Informal Learning

Informal learning

The only knowledge that can be managed is our own

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“Every amateur epistemologist knows that knowledge cannot be managed. Education has always assumed that knowledge can be transferred and that we can carefully control the process through education. That is a grand illusion.” – Dave Jonassen

The only knowledge that can be managed is our own. In my opinion, knowledge management should be about supporting personal knowledge mastery in networks, with a distributed, not centralized, approach. Net Work Literacy entails self-organized learning while cooperating in diverse networks. Each of us is responsible for our own learning and in this network era we are now obliged to share that learning. If no one shared what they have learned there would be no Wikipedia or other free learning resources on the web.

Shifting to Net Work

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Our first Net Work Literacy session ends this week. There were several reasons why Jane Hart and I decided to offer this two-week online programe. The idea first came to me as I realized how many of my clients and colleagues were not as connected as they could be, too often wasting their time on routine things and not building networks that could help them get work done.

I’ve also noticed that people in their mid to late job careers are woefully unprepared to adapt to a post-job world, where work is simultaneously connected, contractual, part-time, global and local. Once the job is gone, many also lose their professional networks. The Net Work Literacy programme aims at getting people to think in terms of networks, with a focus on taking control of their professional development.

Our programme is global in scope, with participants from four continents so far. However, a key to long term success in learning and working in a post-industrial society is connecting these global learning networks with one’s local community. As energy costs increase, more of our resources will have to be local. Using network skills at the local level, connected to a global support network, is one way to develop a sustainable way of life.

As we continue with the Net Work Literacy programme, I intend on getting more stories about what is happening in various localities and learn how people are dealing with what my friend Bill Draves calls a Nine Shift.

There are 24 hours in a day. We have no real discretion with roughly 12 of those hours. We need to eat, sleep, and do a few other necessary chores in order to maintain our existence. That hasn’t changed much through the centuries, so far.

That leaves approximately 12 hours a day where we, as individuals, do have some discretion. That includes work time, play time, and family time.

Of those 12 hours, about 75%, or 9 hours, will be spent totally differently a few years from now than they were spent just a few years ago. Not everything will change, but 75% of life is in the process of changing right now.

Awareness

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Part of Personal Knowledge Management is seeking sources of knowledge (Seek-Sense-Share).

To be able to seek, first you have to be aware. Wolfgang Reinhardt has looked at knowledge workers, researchers in particular, and examined how they can be aware in their fields of expertise. Wolfgang graciously sent me a copy of his PhD thesis (Awareness: Support for knowledge workers in research networks) which he will be defending on 5 April at the Open Universiteit Nederland in Heerlen.

Wolfgang describes 10 knowledge worker roles that I think are helpful in understanding how all collaborative workers can share their knowledge.

  1. Controller
  2. Helper
  3. Learner
  4. Linker
  5. Networker
  6. Organizer
  7. Retriever
  8. Sharer
  9. Solver
  10. Tracker

Think of these roles, and who will do them, as you start or support a community of practice. There are also 13 different knowledge actions conducted by these researchers, to varying degrees, that Wolfgang has found in his research.

  1. Acquisition
  2. Analyze
  3. Authoring
  4. Co-authoring
  5. Information search
  6. Dissemination
  7. Expert Search
  8. Feedback
  9. Formal & Informal Learning
  10. Information organization
  11. Monitoring
  12. Networking
  13. Service search

How many of these are done on a regular basis, and with some degree of consistency, in knowledge-intensive organizations? How can this be improved?

Finally, the generic model of awareness describes how “the overall awareness of objects declines the further an object is away from oneself”.

  1. Self-awareness
  2. Awareness of current practice
  3. Awareness of the local research organization
  4. Awareness of the personal research network
  5. Awareness of the research domain

In complex fields, where various researchers are working on similar problems, it becomes rather important to know who has done what. The challenge for distributed research teams is to find ways of understanding what is happening and ensuring it is communicated throughout the network.

Not only does distributed research need collaborative researchers but there must be an understanding of the role that awareness plays amongst knowledge workers. In complex networks, basic management approaches are no longer adequate.

Some final notes from Wolfgang’s defence:

The term “awareness” in Research Networks is a multilayered term that reaches far deeper than just emulating face-to-face situations in distributed collaboration.

Without supporting the awareness of network researchers, innovation, collaboration and knowledge exchange will not reach its potential.

Omitting support for social interactions between stakeholders in scientific events amounts to wasting the opportunity to recommend objects and increase the strength of research networks.

