DIY

Social media at work, or, is there a Ford in your future?

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