Dave’s Whiteboard

Karyn Romeis writes about her career frustrations, and gets both encouragement and advice from several people. I’ve felt similar frustration a time or two — in no small part because I’ve tended to remain in a position longer than average.

G. K. Chesterton said there’s a great difference between a man who wants to read a book and a man who wants a book to read. Something similar, I think, between a person who wants to do a job and a person who wants a job to do. I think the first is initially harder but clearer — you have some vision of the work you want to be doing, so it’s easier to recognize whether alternatives fit into that vision.

On the other hand, search doesn’t pay all that well.

The world of corporate or organizational (non-academic) learning is wide, but in many places it’s highly structured. I’ve never been a great fan of the corporate university concept; some time ago I encountered one that even had deans. For those who like that sort of thing, that’s the sort of thing they like. It did seem to me that, as with SCORM-heavy environments, an awful lot of time and energy went into justification by weight — the more paper you produced to ground your argument, the stronger it was.

After all, paper’s an insulator.

Not everyone’s able to do the job he’d like; sometimes we’re fortunate to have a job to do that calls for our skills and appeals to our interests. I haven’t worked in a corporate job for seven years — but nearly everything I’ve done since then has been for corporations or large organizations. Sometimes it’s been mainly to pay the bills. (During a debate during the presidential election of 1976, Bob Dole was asked why he wanted to be vice-president. He replied, “It’s inside work, and there’s no heavy lifting.”)

I think I’m a long-term relationship guy: I’d rather maintain and expand my connection with a few clients than go through dozens of them. That isn’t always possible, but it’s an ideal, and it helps influence how I deal with those I come in contact with.

I don’t have any useful advice for Karyn, other than to say that knowing what you want — and occasionally checking its viability — is a real advantage.

Hero help wanted photo by ewen and donabel / Ewen Roberts.

I once heard DNA co-discoverer James Watson speaking at a lecture. Referring to some research, he said, “We thought we were being stochastic, but we were just guessing.”

I’d like to think that I’m integrative, but mostly I just happen across unassociated things. Like, for instance:

Michael Feldstein at e-Literate has a guest post by Jutta Treviranus. You Say Tomato… looks at designing the user-experience interface for distributed learning. Treviranus notes that UI designed is often left to programmers and often happens at the end of the development process.

As part of her work with the Fluid project, Trivarnus and her colleagues “have found ourselves at odds with common or traditional notions integral to pedagogy, software design, user interaction design, usability, and accessibility.”

The Fluid approach to user experience design and usability testing is also at odds with standard or commercial UI design methods. These methods assume that the user really doesn’t know what is best or what they want. Users are not self-aware, what they report doing is not actually what they do and asking users what they might want does not lead to innovation because they extrapolate from what they know and are most likely to ask for a faster horse carriage than a car. Consequently the assumption is that any proposed design requires extensive user testing with objective observation and data gathering from a large number of representative users.

(I’ve always felt a bit sheepish about tinkering with my off-the-shelf software — I have created buttons In Word to prevent tables from breaking within rows, to insert section breaks, and to print just the current page. That’s pretty low-level customization, but a lot more than the average person tends to do.)

The apparently unrelated item that came to mind as I read this was John Tierney’s article in Monday’s New York Times blog, A New Frontier for Title IX: Science. (Title IX is the U.S. law barring sexual discrimination in education, and till now has applied mainly to sports. The article deals with the question of similar discrimination in science.)

Lots of things I didn’t know (it’s an ever-growing list):

• In the U.S., 50% of med students, 60% of biology majors, and 70% of psychology PhDs are women.
• Less than 20% of physics PhDs are women.

Tierney cites research by David Lubinski and Camilla Persson Benbow suggesting that the differences in choice of field may have more to do with an individual’s preferences than overt discrimination. Similar research by Joshua Rosenbloom and Ronald Ash made this less-than-astonishing conclusion:

…Information technology workers especially enjoyed manipulating objects and machines, whereas workers in other occupations preferred dealing with people.

Once the researchers controlled for that personality variable, the gender gap shrank to statistical insignificance: women who preferred tinkering with inanimate objects were about as likely to go into computer careers as were men with similar personalities. There just happened to be fewer women than men with those preferences.

What struck me (for this post of my own) was not the gender gap per se, but the connection between the object-manipulators in IT, and the end-users of software that Treviranus discussed in her user-interface post.

And I figured a post combining user interface, open source, and potential on-the-job discrimation might stir up a thing or two.

Photo of Rosalind Franklin (whose X-ray images helped lead Watson and Crick to their model for the structure of DNA)
from the National Library of Medicine.

This month’s Working/Learning blog carnival is hosted by Tony Karrer at WorkLiteracy. The questions he poses:

• Does a knowledge-work skills gap exist?
• If so, what are examples of where to help knowledge workers?
• Is this receiving appropriate attention?

