Collaboration seen thru many lenses

This morning I've been making connections in my mind (cognitive network) between the many different ways that increased collaboration is emerging globally. I then pondered the possibility that each of these different ways of collaborating are the same thing, looked at though different lenses. Here's how that possibility played out for me.

1. When we think about labor and production, we see peers who are sharing files, contributing to projects, responding to requests. We worry about exploitation of workers and the capitalization of labor.
2. When we think about property and ownership, we see commons getting shared, maintained and protected, We worry about any encroachment on, enclosure of or privatization of the commons.
3. When we think about archives, creative works and publications, we see open source and open access models of dissemination. We worry about destroying incentives to continue creating and investing in the infrastructure for advanced research and productions.
4. When we think about gatherings benefiting from inclusiveness, diversity and mutual support systems, we see communities and cooperatives. We worry about debilitating conflicts, ego trips and abuses of power.
5. When we think about individuals expressing themselves through writing, pics, recordings, video, tags, comments, tweets, and texts, we see social networking platforms. We worry about echo chambers and evil spammers.
6. When we think about the authority to administer governance over collectives, we see collaborative networks comprised of constituencies. We worry about over-representing special interests and charismatic leaders abusing their power.
7. When we think about innovative services and breakout value propositions, we see customers co-creating value with providers. We worry about hackers and inventors selling out to corporate greed.
8. When we think about how individuals mediate the messages they receive and uniquely transform common information into subjective comprehension, we see connections being formed, maintained and strengthened. We worry about isolation and disconnects missing out on the available complexity.
9. When we think about social evolution and disruptive changes in the status quo, we see incumbents getting replaced by new entrants. We worry about the startups building a following, generating revenue and enduring the lull after the initial excitement.

With so many ways to see collaborating occurring with so many pitfalls to avoid, it's small wonder these are exciting times to follow.

Collaborative training departments

It's likely that new start-ups in the coming decade will be intensely collaborative, but initially small and without training departments. Established organizations, large enough to have training departments, will become more collaborative or fall behind the changing times. The training departments may feel pressure to become more collaborative or to join an internal resistance movement that clings to legacy practices. In this contribution to the Entreprise Collaboration Blog Carnival, I explore four major innovations that collaborative training departments will likely adapt and adopt. I contrast these developments with conflicted training departments' reactions to any change and to these changes in particular. I make no predictions whether the progressive or regressive vectors will overcome the other. I merely anticipate the bounty of benefits to be realized by training departments that find their way to become more collaborative.

1. Utilized abundance of SMEs
We're in the midst of a paradigm shift. We relied on credentialed experts until we discovered folksonomies, user comments, wisdom-of-the-crowd rankings and Google Analytics hits counters. We tolerated how little content fit through the narrow slots of primetime TV, pages in the print edition and volumes on the shelf. Now were basking in the long tail of narrowcasting cultural creatives who every day upload "user generated" content, responses to requests, and contributions to projects. Countless books, like Groundswell and Crowdsourcing, have made it clear that a lot of very good work can get done by lots of outsiders who have been set up to take pride in their contribution, enhance their reputation and make new connections. We're beginning to privilege the willing contributions of creative participants whom ivory towers and corporate bastions typically reject.

Training Departments need outsiders to contribute to the Analysis, Design and Evaluation phases of the ADDIE process. The internal professionals can handle the Development and Implementation phases more proficiently than others because of the vast complexity and steep learning curves in using authoring software, multimedia resources, updated training facilities, LMS providers and departmental reporting protocols. While the training departments are usually well supplied with conventional subject mater experts (SMEs), they could benefit dramatically from several other kinds of contributions that "training topic" SME's cannot provide. There are experts scattered throughout most organizations with widely applicable expertise in cost containment, quality improvement, problem solving, brand management, strategy reformulation, product innovation and conflict resolution. All these could enhance the internal functioning of the training department within the enterprise. There is tacit expertise that could only come out by getting a community of practice to convene or gathering SME's together from diverse disciplines. There are also experts in how to get on the same page with particular higher ups and how to effectively argue a case for more funds, access, support or resources. There are even experts among the trainees with the know how to realize better effects on the attendees, to make the material more relevant to the trainees' situations and to build on what the participants already know first hand. All these outsiders could make a training department far more effective if they were regarded as potential collaborators.

Conflicted training departments view outsiders with disdain. They think like obsolete broadcasters, print publishers, Hollywood moguls, and music business executives. They assume the only way to control quality, to protect their reputation and to derive an income from their enterprise -- is to keep everything that gets done by qualified hires and contractors. They imagine the unpaid outsiders could only compromise the legacy standards, trash the fragile image of respectability and end up costing more in the long run.

When training departments take advantage of this broad range of SMEs, their internal functioning improves significantly. A greater number of individuals within the enterprise become fans, advocates, promoters and advisors to the department. The department gains credibility as a resource for other departments looking to improve their internal functioning and outreach. These collaborations effectively enhance the sharing of internal expertise that CIO's and knowledge management consultants chase after.


2. Transparent post mortems
Collaboration thrives on transparency. When we can see what questions others are pondering, what decisions they're wrestling with, what criticisms they have of themselves or what problems they're solving, we're far more inclined to jump in and lend a hand. Books, like Naked Conversations and The Whuffie Factor, have shown us how trust, engagement, volunteer effort and positive buzz all increase when a provider reveals internal processes to the public.

Training Departments need to Evaluate the ADDI phases of their process as well as the eventual outcomes they produce. The setbacks and failures of training materials, presentations and online offerings all need to be diagnosed for underlying causes that can be remedied. Surprising successes need to be characterized so they can get repeated deliberately. When these reviews get done throughly, their programs become more effective, the department earns more credibility, others want the department to succeed more than before and fewer conflicts with training objectives crop up.

Conflicted training departments usually dread doing post mortems at all, much less in public view. They assume it is safer and wiser to appear insular, aloof and conspiratorial to outsiders. They keep review processes internal to avoid getting blamed unfairly by those who refuse to take any responsibility for their part in the outcomes. The conflicted departments imagine their already tarnished image could be ruined by "washing their dirty laundry in public". They assume any transparent review of successes would get taken by hostile adversaries as boasting or dismissing valid criticisms.

When collaborative training departments solicit diverse inputs, their post mortems can exceed all expectations. Participants take responsibility for their share in the outcome. Insights into hidden dynamics come to light. Contexts that indirectly influenced participation get factored in. Attendees volunteer their read of mixed messages and distressing dilemmas that were completely off the radars of the instructional designers and trainers. Coworkers, back on the job, can sort out how much the undesired outcomes are due to the lack of follow-up by the team, lack of initiative by the trainee or lack of resources that should support the changed conduct. Everyone is then aware of the complexity of contributing factors and disinclined to blame any individual after that. Subsequent training cohorts seem more congenial and collaborative as if everyone expects to work together to realize the desired outcomes.

3. Co-created experience designs
Businesses ahead of the curve have been learning to stop thinking that they are selling products and to start thinking they are creating customer experiences. They are beginning to design the long series of sales and service interactions like an unfolding story or theatrical performance. Books, like Change By Design and The Experience Economy, give us clues for thinking about the experiences customers have when they are relating to product/service offerings. Customers who feel understood, respected, inspired and/or enchanted are far more likely to help co-create the experience designs for subsequent customers.

Training Departments could benefit from their trainees assistance in designing educational experiences together. Problems with 'talking to a wall" or "preaching to the choir' could be alleviated. Fine tuning the pace, scope and depth of a program could utilize trainees' insights, perceptions and suggestions. Their anonymous feedback that complains about programs could be put to better use by redesigning the course completion experience.

Conflicted training departments believe it's almost always a struggle to get people to learn. When the program becomes too fun and entertaining, the education value gets sacrificed. . They are wary of weakening the resolve, discipline and endurance of the workforce by indulging trainees' whims. They assume that most employees get sent to training as a reward or a much needed break from hard work on the job, rather than to learn anything memorable, essential or useful. These training departments are torn between being strict and "going easy" on their trainees.

