learning re-imagined

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!  

The Learning Professional’s Guide to Social Media, 101

This past year was the defining year for social media.  With 350-million members of its online community, ‘Facebook Nation’ surpassed the population of the USA and if it were a country would sit behind only India and China.  Twitter exploded from relative obscurity to become a favorite sounding board for everyone from Iranian reformers to Ashton Kutcher.  And Linked-in quietly leveraged its vast database of online profiles into one of the most effective recruiting engines of all time.

Yet despite the publicity and the increasing number of prime-time TV references to social media, it is surprising how many people are still confused by, intimidated by, or just in plain old denial about these networks.

So I offer you this mini guide to the Big Three social media sites along with why it is important from a learning professional’s POV (point of view).

Linked-in:  This is the career web 2.0 site. You create a profile, and the magic of the site starts connecting you to just about every colleague you once worked with. Even those whose names you’ve long forgotten.

Why Important?  There are dynamic discussion groups on almost every topic, including excellent groups on every conceivable learning topic. Get free advice, share best practices, find good people to hire. Your HR department is likely paying Linked-in to get access to resume data for recruiting purposes.

Facebook:  The big daddy of social media. This is your friends and family site. You create a profile and start ‘friending’ people you know. This allows you to share pictures, musings, and links with them.  Your kids will be embarrassed that you finally joined, but your friends will chide you with ‘what took you so long’ messages.

Why important?  Facebook blurs the line between professional and personal relationships. Facebook can help you sustain distant relationships with colleagues spread all over the planet who you might see just once or twice per year.  Most people don’t talk shop, and that’s ok. This is a digital replacement for the water cooler.  And since I’ve heard the term ‘water cooler learning’ more than once, why would you not want to imbibe?

Twitter:  New kid on the block. Simple concept.  You can send and receive messages (i.e. ‘tweets’) that can never exceed 140 characters, including spaces.  Roughly the amount of text up to that last period. You can follow whomever you wish. You don’t share personal information.  You share ideas and links.  

Why important? Twitter gave us the ‘activity stream’ concept which is a powerful model for collaboration. The stream is a dynamic list of all comments from those you follow. The user guardrails the content by adding or deleting followers based on what they tweet about. Twitter is also a way to eavesdrop on the world’s conversation.  Want to know what 40-million+ people are saying about your company’s brand, type it in the search box and read the stream.

These short descriptions purposefully underplay the functionality of these sites. But this is only a 101 course. Now that you’ve passed, continue on to 201, which requires that you delve into these sites on your own.  Only by experiencing these sites first hand will you be able to begin visioning how the concepts behind social media might be leveraged for learning in 2010 and beyond. 

By: John Ambrose

Nice to meet you, can't wait to learn from you!

 “If you have lunch with the same people you’ve been having lunch with for five years, you’ll probably have the same conversations you’ve been having for five years.  Have lunch with someone new!  You both might learn something!”  - Tom Peters

Some of the most fascinating and intellectually fun people I know are constantly meeting and interacting with new people.  We once spent an hour with Patrick Dixon as he stood in front of a camera and provided stacks of incredible stories and insights one after another on highly divergent topics and never once repeated himself.  I asked him later where in the world with all of his touring and lecturing did he have time to do research?  He explained his lecturing and traveling was his research.  He gets invited to all varieties of industry meetings and conferences, and as a result shares meals and conversations with players at all levels in banking, in trade, in technology, in politics, in climate change, and much more.  And he doesn’t claim to be an expert in any of these disciplines but approaches each event and conversation with an open and inquiring mind.

He has a marvelous story in which he was attending a financial trade conference and having dinner with some top executives.  Around the table, each was explaining their role in the banking industry and after one gentleman provided a lengthy and complicated explanation of his work in derivatives trading, Patrick asked, “I don’t mean to impolite, but do you understand what you do?”  The gentleman paused and said, “It’s true, what I do has become so complicated even I don’t always understand it.  Sometimes if I take a shower and have a brisk walk and clear my mind, if my boss were to call me at that moment I could clearly explain our derivatives product.”

