SocialLearning

Social learning

our learning blueprint

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“Culture is an emergent property of human groups, a new property of the whole not manifested in the parts themselves. And it arises from humans having the brains and social systems that allow for retaining and exchanging ideas.

Human culture also accumulates. This means that brains and social systems capable of coping with more and more stuff are increasingly advantaged across time. And it also means that the force that culture has been applying to our evolution has been increasing over the past ten thousand to forty thousand years. Once humans evolved to be capable of teaching and learning, they developed a parallel evolutionary strand, cultural evolution, side by side with genetic. These two strands intersect repeatedly in many places and times. Each leaves its mark on the other. ” —Nicholas Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

Christakis’s ‘social suite’ is a range of traits that are common among all human societies, though not always manifested in the same way. For more information, read Howard Rheingold’s review of Blueprint. When it comes to the age-old question of Nurture versus Nature, Christakis answers that it is both, like a double helix. This is not a unique perspective.

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metamodernity

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Continued from: understanding the shift

To an older culture, a newer one often looks amoral, as morality guides older cultures. To a newer culture, older cultures appear to be primitive, lacking complexity. But each culture has its pros and cons. The challenge in developing what Lene Rachel Andersen calls ‘metamodernity‘ is in taking the positive aspects of previous human cultures in order to create a global culture that can deal with the complexity of technology, climate emergency, and evolving political situations.

The Nordic Bildung perspective of societal evolution aligns with David Ronfeldt’s TIMN Model, which I have discussed in — understanding the shift. Andersen suggests we can build upon the positive aspects of each previous societal form in order to create a metamodern society. We do not need to destroy the old ways.

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“the strategic and purposeful production of ignorance”

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“You will not achieve an informed public simply by making sure that high quality content is publicly available and presuming that credibility is enough while you wait for people to come find it. You have to understand the networked nature of the information war we’re in, actively be there when people are looking, and blanket the information ecosystem with the information people need to make informed decisions.” —danah boyd

So concludes danah boyd in an excellent piece on what lies beneath the current flood of fake news: agnotology — “the strategic and purposeful production of ignorance”. Anyone who is concerned about the erosion of democracy as a result of the fragmentation of society through fake news, propaganda, or conspiracy theories should read this article. The conclusion is that we cannot achieve this by merely spreading good information.

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social learning is innate

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Social learning is a key theme of mine because imitation is how we learn as a species. Social learning is best explained by Albert Bandura, recognized as the most eminent psychologist of the modern era.

“Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.” —Albert Bandura

Making our organizations open to social learning fosters innovation. Nobody works in a vacuum and we all build upon past ideas and achievements. Open structures that distribute authority can lead to more transparent knowledge sharing which promotes social learning. This open sharing can foster more diverse perspectives which can fuel active experimentation. Innovation emerges from this constant flow of ideas and experiments.

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working collaboratively and learning cooperatively

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Improving Organizational Performance

Organizational performance improvement is comprised of reducing errors and increasing insights, according to Gary Klein. For the past century, management has primarily focused on error reduction, with practices such as Six Sigma, especially in manufacturing.

“Fifty-eight of the top Fortune 200 companies bought into Six Sigma, attesting to the appeal of eliminating errors. The results of this ‘experiment’ were striking: 91 per cent of the Six Sigma companies failed to keep up with the S&P 500 because Six Sigma got in the way of innovation. It interfered with insights.” —Gary Klein

Learning and development (L&D) practices reflect this priority on error reduction. But knowledge work, especially creative work, is not mere production.

“Visualize the workflow of a physical job: produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce.

Now visualize the workflow of a creative knowledge worker: nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, flash of brilliance, nothing, nothing, nothing.” —Jay Cross (1944-2015)

Based on 120 case studies, Gary Klein identified five types of ‘triggers’ that produced insights.

  1. Contradictions
  2. Creative Desperation
  3. Connections
  4. Coincidences
  5. Curiosity

Most of these five triggers can be enhanced through informal and social learning, and the individual practice of personal knowledge mastery. Insights often come while working, resting, and playing — or even in the shower — but not while undergoing formal education or training.

