The future of ICT?
January 19, 2013
Industrial work clearly determined the tasks that had to be done. The machine and the ways to work with the machine were given. People served the machine. Workers did not need to be concerned and feel responsible for the results. They just did what they were told.
Knowledge work is very different. The first thing for a knowledge worker is to try to answer these questions: What am I here for? What is my responsibility? What should I achieve? What should I do next? Key questions for a knowledge worker have to do with how to do things and what tools to use. This time, the machines, the tools, need to serve the worker. It is, in fact, a change from only following instructions to also writing the instructions.
Historians claim that the invention of the printing press led to a society of readers, not a society of writers despite the huge potential of the new technology. Access to printing presses was a much, much harder and more expensive thing than access to books. Broadcasting systems such as radio and television continued the same pattern. People were not active producers, but passive receivers.
Computer literacy or the idea of being a digital native still often follow the same model. In practice it means the capability to use the given tools of a modern workplace – or a modern home. But literacy to just use, to be the consumer of, the technologies and the programs is not what we need. The perspective of the consumer/user was the perspective of the industrial age. Success meant learning how to behave in the way the machine needed you to behave.
That should not be the goal today.
As a result of Internet-based ICT we have learned how to speak and how to listen; we have learned how to write and how to read. But in the digital world, it is not enough if we know how to use the programs, if we don’t know how to make them.
We are typically always one step behind what technology can offer. We can now participate actively through tweets, status updates and profile pages, but the thing to remember is that somebody else has made the programs that make it possible. And often the real goal of that somebody is to create a new advertising model. Nothing wrong with that.
The underlying capability of the knowledge era is programming, not reading or writing. It is a change from using things to making things. Creating things for yourself and sharing them.
I have met many people who think that programming is a kind of a modern version of a working-class skill. It can well be outsourced to some far-away, poor nation while we here do higher value things. Nothing could be further from the truth, more wrong, and more dangerous for us. Today the code is the main domain of creativity and innovations. It is a new language. Writing code is the number one high leverage activity in a creative, digital society.
The primary capability of the knowledge era is not using computers, but programming computers. It is not using software, but writing software.
Mitch Resnick talks about the new challenge: “After people have learned to read they can read to learn. And after people have learned to code, they can code to learn.”
It is time for a human response to technology.
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Thank you Mika Okkola
More on the subject: On software productivity. The Finnish ICT 2015 report. How to start learning programming. Codecademy. Linda Liukas. The Estonian approach. On GitHub. On data democracy.
Productivity revolutions and the most misunderstood man in history
January 12, 2013
Few figures in the history of management have had a greater impact than Frederick Winslow Taylor. The irony is that there have also been few who have been so greatly misunderstood and so gravely misquoted.
Frederick Winslow Taylor was born in 1856 to a wealthy family in Philadelphia. Poor eyesight forced the very talented young man to give up on the idea of going to Harvard and becoming a lawyer like his father. Instead, almost by accident, he went to work in a pump-manufacturing company whose owners were friends of the Taylor family. At that time, industrial work was far beneath the attention and interest of wealthy and educated people. Taylor, very exceptionally, started as a manual worker and gained shop-floor experience at the Enterprise Hydraulic Works. He experienced the conditions personally and saw from the inside what was going on. As a result, he was the first person to talk openly about poor manual work efficiency. What ultimately started his study of work was not interest in productivity, but his disgust with the growing hatred between employers and employees. Taylor thought, contrary to Karl Marx, that this conflict was unnecessary.
His mission was to make workers more productive so that they could earn more money. In contrast to what many writers claim, Taylor’s main motivation was not efficiency, but the creation of a society in which owners and workers had a common interest.
It did not go very well.
Workers unions at the time were craft monopolies. Membership was often restricted to the sons and relatives of existing members. They required an apprenticeship of many years and had no systematic training. At that time, you were not allowed to write down instructions. Some historians claim that normally there were not even drawings of the work to be done. It was widely accepted that there was a mystique to craft skills. The members were sworn to secrecy and were not permitted to discuss their work with non-members. Before Taylor, people took it for granted that it took years and years of experience before you could turn out high quality products.
Taylor’s crime in the eyes of the unions was his revolutionary idea that there is no skilled work based on some mystique, there is just work. All manual work could be studied and divided into series of repetitive motions that could be taught. Work-related training was a genuine innovation. Any worker who was willing to be educated and followed the “one right way” of doing things should be called a “first-class” worker deserving a first-class pay. This was much more than the worker got during their long years of apprenticeship.