Employees are often laughing

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cluetrain modified

Here’s a modified version of theses 11 to 13 of the Cluetrain Manifesto (1999), for all those corporate personnel support functions (HR, L&D, OD, KM):

People in a networked society have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from the human resources department. So much for L&D rhetoric about adding value to commoditized learning content.

There are no secrets. Networked workers know more than management does about the company’s own products and services. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone. What’s already happened to markets is now happening among employees. A metaphysical construct called “The Company” is the only thing standing between the two.

Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy (Cluetrain #7)

A workscape perspective

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There are few best practices for the network era workplace, but definitely many next practices to be developed. A good place to start is with an integrative performance framework that puts formal training and education where they belong: focused on the appropriate 5%.

Jay Cross calls the new performance environment a workscape:

Workscape: A metaphorical construct where learning is embedded in the work and emerges in “pull” mode. It is a fluid, holistic, process. Learning emerges as a result of working smarter. In this environment learning is natural, social, spontaneous, informal, unbounded, adaptive and fun. It involves conversation as the main ingredient.

Workscapes are not new structures but rather holistic ways of looking at and reformulating existing business infrastructure. They use the same networks and social media as the business itself, but technology is never the most important part. Foremost are people, their motivations, emotions, attitudes, roles, their enthusiasm or lack thereof, and their innate desire to excel. Technology connects people.

Workscapes go far beyond traditional training and instructional services. Jane Hart has developed a comprehensive framework for the support of workplace learning and performance. Note in the centre that “learning needs to be embedded in the workflow“. This is the premise from which all organizational support must flow.

Another perspective, from Charles Jennings, uses the 70-20-10 framework to prioritize performance support. “If you keep people in the workflow, and provide them with facilities and support for learning, the learning is more effective, faster and efficient.”

A workscape perspective can help management, HR and L&D professionals get away from the trees to see the forest,  because business is a complex, interconnected ecosystem today.

"you simply can’t train people to be social!"

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Over the past year I have been working on change initiatives to improve collaboration and knowledge-sharing with two large companies, one of them a multinational. In each case, implementation has boiled down to two components: individual skills & organizational support. Effective organizational collaboration comes about when workers regularly narrate their work within a structure that encourages transparency and shares power & decision-making. I have also learned that changing work routines can be a messy process that requires significant time, much of it dedicated to modelling behaviours. 

My Internet Time Alliance colleague, Jane Hart, notes, ” … as for the new social and collaboration skills that workers require, well you simply can’t train people to be social! What was required was getting down and dirty and helping people understand what it actually meant to work collaboratively in the new social workplace, and the value that this would bring to them.”

Jane refers to the collaboration pyramid by Oscar Berg, an excellent model to show what needs to be addressed to become a social business.

The low visibility activities link directly to personal knowledge mastery (PKM) skills, based on the process of Seeking information & knowledge; making Sense of it; and Sharing higher value information with others. These individual activities are not a single skill-set that can be trained in a classroom. They have to be internalized and perceived as valuable to each person in order to achieve the discipline to use them regularly. Every person’s PKM processes will differ. As Jane notes, one size doesn’t fit all.

It is a difficult path to get acceptance that each worker is responsible for his or her own learning and additionally must be a contributing member of a network. PKM is individuals retaking control of learning, and making it transparent. It takes time, but it also requires a receptive environment.

Creating a supportive social environment is management’s responsibility. These activities are shown on the upper part of the pyramid, above the water line. Some specific examples of activities I have been involved in over the past year include:

  • Support for small innovation teams to initiate and practice the new collaboration and knowledge-sharing skills.
  • Daily routines of posting observations and sharing with team members.
  • Weekly “virtual coffee” to catch up and help build social bonds.
  • Adding activity-stream technologies to productivity tool suites.
  • Constant analysis of activity data.
  • Providing dedicated time for reflection [this is a tough one to get management buy-in].
  • Regular mediated events like “Yam-Jams” on a select theme.
  • Creation of internal communications material to make social learning and social business more understandable.
  • Professional development activities using the same social media as will be used to work.
  • Face to face social activities.
  • Many conversations [usually Skype or telephone] and much one-on-one support as people work at becoming more social.
  • Social & Value network analyses to visualize network thinking.

My experience is that changing to more collaborative, networked ways of work requires coordinated change activities from both the top and the bottom. It has to be a two-pronged approach and it will take some time and effort.