When educational experience designs get co-created with trainees, the resulting experiences are on their wavelength. Rapport develops easily in discussion, interaction and participation formats. The quality of contributions during educational gatherings also increases when the experiences have been designed collaboratively. The feedback and suggestions following a program are more constructive, useful and insightful.

4. Training Department's brand
Every product and service has a brand in the minds of those who consider using it. The brand may include the user's image of owning it and the reputation it has for reliability, value or convenience. Prior to the current paradigm shift, it was assumed brands were created by advertising, packaging and warranty expense. Focus groups merely tested which efforts at "managing the brand" had the most favorable impacts on a select group of potential users. However, as online social networking has taken hold, brands are no longer under the control of the brand managers. Books like Accidental Branding and Brand Hijack teach us how to work with consumers transforming brands on their own.

Every training department could benefit from improving its brand image in the eyes of its beholders. Getting framed as more reliable, valuable and convenient than before could enhance the trainee's and supervisor's motivation to pursue, commitment to get results from, and satisfaction with -- the training experience. It's possible to inspire the trainees to spread the word about the benefits they obtained, the value they perceive and the respect they now show the training department. Stories will take on a life of their own about what happened during a training experience, what difference a training made and what trainees are looking forward to next. The training department that collaborates with "brand hijackers" will get told "yes" more often when they propose how they could deliver another training.

Conflicted training departments typically suffer from negative reputations. They may be known for providing training programs that are boring, useless, unresponsive, out of date, repetitive, and otherwise ill-conceived. Built on methods of mass production for mass consumption, conventional training "delivers content at unteachable moments". It's assumed nothing can be done about individual differences, timing issues or changing situations outside the training context. This robust negative brand can escalate into stereotypes of incompetent and clueless instructional designers, trainers and departmental managers. Negative brands seem "made to stick" because they tell a trainee's "victim story" that then evokes instinctual vigilance about imminent dangers, tribal solidarity to gang up against the common enemy and unquestionable labeling to blame those in a position of authority. In these situations, brand management takes on the look of "damage control" where the "brand hijackers" are seen as troublemakers, saboteurs and traitors.

When the training departments brand gets co-created with other members of the organization, a self fulfilling prophesy plays out beneficially. The fans of the training department find more to rave about to their social network. The advocates of more training acquire more justifications for their stance in favor of the departments continued success. Informal prophets, who foretell what to expect from training programs, get proven right as trainees find their experiences match the widespread reputation. Experienced collaborators with the training department makes themselves look good by telling others how well the training department works with outsiders.

Conclusion
Each of these innovations pose choices to training departments in collaborative enterprises. These choices may appear between:

• living fearfully the past and living optimistically in the future
• neglecting technological advances or fully utilizing them
• rejecting the younger generations or embracing them wholeheartedly
• facing the future with self-absorbed resignation or creating a future by caring for common interests with many others

These choices disrupt the status quo. They pull people out of the comfort zones, habitual routines and reliable expectations. They bring out people's insecurities, apprehensions and paranoid imaginations. They multiply the number of conflicts with the transition to increased collaboration, no matter how good the idea of learning and working together seems. The success of any change to more collaborative approaches depends on how well these conflicts get anticipated, understood and resolved.

Related Posts
Ecologies of opposition to collaboration
Two ways to be strong
Collaboration comes and goes
Collaborating with the C level
Creating the future by collaboration
Driven to collaborate
Benefits of collaborating
Designing the transition into collaborating

Designing the transition into collaborating

Transitions are often perilous undertakings which fail to get to a new place and stay there. Like infamous New Year's Resolutions and flamboyant attempts at weight loss, the sought-after change does not endure. A transition into collaborations is equally vulnerable to regressive tendencies, old habits and avoidance strategies. An effective transition process needs to be designed for the difficulties involved.

A. Unfamiliar experiences with collaborating can make newbies feel vulnerable, insecure and awkward. Their resilience, confidence and competence may elude them when they are not working alone, complying with commands or competing against others. A successful transition would provide these people with early successes to convince themselves "I can do this" and "this works for me". Leaving them to "sink or swim" or "get the hang of this on their own" does not improve the success rate.

B. New experiences with collaborating can be easily misread by inexperienced participants. Indications of mutual respect, valued diversity and trust in the shared process can give them the wrong impression. Frames of reference from legacy practices can distort what is actually occurring. Collaborations can look like "getting controlled by others", "failing to stand up for what is right" or "letting others win for no good reason". A transition is helped by learning a new "viewers guide" and practicing "calling the plays from the sideline" to gain experience with collaborative frames of reference.

C. Unfamiliar experiences with collaborating can arouse doubts, suspicious and gloomy predictions. Newbies may begin to expect the worst, fear the consequences of this mistake and regret their decision to give it a "go". Those who defend themselves from new experiences with negative questions will succeed at finding answers that make themselves right. They can ask themselves "how futile is this?" or "when will people realize this is not working?" and effectively sabotage their involvement. A well designed transition acknowledges the habitual use of negative questions and explores the use of appreciative inquiry to engage and empower each person's involvement. Letting everyone question the collaboration however they please sets up the working together to fail in the end.

D. New experiences with collaborating can induce a lot of cognitive dissonance. The so-called "change for the better" can evoke experiences of loss, injustice or sacrifice. The transition can appear to the people making the adjustment that their hot buttons are getting pushed, their values are getting invalidated and their confidence is getting shattered. An effective transition design anticipates this interference from previous identification with successful past practices, idolized roles models and heroics without anyone's assistance. It occasionally works to simply acknowledge these cognitive dynamics as if people merely need to feel understood, validated and respected as is. More often, a more strategic intervention is required where these alarmist reactions are "prescribed as appropriate", "given permission to persist" and "framed as solutions to be fully utilized until new responses come to mind".

Each of these four design responses make the transition more complex. The designed system is capable of responding to a wider variety of disruptive factors without crashing. The transition is prepared for more of what can go wrong so the overall process goes right. The effective design keeps the "troublemakers from making trouble". The experience gives those in transition a sense of orientation and safety rather than a feeling of being lost and abandoned. The process of becoming an insider builds their trust in collaborating. They feel cared for, valued as participants and included in what was expected.

Benefits of collaborating

Working with others can be a very different experience from working for others. The more we appreciate these differences, the more benefits we'll realize from our collaborating with others. Here's lots of those differences to get you thinking about how cool it is to migrate to more and better collaborating.

Once we've gotten the hang of working with others:

• It feels like we've moved onto a level playing field where we see "eye to eye"
• It brings out our better nature where we feel like being kind, considerate and compassionate.
• It shows us areas where we've taken our uniqueness for granted until we perceive how we differ from other contributors
• It teaches us about other ways to perceive the shared situation and common objectives
• It changes our story about our past as we act differently than before and find freedoms to be more of who we really are
• It revises definitions of problems we've endured by getting help from others who've outgrown them, see them differently or bring other resources to the issue
• It updates our goals, objectives and plans with better ideas about the differences we can make and the satisfactions we can co-create
• It transforms the ground we're standing on from shaky grounds that maintain our insecurities to common ground where our confidence builds naturally
• It grows our ability to understand others, empathize with their feelings and share their experiences with fascination
• It allows sacred cows, hot button issues and guilt trips to come to light where they can be regarded as developmental experiences
• It frames mistakes as essential to learn from, part of the collaborative process and necessary to refine shared intentions
• It provides us with high quality feedback from people who truly get: what we're trying to do, where we're coming from and what impact we want to have
• It helps us discover what we want to learn next, how our intrinsic motivation is changing direction and where our own curiosity is leading us
• It makes learning seem far more serendipitous, unforeseen and flowing from one good thing to another
• It confirms our suspicions that we really do want to help others, to contribute to their projects and to make the world the a better place

Once we grasp this extensive "benefit package" from our own personal experiences with collaborating, it's tough to go back to working for, against or without others.

Driven to collaborate

When any change needs to occur, there is always a question of what will drive the change. Usually the need for change does not drive the initiatives, transitions and follow through efforts. If that's all it took to realize the change, the need for it would have already been eliminated. It's helpful to consider other drivers.