Taylor offended everybody. He also insulted the owners. Among other things, he publicly called them “hogs”. The biggest insult was that the authority in the plants should not be based on ownership but on something he called superior knowledge. Taylor insisted that the workers should also benefit from the increased productivity that his scientific management produced. He wrote in 1911: “The principal object of management should be to secure the maximum prosperity of the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employee”.
He was the first person to demand that managers should be educated. He thought that management should be a profession and managers should be professionals. This led the owners’ associations to attack him bitterly as a socialist and a troublemaker. Again he was seen as a criminal!
But he was right! The application of knowledge to manual work created a tremendous boost in productivity. By the 1940s Scientific Management had swept the industrialized world despite the early resistance. As a result the workers, rather than the capitalists were the true beneficiaries of the industrial revolution that was changing society. The working class largely became transformed into a new social structure, the middle class.
When Taylor started working, nine out of ten people were manual workers. Today, nine out of ten people are knowledge workers. We ask some of the same questions, but the world is totally different. Taylor’s revolutionary ideas are over 100 years old. His thinking was based on Newtonian mechanics and his ways of understanding human behavior are not up to the task any more.
Scientific Management as a concept is not only unhelpful, but totally outdated. Still the struggles we face with productivity may be the same. If you look at what the labor unions and employers’ organizations are opposing today, you may find the seeds for the next revolution in productivity.
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Thoughts on work, productivity and change
December 31, 2012
Everybody seems to “know” that the only way a worker can produce more and be more productive is by working longer hours or by working harder.
This has led to the view that the key management responsibility is for the performance of the people. This, however, is too narrow a definition. The way we should think today is that the key responsibility is for the application and performance of knowledge.
The industrial firm is a conservative institution. It tries to maintain stability and often tries to maintain the problems that it was originally the solution to. But the organization of post-industrial society is a disruptor and reformer because its function is to put new knowledge to work – which means to learn. It must be organized for constant change because to learn means to change. It must be prepared for the systematic abandonment of the established and the familiar.
The task today is asking: “If we did not do this already, would we go into it knowing what we know now and knowing what technologies and new tools have become available?” If the answer is “No”, the next question to ask is: “How could we plan abandonment rather than try to prolong the life of outdated practices?”
Workers in industrial-age firms were used to and comfortable with the rules that limited the scope for their initiative. The burden of decision making, with the need to communicate and gather costly information, was minimized. Furthermore, by narrowing the scope of decision making and action, the learning requirements for workers and consumers were limited, reducing the transaction costs and related expenditures. In part, the efficiency-enhancing contribution of mass-production was derived from these lower learning costs.
In contrast to consumers being content with limited choice, today more and more offerings are made specifically according to the unique requirements of the individual customers. For workers and customers the burden of gaining the information needed for such tasks is creating an entirely different environment from that of the industrial era.
The knowledge economy could more appropriately be called a learning economy because creative learning becomes the fundamental entrepreneurial activity. Learning that is not industrial in today’s sense of acquiring pre-set information, earning credentials or passing tests, but from the perspective that learning is the foundation for creative action and innovation. Learning to meet the situational needs of value creation better cannot take place outside that context. Learning cannot be a separate domain outside the practice of work. Neither can it be something with beginnings and ends.
Our present formal training systems are neither designed for networked, life-long progression nor designed for situation-specific just-in-time problem solving. Perhaps the worst thing is that they are not accessible to all learners at all times.
The competitive edge of learning comes from the ability to connect with new information and people as and when they are needed. As such, it is not what is already known that gives the creative edge so much as the ability to co-solve problems that require learning on the spot. In increasingly complex environments the curricula for the new just-in-time learning cannot be known and designed beforehand. Needs and solutions emerge situationally in interaction. Learning is more and more about connecting and interacting in wide area networks. This is why the post-capitalistic society and the post-industrial firm have to be decentralized. The nodes of the network organization must be close to customers, close to new technologies, close to changes in society, close to things that matter.
Learning is emerging shifts in the patterns of human networking, interaction and action. Learning is the emerging transformation of inseparable individual and collective identities. Learning, then, does not mean the cumulative growth of knowledge but occurs as shifts in meaning and is simultaneously individual and social.
