Jeff Piontek is an author, keynote speaker and teacher (most importantly). He has worked with many at-risk school districts nationally and is a thought leader in on-line and blended learning.
Steve Jobs is a name which is synonymous with cutting edge, innovative and groundbreaking technology.
So it may come as something as a surprise to learn Apple’s former CEO didn’t believe in letting his kids use some of his company’s greatest products – the iPhone and the iPad.
And it’s not because the Apple godhead was a closet Samsung fan either.
Jobs, who died in 2011, may have had an instinctive flair for technology but he was a low tech parent who firmly believed in restricting his children’s access to electronic devices.
“We limit how much technology our kids use at home,” said Jobs way back in 2010, expressing growing concerns about his children’s gadget use.
As all modern parents know, iPhones and iPads are extremely appealing to children. These little hand-held devices are state-of-the-art toys. Surrogate parents almost, capable of entertaining, distracting, and pacifying children during school holidays and on long car journeys when mom and dad’s attentions are focused elsewhere.
Yet instead of thanking Apple for these extremely convenient parent assistants, should we actually be concerned about the potential harm they may be inflicting upon our youngsters?
Steve Jobs certainly appeared to think so. In a New York Times article published this week, journalist Nick Bilton recalls how he once put it to Jobs that his kids must love the iPod, but to his surprise Jobs replied, “They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”
“I’m sure I responded with a gasp and dumbfounded silence. I had imagined the Jobs’s household was like a nerd’s paradise: that the walls were giant touch screens, the dining table was made from tiles of iPads and that iPods were handed out to guests like chocolates on a pillow. Nope, Mr. Jobs told me, not even close.”
And Jobs wasn’t the only technological guru who had substantial concerns about the long-term effects of kids engaging with touch-screen technology for hours on end.
Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired, also believes in setting strict time limits and parental controls on every device at home.
“My kids accuse me and my wife of being fascists. They say that none of their friends have the same rules. That’s because we have seen the dangers of technology first hand. I’ve seen it in myself, I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.”
Researchers at the University of California Los Angeles recently published a study which demonstrated that just a few days after abstaining from using electronic gadgets, children’s social skills improved immediately.
Which is definitely food for thought considering recent research showed that an average American child spends more than seven and a half hours a day using smart-phones and other electronic screens.
Jobs was undoubtedly a genius but he didn’t get that way through staring at screens and playing Angry Birds until the early hours or constantly updating his Facebook account.
Walter Isaacson, the author of Steve Jobs, spent a lot of time at the Apple co-founder’s home and confirmed that face-to-face family interaction always came before screentime for Jobs.
“Every evening Steve made a point of having dinner at the big long table in their kitchen, discussing books and history and a variety of things. No one ever pulled out an iPad or computer. The kids did not seem addicted at all to devices.”
So the next time the advertising department at Apple, Samsung, or any other major technological corporation attempt to sublimely convince you that life is somehow lacking without their latest little device, remember that the man who started it all, believed somewhat differently.
Donnell-Kay announces a game changing, multi-year effort to create a new state public education system where learning is reimagined and students graduate energized and equipped to thrive in a rapidly changing world.
ReSchool Colorado intends to improve the experience of education in order to better match and keep pace with the needs and expectations of students living in the 21st century.
Back when public education was first formalized, our lives and economy were more industrialized, based on a model characterized by repetitive routine and infrequent change.
Today, change is the norm and technology’s influence is significant. Digitally, we have access to just about any information, right in our pockets. Kids create music playlists or communicate instantly with the swipe of a finger.
And, it all happens anytime, anywhere.
It is no surprise the educational expectations of students and families have changed—dramatically.
To excel in today’s highly technical world, students require an educational system that adapts quickly to the fluid expectations of society and enables schooling to transcend time and place to better fit the learner.
For our centuries-old system to make this mega-leap forward, we need a game change—a fresh start, rich with new ways of learning.
To enable this much-needed fresh start for Colorado’s education system, the Donnell-Kay Foundation initiated ReSchool Colorado.
ReSchool Colorado’s ultimate goal is to design and implement an education system that pushes the boundaries of current thought and practice to provide an exceptional education for students living in this century, not the 20th century.
At full build-out, the system will serve students statewide and eliminate barriers between the key transition points of early childhood, K-12, higher education, and the workforce.
To do this, we will start small and grow over time. But, the system will not replace the existing Colorado educational system. Instead, it will be developed and operate in parallel with the current systems serving students in ECE, K-12, and higher education. Students and educators will choose to enter the new system at various points: some will migrate from their current path; others will start their education or career within it.
In addition, we hope ReSchool Colorado will inspire others, outside of Colorado, to take similar bold steps to envision their own new system and take action.
