This is difficult in a 2.0 sense, because the point of going 2.0 is letting go — but the C-suite among many others throughout every level of most orgs have a hard time letting go of one paradigm without any clear sense of what else they should hold on to. The letting go is how you hold on. It relies on the soft stuff — trust, integrity, candor, relationships; hard to fit into the existing paradigm of metrics, ROI — the former “measures” of “trust.”

So that said, the key to success I’ve found in getting support for transformational engagements comes from a couple of fronts:

1. Know exactly what your role, or the mission of your particular function, is in the organization. Knowing that my learning function is charged with managing the know-how of my organization gives me the leverage needed to make suggestions and even decisions within that context; no other part of the organization owns that as much as my function.

2. Stay within the bounds of your function: Whatever I’m going to suggest must come from what it does for our particular mission; I can’t presume to tell other areas of the company how to do their business. That said, as we’re talking about the big things (enterprise video sharing, for example), it doesn’t hurt to give the line of sight to other parts of the business that might take advantage of such services — but my focus and sell to the leadership MUST be on what it’s going to do accelerate, enhance, improve the know-how of the organization.

3. Do your homework on what’s going on in the business. There are strategic goals your company has. Align with them. There are parts of the business where accelerating or improving their know-how can transform the business, generate more revenue. It can’t just be about cutting costs — you need to challenge yourself to find ways of improving the know-how to reduce cycle times and generate more revenue, improve customer service, etc. The tighter you can align initiatives to revenue, the easier it is to forecast what kind of budget you’ll have –because the goal for a learning organization is to be able to pay it back in a certain amount of time;

I know this isn’t sexy or appealing to our greater sensabilities, but pragmatism really rules out in selling to leadership far more than how things are named; obviously because corporate names for stuff are generally horrible. Basically if the cost of doing it is cheaper than the cost of NOT doing it — and you can forecast that, you can get the buy-in pretty easily. With all the fog that comes with the new paradigm, finding a way to translate things in terms that business people understand (money) makes it clear and gets cultural buy-in. They may not know what they’re getting, but they get that changing behaviors to reduce costs and increase revenues is worth their engagement and investment.