Earlier this month, Charles Jennings, Harold Jarche, Jay Cross and I got together, virtually, to represent the Internet Time Alliance for a discussion around organizations and social media with Xyleme Learning.   Dawn Polous elegantly and eloquently hosted us, providing the starting questions and segueing between the comments.

They’ve gathered them up in a series of podcasts, and if you’re curious about what we’re up to, I recommend you go have a listen.

The Big Question of the Month is “How do I communicate the value of social media as a learning tool to my organization?”.   Now, this is late, but it’s because I’ve been getting ready for and then attending DevLearn (as always, was a great event), but Jay Cross and I spent a day talking about this issue in the larger picture of social learning in the media.

Then, in last night’s #lrnchat, the question was asked again as part of the usual 3 question format.   So, I decided to pull out my tweeted contributions and elaborate on them a bit as my response.   These are the unique answers, not including my responses to others, re-tweets of poignant statements, and snarky comments.

don‘t talk about social learning, talk about innovation, problem-solving, creativity, research, experimentation…

As Andrew McAfee told us in his keynote, the term ‘social learning’ isn’t going to carry a lot of weight where it matters.   You need to talk about benefits.   My message is that learning should be considered as a very   broad umbrella, as it should include all those activities where we don’t have an answer and have to ‘learn’ one.   Therefore, I feel quite comfortable talking about the outcomes of informal learning: innovation, problem-solving, creativity, research, experimentation, design, insights, new products, new services, and so on.

focus on: biz case; need to go beyond execution to continual innovation; collective intelligence.

Organizations don’t want concepts, they want results.   In this case, talk about the concrete outcomes of collective intelligence.   Greater rates of new product and service generation.   More problems solved, and more c0mplex problems solved.   More valuable ideas generated.   Hearing from more members of the organization.   Talk about impacting those things that will make a difference to organizational success.

I point others to @dwilkinsnh excellent list of success stories: http://bit.ly/K16NU

One of the things that helps is having good case studies. Dave Wilkins has collected quite a few in his blog, and more are popping up everywhere.   In particular, showing that the competition is doing it (as one of our workshop attendees intended to do) is a good incentive, and having relevant ones for the particular initiative you choose is important.

standard org change: start small, focus on a good success story, leverage the er, heck out of it

Speaking of initiatives, really the same strategy that goes for most organizational changes holds true, in general.   Start small where the cultural tendencies are supportive and there’s a fairly obvious positive outcome to be had, and get a win.   Then use that to argue for more initiatives.

It’s not easy, there are lots of factors to gaining success, but in the long term it’s really adapt or die.   The most agile will win, and agility comes from aligned inspiration.   Good luck!

Andy McAfee gave us a lively and informative presentation on his view of Enterprise 2.0.   Punctuated by insightful examples, he defined Enterprise 2.0 as “”use of emergent social software platforms by organizations in pursuit of their goals”, and characterized it more simply as ‘bringing web energy into organizations’.

Along the way, he emphasized points about emergent behavior, inherent altruism, emergent process, developing innovation, the intelligence of crowds, and real business benefits.   A 20% improvement in innovation was one concrete result.   He also warned us of the ways to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

BTW, Cammy Bean’s has posted a prose recitation of the talk.   With no further ado:

A number of years ago, I co-wrote a chapter with Eileen Clegg called The Agility Factor, that appeared in Marcia Conner & James Clawson’s excellent collection of organizational culture articles in the book Creating a Learning Culture. The focus of the book was on empowering organizations to be nimble in a context of increasing change.

Eileen’s husband is a marine scientist studying deep sea vents and the creatures that live there.   In biology, organisms that can live in such extreme heat, or in bitter cold, or extreme salinity, etc., are known as extremophiles.   They have a number of mechanisms that allow them to succeed, including stronger ionic bonds, sensing and reacting to changes in the environment, special proteins for extreme circumstances, inoculation mechanisms to cope with toxins, and special partnerships.

In the chapter, we talked about organizational equivalents to these extremophile mechanisms, including tolerating diversity, monitoring the environment, extreme mentoring, and more.   We’re talking about it tonite at a special event, and I reread the article to see what we said then and to reflect on it in light of the subsequent years of experience.   I saw several ways in which to augment the thinking we had then.

In thinking about ionic bonds, it’s not only about the diversity (polarity) adding strength, but it strikes me that it’s also about alignment.   Diversity is particularly valuable when the different abilities and experiences are pulling in the same direction.   It’s important to share and inspire a belief in what the vision is.

On the topic of sensing the environment, I’m reminded of the result from the CLO survey Jay Cross and I did to accompany our Chief Meta-Learning Officer article, where 60% of those who responded thought that their people weren’t talking about  the outside trends that shape their business.   If people aren’t aware, they can’t adapt!   There must be support for individuals to not only self-improve, but to be connected the broader trends in their fields and the organization’s area of endeavor.

Starting from the heat-shock proteins that kick in when things are extreme, I’m mindful of how we need a shift from information presentation or skill-creation to learning facilitation and mentoring.   Organizations can’t provide everything employees need anymore, but they can provide support for developing skills for learning, and coping. I’m reminded of how Outward Bound got started, where older mariners were surviving situations that younger, presumably healthier ones weren’t.   Which reinforces the call for more ubiquitous mentoring that we argued for back then.

