It's all about Attitude (and Skills and Tools)

It’s all about attitude... ...and skills and tools slidshare.net/tonzijlstraGood afternoon everybodyIt is a pleasure to be here. Before I start: slides will be online later today.Ive already heard so many great stories the past two days, that it is hard to add to that.Therefore I want to use a slightly different angle, away from the perspective of topics such as open government, digitalcitizenship, politics 2.0, transparency itself.

Attitudes expressed through Networked life, networked Skilled actions work, networked learning using Tools Management Summary (part 1)I want to look at more individual aspects, at our attitudes, at our skills in dealing with changes, and in dealing with thenetworked world we now live in. But skills in a slightly different way than we discussed sofar. Also I want to talk about the toolswe have to put new attitudes and new skills to work. But tools in a slightly different way than we discussed them sofar.

epsiplatform.eu community steward Sensemaking Complexity Networked Living Change management Open Government Data FabLabs Informal learning Community of Practice Disruptive innovation social mediaThat has been the background of most of my professional activities. I work on very different topics and things as you can seehere, with a strong focus on open government data in recent years. But common to all of them is that I try to shift attitudes andto push skills and tools in to the hands of individuals. It is because I trust people a lot. I trust them to make loads of mistakes,that is the only way we learn. And I trust them to recognize those mistakes and turn that into constructive actions.

InternetWe have two new infrastructures. Internet .......

Mobile communication.......and mobile communications. And new infrastructures always have profound impact on societies. Outside the technology.

Network, individual as nodeThe key element in our new infrastructures is that it has a network as core feature. And it has individual people, notgeographic locations, as end points. You have the end point on your lap, or in your pocket.With internet and mobile communications the unit of organization therefore has become the individual, but there is a twist: it isnot the singular individual, but its the person in the context of the network: the groups and communities he feels part of.

Seeing what’s been lostpeople who say society has become too individualized are wrong, they only see the organizational structures that have beenleft behind,...........

Seeing what’s being createdand they do not see the ones that grew in their place. And these new structures are more fluid, more temporary more flexibleand agile.

individual Networked life, networked attitudes, skills, tools work, networked learning in context of the networkHere we need to look, at the individual as unit of organization. On attitude, skills and tools. But with a twist: the context of thenetworkBecause culture is the sum of our attitudes and behaviours. If we change our attitudes and skills, we change our culture,starting with our organizational cultures. Because effective behaviour is infectuous, people will copy it. Effective behavior goesviral.

Network dominant metaphorNow, internet and mobile communications make the network a dominant metaphor.

(c) Valdis Krebs, orgnet.com Any organizational hierarchyAnd it changes our view of organizations. From the classical pyramid structure

(c) Valdis Krebs, orgnet.com is but a networkTo this network, which is the same as the hierarchy you just saw, a specific network of roles and information flows,which in turn, is part of

....and just (c) Valdis Krebs, orgnet.com a fragment of realityA bigger set of connections, the wider networked reality.

More connectionsOur new infrastructures create many more connections, between individuals. It’s become a small world in that sense.

Abundant InformationOur new infrastructures also allow us to create much more information, an abundance of it.Together this allows us to organize differently. Group forming has now become very easy. Organizing has become cheaperlogistically. We have hierarchies because that used to be an easy and relatively cheap way of organizing things whenconnections are costly and information scarce. The rationale for that has largely dropped away.One of the biggest parties in the Dutch parliament now has no party structure at all and came out of nowhere, it is notorganized in the classical sense. It scares the other parties enormously.

Increased complexityTogether, more connections and feedback loops, abundant info, and the resulting speed of things, increase complexity.Complexity is where there are so many actors and factors that mutually influence each other, that analysis will not help you.That there is no predictability in models there.Like at a garden party: you don’t plan everything up front in terms of goals, and who needs to sit where. You createcircumstances that you hope will make a good party. But there’s no way you can predict how the chairs in the garden will endup the next morning.The world in a lot of ways changes too fast to allow you to analyze.I talked to the higher management of a bank recently, and they used to have strategy sessions every four years. Now they do itevery three months......because by then everything changed again. That is not sustainable

Networked life, networked work, networked learning Digital Disruption Wave Disruption Wavehttp://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/73416633@N00/ If you deny the impact of these two infrastructures, you are being disrupted right now. Either because you deny info abundance, and base your bizz model on access to info (such as the music industry or publishers) Or because you deny the networked reality and the complexity it brings, such as governments are largely doing. The digital disruption wave is currently hitting government full on. You need to change or you will die. So how to deal with that? How to deal with that disruption? How to make the transition without too much chaos? Part of it lies in attitudes, skills and tools.