Productivity is not about doing more but about learning more.
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Neuroscience, The Internet and Leadership
November 4, 2012
The structures of the brain and the Internet look the same. In the brain there are neurons that link as a result of being active at the same time. This firing together creates a connection, a wiring together, that increases the strength of the connection. On the Internet there are wired servers and people that are linked in temporal interaction, sometimes as a result of being inspired and interested in the same topic, firing together. This short-term communication sometimes leads to a longer-term relationship, increasing the strength of the connection. New connections are formed, connections get stronger and connections are lost.
It is not uncommon to think that knowing is something that goes on in the brain. Yet the evidence that it is really so is not quite clear. Some scientists have expressed doubts. The mind, they have argued, is not a thing to which a place can be allocated. Intellectual life is essentially social and interactive, they say. Life is carried on through communication between people. These researchers claim that interactions are not secondary by-products of thinking. They are the primary sites of that activity.
We often think of individuals as independent and self-contained. The view suggested here sees individuals as interdependent nodes of the complex networks they form interacting with others and co-creating themselves and the reality in which they participate.
According to Cathy Davidson, attention blindness is the fundamental structuring principle of the brain. Attention blindness is also the fundamental structuring principle of our society. We see and understand things selectively.
The opportunity lies in the fact that just as we don’t all select the same things, we don’t all miss the same things. If we can pool our insights we can thrive in the complex world we live in.
Amyarta Sen has written that wealth should not be measured by what we have but what we can do. As we engage in new relationships we are creating new potentials for action. Every human relationship, every connection, serves as a model for what is possible. Within any relationship we are in the process of becoming. Each relationship will also bring us into being as a certain kind of person creating a huge repository of potentials. What social technologies are making possible is a much, much richer repertoire than what we were used to before the Internet.
The dominant ways of thinking about the world have their origins in Newtonian mechanics in which the universe was simply the sum of its independent parts. At the moment, this part – whole thinking is being directly applied to the ways we think about leadership. Interdependence plays a minor role and anyway it is seen as the result of a deliberate choice. The Populist political thinking follows the logic that we can choose not to be interdependent.
The old ways of understanding human behavior are not up to the task any more. In contrast to Newtonian traditions, the science of social networks and modern neuroscience offer an entirely new way of understanding the fundamental interdependence of human beings and the human society.
There can be no change without changes in the patterns of communication. Organizations of any kind, no matter how large or how small they are, are continuously reproduced and transformed in the ongoing interaction. These patterns are highly correlated with performance.
In this way of thinking, we leave behind the idea of the self-governing, independent individual for a different notion, of interdependent people whose identities are established and developed in complex interaction with each other.
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Thank you Bo, I miss you very much
The human-centric future of work
October 4, 2012
The big move we are in the midst of is towards an economy that is more centred on information products than physical products. Examples of this are financial services, professional services, the online game industry and software.
The second transformative change is global access to relatively cheap and relatively high quality communication networks
New communication technologies have always had a strong impact on industries and the logistics around production. But this time, with information products, the societal changes are even bigger than before. The Internet is the first communication environment that decentralizes the financial capital requirements of production. Much of the capital is not only distributed but also largely owned by the end users – the workers who have their own smart devices.
The characteristics of the new economy are different from what we are used to: the production of physical goods was (financial) capital-intensive, leading to centralized management structures and the shareholder capitalism we have experienced. The production of information goods always requires more human capital than financial capital. It is much more about finding brains than finding money. The good news is that you are not limited to the local supply. Work on information products does not need to be co-located because of the Internet. If the task at hand is inviting and compelling, human capital investments can come from any part of the network.
This is why decentralized action plays a much more important role today than ever before. The architecture of work is the network and the basic unit of work is not a process or a job role but a task.
Our mainstream management and organizational approaches are derived from the era of the production of tangible goods and high-cost/low-quality communications. These mind-sets are not only unhelpful, but wrong in a world of widely distributed value creation and ubiquitous connectivity.
The opportunity we have is in new relational forms that don’t mimic the governance models of industrial, hierarchical firms. We are already witnessing the rise of very large-scale cooperative efforts that create tremendous value. Coordinated value in these cases is the result of uncoordinated actions by a large number of individuals with different goals, different values and different motivations to take part.
In the networked economy, information products and services can now be created and co-created in a human-centric way, by voluntary, interdependent individuals, interacting with each other by utilizing free or very low-cost social media.
