People are now the engine of change and the fuel is communications, says Jay Deragon in Systemic Impact of Social Technology

System outcomes can be influenced by numerous factors such as:

1. Competitor innovation that attracts the market away from your business
2. Cost of goods increases and margins shrink. You cut expenses to survive.
3. Employee turnover which fuels inconsistency and waste.
4. Customer leave due to dis-satisfaction
5. Market shifts that you are unaware of and don’t understand

The #1 influence that is threaded through all five examples above is communications.

I’ve attended various meetings over the past six months; meetings with groups that I haven’t had dealings with before. These were professional associations, networks of researchers and administrators, and others. I would say that all the problems discussed at these meetings were, at root, communications issues.

Communication in a network is not the same as what we may have considered as traditional business communications. Sending out a clear memo (email) may have worked before, but looking for that email or document six months later on some kind of shared intranet drive is another issue completely. Sharing the emails of a previous worker in a certain position may make sense at first, but becomes totally impractical when 20,000 emails arrive, all in folders that make no sense to the incumbent [I speak from personal experience here]. Adding an enterprise resource system (LMS, TMS, HRIS, etc) doesn’t help much either, because the enforced knowledge structure makes little sense to the individual worker.

What may be considered a knowledge problem is really a transparency one. If I want to find general information, I search the Web, and quite often find what I need. For more contextual knowledge, I ask my network via text message, Twitter, blog or forum. The reason I can do this is that either the knowledge or the knowledgeable person is visible on the web.

Visibility is the key for knowledge work inside the organization as well. Jay Cross described it in Informal Learning, with the case study of CGI using an “Internet Inside” tool approach.

Just compare informal learning on the web with what happens inside the firewall. Online, we all benefit from others who openly share. We read free blog posts, comments, tweets and wikipedia articles. We watch descriptive YouTube videos and check out wiki-how or a host of other self-help sites. We may do all of this without even thinking about the millions of people who share in order to make our lives better. Meanwhile, inside the organization, we’re trying to find that document that got filed away on some shared drive, but nobody remembers the date or the title (about all the metadata available) so it is lost to us.

When I note how easy it is to find the stuff we need on Google, most people understand and agree. Then I explain that it only works if some people are making the information public. Making the information that results from our daily work visible is a huge step in enhancing communications. The simplest and easiest way is to replicate the tools and processes used on the open Internet – blogs, micro-blogs, social networks, social bookmarks, etc. The problem with enterprise systems is that they don’t act as networks. They were not built with network DNA but rather hierarchical frameworks. Therefore, they cannot scale to complexity the way a much simpler protocol can. Simplicity leads to complexity. Complicated systems just get more complicated.

My advice is to keep the tools simple and replicate the web; it works, and the basic protocols are very simple. Use a DIY approach and let the IT department focus on data security not tools.

Effective networked organizations are those with a sharing culture, embracing a new social learning contract.

I was not able to attend any of the sessions at PLENK (Personal Learning Environments & Networked Knowledge)  2010, a Massively Open Online Course (MOOC), other than the one I facilitated on personal knowledge management.  PLENK 2010 was conducted by Stephen Downes, George [Clooney] Siemens & Dave Cormier, three fellow Canadians and two who live pretty close by. However, Zaid Ali Alsagoff provides a comprehensive overview of the most awesome course on planet earth, offered via the intergalactic gaga network.

This is the third part of my response. See Part 1: Corporate Learning’s Focus & Part 2: Integrating learning into the business.

Inspired by Jay Cross, Amanda Fenton asks how her Corporate Learning department could better meet the needs of employees. I think these are excellent questions and the answers form the basis of addressing how to integrate work and learning in the enterprise.

Q7) How can we help support learning environments (resources and tools, relationships and networks, training and education, supervisor and company support) in a way that is highly efficient and scalable across the country? What are the programs and services that are supported centrally and what do we support through consulting? Through self-serve resources? What capacity needs to be developed in the organization to support all these areas? How can we better advocate the use of social software to enable high performance?

Jane Hart, in the state of learning in the workplace, sums up a more efficient & scalable approach; do-it yourself (DIY):

With the easy availability of tools, people are now “doing their own thing”. This is not just the case for those who are designing and/or delivering training or education for formal learners, but also by many to address their own learning and performance needs. There is a huge amount of evidence that shows that individuals (and teams) are using these tools for their own personal, informal learning. Instead of going to the LMS to find answers to their questions or solve problems, they are using tools like Google, Wikipedia or YouTube, or simply posting questions to their networks on Twitter or Facebook in order to get immediate, up-to-date and relevant answers. It is interesting to note that the success of their “learning” is measured in how well it helps them to address the learning or performance issue in hand, not in course completion data in the LMS. In very many cases, individuals are therefore now directing and managing their own learning primarily though the use of these new tools.