This transformation calls for learning and schooling to be reimagined, current policies redesigned, and infrastructure repurposed. Critical attributes of the new system that are beginning to take shape can be seen here. Our goals for the new system are:
The Donnell-Kay Foundation kicked off ReSchool Colorado in 2013, with a Request for Information (RFI) that generated compelling ideas and identified experts suited to help plan the path forward.
Additional input from a variety of sources has resulted in a vision, strategy and timeline beginning to take shape.
Throughout 2014 and 2015, we will invite citizens and experts to inform the design of the new education system, including:
We anticipate completion of the design process by the end of 2015, with policy and implementation strategy starting in 2016.
Join us in transforming the lives of Colorado students through the creation of a vibrant, new education system. Please join our mailing listto stay abreast of ReSchool Colorado.
If you have questions, please contact Amy Berk Anderson, Director of ReSchool Colorado, at ReSchoolColorado@dkfoundation.org.
To learn more, please visit:
Learning Reimagined
Why Now?
Why DK?
Visit Our Work to learn about all current Donnell-Kay Foundation projects.
12 Principles Of Mobile Learning
Ed note: This post has been updated and republished from a 2012 post by Terry Heick
Mobile Learning is about self-actuated personalization.
As learning practices and technology tools change, mobile learning itself will continue to evolve. For 2016, the focus is on a variety of challenges, from how learners access content to how the idea of a “curriculum” is defined. Technology like tablets PCs, apps, and access to broadband internet are lubricating the shift to mobile learning, but a truly immersive mobile learning environment goes beyond the tools for learning to the lives and communities valued by each individual learner.
It is only within these communities that the native context of each learner can be fully understood. Here, in these communities that are both local and digital, a “need to know” is born, knowledge accrues incrementally, progress resonates naturally, and a full picture of each learner as a human being fully emerges.
1. Access
A mobile learning environment is about access to content, peers, experts, portfolio artifacts, credible sources, and previous thinking on relevant topics. It can be actuated via a smartphone or iPad, laptop or in-person, but access is constant–which in turn shifts a unique burden to learn on the shoulders of the student.
2. Metrics
As mobile learning is a blend of the digital and physical, diverse metrics (i.e., measures) of understanding and “performance of knowledge” will be available.
3. Cloud
The cloud is the enabler of “smart” mobility. With access to the cloud, all data sources and project materials are constantly available, allowing for previously inaccessible levels and styles of revision and collaboration.
4. Transparent
Transparency is the natural byproduct of connectivity, mobility, and collaboration. As planning, thinking, performance, and reflection are both mobile and digital, they gain an immediate audience with both local and global communities through social media platforms from twitter to facebook, edmodo to instagram.
5. Play
Play is one of the primary characteristics of authentic, progressive learning, both a cause and effect of an engaged mind. In a mobile learning environment learners are encountering a dynamic and often unplanned set of data, domains, and collaborators, changing the tone of learning from academic and compliant to personal and playful.
6. Asynchronous
Among the most powerful principles of mobile learning is asynchronous access. This unbolts an educational environment from a school floor and allows it to move anywhere, anytime in pursuit of truly entrepreneurial learning. It also enables a learning experience that is increasingly personalized: just in time, just enough, just for me.
7. Self-Actuated
With asynchronous access to content, peers, and experts comes the potential for self-actuation. Here, learners plan topic, sequence, audience, and application via facilitation of teachers who now act as experts of resource and assessment.
8. Diverse
With mobility comes diversity. As learning environments change constantly, that fluidity becomes a norm that provides a stream of new ideas, unexpected challenges, and constant opportunities for revision and application of thinking. Audiences are diverse, as are the environments data is being gleaned from and delivered to.
9. Curation
Apps and mobile devices can not only support curation, but can do so better than even the most caffeine-laced teacher might hope to. By design, these technologies adapt to learners, store files, publish thinking, and connect learners, making curation a matter of process rather than ability.
10. Blending
A mobile learning environment will always represent a blending of sorts–physical movement, personal communication, and digital interaction.
11. Always-On
Always-on learning is self-actuated, spontaneous, iterative, and recursive. There is a persistent need for information access, cognitive reflection, and interdependent function through mobile devices. It is also embedded in communities capable of intimate and natural interaction with students.
12. Authentic
All of the previous 11 principles yield an authenticity to learning that is impossible to reproduce in a classroom. They also ultimately converge to enable experiences that are truly personalized.
• Every two days, mankind creates as much information as it did from the dawn of civilization until 2003.
• The amount of information that an average person is exposed to in a day is the same as a person from the 15th century was exposed to in his lifetime.
• The amount of information generated during the first day of a baby’s life today is equivalent to 70 times the information contained in the Library of Congress.
And you wonder why you’re exhausted?
