Here are most of the cited links & resources (the commentary is from my email to Greg):

1. Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. The examples in the book are a little dated but the overall observations holds. And we’re only at the beginning…

2. Dan Pink’s Free Agent Nation. I swear I thought we’d have a hundred examples of the Freelancer’s Union by now…

3. Derek Sievers’ How to Start a Movement in Three Minutes. Where I’d quibble with him is on the idea that leadership is overrated. I think it’s just the idea of leader at the top that’s overrated – leadership is a role, not a person, it’s important but can be shared. And the more, the merrier.

4. Charlene Li’s Open Leadership. I reviewed it on my Cisco blog here.

5. Jim Kouzes & Barry Posner’s The Truth about Leadership. I also did a blog post on that one.

6. UsNow – how do I love this?!?! It’s a little dated but continues to inspire! Here’s the clip that gives me chills every single time (at this point, I could narrate this film – click on part 1).

7. Social Innovation Exchange

8. June Holley’s blog is a great intro to Social Network Analysis

9. Here’s my presentation on Crowdfunding from REVV 2011.

10. Learning platforms – here’s a good summary of potential disruptors. Here’s a list of learning platforms.

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Photo credit: Flickr frienc eleaf

The Speed of Life

For today’s leaders, the speed and intensity of change in the workplace is among the most significant challenges they face.

Yesterday’s successful approaches may not meet the needs of tomorrow’s customers, employees, or communities. As change occurs, experimentation plays an important role in helping leaders identify new strategies and approaches better suited to emerging demands.

New Ideas Needed

Many leaders know they need new ideas and new ideas need testing.

We found that despite the widespread desire to experiment among leaders and organizations participating in our study, many factors work against trying anything new: risk-averse cultures, resource constraints, incentive systems that favor the status quo or motivate internal competition over collaboration, even just plain inertia.

But these constraints can be managed and appropriate incentives–from public recognition to financial rewards–can support experimentation and create a desirable balance between tried and true methods and innovation approaches.

5 Ways Leaders Can Create Space (and Support) for Experimentation

1. Dedicate staff time and resources to exploring, integrating, and testing new ideas. There are an infinite number of ways this can be structured, but dedicating resources is important because it signals a commitment to innovation.
2. Subject a few existing programs, initiatives, processes, services, or products to close scrutiny to identify needed changes that promise to improve outcomes or increase impact. Make one change. Measure the impact. Repeat.
3. Manage risk openly. This means talking about failure–and owning it collectively. It also means addressing the risk of not trying new things.
4. Document. Document. Document. With every experiment (or near experiment), there is intelligence gathered beyond the narrow set of data associated with a particular change. Why was a given experiment conceived? What was the theory of change in pursuing it? By making a habit out of asking (and answering) these critical questions, leaders
   can create opportunities to learn at all levels – this helps make everyone smarter.
5. Opt for boldness (at least sometimes). It’s easy to get stuck in a series of new small ideas. These are important, but they also tend to be incremental. Leaders can also choose big bold disruptive ideas. They are higher risk, but extremely motivating. (Who doesn’t want to change the world?)

What are you waiting for?

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Kristin Wolff and Vinz Koller, of Social Policy Research Associates, authored the WEadership Guide (August 2011), the result of a one-year US Department of Labor study of leadership in the field of public policy concerned with work and learning. They were thrilled at the opportunity to link their professional pursuits (public policy) with their personal commitments to positive social change and innovation, and look to increase, accelerate, and intensify these connections within the field of workforce in the coming months.
The entire project is documented at EnhacingWorkforceLeadership.org. Follow it (and them) at @WFLeadership, @kristinwolff, @kollerv.

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Photo credit: Flickr frienc eleaf

The Speed of Life

For today’s leaders, the speed and intensity of change in the workplace is among the most significant challenges they face.

Yesterday’s successful approaches may not meet the needs of tomorrow’s customers, employees, or communities. As change occurs, experimentation plays an important role in helping leaders identify new strategies and approaches better suited to emerging demands.

New Ideas Needed

Many leaders know they need new ideas and new ideas need testing.

We found that despite the widespread desire to experiment among leaders and organizations participating in our study, many factors work against trying anything new: risk-averse cultures, resource constraints, incentive systems that favor the status quo or motivate internal competition over collaboration, even just plain inertia.

