The Future of Work is Now - An Interview with Harold Jarche
Steven Forth is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.
Harold Jarche is well known for his contributions to learning in the workplace and how these connect to human and team performance. His email footer includes the line “Work is learning & learning is the work.”
Ibbaka reached out to Harold in late June 2020 to get his insights into how the Covid 19 Pandemic has contributed to his thinking on the future of work and workplace learning.
How did you come up with the line “Work is learning & learning is the work”?
Harold: The theme of the integration of work and learning is something that has been around for a while. My late colleague Jay Cross wrote a book on the subject, Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance. Learning is not a separate thing that happens in the classroom or school part is part of life. Then, ten or eleven years ago, I came across Keats poem ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ that ends with the line
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
So I just flipped that around to “Work is learning, learning work, that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.” I shortened that to “work is learning and learning is the work”, and it kind of caught on.
For the past 20 years I have devoted myself to what I call ‘ABC Learning’, which is — Anything But Courses. I do have a background in instructional design, but I have little interest in doing that. There are lots of great instructional designers creating wonderful courses, but my interest is to support people in working better and smarter and to learn as they work.
Please share with us a bit about your background and what informs your approach to work and learning and to teamwork?
Harold: My parents were immigrants and I grew up in a working class family in the middle of British Columbia, in Revelstoke, and I joined the Army out of high school, and that was my first career. I served for twenty one years in the army. I retired, in 1998, soI have been out of the army for twenty two years now. We moved to Sackville, New Brunswick on leaving the Army. So the first half of my career I was very much involved in pragmatic performance — a get stuff done approach. I was an infantry officer for ten years and then I finished my career working as a training development officer designing helicopter training and simulation.
When I left the military I worked for an applied research facility here at Mount Allison University, and then for an eLearning company for a couple of years. For the last seventeen years I have been on my own, balancing research and practice. I am interested in theory but my focus is on how to apply the theory and what my clients can get from it.
On the Geoffrey Moore Crossing the Chasm model, I pay attention to the innovators, but I work with the early adopters and look at how to get things across the adoption chasm to the early majority..
Please tell us more about the idea that learning needs to take place within work. How do you make that happen?
Harold: That has been my focus for the last seventeen years. It is actually getting easier. It used to be that you could only get the learning by going to the library, or taking the course, or going to the conference, but now with digital media everything is much more accessible. The other enabler has been social media.
It has probably always been that the people with the biggest networks were the best learners. One of the most effective social networkers ever was American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who invested in his network and could call anyone and they would answer. Now we can do this with LinkedIn or Twitter or a blog and people are realizing that we can use social media for learning and professional development.
One aspect is the development of online communities of practice, where professionals get together, sometimes by invitation only, and people discuss critical issues and learn from each other. There can be heated disagreements in these communities, but it is all within a trusted space, which is very different from what we see on the open networks or social media like Twitter.
So the tools are now there, as well as better understanding. It was hard going at first. I would try to sell people professional networks for their business and their eyes would glaze over, but once Facebook came along I could say ‘it is like Facebook, but for business’ and they would get that. Once people have shared mental models it is easier to communicate and work together.
We are now in a network era. We work through networks, we share ideas through networks, we even create in networks. I am sure you and I connected through networks.
Ibbaka (Steven Forth); Yes, it was Jay Cross who connected us.
Harold: I discovered Jay Cross through his website back when I was in the Army. I was commenting on it and it was that exchange of information that brought us together. We were in communication for about six years, when one day Jay called me up and said “I am going to be in Moncton, New Brunswick, is that anywhere near you?” So we met and as we had already been communicating so long there was a lot of trust and we began to work together. Jay was very much a person who was willing to try anything to move learning forward.
Having done this for so long, and with the whole world moving in this direction under Covid 19, what are some of the things that make learning in work successful?
Harold: One is the individual skills. People have to be able to use the tools, whatever they may be, but they also have to have some sort of sense making process. This includes filters, so they are not overwhelmed with information surfing, so that they can explore and find information, and find the right people at the right time to help with whatever they are working on. I have developed a framework called personal knowledge mastery that helps people develop a discipline of sense making for professional purposes.
The other thing, which is just as big, is removing the organizational barriers. I work with companies a lot on this. There are a few things to consider here. If people are already working on things 100% and now you are asking them to do something new, something will have to give. You have to find ways to give people space — physical, virtual, and temporal space where they can learn this new stuff and where they can collaborate better.
This can range from giving people time off to learn, to providing physical space, to looking at the things we are doing that we don’t need to do anymore. This is where this whole pandemic has helped. People can see that, “well, we didn’t need to have big meetings or do all that travel”.
The other thing is to look at how we can do the things we have to do more efficiently. For example, how can we run better meetings. This is something I am working on with several clients. I know people who spend as much as 80% of their time in meetings but they don’t have methods for meetings. I came out of the military where we had a method for doing everything. We knew what kind of meetings we were having and how to do them. We had to, because it was operations, and people’s lives were at stake.