Patrick used that interaction and story to share in later presentations on the value of trust and compliance.  The tip here is: get out of your comfort zone, have new conversations and don’t be afraid to ask a provocative question or two.  Good luck!

By: Shawn Hunter

Many training organizations I speak with are intrigued by Enterprise 2.0 technologies and their promises for creating a viral collaborative community within the organization.  At last count, there were more than 400 companies out there touting ‘e2.0 technologies’ … everything from wiki and blog products, to products that promise a safe Facebook-like or Twitter-like platform that can be rolled out behind your firewall.

Admittedly, some of these products are quite impressive, but they all share one common thread.  They are all enabling technologies. Just software.

Early efforts with these products are mixed at best.  Many early adopters or experimenters with these technologies report a lack of success in creating a sustainable collaborative environment. 

McKinsey, in a white paper entitled Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work,published in February 2009, observed the same phenomenon and described it this way:

“Perhaps because of the novelty of Web 2.0 initiatives, they’re often considered separate from mainstream work…Thus, using Web 2.0 and participating in online work communities often becomes just another “to do” on an already crowded list of tasks.”

Does this mean that social environments can’t work in the enterprise? Emphatically no.

But I am suggesting that there is a better way. 

There are three ingredients to creating a sustainable collaborative environment:  1) enabling technology; 2) abundance of content; and 3) enthusiastic community. When brought together, these three ingredients can produce a delicious collaborative result.

So the call to action for those learning professionals seeking to leverage collaboration to drive new levels of learning is simple.  Think about starting not with the enabling technology, but with your existing content and your existing active community of users who are already coming to your learning destination.  For instance, if you are currently using a product like Books24x7 from SkillSoft, why not think about the millions of pages of professional reference content that you already license as “seeds of discussion” for a thriving collaborative environment.  

Social collaboration offers great potential to help informal and formal learning, but the most effective path to accomplishing this will be to leverage what’s already working.

By: John Ambrose

Workplace Learning: the new “Classroom without Walls”

I was assembling a piece of “big box” furniture for my guest room last week, and the experience presented a metaphor for job-related learning.  (It helps to break out of our traditional assumptions about professional development and observe what happens in everyday life, where we’re actually learning all the time.)

In this case, I thought about how my learning process started, well before I opened the box and spread the pieces of my purchase over the guest room floor.  1) My learning started with realization of a need: my guests had no place to unpack their clothing and other stuff.  2) I turned to the Internet to learn what was available to solve my problem.  3) I engaged in “elearning” as I explored various products available from online vendors.  In most cases, this was pure knowledge transfer – how did the product look, what were the specifications, how much did it cost?

The real point of my story is that I never 4) read the “how to” instructions until my purchase arrived at my door and I prepared to actually do something with all the “learning” that I’d consumed previously.  The manufacturer had wisely included that learning resource for use “on the job” – along with the phone number of a mentor at Customer Service to help me work through the task.

In a very practical way, this experience of selecting, purchasing and assembling my guest room cabinet reminds me that our concept of a blended learning program must extend beyond classroom or online events and include the tools and resources that support the trial-and-error application of new skills on the job – wherever the work is actually done.

I’ll continue to share ways that learning can extend to the classroom-without-walls in our next encounter…

(By the way, I did get the piece assembled on the first try with no injury to self or property!)

By: Darlene Frederick

What a Birdy Told Me

I have already acknowledged an addiction to Twitter. And, I am happy to write that I have found yet another reason to love the site. Twitter allows me access to events that I cannot attend.

