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The New World of Work in The Netherlands

I was trying to make an overview of communities and sites concerning the New World of Work in The Netherlands, “Het Nieuwe Werken”. I came up with the following alphabetical list, which is not complete off course. I excluded all vendors and only added non branded communities.

  • Ambtenaar 2.0, a community with more than 2500 members looking into the new government worker, with regular open coffee events and lots of activity online. Ambtenaar 2.0 is a more open variety of Overheid 2.0, a more closed community on Government 2.0
  • Het Nieuwe Werken Blog, a pure blog written by some the thoughtleaders in the Netherlands on this subject, active since february 2009

  • Het Nieuwe Werken op Lindedin, a group with more than 4700 members and 154 recent discussions

  • Innovatief Organiseren, a platform started by managementsite.nl, active since september 2006

  • Nework community op Linkedin, a closed community with 200 members (of which 88 registered at linkedin) and quarterly meetings

  • Over Het Nieuwe Werken, a community and conference initiated by Kluwer

  • Telewerkforum, a foundation active since 1995 and supported by 88 companies

  • Vernieuwing in Werk, a more recent community with more than 250 members, active online and in meetups

  • Werken 2.0, a blog with more than 563 articles on the subject and also an overview of the communities on linkedin and ning

To show how much content is being added on this theme I performed a Google search on “Het Nieuwe Werken” delivers about 72.400 results. A more loosely executed search on this theme gets you more than 4 million results. The theme is hot in The Netherlands and based on some discussions with people outside of the Netherlands I think were somewhat ahead of the troops. But I doubt if this is true…

Fo you know of other initiatives in The Netherlands or Global initiative? Do you have an opinion on the state of The New World of Work in a global perspective? Let us know!

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Collaboration and Communication

In today’s world of work the need for effective and efficient collaboration to create value is big. To create value we collaborate with coworkers, peers and customers form around the world to solve problems or create new and better products. Collaboration is for the most part communication between the collaborators. Communication is one of the hardest things to do out there. There are three mayor challeges in communicating to collaborate.

The first one is about communication in general. If we want to collaborate we have to communicate to express our thoughts on the subject, get feedback, discuss new ideas, summarize and make conclusions. This is a very hard thing to do effective and efficient. We need to know our own communication skills and preferences and know about these skills and preferences for the people we collaborate with. I think the MBTI assessment is a great way to figure out personal preferences and their impact on communication.

Second challenge is about language. The current playing field is a global one and thus we communicate in different languages. The langauage that is used in communication between people with different languages is mostly english. Let’s call english the global interaction language. If you are a native english speaker you have some advantages here, but for the most of us this is a challenge to translate ideas of others and your own ideas from the interaction language to the native language. For me this blogpost is witten in english (as my cobloggers and myself want to engage the largest possible crowd) but my thoughts are in dutch. Somewhere between my mind and fingers my ideas get translated. Just the use of the interaction language is not enough because the crowd out there does not have the same level of english. For everybody including native english speakers another challenge is to use terminology that the reader can comprehend.

The third challenge is about cultural differences that have impact on communications. The sender and receiver of communication both have mental models in which they interpret communication. This interpretation is after translation. So in this blogpost I am thinking in dutch and writing in english. But I am writing this from a dutch mindset and chances are the you, my valued reader ;-), are interpreting my english writing with a indian mindset. Differences in your culture colour your reading and comprehension of my thoughts. To make this post succesfull I should have written this post with your cultural background in mind and you should have read this post with my cultural background in mind aswell! This is a very difficult task because I am not familiar with indian culture and I don’t want to focus on indian readers but to a global audience, so where to start? For the reader this is also a hard thing to do, because it implicates you need to know about dutch culture as well! Some of the best examples on this challenge I read the other day in Outliers a book by Malcolm Gladwell. He talked about communication in the cockpit of aeroplanes and the possible destructive power of culture on collaboration.

If we take these challenges into account it is a mirracle that communication is succeeding in the first place. The question is if this mirracle is a consequence of contious actions or uncontius behaviour?

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Learning and Creativity

This week I read the article “Teaching Smart People How to Learn” by Chris Argyris. It is a great piece of work discussing the idea and practical application of double loop learning. The examples in this article are very vivid and really get to the point why proffesionals or knowledge workers avoid learning.

Defensive reasoning is a big barrier for double loop learning. Teammembers search for solutions and reasons to problems outside themselves. They are affraid to acknoledge failure and thus are preventing themselves from learning. Success in their careers is the main source for them to be affraid of critisicm.

Learning and the educational systems are two subjects rather close to each other and there is a great video from TED by Sir Ken Robinson.

[ted id=”66″]

Ken argues that educational systems kill creativity. Kids are not affraid to be wrong and if you are not prepared to be wrong you never come up with something original. Kids lose this ability to be wrong and turn in to adults that are affraid to be wrong. Education is telling students that mistakes are the worst things to make.

In sports it is a common sense that mistakes and losing are needed to win matches and achieve goals. If a player makes a mistake during a match this is the only moment you can make them see how to perform better and to avoid the mistake. When I am coaching I always try to make teams lose bigtime during the training season. That is the time when they learn the most and create a bigger appetite for succes.