A change to collaborative approaches can easily meet with lots of resistance. Portions of an enterprise may have walled itself off in isolation to avoid scrutiny, interference or compromises. Individuals may have amassed a lot of power, staff, or discretionary budgets which could get diminished by a transition to collaborative approaches. Others may have evolved into "prima donnas" who insist on being right, experience a crisis when made wrong and reject any feedback as invalid. A collaborative culture would induce chronic anxiety in these traumatized people. For these reasons and many others, proposals and pilot efforts to increase collaboration could encounter a wall of resistance.

Change drivers need to be stronger and more clever than the resistance. Rather that picturing the opposition getting overcome, subdued or backed into a corner, a better approach will emerge from a more collaborative approach. Resistors have lots of experience, deep investments and good reasons to oppose increased collaboration. When their thinking gets acknowledged, respected and understood by proponents, a change comes over their outlook. Their closed minds open, their guard gets lowered and their receptivity to new information increases. Whenever this change of heart and mind occurs, other change drivers may prove to be effective.

Here are the four change drivers I consider when formulating a strategy:

• Getting on a bandwagon - Early adopters of a change can infect others with their enthusiasm. They give off the impression the change is beneficial, enjoyable and the right thing to do. Conformity pressure emerges for others to not miss out, get left behind or get set in their ways.
• Defend against an common enemy - Alarmists can rally the troops to change so as to not fall victim to impending threats. The dangers get magnified to fuel the anxieties, reactions and convictions that the change is necessary at any cost. When the change can then be implemented at a "cost savings", it looks like bargain rather than a burden.
• Follow the leader to a better place - Leaders of a change effort can create a shared vision of where they are taking people. They paint a word picture of the better situation that lies on the other side of a difficult transition. They inspire others to look forward to the same improvements that soften the sacrifices involved.
• Find it within yourself - Facilitators can bring out the best in people, invoke their consciences and inspire them to serve a greater purpose. They remind people of their potential to make a difference, impact others in their lives and leave a legacy others will admire.

None of these drivers produce needed changes when minds are closed, opposing stances have been taken and thinking has been polarized. They take effect superbly when minds are open, stances have been combined and thinking has become creative.

Creating the future by collaboration

When we keep collaborating to a minimum, it has become clear to me that we create the future by default. The things we do to change what occurs fail to take effect. The momentum of the status quo seems overwhelming and unstoppable. Isolated change efforts are insignificant in the context of complex adaptive systems with vast interdependencies seeking continued stability.

The failure of ambitious change efforts, to create better futures, results in several dysfunctional cognitive dynamics:

• Vicious cycles where unresolved conflicts tempt us to work against others and work without their insights, diverse outlooks and creative contributions.
• Paranoid imaginations where we feel safer envisioning what can go wrong, can go from bad to worse and can blow up in our faces.
• Relying on proven predictions about what always happens, never occurs and needs to be accepted as facts of life.
• Escaping from this dreariness with inflated bubbles of optimism which get burst by encounters with unchanging reality.

From a systems view, these cognitive dynamics are closed circuits. They mere oscillate or go "round and round" ad infinitum. They give "recycling" a bad name as they reuse the same old experiences endlessly. They fuel over-consumption and excess materialism rather than sustainable lifestyles.  The chart on the right shows how we talk to ourselves when the ways our minds are functioning are self-perpetuating, self replicating, self fulfilling and self justifying. 

By defining the problem systemically like this, the switch to collaborative enterprises becomes easier. For starters we can catch ourselves falling into dysfunctional cognitive dynamics and choosing an opposite approach. Here's a brief look at how those turnarounds might occur:

• Upon recognizing a vicious cycle, switching to virtuous cycles of working for others' interests and working with their resourcefulness to co-create a better future.
• After identifying paranoia in each others' imaginations, switching to what-if questions that can together generate visionary scenarios of shared ambitions.
• Rather than confirming tired predictions, entering possibility space together calls off predictions in favor of unknowns, mysteries, unforeseen possibilities and serendipitous occurrences.
• In lieu of inflated bubbles, collaborators can "hold the tension of opposites" which combines pragmatism with innovations to come up with advances that function in better ways.

Working together makes all these turnarounds easier, more likely and more productive. The closed circuits get opened and the momentum of legacy dynamics gets broken. A better future emerges from the combined efforts and transformed cognitive dynamics.

Collaborating with the C level

In hierarchies, the highest level includes the CEO, CFO, COO and often nowadays, the CMO, CIO and CLO. At first glance, the presence of such "high ranking officials" connotes the absence of a collaborative enterprise. Within corporate and bureaucratic hierarchies, the top level is often in conflict with lower ranking leadership, divisions and departments. The person in the position functions as a charismatic leader who's personality plays a large part in their impact. While subordinates manage up with servility, compliance and gratuitous respect, there is a notable neglect of power sharing. The underlings feel routinely threatened, unfairly criticized, viciously misunderstood and deliberately invalidated by the C level frames of reference. These enterprises pay a huge price for their lack of internal collaboration.

Within collaborative enterprises, a very different dynamic would get protected and nurtured. The C-level would graciously provide frames of reference used throughout the enterprise. The people in the "top positions" would facilitate others' exploration of those frames in their own contexts. The emphasis would be placed on the conversations in progress, rather than the people in the positions. The individuals would play roles of facilitative servant leaders rather than charismatic kingpins. The distribution and democratization of their "high ranking outlook" would empower the "rank and file" to act more responsibly, to take more initiative, to use better judgment, and to nip problems in the bud. "Collaborating with the C level" would get turned around to expect "the C level to collaborate with the collaborators".  The structure of the enterprise could be flattened, eliminating layers of middle management, as top-down power became effectively decentralized.

Frames of reference can be used to respect someone's efforts, value their contribution to collective endeavors, define unfamiliar problems that result from ineffective conduct. Here's a brief look at how the C level could be embraced as frames of reference in use throughout a collaborative enterprise:

• CEO: Chief Executive Officers admire alignment with the overall mission. People get valued for their emphasis on mission critical components which override non-essential distractions. Problems fall out of "losing sight of the mission" by dwelling on tactical maneuvers, unrelated tasks or meaningless obsessions.
• CFO: Chief Financial Officers admire productive assets and cost-effective solutions. People get valued for realizing greater efficiencies and for "getting more bang for the buck". Problems result from wasteful spending, throwing money at problems and stockpiling "new toys and tools" that end up underutilized.
• COO: Chief Operating Officers admire skills, tools and performance aids that get a job done right. People get valued for results they produce, solutions they formulate and changes they implement. Problems follow from "merely going through the motions", "spinning your wheels in a rut" or "looking busy for show".
• CMO: Chief Marketing Officers admire efforts to protect and extend the brand. People get valued for creating exceptional customer experiences and resolving satisfaction issues promptly. Problems result from "over-promising and under-delivering", acting without the customer in mind or pushing what the customers don't need or want.
• CIO: Chief Information Officers admire sharing information, resources and competencies. People get valued for curtailing duplicated efforts, mentoring proteges and revealing their expertise where it's needed. Problems fallout of hoarding knowledge, distancing oneself from colleagues and barging ahead at "reinventing the wheel".
• CLO: Chief Learning Officers admire learning from setbacks, feedback and unexpected successes. People get valued for turning crises into lessons, extracting value from incidents and encouraging continual improvement. Problems follow on the heels of arrested development, closed minds and shortages of questions.

Each of the frames of reference set-up fruitful collaborations. They define new questions to ask, better possibilities to explore, different situations to look into and greater insights into the complexity of interdependent subsystems. The collaborative enterprise making daily use of these frames could easily outperform rivals on every metric of a balanced scorecard.