The # sign is a powerful thing in Twitter-ville. It creates a dynamic page with whatever word(s) follow it, allowing people to virtually gather and weigh in on a topic. #sscafe09 gave the world access to SkillSoft’s Cafe held in Orlando in September. By following that event on Twitter (via searching for that ‘phrase,’) I was able to keep up with the news – SkillSoft is poised to launch the SkillSoft Leadership Advantage and showed a sneak peak of upcoming inGenius – and get a feel for what people were discussing: the power of Web 2.0, the value of social networking in a learning environment and the power that collaboration can have on learning.

I was also able to keep up with the CLO Symposium. Imagine that. I’m sitting at my desk in Nashua, NH, and simply typing #CLOsymposium allowed me to be a ‘bird’ on the wall (sorry, I had to) at the event in Colorado.

The best use of this tool is when multiple people at an event tweet about it together – all using the powerful # sign to allow other people to view their collective wisdom about an event or a topic within the event. It might take a while for people to catch on to this – but it’s a great way to bring an event home to your co-workers in real time. Let’s all meet virtually at the next event and give each other a chance to read what a little birdy said.

By: Rachel Levine

Dovetails

 

   

The word “dovetail” creates an image of furniture in my mind.  In the land of furniture, dovetail features mean quality.  Drawers that have dovetail joints are far more durable than staples or glue.  In a metaphorical term, dovetailing creates value in conversation as well as in furniture.  In my maiden posting to this blog, I will take the liberty to dovetail on Julie Ogilvie’s recent blog entry about a conversation.  Conversations can dovetail and create quality as much as furniture joints can create quality.

Julie wrote about Café and conversations and work feeling like an extended family.  She points to the customers that are an extension to our work family.  I am fortunate to work with a group of amazing professional Learning Consultants (LC).  The Learning Consultant team extends the SkillSoft family into our customer base, as Julie shared.  The LCs work with our customers on a daily basis collaborating on business objectives, program planning, marketing and communications and value measurement.  Clients benefit from years of combined experience and consistent best practices through partnership with our Learning Consultants.  As I have conversations each day with my team, they truly personify the extended family that Julie refers to. 

 

When it comes to family, I know I can count on my sister to tell me if my hair is a mess or if I have spinach in my teeth.  As a manager of this team, I can always count on the straight-shooting input from these consultants.  The sibling-like relationships we have across the team make it easy to pick up the phone and get the real story about what is happening across various industries.  They know what is important to customers.  As I ponder blog postings, I know I can count on the expertise of the LC team to share their ideas around those things that matter to me, to SkillSoft and to the extended family of customers. 

 

Dovetailing on Julie’s post is a fine start.  Dovetailing on what is happening across our customer base and in the world of our Learning Consultants creates a strong method that we will all find value in.  In future posts, I will expand on some of those strong joints and partnerships, allowing for learning.  Truly, isn’t that what this is all about?

By: Lori Neblung

Innovation - Look into the Future!

One of the reasons why I love Twitter is how fast I can get information. (I admit it, I’m a Twitter addict!) I don’t have to search the Web and read through a lot of data when what I really want is a nugget – a baseball score, a status update, a quick bit of information about a news story. But, then there are times when I want more data; when I want to understand something and get a full, rounded view of a subject. That’s when I look for an expert – someone who can talk to me about something, explain something and give it meaning. And, even more value is added when I can hear from other people who are interested in the same subject as me. What are other people saying? What are they thinking? What do they care about?

That’s one thing that I love about my job. I am able to facilitate an environment – through SkillSoft events – where I can invite people to join in a conversation about corporate learning. It’s like the ultimate large scale search, where people can learn, listen and understand in an environment where they’re with their peers, people who face the same challenges.

These days, I hear our customers talking about a few immerging trends in learning. How does mobile learning impact corporate training? How do you gain leverage from leadership training? How will social networking impact learning, today and in the future? These are not the kinds of questions that you can Google. The subjects are broad; they’re big; they’re multifaceted. But, they’re important and need to be talked about, noodled, addressed.