Chris and Ken are both stating that the inability to make mistakes, to be wrong and be defensive about them is a big problem. This problem leads to the inability to learn and the inability to be creative. We need to start learning again to make mistakes, be honest about them and learn from these mistakes to do a better job!

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Teamwork in The New World of Work

Last weeks I have been working on my thoughts about the new world of work/enterprise 2.0 trying to find new of more meaning. Collaboration is one of the most used word but a google search for collaboration delivers a lot of technical results. Tech companies trying to promote the newest most sophisticated collaboration tools. These tools are very interesting and all but are they the most important aspect of collaboration. I am sure they are NOT and research proves this! Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT is doing some excellent research in this area, explaining the relationship between productivity and social networks. The quote “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics” of Robert Solow is world famous and is saying that only investment in computers just is not enough.

The soft, intangible side of collaboration in teams is a topic that I am going to exam for the coming period. It seems that a clear talent development program has to be in place aligned with overall workstrategy, physical workplace changes and digital workplace changes. Empowerment will be an import topic in the program. Management needs to learn to lead workers to make their own decisions on goals and strategies. This is just on of the many topics that is relevant to the soft side of collaboration.

What is your opinion or are you willing to help me in this quest?

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Het Nieuwe jaar, uw nieuwe werken

Het Nieuwe Werken is dé trend in Nederland op dit moment. YNNO nodigt u uit om met de start van het nieuwe jaar met elkaar uit te vinden hoe het nieuwe werken voor uw organisatie eruit kan zien.


Uw nieuwe werken dus!


Wilt u geïnformeerd worden of meedenken over uw nieuwe werken of gewoon vakgenoten ontmoeten die zich bezig houden met nieuwe manieren van werken binnen organisaties? Kom dan op 22 januari naar onze netwerkmeeting “uw nieuwe werken”


Tijdens deze netwerkmeeting duiken wij met u in de praktijkwereld van uw nieuwe werken. We bespreken:

  • hoe de digitale en fysieke werkomgevingen afgestemd worden op het werk dat in de organisatie uitgevoerd wordt
  • hoe in deze werkomgeving voor uw medewerkers tijd uitgespaard wordt op allerlei administratieve en informatiezoekende handelingen zodat zij meer tijd kunnen spenderen aan hun echte werk.
  • hoe een organisatie zich qua cultuur en management stijl kan voorbereiden om uw nieuwe werken goed te laten renderen

Als startpunt zetten wij een aantal trends neer, geven wij een voorzet voor de impact op organisaties. Vervolgens is het doel om gezamenlijk discussie te voeren, ideeën uit te wisselen, beelden te delen en ambities te bespreken. Hierbij is er volop ruimte om uw eigen onderwerpen aan te dragen. Het seminar is van en voor iedereen die betrokken is bij dit spannende thema.


Wat betekent het nieuwe werken concreet voor uw organisatie in het jaar 2009?


Uw Oude Werken
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDQhHk3JyMo&hl=]

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het nieuwe werken

Op donderdag 22 januari 2009 organiseert YNNO een event over “Uw Nieuwe Werken”. Het nieuwe werken is momenteel helemaal hot, maar wat is het nu precies. Wij denken dat een nieuwe manier van werken voor iedere organisatie anders is. Op deze middag zullen wij u meenemen in een tocht langs alle facetten van het nieuwe werken. Op basis van jaren lange ervaring (we adviseren al meer dan 7 jaar op dit vlak) en onze inzichten op dit vlak hebben wij een mooie middag voor u in petto! 

aanmelden kan via http://www.meetup.com/Uw-Nieuwe-Werken/!

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Enterprise 2.0 movements today

Well actually it started yesterday. I was interviewed for an article in NRC Handelsblad this week and it already was in the paper on thursday!

On october 10th there will the the second meetup of enterprise 2.0 enthousiasts in The Netherlands. For now the meetup will cover the challanges on enterprise 2.0 in adoption and technology!

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article published

Recently I was interviewed about a project I finished recently at a big insurance company in The Netherlands. Read all about it at my publications page!

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Email

Well actually my information diet is going quiet nice. My outlook is performing so badly at the moment I could read email if I want to. Recentley I installed Xobni, which I like very much, but since that point it has gotten worse. With pain in my hart I am uninstalling xobni today…

I am finding it very hard to simply give up on email. The habit of replying and sending attachements by mail is so strong! Sometimes there is hardly a suitable alternative that is safe and accesible for the other side. But I guess it is simply a alternative for the long run changing your habits and ultimately making everybodies live better but using less and less email.

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information diet

I am trying hard to stay on the information diet. Today I worked like crazy to work through a couple of MB of data to give a good representation of sitevisits for a client. Whole day long I only checked email two times and stayed away from internet all together! Missing out on email, news and twitter surely made working more efficient. Got to keep this up at home, by trying to stay away from TV. Now busy cleening up my bookshelve and needing a solution for my magazines…