SocialLearning

Social learning

9 ways to improve workplace learning

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Training, and education, are often solutions looking for a problem. But good training and education can have a huge impact on behaviour and performance. Remember that great teacher who inspired you? Did you ever have a coach who got you to a higher level of performance? But throwing content at someone and hoping for learning to happen is not a good strategy. This is how far too many courses are designed and delivered.

“As I’ve been working with the Foundation over the past 6 months I’ve had the occasion to review a wide variety of elearning, more specifically in the vocational and education space, but my experience mirrors that from the corporate space: most of it isn’t very good.  I realize that’s a harsh pronouncement, but I fear that it’s all too true; most of the elearning I see will have very little impact.” —Clark Quinn

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Revolutionalize Learning & Development

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Work is learning and learning is the work, says Clark Quinn. I agree.

Clark gives a clear path forward for today’s learning and development profession on the cusp of revolution or extinction in his latest book. Revolutionize Learning & Development is required reading for anyone involved in training, instruction, or corporate education. I have known Clark for many years and in this book he makes the case for change very clear. He maps the path to align learning with work. If learning is the solution to the business situation, then this book will explain how to make it so.

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Organizational Learning in the Network Era

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W. Edwards Deming, American management visionary, understood that systemic factors account for most organizational problems, and changing these has more potential for improvement than changing any individual’s performance. Therefore the role of executives should be to manage the system, not individuals. But the real barrier to systemic change is hierarchical management, as it constrains the sharing of power, a necessary enabler of organizational learning. People have to trust each other to share knowledge, and power relationships can block these exchanges. Just listen to any boardroom meeting and see how power can kill a conversation. If learning is what organizations need to do well in order to survive and thrive, then structural barriers to learning must be removed.

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Learning is Connecting

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“Education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make email usage look like a rounding error.” – John Chambers 1999

Cisco’s CEO, John Chambers, was right, but not the way most people understood it at the time. As everything gets connected, we have to re-think our ideas about education and training. While education over the internet may not be as pervasive as email today, learning over the internet is massive. Learning is happening on every social media platform. It’s just not being controlled by educators and trainers. For example, there are how-to videos on YouTube, learning-oriented chats on Twitter, study groups on Facebook, and professional communities on LinkedIn. Google Plus may soon become the biggest social learning platform, as it integrates with collaborative documents, and real-time video Hangouts that can automatically be recorded and made available via YouTube.

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Most socially-shared

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“I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.” – Groucho Marx

I usually ignore “best of” lists that tell us the “Top XX” people in a field. Too often there is no methodology given, and it’s either a popularity contest or just a marketing scheme. I was surprised when I got a note that someone saw my name on a list that actually used data. In this case it was the Center for Management and Organization Effectiveness:

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Knowledge sharing paradox revisited

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The knowledge sharing paradox is that enterprise social tools can constrain what they are supposed to enhance. People will freely share their knowledge if they remain in control of it because knowledge is a very personal thing. Knowledge workers care about what they need to get work done, but do they care about the organizational knowledge base?

So my conclusion this time around was that the centralized stuff we spent so much time and money maintaining was simply not very useful to most practitioners. The practitioners I talked to about PPI [personal productivity improvement] said they would love to participate in PPI coaching, provided it was focused on the content on their own desktops and hard drives, and not the stuff in the central repositories. —Dave Pollard (2005)

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Enterprise knowledge sharing requires trusted relationships

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As the economy gets more networked, open organizations are becoming a necessity. Businesses are increasingly dependent on complex social interactions. Products are becoming services, as we can see with web apps, software, and even books. Trading intangible goods and services today requires trusted relationships, and often across distances. Internally, work teams that need to share complex knowledge require tighter social bonds. These are developed through time, with experience, and most often informally. Trust is a human quality. But the major barrier to encouraging informal social relationships at work often comes down to a question of control.

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The CEO will be the next CLO

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Chief Learning Officers will be the next CEO’s say John Hagel and John Seely Brown, in this short video from Deloitte. I disagree, because I do not see business leadership coming from Organizational Development, Human Resources, or Training & Development. I think it will be much easier, and more important, for business leaders to understand the significance of learning in the workplace. Even Adidas has adopted my adage that today, work is learning and learning is the work.

A well-rounded CEO can more easily become the CLO than vice versa. In addition, the generalists are already in charge. Often, the learning professionals are not core to the business. So where will learning leadership come from? I think it will come from business, and that is where I am focusing my efforts, helping business understand workplace learning, not helping learning professionals understand business.

If business is waking up to the fact that learning is now mission critical, will executives continue to allow learning policy to reside in a separate department? Will they will let learning professionals maintain sole control? I doubt it.

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A simple approach to KM

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Knowledge management (KM) does not have to be a major enterprise effort. But the lack of a KM strategy can be a drag on innovation or hamper decision-making in a knowledge intensive organization. While not perfect, a simple approach to KM may be better than none at all, and preferable to a flawed and expensive enterprise-wide approach. At least this model can be implemented with relative ease and no costly software platforms.

A simple approach to KM in the organization is to look at it as three connected but independent levels. The simplest is organizational KM, which ensures that important decisions are recorded, codified, and easily available for retrieval. This is mostly explicit knowledge that ensures the organizational memory remains clear on what key decisions were taken and why others were not. Over time, this becomes more valuable. Focusing only on decision memories ensures that enterprise KM does not require significant resources but does yield useful results.

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Enterprise social technologies

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I am presenting on enterprise social technologies, learning and performance at the Learning Technologies conference in London today. Most large organizations have something like  Microsoft Sharepoint, an intranet, or perhaps a social tool such as Socialcast. But how can you tell if these tools are right for the job? How can these tools support a coherent social strategy across the enterprise?

7 facets ESN

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