SkillSoft’s upcoming three part Innovation Webinar Series with Training Magazine is a great place to join the conversation. These are important, timely topics that are being discussed in conference rooms around the world. And, personally, I’m excited to join the conversation. We have to discuss what’s next for corporate learning so we can get there together.  As Brad Paisley’s new song says, “Welcome to the future!”

By Rachel Levine

 

Café: It’s about a conversation.

I would not be the first person to observe that companies are often like families.  Especially in organizations where employees stick around for a while, over time you begin to feel like you know the people in your workplace as well as you do your family members.  You know their strengths, weaknesses and eccentricities.  You know who has a wicked sense of humor and who has that annoying habit of bouncing their leg and shaking the conference room table (that would be me).  And you share a history of success and failure that binds you together in a shared purpose. 

One of the things that I find fascinating about SkillSoft is that this family feeling extends to our customers.  This may sound like schmaltzy marketing talk, but I think you would hear the same thing if you talked to one of our long-time customers, and there are many of those.  You would undoubtedly hear a mix of our strengths, weaknesses and our eccentricities, but in most cases, it would be wrapped in an overall tone of affection.

I’m thinking of these things because next week we’re holding Café, which is an event that really embodies SkillSoft and the bond we share with our customers.  Café stands for Client Advisory Forum Event, but the word Café feels more accurate, with its overtone of a coffee klatch.  Café has existed for about as long as SkillSoft has existed, and it has always played an extremely important role in driving the company’s direction and the products we bring to market.  Every year we have a mix of first-timers and customers who are returning for their third or fourth or fifth time. 

Café is like a big focus group in some respects.  We divide customers into groups and discuss various topics. I happen to be a big believer in focus groups because I think there is no substitute for hearing from customers in their own words.  So often companies become ensconced in their own jargon and it may be completely different from the language their customers speak.  There is only one cure for that, and it’s getting out there and hearing what they have to say, directly from their very mouths.

When I started with SkillSoft six years ago, my first day was at a Café.  I remember the day evolving the way large group events often do, with some awkward silence in the morning, and by the afternoon, opinions were flying and conversations were bubbling up on unplanned topics.  Moderators were being challenged to keep discussions within time limits and people stuck around at the close of the event to talk to their colleagues about things that were important to them.

Over the years the format has evolved a bit, and the topics have also changed.  Back then the clients were responsible for taking notes in the breakout sessions and reporting back to the larger group.  The thought was that this gave them more buy-in.  While this may have been true, some felt that it was kind of like inviting someone over to dinner and making them do the dishes.  So now a SkillSoft person keeps the notes and delivers the PowerPoint, but the intent is still to reflect what the customers have said, in their own words.

The topics are much more far ranging as well.  That first Café I attended revolved largely around which course topics SkillSoft should be developing.  In next week’s meeting we’ll talk about the evolving role of courseware, but we’ll also discuss mobile learning, social learning and the future of games and simulations.  And I’m sure there will be some topics no one anticipated.

What I remember most fondly about Cafés of the past are the evening events where we got to know each other on a more personal level.  In 2004 the Yankees and Red Sox were locked in a heated post-season battle, and we were scheduled to board a dinner cruise in the San Francisco harbor.  TVs were brought in to appease die-hard fans on both sides, and that may go down as the loudest dinner in Café history (the Red Sox broke their 86-year championship drought that year, but I’m not saying the two events are directly related). 

Another memorable night was the songwriter’s dinner in Nashville, TN.  I’m not a huge country music fan, but hearing about the inner workings of the music industry was fascinating.  And after a couple of the songs touched on topics close to our hearts, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

So perhaps this is a fitting way to kick off SkillSoft’s entry into the world of blogging.  Our hope is to extend the conversation to more people, and to keep it going throughout the year.  I’m optimistic we can do this, but it will never replace the experience of gathering in a room and listening to what people have to say, in their own words.

By: Julie Ogilvie