be empathic be pro-active be self-reﬂective ‘own’ your world be prepared to be amazed Networked life, networked work, networked learning Attitude! be approachable trust your network accept interdependence shareI think at least part of the answer is going back to the individual as unit of organization. The individual in thecontext of his network, groups and communities. In the global network only the individual nodes are constant.These are some of the attitudes that I think come into play.If you look at them as a group you will notice, this is just a list of things that deﬁnes us as humans, as socialanimals. We already do this, in our family, with our closest friends. The key is, through our networked world, wecan scale this up. Because now we are individuals with a global reach. We all accept interdependence in ourintimate circle. Scaling it up globally means we accept the complexity of our world, we accept the connectionsbetween us and all others. Let’s explore a few of these attitudes a bit more in detail.

Be pro-activeBeing pro-active for instance. This is about getting to work. We have discussed visions andideal pictures during the conference, but in action it is where it gets messy, where you haveto work at it. That’s hard (we also heard about that), so you better make your actions count.Choose actions that YOU can actually do.

Your sphere of influenceIn my change management work I’ve seen two typical responses to the wish for change. People either make theproblem so big it becomes too hard. Or they make it about controlling others first. In both cases it’s an excuse forin-action. Choose actions, choose them in YOUR sphere of influence. And then work to extend your sphere ofinfluence, through your groups and networks.‘Owning’ your world is a similar notion: start with the problems in your immediate vicinity. Don’t try to implementyour ideals everywhere, start working towards it where you can.

ShareIn a network every node needs to share, or nobody will see it and you will be ignored. Sharingmakes you part of a group, of a network. It’s a very human gesture. Social media is made forsharing. Sharing is not an incident, like a campaign blog, but a continuous activity.

Be empathicBeing empathic is about seeing others as human beings too. If individuals are the unit oforganization in our networked world, then you need to acknowledge that not just you arehuman, but all of us are. Start seeing government agencies as collections of real people. Startseeing the ‘public’ not as a mob but as groups of individuals.This is in Denmark, at a conference. Where....

Civil servants are passionate http://www.flickr.com/photos/-sel-/60124583/All civil servants are actually passionate about public service. Sometimes it is well disguised.Sometimes you meet a cynic. But cynics are just frustrated idealists usually. I never met a civilservant that did not care. They all care. So it should be easy to treat them as human beings.Be empathic.

Actief uitnodigend Be approachable http://www.flickr.com/photos/dhammza/492882480/So now you share, you are empathic,but you also need to be approachable, to be open for new connections.You need those to get anything done. You need your network.

Find other change agentsSo go out and ﬁnd other change agents, and make it easy for others to contact you. There arealways more people out there than you think. This is a screenshot of a website where over6000+ Dutch civil servants discuss open government, new ways of working etc. They are allchange agents inside their own government body. Connect to people like this.

know the gov does not exist. Networkedcivil servant find 1 life, networked work, networked learning Government: it takes just 1 person!For citizens, realize you do not need to change The Government. It does not exist. You need to ﬁnd just oneperson on the inside to start things. In my city I found the guy in the blue shirt. Together we worked to raiseawareness around open data, organize a hackday and release government data sets.Who are the guys in blue shirts in your government?

Be self-reflectiveBeing self-reﬂective (I’m the shadow on the right) means asking yourself questions.Questions like “Who am I doing this for?” and “Does this satisfy me for the moment?”

Min BZK For Sake of Transparency?http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/piet_musterd/3856928872/ The transparency debate is a good example I think of lack of self-reﬂection. Transparency is a good thing, and extremely useful to keep checks and balances on our institutions and each other. And if you look at the concrete facades of government buildings like this one, there clearly is a lot to be gained. But: transparency avocates, both inside government bodies as well as activists seem to be asking for transparency not for themselves. But for some mythical ‘other’. This makes it impossible to determine how much transparency is enough to satisfy us.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/laburbuja/131650446/ No ‘wizard’ behind the curtain Transparency is meant to increase trust in our institutions. But we seem to be never satisfied, and demand ever more. But not for ourselves, always for others. It never starts with ‘what I would like to know is’.... 100% transparency is a fatal myth. we will simply find out there is nothing there. No wizard behind the curtain. Like peeling away the layers of an onion and finding no center. 100% transparency will destroy trust, not build it. And we already know that! Such transparency does not exist in our own families after all. We lie to each other, we need private spaces, we shield our intimacy from the eyes of others. We need safe spaces to be able to be vulnerable. A little bit of opaqueness helps to make things work. Yes we need much more transparency in our institutions, but we can’t ask 100%. Because inside those institutions are individual people, who need a bit of room to manouver. If we ask self-reflective questions we will know when to stop.