But these constraints can be managed and appropriate incentives–from public recognition to financial rewards–can support experimentation and create a desirable balance between tried and true methods and innovation approaches.

5 Ways Leaders Can Create Space (and Support) for Experimentation

1. Dedicate staff time and resources to exploring, integrating, and testing new ideas. There are an infinite number of ways this can be structured, but dedicating resources is important because it signals a commitment to innovation.
2. Subject a few existing programs, initiatives, processes, services, or products to close scrutiny to identify needed changes that promise to improve outcomes or increase impact. Make one change. Measure the impact. Repeat.
3. Manage risk openly. This means talking about failure–and owning it collectively. It also means addressing the risk of not trying new things.
4. Document. Document. Document. With every experiment (or near experiment), there is intelligence gathered beyond the narrow set of data associated with a particular change. Why was a given experiment conceived? What was the theory of change in pursuing it? By making a habit out of asking (and answering) these critical questions, leaders
   can create opportunities to learn at all levels – this helps make everyone smarter.
5. Opt for boldness (at least sometimes). It’s easy to get stuck in a series of new small ideas. These are important, but they also tend to be incremental. Leaders can also choose big bold disruptive ideas. They are higher risk, but extremely motivating. (Who doesn’t want to change the world?)

What are you waiting for?

________________________

Kristin Wolff and Vinz Koller, of Social Policy Research Associates, authored the WEadership Guide (August 2011), the result of a one-year US Department of Labor study of leadership in the field of public policy concerned with work and learning. They were thrilled at the opportunity to link their professional pursuits (public policy) with their personal commitments to positive social change and innovation, and look to increase, accelerate, and intensify these connections within the field of workforce in the coming months.
The entire project is documented at EnhacingWorkforceLeadership.org. Follow it (and them) at @WFLeadership, @kristinwolff, @kollerv.

This post originally appeared on LeadChange. It is the third in a seven-part series summarizing the findings of a one-year study of workforce leadership in which we identified six practices next-generation leaders are using, comprising a new model of leadership we call WEadership in a nod to its collaborative nature.

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WEadership and the Crowd

The idea that leaders “control” the people, information, and resources within their organizations is no longer plausible – if it ever was. Today people use social technologies to connect, share, and collaborate with peers and colleagues who can help them get things done, regardless of position or organizational affiliation.

This shift has created new demands for “transparency” on the part of organizations in public, private, and non-profit sectors alike. Employees, customers, shareholders, citizens, doners, etc. – increasingly, all of them want to make the businesses of doing business more transparent, more visible, and ultimately, more accountable.

Leaders can adapt to these changes by opening up the way they listen, share, and engage with employees, customers, and communities to solve important problems.

Openness in the Organization

Many of the 519 leaders in our study reported that the most important thing leaders can do to open up their organizations is listen. It seems simple, but in a media-saturated environment in which customers tweet, employees blog, and people of all kinds have conversations that can be shared with millions in minutes, listening has become complicated. But listening is critical because conversations about your issues are talking place, with or without you. The insights freely available to good listeners can make a business, while ignoring them can make a business irrelevant.

Sharing, too, has taken new forms. Open leaders are discovering the difference between broadcasting and sharing, and finding the latter a more effective approach to building brands, delivering services, and delighting customers. These leaders are:

• Using social media to host conversations
• Making complex data accessible, beautiful, and easy to understand
• Sharing “drafts” of planned changes to products, services, policies,and business models so they can be improved (rather than rolling out a finished product that meets yesterday’s need).

All of these practices speak to a more iterative approach to problem solving and one that involves more than the experts.

Collaborative Networks Within and Across Organizations

The “org chart” may reflect where people in an organization sit, but rarely how they get their work done or the relative value of their contributions to the enterprise. This is more true today, as employees maintain extensive social networks outside of their organizations. Open leaders understand this. They find ways to invite broad participation in problem-solving within and outside of their organizations. For example, leaders in our study reported experimenting with:

• Social networks that made the knowledge and expertise of individual employees known to everyone;
• Crowdsourcing platforms that invite people to share ideas, knowledge, and opinions at significant scale; and
• Convening partners (who might also be competitors) to develop collaborative solutions to common problems;

Sharing Leadership

Open leaders invite others to share leadership responsibility. They understand that leadership is a role, not a title, and that leadership can come from any corner of any organization or community, not just the management tier. For traditional leaders, this is a significant change. But it also represents a tremendous opportunity to engage more people in more meaningful work toward more significant ends.