There is all kinds of research available on how to run meetings but it tends to be poorly applied. One that I like to use is Liberating Structures. It is open source and provides frameworks for 33 different types of meetings. You pick the type of meeting need and it provides guidance on how to do this.
So that is it — help people to develop the skills they need to be self directed learners, and then in the organization reduce the barriers to sharing and applying their knowledge.
If we look at complex work, because the stuff that is not complex is more and more being done by machines or being outsourced, one thing that we know is that people have to trust the people with whom they are working and learning. There is a lot of research to support this. The more complex the task the higher the degree of trust. So how we build that trust becomes a big challenge.
Trust is developed through conversations over time. Helping people have better and more diverse conversations so that they have a more diverse knowledge network becomes an important part of work. This becomes really important in organizations that have fixed silos. One of the causes of the 2008 crash was that different parts of banks were not talking to each other. The investment and retail divisions were not talking to each other and then the compounding risks came as a surprise.
We can see this with the pandemic as well. The epidemiologists, public health officials, workforce management, and politicians are not talking with each other and they are using different languages and mental models.
What is really important in organizations is having better conversations and promoting ways to have these in safe places. Looking at the work that Amy Edmondson has done creating psychological safety in the workplace, we can see that it is critical to create these safe places where we can have deep and meaningful conversations and not have these shouting matches that we are seeing on social media and on television and other places.
There is a science fiction writer you may know William Gibson who has said ‘the future is here, it is just not evenly distributed.’ Given this, where are you seeing the future of work showing up in the present?
Harold: We should probably start calling it the present of work. One could say that the 21st Century began in January 2020 and that the first two decades were just a warm up. We are all finally living in a networked world.
So what is the future of work going to be? There are bad sides, in that there are forces driving us towards greater inequality. The people who have to go back to a workplace right now, a lot of them are blue collar, a lot of them earn low wages, and these are the people who are most exposed to the second phase of the virus. Knowledge workers can work from home and hopefully still make some money and so are more protected.
The model I use to understand these shifts is based on the TIMN model developed by David Ronfeldt when he was at the RAND Corporation. Historically, societies have been organized around tribes, institutions, and markets. And now we are moving into a new model where networks are becoming dominant.
We are going from a triform, T+I+M, to a quadriform society, T+I+M+N. This new form is still emerging, though the pandemic may accelerate this. The historical precedent is when Gutenberg applied moveable type to western texts and then Luther posted his famous 95 theses. The result was 100 yeas of religious wars in Europe and a shift of power away from the church, as people were able to read the bible themselves and to draw their own conclusions. Martin Luther refused to engage the church in Latin, he engaged in German, and the church struggled to catch up with the new medium. Luther was the social media expert of his time.
We see the same thing today. The network is the medium. Many politicians and parties struggle to deal with the new networked medium, but some are masters of it. Whatever you may think of the current president of the United States, he uses Twitter very effectively.
The challenge is how do we shift from this scientific enlightenment world to this fuzzy, chaotic, quantum type of world where being a specialist in one field is not enough anymore.
Take a look at TIMN.
T is the tribal form. For most of us our tribes are our families and immediate communities we live in. These are going through some significant shifts. Look at all of the talk right now around gender, racism, diversity, equity. The foundations of our tribes are shifting to the point that people are asking “What is a family?”
Then there are our Institutions. Name one institution right now that people have faith in. The government? The church? You can go down the list without finding institutions that people trust.
Markets are still the dominant form. Witness the 2008 crash. Look at how people are talking about rebooting the economy. But do people still have faith in markets? I don’t think so. Many people are saying that it is the markets that have created the problem around climate change, not the institutions.
Are the markets the solution to climate change? Are our current institutions? Are our tribes? People are retreating to what they know. For people on the right, that is institutions, for people on the left it is enlightened scientific thinking, but neither of these are going to work. We have to move into this new network form.
The Chinese government and US government are at loggerheads and are not really talking to each other. But scientists from China are talking to scientists in the US and Europe. The networks are working. They have transcended the markets and the institutions. That is where future solutions lie. No individual country is going to be able to deal with climate change. That is what the pandemic is showing us. It is a symptom of climate change and we might learn how to address it.
So my little piece of this is helping people to learn better, helping them to be more connected, and helping companies to become more open, more diverse, more connected to the outside. For the past year I have been working with a global bank on how to do this. It is a global team and we always meet virtually, so the pandemic really has not impacted us at all.
What do you see as the critical uncertainties that are facing us, using the scenario planning terminology? What different futures could emerge in different places?