Collaboration comes and goes

Our state of mind supports collaboration with others when we're feeling safe. We can feel safe when there is an absence of danger, threats and enemies. We can alternatively feel safe by ganging up together against opponents which then achieves "safety in numbers". I suspect the collaborations that emerge from feeling safe are not the same between these two conditions. When there is no danger present, it's likely we can get creative, compassionate, caring and capable of serving others' interests effectively. When we're establishing safety against others, it's more likely the collaboration would be more accurately described as collusion, conspiracy, conformity and cohesion. When we're anxiety-ridden, we lose our tolerance for deviance, our trust in others and our willingness to let go of preconceptions.

The ups and downs of business cycles impact the state of mind of nearly everyone within an enterprise. Anytime the economy, market, rivals or internal mismanagement poses some danger, a collaborative enterprise under siege could easily regress to collusion, conspiracy, conformity and cohesion. This would fail to protect the brand, win back customers, or attract essential talent when hiring again. The loss of genuine collaboration could put an enterprise into a downward spiral without the resourcefulness to pull itself out.

This outlook on collaboration gives me a picture of a socio-technical system. The state of mind that gets creative, compassionate, caring and capable of serving others' interests effectively is the system's core technology. The system crashes when these collaborative dynamics get disrupted by external turbulence. The failure to buffer the core and respond capably to the turbulence exposes deep flaws in the system design. Besides the obvious failures in the industry segment, customers' perceptions and job market, internal failures would multiply. I would expect to see:

• a loss of sustaining innovations, extensions of successful products and upgrades of services
• an inability to learn from what's occurring, get the message in all this feedback and change directions
• a series of leadership failures, bad decisions and flawed policy changes
• an excess of committee meetings, upbeat conferences and enforcement of positive attitudes

When collaboration is protected by a viable socio-technical system, this spiral of potential setbacks gets averted. The potential disaster gets foreseen and forestalled. The state of mind which supports genuine collaboration gets regarded as the "goose that lays the golden eggs". Leadership acts quickly to create safety, provide buffers from turbulence, protect essentials with added resources and nurture the collaborations that then come about.

Two ways to be strong

When people are strongly opposed to collaborations for any of the reasons I explored yesterday, they only have one way to be strong. One way I've facilitated others' migration to effective collaborations gives them a second way to be strong. I simply tell them my version of an old Rudyard Kipling story about a stick in the mud. Here's how it goes:

Once there was a stick in the mud on the banks of a gently flowing stream. In it's vicinity were numerous tall blades of grass rooted in the same mud. Obviously the stick was much stronger than any wimpy blade of grass. The stick expected to come out the winner in any test of strength, size or endurance.

Later that day, a cloud burst filled the stream with a torrent of water that came raging along to where the stick was stuck in the mud. The water overflowed the banks of the stream and submerged everything nearby. The force of the water broke the stick in two and carried what remained downstream. The blades of grass yielded to the flow while remaining rooted in the mud. When the water subsided and the sunshine returned, the blades of grass stood upright again. As they waved in the breeze and deepened their roots, they each grew a little stronger too.

When we're proud of being strong, we have no idea our strength is rigid, brittle and vulnerable to getting broken. We assume we have nothing to lose by getting even stronger in the only way there is to be strong. We become more confident, determined and convicted in our self righteous stance. We become a stick in the mud.

Once we've been broken, we find a different strength within. We realize we're not totally destroyed by having our confidence shattered, pride humbled and superiority knocked down a peg or two. We stop trying to become stronger and let go of our ambitions to win contests of strength. We discover the rooted strength that blades of grass teach us to emulate. We let go of our rigid stance and yield to others validity, dignity and value. We give ourselves the same new-found respect regardless of comparisons to others. We transform our mind to be suitable for collaborating.

Ecologies of opposition to collaboration

Many of my favorite life experiences have involved collaboration. I enjoy many fond memories of working together on architectural projects, theater productions, management consulting interventions, convention exhibit displays, video shoots, software development projects and corporate training designs. I naively assumed everyone would favor collaboration over working in isolation. I realized that collaboration was an acquired taste of mine, given decades of getting graded in school for my individual efforts. But I assumed that the rewards of collaboration would become obvious to everyone exposed to the possibility.

Throughout those collaborations I enjoyed personally and facilitated for my clients, I noticed some people were better at the interactive, mutually-dependent processes than others. Some people appeared to be driven by high needs to be right, in control and more powerful than the rest of us. They seemed more easily threatened, disconcerted and put off by those of us collaborating effectively. Often there would be no attempt to transform them into effective collaborators or collaborate with their misgivings. Instead they got labeled as "prima donnas", "ego maniacs", "power trippers" or "control freaks". We didn't collaborate with them on what to label them. They were 'them" and we were "us" who were pointing fingers at "them" as if acting like team players was not an option for us or them. We got to be right rather than effective.

Since then, I learned a lot more psychology, cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics. Over the past year in the U.S., the news has been filled with oppositions to collaboration during the presidential campaign, financial bailouts and debates over health care reform. My view of those situations is now much more systemic, complex and ecological. Here are four anti-patterns I see inter-relating the collaborators and their less collaborative cohorts .

Abandoning stability
The introduction of collaboration can form a vicious cycle in contexts of well established isolated efforts. Collaboration can be a change that is opposed to the status quo. Proponents of change and stability get locked into a power struggle over who gets to be right. There is no way both can be part of the solution or essential to keeping things in balance. Advocates of stability and the status quo experience change as threatening to their comfort zone of familiar routines and reliable predictions. Their need for lots of stability gets heightened by the evidence of others trying to make them wrong, destabilize their familiar situations and frame them as incompetent.

Changing the rules
Collaboration can revise the unwritten rules of the game being played in ways that give advantage to the presumed losers. It's assumed this is a zero sum game that is dividing a fixed pie where the winner takes all. There no possibility of win/win outcomes, a non-zero expansion of possibilities or sharing the victory to keep the game going infinitely. Letting the enemy  win before the game even begins -- defeats the competitive spirit of those opposed to collaboration. The value of playing the game gets dismantled if the usual victors value those who are supposed to get conquered, subdued and humiliated. The need to put down the collaborators and keep them in their place gets heightened whenever they get the upper hand and change the rules of the game in their favor.

Losing touch with reality
Reliance on collaboration can appear as a delusional construct that lacks realism. Collaboration can put the "decidedly" incompetent and inferior slackers in a position to dominate the competent and superior performers. There's no question that someone ends up on top of the others. The realistic appraisal gets turned upside down. The presumed facts about who really knows their stuff and who actually gets results gets upended. There appears to be no advantage to "letting the inmates run the asylum" or "putting the children in charge of the adults". An endless argument about facts, appraisals of performance and realism gets escalated as the reliance on collaboration appears increasingly delusional.

Asking for trouble
The adoption of collaborative approaches may appear to open a can of worms. Efforts are being made to keep a lid on the chaos, impose some order on the confusion and keep crises to a minimum. There are only safeguards against irrational hysterics, passionate troublemakers and high maintenance characters. There are no patterns in use for calming the furious, reassuring the compatriots or restoring the combined resourcefulness. The lid is either on or it flies off. Collaboration apparently does nothing to silence, squelch, dismiss, downplay or steer clear of eruptions. The crazier things get, the more it appears collaboration has to be counteracted to maintain a semblance of order.

In every one of these anti-patterns, the collaborators "get into it" with those opposed to collaboration. The underlying perceptions, fears and cycles do not get addressed. Exploration of the anti-pattern itself gets avoided. Work on the migration from the anti-pattern to an effective, resilient pattern gets deferred. Living with the problem appears preferable to co-creating a solution.

Forthcoming blog carnival

Entreprise Collaborative recently announced a monthly series of blog carnivals dealing with facets of social learning and networked enterprises. This dovetails superbly with all those issues and active projects of mine I tied together yesterday. You can visit the Ecollab Blog Carnival web page to get the details on adding to the festivities yourself. Their first topic is one where I take a rogue approach: the future of the training department in the Collaborative Enterprise. The participating blog posts will get published on Saturday, December 12th and get announced on Twitter with the tag: #ecollab.

