Wirearchy

Last night at ThirdTuesdayNB the conversation came around to how to implement social media in large, bureaucratic organizations without creating a white elephant type of project that takes years to implement. Michele Martin just posted some social media baby steps that have worked for her, particularly:

Static website => blog

Wikis for committee work to replace/reduce e-mail

Other small steps that I think can work without major business process re-engineering (BPR):

• Use e-mail only for contractual/legal/official communications that need to be tracked, and add an internal Jaiku or Yammer instance of Twitter for business conversations inside the firewall.
• Use social bookmarks and tags (Delicious or open source variants) to highlight external information, once again to replace e-mail and to open everyone’s browser “favorites” to the rest of the organization.
• Replace multi-recipient e-mails with internal blog posts and send the link via e-mail or IM. All comments get added to the blog post and if the position holder leaves, the replacement takes over the blog. Great for non-sensitive discussions like training schedules.

Here are the links for my presentation today on The Future of the Training Department for the Canadian Society for Training & Development:

Main Article co-authored with Jay Cross

Slideshare presentation

Wirearchy framework

Cluetrain Manifesto

Cynefin framework

Delicious bookmarks on Personal Knowledge Management

Creative Commons search engine for shareable images

Wikimedia Commons for shareable and copyright-free images

GapingVoid cartoons

In response to questions from participants:

Twitter in plain English

ROI of Social media

Aaron Chua at Wild Illusions sees financial measurements as no longer able to tell the complete story. He mentions various other areas for measurement, including “talent development” but in a different context from the tired “talent management” perspective we’ve heard for several years:

This means a total redefinition of what talent development means in organisations. The first implication is of course to throw out the idea of having a talent development unit. Instead, we need to think about ways to rebuilt how talent is truly developed via connections to the resources at the edge, connections to different organisational competencies that plugs their gaps, connections that increases cognitive diversity and brings about unexpected learnings et al. All these are rich areas for a new breed of talent development companies to think about and to create new products/services upon.

If you buy into Richard Florida’s concept of the Creative Class (which I mostly do) then it becomes obvious that for organizations to succeed they will have to nurture creativity in their workforce. Creative people are at all levels, including the janitor, and are not ‘human resources’ but individuals who have the capability of  gaining wisdom. From the Creative Class Blog is an article on The Workplace in a Wiki World, with this idea about the changing emphasis for workers:

Therefore, for an individual to succeed in a wiki-corporation or wiki-organization it will increasingly require being more than an engineer, programmer, economist, or accountant. It will also require the “soft skills” to do media relations or “wiki” relations, interacting daily with a range of customers and outside contributors, as well as collaborating with others in the company.

Here’s my speculation on workplace learning in ten years.

Soft skills, especially collaboration and networking, will become more important than hard skills. Smart employers have always focused more on attitude than any specific skill-set because they know they can train for a lack of skills and knowledge. The soft skills require time, mentoring, informal learning and other environmental supports. Once you have the soft skills to perform in a networked workplace, you’ll have foundational competencies.

I think many people will say of course we’ve known this all along, but in a workplace where our networks are as important as our skills, it will be more difficult to hide the fact that you’re a highly skilled jerk.

In — No more “learners” — Jay Cross uses the preacher-congregation metaphor to show the dysfunction in our educational and training systems. Much as the Reformation, sped by the new technology of the printing press, ushered in an era of believing and thinking for ourselves, we have the makings of our own Learning Reformation.

The removal of overt rules (Jay uses traffic signs as an example) can empower people, while thinking of them as just “learners” is condescending and plays to the power game of teacher-students. Let’s face it, especially in light of how our institutions have screwed up the world, we all have to be learning together.

In The future of the training department, Jay and I put forth the idea that in order to help organizations evolve in a complex environment we have to move away from training delivery and focus on Connecting & Communicating. Workers, provided the right tools and resources, can figure out what they need to learn. Tony Karrer has picked up on this, as has David Wilkins.

Here are some suggestions for people in training organizations as they shift to supporting the networked workplace:

1. Be an active & continuous learner yourself (e.g. personally manage your knowledge).
2. Be a lurker (passive participant) & LISTEN
3. Communicate what you observe.
4. Continuously collect feedback, not just after formal training (yes there’s still a place for some of this).
5. Make it easy to share information by Simplifying & Synthesizing.
6. Use Networks as research tools.
7. Identify learning skills and develop them in yourself and others [thanks, Clark]

All of these skills are dependent on #1. You can read about being a good learner and then put the book back on the shelf, but learning is a process and leadership by example is needed. Be an example.

Q: What’s the best way to use social media in your organization?

A: Start by using them yourself.

Steve Simons recently wrote:

I read with interest your article “The future of the training department”, particularly the last paragraph. As an IT trainer in the UK (I train on a contract basis for large organisations), I’ve often wondered what uses people will get from their learning. Sometimes my general feeling is “none”. Your phrase “shift the focus to creativity, innovation, and helping people perform better, faster, cheaper” really hit the spot with me.

I recommended the book From Training to Performance Improvement to Steve, as it helps get training departments out of the “solution looking for a problem” approach. As much as books like this are a good start, a shift to performance improvement is not enough. There is no single best approach and we need to bring in other frameworks such as connectivism, wirearchy and social network theory. The era of silos is over.

Here’s some advice for anyone in charge of a training department:

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 for “your” organization. Don’t believe the hype that one technology or one method will save you, because no single method in the past has done that. You have the best knowledge about your organization. You may need some direction, support, data, advice or a sounding board, but you have to create your own inter-dependent network.