In The Human Face of Big Data, Rick Smolan, a former Time, Life, and National Geographic photographer famous for creating the Day in the Life book series, and author Jennifer Erwitt examine how today’s digital onslaught and emerging technologies can help us better understand and improve the human condition–ourselves, interactions with each other, and the planet.
The 14 x 11-inch, 224-page coffee table book, arriving Dec. 4, employs a collection of images, essays, and articles (including one by yours truly) to explore innovative ways that business, science and medicine, academia, politics, law enforcement, and Hollywood are collecting and utilizing data–such as predicting crime and earthquakes, identifying counterfeit drugs, disease screening, home electricity usage, and understanding animals and nature–while raising questions about data ownership and privacy erosion. The one blissful omission: not a cat video in sight.
“This is the most challenging and satisfying project I’ve ever worked on,” says Smolan. “It’s like watching the planet develop a nervous system. The ability to collect, analyze, triangulate, and visualize vast amounts of data in real time is something the human race has never had before. This new set of tools, or Big Data, is being used to address some of the biggest challenges facing our planet. I hope the book will spark a global conversation about both the tremendous potential for good and the concerns about who owns data that you and I generate.”
The work capitalizes on some of this technology in its narrative. It’s the first coffee table book to utilize the Aurasma mobile app–enabling readers to trigger related video and other content by training their smartphone and tablet cameras on specially marked yellow key icons on some of the pages.
An interactive iPad version of the book will be available down the road, allowing users to interact with multimedia content exemplifying how Big Data addresses some of humanity’s biggest challenges.
Those elements culminate in the Human Face of Big Data project, a series of initiatives begun earlier this fall to spark global conversations about the effect of humanity’s ability to collect and analyze enormous amounts of data in real time. It launched late September with a free mobile app that gleaned a week’s worth of information from some 300,000 participants on how they lived, viewed their lives, and interacted with others with similar digital footprints. The crowdsourced collection of anonymous data will be made available to researchers, data scientists, and educators to study as a data snapshot of a week in the life of humanity in 2012.
On Oct. 2, the project sponsored Mission Control, a simultaneous speaker event in New York, London, and Singapore where tech leaders discussed what the concept meant to them, alongside a networking forum that showcased new startups. On Nov. 17, in conjunction with TEDxYouthDay, it launched the Data Detectives website as the student component of Big Data. Through the end of the year, it will collect answers to questionnaires and real-time data interaction from students in grades 6-12. Like its adult counterpart, that anonymous information will be available for researchers next year, and get young people talking about how new technologies will impact their thinking and expression during their lives.
Smolan, who now lives in his native Manhattan, was working as a photographer in Australia in 1980, when he came up with the idea of a coffee table book that pooled a single day of shots of the country from leading photographers. When Smolan couldn’t find an interested publisher, he asked then-Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, with whom he’d traveled on assignment for Time, for government money. Fraser declined, and instead helped him tap corporate sponsorship. The result, A Day in the Life of Australia, was not only a bestseller in that country, but spawned the bestselling Day in the Life book series that chronicles life in other countries.
“I could barely add up expenses at the end of an assignment, so the idea of me running a company was totally bizarre,” says Smolan. “But because I was turned down by every publisher, I had to learn how to be a publisher.”
In 1989, Smolan and his wife, Jennifer Erwitt–daughter of the
famed photographer Elliott Erwitt–founded Against All Odds Productions to expand their storytelling to other topics and enhance it with emerging digital technology and interactivity. In 1995, Katya Able joined as COO. The projects run about 18 months, employing a global network of some 200 researchers, photographers, writers, illustrators, and designers. Past efforts include 24 Hours in Cyberspace, The Power to Heal: Ancient Arts & Modern Medicine, Passage to Vietnam (exploring that country’s opening up in the early 1990s), and Blue Planet Run (about the global water crisis). America 24/7 broke ground by inviting the public to shoot and submit photos alongside professionals. From Alice to Ocean, chronicling Robyn Davidson’s cross-Australia trek, was the first book to be packaged with a CD-Rom and is now being made into a movie starring Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland).
“All our books have been made possible via sponsorship–no publisher in the world would spend millions of dollars to create a coffee table book. Nowadays, they don’t even want to risk the cost of printing the book,” says Smolan. “Jennifer and Katya are the database, budget, and scheduling queens. Photographers are notoriously independent and difficult to manage. They coordinate the 200+ creative individuals scattered around the globe, making sure the work of one team passes seamlessly to the next. Photographers are notoriously independent and difficult to manage. Jennifer and Katya have the rare skill of being able to herd the cats.”