I view the training function as emergent from the complexity of interdependent relationships internal and external to the enterprise. The training function reflects the level of conflicts within the collaborative environment as well as the amount of turbulence disturbing the enterprise as a whole. How the training department functions depends, not only on the culture of P2P learning and collaboration, but on the nature of the market, product/service mix and size of the enterprise. There are usually many vectors within an organization that oppose the training function becoming more effective, responsive and techno-savvy. Collaboration may be given more lip service than actual implementations by those who need to make a show of keeping up with the changing times. The driving influences for the training function to "wise up" are often "low on the totem pole", external consultants or those visionaries out on the fringes of the organization where power and influence over the center are minimal. The switch to collaborative modes of learning often proves to be a disruptive innovation that the organization's immune response extinguishes in a big hurry.

I expect to explore all these issues in my contribution to the first of these intriguing blog carnivals on December 12th.

12/6/09 J'ai corrigé juste l'orthographe de l' « entreprise » de mot. 

P2P learning ties in with everything

This morning my internal cognitive network has a "small world" feel to it. There are very few degrees of separation between the nodes in my cognitive network. It's clear to me I have tons to share with you in the coming months but I don't know where to begin. That may be due to the fact that robust networks don't have a beginning.

Over the extended holiday weekend, I captured a lot of inspirations for how peer-to-peer (P2P) learning could occur. After taking time out to prepare "baked yams and apples in a sherry butter sauce" for 20 friends and relations, I got to explore how P2P learning ties into so many other possibilities I'm exploring. Each of these explorations seem like hubs enjoying power law scalability. The well connected nodes are becoming increasingly connected to each other and vast arrays of other ideas, books and bloggers.

P2P learning functions superbly within one of the disruptive innovations I've proposed will impact higher education in the near future. It appears to alleviate many of the adversities playing into the chronic 50% college dropout rate. P2P learning provides wonderful preparation for contributing to P2P production, property and governance practices that Michel Bauwens and many others are advancing. P2P learning also prepares people to function in a "world without Wall Street" that David Korten defines in his latest book, which I read last week, Agenda for a New Economy. P2P learning appears to be compliant with John Medina's Brain Rules which exposed the counter productive cognitive impacts of classroom and curriculum based learning. P2P learning is highly congruent with all I've written about as PLE 2.0 that combines DIY with DIT (do it together) serendipitous learning.

P2P learning links to another major cognitive hub I have not yet written about here: conflicts with and within collaborative networks. P2P learning functions as a collaboration that is vulnerable to external turbulence and internal dissensions. Formulating response capabilities to "buffer the core technologies of collaboration" serves many other purposes. It shows promise for resolving emotional baggage that individual collaborators bring to the interactions. It makes the collaborative networks more resilient, sustainable and supportive of disruptive diversity. It transforms a single-minded endeavor into a total solution which is much more likely to scale into widespread adoption.

P2P learning also solves some technical issues I've been wrestling with while preparing a business plan entry for the contest at the University of Pennsylvania. It reframes the business model as a support system for curiosity and creativity. It defines the value proposition as something that gets crowd sourced, rather than delivered with a factory model of production. It sets up the startup to launch "off radar" of rival incumbents by not serving the consumers of what could be called "anti-P2P learning". It defines the challenge of making P2P learning seem very appealing, accessible and easy to adopt by refining the "customer experience design".

Freedom from too much information

The abundance of free content gave me another idea for a possible scarcity to spawn a freemium business model. What if the abundance of free content gets old? What if we begin to experience the negative side of all that abundance? What if we begin to throw up red flags when we're feeling overwhelmed by the abundance like:

• I didn't ask for this information!
• This is too much information!
• I'm not ready for all this content!
• This comes at a bad time for me!

To throw up red flags like this is a healthy sign. We are exhibiting a sense of an independent self with healthy boundaries from recurring abuse. We've disentangled ourselves from entrapments that fail to honor, respect and value us. We are standing up for what represents who we intend to be and how we want to relate to the world. We are acting on choices found within rather than reacting with fear, guilt or obligatory limitations to what gets imposed on us.

Within this possibility, freedom from "too much information" is a new scarcity created by the abundance of content. The abundance is easy to come by, the freedom from it is not. It's no problem to drink from the fire hose. It's a big problem to shut it off or distance ourselves from getting blasted.

Within this possibility, the abundance of content is free. It then will be worth some added expense to:

• get information only when we request it
• get the right amount of information for our immediate purposes
• get the content when we're ready for it
• get to postpone receiving or inventory content for later use when the timing is right

This business model would then function as a disruptive innovation for enterprises that:
deliver content on it's own broadcasting schedule in formats that cannot be time-shifted
publish content in bound volumes that cannot be searched, tagged or bookmarked
aggregate large quantities of digital resources that do not support searches for personal uses
push too much content onto audiences that wanted "just a little for now"

The goal posts would then be moved. The game would be changed to providing answers to questions, responses to requests and possibilities to generate further questions. Free content would remain free, but freedom from it's timing, excesses and lack of selection options would be costly.

Free answers - costly questions

When we're formulating a "freemium" business model, we need to become well travelled along the boundary between abundance and scarcity. Any new abundance creates new scarcities while rendering previous scarcities as obsolete, contrived or controlling. The new abundance also heightens our appreciation of the potential value, benefits and uses of a new scarcity. We recognize how some of the new scarcity is cheap, over-priced or useless.

This morning I've been exploring how "quality questions" might become the new scarcity amidst the abundance of free content, answers, finds, resources and solutions. It initially occurred to me that there are plenty of cheap questions, throwaway questions and unrewarding questions. We don't need "consumer education" to recognize questions that create value while satisfying our love our mysteries, adventures and ongoing explorations.

I then realized that most of my best questions have dawned on me in the midst of intense thought processes. Questions seem to arise like emergent outcomes of complex adaptive systems. When I'm describing this process I say things like:

Reflecting on all those recent developments that I'm seeing suddenly gave me a new question to explore.
Changing my point of view revealed a new question I was not previously considering.
Making use of that new concept raised a whole new set of questions for me to get answered.
Comparing these alternatives uncovered many deeper questions to ponder.

When I'm saying things like this, I'm expressing a profound appreciation for quality questions. I regard them as relatively scarce compared to the abundance of further explorations. I value them as gifts, treasures and gems. The value of these questions seems genuine to me, not artificial, contrived or hyped. I'm using the questions to support processes that I trust while get me where I want to go.

I then entertained a new question: could the right kind of question change our minds? I thought of several different ways to ask the question:

• How can challenging questions open closed minds that have adopted a stance of "no further questions your Honor"?
• How could an insightful question shatter long-held assumptions which have denied the reality of the situation?
• How can penetrating questions revise reasoning that has relied on "either/or" binary explanations?
• How could several disturbing questions transform a draining vicious cycle into an energizing virtuous cycle?

I then noticed how I was framing valuable questions as challenging, insightful, penetrating and disturbing. I was setting myself up to appreciate scarce questions, discriminate between different qualities of questions, and regard the right questions for the job as inherently useful. By seeking valued outcomes from my use of questions, I was both open to benefiting from the abundance of answers and guarded against cheap, throwaway and unrewarding questions.

This seems to me like the start of a freemium business model that works with "content wanting to be free".

Forecasting the flip

Another way to assess the likelihood of scaling an innovation eluded my searching yesterday. This morning I found it in Chapter Four of the book: Disrupting Class - How disruptive innovation will change the way the world learns by Clayton Christensen, Michael  B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson. In the words of the authors:

It turns out there is a way to forecast the flip. ... one must plot on the vertical axis the ratio of market shares held by the new, divided by the old (if each has 50 percent, this ratio will be 1.0). Second, the vertical axis needs to be arrayed on a logarithmic scale—so that .0001, .001, .01, .1, 1.0, and 10.0 are all equidistant. When plotted in this way, the data always fall on a straight line. If the first four or five points do not lie in a line, it is a signal that there is no compelling driver for substitution. But the line is always straight if a disruption is occurring. Sometimes the line slopes upward steeply, and sometimes it is more gradual. The reason the line is straight is that the mathematics "linearizes" the S‑curve. When the substitution pace is plotted in this way, one can tell what the slope of the line is even when the new approach accounts for only 2 to 3 percent of the total. That makes it easy to extend the line into the future to get a sense of when the innovation will account for 25 percent,50 percent, and 90 percent of the total. We call this line a "substitution curve." (pages 97-98)

The compelling driver for "the innovation replacing the incumbent" is evident in the early market share data. Scaling of the innovation is simply the accumulation of the ongoing logarithmic increases. The S curve flips from "curving up" to "bending over". That turning point has been compared to "taking swings at beach balls where you can't miss", "getting caught up in a tornado" and "hitting the first bowling pin that knocks over all the others".

