If you want to learn something about a field you know little about, what do you do? There are many areas where I know very little, and learning about them in depth would be a major time commitment. Is there anything we can do do to make it easier? I think so.
SocialLearning
Social learning
finding people who know
Jane McConnell published her 9th annual report on The Organization in the Digital Age last month. Jane recently posted 10 key findings from the nearly 300 organizations surveyed.
“4. Finding People “Who Know” Is Winning Over Finding “The Information I Need”
Enterprise search is stuck at a low level of satisfaction with results. Organizations are prioritizing their efforts between finding information or finding people and the latter is the more frequent choice.
Lack of good information management practices is a concern because the high performers in the learning, customer and knowledge scenarios cite information management as a key success factor.”
the keystone of the intelligent organization
This is a summary of my closing keynote for the workplace learning & VET stream at EduTECH15 in Brisbane on 3 June 2015.
The intelligent enterprise [l’entreprise intelligente] has to be founded first and foremost on intelligent communication, which in the network era is much more than just passing information. It is actively engaging in conversations to continuously make sense of the changing environment. As it was necessary to be literate in order to work in the industrial era, it is now a basic work requirement to be able to communicate effectively. This means adding value to knowledge, in various mediated forms (video, audio, written, oral). Being able to read and write is not enough. Intelligent communication requires seeking out knowledge in social networks, making sense by creating new communications, and being cognizant of the appropriate times and ways to share that knowledge.
preparing for 2020
This is a synopsis of my opening keynote for the workplace learning & VET stream at EduTECH15 in Brisbane today.
We cannot look at the 2020 workplace merely from the perspective of what will be different from today, as if these five years will pass in splendid isolation. How we think of work has changed over the millennia and one major factor has been our communications technologies. When communication changes, work does too, as well as our understanding of what is knowledge, and what it means to be knowledgeable.
knowledge catalysts
Most people have heard Clay Shirky’s quote that, “It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure.” The professor and author has coined terms such as ‘cognitive surplus’ to explain that we have the mental capacity to do a lot more with our collective intelligence, but too often, societal barriers inhibit us. We are too busy with the day-to-day commute, usually in a deluge of noise from radios, billboards, and news sources, to reflect and consider bigger issues. Getting paid every two weeks focuses employee attention on the short term, as do quarterly reports for executives.
digital transformation skills
Oscar Berg has further developed his digital collaboration canvas that describes nine capabilities required for collaborative knowledge work. He includes a handy CC-licensed worksheet to go with it. Oscar’s original work on this subject was part of my inspiration while working on a way to describe the required facets on an enterprise social network (ESN). I described how I developed the framework, based on the work of Oscar and others, in a presentation at the Learning Technologies conference in 2014. A recording of my presentation is available as well.
moving to social learning
“We are living in a world where access trumps knowledge every time. Those who know how to search, find and make the connections will succeed. Those who rely on static knowledge and skills alone will fail.” —Charles Jennings
We are all interconnected because technology has enabled communication networks on a worldwide scale, so that systemic changes are sensed almost immediately, which means that reaction times and feedback loops have to be better. Therefore we need to know who to ask for advice right now, which requires a level of trust, but this takes time to nurture. So we turn to our friends and trusted colleagues, who are those with whom we have shared experiences, which means that we need to share experiences in order to trust each other. This is social learning.
adapting to perpetual beta
- There is no such thing as a social business strategy.
- There are only business strategies that understand networks.
- Cooperative and distributed work is becoming the norm in the network era.
- Social learning is how work gets done in networks.
- Sharing power, enabling conversations, and ensuring transparency are some of the values of networked business.
- Trust emerges when these principles are put in practice.
- Learning is part of work, not separate from it.
What follows is a summary of what I believe are some of the most important issues facing organizational design today.
from training to social learning
This video provides an overview of my six-week online social learning workshop. It is focused on moving from training, to performance improvement, to social learning.
caught in-between
The core premise of finding perpetual beta is that the digital world is bumping against the analog world and we are currently caught in-between.