Smolan initially got the idea for Big Data early last year from Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. (“She was the first person to describe Big Data to me in visual terms,” he says.) But the digital universe’s rapid expansion would have rendered a single-day snapshot obsolete by the time the book came out 18 months later. So instead of that type of random sample, Smolan wanted give an overall sense of the impact it was having on the planet.
With the economy reining in publishing money, Smolan once again tapped corporate sponsors: primarily IT solutions provider EMC Corp., with supporting sponsorships from Cisco Systems, VMWare, Tableau Software, Originate, and FedEx (which is delivering 10,000 copies to world leaders and Fortune 500 CEOs) and distributed through Barnes & Noble’s Sterling Books.
“Right now it’s primarily companies and governments who are thinking about the uses of Big Data,” says Smolan. “It’s really important that each of us also thinks about how this is going to affect our lives.”
To illustrate, he tells the story of one of the book’s profiles, Hugo Campos, whose pacemaker wirelessly transmits heart metrics to his physician throughout the day. Campos wanted to correlate pacemaker activity with his exercise, sleep, and diet. But when he asked the device manufacturer for a copy of his medical data, the manufacturer refused, claiming he did not own the data.
Another subject, scientist Craig Venter, is patenting new forms of life. “While these new forms are being designed for human good, it does make you think of unintended consequences, like Frankenstein,” says Smolan. “There are no laws governing this. All this stuff will be set in stone soon by corporations. My worry is that by the time individuals begin thinking about it, it will be too late.”
Click on the slide show for some of the book’s examples of how Big Data is being visualized and applied.
The federal government’s review of Ohio’s original application for the $71 million dollar grant, which was written by the charter leader who resigned, is ongoing. Two federal bills have also been proposed in order to improve oversight for charters.
Bill Phillis, former deputy Commissioner of Education in Ohio, runs the Equity and Adequacy Coalition.
Highway robbery is legal in the Ohio charter industry
The charter industry has been largely deregulated from the beginning. The charter promoters and operators have had unrestrained freedom to use public money recklessly and dumb down educational opportunities for children. This industry is not a part of the common school system but it is a bloated parasite extracting valuable resources from the public system.
It is legal or not illegal in Ohio‘s charter industry:
For a for-profit charter school company to hold title to real estate, furniture, equipment and other tangible assets that were purchased with public money
For a charter school board to pay a company allied with their for-profit management company $700,000 per year rent to house 150 students
For a charter school of 600 students to pay $185,000 in year for marketing and promotion
For an online charter school operator to siphon off funds set aside to educate students to operate other private companies that personally benefit the charter operator
For a charter operation to help subsidize a worldwide religious movement
For charter school board members to serve without being a citizen of the United States
For non-profit charter sponsors and charter school boards to pay outrageously high salaries and benefits that would not be tolerated in the public common school system
For a person with no training or experience in education to operate a charter school
For the presence of nepotism and contractual relationships that would not be tolerated in the public common school system
For a charter operator to buy legislation via obscene levels of political contributions
For charters to spend unlimited amounts of funds on marketing and promotion
For charter operators to operate in the dark and be shielded from public exposure regarding illegal activities
The list goes on and on…
Children in public school districts are being robbed of educational opportunities by the transfer of more than $7 billion from districts to the failed charter industry over the past 15 years; yet, state officials allow this fraud on the public to go on and on and on.
Under pressure from the public, the 131st General Assembly passed legislation that will rein in some of the abuse now authorized by law. But big money from the charter industry, ineptitude of the Ohio Department of Education and the $71 million federal grant to expand charters will work together to fatten this failed industry.
The only hope is for the public common school community and advocates to band together to demand the end of this debacle that has utterly failed.
William Phillis
Ohio E & A
Great article posted by Rob Cross, Reb Rebele and Adam Grant
EXPLORE THE ARCHIVE
Collaboration is taking over the workplace. As business becomes increasingly global and cross-functional, silos are breaking down, connectivity is increasing, and teamwork is seen as a key to organizational success. According to data we have collected over the past two decades, the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50% or more.
Certainly, we find much to applaud in these developments. However, when consumption of a valuable resource spikes that dramatically, it should also give us pause. Consider a typical week in your own organization. How much time do people spend in meetings, on the phone, and responding to e-mails? At many companies the proportion hovers around 80%, leaving employees little time for all the critical work they must complete on their own. Performance suffers as they are buried under an avalanche of requests for input or advice, access to resources, or attendance at a meeting. They take assignments home, and soon, according to a large body of evidence on stress, burnout and turnover become real risks.
What’s more, research we’ve done across more than 300 organizations shows that the distribution of collaborative work is often extremely lopsided. In most cases, 20% to 35% of value-added collaborations come from only 3% to 5% of employees. As people become known for being both capable and willing to help, they are drawn into projects and roles of growing importance. Their giving mindset and desire to help others quickly enhances their performance and reputation. As a recent study led by Ning Li, of the University of Iowa, shows, a single “extra miler”—an employee who frequently contributes beyond the scope of his or her role—can drive team performance more than all the other members combined.