Leaders, their organizations, their boards, and their communities will all have to find the particular combination of open leadership practices that is right for them.

Openness is a matter of degree, but it is also inevitable.

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Kristin Wolff and Vinz Koller, of Social Policy Research Associates, authored the WEadership Guide (August 2011), the result of a one-year US Department of Labor study of leadership in the field of public policy concerned with work and learning. They were thrilled at the opportunity to link their professional pursuits (public policy) with their personal commitments to positive social change and innovation, and look to increase, accelerate, and intensify these connections within the field of workforce in the coming months. The entire project is documented at EnhacingWorkforceLeadership.org. Follow it at @WFLeadership.

Practice #1: Adopt a Wide-Angle Point of View

Where do effective leaders look for new ideas?
For better ways of doing things?

In short, everywhere.

We found that effective workforce leaders look for new ideas in unlikely places—in completely unrelated fields of practice and peers and neighbors alike—and find creative ways to apply their resources and expertise. They focus on community problems, not just workforce problems.

It sounds simple but this kind of ‘opening of the aperture’ has fundamentally changed what many workforce leaders do. In fact, we identified many ways leaders can broaden there vision. Here are three. 

Embrace Long-Term

First, today’s workforce leaders embrace bigger, longer-term agendas. We talked to workforce leaders about industry clusters, broadband penetration, literacy, school reform, social innovation, poverty, entrepreneurship, and dozens of other challenges that comprise their to-do lists. Traditional issues like jobs, skills, and wages still anchor their work, but today’s workforce priorities can take many forms and require action on different time horizons.

Embrace Diverse Thought

Second, and following from the first, leaders are working with more diverse partners than ever before—not just economic development and education partners, but industry and professional associations, libraries and cultural institutions, universities, incubators, even grassroots and neighborhood groups. Leaders work with these partners in different ways—not just as Board members or political constituents (or competitors), but in a myriad of roles that reflect the multiple dimensions every person and organization brings.

Embrace Diverse Methods

Third, leaders are actively seeking ideas from other professional fields—even those completely unrelated to workforce or public policy—that have the potential to impact their own performance or field of practice. Whether through organizational or community book clubs, attending conferences or events in other professional fields or disciplines, or adopting new ideation, experimentation, or learning methods within their organizations and networks, these leaders know they do not have all of the answers and are employing methods that will both introduce them to new ideas, and engage their staff, partners, and communities in solving important community problems.

One leader convenes monthly discussion around TED talks; another asks staff to convenes openspace conversations to encourage sharing among staff and partners; several take (unpaid) sabbaticals and offer them to staff; and some regularly return to the classroom (in-person or virtually).

These leaders share shift strategies as new information changes how they see the problems they are working on. They share a commitment to doing what they can over doing what they’ve always done and a willingness to let others be in charge.

They know leadership is a shared role, and not just a title.

Is your own view wide enough? Are you gaining insight from innovators in other professional fields? Your own employees?

Photo credit: achichi on Flickr

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Last Week: An Introduction to WEadership: Workforce Leaders Remaking Policy and Redefining What it Means to Lead

Next Week: WEadership Practice #2: Build Diverse Networks

Kristin Wolff and Vinz Koller, of Social Policy Research Associates, authored the WEadership Guide (August 2011), the result of a one-year US Department of Labor study of leadership in the field of public policy concerned with work and learning. They were thrilled at the opportunity to link their professional pursuits (public policy) with their personal commitments to positive social change and innovation, and look to increase, accelerate, and intensify these connections within the field of workforce in the coming months.
The entire project is documented at EnhacingWorkforceLeadership.org. Follow it at @WFLeadership.

This post is the second in a series that began here. We are summarizing the findings of a one-year study of workforce leadership and through that process, we have identified six practices next-generation leaders are using to be effective; a new model of leadership we call WEadership, in a nod to its collaborative nature. Practice [...]

WEadership Practice #1: Adopt a Wide-Angle Point of View

It just re-surfaced. Since it covers a number of the themse we have explored in the Enhancing Workforce Leadership Project, we thought we'd share.