In talking about a framework, Tony has an initial list of possible task categories:

• Scan: stay up to speed on a topic
• Find: this includes evaluate, narrow, adjust
• Keep / Organize / Refind: I like the word “retrieve” as a shortcut
• Leverage / Present
• Network
• Collaborate
• Learn
• Improve (evaluate and build your work and learning skills)

That framework post has an overwhelming amount of other looks at the topic (as well as topics living on the same block).

One difficulty I’ve been having with the label “work literacy” is the implication that everybody knows what the “common knowledge work tasks” are, and that these tasks manifest themselves in the same way regardless of setting.  (I’m fully aware that Tony, Michele, and others aren’t implying this, but the inference seems there for the making.)

Another problem is one that Richard Hoeg raises in a comment:

The BIG “learning” I’ve taken away from my failures, is that any initiative I lead I must always first analyze the present work flows of my company’s employees. Any tool which does not easily integrate into one’s normal daily work will never be adopted. My employees have no desire for new tools, but they do want to have their tool set be more effective.

“My employees have no desire for new tools” may be a little hyperbolic, but not much. I have a hunch (a bias?) that many people who are highly networked, highly connected, highly 2.0 just plain like tools. Especially new ones.

But not everybody does. The average person, by definition, isn’t an early adopter — he’s average. Even the average knowledge worker is average. His job is “knowledge work” mostly because he’s not waiting tables and not loading cowl sides into boxcars: “knowledge work” is a category. I think the worker himself sees his job as its main outcome-producing processes. In other words:

“I manage my food-company inventory for our grocery-chain client.”
“I resolve supply problems for the retailers who sell our printers and copiers.”
“I review health claims for former atomic-weapons workers or their survivors.”
“I train our sales force in features, benefits, and competitive positioning for our EDI software.”

So what?

So, I don’t think I’ll get far starting a conversation that implies folks are not literate. I know that’s not what’s intended, but I see it as a potential barrier.

The conversation can’t be about “literacy” — unless you’re talking to the CEO, who of course will figure you mean other people.

If you’re talking to the workers themselves, the conversation might start with information. Ignoring (or at least not focusing on) content details (what IBM used to call speeds and feeds), what information do you need to get to do your job? What information do you need to have? What information do you need to share? (And when, with whom, et cetera…)

Stealing freely from Tony’s grid, but sliding things around a bit, the conversation deals with questions like:

• What do you need (to know, to get, to do…)?
  • This isn’t “what’s missing?” This is, “what do you need to get your job done?”
  • It’s also not about physical objects, though they’ll come into the conversation.  The key is the knowledge/informational aspects of the physical objects.
    
• How do you do that now?
• What works well? What doesn’t?
• Could you / would you like to do the “well” better?
• Would you like to do the “doesn’t” better?

I’m rummaging around for a term. It’s something similar to metacognition, but that has a lot of polysyllabic baggage, and people outside of the training/learning profession don’t light up with joy when you start talking about “learning how to learn.” I haven’t found that term yet, but it connects to this useful debate on ways to help people who want help to find, retain, apply, share, and strengthen their knowledge-work skills

My side trip yesterday, griping about the less-than-helpful response to a local water problem, has blossomed into a case study. From today’s Washington Post (Montgomery’s Alert System Stayed Silent):

• “…The two employees who know how to operate [the county's e-mail 'emergency alert' system] were out of town…”
• “…A third employee who was supposed to run it said that he had never been trained…”
• “…A fourth employee who was found eight hours later knew how to operate it but failed to send out any alerts.”
• “The e-mail system is the county’s primary method for contacting residents in emergencies without relying on radio or television.”

According to the county’s homeland security director, “The system worked. We failed.” He also said, according to the Post, that no employees would be disciplined but that “he would look into training issues.”

I’m not sure what “worked” — the fact that they noticed a 48-inch water main had broken?

I don’t want to pile on here. It’s more that “training” in this context is a hidden discrimination — a sort of cognitive clown car with its doors shut. We each look at it and associate it with our own particular experience of cars, not necessarily another person’s experience and not necessarily what’s in this particular car.

My hunch is that under the “training” label, you’ll find lots of things: paper-based systems rather than automatic ones, an e-mail distribution list that doesn’t include outside addresses for the sender (so he’ll know people got the alert), competing expectations, dosages of “training” given about as often as tetanus shots…

So here’s a one-page guide to performance problem analysis, just in case the cause of the problem is not restricted to a lack of skill or knowledge. (Click for full size.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Tony Karrer is hosting the June 2008 edition of the Working/Learning Blog Carnival (about the carnival) at WorkLiteracy.  (WorkLiteracy is “a network of individuals, companies, and organizations” looking to address “a growing gap between the work practices and skills that most knowledge workers possess and the resources available to them.”)

You’re invited to share your opinions:

• Is there a gap between how knowledge workers to their work, and how they could if they harnessed different methods, tools, resources?
• If your answer’s yes, where do you see the opportunities?
• Is the issue of work literacy receiving enough attention?

In a departure from the usual blog carnival format, you can participate by posting on your own blog and sending Tony a link, or by sharing your thoughts as comments to the “host post” (where you can see more of the thinking behind this issue.

The invitation’s open through the end of June.