community building designing user centric group dynamics Networked social media life, networked work, networked learning Skills! recognizing complexity networked learning safe-fail experimenting understanding innovation making things story collecting/tellingLet’s move on to skills now. Skills are what we use in our actions to express our attitudes, putting our attitudes towork. And I’ve listed a number here that I think are relevant in our networked age.

SkillIt is again crucial to understand though, that this is a networked world. And it changes whatskills for that networked world are like.We are moving from skills to new literacies. Let me explain that. A skill is something you cando that has value to you even if nobody else can do it. Like making cools jumps with yourbike.

LiteracyA literacy is something that is useful if you AND those around you can do it. If you know how to read and write, and only youhave that skill, its useless.

Networked life, networked work, networked learning Literacy = Skill + CommunityLiteracy is the combination of skills (reading/writing) with community (of readers and writers). In our networked age, where weall are individuals in the context of our communities and networks, we need more literacies than singular skills.

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/judybaxter/3856061/ • Pake schuurtje: could make anything Making skillsAt the same time, the digitialization of our world is helping us to turn existing skills into literacy. Like for making things. Mygrandfather had a toolshed much like this. He could make anything. He had making skills.

Making LiteracyI now have this, FabLab, digital production workshops. Where knowledge and designs areshared globally in a community, and you make your own product locally. There’s a FabLab inBarcelona now and about 60 worldwide. There should be one in every city in Spain. It will helpcreate new economic activity and offer young people new ways to employment in the end.

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/matteo_bagnoli/5030431525/ This is not innovation We need to change our way of looking at what innovation is. Learn to really understand it. Innovation is not invention. It is not about making something futuristic. Innovation is not research.

Innovation starts in unlikely placesInnovation does not come from big existing structures. Not even if the people inside thosestructures really want it. Because the structures are a machine, a machine built to create thebest results of what we are already doing, not for doing new things. Innovation starts inunlikely places.

This is innovationInnovation is disruptive, it changes the game. It takes something that already exists and hasa market, like 3D printing. It then creates a less perfect solution at a fraction of the cost, fornew groups of people and markets, using novel ways of production, and new distributionchannels. It begins small and then starts continuous improvement. This is a RepRap, a 3Dprinter that will be able to print itself. It costs about 2% of a commercial machine. Most ofwhat we now call innovation is not much more than quality management. We need to learnhow innovation processes really work. The digital disruption of government can be theinnovation of government if we are smart. Sites like “actuable” are of this type of disruption.

Take a design perspectiveWe already saw the piano stairs of fun-theory yesterday, urging us to learn to take a designperspective. But it’s also a lot more serious than playing the piano to take the stairs. Designperspective is about putting the user and usage at the center, and involving that user andusage perspective throughout the entire development process. This is where big IT projectsoften fail at, leading to tremendous waste of money and time.

Recognize complexityIn complex situations, in wicked problems, and there are more of those now than before,lineair planning and traditional management are useless. Because there is no predictability,no visible chain of causality, other than afterwards when you look back. We need to learn torecognize what are complex problems, and what are not. Right now we treat everything asnot-complex, which is why we’re not solving any real problems most of the time.So we need to be able to do lots of small experiments, based on our best educated guess ofwhat factors are important, to see what works, and build on that. These experiments need tobe safe to fail. They are allowed to fail, to be able to learn. Not fail-safe, that will not tell usanyhting, but safe to fail. That is how you deal with complexity.Remember I trust people to make lots of mistakes? This is the type of mistakes we need tomake lots of.

rhythm variety of spaces excitement and safety inside and outside perspectives Networked life, networked work, networked learning Community Building evolution of the group value to individual diverse levels of engagementCommunities are the larger organizational bodies of the networked age. And they have their own rules on how tomanage them. Mostly it is not about control, but about creating the right circumstances. Less about management,more about stewardship. I’ll won’t go into it, but wil just give you one little example.Rhythm is important to groups: like Christmas for your family, or weekly Monday meetings at the office. They givepredictability. You always know you’re welcome at Christmas. You can play with those rhythms, see them as a wayto inﬂuence the way groups work. The same is true for the other terms on this slide.