But this “escalating citizenship,” as the University of Oklahoma professor Mark Bolino calls it, only further fuels the demands placed on top collaborators. We find that what starts as a virtuous cycle soon turns vicious. Soon helpful employees become institutional bottlenecks: Work doesn’t progress until they’ve weighed in. Worse, they are so overtaxed that they’re no longer personally effective. And more often than not, the volume and diversity of work they do to benefit others goes unnoticed, because the requests are coming from other units, varied offices, or even multiple companies. In fact, when we use network analysis to identify the strongest collaborators in organizations, leaders are typically surprised by at least half the names on their lists. In our quest to reap the rewards of collaboration, we have inadvertently created open markets for it without recognizing the costs. What can leaders do to manage these demands more effectively?
Precious Personal Resources
First, it’s important to distinguish among the three types of “collaborative resources” that individual employees invest in others to create value: informational, social, and personal. Informational resources are knowledge and skills—expertise that can be recorded and passed on. Social resources involve one’s awareness, access, and position in a network, which can be used to help colleagues better collaborate with one another. Personal resources include one’s own time and energy.
These three resource types are not equally efficient. Informational and social resources can be shared—often in a single exchange—without depleting the collaborator’s supply. That is, when I offer you knowledge or network awareness, I also retain it for my own use. But an individual employee’s time and energy are finite, so each request to participate in or approve decisions for a project leaves less available for that person’s own work.
Up to a third of value-added collaborations come from only 3% to 5% of employees.
Unfortunately, personal resources are often the default demand when people want to collaborate. Instead of asking for specific informational or social resources—or better yet, searching in existing repositories such as reports or knowledge libraries—people ask for hands-on assistance they may not even need. An exchange that might have taken five minutes or less turns into a 30-minute calendar invite that strains personal resources on both sides of the request.
Consider a case study from a blue-chip professional services firm. When we helped the organization map the demands facing a group of its key employees, we found that the top collaborator—let’s call him Vernell—had 95 connections based on incoming requests. But only 18% of the requesters said they needed more personal access to him to achieve their business goals; the rest were content with the informational and social resources he was providing. The second most connected person was Sharon, with 89 people in her network, but her situation was markedly different, and more dangerous, because 40% of them wanted more time with her—a significantly greater draw on her personal resources.
We find that as the percentage of requesters seeking more access moves beyond about 25, it hinders the performance of both the individual and the group and becomes a strong predictor of voluntary turnover. As well-regarded collaborators are overloaded with demands, they may find that no good deed goes unpunished.
The exhibit “In Demand, Yet Disengaged,” reflecting data on business unit line leaders across a sample of 20 organizations, illustrates the problem. People at the top center and right of the chart—that is, those seen as the best sources of information and in highest demand as collaborators in their companies—have the lowest engagement and career satisfaction scores, as represented by the size of their bubbles. Our research shows that this ultimately results in their either leaving their organizations (taking valuable knowledge and network resources with them) or staying and spreading their growing apathy to their colleagues.
Leaders can solve this problem in two ways: by streamlining and redistributing responsibilities for collaboration and by rewarding effective contributions.
Redistributing the Work
Any effort to increase your organization’s collaborative efficiency should start with an understanding of the existing supply and demand. Employee surveys, electronic communications tracking, and internal systems such as 360-degree feedback and CRM programs can provide valuable data on the volume, type, origin, and destination of requests, as can more in-depth network analyses and tools. For example, Do.com monitors calendars and provides daily and weekly reports to both individual employees and managers about time spent in meetings versus on solo work. The idea is to identify the people most at risk for collaborative overload. Once that’s been done, you can focus on three levers:
Encourage behavioral change.
Show the most active and overburdened helpers how to filter and prioritize requests; give them permission to say no (or to allocate only half the time requested); and encourage them to make an introduction to someone else when the request doesn’t draw on their own unique contributions. The latest version of the team-collaboration software Basecamp now offers a notification “snooze button” that encourages employees to set stronger boundaries around their incoming information flow. It’s also worth suggesting that when they do invest personal resources, it be in value-added activities that they find energizing rather than exhausting. In studying employees at one Fortune 500 technology company, we found that although 60% wanted to spend less time responding to ad hoc collaboration requests, 40% wanted to spend more time training, coaching, and mentoring. After their contributions were shifted to those activities, employees were less prone to stress and disengagement.