Harold: The reactionary forces are strong. Surveillance capitalism could emerge as a force that limits people’s opportunities. Institutions are also doubling down. One thing the pandemic has allowed is more nationalistic supply chains. In the long run the network form should win out, but in the short term there is the risk of another hundred years war. You have China, which is organized around institutions, the United States, which puts its faith in markets and financial capital, not human capital, and then there is the European block, where community and individual rights have taken more of a leading role, as we can see with GDPR (Global Data Privacy Requirements) and other regulations. It is a more social, human type model. These three competing blocks offer competing models. I have to admit that I have more affinity with the European approach and have been working mostly in Europe for the past ten years.
I see what the young people are doing and I have a lot of faith in them. The main reason human society advances is because old people die and young people are able to try something new. I think there is hope there.
In terms of the short term future of work, the current trends are not going to go away. People will be connecting virtually and networks will become more important. Companies need to pay more attention to their networks. It is not just their internal organization or even their supply chains that matter. It is the networks they are embedded in. In a recent pitch that we did to a global technology company the business challenge was to make the salesforce more effective and more networked. The company was thinking about moving to consultative selling, but we countered that what they should be doing is adding value to their networks. If your customers are smarter they will make the right decisions.
A short while after this I noticed that CSE (Communications Security Establishment) had put out their crypto analysis and detection tools open source, as they believed that having smart companies working together would improve Canada’s crypto security. Together they will be better than anything we could do as a single organization.
Let’s go around the circle of the TIMN model (Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks) ask how each part of your community is responding to the Covid-19 Pandemic. How did Sackville respond.
Harold: My local community is Sackville, New Brunswick, a small town of 5,000 people. Mount Allison University is a big part of the town. Normally we would have 2,500 students coming back in September, but will we this year? We don't know. The first thing that happened is that we had two restaurants that closed for good and one bar. Recently the university has announced that a number of non-faculty staff were being laid off because they expect fewer students. The students drive the local rental market and a lot of the economy. We had a local cinema that was a social hub for the town. It is closed now and it is doubtful it will reopen. There are other layoffs happening in the surrounding area.
When the lockdown started I wanted to be well connected to my community and I reached out to people, especially to local farmers. What I found was that all the communication was happening through Facebook. A multinational surveillance platform. I have not used Facebook for ten years, so suddenly I could not communicate with my local community.
The major institution is Mount Allison University, which was established back in 1839. It is the reason we are a town of 5,000 and not 1,000. What will happen if only 50% of the students come back? It will have a huge impact on the town.
At the market level? I don’t know. Will the only restaurants be international chains? I live here rather than work here. In my conversations I find that many people don’t know what this pandemic is doing and the repercussions it will have for them. Our whole capitalist system has been given a big knock.
One unexpected outcome of the pandemic is that people have more time on their hands, as they have lost their jobs in the service industry, and they are paying more attention to things like Black Lives Matter and other social issues. Sackville has already had a couple of demonstrations supporting Black Lives Matter. This would likely not have happened without the pandemic.
Even at the local level there is a bit of an awakening happening.
How has your network changed under Covid 19?
Harold: Well one thing is that the tools we use are becoming widely accepted. You don’t have to sell things like virtual conferencing anymore. People are more accepting of bringing your whole self into meetings. I have been in meetings where someone has a baby on their knee or the kids run in. People are accepting and liking this. According to Gallup, three of five people who were forced to do remote work would prefer to keep working remotely. We have just done a huge test on the viability of remote work, and guess what, it works. There is a bank I know that had a five year plan to get traders to work remotely. Under Covid 19 they got it done in a week.
There is a joke about who is responsible for digital transformation over the past months? The three Cs — the CEO, the CIO, or Covid-19.
Have you been seeing any emergent uses of Scenario Planning in your work?
Harold: Well, as they say, ‘plans are useless, but planning are important.’ I am sure you have seen many of those 2x2 scenario matrices that give a name to each quadrant and say that one of these is the direction in which we are going to go. When you look back, the answer is ‘none of the above.’ So it is not all that interesting to read scenarios, but it is important to go through the process and ask the questions.
One tool that I use for this is Marshall and Eric McLuhan’s Laws of Media (also known as the tetrad of media effects). This approach looks at how a new medium impacts the user. One looks to see how a new medium or technology enhances a human ability, how it obsolesces a recent technology,, how it retrieves something from the past, often the deep past, and how when pushed it reverses what it has enhanced.
An example is the automobile. It enhances mobility. It obsolesces the horse and carriage, and turns it into a luxury good, it retrieves from the past the knight in armour, as a cyclist and pedestrian I know that, and it reverses its own benefits when everyone has a car and the roads get gridlock.
I use this a lot in my own work. Going through the tetrad and asking questions about each of the four aspects leads to better and deeper conversations. Sensemaking tools become social objects around which we can have critical conversations.
It is really important that we all get better at having conversations, because in terms of the network, we are all in this together.