Technology does not determine social and organizational change, but it does create new opportunity spaces for new social practices. Some things are becoming much easier than before and some things are becoming possible, perhaps for the first time.
We are living in a world that is built on the centrality of information and radically distributed intelligence. The organization is not necessarily a given entity or hierarchy any more, but an ongoing process of organizing. The factory logic of mass production forced people to come to where the work is. Work was a place. The crowdsourcing logic of mass communication makes it possible to distribute work to where the (willing) people are, no matter where on the globe they may be. Knowledge work is not about jobs or job roles but about tasks. Work is what you do, and most importantly what you want to do!
Knowledge work can, if we want, be human-centric.
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The post is a shortened version of my lecture today at the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Aalto University, School of Science.
Thank you Jochai Benkler and Bent Flyvbjerg
Interactive competence and flash communities
September 20, 2012
All of us have at some point in our lives experienced performance appraisals where we as individuals were evaluated. This approach to judgment was the same in school and at work: individuals separated from other individuals.
As a result of recent developments in psychology and sociology, we are now leaving behind the preoccupation with the autonomous individual and beginning to appreciate the importance of relational processes and interdependence. The way we perceive organizations is changing accordingly. Rather than an organization being though of as an imposed structure of separate, autonomous functions, today’s organization arises from the interactions of individuals who need to come together. An organization is a continuous process of organizing.
This shift in the way we see organizations changes the way we perceive competitive advantages. The new competitive edge comes from openness and interactive capacity: the ability to participate and connect, as and when needed.
Live organizations and open, live information
Similarly produced products with the same product features are used by different customers in different ways. Just because a product is a commodity doesn’t mean that customers can’t be diverse in their needs and the way they use the product.
Companies used to have no mechanisms for connecting with the end users in order to understand and influence this. Social media and mobile technologies are now changing this.
Organizations are creative, responsive processes of communication. All creative, responsive processes have the capacity to constantly self-organize and re-organize. Change is not a problem or anomaly. Solutions are always temporary and contextual.
In this view, it is information that is the energy of organizing. Or, as Gregory Bateson wrote, “information is a difference, which makes a difference”. When we see information as a power plant that has the ability to organize and change the organization, we realize the power of openness. When information is transparent to everybody, people can organize effectively around changes and differences, around customers, products and new technologies.
When information is transparent, different people see different things and new interdependencies are created, thus changing the organization. The easier the access that people have to one another and to (different) information is, the more possibilities there are. What we have still not understood is that people need to have access to information streams that no one could predict they would want to know about. Even they themselves did not know they needed it – before they needed it. Thus information architectures can never be fully planned in advance.
Engagement and participation
No one person or function can meet today’s challenges alone. We need a community of people who willingly participate and provide their insights to address increasingly interdependent issues. Collaboration is necessary because one person no longer has the answer. Answers reside in the interaction, between all of us.
Therefore the challenges of today are engagement and reducing the transaction costs of participation. Widening the circle of involvement means expanding who gets to participate, comment and contribute. It is about inviting and including relevant, new and different voices.
The unfortunate misunderstanding is that engaging people requires managers to let go. As managers contemplate widening the circle of involvement they sometimes believe that it means to have less ability to provide input based on their knowledge and experience. Paradoxically, engaging more people requires more from managers than the current management paradigm.
Instead of being responsible for identifying both the problem and the solution, they are now responsible for identifying the problem and identifying the other people whose voices need to be heard. Who else needs to be here? How do I invite people who do not report to me? How do I invite customers and other people from outside our organization?
Success today is increasingly the result of skilful management of participation: who is included and who is not. Who is needlessly excluded from the information streams and the subsequent interaction?
A common misunderstanding is that productivity will suffer if larger numbers of people are involved. The new social platforms and interaction technologies have dramatically reduced the cost of communication and participation. Temporary, flash communities can be formed to solve a problem or to tackle an opportunity more easily, more cheaply and faster than ever before – if there is openness and people are invited and if people want to engage. It is about distributing the intellectual tasks at hand and integrating the contributions of many resulting in creative learning.
Creative learning is the new productivity. In creative, interactive work, productivity cannot be measured in quantitative terms or as a difference between input and output, but as the speed and quality of learning.
The management task is not to understand people better, but to understand better what happens, and can happen between people. Our world is co-created in relations.
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