To stem the tide of incoming requests, help seekers, too, must change their behavior. Resetting norms regarding when and how to initiate e-mail requests or meeting invitations can free up a great deal of wasted time. As a step in this direction, managers at Dropbox eliminated all recurring meetings for a two-week period. That forced employees to reassess the necessity of those gatherings and, after the hiatus, helped them become more vigilant about their calendars and making sure each meeting had an owner and an agenda. Rebecca Hinds and Bob Sutton, of Stanford, found that although the company tripled the number of employees at its headquarters over the next two years, its meetings were shorter and more productive.
In addition, requests for time-sapping reviews and approvals can be reduced in many risk-averse cultures by encouraging people to take courageous action on decisions they should be making themselves, rather than constantly checking with leaders or stakeholders.
Leverage technology and physical space to make informational and social resources more accessible and transparent.
Relevant technical tools include Slack and Salesforce.com’s Chatter, with their open discussion threads on various work topics; and Syndio and VoloMetrix (recently acquired by Microsoft), which help individuals assess networks and make informed decisions about collaborative activities. Also rethink desk or office placement. A study led by the Boston University assistant professor Stine Grodal documented the detrimental effects of team meetings and e-mails on the development and maintenance of productive helping relationships. When possible, managers should colocate highly interdependent employees to facilitate brief and impromptu face-to-face collaborations, resulting in a more efficient exchange of resources.
Consider structural changes.
Can you shift decision rights to more-appropriate people in the network? It may seem obvious that support staff or lower-level managers should be authorized to approve small capital expenditures, travel, and some HR activities, but in many organizations they aren’t. Also consider whether you can create a buffer against demands for collaboration. Many hospitals now assign each unit or floor a nurse preceptor, who has no patient care responsibilities and is therefore available to respond to requests as they emerge. The result, according to research that one of us (Adam Grant) conducted with David Hofmann and Zhike Lei, is fewer bottlenecks and quicker connections between nurses and the right experts. Other types of organizations might also benefit from designating “utility players”—which could lessen demand for the busiest employees—and possibly rotating the role among team members while freeing up personal resources by reducing people’s workloads.
Rewarding Effective Collaboration
We typically see an overlap of only about 50% between the top collaborative contributors in an organization and those employees deemed to be the top performers. As we’ve explained, many helpers underperform because they’re overwhelmed; that’s why managers should aim to redistribute work. But we also find that roughly 20% of organizational “stars” don’t help; they hit their numbers (and earn kudos for it) but don’t amplify the success of their colleagues. In these cases, as the former Goldman Sachs and GE chief learning officer Steve Kerr once wrote, leaders are hoping for A (collaboration) while rewarding B (individual achievement). They must instead learn how to spot and reward people who do both.
Why Women Bear More of the Burden
The lion’s share of collaborative work tends to fall on women. They’re stereotyped as communal and caring, so they’re expected to help others with heavy workloads, provide mentoring and training to more-junior colleagues, recruit new hires, and attend optional meetings. As a result, the evidence shows, women experience greater emotional exhaustion than men.
One important solution to this problem is to encourage women to invest different types of resources in collaboration. In a 2013 Huffington Post poll of Americans, men and women estimated how often they contribute to others in a variety of ways. Men were 36% more likely to share knowledge and expertise—an informational resource. Meanwhile, women were 66% more likely to assist others in need—an action that typically costs more time and energy. By making contributions that rely less on personal resources, women can protect themselves against collaboration overload.
Managers must also ensure that men and women get equal credit for collaboration. In an experiment led by the NYU psychologist Madeline Heilman, a man who stayed late to help colleagues earned 14% higher ratings than a woman who did the same. When neither helped, the woman was rated 12% lower than the man. By improving systems for measuring, recognizing, and rewarding collaborative contributions, leaders can shift the focus away from the gender of the employee and toward the value added.
Consider professional basketball, hockey, and soccer teams. They don’t just measure goals; they also track assists. Organizations should do the same, using tools such as network analysis, peer recognition programs, and value-added performance metrics. We helped one life sciences company use these tools to assess its workforce during a multibillion-dollar acquisition. Because the deal involved consolidating facilities around the world and relocating many employees, management was worried about losing talent. A well-known consultancy had recommended retention bonuses for leaders. But this approach failed to consider those very influential employees deep in the acquired company who had broad impact but no formal authority. Network analytics allowed the company to pinpoint those people and distribute bonuses more fairly.
Efficient sharing of informational, social, and personal resources should also be a prerequisite for positive reviews, promotions, and pay raises. At one investment bank, employees’ annual performance reviews include feedback from a diverse group of colleagues, and only those people who are rated as strong collaborators (that is, able to cross-sell and provide unique customer value to transactions) are considered for the best promotions, bonuses, and retention plans. Corning, the glass and ceramics manufacturer, uses similar metrics to decide which of its scientists and engineers will be named fellows—a high honor that guarantees a job and a lab for life. One criterion is to be the first author on a patent that generates at least $100 million in revenue. But another is whether the candidate has worked as a supporting author on colleagues’ patents. Corning grants status and power to those who strike a healthy balance between individual accomplishment and collaborative contribution. (Disclosure: Adam Grant has done consulting work for Corning.)