Note: Oscar Berg has made a higher resolution image available on Flickr with a CC-BY license: The Collaboration Pyramid

When learning is the work …

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What if your organization got rid of the Learning & Development function? What would the average manager or department head do? What would workers do?

I’ve been thinking about this for a while. When work is learning, and learning is the work, training that is pushed from outside has less relevance. The L&D department is supposed to ensure that training is appropriate for the job, but with jobs constantly morphing into something else, a major disconnect is developing between the doers and the trainers. How many people take courses that are not relevant to their current work or are provided at the wrong time?

Let me propose some things managers and knowledge workers can do without a Learning & Development department.

Observe how people are learning to do their work already. Find these natural pathways and reinforce them.

Connect any “how-to” learning to the actual task. Show and tell only works if it can be put into practice. The forgetting curve is steep when there is no practice.

Make it everyone’s job to share what they learn. Have you ever noticed how easy it is to find “how-to” videos and explanations on the Web? That’s because someone has taken the time to post them. Everyone in the organization should do this, whether it’s a short text, a photo, a post, an article, a presentation with notes, or a full-blown video.

Make space to talk about things and capture what is passed on. Get these conversations in the open where they can be shared. Provide time and space for reflection and reading. There is more knowledge outside any organization than inside.

Break down barriers. Establish transparency as the default mode, so that anyone can know what others are doing. Unblock communication bottlenecks, like supervisors who control information flow. If supervisors can’t handle an open environment, get rid of them, because they are impeding organizational learning and it’s now mission critical.

If you do have an L&D department, share what you are doing and perhaps they will help you become more self-sufficient for your organizational learning. If they don’t, ignore them, as they will be going away anyway.
illuminated crowd

Informal learning, the 95% solution

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Informal learning is not better than formal training; there is just a whole lot more of it. It’s 95% of workplace learning, according to the research behind this graphic, by Gary Wise.

 Since the latter half of the 20th century, we have gone through a period where training departments have been directed to control organizational learning. It was part of the Taylorist, industrial model that also compartmentalized work and ensured that only managers were allowed to make decisions. In this context, only training professionals were allowed to talk about learning. But formal training, usually in the guise of courses, is like a hammer that sees all problems as nails. Unfortunately, these nails only account for 5% of organizational learning.

A significant percentage of workplace learning professionals are solidly grounded in that 5% of workplace learning that is formal training. They know the systems approach to training (SAT), instructional systems design (ISD) and the ADDIE model (analysis, design, development, implementation, evaluation), among some less useful things like learning styles and Bloom’s taxonomy. There are plenty of hammer-wielders in corporate training departments, supported by an entire industry, including institutions and professional associations, all addressing that 5 percent.

Supporting informal learning at work is not as clear-cut as something like ISD. It requires tools, processes and methodologies from a variety of disciplines. There are methods from knowledge management, organizational development and human performance technology, for example, that are quite useful in supporting informal learning. The modern workplace is a complex adaptive system. There is no single approach that can be used all the time.

We  should not constrain our approach with a single methodological lens when looking at organizational performance. While all models are flawed, some may be useful, and any analysis requires an understanding of the situational context and then the selection of the most useful models. Today there is no agreed-upon informal learning design methodology. I doubt that a single one would be useful anyway.

An industrial age mindset would require a unified approach for informal learning, but the network age demands an acceptance of perpetual Beta. We have many methods and frameworks that can better inform us how to design work systems. When learning is the work, the support systems have to enable both. Integrating the best of what we know from multiple disciplines, in an evidence-based fashion, is the way to proceed and support complex, creative, collaborative work. Several of these next practices have been discussed here or amongst my colleagues.

To create real learning organizations, there is a choice. We can keep bolting on bits of informal learning to the formal training structure, or we can take a systemic approach and figure out how learning can be integrated into the workflow – 95% of the time.

CSTD 2011

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Here are my notes from the session this afternoon at CSTD 2011 in Toronto. If you need other links or information, just add a comment.

I’m glad we had a chance to field test a variation of the improv icebreak activity of equilateral triangles. It seems to have got things going a bit.

My slide presentation is available for viewing or download here:

Integrating learning and work CSTD 2011

I also showed two videos, the trailer to Networked Society: On the Brink as well as Dave Snowden’s How to Organise a Children’s Party.

Update: some people asked about selling social learning in their organizations, so these posts may be useful:

Social Learning for Business – 10 phrase elevator pitch

Why do we need social business? – many links to other resources & posts

Also: my social bookmarks on social media policies in a wide variety of organizations