Will your innovation scale?

Yesterday I was thrilled to discover, via LinkedIn, the announcement of a competition for business plans in the education space. So much of what I've explored in this blog could be restated as a business plan. I spent most of yesterday contemplating how I could reformulate my writings about disrupting higher ed into a scalable solution to the college dropout problem. The First Annual Milken-PennGSE Education Business Plan Competition defines it's parameters as:

Educational entrepreneurship business plans should outline the problem they address, offer a solution, and discuss scaling possibilities for bringing the proposed innovation to additional settings ...... In evaluating business plan submissions, our judges will consider the importance of the educational problem, the creativity and feasibility of the proposed solution, and the potential for widespread impact.

This morning I did a Google search of "scaling innovations" to refine my thinking about the third parameter in the competition. While I found an abundance of content that addresses the scaling of innovations in education, none of it aligned with the model in my mind about scaling. Most of it sought to get incumbents to disrupt themselves, as if educators are being asked to pull the rug out from under their own feet Thus I'm feeling compelled to spell out how I answer the question: "Will my innovation scale up into widespread use?"

1. Innovations have a chance of scaling if they are "off the radar of the incumbents". This may occur by serving non-consumers of the market leaders, offering lower cost alternatives down market or appearing too weird to pose any obvious threat to those incumbents. Innovations are imperiled by competing directly with, stealing customers from or generating negative press for the incumbents with the resources to annihilate the innovation.
2. Innovations may scale if they evolve into a total solution. They they offer a "package deal" that handles lots more issues besides the innovation itself. Innovations will not take off if they cannot answer the misgivings and exploratory questions of potential customers.
3. Innovations are likely to scale if the inventors have "let go of their baby". The process of developing a viable innovation is deeply immersive and intensely engaging. The design issues demand so much attention, the inventors assume "everyone will want this". The innovation only gains widespread adoption when it serves other perspectives, functions in other contexts and solve other problems besides the inventor's original conception.
4. Innovations improve their chances of scaling when they rebound from the dip (Godin), chasm (Moore) or hype cycle (Gartner). The second launch then appeals to pragmatists who want to use the innovation as a tool, shortcut or solution to their particular situation. They are relying on it's reputation and will spread the word if it works for them. Otherwise, innovations lose out when once the thrill is gone, the early adopters have gotten bored with it and the high churn press coverage has moved on to the next new thing.

When all four of these issues get handled by the ways of bringing the innovation to market, the odds are in its favor to scale to widespread adoption. Each neglected issue weakens the chances significantly. Failing all four concerns reduces the possibility of scaling to nil.

Formulating a total solution

When we've developed an innovative product or service, the marketplace may not want it yet, understand it on their own terms or see any use for it in their personal contexts. They may be asking:

• What good is this to me?
• Why should I want to acquire this?
• How can I be the judge of the quality of this?
• Why should I trust what the sales pitch says about this?

Those adventurous types that buy something before the herd has a clue that it exists, may be disappointed with their purchase of the innovative product or service. It may not work as promised, not function in the way they had hoped, or took more effort than they expected. Those early adopters may be asking:

• Why wasn't I told about these disadvantages and difficulties before I bought this?
• How could I be so gullible, unsuspecting and naive to fall for this?
• What was I thinking when I found this offer to be appealing?
• Why was I so impulsive as to leap before I looked?

Once the innovation gets debugged and refined, some of that buyer's remorse will vanish. Once the disconnects between marketing and actual functionality get cleaned up, more customers will be satisfied with their purchases. Then there will be a new crowd of customers who want to do more with the innovation, who wonder how to get the most out of it and who are considering ways to apply the innovation in other situations. These pragmatists may be asking:

• Where else can this be applied?
• How else can this be made to function for me?
• What can this do when applied to some of my other problems?
• Why does the innovation limit itself to those prescribed applications?

All three sets of questions are opportunities to formulate a total solution for the customers. The original innovation gets contained in a larger package. The potential buyers with problems encounter the total solution that says to them: "bring it on, we get this all the time". The potential buyers experience "customer service before the sale". They're then sold on how they were treated, served and respected by the total solution. Their trust in the innovation is deepened by how they got their questions answered, misgivings resolved and remorse prevented. The established customers get service after the sale. They become "brand hijackers" who spread the word of the "great innovation they've been using". They get into the spirit of how they we're treated as they serve their strong and weak social network links with answers to their questions. The total solution takes on a life of its own.

Inducing realizations

When we're presenting, authoring, teaching or designing instruction, we're relying on a field-tested theory about learning. We may assume that the only things coming to the minds of the learner are from us. We may otherwise assume we're competing with many other things that come to their minds besides what we're presenting.

When we assume we're in control of what comes to learners' minds, we're inclined to think that we can make learning happen. We've simplified our world view to include so few variables that we're overconfident about our role in the complex interdependencies. We presume to educate by delivering to, imposing on, coercing the internal processes and manipulating the outcomes from the minds of the learners.

When we assume the learners' minds are out of our control, we're open to the possibility that learning happens emergently. We've complicated our world view to include complex adaptive systems, ecological models and adaptive outcomes. We've gained a different perspective on our role in the system. We're one more pea in the pod, bozo on the bus or drop in the bucket. We presume to educate when we do what it takes for learning to happen on it's own and to come about naturally. We stop trying to make learning happen and then let it happen by trusting the complex processes involved in the minds of the learners. For the past two decades, I've been calling this approach "inducing realizations".

One way to induce realizations in the minds of the learners is to contrast two approaches. For instance, I've just compared "making learning happen" with "letting learning happen". This breaks up the assumption that there is only one way to function, react or decide about how to proceed. It "voices a choice" that may not been previously considered. It may induce added complexity to educators' cognitive networks which routinely respond to situations which call for presentations or instructional designs. It implies that more will come to their minds than what I've just put into it by reading this. I'm assuming readers will come to your own realizations about the significance, uses and value of this choice within their personal contexts. They'll  make up their mind as they're so inclined. Perhaps some learning will happen.

Leveraging your empathy for the learners

When we already know the material we're going to present, our minds become free to know the learners. We can spend time understanding them in ways they understand themselves. We can prepare to speak their minds and picture them in ways that induce more learning. This cultivated ability to empathize with the learners can be leveraged into more effective instructional designs, learner experiences and disruptive value propositions.

When I've spent time "learning the learners", here's some of what I've discovered:

• There's a range of different expectations about what I will do for them, with them and in spite of them. Some are cynical and expecting the worst. Others are optimistic and trusting me to provide exceptional value.
• There are lurking fears about who this may get off to a great start but end up disappointing them. Some are afraid this will be over the heads, moving too fast to keep up or too basic to be of any use.
• There are those who want to be told the facts, methods and guiding principles. Others want to understand why this approach makes sense, how it compares to others and when it's not applicable.
• Some learners assume classroom experiences are done to get the grade and nothing else. Others expect to apply what they learn in other classes and then later in life. Some organize their efforts to prepare for the test while the others prepare to enrich their understanding.

When we understand these kinds of variables, there are two ways to mention them to the learners. One way belittles them by saying "I know what you're thinking" and implying "How could you be so stupid?". The other opens their closed minds by saying "Some of you share these concerns" and implying "You want to get the most out of this investment you're making". The first approach is manipulative and attempts to control the learners. The second approach is empathetic and relates respectfully with the learners.

