Some organizations will manage to encourage and to benefit from both informal and organized learning, just as they can profit from both informal and structured communication channels (say, ad hoc inter-group teams on the one hand, and scheduled forums with upper management).

In those organizations, my hunch is that you get the leadership to give up control when you have some reasonable prospect of a return to the organization. I talked with a woman who helped the procurement group at an oil company set up an internal wiki to record successes and setbacks in contract negotiations. The idea was to enhance institutional memory -- e.g., if you hadn't been involved in the XYZ deal, you could find out what Sam and Sheila did to close it.

The moral to me is not "hey, everybody, set up a wiki!" It's more defining a problem (nobody outside the deal knows what made it work) or an opportunity (new procurement folks get better faster with details of what's worked and what hasn't).

Tangentially, I don't think I want the procurement folks learning informally about legal and ethical requirements for contracts. Maybe I just see lawsuits as so very formal...

At present, if you can overcome the logistical barriers, organized learning (like an in-person workshop) offers the potential for person-to-person networking while increasing the common denominator. At GE, for example, once 25% or so of your peers had completed Six Sigma training, you'd use related terms as shorthand and would find yourself and others thinking about problems with a similar analytical framework.

(This isn't a Six Sigma endorsement so much as a cultural-practice one.)

Social software and other tools offer similar potential once people start putting them to work, and I think there's some law of the unexpected at work. GE had standardized on some Lotus tools like LearningSpace, and so even for a one-to-one phone call I could open a virtual classroom to demonstrate software on my computer and even let you try it out. Informal, focused, effective.