Community building: Etienne Wenger Complexity: Dave Snowden Networked life, networked Innovation: Clayton Christensen work, networked learning Networked Learning: George Siemens For more on some of these topicsFor more on these topics (there is so much to tell, but limited time), look at the work of these people. See how Ipoint you to people, not books. It’s a networked world.

organizations data visualization Networked life, networked work, networked learning open data Tools! network visualization social media open space / unconferencingLet’s move on to tools.Tools help us to apply our skills. Good tools also help make things easier, so you don’t need to be expertly skilledat something. They lower thresholds.In a networked world some of our existing tools stop being very useful. Lineair management for instance.I want to highlight some new tools. Also do realize that some things you may not recognize as tools are actuallytools....

Social Media toolsSocial media of course is part of the toolset. To share, to have conversations. This is not a regular marketing toolto broadcast, but a way to interact.

Open Space / UnconferencesIt is important to see that in a networked world, structures, organizations are just tools as well. You can use themwhere you want, and throw them away when they are no longer useful.This is true for any organizational structure: they are tools, you can put them away when unneeded. Hang themnext to the hammer and screwdriver in your toolshed.And there are new ways of structuring things. Methods like Open Space and Unconferencing (like BarCamp) whereparticipants shape the event, the agenda and way of working on the spot. In the picture you see one of 22workshops in my home on my 40th birthday, when we held a BarCamp unconference.

Open Government DataOpen Government Data is also an important tool. Both for citizens as well as government bodies itself.Governments really need to start seeing this as a tool. This is not to please citizens. This is government’s bestopportunity to save money and ﬁnd new solutions to problems. The biggest re-user of government data isgovernment. Ask yourself how open data can help you execute your tasks, and reach your goals in a cheaper andbetter way.

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/marc_smith/5576936445/ Network visualization (NodeXL)If the network is so important, we need ways to be able to see patterns in those networks. Luckily tools areemerging to help us do that. To see blank spots, to see echo chambers in our network, to see the level of diversityetc.

SensemakingThe same is true for quantitative information: stories. We are sharing our stories over thenetwork in social media, and there is an abundance of it. Tools like this, Sensemaker, help ussee the patterns in those stories. It’s a new form of measurement, not measuring money, butmeasuring meaning. And these tools allow you to see the actual underlying stories as well.

Data visualizationData visualization tools help you do the same thing: ﬁnd the patterns in large bodies ofinformation. We need much more of these pattern ﬁnding tools in this age of informationabundance.

Networked life, networked work, networked learning Digital Disruption Wave • Disruptionhttp://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/73416633@N00/ So let’s go back to the disruption I mentioned at the start. I think our attitudes , skills and tools can help make the transition, make the disruption bearable.

Government as platform questions Politicians Civil Servants Networked life, networked work, networked learning E solutions Organisations CitizensWe have a golden opportunity to turn our governments into platforms. Where we don’t go toask for answers to our problems, but a government that asks us the right questions so wecan come up with solutions through experimenting. We have a golden opportunity for anOpen Government.

Networked life, networked work, networked learning Participation + Open Data Open GovernmentAnd I deﬁne open government as the sum of participation and open data.

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/vredeseilanden/3646968183/ Networked life, networked work, networked talking Participation as learning Participation? Not participation as talking

Networked life, networked work, networked= life Participation learning Participation!But participation as taking active part in the real life around you. Bringing your attitude and your skills.

Impact where you liveRight where you live. Right where it matters most to you.

Networked life, networked work, networked learning Optimistic Radical Management Summary (part 2)I am an optimistic radical. We are at an important moment, it does not take much to bring things down or to completelydisrupt the system, now the system is growing ill fitted to our reality and our complex problems. So I am a radical in the sensethat I am less patient than before, and feel an urgency to get things done.I am also optimistic, because we have great opportunities, and because like I said at the start I believe in people. And all thisdigital stuff, all this techology: it is only about people.

It is up to you, me, usWe just have to make it happen. We-government, as it says on the conference poster.

tonzijlstra.eu knowledge work, learning, social media CreditsAll photos: Ton Zijlstra, by nc saExcept where mentioned on the photo.Slides: http://slideshare.net/tonzijlstraBlog: http://zylstra.org/blogContact: ton@tonzijlstra.euSkype: ton_zylstraTwitter: @ton_zylstra

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It's all about Attitude (and Skills and Tools)

by Ton Zijlstra on Apr 15, 2011

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It’s all about Attitude (and Skills and Tools) — Document Transcript