Collaboration is indeed the answer to many of today’s most pressing business challenges. But more isn’t always better. Leaders must learn to recognize, promote, and efficiently distribute the right kinds of collaborative work, or their teams and top talent will bear the costs of too much demand for too little supply. In fact, we believe that the time may have come for organizations to hire chief collaboration officers. By creating a senior executive position dedicated to collaboration, leaders can send a clear signal about the importance of managing teamwork thoughtfully and provide the resources necessary to do it effectively. That might reduce the odds that the whole becomes far less than the sum of its parts.
A version of this article appeared in the January–February 2016 issue (pp.74–79) of Harvard Business Review.
Rob Cross is a professor of management at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce and a coauthor of The Hidden Power of Social Networks.
Since it’s Thursday, I want to take another look back at a throwback: one of my favorite stories about how it is possible to score a meeting with almost anyone.
When these guys come knocking, who wouldn’t answer the door?
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Have you ever been desperate to land a meeting with someone – a potential client, investor, mentor, et al. – but just couldn’t get on their radar?
You want nothing more than a few minutes of time with them. You try everything: persistent calls, emails, tweets, carrier pigeon. But nothing works.
I like to think of myself as a fairly successful entrepreneur, but this used to happen to me all the time. Then I discovered a way to reach almost anyone.
A couple of years ago, I was trying to score a meeting with a grand poobah at a bank in Midtown Manhattan. I can’t tell you this gentleman’s name, but trust me, it’s a big name.
Nothing worked. Not the calls. Not the smoke signals. Not even the singing telegram on his birthday. (Okay, I didn’t send him one of those, but I did some similarly desperate things.)
Then I had an idea. Since he’s a New Yorker, I wondered if Mr. Big didn’t idolize a New York Yankees baseball player or two.
I called Mr. Big’s secretary and before she could pass me to his voicemail for the umpteenth time, I said, “No, I need to speak to you.” I asked her if Mr. Big was a Yankees fan and learned he was a huge admirer of Yankees reliever Mariano Rivera. With that news, the heavens parted, the angels started singing and I saw the light.
I immediately had my trusty assistant send Mr. Big a small plastic cube — an empty baseball case — with a note attached.
“I heard you love Mariano Rivera,” it read. “Here’s a case for a Mariano-signed baseball. When you and I meet within the next two weeks, I’ll bring you the ball.”
Wouldn’t you know it? Big called me that day. And we met the next week.
Maybe you’re thinking: “That’s a cute story, Brandon. But what if the person I need to reach doesn’t like the Yankees or even sports? And what if I don’t have any special connections?”
You’re still in luck. The philosopher Joseph Campbell showed us that there’s a bond connecting human beings that’s even stronger than those of death and taxes: hero worship.
Every culture, throughout history, has told its own hero stories — whether they take the form of religion, myth, or, in our society, pop culture. Be it an athlete, actor or singer, every American has a hero. I guarantee you that the big fish you can’t reel in has a hero or two of their own.
Sometimes this hero is relatively easy to identify. For instance, a quick look at Barack Obama’s Facebook page shows that the president loves Bob Dylan. So, if I wanted to land a meeting with him, maybe I’d send him an empty Blood on the Tracks record case, with a note saying I had an original vinyl copy I’d like to give him in person. (Obviously that’s an outlandish hypothetical, but you get the point.)
Are you there Barack? It’s me, Bob.
Sometimes the hero will be more difficult to find. If a little internet stalking doesn’t turn anything up, do what I did: chat up the personal assistant, or someone else who might know.
Maybe you can’t afford to send a high-end totem. In that case, be creative.
For instance, say the person you’re trying to meet is a fan of the show Mad Men. You probably can’t have Jon Hamm make a phone call for you, but you can send a reasonably-priced and eye-popping photo of the actor (there are great shots available on sites like Crestock.com) with a note saying: “I work as hard as Don Draper and I’m almost always more sober.”
Who could say no to this face?
The “bait” doesn’t have to be shiny and expensive. It just has to stand out from the dozens of other requests your prospect will receive that day.
The only necessity, really, is to abandon the business or sales angle and channel a hero’s voice instead. Of course, once you get the attention you’ve worked so hard to score, the rest is up to you.
For years, common experience and studies have prescribed that humans learn best in their earliest years of life – when the brain is developing at its fastest. Recently, though, research has suggested that the period of optimal learning extends well into adolescence.
