How Important is Social Learning to Your Organization?

By John Ambrose

How important is social learning to your organization? According to just-released survey data from Hyunkyung Lee, a MASIE Fellow from South Korea, 76.57% of some 781 global organizations are either currently using or planning to use social learning at some point in the future.  

While Mr. Lee doesn’t break down in the split between “planning” and “currently using” in the summary I read, I am encouraged to see that the total number is this high.  Based on the informal polling I have been doing in presentations over the past year, I would estimate that the number would have been below 50% just a year ago.  However, I predict that by this time next year, this same poll would be at or near 100%.

Learning organizations are rapidly becoming more familiar with social media. They are becoming more curious and aware of the potential to amplify learning and knowledge sharing. 

They are also starting to understand differences between the many tools and are starting to realize that the most effective solutions will be content-centric, not technology centric.  What I mean by that is there are already more than 400+ “Enterprise 2.0” technology solutions out there that all share one fatal characteristic: they are enabling technology in search of content.  In fact, in 2010 I believe we will begin to see a growing distinction between “old” generation social tools that exist apart from content and “next” generation social learning tools such as SkillSoft inGenius that spring up from within the content.   But that is an article for another day.

Back to Mr. Lee’s research report.  While 76.57% are considering social media, what about the other 23.43%? 

Well, he lists the four top reasons this shrinking minority is not currently using or planning to use social learning.  Frankly, most of these sound like rationalizations for inertia rather than legitimate business roadblocks. Let me take them in order and offer some suggestions:

#1 More proof of Social Learning's effectiveness is needed.
Suggestion: Social media is not perfect, but it is powerful. It is not a fad, but a new communication channel. Its global impact is being studied at MIT and has been written about extensively in The Harvard Business Review. Proof can be easily and cost-effectively obtained by dipping a toe into the social learning world and analyzing your own results. It also should not require a significant amount of investment. If your vendor is telling you it does, wrong vendor.

#2  No interest in our organization.
Suggestion: Don’t rely on your intuition to draw this assertion. Pose the question on Facebook with those work colleagues who are friended with you.  What?  Not on Facebook?  Maybe that is why you are under-estimating the interest in your organization.

#3  Compliance, legal, privacy, security or other restraints.
Suggestion: If humans focused only on risk, we would never drive a car, sit in an airplane or step into an elevator. I don’t want to diminish the importance of concerns around privacy and security, but it is important to not shield ourselves behind them.  At some point in the 1980s, 23.43% of companies did not embrace email for these same exact reasons. Those companies either embraced it shortly thereafter, or are extinct now.

#4 Not compatible with our organizational culture.
Suggestion:  Your culture is not interested in greater communication, sharing, connections and productivity?  The only legitimate instance I could come up with where social learning would be detrimental to the culture of a large body of people under one roof to -- is in a prison.  And I’m not talking about the guards and staff.  For them, social learning would work great!  

Comments

[John Ambrose]

Simon, you make great points. I agree with you that the distinction between knowledge management and social learning is blurring. And will continue to blurr. The goal of both is to provide a degree of order to the chaotic reality of unstructured trusted content. The difference I see is that KM sought to achieve this through the rigid workflow, process and tools. Social technology can remove these barriers and allow those with the most to gain from using the content to provide the necessary structure (through tagging, sharing, rating, etc). To your second point, I think social learning (and all social enterprise tools for that matter), are at a nascent stage and much will evolve in the coming months and years. My impression is that most companies are not adopting a single monolithic software deployment model for social media. Rather, they are taking a more Darwinian approach of working with multiple vendors who can bring enhanced value to existing business applications through deep integration of social capabilities – and then letting the user population ultimately determine the real business value. Wisdom of the crowds, as James Surowiecki would say!

[BFchirpy]

I'm with you on this one, particularly about the take-up question.

Two things: I don't really see the difference between some social learning and most Knowledge Management projects. I'd be interested to see the percentage of organisations who are 'considering' social media but already have KM teams/projects.

And the great danger for social learning is the same as the hard-learned lessons of KM. The monolithic software deployment and the boxed-in knowledge repository are the greatest dangers to success - not 'lack of evidence-based proof', 'incompatibility' and the rest.