This same contrast occurs in the formulation of disruptive value propositions, innovative educations products and new business models. The first lacks empathy for the learners and pushes the product in their faces. The attempts to deliver the product backfire. The other leverages the empathy for the learners and creates demand for them to inquire into, explore further and realize for themselves the value in this offering. The effects on the learners are enduring, mutually beneficial and significant.

Disrupting the value proposition

Whenever a significant new technology comes along, it's human nature to overreact. Andy Kessler tells some wonderful anecdotes about the furor over steam, electric, gasoline and nuclear power  sources in his book How We Got Here. We act like the technology will be disruptive of the previous mode of existence. There's lots of evidence that we're currently immersed in that overreaction to the technologies of online learning. It's not wrong to think there will be sweeping changes associated with online access, searchable archived content, immersive digital environments and free tools for self expression. It's wrong to think the technologies will drive the change.

The two disruptive business models for higher education I've proposed are not defined by online learning. Both the service based and peer based learning could be enhanced by online experiences. Yet both were generated by the kinds of subsequent employment the graduates will find and the kinds of learning best suited toward those objectives. They revise the "strategy canvas" in search of "blue ocean market space" as Kim and Mauborgne advised us to pursue in Blue Ocean Strategy. These models also seek out "bowling alley" niches for Crossing the Chasm (Geoffrey Moore). They also demonstrate Mastering the Hype Cycle (Fenn & Raskino) by rebounding after the overreaction fizzles out.

I've become convinced that Clayton Christensen's model of disruptive innovation gets it right. The technology is not itself disruptive. The new value proposition made easier with the technology moves the goal posts. There are non-consumers of existing business models who can be served by something new that is good enough for starters. There are jobs they are getting done with difficulty or not getting done at all with the current offerings. The disruptive value proposition helps them get their jobs done at last or done faster, better and/or cheaper. The value is experienced "in the eyes of the beholder", not the eyes of the technologists, inventors or promoters.  The new business model delivers that intangible value. It uses tangible products, services and technologies as a means toward the end of delivering that intangible value.

To come up with disruptive value propositions, we need to think of the end user in their own contexts. We need to empathize with their plight, feel their pain and walk in their moccasins. When we see the jobs they are trying to get done, the tools become useful in their context. We see how to best apply them without overreacting to the obvious benefits of the new technology. We change our orientation so that we're "selling holes, not electric drills".

Making college affordable

As Karl Kapp recently explored in The Higher Education Bubble Continues to Grow, most colleges are mimicking Wall Street's flawed strategy of self-serving financial schemes. Colleges cannot slow the runaway inflation which results in soaring costs, declining value and under-served students. These colleges are conforming to a single contaminated business model, much like the health care providers that Clayton Christensen has analyzed. The "significant" differences between colleges amount to mere superficial variations in course offerings, campus activities and financial aid resources. The financial crisis is shared by nearly all institutions of higher education. As I recently explored on my other blog, the reasons the costs are soaring out of sight are not even on their radars.

I expect four different business models will emerge from the widespread collapse of over-priced academic institutions. Each constitutes an exit strategy from the stampede headed for the precipice. Two exits develop sustaining innovations which maintain the use of college campuses and classroom contacts with students. The other two introduce disruptive innovations which change the game of "getting a college education". All four innovations make college more affordable while redefining and differentiating their value propositions. Each new business model will need to "circle its wagons" to defend itself against contamination by the other three innovations.

Academic credentials providers
Only one of the four new business models will continue to offer degrees and transcripts from accredited institutions. This exit strategy is the least affordable alternative, though cost reductions can be achieved. This sustaining innovation only serves the sciences, engineering programs and technical disciplines. This model views undergraduate education as a certification process for grad school. The credentials earned remain within academia. Every student is required to progress through the same obstacle courses, get over the same hurdles and exhibit the same competencies. The factory model for the production of uniform outputs can be better utilized to make the educational and matriculation processes more efficient and cost effective. Presentations by pricey faculty members can be archived for download as the open courseware movement has already initiated. Personal contact with undergrad students can be handled by low cost grad students who are "learning by teaching". The faculty will continue to be devoted to academic research, publishing and grant seeking. Much of the students' testing and lab work will migrate into game environments where learners proceed at their own pace, self-remediating flaws in their perception, understanding or execution.  Cost savings will also be realized by the elimination of the "cruise ship" amenities and their accompanying layers of bureaucracy.

College experience providers
One other business model will sustain the use of college classrooms and campuses. It does not credential the advancement to grad school or support academic research. It values the quality of teaching and relating to students over subject matter expertise. It provides the enrollment with high quality college experiences and utilizes liberal arts and humanities curricula toward that end. It serves those college students looking to mature, separate from their family systems,  find themselves, and/or get experience with mating -- while living on campus. It expects there will be no connection between what students study in college and their subsequent employment. There is no need for grades or other academic credentials. The subject matter gets used to cultivate their ability to critique, problem solve, change frames of reference, perceive subtleties and express themselves. The instructors function as mentors, coaches, guides and sounding boards for the students' personal development. There remains a parallel staff of RA's, counselors, activity sponsors etc. for the rich variety of "student life" offerings. Cost savings are realized by the elimination of academic tenure, committees, research, libraries and administration. This labor model can be delivered entirely by part time "adjuncts" who exude a passion for teaching and cultivating individual students. These faculty members will write recommendation letters for the students they know very well upon graduation and job seeking. These students will have also assembled portfolios, verified by faculty members -- that reveal abilities that could contribute to an employer's objectives.

Service learning providers
The first of the two disruptive innovations utilizes a service learning paradigm. This business model serves those going into service careers. The process of apprenticeship, on-the-job training and action learning cultivates the needed skills and awareness. This "game-changer" will evacuate most community college and 4-year classrooms that pretend to prepare students to serve others by listening to lectures and taking tests on textbooks.  It delivers hands-on practice for subsequent work that will involves hands-on practices. While academia discredits this innovation as inferior  "vocational training" or "trade school", it redefines quality in "unacademic ways". Much like business recruiting and promotion efforts, this model relies on role play, in-basket and other "immersion in simulated situations" to qualify individuals. It's not what they say they know, but rather how effectively they "walk the talk" that counts. This model will deliver students who can get the job done, handle the responsibility effectively and respond to unfamiliar situations impressively. This innovation will frame academia as merely preparing students to be hypocrites who only "talk the talk" and look good on paper. Cost savings will be realized by the elimination of classrooms, campuses, textbooks and the academic administration.

Peer learning providers
The other of the two disruptive innovations utilizes a peer learning paradigm. This business model serves those going into professions that initiate projects, work with clients, collaborate with colleagues and create new solutions together. Learning from interactions with peers cultivates the core skill sets for collaborating. Getting an education from peers provides of sense of getting along with others more easily, gaining trust in others, getting others to feel understood and getting common ground established at the beginning. Learners get accustomed to making a difference by listening, appreciating differences and relying on others. They will become clear about the value they offer others and many other dimensions of "entrepreneurial literacy". They will get a sense of "how and why it pays to know this" which will set them up to prosper in the world of free lancing on call and working with virtual teams. These educations can emerge from mutual investments in sweat equity. Very little, if any, money will change hands -- much like the transition from the Wall Street to Main Street playbook of the next generation global economy. The cost savings, compared to other three business models is staggering, like the growing abundance of free online content and freemium offerings that are disrupting newspapers, radio/ television broadcasters and conventional advertisers.

Disrupted college advising
At the center of these four exit strategies will be a new space. Instead of admissions advisers and college recruiters, we will find the likes of optometrists or travel agents for each seeker of a higher education. Students will come to get the equivalent of a new eyeglass prescription or a travel itinerary. They'll get help sorting out all these options to arrive that the best personal fit. Those that show signs of continuing dependency on authority figures, expert content and formal instruction -- will favor the sustaining innovations. Those revealing confidence, independence and self-direction will favor the disruptive alternatives. Those with no idea what they want to study will find the "college experience" emphasis will serve them best. Those with their sights set on grad school will favor the academic model that continues to issue diplomas and grade transcripts. Those who are inclined to make the same difference in different people's lives everyday will be advised to explore the service learning model. Those who expect to co-create new solutions with varieties of projects, collaborators and clientele will favor the peer learning model.