The flurry of new findings may force a total rethinking of how educators and parents nurture this vulnerable age group, turning moments of frustration into previously unseen opportunities for learning and academic excitement.
New evidence shows that the window for formative brain development continues into the onset of puberty, between ages 9 and 13, and likely through the teenage years, according to Ronald Dahl, professor of community health and human development at the University of California, Berkeley. Dahl spoke at a recent Education Writers Association seminar on motivation and engagement.
Adolescence is a tornado of change: Not only is it the period of fastest physical change in life – aside from infancy – but also newfound drives, motivations, and feelings of sexuality are amplified. There are profound shifts to metabolisms and sleeping cycles, as well as social roles – especially in the context of schools. During these years, motivation is propelled not by a tangible goal to work toward, but by a feeling of wanting and thirst. Within the tumult of pre-teens or teens is an opportunity to enhance their desire and interest to learn.
In the past decade, neuroscientists have been able to identify what makes the adolescent brain so geared for the kind of inquiry that can pay dividends in the classroom. As children enter adolescence, some developing neural systems have already stabilized, Dahl said. But puberty creates a whole new set of elastic neural systems that, when interacting with the already stabilized systems, offers unique windows of opportunity for engagement and experiencing the world around them in multiple ways.
“Adolescence is a perfect storm of opportunities to align these changes in positive ways,” Dahl said. “Learning, exploration, acquiring skills and habits, intrinsic motivations, attitudes, setting goals and priorities: There’s compelling need for transdisciplinary research to understand unique opportunities for social and emotional learning. But few people do it in fear of these challenges.”
These new scientific insights have large implications for how schools teach adolescents, which have traditionally viewed this age group astroublesome.
The feelings of acceptance, rejection, admiration, among others, are all the story of adolescence. Children in this age group also seek physical sensations and thrills. There’s heightened awareness of social status, especially as they realize that acts of courage can earn them higher social status among peers. Their wildly swinging neurological systems also mean that adolescents can readjust quickly – making those years critical for educators to engage students in “the right ways,” when the brain is learning to calibrate complex social and emotional value systems that use feelings as fast signals, Dahl said.
Contrary to common belief, children in this age range don’t actually have “broken brains.” Rather, these children are undergoing a profound update to how they process the world around them. Adolescents are often considered bad decision-makers who are thrill-seekers. These myths, however, stem from young people’s desire to display courage, which is valued across cultures — and adolescents constantly seek the emotional satisfaction of being admired. In fact, Dahl said that adolescents take risks to overcome their fears, not seek them out.
“[Adolescents] are learning about the complex social world they must navigate, including the hierarchies, social rules for gaining acceptance and status, and the mystifying discovery of a sexual self,” Dahl said. “This is a flexible period for goal engagement, and the main part of what’s underneath what we think about setting goals in conscious ways – the bottom-up-based pull to feel motivated toward things.”
Adding to the confusion over how best to respond to adolescents is a wave of research showing children around the world are entering puberty at younger ages. One report found that in the 1860s, puberty for girls began at age 16. In the 1950s, it occurred at 13. Today it’s closer to eight years old. The transition for boys is similar, according to the report. The earlier onset of these pronounced biological changes puts pressure on educators and parents to update their expectations for what it means to be young, and how youth plays into adulthood.
“This is an interesting potential opportunity, with the longer time to learn activated motivational systems, longer time to increase skills and develop patterns of developing knowledge,” Dahl said. “If kids grow up in opportune settings, they can take advantage of the scaffolding and freedom to go on to take adult roles. But the risks are probably more amplified than opportunities for kids in disadvantaged settings.”
It’s still unclear how the earlier development happening in children might create other sets of challenges, Dahl noted, but it’s evident that it’s a key development window of motivational learning, a time when the brain more intensely senses motivational feelings, strengthening the patterns of connections to heartfelt goals, and creates potential for deep, sustained learning.
This period of learning is exemplified by even the forbidden love of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The young couple is brought together by a single brief encounter, after which all mental processes of planning, goals, motivations, longing, and desire are transformed. They begin to obsess over reuniting, and would sacrifice anything – including comfort, safety, family, and friends – to be together again.
Without the context that adolescents’ motives can explode entirely by the spark of a single passion, Romeo and Juliet’s story would be one of utter insanity, Dahl said. But adolescents’ abilities to rapidly reshape motivations and goals both supports their emotional volatility as well as presents a key period to find love – not necessarily romantically for others, but for academic activities and goals.
“With the feelings that pull you to persevere, maybe [adolescence is] a particularly opportune time to fall in love with learning itself, to love that feeling of exploring,” Dahl said. “There’s a new window to create that ‘Yes!’ feeling.”
This story was written for the Education Writers Association and originally appeared there.