All these factors are influencing the look of learning in the workplace …

As Charles Jennings shows in this very articulate presentation, 8 reasons to focus on informal & social learning, that learning happens as a process, not a series of events. Studies have shown that up to 90% of workplace learning happens outside of formal training. This is what needs to be supported, but not controlled, by the organization. Informal learning is generally more effective, less expensive and better received than formal training. Informal is more scalable than formal. Central control is only necessary for about 10% of workplace learning and this is the portion of resources that should be allocated to it. The graphic below (slide 32) clearly shows how ineffective typical formal training can be:

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The data and research are available. Advocating for a better balance of learning options inside the enterprise depends on how well the training department understands its own organization.

Q8) What would an integrated OD, HR, IT, KM, Marketing/Communications and L&D partnership look like? How would our roles, responsibilities and structure change? Who does the manager or employee call when they run into a performance problem? What big organizational beliefs do we need to let go of to support these changes?

Euan Semple has tarred HR, Communications and IT with the same brush. Euan says that:

• HR are “maintainers of order, rather than enablers of staff”;
• Communications manages rather than enables communication;
• IT controls risk instead of enabling the business.

These are generalizations, but expose the weaknesses of our current management systems.

The same workplace issues are being faced by HR, IT, OD, KM, Marketing/Communications and T&D departments. Similar complaints and parallel strategies are being developed in isolation in each of these areas. We really need to get away from our self-imposed tribes and adopt network thinking and practices. All levels of complexity exist in our world but more of our work (especially knowledge-intensive work) deals with complex problems, whether they be social, environmental or technological. Complex environments and problems are best addressed when we organize as networks; our work evolves around developing emergent practices; and we collaborate to achieve our goals.

With hyper-linked information and access to expertise, not only are all internal support departments of less value, they can actually subvert the organization’s future by not responding quickly and appropriately. We need to look to business models on the fringes that foster a sense of community and focus on agility and autonomy. No single, sure-fire, cookie-cutter approach can be implemented in a top-down or consultant-driven manner to create a networked workplace performance model that works. There are no best practices, only next practices.

We can start by recombining organizational DNA, breaking down silos and inverting the organizational pyramid.

This is the second part of my response. See Part 1: Corporate Learning’s Focus.

Inspired by Jay Cross, Amanda Fenton asks how her Corporate Learning department could better meet the needs of employees. I think these are excellent questions and the answers form the basis of addressing how to integrate work and learning in the enterprise.

Questions on the role of managers and integrating learning into the business:

Q5) How can we facilitate the line managers’ ability to identify the root cause of a performance problem, own it, and know what to do about it (e.g. managing performance problems)?

The situation has gone beyond the case of  helping managers develop a few new skills for their professional toolbox. Transformational, not incremental, changes are needed.

The basic premises of most current management and organizational models no longer apply. These frameworks are based upon work that is being automated and outsourced every day. There is little time to prepare people for this change. Any scenario that I consider – peak oil, global warming; globalization; Asian dominance – still requires that the developed world’s workforce deals with more complexity and even chaos. We need to skill-up for emergent and novel practices and that means a completely different mindset toward work and the “supervision” of work. Knowledge artisans don’t need supervision as much as the reduction of barriers to communication and connection. That’s the role of the “supervisor”.

Here are two other examples.

Ev Williams, co-founder of Twitter, is doing everything he can to keep the company BELOW 150 people. He understands both the old (primates & Dunbar’s numbers) as well as the new (agility & networks). For the past century, the key has been to grow companies. It’s celebrated and rewarded by markets and pundits. Not any more. This company is not growing and not hiring more managers and supervisors. In the new organization, everybody is an independent contributor because there is no need for layers of command and control. Everyone talks to everyone else in this hyperlinked world.

This is one the fastest growing occupations today – community manager. The skills needed here are completely different from traditional command and control supervision. Soft skills are now the hard skills. Supervision is not needed when all work is transparent.

Q6) What if we closed the training department and became mentors, coaches and facilitators, where our focus was on improving core business processes, supporting communication and collaboration to help people perform better, faster, cheaper? Where we worked with managers to fund and develop appropriate tools and processes for employees? How could this be successful?

I would reword this question to: when the training department closes, what do we do? That’s what most people in the business of organizational training should be asking. This will happen with or without the training department. The future of the training department is to stop delivering content and focus on conversations and collaboration. Here’s an example of one of the best “training” programs developed by people who are not instructional designers: CommonCraft “In plain English” videos. There are thousands like this on the Net (e.g. Wiki-How). Add in just-in-time answers to questions on Twitter or Facebook and you have a learning ecosystem. Many workers no longer need the training department to learn. In fact, the training department is often a barrier to learning.

Trainers had better become mentors, coaches and facilitators very soon, or they will become irrelevant in an age of ubiquitous access to content and expertise.