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90% of everything is crap

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Currently, I have written 3,170 posts on this blog. I don’t have any surveillance technologies (analytics) here, so I don’t know how many people read my work, or how much they like it. I do use Feedly as my feed reader and subscribe to my own site, so I can ensure that the RSS feed is working. Feedly also gives me an idea of how popular a post is. The number [second column from left] represents some algorithm based on how much more popular a post is than the average one. I don’t know how they determine this.

Over the past 6 years that Feedly has been keeping track of my site I have written over 1,000 posts. Of these, only 13 have been wildly popular. Most of my posts have a popularity rating in the single digits. This aligns with Sturgeon’s Law — “90% of everything is crap”. It’s hard to write a great post every single day. But writing the not-so-good stuff prepares you for the odd good post.

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connected thinking

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“… it’s easy, and it’s seductive, to assume that data is really knowledge. Or that information is, indeed, wisdom. Or that knowledge can exist without data. And how easy, and how effortlessly, one can parade and disguise itself as another. And how quickly we can forget that wisdom without knowledge, wisdom without any data, is just a hunch.” —Toni Morrison (2019) The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

Data needs knowledge to understand it. Those who have this knowledge can then create information about the data to help others understand it. This is why there are so many different interpretations of complex issues. We have limited data and limited knowledge. Therefore experts often disagree. Each expert comes with a different story. Some groups share a story which influences their judgement. But wisdom is being able to understand knowledge and data in context and then make appropriate decisions. Without enough good data, we have no foundation for our knowledge.

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we all need an inner circle

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Work has always been about who you know, more than what you know. That’s why the rich and powerful send their children to elite schools. It’s not about the education but rather the connections. We still fool ourselves that a capitalist economy is a meritocracy — which any marginalized group can attest is false. However, the emerging network era and its democratization of media is giving voice to more of these groups.

I have advocated for retrieving gender balance in our organizations as the controlled linearity of the written and printed word — patriarchal in their essence — will be obsolesced by the connected, electric medium. This connected world requires each of us to develop broad and diverse social networks in addition to trusted communities of practice. Today, this is even more important for women than men, though I think it will be essential for all genders in the near future. Social networks are our professional safety nets.

Professor Brian Uzzi studied hundreds of MBA graduates and noted significant differences in the social networks of men and women. While social networks are important to both, successful women also had an ‘inner circle’ of trusted female advisors. Networks and communities are not the same. Communities are the connectors between diverse networks and work teams. They are essential. We all need an inner circle.

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filter failure is a human failure

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There was an explosion on social media over an incident between school boys, on an official school trip to demonstrate in Washington DC, shown in a video vocally berating a Native American elder. Here is one of the latest articles about it, showing additional video — don’t doubt what you saw with your eyes. Mainstream media, like our own Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, are trying to establish a very difficult-to-find middle ground. I have opinions on what I have seen and read but I am not ready to share these in public. I am talking about them in private with some trusted friends and colleagues. I will share if and and when it is appropriate.

“It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure”, wrote Clay Shirky a decade ago. As the online space of social media gets more polluted and manipulated by trolls, bots, and hidden agendas, then filters become critical. Sensemaking cannot be done alone. Every thinking person has to find ways to understand issues of importance. If professional journalists can be co-opted by bots, what about the rest of us?

“Using bots to seed a divisive meme is akin to lightly blowing on an ember to start a fire. In a healthy society, that ember quickly burns out, starved for fuel. In a society in transition, the landscape is littered with desiccated institutions and ideas, ready to ignite.” —John Robb

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gaining insight at work

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With increasing complexity in most aspects of a network society, the way that we support organizational learning must change. With low levels of complexity, knowledge can be codified into documentation and distributed throughout the organization. Best practices can be determined and then people can be trained to perform these methods at work. Basic aircraft flight operations can be taught in this way. But complex problems require implicit knowledge that cannot be put into a manual. This type of knowledge is nuanced and dependent on the context and situation. For example, negotiating the creation of the United Nations required many conversations and involved a myriad of social connections. It required social learning, which is how we gain insights, by connecting with others and learning while we work.

Social learning is the process by which groups of people cooperate to learn with and from each other. The network era is creating a historic reversal of education, as discourse replaces institutions, and social learning in knowledge networks obsolesces many aspects of organizational training. It is as if Socrates has come back to put Plato’s academy in its place, but this time the public agora is global.

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