Entreprise Collaborative, a cross-cultural endeavor bridging English and French to provide a jumping off point on organizational collective intelligence (and co-led by my Internet Time Alliance colleague Harold Jarche), is launching a blog carnival.   The first topic is: the future of the training department in the Collaborative Enterprise.

I’ve written before about the changes I see coming for organizations (e.g. here), and they’re driven by the changes I am seeing in business and in society.   Things are moving faster, and this has all sorts of consequences: it means that change is occurring more frequently, information is doubling, our competition is more aggressive, and more.   Really, we’re unmasking the chaos that we’ve been able to cover with observed patterns, and explain away the excepti0ns. Well, now the patterns are changing fast enough that we can’t expect to be able to plan, prepare and execute to succeed. We have to be more nimble, more agile.   In short, we have to move away from depending on formal learning to be able to cope, and we need a new solution.

The solution is to empower individuals so that they’re pulling together.   No longer can a few do the thinking for everyone, as we see in a hierarchical organization. Instead, we need to make sure everyone understands what the overall goal is, and have them work together to achieve it.   We need to tap into the collective intelligence of the entire organization. This is a redefinition of learning as performance, incorporating problem-solving, innovation, creativity, design, research, and more.

That means a number of things: we need to be explicit about goals, transparent about processes, supportive about collaborative skills, and proactive in creating a culture that fosters and nurtures the necessary approaches.   This doesn’t come for free.   Who is responsible for ensuring this works?

In some organizations it’s the information services group, or the knowledge management group.   And they certainly should be on board; ideally you don’t want a hodgepodge of different systems to do the same thing, you want a coordinated environment that supports lessons learned in one area to be easily shareable elsewhere in the organization.   At core, however, I believe that folks who understand learning have to be part of the picture.   They may not own it, but they need to be actively facilitating across the organization.

And this, to me, defines the future of   the training department.   It can no longer be just about courses.   It’s got to include performance support, and informal learning. It’s got to be about culture, and learning together skills, and facilitating productive information interchange and productive interactions. We have technologies now to empower user-generated content, collaboration and more, but the associated skills are being assumed, which is a mistake.   The ability to use these tools will continually need updating and support.

This should not be threatening or anxiety-inducing!   Training used to be important, as skilled workers were critical.   As we’ve automated more work and started developing training for more knowledge work without adapting our methods (and, consequently, making generally dreadful learning experiences), the training role is less and less seen as worthwhile. The opportunity to reestablish a strategic role in the organization should be viewed with excitement, and taken up as the gift it is!

So, I see the future of the training department being as learning facilitators, and the path there to be to take on more and more of that role.   In the future, I reckon, learning facilitators will be partners with the technology infrastructure units in providing an innovation infrastructure, a performance ecosystem.   These facilitators will be (virtually) distributed across the enterprise just as the technology infrastructure is.   Yes, there’s likely some re-skilling involved, but it beats irrelevancy, or worse.   Here’s to redefinition!

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.