The inoculation approach to toxins sparks two thoughts.   One, while we need to tolerate diversity in experience and skills, I suspect we can’t tolerate those who do not buy into the vision and the mission.   In my own experience, I’ve seen how the naysayers can undermine organizational effectiveness.   Yet incorporating new approaches can be extraordinarily valuable. As I’ve argued before, the approach to take is not to try to appropriate so-called best practices, but instead to understand and contextualize best principles.

And finally, in thinking about symbiosis, one of the revelations has been to see the benefits organizations have found by increasing their dialog not only internally, but externally with partners and customers.   The advantages of more transparency and communication, if coupled with a sincere desire to truly listen and respond, are considerable.

It’s always a revelation to re-read something written several years ago and reflect on your thinking then.   I’m always amazed (and, mostly, pleased) with what I find.   Organizations need to reinforce their culture and learning mechanisms to make themselves more agile and more resilient, and that adaptation is possible on principled grounds.

At the upcoming DevLearn conference, Jay Cross and I are holding a pre-conference workshop titled: Be the Future of Organizational Learning:  Become a Chief Meta-Learning Officer. We already know we’ve got critical mass in terms of signups, so we’re excited about the possibilities, but we really want to do our best to ensure we   deliver a valuable experience.

Based on the principles from our CLO article on the topic, we’re intending to make it a real hands-on, wrestling with the issues, talking about specifics, and bolstering the discussion with data from close to 200 respondents to the survey that was associated with the article.   We want attendees to not only be informed, but empowered to go back to their organizations and make a meaningful impact.

Though we’ve ideas on what we think is important, we’d really like to hear what you’re expecting, are concerned with, would like to see, etc.

There’s a social networking site for DevLearn, and I’ve created a group for this session. I’d welcome you going there and beginning to talk up things like what you’re seeing, what you’re worried about, and what you’d like to get out of the session.   Of course, you’re welcome to comment here, too.

I’ll be speaking also on the topic in a concurrent session as well, on mobile design with David Metcalf in Judy Brown’s Mobile Learning Jam, and with Richard Clark on pragmatic mobile development, but those are topics for another post.

I’ve always found eLearning Guild events to be worthwhile, and given the lineup I think this one will be as good as ever.   Hope to see you in the workshop, or at least at the conference.

In some client work I’m doing, I’m helping out an effort to establish a Web 2.0, social, informal, [enter your own bizbuzz phrase here] strategy.   Despite the hype, this looks to be a real value proposition for them.   They’ve serious needs in terms of deep knowledge retiring, acquisitions to integrate into a streamlined operation, and more.

As a consequence, I’ve been talking to folks within this large organization who are embarked on various social media efforts.   Some are instituted from different organizations, like under the CIO, and others have emerged from the learning function with the organization.   The interesting thing is how the actions are blurring the notion that there are tight boundaries between formal and informal.

In two separate cases, the solution emerged as a realization that the ability of the learning organization to continue to meet the growing rate of change (both in the rate of changes, and the increasing complexity), is not keeping up with the need.   There’s also a recognition that empowering the users to take control is a real opportunity. In one case, they’re rolling out a wiki that they’re initially populating, but are already in the process of devolving access and the ability to contribute.   In another, they’re making accessible the resources for users to choose what to film or software activity to capture, to make their own little ‘learnlets’ and make available.

Is this performance support? Is this formal learning? Is this social or informal learning?   It doesn’t matter! What matters is that these are areas where the learning function can and should contribute!   However, it’s blurring the line between control of learning design, responsibility for curriculum, and more.   And this isn’t an abrogation of responsibility, but instead a necessary extension of the learning function scope, on principle, and a pragmatic response to a changing world.

There was a separate instance where the KM group was developing a wiki for similar needs, e.g. the growing body of knowledge.   However, there were two reasons why they could benefit from the learning function as well. For one, they’re focusing on developing rich semantic underpinnings that will facilitate smart search and rule-driven complex behaviors (read: opportunistic and customized information).   This is great and important work (I love this stuff, it’s Web 3.0), but they won’t actually be putting in useful information for another year!   There’s an immediate need that needs to be addressed here.   The second one comes from when they are ready to move forward; they’ll benefit from the learning function’s experience in both gathering knowledge and in supporting rolling out access to the learners themselves.

There was also a definite recognition that the proliferation of resources was a problem to make accessible, and to govern the lifecycle of, and to message the updates. These are clearly central roles, and require an understanding of learning. And more. I’ve argued that learning designers need to understand information architecture and information design as well, and this only reinforces that message, but, those fields share much foundational knowledge and the extension isn’t onerous.

The bigger picture is to go beyond the individual initiatives, figure out ways to scale the approaches enterprise-wide, to make the breadth of resources systematically organized, and to remove redundancies and inefficiencies. By coordinating the technical sophistication of the Information Services group with the learning function (and other strategic alliances), this organization has a real opportunity to tap into the collective intelligence of it’s employees, and get a handle on the continuous innovation that will be required in the increasingly competitive market.   But it only happens by some systematic work to streamline the effort, otherwise there will still be bottlenecks to effectiveness and redundancies to hamper efficiency.

There’s still a role for formal at one end, and I haven’t really exposed the alternative mechanisms supporting the far end of collaboration, but here I wanted to focus on the gray area in the middle and the necessity of not trying to artificially create a boundary.