Entering possibility space

Most people on the planet are outside of possibility space. They have yet to awaken from dreaming up what they are convinced is realistic. They are missing out on all the freedom that is to be found in possibility space. I'll call where they are at "captivity space" to contrast their experiences with possibility space.

In captivity space, we act as if it's been said "Behold, I make all things old". We already know how familiar most things are and what they mean to us. The majority of our experiences are the "same old same old". We live inside our habits, routines and predictable occurrences with no way out. We pretend to value this much repetition while feeling trapped, bored and starved for stimulation. In possibility space, "all things are new". We know to not already know, to wonder instead and to be fascinated with the mystery we're beholding. Nothing has happened before in exactly this way, sequence or detail. There is so much to be in awe of like a newborn with sparkling eyes of wonder. By liberating ourselves from too much familiarity, we are free to explore and enjoy the freshness of this day.

In captivity space, we also act as if it's been said "All things are not even slightly possible". We argue for our limitations and favor chronic problems. We get stuck, stagnant or stalemated because the needed changes are not possible according to what we already know too well. We assume there's nothing new that could come along. In possibility space, "All things are possible". If it's conceivable, it's doable or possibly emergent from self organizing complexity. It's not a question of "can I?" but rather numerous questions of "how can I?". Because it's assumed to be possible, it becomes fascinating to explore how it can be done.

In captivity space, we want to do something that's never been done before. We expect to be completely original to escape the oppressive repetition. We're disappointed when we discover our thing appears to be derivative, it's actually been done before, or it looks like an unintentional copy. Mortality and time seem very real. We have one life to live and thus want to make spectacular progress with these elusive,  breakthrough productions. In possibility space, everything has been done before. We can get messages from the so-called future to stay on the path of recreating our latest copycat production. Neither time or mortality is real, but experiencing them is very real. We're free to live as if we're really experiencing convincing illusions.

In captivity space, we take things literally. The familiar is familiar and the unfamiliar is unfamiliar. There's no two ways about what is simply the facts. It's comforting to be objective, analytical and precise. In possibility space, we take things paradoxically. Everything offers a both/and combination of perceptions. What seems objectively real is also illusory, purely subjective and dreamlike. The familiar is delightfully unfamiliar as well as predictably familiar. The unfamiliar exhibits patterns that can make it seem familiar while remaining mysterious. The amount of fascination, appreciation and creativity soars in possibility space.

To enter possibility space, it helps to say to ourselves "I don't know what this is or what this means". It's helpful to play around with "what-if questions" instead of thinking about what is, what has to be and what always happens. It helps to ask ourselves "where's the freedom in this? and allow for experiencing a dramatic change of perspective. It may even help to be still and innocently observe the immediate surroundings as if there is no time like the present to bask in the wonder of now.

Why it's so difficult to awaken

As you're reading this, it probably seems like it is really happening that you're reading this. Now that you're to the next sentence, there is some continuity with reading the first sentence that gives you some historical perspective. With that ongoing stream of experiences and more of the same by the time you're reading this third sentence, your mind will predict that there will be more reading here much like what has already occurred. All this seems very realistic. You are really doing this reading of these words that are really here to be read. There's no indication that you are dreaming and thus, there's nothing to awaken from. With such powerful experiences of what is happening, what has already happened and what's going to happen, there's little room for doubt or suspicions regarding the reality of this.

As if that was not enough to keep things seeming real, there's the meaning this has for you. At some level this proves that you were right. It confirms what you've been expecting and intending previously. You feel justified in regarding this as real. It vindicates your convictions that it has to be this way, to take this time and to occur where you are. It substantiates your familiarity with how difficult/easy this is, what does not/does happen after doing this, and what remains the same/changes as a result.

With this preponderance of evidence of real occurrences and experiences, we assume it's not a dream to awaken from. We're convinced:

• We are not muggles dismissing the possibility of magical transformations this instant.
• We are not hobbits hanging out in the Shire where the usual things continue to happen
• We are not inside the Matrix taking those artificial constructs to be real.
• We are not Alice staying on the familiar side of the looking glass.
• We are not trapped in a London nursery only pretending Never Never Land is real.
• We are not confused about what is real and what is an illusion

If the truth be known, you are dreaming. This is not really happening. The time that has passed along with the seeming continuity between prior incidents is all an illusion. The particular place you're at only appears real. The meaning this has for you provides a wonderful story, with you as the main character, without sticking to the facts about how it got dreamed up by you and us together.

Rethinking nodes in networks

When we're making a study of a network or formulating an explanation for outcomes produced by a network, we need things to examine. We are prone to make a "thingy" of nothing or of an ongoing processing. Alfred North Whitehead coined the term "misplaced concreteness" to separate his "process philosophy" from all the scientific studies that had made things of processes in order to study them objectively.

In the Prince of Networks, Graham Harman characterized Whitehead as the grandfather of Bruno Latour's Actor Network Theory. Latour takes exception to scientific explanations that add a false dimension to their descriptions of networks. He expects explanations to emerge from sufficient complexity of descriptions, rather than conforming the data to established explanations. He treasures Whitehead's investigative principle of "beginning and ending with wonder".

As I've pondered how all this might support our rethinking the concreteness of nodes in a network, I've made a lot of associations to the possibility of nodeless networks. If there's nothing there where connections come together, we have to wonder what the intersection is about. The connections would meet with wonder and explore what it's about. There could be no "misplaced concreteness" in a absence of nodes.

What could occur at "connections over nothing" is significant learning. The unknowns could come to the forefront of the experience. The exploration of combined questions, possibilities, hypotheses, and contrasting descriptions could replace the so-called "learning" of information through network connections. The takeaways from the encounters could enrich each exploration and better articulate the intersection.

This is a reversal of preexisting nodes forming new connections. This proposes preexisting connections resulting in emergent nodes. The coming together is the constant process. The resulting nodes come and go. The process begins and ends with wonder.

Missing interfaces users and edges

Our eyeballs can see nodes, but not connections unless they're hard wired. Most connections are subtle, hidden or implied without taking form. As result, there is excessive attention on nodes, as Ailsa recently explored on her blog: Exploring the dark wood. In the comments I added there over the last few days, I explored some connections to Bruno Latour's Actor Network Theory. Since then I've been reflecting on what else is missing in all this exploration of connections. Interfaces, users and edges came to mind.

When systems are closed they lack interfaces. They seem to be for internal use only. They don't share information, make access easy or attempt to connect outside it's own boundaries. yet these closed systems are very well connected internally. Their lack of external connections is usually an indication of internal availability to every kind of resource, support and information they need.

When networks are self serving, there are no users to be served. It's all self-service and DIY functionality. There's no need to understand users or uses made of the functionality. Everybody is free to do what they want as if that will be useful to them. Providing structure to guide uses or advance the users abilities seems excessively imposing, authoritarian and industrialized.

When networks are ubiquitous, they lack edges. They seem to be everywhere in a way where there's no way to cross a line, reach a limit or hit a wall. Thus there is no supporting those who may have come to an edge, gotten stuck or maxed out. Everyone is getting connected as if that's an end in itself.

If a network had interfaces, user support and edges, many would say it's no longer a network. They make a purist argument about connections between nodes that handle anything that comes up. They might also argue that a system with interfaces, user support and edges needs to be more networked, interconnected and complex. Interfaces, user support and edges are missing from the focus on connections because connections and edges are mutually exclusive in the minds of these advocates.

What if connections and edges are two sides of one coin when we give less emphasis to nodes? What if there is a both/and alternative to replace the either/or conceptualization? What if nodeless networks are comprised of connections that require interfaces to compensate for the absence of nodes? What if a network that embodies wonder, questions, unknowns and ongoing explorations would easily imagine it serving users encountering edges in spite of all the connectivity? What if I explore this further tomorrow?